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Remember when programming languages were free? When your compiler/editor didn't call back to some corporation every time you compiled code? When our package managers weren't linked to data aggregators watching our every move? When we used free tools to build free software.
Remember when programming languages were free? When your compiler/editor didn't call back to some corporation every time you compiled code? When our package managers weren't linked to data aggregators watching our every move? When we used free tools to build free software.
I certainly do remember the main options being: buy commercial software, download an inferior freeware, or go through a huge effort setting up emacs to be a low quality version of one of the first 2.
Oh, and now it's ok/expected you don't have to use windows for everything, because that was the case for a while.
IMO, it's never been easier to use excellent software while avoiding corporate bullshit, so I'm glad we're not back then anymore.
Edit: FWIW I'm early 30's programming for about 15-20 years of those (arguably!)
Remember when programming languages were free? When your compiler/editor didn't call back to some corporation every time you compiled code? When our package managers weren't linked to data aggregators watching our every move? When we used free tools to build free software.
Remember when programming languages were free? When your compiler/editor didn't call back to some corporation every time you compiled code? When our package managers weren't linked to data aggregators watching our every move? When we used free tools to build free software.
> When our package managers weren't linked to data aggregators watching our every move? I haven't heard of this before (other than TFA's bare question-raising). Do you have an example?
I'd imagine having the data lets you detect/fix issues faster and flag malicious packages much easier.
I would highly recommend Odin to anyone who has looked at Zig or Nim (as the author did here). Also not corporate controlled, but used in production at several corporations. https://odin-lang.org/
To me, the most promising newer languages all attempt to make automatic memory management faster, more predictable, and more scalable. That’s what I think is so compelling about Rust. Koka is a promising upcoming language as well, and there are many others in this space.
I would highly recommend Odin to anyone who has looked at Zig or Nim (as the author did here). Also not corporate controlled, but used in production at several corporations. https://odin-lang.org/
Open source projects are under financed and their maintainers are overwhelmed. I would rather read proposed solutions about that because that seems like the more important problem.
The economics for corporate controlled open source are quite clear. It's a cost saver for corporations to open source solutions to common problems. This gets others to buy in, which spreads maintenance costs and ensures that no one is seriously winning in the domain of the project. Essentially de-risking cost/benefits in the domain of the project.
Another problem, which the author didn't discuss, is that corporate controlled software is often designed by a committee, or designed by those with political capital within the corporation. There is not usually a strong selection mechanism for good system designers, or good open source leaders. Go is a happy and rare exception. Projects coming out of corporations are often not as well designed as projects which rose to prominence organically through differential amplification by the community.
So what’s the problem? There doesn’t appear to be any risk here.
Great title, very poorly-articulated article.
tl;dr: It wants you to use Nim for $reasons.