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.

Or, hear me out, they went public and now they are making their product worse as enshittification takes its toll.

I was trying to keep my comment short(ish), but you’re not wrong. There are other complications :)

kate

I use Kate – part of the KDE project ecosystem (for anyone else wondering) – on all platforms, including Windows. So worth it.

Just use wine on windows ;)

I’ll ignore the market share question and talk a little about history. The compatibility layer is what killed OS/2 back in the day.

See, IBM (with OS/2) and Microsoft (with Windows 2.x and 3.x) were cooperating initially. Windows was the new kid on the block, and MS was allowing IBM to make a windows application compatibility layer on OS/2 in the early days. Think Windows 2.x/3.x. This was a brilliant stroke on behalf of MS, since the application developers would choose the Windows API and develop against that API only. Soon, there were no real native OS/2 apps being sold in any stores. Once MS Office came about, OS/2 was effectively a dead commercial product, outside of the server space.

The parallel here is that wine allows developers to target only the Windows API (again). This means you don’t have to bother with linux support at all and just hope that Proton or whatever will do the work for you.

There are some modern differences though. First: Linux didn’t start as a major competitor to Windows in the desktop/gaming space. We’d all love the Linux marketshare to increase, but largely there isn’t a huge economic driver behind it. So Linux will increase or not and the world will keep on turning. We’re not risking being delegated to history like OS/2. The second: the compatibility layer is being made as an open source project, and this isn’t MS trying to embrace-extend-extinguish in the same way that their assistance to IBM implementing that layer was. (We could quibble about .Net and Mono and others though.)

So I don’t think it’ll play out the same way. Linux will be okay. It’s already a vast improvement from prior years.

Historically, there was nothing like a killer hardware situation for OS/2 – no equivalent of the Steam Deck – that was driving wide hardware adoption to encourage additional native apps. Valve has done more for linux desktop adoption in the last few years than anyone that came prior.

What an organ!

It begins. Fascism requires enemies within and without.

A 32 but integer can store a number up to four billion. If measuring RAM size in integer bytes, 32GB would be 0 bytes, because that integer would wrap around four times.

Assuming windows, if you right click on the executable, you may be able to choose to run it in a compatibility mode of some sort (like XP mode or something) in which case it should report smaller memory to the game, probably.

Sundog is on both sides, just using the steam to tone down the brightness of the sun for higher dynamic range, to allow the colours of the sundog to photograph better.

It’s not really steam either – it’s a sign of really cold air causing the natural gas furnace exhaust to condense rapidly. The exhaust wouldn’t normally be visible.

It’s quite cold here. Currently -20°C on the ground and certainly much colder as you go upwards.