Well, for most real-world programming languages, you do have to teach syntax. You do not have to use the word “syntax”, you can call it something else.

Obviously there are things like Scratch that are intended for your exact use case.

I don’t think you need to use the word “syntax” at all when teaching anyone basic coding. There are many ways to paraphrase the concept. It is kind of an odd question, why that specific word?

In any case, the IPA above doesn’t seem “unpronounceable” at all to me as a native speaker of German and fluent speaker of English. The pronunciation isn’t intuitive from the spelling, that is quite a different thing from being unpronounceable.

I’m too young to have gotten chain emails 30 years ago, but https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/courtroom.quips.html may be from that era too.

In any case, there have been way more people than those two in world history who have had the first name “Joseph”, and it works equally well for all of them.

I don’t use one except for work (to connect to corporate networks).

A VPN mostly changes which entity you have to trust (from your ISP to your VPN provider). I don’t have a reason to distrust my ISP any more than any VPN provider. I don’t have any need to regularly get around any geoblocking.

When I do privacy-sensitive things, I use Tor, which is actually effective at hiding who I am and what I am doing.

Do you have a link to a source for this?

Notepad: Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code. Or if you like terminal windows: https://github.com/microsoft/edit

Paint: https://www.pinta-project.com/ seems to have Windows builds.

Calculator: https://qalculate.github.io/ is the best I know of.

I usually suspect cats of being communists (thus, probably atheists), given they won’t shut up about Mao.

I no longer use IRC; when I did, I used KVIrc near the end, which seems to still be getting releases.

then I have good news for you: https://linuxiac.com/ladybird-browser-team-selects-swift-as-preferred-language/

also several places at which I’ve worked on business-internal software, including my current job

GitLab, I am not sure if their own installation hits all points (depends on what you define as “big tech involvement” maybe), but if you self-host it, certainly.

This is true for the LGPLv3 but not v2.1 which, if I am not mistaken, KHTML is licensed under.

I don’t think Chromium actually has any GPL code in it, only LGPL (mostly from KDE because Chromium is ultimately descended from KHTML) and less restrictive ones. If it had GPL code in it, Google Chrome and Edge would also need to be FOSS, which they aren’t.

And given that the filename starts with LICENSES.chromium, it is probably just the one copied from Chromium which is the base of all Electron apps. Nothing we didn’t know yet.

I notice there is no mention of a license, so this is not actually open source.

You can just ssh to the machine you want to run things on I think?

Is there a translation of https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence into Nepali yet, I wonder.

I agree. It should be that stores just provide enough dividers that the problem doesn’t arise.