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Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

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Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#181

Post by nandalism »

rblatz wrote: post #27
alphazard wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economics of independently lead open source is still a problem with no solutions in sight. The economics for corporate controlled open source are quite clear. It's a cost saver for corporations to open source solutions to common problems. This gets others to buy in, which spreads maintenance costs and ensures that no one is seriously winning in the domain of the project. Essentially de-risking cost/benefits in th…

I’d also like to throw another counter example out. C# and Typescript from Microsoft are both excellent languages and are led by Anders Hejlsberg.

Is that the same Anders Hejlsberg who developed Turbo Pascal and Delphi for Borland, another company which microsoft successfully crushed in the 80's and 90's? (Hint: It is).

We could have C# 30 years before we did if it weren't for microsoft.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#182

Post by arcanemachiner »

macintux wrote: post #64

I was unpleasantly surprised when I installed Dart last weekend and received a warning about it reporting back to Google Analytics by default(?!), so I can definitely sympathize with the concern.

I would expect no less from the king of data mining. I'll use Google's developer tools, but the first thing on my mind when I install them is "Where's the opt-out for the analytics?"

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#183

Post by kube-system »

numbsafari wrote: post #76
giaour wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen this perspective a lot in government and adjacent entities. For them, commercial software and corporate open source has a clear financial motive. If they can't identify why a project exists and continues to receive support, they see a security risk, either via direct compromise or project abandonment and the associated supply chain rot.

and they aren’t wrong to do so. Browser plug-in author gets bored and sells out customer base is a well tread story. Takeovers of well known packages are another. Most of these ecosystems do not offer proper sandboxing for the things we take from them, so it’s easy for things to grow an appendage that abuses our prior assumptions. Apache’s Java ecosystem is full of consultant abandonware and tripwires.

> Browser plug-in author gets bored and sells out customer base is a well tread story.

Not even just "get bored" but, just a plain matter of incentive. Salaries are a strong incentive against undermining your employer's work. Now, of course, there are people who are incentivized because they are altruistic and good at heart, but that's very difficult to measure. It's much easier to demonstrate aligned interests monetarily.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#184

Post by cschep »

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.

The VB developers I knew used the exact same super high quality IDE to start learning C# and a lot of the concepts either transferred or they would have had to learn them anyway to hop to VB.NET so.. this all just feels like normal forward progress to me.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#185

Post by shadowgovt »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #172
shadowgovt wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's very little in the open source space that competes with, for example, npm + TypeScript + VSCode for usability (where "usability" here runs the gamut from package / dependency management to code comprehension / documentation / refactoring to debugging). That kind of polished integration often costs money. In contrast, in the open source world we limped along with gcc + gdb for decades until Clang was able to f…

That strongly depends on your definition of "usability". If it means appealing to the lowest common denominator, that's probably fair. Open source software tends to lean technical, because it's made by technical people for themselves. If it means being useful to the people who use it, then I don't think your argument holds water. NeoVim and Emacs at least fairly compete with VSCode, npm is not at all special in the w…

> If it means being useful to the people who use it, then I don't think your argument holds water

I recently worked on a project involving a couple Docker containers, one of which wraps a Postgres DB and the other extends it.

Some of the features of the extension are broken because the Postgres maintainers changed something key in their Docker image (they disabled the DB listening on localhost) and the scripts the extension generates assume localhost is accessible.

In the (volunteer, free) open source ecosystem, nobody is paid to have that be their problem to solve and so problems like that, to my observation, rarely get solved because these two groups are unrelated to each other and it's nobody's job to make sure "the whole offering" is easy to use.

(And as an ardent and frequent user of Emacs, I simply must see the config file someone claims to have put together that competes with VSCode for managing TypeScript projects. That's a hard claim to swallow without evidence; I've tried, and it's extremely non-trivial. Emacs just pulled in eglot for LSP support... Not that one couldn't self-install it earlier, but every time you have to mutate a system to one-off your own solution you increase the maintenance burden of that system.)

... I'll have to carve out some time to look at Elixir. In my world, of course, "Doesn't have a tool to compile to JavaScript that has made it to v1.0 yet" is a major strike against it, but my problem domain is specific. ;)

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#186

Post by mschuster91 »

bitwize wrote: post #176
brushfoot wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all that VB knowledge and experience was worth exactly zero Except that didn't happen at all. Visual Basic still exists. From Microsoft (2020): > One of the major benefits of using Visual Basic is that the language has been stable for a very long time. (Source: Microsoft, on Visual Basic support in .NET 5: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/visual-basic-support-p... ) As of January 2023, the latest version of Vi…

VB.NET has only superficial similarities to VB 6 and before. Microsoft discontinued the original VB in favor of VB.NET, but the engine lives on in VBA and Microsoft has used VB6 to build various internal things (I think some of the UI to Windows Defender is VB6). But for most "Microsoft shops", VB6 was a dead end, and that left a lot of VB developers out in the cold. They had to reskill with the .NET stuff (significa…

> I think some of the UI to Windows Defender is VB6

... What?! Amazing they still have running tooling to build it, and I don't even want to know what bad surprises hide in the redistributable runtime.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#188

Post by stephc_int13 »

scarface74 wrote: post #96
stephc_int13 wrote: post #85

I tend to agree with this type of stance against corporate ownership. Simply because ownership is power. Power in the hands of individuals is harmless as it is mostly Brownian motion; on the other hand, power in the hands of huge corporations (or governments) can turn nasty very quickly. This is the reason I stopped using VSCode even if the tool is very good. Ownership is too important, with heavy long-term political…

> This is the reason I stopped using VSCode even if the tool is very good. So you’re not going to use the tools that you think are the best and most productive and instead depend on the kindness of strangers volunteering in their free time? And before you cite “Linux”, look at who the top contributors are - all corporations. Yes and how deep down are you willing to do everything on your own and does it give you a com…

I use Sublime Text over VSCode, a paid tool, and I am glad to pay for it as I use it something like 8-10 hours every day. The licence is $80 and can last for years and the tool is very high quality.

The answer is not always open source, even if I think that the contribution of open source to the overall ecosystem is both positive and invaluable, as it clearly empowers individuals.

The dangerous trend is concentration of everything. We don't have to use every services from Google or Apple etc.

I only use Google Maps from Google, nothing else. I use iOS from Apple, but I barely use my phone these days.

We need more diversity to have less corporate control, increase healthy competition and mitigate the political risks.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#189

Post by hutzlibu »

pelasaco wrote: post #166
hutzlibu wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Well yes, there are many reasons why linux has problems and people go ways to avoid them, but my point was, that Microsoft did not embrace linux for their new love of open source, but to eat its marketshare.

I mean, Linux was never significant on the desktop, but had and still has significant market share for developers. In University I was basically tought how to use Linux and despise Windows. Microsoft does not want that obviously.

edit: but according to this chart, linux is actually still gaining market share

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#190

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"I had some problems building Zig from source, so moved on to Nim (which I also failed to build from source as it set my laptop on fire). I gave up at this stage and installed the pre-compiled binaries for Nim. So, just by luck I ended up choosing Nim for a deeper look."

GCC will build from source on NetBSD, even on low resource computers. It has been quite reliable for me over the years.

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