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Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

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Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#161

Post by zozbot234 »

verdagon wrote: post #145
com2kid wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question about Vale's positioning, where does it exist relative to Zig and Nim? At a brief glance Vale seems closed to C than C++, which seems to put it in some of the same use cases as Zig, but perhaps a bit higher level. Is that an accurate assessment?

Zig is great for low-level use cases like embedded, especially where performance is a high priority and memory safety doesn't offer as much benefit as in other domains [0]. Nim's also geared towards systems programming, though it does so with an RC foundation. It's features are well-designed and complement that pretty well. Vale's more geared towards the higher-level cases (games, apps, servers) where memory safety,…

Rust will probably encompass most of these use cases eventually. Features like e.g. RC with efficient cycle collection as found in Nim, or generational regions as found in Vale, will simply be implemented as add-on crates in Rust, complementing the existing borrow checker.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#162

Post by newuser94303 »

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.

vb6 does not exist anymore. It is the reason that I refuse to use Microsoft products anymore. I learned other languages, Just not Microsoft languages.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#163

Post by phendrenad2 »

The post fails to connect the dots to explain why I would want to "stop using corporate-controlled languages". The author mentions that they stopped using them because they "phone home about all kinds of things". But that implies that I dislike any and all "phoning home" (which is the vast majority of instances is simply anonymous statistics to help you, the user, find the most popular packages) enough to shun it. But I also don't think that the author's intention was to convince, and this is more of a "I'm better than the rest of you and here's why" piece.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#164

Post by hgsgm »

nandalism wrote: post #102
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 c…

Name a popular language without corporate backing.

C was corporate, AT&T.

C++ was corporate, AT&T.

Java was corporate, Sun.

Maybe Perl wasn't corporate. Had a great run but faded.

Python? Maybe, but Guido van Rossum worked at Google and Dropbox for many years.

Ruby? Is popular because Rails, corporate.

JavaScript? Mozilla.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#165

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

> remember when programming languages were free?

This is actually the golden age of free programming languages.

Previously, if you wanted a high quality compiler, you had to either get it from the vendor of your operating system or license one for a lot of money. Now, you have access to multiple high-quality compilers.

In addition, even if you had a free compiler, you would have to pay for floppy disks or a cd-rom. Now you can download it for free.

There is also a lot more information for learning about new programming languages thanks to the Internet.

Finally, you also have access to libraries/frameworks like LLVM that make it much easier to build your own compiled languages. For example, Rust probably would have taken much longer to get where it has, if it was not able to leverage the LLVM infrastructure early on for things such as optimizations and cross-platform compilation.

Now with regard to corporate control/backing of languages, if you look at computing history, you will see that most successful programming languages have been backed by some corporation (there are exceptions, though).

Fortran was backed by IBM. C and C++ was backed by AT&T and later Microsoft (especially for Windows). Pascal was backed by Borland. Java was backed by Sun. Rust was backed by Mozilla.

The question is not so much if a corporation backs a language but rather how it goes about building a community around the language. IMO, I think Mozilla did a very good job of building a very broad community around Rust so it became more than just a Mozilla language.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#166

Post by pelasaco »

hutzlibu wrote: post #55
cosmotic wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

"they've embraced Linux containers in Azure and WSL on windows" I am open to the possibility, that Microsoft changed, but this example is a classic "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" tactic by my understanding. Linux is strong with developers and certain tech, but by incorporating Linux, Microsoft makes devs have many good sides of linux, but with all the nice proprietary windows extensions. So they stay on windows. A…

if developers move from Linux to Windows + WSL as desktop, in my experience, is because Linux as desktop doesn't offer a great experience for everyone. In some terms, companies trying to sell Linux, did a bad work to get it done well.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#167

Post by michaelsbradley » 

   Nim … relies heavily on exception handling as opposed to golang's explicit rejection of exceptions
If exceptions aren’t your cup of tea, look into using stew/results and questionable instead:

https://github.com/status-im/nim-stew/blob/master/stew/resul...

https://github.com/status-im/questionable#readme

Re: std/db_sqlite, you’re probably better off using sqlite3_abi:

https://github.com/arnetheduck/nim-sqlite3-abi#readme

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#168

Post by hgsgm »

yashap wrote: post #142

The author specifically calls out Google/Go, Apple/Swift and Microsoft/C#, around tools that do compilation and package management spying on you. It's worth noting that this potential exists in both corporate-controlled and non-corporate-controlled languages, but ... have there actually been any incidents of Go/Swift/C# doing anything sketchy here? IMO this argument needs specifics, because non-corporate projects can…

I don't see the benefit of eschewing a proprietary runtime and them running your program on a proprietary OS owned by the same company.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#169

Post by mixmastamyk »

jefftk wrote: post #146
mixmastamyk wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

None of that is about their relationship to open source. There are still lots of reasons to dislike Microsoft, but their interaction with open source has dramatically improved in the last 10-20 years.

To clarify my point, is that if we know where the priorities of MS lie... and as demonstrated we know from experience that the needs of MS come first. Then extrapolating to their open source telemetry is a no-brainer.
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