> I bring up PL/I here on HN occasionally just as an example and lesson in programming language design.

PL/I influenced B, which influenced C, which influenced so many things that literally every person on HN has used a language influenced by C. You're out here talking down to people like "you whippersnappers don't know what you're doing" when you're literally decades behind the curve.

and besides, check out lambda-the-ultimate.org, that's a community more specifically oriented at programming language design. And no, they don't talk about PL/I either.

> A broad point about PL/I is that its structures are nearly as useful as the .Net style classes but with much faster and simpler addressing. In programming language design, that's a little point to keep in mind.

Go has this, Rust has this, lots of languages have this. Language that give the developer the ability to control how their data structures are laid out in memory are not a revelation, we know about them. That's not a new or lost feature, you just have your head buried so far in the sand that you are incapable of viewing anyone that came after you as knowing anything.

https://syslog.ravelin.com/go-and-memory-layout-6ef30c730d51
https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/type-layout.html

And besides, Go was co-designed by Ken Thompson, who invented B, which was strongly influenced by, drumrollllll please, PL/I!!! Your dedication to not listening to people has robbed you of knowing about things that you would probably like.

> just copy the contents of memory in the block of addresses

I already addressed this earlier. That's what cap'n proto and flatbuffers both do:
https://capnproto.org/
https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/

If you listen to people, they don't have to repeat themselves so much.

> de/serialization needs implementation by the language developers

that's literally untrue. People write serialization and deserialization libraries all the time. Lots of languages give the programmer the ability to lay out how their data will look in memory, and lots of serialization libraries are mindful of creating values that have reasonable data locality characteristics. Lots of languages and deserialization libraries don't do this because it literally doesn't matter for most programs and for most programmers most of the time. You're approaching the problem as if computers are expensive, because in your PL/I days they were. But computers are cheap now, and getting cheaper every day. For example, an ec2 instance with 4gb of memory will run you all of $20 a month. Napkin math on some nice round numbers: a programmer costs you $150k a year and they work 2000 hours a year, that works out to $75 an hour, or $600 a day. If a task takes you one day, but you could avoid the task by buying another ec2 server, you just buy the space and avoid the task. A day of programmer time is worth 30 months of server time. Unless you're talking about Windows servers, which are twice as expensive because literally nobody runs Windows servers, they are garbage.

> I wrote enough C code to see how nearly all that syntax worked. So, maybe someday I'll write some C# code to be sure I know how its version of the C idiosyncratic syntax works!

That word does not mean what you think it means. Idiosyncratic is a relative term: it specifically means someone who is outside of expectations, outside of the norm. C-style syntax is used in, yes, C#, but also JavaScript, Go, Rust, and a great many other programming languages. It is PL/I that is idiosyncratic, as it is literally only you talking about it. Idiosyncratic does not mean "unfamiliar to ME", it means "differentiating the individual from the majority". If everyone is doing something one way, and an individual is doing it a different way, it's the individual that is being idiosyncratic.

I don't know why you went off on a long tangent about your backup problem. I do not care. It should be obvious to you that I would not care. And the cherry on the top was "I call it mud wrestling". Dude. We have a name for this. It's "yak shaving". Everyone uses that name. You would know that if you ever listened to anyone. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving

> What do others do about such mud wrestling?

You put all of your code in a hosted source control provider like Github or Bitbucket. Database backups and archival images go on Amazon's S3 or Google Cloud storage. Usually you'd automate the backups and make them full backups and retain a certain number of snapshots. I don't think most people nowadays back up their entire computer. "Everything important is in the cloud" is the most common strategy.

Talking to you is very exhausting. You consistently demonstrate a complete lack of respect for the generations of programmers that have followed you. As a result, you struggle with problems that beginner programmers solve every single day without issue.