How can you waste your cash on something that will never be released? Surely no one is going to accept any "three year pre order" lark?
Oh and I definitely agree we should all get rid of this compiler malarky. Including the developers, especially the developers! We should just stick to perl / bash / python scripting and pray to god no one loses the interpreters.
(Hmmm, Doom 3 written as a python script, drool over the processor size I'll need to run it...) Oh wait. We should just go back to assembly!
(Maybe you need to qualify / quantify your statements a bit...)
I've never had any problems with compiling. And I've certainly never had any problems with apt-get . (altough this is with Debian not Red Hat so your mileage has varied as you say...)
On a more personal note, does anyone else get thoughts about how much cooler CS would be if someone ported perl to the half life console?