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Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

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Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#251

Post by scarface74 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #247
scarface74 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that means less devs switching fully to linux to struggle with drivers and co. meaning less solutions there, so even more devs stay on windows and just use the Linux goodies. Isn’t the fact that Linux is still more of a headache an argument for using a product from a company that has a profit motive to provide a good user experience?

Most of the hassle comes from picking a random computer full of parts whose OEMs explicitly and only support Windows and playing does this work with Linux wherein the answer ranges from yes, to yes with kernel version n+, yes with an out of kernel driver, yes with some manual configuration, to hell no. If you dealt with an OEM that ships a computer with Linux they would iron out these issues for you. If you choose to…

> Most people complaining about Linux hardware support have decided that good support means working without issue on whatever they throw at it including the laptop they bought for $200 7 years ago from walmart and that any difficulty in installing or operating it is an indication that volunteers haven't donated enough infinite free labor

But you know who has thrown labor at getting that $200 laptop to work? Microsoft and Google (Chrome OS).

It’s amazing how many more people who are willing to work for money than to work for free.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#253

Post by JustLurking2022 »

bob1029 wrote: post #91
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…

> 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…

Long time .NET developer here - I think criticism of Microsoft as being worse than other companies, particularly at that time, is valid. For the longest time, choosing .NET also required it to run on Windows Server which, besides the cost implications, isn't great at scale. They also used it to try to push SQL Server. .NET Core solved some of this but some skepticism is still justified.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#254

Post by a_JIT_pie »

moloch-hai wrote: post #225
a_JIT_pie wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No. Foot is right, meaning "pay". "Fit the bill" is also used, but not in this context.

Yes. _Fit_ is right, specifically in this context. Re-read the comment you're talking about. In fact, either work fine. I'm taking issue with the pedantry we're engaging in here (while admittedly adding to it).

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#255

Post by justinjlynn »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #38
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…

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've had very good luck with Racket ( https://racket-lang.org/ ), in that regard. It's a Lisp which is geared towards the implementation of languages and their interoperation. There's even a strongly typed Haskell-like language - Turnstyle - implemented in it as part of ( https://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/stchang/popl2017/ - the paper: https://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/stchang/pubs/ckg-popl2017.pdf ) and the even more powerful ( http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5587 ( the paper: https://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/stchang/pubs/cbtb-popl2020.pdf ) ) Turnstyle+ which implements dependent types on top of that language as well. Which is just plain cool...

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#256

Post by mixmastamyk »

horsawlarway wrote: post #211
mixmastamyk wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/…

Already do. Still feeling like a personal attack to discuss this idea?

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#257

Post by bitwize »

Jtsummers wrote: post #200
bitwize wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> They had to reskill... This always baffles me. It doesn't surprise me, but it baffles me. Why are so many professional developers having to "reskill" to adapt to a new language? We're not necessarily talking about new domains (that would be different, there's a lot I don't know about server administration and automation, for instance, given my background primarily with embedded and desktop systems). But a language…

I sat in on a meetup of professional Microsoft admins once. It was... different. They seemed mystified by the concept of variables in PowerShell. Like, the idea that a variable can hold different things at different times, and the behavior of a script can change depending on what's in the variables... that astonished them.

A lot of professionals who work on Microsoft platforms are not like us. They're not even like Mark Russinovich or Raymond Chen, real smart people associated with Microsoft systems. They're filing clerks or middle managers or sales people for traditional companies. White collar working stiffs who aren't programmers by trade, they learned a bit of programming to automate their real job or add value because computing and the internet were becoming critical to their business, and they sort of fell into a developer role from something else. In Microsoft developer persona terms, they're Morts. And there are a lot of them, hidden in companies and organizations around the world. This was probably even more true in the 90s than today. And it was especially true of VB, which was explicitly designed for the Morts of the world.

And a Mort would be absolutely flummoxed by the changes between VB and VB.NET. VB is VB, drag some controls around, double click and add code. Its syntax and semantics are borrowed from QBasic. VB.NET is basically C# with a more Pascal-like syntax. You now have to worry about, like, classes and encapsulation and stuff. Any significant VB6 code will require considerable changes to run in VB.NET. If VB is what you're used to, VB.NET seems like intolerable change for change's sake. People toward the Elvis and Einstein side of the developer spectrum don't mind the differences; they're only as bad as, say, those between Java and JavaScript, but to someone for whom programming is a job, not a calling, those differences can be death by a thousand papercuts.

Microsoft actually caught a lot of heat for this back in the day, and people started calling VB.NET "Visual Fred" because it was so different from classic VB -- and difficult for classic VB programmers to get accustomed to.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#258

Post by JustSomeNobody »

crtc wrote: post #116
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #81

I'm confused. When I go get ... is it "phoning home" to Google? I could wireshark it, but since we're all here...

It accesses the module proxy proxy.golang.org, which is run by Google. If you want to opt-out of this module mirror, you can turn it off by setting GOPROXY=direct. The proxy has a clear privacy policy: https://proxy.golang.org/privacy It collects anonymized usage metrics like other package registries (rubygems.org, nuget.org, crates.io) do.

Okay, thanks. Seems harmless enough and has an opt out.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#259

Post by stonemetal12 »

hgsgm wrote: post #164
nandalism wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lisp, and OCaml are about as close as I can get. I would argue Haskell (several of GHC's core team worked at MS though). I would also argue Python was popular before Guido worked at Google. Those 4 all came out of academia though so they had backing just not corporate backing.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#260

Post by YoshiRulz »

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…

Just to turn your own example against you for a moment: Mono is dead. If you were using it for your cross-platform WinForms desktop app, as my team was, you're now stuck with no updates and no migration path to MS' new offering, MAUI (though it still doesn't run on Linux, and nor did the several UI frameworks in between). At least Mono is still getting patches. They even recently did a stable build after a long hiatus.

I believe the cause of Mono's death was a combination of MS buying out the company where many Mono devs worked (Xamarin), and the huge rearchitecting MS did for .NET Core. The latter being something that on paper sounds great for openness and cross-platform support—but in practice, it hasn't turned out that way. The .NET team is mostly MS and they still play favourites with Windows (and increasingly Android, which is fair) and Visual Studio.

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