Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#311

Post by jonathankoren » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 5:35 PM UTC

stonemetal12 wrote: post #263

jonathankoren wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real threat. So much “open source” technology is just free community editions of closed source software. If any of these companies decide to change course for any reason, you’re screwed. Who’s going to pick it up? You? No, you were coasting along on someone else work, you don’t have a good expertise or slack to support it. But someone who law will right? Nah. They’ll just shrug and pivot, as will you. May…

Same holds true of any software you didn't build yourself. EMACS devs get collective brain fog and start using VS Code tomorrow? I can't support that, same goes for Vim or just about any other editor out there.

You literally picked the two of the longest lived and most successful open source, and not effectively corporate owned projects.

I really don’t think this is the critique you think it is.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#312

Post by bitwize » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 6:20 PM UTC

drewcoo wrote: post #282

bitwize wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 M…

> They seemed mystified by the concept of variables in PowerShell. Then they hadn't been writing batch files before PowerShell existed, either. They probably weren't programmers. Windows admin at least used to be very UI-/wizard-driven.

That just shows their Mort-ness in their own domain though. In the Unix world, a sysadmin may not be a software engineer, but the ability to cruft up a program in bash, perl, or python to automate some task would be table stakes for the job. On Windows, not so much.

These admins learned just enough to be competent at the job that was in front of them. Many (not all) VB and VBA programmers are the same way.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#313

Post by stonemetal12 » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 6:53 PM UTC

jonathankoren wrote: post #311

stonemetal12 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same holds true of any software you didn't build yourself. EMACS devs get collective brain fog and start using VS Code tomorrow? I can't support that, same goes for Vim or just about any other editor out there.

You literally picked the two of the longest lived and most successful open source, and not effectively corporate owned projects. I really don’t think this is the critique you think it is.

VB had a lifespan of more than a decade and was seen as a pretty safe bet until it wasn't.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#314

Post by ilc » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 10:48 PM UTC

znpy wrote: post #269

ilc wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_... . I disagree that Java is an Open language. Experience says otherwise.

https://openjdk.org/ There you go

You can point me at that... and Google still got sued. As long as Oracle is involved as much as they are. Java is a dangerous language, in a legal sense.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#315

Post by anta40 » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 11:35 PM UTC

"I refuse to install android-studio since I am sure it will be phoning home about all sorts of things."

I wonder what the OP use to build Android apps. Perhaps simply gradle?

BTW, I use Go ocassionally for building API stuff at work, and Nim for personal projects. Since my main responsibility is building Android apps, I don't see myself leaving Android Studio, unfortunately.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#316

Post by mypalmike » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 3:02 AM UTC

a_JIT_pie wrote: post #254

moloch-hai wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The context was clearly about payments. So it's foot. It's not particularly ambiguous even.

I don't correct people to be pedantic or argumentative. I love being corrected and learning from others, but I suppose not everyone does.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#317

Post by nickcox » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 5:25 AM UTC

turtlebits wrote: post #48

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:…

I'm not sure I believe this. IME, the developer experience of .NET on Linux and Mac platforms is definitely subpar compared to Windows. I've tried to get started on F# several times and have always run into bugs and incomplete/inadequate documentation.

Have you tried JetBrains Rider? I've found it pretty great on Mac and Linux.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#318

Post by yazzku » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

nwah1 wrote: post #294

yazzku wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I don't know why you'd run a flatpak you don't trust with all that permissions micromanaging. That's the kind of thing you do when reversing malware, not when using everyday tools. The idea that that kind of flatpak even exists already portrays a very sad state of software.

Corporateness is also not entirely irrelevant, since the incentives are different, and 'corporate' is highly correlated with proprietary, spyware-ridden software. Also, the author talks about corporate languages (and then throws in the tools too), which have their own different set of problems.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#319

Post by fithisux » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 8:09 AM UTC

pphysch wrote: post #159

fithisux wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every where in "west". 1975 is the critical year.

1971 was when Washington really abandoned the Westphalian, internationalist, UN-arbitrated world order in favor of seeking unipolar world domination, by abandoning the gold-backed USD in favor of a violence-backed USD/"petrodollar".

Thank you for the info.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#320

Post by Tozen » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 2:39 PM UTC

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…

> ...easy interop with C work around this problem...

Think this is a good point. Languages like Vlang, Dlang, Nim, etc... Use their interop with C to their advantage. They are not starting out in the wilderness, but can build off of the already strong C ecosystem, then add unique advantages that their userbases want or prefer.