Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

blog.deckc.hair

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 324 posts

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#141

Post by [deleted] »

nandalism wrote: post #107
shadowgovt wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a platform problem... It's a money problem. I've got a toy language I've built at home for my own reasons. Lots of developers do. The difference (especially in these modern times) between my toy and Rob Pike's toy is that Rob is paid by Google to develop it, hammer out the details, work out the bugs, and support it. As are the whole team Google dedicated to it. Some languages get supported by volun…

I constantly hear that "we can't do it without corporations" and yet there are so many counter examples. Most of the corporations were built on free languages and ecosystems which existed before they did.

[deleted]

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#142

Post by yashap »

The author specifically calls out Google/Go, Apple/Swift and Microsoft/C#, around tools that do compilation and package management spying on you. It's worth noting that this potential exists in both corporate-controlled and non-corporate-controlled languages, but ... have there actually been any incidents of Go/Swift/C# doing anything sketchy here? IMO this argument needs specifics, because non-corporate projects can do the exact same thing.

The other concern is:

> Using java for free software was the first misstep. We were warned against it but ignored those warnings. Much later the oracle/google battle showed how precarious it is to build on languages controlled by corporations.

There's certainly an argument there, but it also happens with non-corporate open source. To give an example:

- Scala (programming language) was released in 2004, as a non-corporate open-source project

- Play (web app framework for Scala and Java) was released in 2007, as a non-corporate open-source project

- Akka (actor system lib for Scala and Java) was released in 2010, as a non-corporate open-source project

- Key people in these projects form Typesafe (now Lightbend) in 2011. A company that provides premium support and tools around open-source projects, largely centred around Scala/Play/Akka

- A few months ago, in 2022, Lightbend changed the Akka licence, made it proprietary ("Business Source Licence") and very expensive at large scale

Software that starts out as more "pure", non-corporate open-source can still turn the tables on you and charge large licensing fees later. But at least if it's open source from the start, it can be forked, e.g. for Akka, there's this Apache fork that was started after Akka changed its licence: https://github.com/apache/incubator-pekko . This is the key open source protection, and it's true for both corporate and non-corporate projects - if the maintainers start doing things people disagree with, anyone can just fork it.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#143

Post by mattgreenrocks »

nandalism wrote: post #107
shadowgovt wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a platform problem... It's a money problem. I've got a toy language I've built at home for my own reasons. Lots of developers do. The difference (especially in these modern times) between my toy and Rob Pike's toy is that Rob is paid by Google to develop it, hammer out the details, work out the bugs, and support it. As are the whole team Google dedicated to it. Some languages get supported by volun…

I constantly hear that "we can't do it without corporations" and yet there are so many counter examples. Most of the corporations were built on free languages and ecosystems which existed before they did.

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.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#144

Post by tclancy »

stcroixx wrote: post #123
bob1029 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In the late 90's I used to sit next to a team of about 20 VB developers. When MS decided to make VB obsolete, those folks had to re-learn software development and were getting intern like opportunities because suddenly all that VB knowledge and experience was worth exactly zero. Hopefully y'all fare better when they decide to nuke C# and .NET.

I'm not totally sure what that means. VB and the change to .NET are kind of a one-off event. A "VB developer" could mean anything from someone writing VB/ ASP in a text editor with minimal syntax highlighting to someone using a drag and drop editor and never writing code to someone who was really just writing fancy Excel macros. If you want to suggest some of the people working in a GUI only had trouble making the transition, I suppose it's possible, but .NET offered VB.net and VisualStudio still had drag-and-drop editors. So why would they need to be interns? Because people started organizing code differently in folders and linking DLLs?

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#145

Post by verdagon »

com2kid wrote: post #44
[deleted] wrote: post #37

[deleted]

Question about Vale's positioning, where does it exist relative to Zig and Nim? At a brief glance Vale seems closed to C than C++, which seems to put it in some of the same use cases as Zig, but perhaps a bit higher level. Is that an accurate assessment?

Zig is great for low-level use cases like embedded, especially where performance is a high priority and memory safety doesn't offer as much benefit as in other domains [0].

Nim's also geared towards systems programming, though it does so with an RC foundation. It's features are well-designed and complement that pretty well.

Vale's more geared towards the higher-level cases (games, apps, servers) where memory safety, performance, and developer productivity are all priorities. It's meant to be more of a "software engineering" language, focusing on keeping things loose and decoupled in the large, while offering tools like regions [1] (not done yet) to eliminate overhead everywhere it can.

[0] https://verdagon.dev/blog/when-to-use-memory-safe-part-1

[1] https://verdagon.dev/blog/zero-cost-memory-safety-regions-ov...

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#146

Post by jefftk »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #136
jefftk wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before or after they were shaking down Android OEMs over FAT? Looks like that was 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#Challeng... Nadella started in 2014.

What about forcing Windows upgrades? What about endemic telemetry with no/constant-shifting off switches? What about dark patterns to all but force folks to create a online account? The first big tech co to jump in bed with the NSA? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727293 The truth is the culture at MS hasn't changed much even as the world around it has.

None of that is about their relationship to open source.

There are still lots of reasons to dislike Microsoft, but their interaction with open source has dramatically improved in the last 10-20 years.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#148

Post by shadowgovt »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #143
nandalism wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I constantly hear that "we can't do it without corporations" and yet there are so many counter examples. Most of the corporations were built on free languages and ecosystems which existed before they did.

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 force the issue (which was funded by Apple, Google, Microsoft, ARM, Sony, Intel, and AMD).

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#149

Post by mixmastamyk »

scarface74 wrote: post #96
stephc_int13 wrote: post #85

I tend to agree with this type of stance against corporate ownership. Simply because ownership is power. Power in the hands of individuals is harmless as it is mostly Brownian motion; on the other hand, power in the hands of huge corporations (or governments) can turn nasty very quickly. This is the reason I stopped using VSCode even if the tool is very good. Ownership is too important, with heavy long-term political…

> This is the reason I stopped using VSCode even if the tool is very good. So you’re not going to use the tools that you think are the best and most productive and instead depend on the kindness of strangers volunteering in their free time? And before you cite “Linux”, look at who the top contributors are - all corporations. Yes and how deep down are you willing to do everything on your own and does it give you a com…

There have been great FLOSS dev tools for decades—it's one of the few areas with "an embarrassment of riches." Other areas so-so, but dev tools are top notch and ubiquitous.

Definitely one area we don't have to compromise principles.

It's also important how its distributed, if in a main distribution at least a pair of eyes or two have looked at the source.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#150

Post by brushfoot »

stcroixx wrote: post #123
bob1029 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In the late 90's I used to sit next to a team of about 20 VB developers. When MS decided to make VB obsolete, those folks had to re-learn software development and were getting intern like opportunities because suddenly all that VB knowledge and experience was worth exactly zero. Hopefully y'all fare better when they decide to nuke C# and .NET.

> 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 Visual Studio (2022) still offers to scaffold me a new Visual Basic project!

And VB exists in other forms, too. The other day, I was coding VBA macros for an Excel spreadsheet for my business. Worked great and saved me a bunch of time.

Post reply on HN