based on curiosity, which was short lived, because Linux (Mandrake) at the time was too challenging.

Story of my life back in high school. Except it was Slackware, from the back of a magazine.

Wasn’t until I took Operating System Design in university that the whole linux/unix philosophy clicked.

Or, someone donated 2.5-12, Apple matched it and filed the whole thing under their corporate account.

Those were the times when I had to pull out my hard drive, ride my bike to my best mate’s house, and plug it into their PC so I could finish up a report due the next day. All because Windows 95 didn’t shut down cleanly and refused to boot.

Honestly, the joke landed anyway. I’ve done numerous uppercase-Q trying to quit, because I didn’t let go of Shift fast enough after typing the colon…

The meme refers to the old adage “C lets you shoot yourself on the foot. C++ lets you shoot both feet and gives you a shotgun to do it” - referring to the how C allows you to perform memory-unsafe operations (causing corruption, or worse, security vulnerabilities), and C++'s complexity, potentially obscuring such unsafetyness.

Rust’s memory safety tries to save you from doing (un)intentional bad stuff, by giving you compile-time errors. It’s also the bane of everyone so used to C/++'s ability to just pass around and modify whatever memory they want.