Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

blog.deckc.hair

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 324 posts

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#131

Post by mixmastamyk »

spankalee wrote: post #88
[deleted] wrote: post #37

[deleted]

I work for Google now on an open source project, and have worked on open source language projects for them before. This is just not how things happen. At all. There's a lot of fear in our post about things that _could_ happen, but haven't actually happened in Google's history, or aren't unique to corporate sponsorship. > 1. I wouldn't be able to refuse if they told me to add tracking, analytics, AI "learning", or loc…

Can you guarantee this in four dimensions? i.e. after new management takes over?

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#132

Post by [deleted] »

stcroixx wrote: post #123
bob1029 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is exactly where I am at. I use Windows/C#/.NET without any shame for absolutely everything. The more developers who give me grief on some principled basis that " bad, so everything related is bad", the more I double-down on my position. These non-technical argumen…

In the late 90's I used to sit next to a team of about 20 VB developers. When MS decided to make VB obsolete, those folks had to re-learn software development and were getting intern like opportunities because suddenly all that VB knowledge and experience was worth exactly zero. Hopefully y'all fare better when they decide to nuke C# and .NET.

[deleted]

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#134

Post by ilc »

znpy wrote: post #62

the article seems to be mainly about Go, but iirc Amazon now employs most of the Rust steering committee, so much so that there was an ex contributor complaining about it a while ago. Java used to be backed by Sun Microsystems, but now it's really open source. Nowadays (iirc) Oracle and Red Hat are the main contributors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

I disagree that Java is an Open language. Experience says otherwise.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#135

Post by mattgreenrocks »

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…

Google's Go team is not that large AFAIK.

It's probably my love affair with Lisp speaking, but I really think there is space for PLs to implement 80% of production-level features with 20% effort and improve slowly as they turn out to be blockers. There's also a branding thing: users who are put off by lack of corporate funding won't be working on the ground floor of building a PL anyway. That's fine.

LLVM/JVM/WASM give leverage to both indie and corporate langs. More of those types of tools are great.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#136

Post by mixmastamyk »

jefftk wrote: post #70
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> changed leadership to a team that embraces open source years ago Before or after they were shaking down Android OEMs over FAT? Microsoft didn't change, they're just operating in a market where they can't get away with as much.

> Before or after they were shaking down Android OEMs over FAT? Looks like that was 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#Challeng... Nadella started in 2014.

What about forcing Windows upgrades? What about endemic telemetry with no/constant-shifting off switches? What about dark patterns to all but force folks to create a online account? The first big tech co to jump in bed with the NSA?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727293

The truth is the culture at MS hasn't changed much even as the world around it has.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#137

Post by AnimalMuppet »

rstat1 wrote: post #51
runjake wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some risk. A language and it's tooling can be GPL or BSD-licensed, but if it's corporate-controlled, the following things can happen: - The corp still doesn't need to take direction, nor input, nor patches from the community. - The corp can steer the language and frameworks wherever they want. Sure, you may be able to then fork it, but is that fork going to gain any traction? Probably not. And it definitely w…

> The corp still doesn't need to take direction, nor input, nor patches from the community. >The corp can steer the language and frameworks wherever they want. Sure, you may be able to then fork it, but is that fork going to gain any traction? Probably not. These both apply to not-corporate projects as well.

But if it's a non-corporate project, and the lead/owner/BDFL decides to go in an evil (or just stupid) direction, and I fork it, my fork has a better chance of gaining some traction. It's not perfect, but it's somewhat better.

(Or so I suspect - I haven't ever been in that position.)

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#138

Post by [deleted] »

btown wrote: post #109
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 audi…

[deleted]

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#139

Post by fexecve »

stcroixx wrote: post #123
bob1029 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is exactly where I am at. I use Windows/C#/.NET without any shame for absolutely everything. The more developers who give me grief on some principled basis that " bad, so everything related is bad", the more I double-down on my position. These non-technical argumen…

In the late 90's I used to sit next to a team of about 20 VB developers. When MS decided to make VB obsolete, those folks had to re-learn software development and were getting intern like opportunities because suddenly all that VB knowledge and experience was worth exactly zero. Hopefully y'all fare better when they decide to nuke C# and .NET.

I was there in those days too. VB was a very beginner-friendly language, more akin to what we call today "low-code" than other languages. Those developers didn't have to "re" learn software development, as you think, instead they probably never knew software development well enough to use languages like VB.NET (which is what all of the VB devs I worked with ended up on). "C# and .NET" is equal to any language you can think of in terms of complexity, so C# devs are going to be just fine.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#140

Post by unethical_ban »

>Python Syntax: Nim syntax is vaguely like python, indenting and colons for block structure

I am an ops automation person quarter-time, and I use Python for all my work.

I wish Python did not make whitespace significant.

I won't pretend I was going to learn Nim tomorrow, but knowing it is whitespace-aware takes my interest to zero.

---

Now on-topic, having RTFA, the complaint is "I don't want a corporation having analytics about my usage".

>Something I read recently and my own experiences with the golang package proxy reminded my how much I trust the golang tools on my machine, and yet how little I should trust them.

Why not? Why not trust them? What pictures of your vacation, what personal source code are they leaking?

Post reply on HN