French remained influential in the courts, higher education, and elite society long after it stopped being the "official" language. That last part is totally right.
Sure, but many of those words for specialised doctors came to English through French, not directly from Latin or Greek. And I don't think that you can reasonably argue that English words with French origins aren't by now a native part of the language. We use many of the same names in Dutch too, coming from French loanwords.
Only stuff that starts off heavier than lead, and even then not everything, some decay chains stop at thallium instead. Cobalt, with atomic number 27, won't ever become lead, with 55 more protons.
In my opinion yeah, the texture is better, smoother, when they're freshly brined as opposed to the more crumbly/flaky texture when they're marinaded in vinegar. But Danish picked herring is also delicious.
Yeah. I've had a wide variation of them, some are awful like the ones you had, some are just okay. If they are shelf stable they're usually never good, but you can get vinegar pickled ones in refrigerated jars or pouches which can sometimes be a bit nice if you're into that. I would definitely recommend them over tinned ones. But none of them come anywhere close to the real delicacy that's in that photo.
Even though they're "pickled" these don't really keep so you don't really see them overseas much.
I guess you're Dutch, you might not know that in English 'pickled' doesn't only refer to things in vinegar, but it can also refer to things put in salt brine for a few days like maatjes.
It's very soft, you eat it with the skin. The Dutch version of salted herring is the nicest one (compared to Nordic and Baltic versions), it's quite mild flavoured and has a great raw-fish kind of texture. Ones which are pickled longer are still nice but can get a bit floury sometimes.
Well sure, I guess you're right, it's definitely a bit subjective and some people have an easier time with some languages and ways of thinking than others for sure. And I didn't really mean to say that it was totally super easy, but... no kind of programming is really super easy. It is quite different and that in itself has a learning curve.
My recommendation is for sure anecdotal, but I think the point about it seeming more difficult than it really is because people often use it for difficult stuff is actually true.
People really overstate it, it's not that hard. It has a reputation of being difficult because people use it for difficult, low-level tasks, OS stuff, parsers, cryptography, highly optimised serialisation, but those things would be hard in any language. For a newcomer it's, IMO, way easier than say C++, because it doesn't have a mindbogglingly huge std lib with decades of changing best practices to try to figure out. To do simpler things in it is really pretty straightforward, especially if you're already comfortable with a robust type system.
French remained influential in the courts, higher education, and elite society long after it stopped being the "official" language. That last part is totally right.