There's still some learning you may need to do when changing languages:
* If you learn C, you'll need to learn about manual memory management (and will definitely get some segmentation faults when you make mistakes). (If you want to get into the internals of how the kernel works, you're going to need to learn C.)
* If you learn Haskell, you'll need to learn pure functional programming, which is a very different mindset. Learning other functional languages, like Lisp and Erlang, may have similar issues (though learning one helps learn the rest).
* Rust is another language that will have a learning curve, but at least the compiler error messages (which you'll see a lot of when learning) are helpful.
* Modern JavaScript often involves async programming.

Socialism is bad? I hate it when Americans say socialism is bad and I am saying that as a American who was born in California.

Europe and the rest of the world have socialism they have free universal healthcare only us here in America cannot get free healthcare and it sucks.

I as a American born in America am a socialist, then again most of California Democrats are socialist in one way or another.

Anyways all forms of Digital Rights Management (DRM) copy right protections software is bad.

Back in 2004 when I purchased the physical boxed PC version of Half-Life 2 for PC and I read on the back of the box that Steam needs to be installed and a internet connection I was like no screw this then one month later I decided to activate it. It was only until 2006 I came to accept Steam, then in 2012 I started hating Steam and not accepting it much. I first learned of gog.com in May of 2011, in 2012 I just hated everything being on Steam or when you purchase physical boxed versions of the PC versions of video games from brick and mortar retailer stores saying you need a Steam account made me so very mad and I kept calling Steam a monopoly, but ones Bethesda Softworks joined gog.com in August of 2015 to sell their video games and now this year SEGA joining gog.com to sell their video games I do not think Steam is much of a monopoly any more, but more of a pseudo monopoly.

How ever as much as I hate Steam, I will not delete my Steam account or disable my Steam account or stop using my steam account.

I have had my Steam account since 2004 and spent a lot of money on Steam between 2004 with Half-Life 2 up until 2012 also as I said I do not think Steam is much of a monopoly any more so I will be using both of my gog.com and Steam accounts.

Both need to be competitive and compete against each other, otherwise either Steam or gog.com will be a monopoly if only one or the other remains to be selling PC versions of video games on PC digitally and that is not good for any one.

It is why I want zoom.com and itchi.io to be competitive with gog.com, which for now it seems zoom.com is slowly becoming competitive, slowly but it is moving.

We need gog.com, Steam, zoom.com, itchi.io to exist.

As for Epic Games store and Electronic Arts (EA's) Origin or whatever they name them these days I do not really care for them to be competitive against Steam or gog.com because they offer way less of any thing in terms of features than compared to both gog.com and Steam.

As I said though we need them to exist to be competitive and not a monopoly.

Well, not sure about the term socialist, never used it in conjunction with the UK. We do have a the national health system which is paid for by national insurance contributions amongst others, so it’s not “free” as such. In Belgium I had to buy insurance for the healthcare there when I worked there. It sure about other places in Europe.
The term free simply means someone else has to pay somehow. Anyways, there are people risking life and limb crossing the channel on dinghies to get the “free healthcare”, so it’s really not the best idea ever.
Anyways, just wanted to clarify that.

Oh i don't know, i could be wrong. If only there was some recent example i could point to...

Um Americans get it wrong time and time again.

There is socialism and then there is social aspects.

The Venezuelan government or the president in this case are not socialists they are fascist shooting protesters dead, etc.

I think Maduro is the current Venezuelan president doing this?

There is also Communist Socialism which Americans get mixed up with Socialism.

Then there is the Nazi's who were National Socialists. Again which Americans think is Socialism.

The most successful Socialist country on planet Earth right now is Sweden.

Also like I said the rest of the world has free universal health care. Which is not "free" is payed for by taxes by everyone, but at least in Europe since my entire family was born in Europe and the way it works in Europe is you can go any time to the hospital if you are sick or have broken bones check in get looked at by the doctor and not have to worry about a medical bill. At most you will get charged for medicine that is only about ten or so Euros and that is it. Rest of everything is free for you.

So no Socialism is not bad, what is bad is fascism, Communist Socialism, a dictator, and a tyrant.

That foxnews.com website you showed even says this about Americans, which I who lives in California the most socialist state in America can agree with.

Despite that situation in Venezuela, polls show Americans warming to the term “socialism” in recent years.

Pretty sure they adopted socialism to it's core.

So... all examples of socialism failing horribly aren't real socialism because they weren't done correctly?

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And the likelyhood of giving someone power and it not corrupting them is less likely; Still if you believe that i got a bridge i can sell you.

And people are fleeing California if they can.

What you are more referring to is socialism on top of capitalism which does work (to a degree), but socialism itself destroys over time as it gets heavier and pushes more and more social programs before it all just crumbles apart. Better not to have it at all.

What was the phrase? The problem with socialism, is you eventually run out of other people's money...

I envy you. When I was in high school, computer classes were about how to type properly on a keyboard.

Then, to go in computer sciences, I had to do 2 years of mandatory natural sciences where I was limited to one programming elective in C.

I finally really started learning my craft when I was about 22 years old. To this day, I think people managing the public education system are incompetent.

When I got my first PC, it was like a revelation.

I could use the same machine to play games, do my homework (on a text editor), do searches on the internet, correspond via email and several years later, I could program on it as well.

I didn't see much of a point after that in getting a machine that was purposefully locked down to a single purpose (ie, play games), but I guess most people didn't get that feeling.

Ouch. I remember in 4th grade seeing kids trying to do BASIC on the Apple2 systems and getting something wrong. I never got to do it myself, no i had to teach myself assembly BASIC C and others.

People are fleeing California haha funny, only businesses and only a few of them left like Tesla?

More people are coming into California every year than leaving California every year.

Can we not derail the thread, please. This is a discussion about games, Denuvo and DRM. Not socialism or other political leading topics that do not belong on this forum as mentioned the Forum Code of Conduct.

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Most of Valve's games are DRM-free, and have been for quite some time. You, like many of us bought Half-Life 2 back in 2004, and now we're almost 20 years later and the game is fully accessible by you, and Valve even still updates the games from time to time. Has Valve ever done anything to wrong you, or break your trust?

While I can understand how some might think it, but S**** has never been a monopoly. They may seem like they're in a monopolistic position, but they got there because they're offering a better service than everyone else, and are providing things that people value. Studios want to publish games on S****. That's not really the case with most studios when it comes to places like GOG.

Bethesda doesn't care. I honestly doubt we'll get another major game from Bethesda ever again. There's been plenty of opportunities for a Skyrim or a DOOM 2016, but it never happens, and the GOG community will continue to beg for ports that are over a decade old like in Skyrim's case.

Sega is a newcomer, but much like Square Enix, it appears we'll never see anything from their Japanese development houses. Square Enix just recently sold all their "Western" IP and development houses for pennies on the dollar. It's unlikely we'll ever see anything new release here from Square Enix ever again.

Competition is good, generally speaking, but in cases like this I will disagree on that. Most people don't want competition. They might say they do, but they really don't. Competition is good as long as the software they want is always coming out on their preferred store of choice. The fact is that having all your games in one single place is just too appealing to most people.

If a game comes out the same day on GOG and S**** then you'd like to think that people would buy it on GOG, because GOG is "DRM-free" and all about "game ownership" but that is not the case for the vast majority of PC gamers.

Why is that? Because the perceived value of that other store trumps anything that GOG could provide. Having that game on the account with all the rest of your PC games. The value people place in social communities, like having your S**** profile that you can customize and decorate with showcases, screenshots, artwork, trading cards, and all that crap. That stuff is just far more "valuable" to the modern gamer than having an offline installer being available with the GOG version. Not to mention the S**** version is likely DRM-free in that scenario also.

It's the same way people are sick of all these streaming media services. People don't want to have half a dozen or more accounts for stuff like that. It just becomes a hassle and incovenience at that point.

Most people just don't want PC games tied to a whole bunch of different accounts like S****, GOG, Epic Games Store, Battle.net, Windows Store, EA Origin, Ubisoft's Uplay, and so on. There's just too much value in having them all on S**** for example, and that's what most people do.

People think having a monopoly is good. They might not say that, but their actions and purchasing behavior says otherwise.

For me personally, if something is on both GOG and S**** then I'll always buy it on GOG. The only issue is that games that I want on GOG are so few and far between now, and then when something actually does come that you are interested in, it gets intentionally delayed by the Studio while the S**** version doesn't. Specific example of that recently was 'Neptunia x Senran Kagura: Ninja Wars. Game released on S****, but was artificially delayed by six (6) months here on GOG. So for a situation like that I'm just not buying the game anywhere.

Awesome, so their client easily allow me to download my drm free installer and/or there is a web interface I can go to to download them?

If some of their installers suddenly become online-only, I can complain about it and they'll try address the situation?

And it is easy to verify before buying that the installer is drm-free?

I won't contest that they offer a good "service" (your choice of word was appropriate), but I will contest you on being a monopoly.

They have tried very hard to move a lot of things in their proprietary ecosystem to the point where devs with more limited resources find it hard afterwards to release their games elsewhere.

I won't pretend to know what big publishers think, but I'm more interested in indie games anyhow.

Its complicated. People tend to want their preferred store to do best (the pragmatist phenomenon on the adoption curve), but they also want competition as it drives their preferred store to do better.

True, until something happens to Steam.

For most.

From what I could discern, Steam support for DRM-free is second rate at best.

Sure.

See my answer above.

mmm it would be nice if the world was in a state where that didn't happen. I hadn't intended to go on a tangent, and while i'd like to argue further i don't think it will matter much.

Actually a lot of the games from there you can download with the client and then uninstall it, there was a whole thread on it, and epic as well. And to also note, apart from a few people left here who remember offline installers, it’s mostly client here as well, I would guess that almost all customers now only interface with the client and never store or download anything themselves. It would be an interesting test by GOG if they dropped offline installers completely and stated you could get them via galaxy, would anyone even blink anymore? I don’t like steam or epic or most of the others, but GOG is no better anymore and with their constant “mistakes” are probably worse.

I know there are experiments here to see what games you can play by installing and them removing the client to see if it still plays but I still dont think its that many. If you have more concrete numbers to show a larger share of steam games are DRM-free, it would be interesting to see but I still dont think its a priority for them.

Offline installers are the main reason why I choose GOG and seem to be a big point with others on the forum as well. Its why you buy from GOG. Alot of users already make a big issue about Galaxy and although Galaxy makes it easier to download installers, I do think many will make it an issue if offline installers become Galaxy online. If GOG ever thought of dropping offline installers completely, they are digging their own grave.

Epic going DRM-free would be interesting but I doubt they will given they are open to blockchain games and possibly NFTs. Steam I really dont see the appeal. They do have a big library of games but with sales prices being the same across all 3 storefronts, Epic is ironically cheaper given they often throw in a discount coupon on top as well. Add to that the many things Valve has introduced to make gaming worse and Im not a big fan of steam.