nah, one is never to old to learn stuff.

a tough, but hands-on start would be something like https://www.theodinproject.com/

it’s a free course for web development and their material is really good, so even if you don’t finish it you’ll aquire some good fundamentals about programming.

sadly that does not match your language preferences, but a lot of knowledge tends to transfer or helps to understand different approaches.

you could also try a course like Introduction to CS and Programming or other university/college courses. they are meant for people who start without programming experience.

sure, if the limitting factor in a case like this would be the speed of computation and not slow IO than implementing the computation in another language would be a viable way to increase performance.

Not to aware of how c# works, or interested in defending java, especially ancient java versions, but what does it do better in that regard?

Only records for more or less pure data objects come to mind, but those are also in modern Java.

Access control and offering a sound interface.

You don’t need getters and setters if every attribute is public, but you might want to make sure attributes are accessed in a specific way or a change to an object has to trigger something, or the change has to wait until the object is done with something. Java just has tools to enforce a user of your objects to access its attributes through the methods you designed for that. It’s a safeguard against unintended side effects, to only open up inner workings of a class as littles as necessary.

In a language without something like private attributes you’d have to account for far more ways someone might mutate the state of objects created by your code, it opens you up to far more possible mistakes.

You let your ide generate simple getters and setters or utilize something that generates them during a compilation process.

Who ever writes them per hand needs to utilize their tooling better or needs better tooling.

If null is a valid value for the field there is no reason why a builder should not construct an object where the field is null.

The only thing i dislike about the pattern is that a class utilizing the builder to retrieve the object has to know a lot about how the object has to be constructed, however it makes for very readable code imho.

My group is pretty good at starting to act insane after actually using an insanity effect, so we might miss the first check, but after that the manic laughter and the shouts of “fhatagn” and such are good reminders.

We’d proably miss it more often if we were just playing cards though…

Best Love Letter version i have played so far.

And it high jacked many board game nights, just because someone wanted to play “just another quick round”. The insanity mechanic really adds something.

The only thing that sometimes annoys me is the high luck factor, but rounds are over so quick that a round lost to an unlucky insanity check or drawing cthulhu and the necronomicon at the same time is quickly forgotten.