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Thank You, Guido

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Re: Thank You, Guido

#171

Post by Alupis »

mcny wrote: post #161
nine_k wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either you have a stable platform, and it reflects the state of the art form the year of its inception, or you have a platform that keeps on improving, but this means you need to change your code along with it, to keep up with the improvements. You can't have it both ways, OTOH current JVM can still correctly run bytecode compiled by Java 1.0.1 (or maybe even earlier), so the backwards compatibility is indeed excelle…

I am not a go programmer but I would love to revisit this conversation but with golang twenty years from now. Please correct me if I am wrong but I believe golang is essentially complete, right? and golang programmers like golang?

> Please correct me if I am wrong but I believe golang is essentially complete, right

I'm confident every programming language thought it was complete at some point... but eventually it's users demand some new "hot" feature and then you're back to releasing new versions again.

The C programming language just had a release in June 2018, C18. For a language released 47 years ago... and it's a pretty basic language compared to most other languages.

Fortran was released 62 years ago, and just released Fortran 2018 in November of 2018.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#172

Post by mongol »

mcny wrote: post #161
nine_k wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either you have a stable platform, and it reflects the state of the art form the year of its inception, or you have a platform that keeps on improving, but this means you need to change your code along with it, to keep up with the improvements. You can't have it both ways, OTOH current JVM can still correctly run bytecode compiled by Java 1.0.1 (or maybe even earlier), so the backwards compatibility is indeed excelle…

I am not a go programmer but I would love to revisit this conversation but with golang twenty years from now. Please correct me if I am wrong but I believe golang is essentially complete, right? and golang programmers like golang?

Go is not complete. But it does not evolve by revolution as of now.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#173

Post by mathgladiator »

Grue3 wrote: post #108
skellera wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d think it would be common sense when writing something that other people will read. We don’t see people writing books in acronyms or omitting words. How come so many people try to use code to show how smart they are?

We don't use code to show how smart we are. We just assume that other developers are as smart as we are. >We don’t see people writing books in acronyms or omitting words. Math books written for mathematicians do this all the time.

The key difference being operational ownership and business continuity. If all mathematicians (and I say this as a mathematician and math lover) just up and had a heart attack, then the world would probably not notice (as a whole).

If a critical service is experiencing growth and built on cryptic stuff, then the world may notice if no one can maintain it and it falls over.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#174

Post by Alupis »

anoncake wrote: post #170
Alupis wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm starting to long for a stack that doesn't constantly change Come on over to Javaland, it's nice, warm, and the sun is always shining! With the exception of the Java 8 -> Java 11 transition (skipping the non-LTS versions), things are pretty stable. You don't have to use any new-fangled features if you don't want... and your Java 3 code compiled nearly 20 years ago will still run just fine on modern JVM's.

> Come on over to Javaland, it's nice, warm, and the sun is always shining! My oracle predicts much worse weather.

> My oracle

Funny joke, but Oracle is all but out of the equation at this point.

They've stepped back and become yet another JVM vendor that takes OpenJDK source and compiles it into a binary for users, sprinkled with some special sauce here and there, and just happens to charge for support.

That puts them in line with Azul, IBM, Amazon, AdoptOpenJDK Project, SAP, Red Hat, and a ton more.

You get your pick of JVM vendors now... That's a fantastic thing for Java.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#175

Post by mcguire »

blauditore wrote: post #129
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One day tech historians are gonna look back at this era and shake their heads at all the time, energy, and talent being wasted by people just trying to keep up with tech trends for the sheer purpose of remaining employable.

I don't think it's that bad. I've never heard of someone who got fired because they didn't know the latest JS framework. Also, new tech trends are not just hot air, there's also a lot of innovation happening. You just have to see through the hype and wait until the dust settles.

How many haven't been hired because they didn't know the latest JS framework?

Reinventing wheels isn't innovation, particularly if the reinvention isn't round.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#176

Post by rafaelvasco »

It's been some time since I programmed in Python and it left a good impression with some caveats. I remember being bothered by the lack of a strong type checker. I see that now there is MyPy. Good to know. The other problem is the lack of a super fast runtime. A Python to C compiler would be great. I remember using Cython but didn't like it that much, even though it was much faster then normal Python;

Re: Thank You, Guido

#177

Post by TeMPOraL »

3pt14159 wrote: post #79
not2b wrote: post #16

Did you notice this: "He has already put into motion the conversion of the Dropbox server code from Python 2 to Python 3." Even the company that hired Guido is still heavily dependent on Python 2, and it doesn't surprise me at all; my own employer still has a lot of it in internal tools.

I'm starting to long for a stack that doesn't constantly change. Just set the features and that's it. Security updates only after that. It feels like a constant grind keeping up with everything. Containers, clouds, programming languages, operating systems, frontend frameworks, transfer protocols, it seems like it takes so much effort to just build something and keep it going. That Python 2 is still around doesn't rea…

Try Common Lisp. The language has an ANSI standard, published in 1994. So the base has been stable and fixed for the past 25 years. A lot of Lisp code that old or even older works perfectly fine on a current CL implementation.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#178

Post by huhtenberg »

notkaiho wrote: post #2

"“When asked, I would give people my opinion that maintainable code is more important than clever code,” he said. “If I encountered clever code that was particularly cryptic, and I had to do some maintenance on it, I would probably rewrite it. So I led by example, and also by talking to other people.”" This is very sage advice.

The third option, of course, is to just comment your clever code to make it less cryptic.

Yes, you can have your pie and eat it :)

Re: Thank You, Guido

#179

Post by AnimalMuppet »

earenndil wrote: post #64
ajford wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a beginner, compared to many languages out there, it is very intuitive. I taught many 1st/2nd year college students Python as their first foray into programming, and it's flexibility and readability was a great way to get people in the door. I won't defend beauty, as that's extremely subjective. I happen to find the whitespace significantly more intelligible than nested braces and parens, but that's me. I know pl…

> Lisp is a bad language to write an OS in Beg to differ. Lisp machines were huge, back in the day, and there are still hobbyist projects like https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano

"It was done at least once" != "it was a good choice", though.

There's a reason why most OSes are not written in Lisp, and it's not because the OS writers aren't smart enough to learn Lisp. It's not because they don't know it exists. It's because there are better languages to write an OS in.

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