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Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

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Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#211

Post by horsawlarway »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #115
horsawlarway wrote: post #82

I think this is a fairly misguided rant, and ignores the real priorities (and risks) that I have as a developer - both personally and professionally. I'm happy to use languages funded by corporations - the incentives for them are clear, they fund development and work on the tooling and spec for their own use-case - they garner additional support, momentum, and goodwill by releasing the language under an open definiti…

> particularly malicious... not any more than I would find it both reasonable and sane for a store to be tracking how many customers they get a day, and to pay attention to what their hot-selling items are. This is substantially less than what code running on your machine can do, which is basically unlimited its spying capabilities. Yes, this is a problem in itself that needs to be fixed. Otherwise you appear to will…

> Otherwise you appear to willfully misunderstand. These may not be your priorities, but taking offense and framing them as "crazy" does a disservice.

So make your own Go compiler & package manager and stop complaining? The language spec is open.

Or if putting your money where your mouth is feels too hard...

Use an implementation of a corporate sponsored language that has free and open tooling around it... ex: GNU C/G++

Or fuck it - use the GCCGO compiler... https://go.dev/doc/install/gccgo

Because it turns out if this really is your priority - there are active ways to handle it because, despite being corporate sponsored, the language definition is still open...

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#212

Post by nandalism »

WalterBright wrote: post #179

> I'm not so sure about the openness of D-lang so I've left it out D is the most open language you will find. It is Boost licensed, which has the least restrictions of any language you'll find: https://www.boost.org/users/license.html The compiler is 100% Boost licensed. Nobody pays me a dime for D.

(The one and only WalterBright! What an honour.)

Terribly sorry about that. I've moved you into the list. It's been a long time now but I really did like D and its meta-programming features.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#213

Post by scarface74 »

nandalism wrote: post #175
scarface74 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Richard Stallman once said he'd rather use software that was slightly less good over non-free software. If you think this is insane or don't understand the viewpoint, I refer you to the fable of the wolf and the dog. https://fablesofaesop.com/the-dog-and-the-wolf.html

I would rather refer you to the reality of the starving developer.

I don’t know about you. But I can’t seem to kick my addiction to food and shelter.

The best method based on my experience and talents that I know how to adequately feed my addiction is by exchanging my labor doing software development for money.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#214

Post by a_JIT_pie »

mypalmike wrote: post #154
cbushko wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

*fit the bill - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fit-t...

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#215

Post by scarface74 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #149
scarface74 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There have been great FLOSS dev tools for decades—it's one of the few areas with "an embarrassment of riches." Other areas so-so, but dev tools are top notch and ubiquitous. Definitely one area we don't have to compromise principles. It's also important how its distributed, if in a main distribution at least a pair of eyes or two have looked at the source.

The dev tools that are not developed or supported by a for profit corporation that are “top notch” are not “great”

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#216

Post by pwinnski »

nandalism wrote: post #107
shadowgovt wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure what you're hearing is "we can't do it without corporations" so much as it is "the ones sponsored by corporations are better."

I mean, GIMP exists, but any one of a half-dozen commercial products built by fewer people in less time are easier to use and have better feature lists. It's not that it's not possible for GIMP to be best-in-class, it's that it isn't best-in-class. (And sure, dear reader, GIMP works perfectly well for you. Great!)

Given more time, I'd love to explore the idea that "most of the corporations were built on free languages and ecosystems" given how many of the companies we're talking about today seem to have some roots in C, developed under corporate control. But definitions are everything in a statement like that, so it probably would take a lot of time to sift through and ultimately convince nobody either way.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#217

Post by michaelmrose »

cosmotic wrote: post #40
autodev1 wrote: post #28

I feel this way about TypeScript. That said, I see its value. We use it at my company. TypeScript is open-source but created and (I think) pseudo-owned by Microsoft, which has had terrible ethics over the years, including the 3 E's [1] [1] ""Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE),[1] also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] that was used internally…

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:…

When Microsoft committed a whole host of criminal acts including funding a criminal pump and dump scheme targeting competitors with fraudulent lawsuits Satya Nadella had already been among MS leadership for years. If you were part of the MS leadership team in the 1990s and 2000s you were at least tacitly OK with profiting from crime. The only difference between then and now is deciding that open source can profitably be used and can't realistically be crushed.

It's like the mob boss deciding there is money to be made working together so he stops trying to have you whacked. It's certainly a better position to be in but not one that engenders trust nor should it.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#218

Post by elcritch »

zozbot234 wrote: post #161
verdagon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure that'll be likely. If anything Rust gets more complicated with GADT's and such. While GADT's makes sense, Rust's fundamental philosophy lends toward verbosity and low level semantics in my opinion.

Don't get me wrong, it encourages very memory efficient code but its also tedious to write. Take RC for example, but you can already do efficient RC in Rust. It's just not as pleasant or easy as in Nim. Rust Rc's still require a fair bit of details about using and borrowing the memory, passing references to non-rc functions, etc.

Also Nim could just compile to Rust as a backend. ;)

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#220

Post by WorldMaker »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #49
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:…

> 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.

After. That was also closer to a decade ago now than not. (It was settled in October 2015. Microsoft released an Open Patent Agreement with Android manufacturers a few years after that and dropped licensing fees at that time.)
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