There are a few reasons you shouldn’t use this in proper programs. If you’re the sort of person that thinks hacky Bash scripts are acceptable then sure, use it there.

1. It isn’t cross-platform. Not available on Mac/Windows.
2. There are several types of UUID with different properties. This doesn’t let you choose which one to use.
3. To make programs deterministic (really useful for testing!) you want to be able to seed all their randomness with a specific seed so that it generates the same UUID each time you run it. (Obviously in normal use you would use a random seed.)

Yeah but please don’t actually use this. Use a proper UUID library that works cross-platform and lets you choose the UUID type and can be seeded etc.

By that measure basically every StackOverflow question asking how to do something is opinion based - the very nature of the site is questions asking for the best solutions. The “opinion based” rules is NOT meant to prevent questions like this. This is the kind of useless pedantry that killed StackOverflow.

I think it comes from a fundamental disconnect. You have something like:

1. People ask questions like “which programming language is best” or “what’s the best game engine” or “should I use tabs or spaces”?
2. Someone decided they didn’t want StackOverflow being used to debate these things, so they made a rule against opinion-based questions.
3. People later come along and blindly apply the rule to ban anything that is worded as if it is an opinion, even if it’s a perfectly suitable question.

not sure why that wasn’t enough for you

I never said it wasn’t; just that it shouldn’t have been closed.

Just because it’s closed doesn’t mean the answers already provided are bad.

Again, I never said otherwise. The point is it shouldn’t have been closed.

Oo thanks!

My favourite closed question is how to do Case-insensitive string comparison in C++ - closed as opinion based!

ChatGPT helped, but this is why you died StackOverflow.

I disagree. I still easily find new questions to ask, for example this one which is a nice demonstration of why StackOverflow is dying. Or this one (which also received 4 downvotes).

Even so, I definitely go to ChatGPT first now. Now that we finally have an alternative to the toxic downvotes/closing, why would I go there unless I absolutely need to?