Balcerowicz is hated by many Poles. The cost of his reforms was pushed onto the poorest citizens. Because of the mess created by him in the early years of transformation, some people are still convinced that communism was better. Real change came later, when proper regulations were introduced, and his successors cleaned his mess.

Same for Russia with Gaidar. Deregulation was inevitable, and people suffer if economy changes dramatically. And we always find someone to blame.

> the cost of his reforms

It wasn’t the cost of his reforms, it was the cost of 40 years of communism. The only way out of the frying pan is through the fire, sadly. Blame the people who put Poland into the frying pan, not the people who led it out.

> 40 years of communism

Don't attribute to communism what can be explained by incompetence.

Communism results in incompetence, that is the whole problem.

There is an open source VCV rack fork called Cardinal I can recommend https://cardinal.kx.studio/

Had a fountain pen in elementary school, but I’m left handed and all my writing was smudged

I’d say ABAP and T-SQL are quite similar.

I used to maintain COBOL system written in late 90s at a previous job. There are still new features released, mostly because of legislation changes. Since the core codebase is from the 90s, we never used new COBOL features like OOP.

I am observing an increased demand for COBOL devs in Poland since developers in western countries are retiring. Companies will hire anyone willing to learn it for a good money. Maybe the new generation of COBOL developers will use some of the new stuff. In my opinion it would add unnecessary complexity. You need COBOL to implement a read/write API to the mainframe and handling more sophisticated stuff should be done with a modern language.