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Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

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Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#291

Post by alphazard »

TUSF wrote: post #288
alphazard wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zig's comptime idea is definitely an edge to Zig. It's an elegant feature that solves a lot of problems. However, using it for parametric polymorphism is very clunky. Not that it's a bad way to think about PP, but right now the ergonomics are just not there yet. Odin has a sophisticated PP system, which supports something like dependent types last I checked. Odin's context system is excellent. It is similar to implic…

> Odin doesn't do OOP. Zig does. I don't know why a C replacement would try to. What sort of OOP does Zig do, exactly?

The kind with objects that have methods. Look at the examples. They don't have a class hierarchy, but they have something very similar to Go where a data type (object) "owns" a set of procedures (methods).

https://ziglang.org/learn/samples/

`try int_queue.enqueue(25);`

Go has a pretty sane approach to OOP, with methods forming the basis for interfaces (one of Go's most powerful concepts) very nicely. But Go is not really a C replacement. I know Rob Pike said they "started with C", but realistically Go replaced Java in its niche. It's not a C replacement in the way that Zig and Odin are.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#292

Post by pjmlp »

> C also came from a corporation but it came free with every unix install and soon after I started using it, Richard Stallman et al. gave us GCC, a free C compiler.

Until Sun decided to create user and developer SKUs for UNIX and everyone else in the UNIX space followed, along. Only thereafter did GCC start to get really used, until then it was largely ignored.

This also ignores that WG14 participation isn't free beer and for GCC/clang to be compliant with ISO someone has to actually buy the standard documents, the free draft and final versions aren't 1:1 the same.

> GCC, in turn, allowed the development of new languages like Perl and python. No corporations in sight! We got a lot done with these languages. It's not like we are incapable of creating ecosystems without corporate "help". We have proved that, with countless projects in the past.

Perl and Python came to be didn't had anything to do with GCC, and both were at one time or another sponsored by corporations.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#294

Post by nwah1 »

yazzku wrote: post #281
nwah1 wrote: post #3

Terrible arguments. Golang and Android Studio are both open source, and you could compile them yourself. Telemetry can be turned off in Android Studio, and you can use stuff like flatpaks to isolate the software from your system, and completely turn off networking permissions if you don't trust the settings.

"Terrible arguments. [...] and completely turn off networking permissions" So it basically goes back to what the OP argued, right?

No. OP argued that you should not use the software because it might phone home, and the author doesn't think the tools should phone home for any reason. Yet, with flatpak you can specifically turn off networking permissions just for that app, and thus remove the concern.

Also, similar concerns would exist for non-corporate software, so the corporateness is irrelevant to whether to use a free tool which you have full ability to inspect and compile yourself.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#295

Post by pjmlp »

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…

It did not on version 1.0, but most of the differences were fixed in later versions.

As if COM as used in VB6 isn't OOP.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#296

Post by pjmlp »

stcroixx wrote: post #209
Jtsummers wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Did you use VB6? It was less a language and more of a wysiwyg windows desktop GUI application builder. If that's what you learned in school and it was your first professional job, you would have a very difficult road ahead of you learning something like C. Maybe 3 out of the 20 were successful moving on. Some VB apps had almost no code at all that wasn't auto generated by the platform and bound to UI elements to hand…

Just like using VB.NET with Windows Forms, and version 2 introduced back all the Me stuff and some of the semantics that were initially left out.

I not only used VB 6, I used version 3 when VBX was the only option for 3rd party components.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#297

Post by pjmlp »

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…

The JVM showed nothing new in that regard, that idea predates the JVM for a couple of decades, and Gosling even refers it was his past experience with such platforms that made him go with a bytcode based format.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#298

Post by mikewarot »

pklausler wrote: post #231
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #165

> 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. N…

Way before Borland existed, Pascal was created at ETH Zurich and enjoyed its early rush of popularity from free (minus media & shipping charges) distributions for CDC hardware from the University of Minnesota and for the P-machine on many platforms from UCSD.

UCSD Pascal was famous for being slow and crashing. Turbo Pascal was faster than any other compiled language available, and it kept getting faster.

Had Borland not gotten greedy, Delphi would still be widely used.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#299

Post by pjmlp »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #259
hgsgm wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OCaml - INRIA and Jane Street, Facebook, Microsoft research

Lisp - IBM, Xerox, MIT, Apple

Python - CWI, NIST, CNRI, afterwards Guido joined Google in 2000

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#300

Post by leftcenterright »

skybrian wrote: post #264
leftcenterright wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google just doesn't do this with OSS projects. So, android being an open source project, how does one turn off these nefarious repeated connectivity checks (phoning home)? Or how does one modify `/etc/hosts` like we do on Linux? Why do we have to go all the way to root the device or use a different OS to achieve these? - https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...

Android has a lot of open source parts to it, but nearly all users are running a commercial version and it's not managed as an open source project, so I don't think it counts. Developer tools are different.

My comment was in response to "Google just doesn't do this with OSS projects."

Also the source code link I provided was to vanilla Android, not to a commercial version running on someone's phone.

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