Probably someone’s pet project

Yeah, it’s easy to forget sometimes that they were actually pretty good coders to get started. Obviously that doesn’t always translate to corporate leadership. But hey, assembly is far better than Zuckerberg’s start (PHP?)

This is because AI (vis-a-vis LLMs) became a religion to many, rather than a technology.

It’s going to be much much worse than just “hard to get a visa” – this shitball is rolling downhill and anyone brown should be considering another country.

First they came for…

Just drove past a US consulate. Probably 200 people outside waving signs around in protest against US imperialist behaviour. Seems very grassroots. How much do you wanna bet these people are the seeds of future resistance…

Steam sale. $0.12. sold!

2A proponents suddenly supporting the right to own ICBMs

I’m sorry you had a bad experience. I’ve used it as my daily driver with minimal effort post installation on multiple occasions, usually on work laptops where time spent tinkering is time wasted. I’ve found it to be a good choice in that context. I now own my own business, and OpenSuse has allowed me to repurpose older laptops as workstations for my employees with minimal effort.

The only actual pain point I’ve seen is setting up a wifi enabled printer … required that I change my firewall zone so the printer could be discovered. And that only required a few minutes to figure out. The fact that the firewall is set to a more secure default is probably a feature, not a bug.

OpenSuse Leap or even Tumbleweed. After getting the media codecs up and running, and remembering to set you firewall zone to “home”, you’re pretty golden.

MATLAB is basically a UI wrapper around Fortran’s BLAS and LAPACK – change my mind. ;)

print(eval(input(“Expression:”)))

Unsafe coding is best coding ;)

Insist they index from 1. Like God and Fortran intended it. ;)

Chicken and egg problem strikes again

I agree. And those decades of development come with huge advantages. Libraries. Patterns. Textbooks! Billions of lines of code you can cross reference and learn from!

It’s fun to bleed a little when you are tinkering. It’s not fun to have to reinvent the wheel because you choose a language that doesn’t have an existing ecosystem. That becomes and chicken-and-egg problem. The tinkerers fulfill this role (building out the ecosystem) and also tend to advocate for their tinkering language of choice. But there needs to be a real critical mass.

It takes decades to shift an entrenched ecosystem. Check in ten years if the following exist in languages other than C/C++: an enterprise grade database, a python(/etc.) interpreter that isn’t marked experimental, an OS kernel that is used somewhere real, an embedded manufacturer that ships the language as its first class citizen, a AAA game using it under the engine…

Like, in the last 15 years, I’m only aware of a single AAA game that used a memory safe language – Neverwinter Nights 2 used C# for part of the Electron Engine…

Rust is the most likely candidate here, although you see things like Erlang being used to make some databases (CouchDB). People see Rust being used on some real infrastructure projects that gain actual traction (polars comes to mind). Polars is an interesting use case though – it’s simply better than the other projects in its particular space and so people are switching to it not because it is written in rust at all… And honestly, that’s probably the only way this happens.

Certainly, if I had said that.

It’s like the Brits trying to convince everyone else to switch to their electrical socket. Sure, the design is better for higher voltage and current, has all these extra safety features, etc. But you cannot dramatically shift an entrenched ecosystem for free.

No.

C is going to be around and useful long after COBOL is collecting dust. Too many core things are built with C. The Linux kernel, the CPython interpreter, etc. Making C go away will require major rewrites of projects that have millions upon millions of hours of development.

Even Fortran has a huge installed base (compared to COBOL) and is still actively used for development. Sometimes the right tool for a job is an old tool, because it is so well refined for a specific task.

Forth anyone?

The rewrite-it-in-rust gang arrives in 3, 2 …

Tell that to Belarus.

A good contrast is something like Outer Worlds, where there is usually multiple possible outcomes. I think it comes from their Fallout lessons learned and GURPS background. Love the game design. (Dislike the combat, but that is a separate thing.)

I use old.reddit in desktop mode still, on occasion. Today I clicked on a screenshot of a game cause I wanted more detail. I was directed to the new Reddit interface. I right clicked on the image and chose “open image in new tab” and got the new Reddit interface. I tried CTRL-scroll to zoom in the image, and it made the UI elements larger and in the process shrunk the image. I left the site.

Fascism requires enemies, both internal and external. These enemies need to be painted as simultaneously: weak and can be crushed; but also so dangerous that they are destroying the country. Once the population accepts this rhetoric, the government can literally do anything.