The Vent and Rant Thread

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by cc_in_oh

I'm on an ancient Core i7 system, maxed out at 16GB. But my bottleneck is probably my 25-ish mbps DSL. Especially since I have Playlater recordings soaking up the meager bandwidth most of the time

Yes. You are as fast as your connection to the Internet, and the site you are visiting.

Firefox 57 is faster, but whether you see the benefit is determined by an assortment of factors, like your connection speed.

My current box is Win10 Pro on a 3.1-3.4ghz quad-core i5-2400 CPU, with 8GB RAM and Intel HD 2000 graphics. Unlike my prior Xeon based system, Win10 actually sees/uses all four cores of the i5. Win1o and applications run off an SSD. Performance is quite acceptable, thank you. RAM can be expanded to 32GB, but no hurry - I don't normally see more than 4GB in actual use.

I had DSL way back when, and would have killed for 25mbps when I had it. The current connection is a 100mbps cable modem. FIOS is finally available in my neighborhood, and I'm looking at switching when it's available were I am. Proximate cause is that I can get a FIOS deal with everything I have now for half what Spectrum is currently charging. Icing on the cake is that FIOS is offering gigabit connection speed, and symmetrical at that.

I'll have to look for that paywall addon. When I had separate stop/refresh buttons I could usually bypass with 2 or 3 tries.

I believe there's a CSS tweak that offers separate stop/refresh buttons, but it must be applied in UserChrome.css in the profile folder.

I've been happy with FVD Speed Dial but haven't tried others...

I looked at it. The advantage to the Speed dial variant I used was a tabbed interface, with multiple pages of dials. That was a good match to how I worked. Group Speed Dial shares that, and can import saved settings from Del Rio's Speed Dial. It had problems with various of the Firefox "about:" entries, so I dropped them, but the rest works fine.
______
Dennis

[cc_in_oh]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Yes. You are as fast as your connection to the Internet, and the site you are visiting.

Firefox 57 is faster, but whether you see the benefit is determined by an assortment of factors, like your connection speed.

My current box is Win10 Pro on a 3.1-3.4ghz quad-core i5-2400 CPU, with 8GB RAM and Intel HD 2000 graphics. Unlike my prior Xeon based system, Win10 actually sees/uses all four cores of the i5. Win1o and applications run off an SSD. Performance is quate acceptable, thank you. RAM can be expanded to 32GB, but no hurry - I don't normally see more than 4GB in actual use.

I had DSL way back when, and would have killed for 25mbps when I had it. The current connection is a 100mbps cable modem. FIOS is finally available in my neighborhood, and I'm looking at switching when it's available were I am. Proximnate case is that I can get a FIOS deal with everything I have now for half what Spectrum is currently charging. Icing on teh cake is that FIOS is offering gigabit connection speed, and symmetrical at that.


I believe there's a CSS tweak that offers seperate stop/refresh buttons, but it must be applied in UserChrome.css in the profile folder.


I looked at it. The advantage to the Speed dial variant I used was a tabbed interface, with multiple pages of dials. That was a good match to how I worked. Group Speed Dial shares that, and can import saved settings from Del Rio's Speed Dial. It had problems with various of the Firefox "about:" entries, so I dropped them, but the rest works fine.
______
Dennis

My i7 still handles my workload - concurrent recording, ripping, Video ReDo editing, huge Excel macros that can take 10-15 minutes to run, and demanding games like Skyrim (3GB video card with dual 24" monitors). I've never before had a 6+ year old system that could still handle everything, though I would add RAM if I could. And bluetooth and more USB3 ports would be nice...

FWIW FVD has tabs and save/restore dials - I keep it synced with a i3 laptop...

[Hitch]

Warning, not a rant...more a vexed puzzlement.

So, lots of you guys have pets, and I know that my fellow furpeople families will appreciate this one (particularly Pooh, who I know has gone through this himself):

Usual morning, for a Sunday. Sleep in a bit, awakened mostly by furpeoples (our Furfamily consists of two Maine Coon cats; both neutered/spayed, a male and a female) who think that sleeping even a moment pas a nice cool dawn is a criminal offense.

Typical morning; around 11, we gather up the female, who's overdue for her trip to Truvy's Beauty Salon, for nail trimming. She willingly shows up; we trim her fronts, and the male wants his 5 seconds in the attention zone, too, so we do his rears (as he has this hair-brained thing where he'll cut his chin, scratching himself. He gets his fronts done lying around on the sofa, 'cuz he doesn't mind having his nails trimmed, being clipped, etc.). Both furballs sit in Mr. H's lap while I do this, so I'm clearly seeing their underneaths, feet, etc. (Bear with me, there's a reason for this recitation).

Not 10 minutes later, I'm playing with them, because that's their post-grooming reward, dragging string and ribbons around, etc. and in the bedroom, I see a big old smear of poo, on the sheets. I know that it wasn't there when I arose, but its there now. This is a highly unusual occurrence, here; ever since we got Miss Storm's IBS handled with her new food, we haven't had any issues around the Poo Zone.

Strip the bed, throw stuff in the washer, etc.

But here's the Mystery: I check both cats, and there's NOTHING. Nothing on their feet. Nothing on their bums. Nothing anyplace.

I can't find a spot of smear on the carpet, near the bed. Nothing on the floors, between the box and the bedroom, thinking that maybe, it wasn't a Klingon; (as it's just a smear); maybe someone's paw got smeared in the box. But there's NOTHING. No smears. Nothing in the box, nothing near the box. Nothing anyplace.

I'm still boggled. I mean, from whence cometh the Poop smear? The Magical Mystery Tour? How the Hell did it get there? Did Dr. Who arrive, open the door of the Tardis, let my cats out for a Klingon drop and go--or, rather, smear and go?

For the life of me, I can't figure it. It's as though a cat was transported by the Enterprise to the bed, smeared, and was promptly beamed up--and cleaned. Any minute now, I'm going to start giving side-eye to Mr. H.

Bizarre. Absolutely Bizarre.


Hitch

[Katsunami]

Developing software based on web technologies is becoming some sort of a farce.

I'm looking into this, just to expand my skill set. I'm normally a software engineer doing factory automation or embedded software (programming PCL's, or writing stuff in C/C++ to make firmwares).

However, I don't want to use C or C++ to write some 'fun stuff.' I've been into AI before AI was cool (Hi, DeepMind, and AlphaGo), but never took too much time to do projects with it because writing that sort of software takes A LOT of research, and then it's VERY time consuming writing code in C(++), especially if you want to make an app out of it.

Then there's Java (which I hate), and C# (which I don't want to use, even though it's now becoming cross-platform).

So, I've been hearing about stuff like Node.JS, and Electron, and so on... which enables web technologies to be used to write cross-platform applications. It can interface to C++. Nice... I could write the user interface in web tech stuff, write the AI-engine for whatever I'm doing in C/C++, and then call that from the Electron front-end.

Cool. So I take a peek, and discover.... complete and utter crazyness.

- On the back end: PHP. Because you don't want to write everything yourself, you'd best use a framework. OK, I'll dust off CodeIgniter...
- Or not. Yii seems to be bigger now. I've used that in the past. Fine, let's download....
- Nah. It's now Version 2, and it isn't compatible with Version 1. Just learn everything anew, all over again. I could just as well pick Symphony, Laravel, or Falcon. Maybe CakePHP is still alive too; I don't know.
- I haven't even looked into Node.JS on the server to replace PHP, but there are a bazillion frameworks for that as well.
- Javascript has had a major overhaul (ES6) in 2015.
- There's something called CoffeeScript, which I've seen mentioned, as calibre uses it; it seems to be a programming language on top of Javascript, giving it a different syntax.
- However, Coffeescript is said to have been 'defeated' by Typescript, which is a superset of Javascript.
- Then you have Node.JS, which is now basically used for everything: backend, front-end, AND package management.
- Nobody seems to install anything anymore by downloading a javacript file. They use Bower... OK. I've heard about that. Made a splash at around 2013.
- Eh. What? Bower? Deprecated. They advise you to use Yarn or Webpack.
- So, I look into Yarn, and discover that it's fast becoming a replacement for npm, which is NodeJS's package manager. And you can install it by using npm. Great. Install one package manager using another.
- Task runners... Ah. Grunt. Heard about that. Let's look into that too.
- *screeching halt* : Grunt? Damn... that's so 2014. Everyone's using Gulp now.
- Or Broccoli.
- You see, I haven't even mentioned Less, which was a nice pre-processor for CSS, which I learned while using Bootstrap....
- F****. Bootstrap uses the SASS pre-processor now. And if you think Bootstrap isn't enough, there's also Angular, Aurelia, Vue.js, and React.js. And what about Backbone.js and Knockout.js? Can't we just use something like...
- JQuery? No. If you do that in 2017, you'll apparently be shot.

It's no wonder no companies can find qualified developers. NOBODY KNOWS WHAT THEY'RE DOING! Not the companies, not the developers.

Web technologies, since the last 4-5 years, seem to go from fad to buzz, with a new framework, task runner, Javascript scaffold, or language-inside-a-language being the fad-du-jour.

Whatever you've used in the past (before 2014), it's irrelevant now. There's SO MUCH stuff now, starting at the server side and all the way up to the front-end, that it's impossible to keep up.

The only thing you can do is take a look at the biggest players, choose some stuff you like best for whatever reason, and start making your own hobby stuff... hoping that it's not TOO difficult to switch to the new (or different) fad if you ever get employed to write software based on web technologies.

"Have you ever worked with...?"

You'll be forced to lie at a job application, because the chance that the answer really *is* "yes", is one in a bazillion. Then hope there's not a test to write some code, and when you get home, start looking into that stuff like crazy, hoping you know enough to not get killed when you're hired.

This is no way to build or continue a stable career. I should have become a lawyer or a politician, and by this time in my life, I would have been filthy rich.

edit: Looking into typescript, the first thing I see is this:

function add(left: number, right: number): number {
	return left + right;
}

WHY would anyone want to use the Pascal-version of type declarations in a curly-brace, C-influenced language like Javascript?!

left : number
right: number
function add() : number

REALLY, MICROSOFT? There *really* wasn't a way to use C-type syntax, lilke most (all?) curly-braced languages?

int left;
int right;
int add();

Djeez.

[Katsunami]

And if this wasn't enough (with regard to TypeScript):

A browser obviously cannot execute it, because it's not Javascript. Therefore Microsoft supplies a compiler, to translate typescript into Javascript. However... that compiler is written in TypeScript.

As there's no way to execute that compiler, you're stuck with a chicken and egg situation. So what do you do? Write a Node.JS package (thus, in Javascript) that can run the compiler.

Are you still with me?

So you've got TypeScript, which is basically Javascript with Types.
No browser can execute it, so you need a compiler to make Javascript out of it.
To FRACK THE WORLD, you write that compiler in TypeScript itself, so you can't run it.
To FIX THIS, you write a Node.JS module that can run the compiler...
And Node.JS modules are written in.... right. Javascript.

Summarized: Microsoft designed a Javascript derivate, TypeScript, which has a compiler written in TypeScript itself, which therefore needs an interpreter that can run it, written in Javascript, which runs on top of Node.JS, and that compiler translates TypeScript into Javascript.

Eh. I don't know, but maybe people are making software engineering WAY HARDER than it has to be. Everybody seems to think this stuff is cool, but I think its completely crazy and a roundabout way of getting stuff done.

(Yes, I know, Nicklaus Wirth wrote his Pascal compiler in Pascal, and therefore a compiler had to be created in a different language to compile the Pascal compiler... after which it could, obviously, compile itself. It's called bootstrapping a programming language, but in the case of interpreted languages, it's completely crazy, as you're running one interpreter/compiler on top of the other, which makes slow things slower.)

As Gordon Ramsay would say: ****** me.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Warning, not a rant...more a vexed puzzlement.

So, lots of you guys have pets, and I know that my fellow furpeople families will appreciate this one (particularly Pooh, who I know has gone through this himself):

Usual morning, for a Sunday. Sleep in a bit, awakened mostly by furpeoples (our Furfamily consists of two Maine Coon cats; both neutered/spayed, a male and a female) who think that sleeping even a moment pas a nice cool dawn is a criminal offense.

Typical morning; around 11, we gather up the female, who's overdue for her trip to Truvy's Beauty Salon, for nail trimming. She willingly shows up; we trim her fronts, and the male wants his 5 seconds in the attention zone, too, so we do his rears (as he has this hair-brained thing where he'll cut his chin, scratching himself. He gets his fronts done lying around on the sofa, 'cuz he doesn't mind having his nails trimmed, being clipped, etc.). Both furballs sit in Mr. H's lap while I do this, so I'm clearly seeing their underneaths, feet, etc. (Bear with me, there's a reason for this recitation).

Not 10 minutes later, I'm playing with them, because that's their post-grooming reward, dragging string and ribbons around, etc. and in the bedroom, I see a big old smear of poo, on the sheets. I know that it wasn't there when I arose, but its there now. This is a highly unusual occurrence, here; ever since we got Miss Storm's IBS handled with her new food, we haven't had any issues around the Poo Zone.

Strip the bed, throw stuff in the washer, etc.

But here's the Mystery: I check both cats, and there's NOTHING. Nothing on their feet. Nothing on their bums. Nothing anyplace.

I can't find a spot of smear on the carpet, near the bed. Nothing on the floors, between the box and the bedroom, thinking that maybe, it wasn't a Klingon; (as it's just a smear); maybe someone's paw got smeared in the box. But there's NOTHING. No smears. Nothing in the box, nothing near the box. Nothing anyplace.

I'm still boggled. I mean, from whence cometh the Poop smear? The Magical Mystery Tour? How the Hell did it get there? Did Dr. Who arrive, open the door of the Tardis, let my cats out for a Klingon drop and go--or, rather, smear and go?

For the life of me, I can't figure it. It's as though a cat was transported by the Enterprise to the bed, smeared, and was promptly beamed up--and cleaned. Any minute now, I'm going to start giving side-eye to Mr. H.

Bizarre. Absolutely Bizarre.


Hitch

I was going to say you forgot to check a butt.
Hey it could be worse, you could have found that or vomit in the middle of the night.

[Hemmi]

Or, like me, find the poop smear from kitty by stepping on it. Ick.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by cc_in_oh

My i7 still handles my workload - concurrent recording, ripping, Video ReDo editing, huge Excel macros that can take 10-15 minutes to run, and demanding games like Skyrim (3GB video card with dual 24" monitors). I've never before had a 6+ year old system that could still handle everything, though I would add RAM if I could. And bluetooth and more USB3 ports would be nice...

If there's a slot free, USB3 addon cards offering more ports are cheap enough. My desktop didn't come with USB3, but there's a four port USB3 addon card that can go into an unused mini-PCIe slot. I don't really need USB3 that much, but might as well add the capability. Guaranteed, once I have it, uses will present themselves...

But what you mention is a challenge for system vendors and Microsoft.

Historically, users got a new version of Windows when they got a new machine. They mostly didn't upgrade in place. And they upgraded every three years of so to get more speed and power.

That cycle is broken. Hardware has grown steadily smaller, faster, and cheaper. Users don't need to upgrade that often, as what they buy will probably be more than adequate for their workload. PC vendors face stagnant or shrinking markets. New sales are hard to come by. Most folks who can use a PC have one. Replacements and upgrades still occur, but less frequently.

MS wants everyone on Win10 going forward, and their free upgrade offer was part of that. Down the road, Windows upgrades will mostly be online downloads. MS had to make that process as friction free as possible. And they define their core customer as the Enterprise, and Enterprise users had been pounding on them for greater control over just what got deployed to corporate desktops.

FWIW FVD has tabs and save/restore dials - I keep it synced with a i3 laptop...

Good to know, and thanks. I have no need to sync my speed dial setup with another machine, and a purely local solution was preferred.
______
Dennis

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

I was going to say you forgot to check a butt.
Hey it could be worse, you could have found that or vomit in the middle of the night.

Been there, done that. My male has hairballs the size of Great Dane Poo, despite nightly grooming/combing, head-to-tail. When he hawks, I'm surprised that my neighbor's horses can't hear him. I've woken many a night to the melodic sounds of hawking, and the results.

Originally Posted by Hemmi

Or, like me, find the poop smear from kitty by stepping on it. Ick.

Fortunately, that's only happened ONCE. When Miss Storm had her bout with IBS, it went on for months. (The V&R thread remembers, no doubt.) I mean, we tried EVERY-thing. Added fiber, removed fiber. Added special food supplements, removed them. Blabbety-blab so on and so forth. But man, it was BAD. In a half-century of being owned by Kitties, I've never seen anything quite like it. (OR smelled anything like it...eye-watering.)

We finally found a kibble that agreed with her (Praise Ceiling Cat!) and it was done and over within a matter of two days. But, man, when it was ongoing, due to the EXCEEDINGLY runny nature, we spent a lot of time walking around with our eyes DOWN, looking for drips and drabs. And yes, I found one the hard way once. ICK! doesn't do it justice. (Hopping around on one foot, trying not to make the damage worse, attempting to hoppity-hop to the nearest sink...)

Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

We finally found a kibble that agreed with her (Praise Ceiling Cat!) and it was done and over within a matter of two days. But, man, when it was ongoing, due to the EXCEEDINGLY runny nature, we spent a lot of time walking around with our eyes DOWN, looking for drips and drabs. And yes, I found one the hard way once. ICK! doesn't do it justice. (Hopping around on one foot, trying not to make the damage worse, attempting to hoppity-hop to the nearest sink...)

My late cat Kvetch had problems like that. I found her wandering the hall in my building in the winter, cold and sick. She was obviously pre-owned, as she'd been declawed.

She had a nasty chronic sinus condition medication cut down on but did not alleviate, and intestinal issues that made poos extremely messy. She did make it to the cat box, thank $DEITY.

At the point where I had Kvetch, I also acquired a kitten named Dizzy. The cat box was in a location where Dizzy could climb above it, and then lean down from above peering upside down when Kvetch used the box in an instance of "Whatcha doin', big cat? Huh? Taking a big messy poo?"

Kvetch would come stalking away from the box, tail stiff and quivering in outrage, radiating "I want to rip the little !@#$%s throat out, but it's a kitten and I can't!"

Years later, Kvetch had passed, and older cat Dizzy got joined by kitten Dazzle. Dazzle did to Dizzy what Dizzy had done to Kvetch, and produced the same response.

Dizzy never did understand why his humans fell about laughing when the saw it.
______
Dennis

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

My late cat Kvetch had problems like that. I found he wandering the hall in my building in the winter, cold and sick. She was obviously pre-owned, as she'd been declawed.

She had a nasty chronic sinus condition medication cut down on but did not alleviate, and intestinal issues that made poos extremely messy. She did make it to the cat box, thank $DEITY.

At the point where I had Kvetch, I also acquired a kitten named Dizzy. The cat box was in a location where Dizzy could climb above it, and then lean down from above peering upside down when Kvetch used the box in an instance of "Whatcha doin', big cat? Huh? Taking a big messy poo?"

Kvetch would come stalking away from the box, tail stiff and quivering in outrage, radiating "I want to rip the little !@#$%s throat out, but it's a kitten and I can't!"

Years later, Kvetch had passed, and older cat Dizzy got joined by kitten Dazzle. Dazzle did to Dizzy what Dizzy had done to Kvetch, and produced the same response.

Dizzy never did understand why his humans fell about laughing when the saw it.
______
Dennis

Yeah...you haven't lived until you have a big honking long-haired cat with IBS. It's just...wow. And the stinky factor is mind-blowing, too.

The whole Peeping Dizzy thing is hilarious. ;-) We occasionally get a queue going (as the box is in our hall/guest bath, on the floor), where I'll be using the facilities, and Storm (female) will want in. She knows how to open doors, which can be, well...interesting. She'll start out by yelling, "(Hey, human! I need to use the loo, d*mmit!)" and then she'll just open the door. With her, I swear it's the power of suggestion, more than actual need.

This invariably brings the Big Guy, who can't bear to be left out of anything. So our wee hall bath has me, 40lbs of cats, etc. Poor Storm frequently has to swat Zep (big guy) on the nose, to keep him from trying to climb in and use the box at the same time, when the "queue" occurs. That's the only time he ever tries to climb in at the same time--I guess there's something about "the family that weees together stays together," you know? ;-)

Cats!

Hitch

[Rbneader]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Developing software based on web technologies is becoming some sort of a farce.

I'm looking into this, just to expand my skill set. I'm normally a software engineer doing factory automation or embedded software (programming PCL's, or writing stuff in C/C++ to make firmwares).

However, I don't want to use C or C++ to write some 'fun stuff.' I've been into AI before AI was cool (Hi, DeepMind, and AlphaGo), but never took too much time to do projects with it because writing that sort of software takes A LOT of research, and then it's VERY time consuming writing code in C(++), especially if you want to make an app out of it.

Then there's Java (which I hate), and C# (which I don't want to use, even though it's now becoming cross-platform).

So, I've been hearing about stuff like Node.JS, and Electron, and so on... which enables web technologies to be used to write cross-platform applications. It can interface to C++. Nice... I could write the user interface in web tech stuff, write the AI-engine for whatever I'm doing in C/C++, and then call that from the Electron front-end.

Cool. So I take a peek, and discover.... complete and utter crazyness.

- On the back end: PHP. Because you don't want to write everything yourself, you'd best use a framework. OK, I'll dust off CodeIgniter...
...snip...

Well, PHP is your first mistake. There's a lot I can say about PHP, but most of it isn't family friendly.

Messing around with the *script variants is also just a useless spiraling headache.

Start with Python, pick a large framework (I use Django) and build on that. And yeah, expect to need to do on the job learning at basically every position. There's no getting around it.

/webdev for 6 years

[Rbneader]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Yeah...you haven't lived until you have a big honking long-haired cat with IBS. It's just...wow. And the stinky factor is mind-blowing, too.

The whole Peeping Dizzy thing is hilarious. ;-) We occasionally get a queue going (as the box is in our hall/guest bath, on the floor), where I'll be using the facilities, and Storm (female) will want in. She knows how to open doors, which can be, well...interesting. She'll start out by yelling, "(Hey, human! I need to use the loo, d*mmit!)" and then she'll just open the door. With her, I swear it's the power of suggestion, more than actual need.

This invariably brings the Big Guy, who can't bear to be left out of anything. So our wee hall bath has me, 40lbs of cats, etc. Poor Storm frequently has to swat Zep (big guy) on the nose, to keep him from trying to climb in and use the box at the same time, when the "queue" occurs. That's the only time he ever tries to climb in at the same time--I guess there's something about "the family that weees together stays together," you know? ;-)

Cats!

Hitch

My cat does exactly the same thing. If I try to use the bathroom without him he has to come in, and then I have to let him out so he can go use the litterbox. No idea what is going through his brain.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

The whole Peeping Dizzy thing is hilarious. ;-)

We thought it was. Kvetch dramatically did not. She was older neutered female, quite set in her ways, and did not appreciate the kitten.

Dizzy was quite baffled when we fell over laughing when Dazzle did the same thing to him.

We occasionally get a queue going (as the box is in our hall/guest bath, on the floor), where I'll be using the facilities, and Storm (female) will want in. She knows how to open doors, which can be, well...interesting. She'll start out by yelling, "(Hey, human! I need to use the loo, d*mmit!)" and then she'll just open the door. With her, I swear it's the power of suggestion, more than actual need.

Count your blessings. There are an assortment of photos posted to Reddit's AWW forum, reserved for cute animal pictures, of cats who decide thtn when their human is sitting on the potty, their place to be is curled up inside the human's pulled down pants, looking up with a quizzical "Whatcha doin' person? Huh? Taking a big poo?" expression.

This invariably brings the Big Guy, who can't bear to be left out of anything. So our wee hall bath has me, 40lbs of cats, etc. Poor Storm frequently has to swat Zep (big guy) on the nose, to keep him from trying to climb in and use the box at the same time, when the "queue" occurs. That's the only time he ever tries to climb in at the same time--I guess there's something about "the family that weees together stays together," you know? ;-)

They love you, and want to be where you are, regardless of where that happens to be. I had a cat once that would hop into the tub and swim around when a human was taking a bath.

Cats!

Yep.
______
Dennis

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Rbneader

Well, PHP is your first mistake. There's a lot I can say about PHP, but most of it isn't family friendly.

Messing around with the *script variants is also just a useless spiraling headache.

Start with Python, pick a large framework (I use Django) and build on that. And yeah, expect to need to do on the job learning at basically every position. There's no getting around it.

/webdev for 6 years

Re PHP: No way around it. It's the only thing in use in the Netherlands, except if you have your own web server. I don't know of any host (with a normal price) that runs Python on the server. Companies all use Wordpress, Joomla, or Drupal for websites, or a custom backend on top of one of the PHP frameworks.

Re *script variants: There are several, I've seen... Babel, Typescript, CoffeeScript. Sometimes they can't be avoided, because Javascript frameworks sometimes use them, such as Angular 2, which uses Typescript, and React.js which uses Babel.

Re learning: No problem. If I get employed somewhere, I'm willing to put in the time to learn the stuff they use. I knew as much when I started studying computer science. The problem is that in the Netherlands, the entire job market is completely ***** up.

Positions often have requirements like this:
"You are an expert in the following programming languages: C++, PHP, Javascript, C#, Cobol, and Blaaterdiebladiebla"

"You are an engaged front-end developer, knowledgeable in the latest technologies, among which are Angular, React, Vue, Backbone, and others."

"You know how to work in, and administer, Windows, Linux (all distro's), OSX, and occasionally, OS/2 version 1.1.7.385."

And they expect you to *KNOW* all of this stuff off the bat, so they don't have to pay for half a month of learning.

I've been in the situation that I've been rejected for a position "because I didn't know X or Y, and they needed someone to code app A or B quickly", and then being contacted 8 months later because they didn't find anybody...

After which they rejected me again, when they found out they had the same person. If they had hired me, they would have had their app for months already.

And when I tell them so, it's always like: "Uh... yes, maybe... probably, but the _ manager said_...."

As I said, the IT jobmarket in the Netherlands is completely messed up. If you have a diploma in IT (whichever one of the several), you'll be expected to know everything ever invented, and be able to use it immediately.