Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#101

Post by unity1001 » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 5:56 PM UTC

czx4f4bd wrote: post #54

unity1001 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How do you accomplish that for a programming language? Make the language open source but sell a proprietary debugger? And how does that solve the problem corporations controlling languages, given that you would presumably have a corporation controlling at least the proprietary components?

> How do you accomplish that for a programming language?

That's a more difficult case of course. But I believe enterprise support and custom enterprise features/addons could help in the case of languages.

> corporation controlling at least the proprietary components?

WP plugins are still GPL. But the users can buy, download them from the original source, install them on their site, and update them from their site with one click. Coupled with premium support, this works well. Its a bigger risk and hassle to 'pirate' the plugins from 3rd parties rather than just getting everything directly from the source. (though such 'piracy' does have impact).

In any case, one organization controlling at least the proprietary, custom enterprise components is much better than the alternative.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#102

Post by nandalism » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 5:58 PM UTC

jchw wrote: 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…

As I said I love golang. I invested a lot of my own time into learning it and its ecosystem. The time developers spend learning a language and its libraries should not be discounted.

Maybe we overestimate how much corporate backing is required to make a language a success. After all we had successful languages and ecosystems long before any corporations became interested in funding such things.

You mention golang's crypto. Is it true that all that code is native to the go project or are they mostly just wrapping other open source libraries which have been created by 3rd parties? Any open source language could do the same without massive investment (many have).

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#103

Post by brianolson » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

Yeah, I don't want to use the Microsoft language (C#)

Certainly not the Oracle Language (Java)

I like the Google Language (Go) and it's BSD so maybe safe-ish?

I'm not in that ecosystem, but I'd use the Apple language (Swift) if I had to.

Maybe the JetBrains language (Kotlin) is okay?

I hear lots of buzz about the Mozilla language (Rust), maybe they have a good history of open source stewardship.

The Guido language is pretty friendly (Python) ;-)

But I'm pretty done with the Larry language (perl)

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#104

Post by nandalism » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 6:00 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #66

I don't think I understand the ask here. Author's claim is they're concerned about corporate ownership of the languages but the examples they cite of concrete issues is the system "phones home." Well, so does Python every time I pull a pip package in. So does every package manager. Is there an implied "I don't trust the phone-home features of package management systems supported by corporations" that doesn't apply to…

Pip is separate from python itself. With a given language can I download packages with curl and install them myself? I think I can trust curl.

The problem is not only that the tool connects to the networks, but who is behind the tool. Google is a company whose business is collecting all the information on people it can. I don't think those in control of python/pip have the same incentives.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#105

Post by thanatropism » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 6:00 PM UTC

czx4f4bd wrote: post #54

unity1001 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How do you accomplish that for a programming language? Make the language open source but sell a proprietary debugger? And how does that solve the problem corporations controlling languages, given that you would presumably have a corporation controlling at least the proprietary components?

Think Pycharm.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#106

Post by bmitc » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 6:01 PM UTC

Why do some software engineers work and think this way? There are a ton of things in society built on corporate-controlled and even proprietary languages and software tools, from buildings to bridges and more.

There are quite a few open-source projects and packages that I would love to be corporate controlled so that I could get some help and support that I would gladly pay for.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#107

Post by nandalism » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 6:01 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #59

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it's a platform problem... It's a money problem. I've got a toy language I've built at home for my own reasons. Lots of developers do. The difference (especially in these modern times) between my toy and Rob Pike's toy is that Rob is paid by Google to develop it, hammer out the details, work out the bugs, and support it. As are the whole team Google dedicated to it. Some languages get supported by volun…

I constantly hear that "we can't do it without corporations" and yet there are so many counter examples.

Most of the corporations were built on free languages and ecosystems which existed before they did.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#108

Post by trinsic2 » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 6:02 PM UTC

This is a good idea. Corporations primary interests don't align with the needs of the public.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#109

Post by btown » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 6:03 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #66

I don't think I understand the ask here. Author's claim is they're concerned about corporate ownership of the languages but the examples they cite of concrete issues is the system "phones home." Well, so does Python every time I pull a pip package in. So does every package manager. Is there an implied "I don't trust the phone-home features of package management systems supported by corporations" that doesn't apply to…

Ironically, a small programming language is much more vulnerable to telemetry-code injection by its maintainers than a large one like Go, where multiple non-Google-affiliated members of the community are actively following each commit made to the compiler source code. As long as you build your compiler from source (and have always done so, per Reflections on Trusting Trust) then you benefit from those eagle-eyed auditors for free. That said, it's important that the language have good governance with representation from firms other than the original creator.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#110

Post by FireInsight » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 6:07 PM UTC

I thought this was _just_ a rant, but apparently it was a rant (maybe a bit misguided) AND an argument for what's also my favorite programming language; Nim.

As long as you're fine with whitespace-based syntax, Nim will bend to anything as well as C at least, add on top of that compilation to JS (not WASM, just plain old JavaScript), you _could_ develop everything with Nim.

Alas, I don't do that either. I still love Golang, and the extensive support and familiarity of JS on the web keeps it as my main language. Someday I'll need a program again, that'd be as easy in Python as in Nim, and where the development wouldn't benefit from the effortless concurrency of Go.