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Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

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Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#271

Post by mike_hearn »

brabel wrote: post #87
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. This is something I believe will happen in a few decades (progress in this are is very slow). The JVM showed that a runtime can host a multitude of languages, compile to multiplatform bytecode that require only a "small" runtime (the core of the JVM is pretty simple, the complexity is on the stuff on the edges, like the stdlib) to run on anything and can be ported easily to any architecture. WASM is the new…

JVM has moved beyond bytecode now. See my sibling comment. Truffle takes the JVM to the next level - you don't have to compile your language to bytecode anymore, you write an interpreter for the source code (or a binary form if you have one already) and then the JVM turns that interpreter into a JIT compiler, giving it many other features and tools along the way. You aren't constrained by what Java bytecode can express.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#272

Post by unity1001 »

charcircuit wrote: post #119
unity1001 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think whatever format that works would be ok, right? A cooperative, or a foundation with an attached company (a la WP foundation + Automattic etc), whatever that works would be ok.

I typoed corporation. My point was that you would become the very thing you were trying to avoid.

There is no problem in organization. What matters is who controls an organization and how it works. A corporation is just an organizational entity. It can be run in many ways. It does not have to be organized and run like a privately owned capitalist corporation.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#273

Post by horsawlarway »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #256
horsawlarway wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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

Show me any non-corporate sponsored language that is not a toy, and is seeing serious traction. (hint - I enjoy Nim, but it's not a valid answer).

Unlike the original post implies - most of the languages in his list are corporate sponsored...

D was created at Digital Mars

Open Pascal is... an open implementation of pascal, which was created by IFIP, but most variants are dead and Borland poured a fuck load of money into turbo pascal. So both gov + corporate sponsors

Nim... is arguably not corporate sponsored, but it comes right out of open Pascal (which was) and it has trivial use at large (I still enjoy the language - I'm not about to suggest we use it at work).

Same as Zig - which is probably the closest to being a true open project in the list (IMO) but which still builds heavily on c++ tooling. (Honestly - I'm most excited about Zig, it's nice and is very close to self-hosting)

Steel bank comes right out of Carnegie Mellon (and if you don't think colleges are corporations... boy I've got news for you)

Vale... well I actually don't really know anything about this. Honestly one of the first time's I've seen it referenced at all, I'll have to look it up some time.

---

So again - WTF is the author talking about?

If he just wants a free compiler (Free as in free, not as in beer) they exist for basically any large language out there.

If he wants to control language direction and goals... well - he's welcome to write his own language but otherwise I find no compelling difference between a guiding committee/creators on what he considers a "good" language, and the company making decisions for "corporate controlled" languages. If anything - at least I can usually predict what the corporate controlled languages will do, even if it's not always what I'd like...

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#274

Post by mixmastamyk »

spankalee wrote: post #153
mixmastamyk wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, and could damage the product/brand in the process. mysql, openoffice, and oracle come to mind. It is survivable but often not a win in the long term for the original author. Seems like a personal decision however.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#275

Post by horsawlarway »

YoshiRulz wrote: post #260
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 hiatu…

Eh - I don't really know that dead is the right term, and I think it mostly served it's purpose (It's actually still getting fairly regular commits, but I agree that it's no longer keeping pace with dot net core)

I would also draw a pretty clear distinction between C# the language, and something like WinForms.

And that's really the whole point - implementations differ in functionality exposed and features worked on (hell - just the compatibility issues and differences between clang/GCC/MSVC is a great example). The corporate implementation is usually the most feature full because it has the most resources poured into it.

That's not a problem. That's the community being able to take advantage of those resources. If/when the company stops being a useful partner, they're free to ditch them and fork (and this is historically how things like Linux/OpenBSD/Gnu tooling exist...)

So again - if you have a real problem with using the corporate release, use the open versions. Contribute to them.

But I don't find it a compelling argument to say that just because a language is sponsored by a company we should avoid it. Doubly so if the corporate version is licensed well.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#276

Post by vluft »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #241
vluft wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's nothing preventing you from downloading go code manually without the package manager and using it that way

Or even easier--pointing your Go tool at a package proxy of your choice.

yup; you can easily run your own or just set GOPROXY=direct to use go modules without a proxy at all.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#277

Post by canadianfella »

EMM_386 wrote: post #203
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…

VB6 does not equal VB.Net. I personally know developers who switched careers after Microsoft transitioned to .Net. I worked with them around 2001. They didn't understand OOP concepts and were not interested in having to relearn everything. It felt totally unfamiliar and strange to them. Microsoft tried to make the syntax somewhat familiar, but at the end of the day .Net is an object-oriented programming language and…

[dead]

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#278

Post by wprl »

shadowgovt wrote: post #148
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been a shift away from vague distrust of corporations (think Slashdot) to full-on embrace. The fallout from that is we can't imagine platforms that don't require tens of millions of dollars to bootstrap, and we cling to the ones we have because they're so expensive. Too big to fail is not the hacker ideology I grew up with. Maybe that's gone now.

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…

I found Dahl’s approach to packages with Deno very interesting. It decouples package management from the runtime’s tool chain. So a package manager isn’t needed. (Instead a proxy can be used as a cache similar to how an artifact registry would work.)

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#279

Post by UncleEntity »

shadowgovt wrote: post #185
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

> Some of the features of the extension are broken because the Postgres maintainers changed something key in their Docker image…

I’m not trying to set the wrong tone here but… how hard is it to modify a docker image that is used as a fundamental part of a production system? There isn’t someone who’s job it is to wrangle these things?

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#280

Post by fsckboy »

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…

> 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?

stretch your thinking a little, it's really not baffling.

you have people who teach themselves to code as teens or younger, then major in computer science then take jobs as professional developers by which time they've been experienced in a variety of programming paradigms, and where the nature of computer science is natively appealing to them.

In some large companies they might find themselves working alongside some people who were English majors/barristas and recently took a coding bootcamp to earn a better living writing some VB. Yes it's going to be harder for the latter group to drop what they know to pick up languages with more complex CS constructs and semantics. It's entirely reasonable for a not-so-experienced VB programmer to consider themselves a professional developer, even if it's a profession that they just took up, or even if they've been at it awhile but all their knowledge is within the VB ecosystem.

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