> the other sci-fi/nerdy stuff I was into

I guess that’s your answer. People have different interests and as such there’s a virtually unlimited number of culture combinations that people can be into. And people can have white spots in places that are surprising to others, there’s only so much time.

I think you hit the nail on the head there, you and the author are simply from different cultural zeitgeists. I also remember Star Trek and Dr Who being a big deal, but I was entirely too young to care. And I continue not to care, since I don't watch live action shows much. Never seen an episode of Friends or Game of Thrones either for example. Just a starkly different generation and subculture.

It’s tricorder not tricoder.

Who needs Star Trek when you have Vintergatan?

With the benefit of hindsight, I'd say that impression is more because every series is very different. TOS and TAS may have been similar to TNG seasons 1 and 2, but TNG got more thoughtful as it went on; DS9 was a very different show to both TOS and TNG, with long-term continuity and changes (beyond casting) that stuck, and far more shades of grey and where outright evil came with a smile and a charismatic speech rather than being a puddle of psychic oil; VOY had almost no continuity, making it the polar opposite of DS9, but most of the characters were interesting enough for a space soap opera; ENT was derided by many when it came out, because all the main plot arcs made no sense and they kept introducing old fan favourites that didn't make sense contextually because series set in the show's future had yet to meet the Borg, the Ferengi, etc. And while I've never seen Prodigy, I'm aware that was trying for a very different approach to exploring the cannon and had its own story to tell.

And famously, only the even-numbered films are any good (which doesn't mean all even films are good, e.g. Nemesis).

In this light: DIS throwing away an interesting premise and then going nuts; PIC being three seasons of "why did the scriptwriters put the Borg everywhere, when the main story is androids vs. Romulans, Q, and warcrimes(*?) against changelings leading to changeling terrorism?"; and the very much more pew-pew-lasers action films of Kelvin**… none of this is particularly shocking.

What's nice (for people like me) is that SNW and LD are both well-written and thoughtful — but again, very different shows.

SNW feels like it is trying to be the best of TOS, TNG, and DS9, even if it does have a bit of fan service with insufficiently justified presence of Kirk (James, the other one is fine).

LD is very very silly, but it works for me — not as a canonical set of events (Mariner is even less suitable a personality for a ship officer than is Burnham, and in the same way I can head-cannon all Q episodes as "Q is actually Barclay on the holodeck having a power fantasy", most of the main four cast feel to me like students LARPing trek on a holodeck), but rather I like it because the tries to "yes, and…" the show's existing cannon in ways that mostly work and the characters are fundamentally decent to each other 95% of the time (and when not, justified).

* Perhaps "crimes against humanity" would be a closer take, or whatever the term should be in a not-just-humans universe

** and Section 31 whose critical response is so low that I forgot it existed rather than watch it, and only remembered the existence of when looking at Wikipedia to check if Nemesis was even or odd

Are you sure?

I'm Italian and we had Star Trek (all the films, all the shows, many of the books), and apparently the Star Trek Italian Club[0] was funded in 1982. I think Spock and Kirk were quite familiar to most people, and for sure as a nerd in the '00s everybody understood the joke of showing Bill Gates as a Borg on Slashdot.

[0] https://stic.it/

> Hint: it was never big outside of the USA.

Really? I must have grown up in an alternative universe. Star Trek TOS and TNG were aired on our local TV station in the 80s and 90s, IIRC even in the afternoon. I would be extremely surprised if I'd meet a 30+ person who grew up here (European country) and didn't know Star Trek.

That’s just not true.

Both TOS and TNG aired in various European countries.

Very big in Germany imo. I came back from school and always watched back to back TNG and MacGyver. TNG and DS9 were big and aired nationally. My father grew up with Kirk & Spock and most people who were children in that generation and had access to a TV know the show, because there was not much else on TV. He's not a nerd at all :)

It was aired even in Bangladesh (a tiny country in Asia), and I just fell in love with TNG, and the line: "Space the final frontier ..."

I was never a big Star Trek fan, but here in Sweden growing up I watched episodes of The Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space Nine when they happened to be on. There definitely always seemed to be some Star Trek series running in a decent TV slot and everyone seemed aware of it - even if its popularity was eclipsed by that of Star Wars.

From friends and family in Belgium it seems it was somewhat bigger there.

Adding to the comments: Not an American, but like others here watched TNG every day after school, and TOS before that. Many other people my age did, for example my wife.

BTW, we have watched with our sons all of TNG and DS9 for the last 3 years, and our eldest is now deeply familiar with Star Trek as a result. Very few of his peers are familiar with it, though.

There's a Swedish Star Trek-themed band that has been continually active since 1988 and are popular enough that they still do festivals in Sweden, Germany and other European countries every year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.P.O.C.K

sounds like trouble

Yeah, pretty much the same for me.

Plus, Star Wars universe just felt way more interesting and fascinating to me than Star Trek as a kid.

Star Wars felt like knights and wizards and jet fighter pilots and heroic adventures in space, Star Trek felt like “adults doing boring adult things… but in space”. Not trying to dismiss ST, clearly it has a lot of appeal to tons of people, but it had zero appeal to me as a child.

It also helped that SW universe had some of my favorite games at that time, like SW:Demolition (vehicle combat genre, similar to Twisted Metal), Jedi Knight series, Knights of The Old Republic, etc.

I agree with you. The dinosaur game in Chrome is the classic example; turned off because schools threatened to not buy Chromebooks if kids could play a game in the browser. At least it seems to be a setting now, so your individual locality can decide if fun is allowed.

I don't mind either personally, but I've had a few occasions where such things have caused issues with engineers that didn't have English as a 1st language.

A fair bit of time was wasted on trying to understand some joke/pun code and variable names, and on another occasion, spending the best part of a day working on something because they took some sarcasm in code/comments literally.

I think that's a big line between people who work as software engineers becuase they enjoy the work and want to build something and folks who go there to punch the ticket and run back home as soon as possible.

The second group doesn't want to deal with "all the fun crap" and "distractions" that stand in the way of them marking a bug fixed (or, god forbid, actually getting extra bugs/work assigned because some "fun" code might break or cause confusion).

As teams and companies grow, the second group usually outgrows the first and the first group moves on to reform into smaller teams working on something else again.

There's a middle ground for sure. I've left a few witty comments and loglines in my time.

But I've also had to debug a Delphi unit which returned error codes inspired by the magical supercomputer Hex from the Discworld novels.

"Divide by cucumber error" is not a decent enough representation of a module's internal state, no matter how funny you think you are.

Who cares what happens after you’ve passed away. You’re dead.

Not having to understand someone's goofy inside joke gives me more time to spend on the things that matter the most to me. So: less funny code == living a little more.

You can always ask for a refund.

I remember when the Steam "login from a new computer" auth flow shoved a big "Hi there!" in user's faces the moment it blocked access to their entire online functionality until they left to get a code from their email and came back. Sometime later they removed it and now it's just "please look for the confirmation code sent to <address>".

I think in the push to make computing "friendlier" by dressing up error messages, past a certain point they began to come off as condescending. I wish modern UX could focus on working for me instead of trying to be my friend all the time.

The cute error messages are annoying because they hide what actually happened, not because they are trying to be funny. They are also usually not the result of a single developer's whimsy like a proper easter egg is so they end up being as "funny" as a shitty sitcom with a forced laugh track.

That statement is far too general and also factually wrong e.g. HT83C51 is specced for operating temperatures of 225 deg Celsius

Blink shows that the webs often touted absolute backwards compatibility can be broken for really petty reasons.

At least these days you can easily bring back the fun:

  blink {
    animation: blink 1s steps(5, start) infinite;
  }
  @keyframes blink { to { visibility: hidden } }

Also this is an enterprise policy constant, so it gets sent (and configured) as string/string dictionary via REST API from MDM backend. That's mostly because the constants can be of mixed types (e.g. "MAX_PASSWORD_CHARS" : "1", "DISALLOW_NETWORK_SWITCHING: "true" - example, constants not actual).

That's a great call-out, and it (along with the change itself) underlines the importance of not letting fun get in the way of actual engineering improvements. Defunnification as a side effect, if you will.

TFA = The Friendly Article (or with the other word that begins with f)

It's used as a shorthand for "the article we're talking about"