41–50 of 63 posts
In 2005 I wrote a little rant about ancient software [1]. The idea is that far in the future there would be very stable software that had not seen changes in centuries. [1] https://markwatson.com/blog/2005/08/04/ancient-software.html
I don't think the rant about Ubuntu Unity is fair. If anything, Ubuntu 18.04/20.04 LTS releases based on Gnome shell are serious regressions in so many ways (FF not opening new windows on top, std menu missing wtf, etc etc) that I'm considering something KDE-based next.
Yeah, I think Unity happened because of Gnome 3? Gnome 2 EOLed and Canonical didn’t like Gnome 3.
There was a very vocal minority of shouties in various forums that spewed their venemous hate at Unity but by and large most people who tried it really liked it and I still get very positive feedback from non-technical users even today when they find out I was heavily involved in that project.
The criticism levied in the feature article is the same tired old one that boiled down to "I didn't like it because it wasn't the Microsoft Windows I used when I was first learning." There is always a certain merit to the "all change is bad" argument, but since it's entirely based on visceral reaction and not technical merit or rational discourse, it can be difficult to use to convince others without appearing petulant.
Does anyone have experience using one of the more formal method oriented languages (e.g. Idris, Agda, F* etc) as their "daily driver" language, i.e. using them for general purpose programming, for any extended period? I'm dreaming that by focusing on correctness one could reduce the maintenance churn that then can lead to various other spurious changes. But I don't know if any of those languages are really suitable t…
Idris is actually a general purpose language unlike the rest you listed.
> F* (pronounced F star) is a general-purpose functional programming language with effects aimed at program verification
I haven't used either, so that's why I'm asking. Certainly going by their marketing F* seems very practical oriented, fusing common sensibilities from F# with formal methods
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Visual c++ 6 circa 1998 was the pinnacle of responsive IDEs, and was more responsive in 2000 on 2000 hardware than the the visual studio 2013 o last used in 2015 - are new versions any better, or so you still wait a couple of seconds when pressing “run” just for the IDE to figure out that no compiling needs to be done?
Yes, so much this. My thoughts on Eclipse the entire time I used it was "why can't this be as fast and reliable as VB6?"
In 2015, when I had to port something to Windows, I was so frustrated by the IDE speed that I was doing “make ; make test” outside instead - only using the ide when I needed the debugger. (I had makefiles from Linux, I would probably have been to lazy to create them if I didn’t)
I don't think the rant about Ubuntu Unity is fair. If anything, Ubuntu 18.04/20.04 LTS releases based on Gnome shell are serious regressions in so many ways (FF not opening new windows on top, std menu missing wtf, etc etc) that I'm considering something KDE-based next.
It made me move into XFCE, GNOME focus in GJS and extensions everywhere is just too much. KDE would have been the alternative. I really don't get the hate against Unity.
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Then what happened to C?
C has been evolving, there are C89, C90, C99, C11 and C17 standards and a new one is in the make.
Put another way, while the C language has evolved, you can still compile C code written several decades ago using modern tool chains with an excellent chance of having it work immediately or at worst needing some very minor changes.
It’s depressing that some of the comments in today’s discussion are praising Clojure because code often still works after 5 years. Obviously that is itself a good thing, but is only 5 years now a remarkably long time for code to still work?
"you can charge [a MacBook Pro] using any of the 4 USB-C ports, but you really should only ever charge it from the right side." ...wait what?
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C has been evolving, there are C89, C90, C99, C11 and C17 standards and a new one is in the make.
But the last version with major changes was C11, nearly a decade ago. Even that was almost entirely backward-compatible, other than a few very specific cases like removing the inherently dangerous `gets` function from the standard library. And even that removal followed formal deprecation several years earlier, and widespread advice not to use it at all for many years before that. Put another way, while the C languag…