That's an antique piece of software right there.

7-Zip on Windows, or 'apt-get install zip && apt-get install unzip' on Debian/Ubuntu is what you want. I don't know on Mac, I've just used the built-in OS facilities for Zip files there.

It's interesting you regard classes as old-fashioned. C is the first language that comes to mind when I think of imperative programming without classes and inheritance. Classes were considered the new and modern way of doing things when they were introduced with SmallTalk (I think that was the first) in 1980.

Classes are meant to be a way of providing packaging and structure, and allowing for greater code re-usability in larger code bases, but if you ask me, object-oriented over-design is a bit of cargo-cult among some Java programmers, or others who literally do not seem aware there is another way of doing things.

No, and surely there's half a dozen RDBMS that would let me sleep better at night. Why RetardDB?

I think some people who don't want to learn SQL like it.

The hardest part of the job is often trying to understand what the user/boss/client actually wants.

The IDE was a simple text editor...no intellisense, no code completion, no built in compiler. I was not allowed to use any resources (internet, books, etc.).

I don't understand the point of that. A plain text editor is fine for C, sure, but no real Java code is written like that. The thought of writing Java without autocomplete makes my fingers hurt. That's like asking an applicant to carry passengers around on his back to evaluate how good he would be at driving a bus. I'm really not sure the skills I would need to do that have a strong relationship with the skills I would need to do the job.

You can execute a .py script directly on Windows with the command "python.exe myscript.py". You will need to add the full python.exe path (Python interpreter program) to your PATH environment variable first. On Linux and Mac you have to first give execute permissions with "chmod +x myscript.py" and then you can run with "python myscript.py".

You need the Python interpreter on a machine in order to run Python programs.

Although, for interest's sake, here are some more technical answers to the question you probably aren't actually asking...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/138521/is-it-feasible-to-compile-python-to-machine-code

This is a bit philosophical, but it's information that may be illegal to share, not the way it's encoded. Symbols have potency because of what they represent. You would use a different number to represent the same information if you were using a different computer architecture to store it digitally. You can use any arbitrary number as an encryption key - its symbolic potency comes from the fact that it you are using it as your encryption key, not the number it happens to be.

Not really, I would say they are roughly equally popular, but Flask is simpler than Django - less modules and things included out of the box. It designed more for simpler apps. Flask doesn't have its own ORM layer, for example... In these tuts they use SQLAlchemy, but you could also use MongoDB or even SQLLite. There's more structure and convention already in place with Django - more things happening by themselves in the background to make things work.

Pyramid is another popular Python web framework these days, but I've never used it.

Human user has to log in before those run.

I get the feeling this thing is running on the DB server itself, in place of what would otherwise be a web service. A web service obviously connects using a direct database connection.

This sort of simplistic under-engineering is a lot more common than you think in the dingy world of data warehousing. If it works, you know... You should just be thankful if you've actually got a proper full-on DB server like MS SQL Server or Oracle going, and you're not using MS Access or Visual FoxPro, or something more horrible than you can imagine.

Two smaller, more focused programs with better separation of concerns is really supposed to be easier to maintain than one big confused one with an identity crisis.

Otoh, you know, things don't get fixed if they aren't perceived to be broken. Just be ready to say 'Well, I told you so', and have the simple solution ready to pitch when that server next power cycles and that thing doesn't run over the long weekend and there is great wailing and gnashing of teeth.

And design the next one properly in the meantime.

I write JavaScript almost every day, because it's the only language the modern web browser client platform supports natively, but it will be cold day in callback hell before I call myself a 'JavaScript Developer'.

I'm praying for the first C/C++/C#/Java/Go/Rust/Perl/PHP/PLSQL/COBOL/JCL/Brainfuck -> WebAssembly compiler every day over here so I can just use something else, ANYTHING ELSE.

Obligatory xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/378/

After about 10 minutes we jump right into whiteboard problems — implement a breadth-first search (BFS) algorithm.

The thing is, it takes less than three seconds with Google to find a perfect implementation of a breadth-first search algorithm, and if you actually wanted to implement one in production, no programmer in their right mind would write a solution to a known problem blind instead of using code that's already been tested a few trillion times. If the test is to discover the thought process I would follow on the job if I knew I needed to implement a breadth-first algorithm from scratch, my thoughts are that I would use Google.

Maybe it would be better to ask what the advantages and disadvantages are over other means of tree traversal, or whether I have ever used it before, which I actually have, in a chess AI, whose code they can look at if they want... To see if I actually know why and when I would use it is more important than the details of how one is implemented, when that is public information that is trivial to look up, I would think. Good judgement and understanding is not.

Some companies not only expect programmers to work 50- and 60-hour weeks, but tell them that real programmers love programming so much that they do it in their spare time, too.

I want to write beautiful, perhaps pointless programs in my spare time, not the ghastly, boring enterprise CRUD pieces I get paid to write 9-5.

Recursive Java:

public class FnrC
{
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        if (args.length > 0) {
            System.out.println(fnrc(args[0], args[0].length()));
        } else {
            System.out.println("no args");
        }
    }
    static char fnrc(String str, int len) {
        if (str.length() == 1) {
            return str.charAt(0);
        } else {
            String subStr = str.substring(Math.abs(len - str.length()));
            String inStr = str.replace(subStr, "");
            if (subStr.indexOf(subStr.charAt(0), 1) < 0) {
                if (inStr.indexOf(subStr.charAt(0)) < 0) {
                    if (subStr.length() + inStr.length() != str.length()) {
                        return 0;
                    } else {
                        return subStr.charAt(0);
                    }
                }
                return fnrc(str, len - 1);
            } else {
                return fnrc(str, len - 1);
            }
        }
    }
}