Same in Oslo

Also not having used Java for decades I’ll not comment on the state of their abstractions, but

IMO at the extreme being unable to shed the past means negatively hindering progress. I think modern Java versions show a budding shift in mentality

both reminds me of similar complaints against C++ (and with a sizeable amount of users wishing for an ABI break), and how weird it is to get both complaints like that and over the fact that so many shops are on ancient versions. They’ve moved slowly, but it doesn’t seem like anything was slow enough for a lot of shops, which indicates they likely could’ve moved faster without changing which versions users would be at today.

This sounds like the antithesis to parse, don’t validate. It is possible to use just maps and strings and get a “stringly typed” program, but there’ a bunch of downsides to it too:

• your typechecker can’t help you if you used the wrong dict[str, Any]; most of us want the typechecker to help us write correct code
• there’s no public/private
• everything you .get from a map is Optional; you need to be constantly checking and handling that rather than being able to have methods that return T, or even direct field access
• you can derive or hand-implement a bunch of operations on (data)classes that you can’t on maps: Comparison, ordering, hashing so you can use the blob of information as a map key, …

Ultimately while Hickey has a good point in the distinction between easy and simple, his ideals don’t seem particularly aligned with the programming world at large: For one thing, Clojure remains pretty small, but even other dynamic programming languages like Javascript and Python have been moving towards typechecking through Typescript and typing in Python.

Doing a json.load into some dict[str, Any] is simple, but actually programming like that isn’t easy. Apparently a lot of programmers find value in doing the extra work to get some stdlib or pydantic dataclasses. Most of us get a confidence boost from using parsed data, and feel uneasy shuffling around stuff that’s just strings and maps.

Yeah, the left generally considers it a “fighting day” similar to March 8th. The right does gardening (to make it visible that they’re not marching). Others do whatever they feel like; not uncommon to spend the day hung over.

Kokoro.

Also have vague plans to reread Der Zauberberg

Likely also will reread V. and the Count of Monte Christo at some point.

Yeah, let’s have a go with the ACI (anti-coercion instrument) and see if we can’t make their patents free game. Playing to Trump’s tune is unlikely to work out well

Isn’t that sort of just the cost of doing business in C? It’s a sparse language, so it falls to the programmer to cobble together more.

I do also think the concrete example of emails should be taken as a stand-in. Errors like swapping a parameter for an email application is likely not very harmful and detected early given the volume of email that exists. But in other, less fault-tolerant applications it becomes a lot more valuable.

It is pretty funny that C’s type system can be described pretty differently based on the speaker’s experience. The parable of the Blub language comes to mind.

Parsing is a way of “validating early”. You either get a successful parse and the program continues working on known-good data with that knowledge encoded in the type system, or you handle incorrect data as soon as it’s encountered.

I feel I gotta point out it’s a pretty funny example—email comes up so frequently as a thing that you’re recommended to neither parse nor validate, just try to send an email to the address and see if it works. If you need to know that it was received successfully, a link to click is the general method.

But “parse, don’t validate” is still a generally good idea, no matter the example used. :)

Afaik they’re hoping to land it on nightly in 2025H1.

Between that, work on the next-generation trait solver and promoting parallel frontend, there’s some stuff to look forward in the compiler this year.

Do also note that by saying that some % of crates use unsafe, it’s not implied that 100% of the code in that crate is marked unsafe. It could be as little as one line; it could be a whole lot; it could be well-documented and tested; it might not be. (This is part of what the talk is about.)

It’s also rather to be expected that there’s more unsafe in embedded. As Steve Klabnik gets into in How to Do Embedded Development with Rust (GOTO 2023), it’s used when you e.g. want to set a certain memory address to a certain value, which in a lot of contexts is nonsense, but in some contexts makes a LED light up.

Yeah, the article comes off as needing so much context that the article itself is sus. Like

Hejlsberg stated the obvious when saying that TS isn’t the fastest language. Although it can laughably run Doom at 0.0000009645 fps.

… which is referencing an implementation of Doom in the TS type system. It’s a funny idea, but an arbitrary reader who doesn’t know about that and doesn’t bother clicking through will get a very wrong impression.

The reimplementation (which they’ve done partially automated; Go apparently lets them do a very simple translation while Rust or C# would require more work to fit) should be a boon for TS devs, but not noticeable for those who just run stuff that happens to be written in TS.

Would be kinda interesting to see the effect if stuff targeted deno rather than node, though.

One rather obvious reason is that society has a lot of greybeards in general. The baby boomer generation was named that for a reason, and people have been living longer on average. Lots of countries are struggling with the demographic effects. There’s no reason to expect that tech or something even more specific like FOSS would be exempt.

Another aspect here is that FOSS is still kind of new in society. There’s just more people who have had the chance to age into FOSS greybeards than when those greybeards were young. (And they were thus likely to a lesser degree blocked by entrenched greybeards when they were getting started.)

To be a bit more generic here, when you’re at government scale you’re generally deep in trade-off territory. Time and space are frequently opposed values and you have to choose which one is most important, and consider the expenses of both.

E.g. caching is duplicating data to save time. Without it we’d have lower storage costs, but longer wait times and more network traffic.

Yeah, it’s essentially a weathervane or thermometer. You can indicate the state of a country by it.

At this point the US has joined the ranks of, well, grim theocracies. Not that the people at the top in the US worship anything but Mammon.

TIOBE literally ranks languages by search results. It’s at best a measure of SEO. It is, generally, a trash metric that shouldn’t be used for anything.

I’ve moved on from vim to neovim, and I think I’ll continue using something in that family in the future. It’s a pretty stable experience overall, but the inclusion of LSPs and tree-sitter have been good improvements too.

Ultimately editors are tools, similar to keyboards, os-es, screens, chairs, shoes and so on. There are some objective quality differences between a well-constructed tool and some slapdash nonsense, and there are a huge amount of subjective quality differences. What suits me may not suit you, and vice versa.

It’s generally good to try out some new (to you) stuff and see if you like it. If you do, great; if you don’t, well, now you know. I think my worst experience was with Acme (or Wily? can’t remember), during a phase where I experimented with Plan 9 stuff. Ultimately very not my cup of tea, but apparently Rob Pike (who made it) and some other gophers still enjoy it? Which is good for them, just like it’s good for me that I can choose not to use it. It’s just personal tastes, and I still think it’s good that I gave it a go.

The debate over holding down modifier keys vs modes is also a part of the Emacs vs vi debate from many decades ago. There might be some statistics for what works best for the most people now, but again, use what suits you. And try some new stuff when you get curious, it’s generally good for you.

Smells a bit Scandinavian to me. In Norwegian we also use “ur” that way, including “urspråk” (Ursprache, ur-language). We have a different word for origin (opphav), so ur remains a prefix that’s difficult for us to translate.

Going by Wikipedia however, the English translation for Norwegian urspråk and German Ursprache is proto-language.

I had to figure out how to do the factory reset at the gym after I got the blue triangle of death when leaving work. Oddly enough it synced the gym plan I wanted and leaving it connected to the phone didn’t seem to produce any other ill effects, but I stayed away from anything using GPS.

But yeah, the general advice for Garmins just now seems to be “just don’t” and hope it doesn’t triangle itself until the fix is out