TechNom (nobody) @ technom @programming.dev

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2 yr. ago

It's more likely we'll see a new browser with Servo rather than Firefox replacing Gecko with it - especially after Mozilla's recent wayward behavior starting with cutting Rust and Servo lose. But even more likely is Servo becoming a backend for Tauri. Anything beyond that will depend on the developers' persistence.

Others have linked it, so just the summary here. Tauri is an alternative to Electron. But unlike electron, Tauri doesn't bundle the web engine (blink) and uses the platform's webview instead. Tauri and Servo teams are working together on integrating the latter as the engine.

Syntax isn't the scary part - it's the concepts. You need a decent understanding of the hardware to make sense of the language rules. Rust has a lot of high-level abstractions (like other modern languages and unlike C). But they don't deviate from what the hardware limitations dictate.

I can recommend Rust - I'm training a few people on it.

And a pure functional programming language like Haskell or Scheme, if you don't know what functional programming is, or are not comfortable with it. Functional programming needs a different mental approach to traditional (imperative) programming paradigm. Some of the more modern languages like Rust, JS and Python incorporate a lot of functional programming constructs. So it makes sense to learn them.

And a lisp - Common Lisp's popularity is a public secret. Scheme is also fine. This family is homoiconic (program and data are treated more less the same). The syntax is actually very close to its AST. This gives Lisp unparalleled metaprogramming capabilities - mostly through macros. Macros in traditional languages are nowhere near Lisp Macros.

If it interests you, study a stack based language like Forth or Factor. Though they feel very different from Lisps, they have similar underlying properties. And you get more or less the same advantages.

All his other arguments have some meat, though they're debatable. This one statement is the most surprising and probably the only unacceptable stance in that entire article. Rust is just starting to be more widely used - and that success can be attributed to how much people and companies are fed up with bugs caused by unsupervised manual memory management.

C didn't have that sort of machine supervision for safety - but then again, computers simply weren't powerful enough to do the safety analysis back when C was created. Retrofitting an analyzer isn't possible without changing the language completely. But today the situation is different. We have vastly more powerful computers and static safety analysis isn't a limiting factor for newer languages. Insisting that unsafe programming is acceptable is a very regressive stance. Look for a safety paradigm with less cognitive overhead to the programmer? That's worthwhile. But safety is an absolute necessity. If decades of programming has taught us anything, it's that even the most knowledgeable coders can make mistakes with disastrous consequences due to momentary lapses in judgment. There's no justification in not using the computing power at our disposal to catch such mistakes when they happen.

This is an old post and a lot has changed since then. Many of the points in that article are no longer true. Drew himself started a language - hare, for which he is considering Rust style borrow checker to ensure safety. It's a bit wrong to bash anything based on a half a decade old opinion.

Here's one issue they hope to solve with this rewrite: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/238

I didn't know he was alive. But he was a legend enough to be known. It's sad when the world loses a mentor like him. RIP!

Git is a lot of things at once:

1. A tool to record development history - warts and all
2. A tool to create a logical sequence of changes
3. A tool to communicate intent and ideas to a maintainer

Meaningless messages like minor and . don't suit any of these roles - not even 1. Even when recording development history with all mistakes, you'd still need context when you look back at the history. Matklad is a well respected developer. I wonder why he's make such a bizarre claim.

I don't think it's practical for any distro to package every possible combination of cross building toolchains. Perhaps you should consider Crosstool-NG to get the toolchain you want.

I don't completely agree with many of RMS' stances on sexual abuse. It often feels like he is a bit tone deaf in that regard. However, the cancel campaign against him was very much motivated and they twisted his words completely out of context in several cases. I'm not going to get into the tiresome argument of if he was right or not. But one thing I noticed back then was that many involved in the campaign had clear vested and conflicting interests with undisclosed financial motives. Watching it live, it was pretty clear that the campaign was sponsored by certain big names in the industry.

The anti-FSF campaign you mentioned and the anti-copyleft propaganda I mentioned shouldn't be seen in isolation. It might sound like a conspiracy theory, but there were clear indications of a long term corporate-funded smear campaign to attack the foundations of FOSS - a hit job, if you will. Too bad I didn't bother to save those back then. A lot of illuminating messages were forcefully deleted.

They really took advantage of the outrage mentality of common people. Meanwhile, people took the bait and went after the small fish while being completely oblivious to the big sharks feeding the outrage.

The newer FOSS projects have a preference for permissive licenses like MIT. That's due to a narrative going around that copyleft licenses like GPL are somehow 'less free'. Apparently, GPL etc are not free enough that companies avoid such projects. And if you want your project to be adopted, you have to avoid these licenses. You can easily guess who is behind such narratives and why.

Apparently, this change was in 2016 - before MS bought them. However, I agree with your point. But the proof of that isn't in restricting search to logged in users. It's in how they ripped off FOSS code (esp GPL code) for training copilot. They did something that fundamentally damaged the roots of FOSS activity.

The last part is happening. A lot of people switched to gogs/gitea/forgejo instances like codeberg when GH pulled a copilot on them. Lemmy went from being an obscure platform to a good one with lots of new users, better codebase and loads of clients when Reddit screwed its users. Mastodon was already healthy, but ballooned in size when twitter was trashed by Musk. YouTube is the only platform standing without a viable alternative, but people are trying after their adblock shenanigans.

Are the big proprietary platforms dead yet? No. Did they lose the audience - only a little bit. But it has made the alternative open platforms healthy and stronger. We are no longer in a condition where big platforms can just screw their users knowing that nothing will happen to them. Each transgression will cause more and more people to migrate. That's a good thing.

They could instead severely cripple or outright block Firefox users. Since we are the minority, it won't affect them. They will just blame it on Firefox and wash their hands off.

They can arbitrarily reduce the max number of the blocking rulesets, how often the extension can update the rulesets

The size is already just 50. Those who think that adblocking is possible with this are fooling themselves.

or even elect to skip running any rulesets that target YouTube or Google domains.

If anybody acts surprised when it happens, they're probably too stupid to be allowed on the web.

Facebook for all its nastiness was very much incompetent in influencing the direction of the web. Look at their failed attempts like free basics.

Google on the other hand has the web tightly in its dirty grip. At this point, they aren't even pretending to be nice. Even those plans that cause them reputational damage are brought back in some other name.

The only way to stop Google is for the regulatory agencies to put their foot down hard. They should be divided into at least a couple dozen companies that are not allowed to do business with each other.

All the problems mentioned here are common to various tech jobs and possibly other fields as well. It's nothing specific to programming. All problems mentioned are societal issues and not inherent problems of any profession. Things like student loans, hustle culture that leads to burnout, over compartmentalization of work, clueless managers, etc. We need a social revolution, not a career change.

Protobuf is also not a proper binary alternative for Yaml. Protobuf needs a schema in the form of its IDL. Cbor and messagepack might be more analogous.

What are the other reasons?