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Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

blog.deckc.hair

151–160 of 324 posts

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#151
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.

If they had to relearn their craft because they changed tools, they weren't very skilled to start with. You've drawn the wrong conclusion here.

And yes, I hopped off the .net train after 15 years of using c# and took a job writing python, and some JavaScript. I had done JavaScript before, using jQuery. Now I had to learn react. And they used MongiDB as the primary data platform. I had spent the last decade working with SQL.

And it was fine, because my skill isn't tied to a single tool.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#152
post #86

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.

Since the 70s, Washington has largely abandoned public investment in favor of the private sector. Zero surprise that this dynamic emerged in the software industry. Of course, in an alternate timeline where the government successfully funds public/"open source" software, this post would be titled "Stop Building on Government-Controlled Languages".

Every where in "west". 1975 is the critical year.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes: new management can't un-open-source something. If it's out there, it's out there. They could close future work, but not existing work.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#154
post #93
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…

The same goes for huge open source projects like Kubernetes. The amount of money to run the infrastructure for CI/CD and CDN is in the millions per year. Someone has to pay for that and the big companies are the ones that fit the bill. Google mostly pays for it but others have started contributing also. For example, Amazon recently announced that they are funding part of the infrastructure also.

*foot the bill

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#155
I liked the article, while disagreeing with a few parts of it.

I agree with the main premise, having independence from large corporations, in the same way I like individual countries to be autonomous and not beholden to other countries (and one world order/government agencies like World Economic Forum can go to hell…)

I would add Python, Common Lisp, and several Scheme implementations to the list at the bottom of the article.

Nim looks like a very nice language but as a niche language it probably lacks broad classes of libraries that I would like to have available.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#156
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.

Like RPC and IPC and SWIG? We have that.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#157
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

> The alternative is to keep it open-source

I can't imagine that there would be a reason to close it to work on it at Google. That would be a very unusual situation.

> This isn't just a side project for me.

Then you probably made the right decision to work on it full time, but only as an alternative to working on it part time. If Google would have paid you to work on it full time, there really isn't any risk. If they ever tell you to work on something else, you can still quit.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#158
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…

Replace "Go" with "Internet Explorer", and see how that reads:

"My response to the plea in this article is simply "No thanks." If Internet Explorer gets that bad, I'd be happy to use "works best on internet explorer" banners, or migrate to another browser, 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 websites and animations. That's hard. Internet Explorer has a high quality library of windows-specific functions. Hard. Internet Explorer has a fast browser which leverages windows-specific optimisations great. Hard. Internet Explorer has an incredibly liberal interpretation of web standards, making other browsers break 99% of the time, affecting most of my target users. Very hard. Some of those hard solutions are self-inflicted by the choices made in the browser, but the fact that they are so ubiquitous and integrated with the microsoft ecosystem so well is what makes it valuable. If the web standards are missing the many lovely MS-specific extensions of Internet Explorer, a more standards compliant browser would have less value. A standards compliant browser with a tiny user base by comparison would be even harder of a sell.

I am by no means trying to say that Netscape is low quality or not interesting for anyone. In fact, I actually think Netscape is cool. It is not the only other smaller browser I like. I have a strong affection for Opera as well. There are unique properties that make these browsers desirable. Netscape addons are really cool for example. I like stuff like this.

But: I also think Internet Explorer is a great piece of production-quality software. I know many people hate the browser now, especially now that the honeymoon has thoroughly ended. But I still like it. I feel highly creative in it, the ecosystem is good, and at the end of the day, I know I can make reliable, flashy websites in it.

Corporate control is a shame, but the truth is that corporate control is not the problem at all. The problem is funding. Because anyone can try to deviate from web standards and implement windows-specific extension hacks in other browsers, but can you pay maintainers? Can you run the CI, the website and playground, host the CDN with the downloads? Etc. Sometimes the answer is yes, especially with how much SourceForge supports a lot of those things, but in general the answer is no.

"Corporate control" is not the problem itself. Governance is just an outwardly visible consequence. The true control comes from maintainership and stewardship. Because if nobody is stepping up to the plate to take that role of introducing microsoft hacks in browsers, then whoever is doing it today effectively has control over the internet."

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#159
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the 70s, Washington has largely abandoned public investment in favor of the private sector. Zero surprise that this dynamic emerged in the software industry. Of course, in an alternate timeline where the government successfully funds public/"open source" software, this post would be titled "Stop Building on Government-Controlled Languages".

Every where in "west". 1975 is the critical year.

1971 was when Washington really abandoned the Westphalian, internationalist, UN-arbitrated world order in favor of seeking unipolar world domination, by abandoning the gold-backed USD in favor of a violence-backed USD/"petrodollar".

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#160

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.

The languages may not make money for the corporation sponsoring them, but they can be used to implement corporate strategy for competitive advantages and you would never even know. The risk you're taking using a language like this is that the sponsor does something with it that is in their best interest instead of yours without your knowledge.

When I started in software development in the late 90's, avoiding proprietary software was a best practice. SQL - great, open, use freely. TSQL and PL/SQL - avoid because of MS and Oracle.

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