131–140 of 291 posts
Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs. He is an inspirational leader and talented people want to work with him. It appears it will be harder and harder to attract and keep talent at Apple with out a leader like Steve Jobs.
My favourite bosses were engineers first.
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Jobs wrote the Atari game brick breaker. So like Gates, Zuckerberg, and Musk he does have a technical background.
Not really. He was contracted to do it, but subbed all the actual engineering work to Wozniak then essentially lied to Wozniak about how much that work was worth.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)#History_...
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ARC is a whole debate, but the one thing it is not is simple and I would argue its more error prone than a traditional GC. I've used it for most of my career and I have seen what sloppy/unaware coding can do to it. Lattner is a well known expert on compilers. Having used Swift since its inception, I would call into question the reliability of the Swift LLVM compiler. In its current state (3.0.2) its absolutely terrib…
Can you explain why you call into question the reliability of the Swift LLVM compiler?
Still, I would say it's mostly usable now. It used to be a lot worse.
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Can you explain why you call into question the reliability of the Swift LLVM compiler?
Do you use Swift at all? -edit- I meant it as a serious question. But the person who responded to me sums up the issues.
The Swift compiler segfaults very frequently. I do find this amusing in that it's the compiler for a theoretically largely-memory-safe language (yes the compiler is written in C++, it's still funny). The syntax highlighter in Xcode, which is driven by the same stuff, also crashes, which breaks autocompletion and even indentation. Using Xcode, you just have to get used to it. It frequently reports the wrong error message - just something that isn't even close to related. Sometimes object files just become 0 bytes and you either need to clean (and experience the Swift compiler's blazing performance again) or go and modify that file so that the incremental compiler will pick it up.
I've found most of these to be triggered by using a lot of closures and possibly type inference. Shaking out the incorrect errors or segfaults is... not fun.
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Swift, XCode, and Apple software in general don't scream reliability to me. No doubt Lattner is a smart guy, but I'd be more comfortable with a smart guy from NASA or somewhere similar with experience developing survival-critical software systems.
Pretty much none of Apple's current software is written in Swift though, from what I can tell.
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> Wow, that was unexpected. Great poach by Tesla. Tangential, but I really hate the term "poach" when referring to recruiting employees. We shouldn't think of hiring people as "poaching", because employees are not property. You can't "poach" an employee because there's no ownership, and employees should be free to make their own decisions regarding their employment opportunities.
I hope you similarly dislike the term 'head-hunt' on the grounds that no-one's head is severed. 'Poach' is a useful metaphor that suggests that one company actively tried to lure an employee from another. It is a metaphor, it doesn't imply that the employee is a chattel. I think one can get a bit too precious about these things.
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ARC is a whole debate, but the one thing it is not is simple and I would argue its more error prone than a traditional GC. I've used it for most of my career and I have seen what sloppy/unaware coding can do to it. Lattner is a well known expert on compilers. Having used Swift since its inception, I would call into question the reliability of the Swift LLVM compiler. In its current state (3.0.2) its absolutely terrib…
I'm not claiming Swift 3.0.2 is the most reliable language ever. All systems require time to mature and it is very young historically speaking. I am saying Lattner's design principles should realize better results for safety-critical software in the long run. Compiler bugs can be fixed; programmer error is tied to design. It might be Swift, it might be something more pared down, but he's a good guy to have in charge…
His online presence always has that Apple Arrogance™ to it. Thats coming from someone who was born and raised an Apple fan.
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Do you use Swift at all? -edit- I meant it as a serious question. But the person who responded to me sums up the issues.
This is downvoted presumably for lack of information, but it's pretty much true. The Swift compiler segfaults very frequently. I do find this amusing in that it's the compiler for a theoretically largely-memory-safe language (yes the compiler is written in C++, it's still funny). The syntax highlighter in Xcode, which is driven by the same stuff, also crashes, which breaks autocompletion and even indentation . Using…
I should mention I also find the community to be sorta toxic. They are so focused on Swift being the one language to rule them all and they use terms like "Swifty".
Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs. He is an inspirational leader and talented people want to work with him. It appears it will be harder and harder to attract and keep talent at Apple with out a leader like Steve Jobs.
I can't even imagine what Musk would do with Apple's $200 billion in cash. I think he would've been much more daring with that money than even Steve Jobs would've been.
But I think Apple missed its shot, and the merger of Tesla and Solar City probably sealed that for good. Now Musk is probably already seeing a 10-20x larger combined Tesla/Solar City company in his head, 10 years from now, and a potential merger with a bigger Space X as well.
So from his point of view, it probably won't be worth it anymore for him. He would probably have to take over a declining iPhone market and deal with that at the same time as dealing with explosive growth at Tesla and an imminent launch of SpaceX' big rocket to Mars.
On the other hand there would be hundreds of billions of dollars he could get access to, so I wouldn't say it's impossible to happen anymore either. However, at least to me, this would only be interesting from the "let's give Musk unlimited money and see what he can do wit it" point of view. Otherwise, I would rather see Tesla/SpaceX be on their own, than join an Apple/Tesla/SpaceX megacorp.
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Can you explain why you call into question the reliability of the Swift LLVM compiler?
It would be apparent if you were a regular user of the compiler. Random crashes while compiling well-formed code and performance problems with larger files/projects are quite common. Still, I would say it's mostly usable now. It used to be a lot worse.