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Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

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31–40 of 324 posts

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#31

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.

> Open source projects are under financed

Freemium format. It floats the WordPress plugin ecosystem. That ecosystem has $1 bn size. Likely larger now since that statistic was made 1-2 years ago.

You give the base software and most if it free. You provide paid addons for niche, corporate, business use cases etc. Everyone is happy - the userbase gets their software free, advanced & business users have advanced features that could not have made it into the main software in addition to having paid support. And most important for everyone - the project & its organization can sustain itself and it can keep maintaining its software.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#32
There is salt on my kitchen counter but I don't put much concern and exactly how it got there. Some transactions (go ahead download our cool stuff) over the internet comes with strings attached, some don't (very few). The aggregate effect of for profit entities embedding themselves across hardware they don't own but in one fashion or another, start controlling, is harmful. On whose behalf my router and my pc are churning computations and transferring bytes anyway? Should compilers and computer language be like salt. Now you have it, use it, no strings attached. I'm so glad that spices can't be licensed.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#33

I feel this way about TypeScript. That said, I see its value. We use it at my company. TypeScript is open-source but created and (I think) pseudo-owned by Microsoft, which has had terrible ethics over the years, including the 3 E's [1] [1] ""Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE),[1] also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] that was used internally…

TypeScript is the least concerning one. If Microsoft somehow does something so outrageous that you can't stomach using TypeScript anymore, just compile it to JS permanently and call it a day.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#34

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/

My problem with Odin is the same as Zig. I think that manual memory management is a bad choice for most applications and only really has a place in very low-level or performance-critical code. 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 we…

Outside of Rc and Arc, which part of Rust memory management is automatic? The whole pitch for Rust is making manual safety management safer by using more sophisticated compile time checks. It certainly doesn't make automatic memory management faster or more scalable. (Rc and Arc are both regressions from tracing GC in that regard.)

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#35

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?

Yes, now. I also remember when they were not free.

> When your compiler/editor didn't call back to some corporation every time you compiled code?

Yes, now. Just do not use Visual Code.

> When our package managers weren't linked to data aggregators watching our every move?

Yes, now.

> When we used free tools to build free software.

Yes, now. Just do not use Visual Code or Github.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#36
post #21

I don’t see the issue with using corporate backed languages. Java (the language, the core libraries, and the compiler, etc) are all GPL2. GoLang is BSD licensed, c#/dot net is some mix of MIT and a few others. So what’s the problem? There doesn’t appear to be any risk here.

Did you read the article? The author is concerned about spyware.

That just seems like a weak concern though. The code for the java compiler is open source. The code for maven is open source. So how is Nim safer from spyware?

If I’m concerned about spyware, then my language and compiler are low down on my list. My OS, my phone, and my network are far higher on the list.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#38
post #23

My response to the plea in this article is simply "No thanks." If Go gets that bad, I'd be happy to use an ungoogled fork of it, or migrate to another toolchain or language, or whatever needs to happen. But until then, I'm not going to preemptively switch ecosystems and banish technically good options from my tool belt because I have fears about what could happen. I want production quality toolchain and runtimes. Tha…

Maybe we should be investing more time into creating meta-platforms so that we don't need millions of dollars to bootstrap production-ready languages.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#39
Didnt read the article but based on the headline I agree.

Currently working for doing real time surveillance on an enormous amount of data. Using a proprietary language owned by

Technically, theres no conflict of interest because we, as a regulatory body, are a seperate business entity from the company A- but honestly what interest does company B have in addressing our concerns with their software? They arent incentivized to fuck us over nut they have no incentive to help us out either.

We are running into so many problems. And I know for sure that we could, with about a million dollars worth of billable hours in total, create a product vastly superior to cokpany Bs product. But progress marches on and were already bought in. So we just deal with the problems.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#40

I feel this way about TypeScript. That said, I see its value. We use it at my company. TypeScript is open-source but created and (I think) pseudo-owned by Microsoft, which has had terrible ethics over the years, including the 3 E's [1] [1] ""Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE),[1] also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] that was used internally…

These Microsoft examples are 20 years old. The company has changed leadership to a team that embraces open source years ago and I think they've done a pretty good job demonstrating this embrace. They have adopted open source Java, they further open sourced .NET, they've embraced Linux containers in Azure and WSL on windows, etc. Might be about time to reconsider this perspective of 'hate Microsoft'. Full disclosure: I work at Microsoft and these things I listed are a big part of why I moved there this past year.
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