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Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

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Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#51

Post by rstat1 »

runjake wrote: post #24
MichaelNolan wrote: post #19

I don’t see the issue with using corporate backed languages. Java (the language, the core libraries, and the compiler, etc) are all GPL2. GoLang is BSD licensed, c#/dot net is some mix of MIT and a few others. So what’s the problem? There doesn’t appear to be any risk here.

There's some risk. A language and it's tooling can be GPL or BSD-licensed, but if it's corporate-controlled, the following things can happen: - The corp still doesn't need to take direction, nor input, nor patches from the community. - The corp can steer the language and frameworks wherever they want. Sure, you may be able to then fork it, but is that fork going to gain any traction? Probably not. And it definitely w…

> The corp still doesn't need to take direction, nor input, nor patches from the community.

>The corp can steer the language and frameworks wherever they want. Sure, you may be able to then fork it, but is that fork going to gain any traction? Probably not.

These both apply to not-corporate projects as well.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#52

Post by charcircuit »

unity1001 wrote: post #31
anonyme-honteux wrote: post #8

Open source projects are under financed and their maintainers are overwhelmed. I would rather read proposed solutions about that because that seems like the more important problem.

> Open source projects are under financed Freemium format. It floats the WordPress plugin ecosystem. That ecosystem has $1 bn size. Likely larger now since that statistic was made 1-2 years ago. You give the base software and most if it free. You provide paid addons for niche, corporate, business use cases etc. Everyone is happy - the userbase gets their software free, advanced & business users have advanced features…

So become a corporation?

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#54

Post by czx4f4bd »

unity1001 wrote: post #31
anonyme-honteux wrote: post #8

Open source projects are under financed and their maintainers are overwhelmed. I would rather read proposed solutions about that because that seems like the more important problem.

> Open source projects are under financed Freemium format. It floats the WordPress plugin ecosystem. That ecosystem has $1 bn size. Likely larger now since that statistic was made 1-2 years ago. You give the base software and most if it free. You provide paid addons for niche, corporate, business use cases etc. Everyone is happy - the userbase gets their software free, advanced & business users have advanced features…

How do you accomplish that for a programming language? Make the language open source but sell a proprietary debugger? And how does that solve the problem corporations controlling languages, given that you would presumably have a corporation controlling at least the proprietary components?

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#55

Post by hutzlibu »

cosmotic wrote: post #40
autodev1 wrote: post #28

I feel this way about TypeScript. That said, I see its value. We use it at my company. TypeScript is open-source but created and (I think) pseudo-owned by Microsoft, which has had terrible ethics over the years, including the 3 E's [1] [1] ""Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE),[1] also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] that was used internally…

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:…

"they've embraced Linux containers in Azure and WSL on windows"

I am open to the possibility, that Microsoft changed, but this example is a classic "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" tactic by my understanding.

Linux is strong with developers and certain tech, but by incorporating Linux, Microsoft makes devs have many good sides of linux, but with all the nice proprietary windows extensions. So they stay on windows.

And that means less devs switching fully to linux to struggle with drivers and co. meaning less solutions there, so even more devs stay on windows and just use the Linux goodies.

Effect extingushing remaining linux users on the desktop.

But of course, they offset that very effectivly, by making me fight their system to not show me advertisement, track me or update at a very inconvinient time for example. Which is why I still love linux, aside from bugs, it does exactly what I want and when I want. I am in control. With windows I feel like I am renting something, where the contract and services can (and sometimes will) change any moment.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#56

Post by guhidalg »

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.

F# will always be a niche language compared to C#. The VSCode extension for F# is bad, while the C# extension for VSCode is just as good as Visual Studio for C#. I'm not apologizing for the .NET team, but if you want to be productive with F# then you really should stick to Visual Studio on Windows.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#57

Post by mseepgood »

chomp wrote: post #42
ARandomerDude wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When our package managers weren't linked to data aggregators watching our every move? I haven't heard of this before (other than TFA's bare question-raising). Do you have an example?

Golang out of the box aggregates and analyzes usage metrics of modules whenever they are downloaded.

Which package management system doesn't do this?

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#58

Post by rstat1 »

jeffbee wrote: post #16

There's a hell of a lot of fuzzy thinking in this article. Exactly what "ecosystem" tainted by Google's articles of incorporation pollutes the author's machine? I know it is the modern style, but I preferred discourse when words had meanings. "Corporation" is not a word that means the thing the author is obliquely suggesting. Their precious GCC is maintained and distributed by a Massachusetts corporation doing busine…

I also miss the days when words actually meant something. Back when "spyware" actually meant "steals your data, without you knowing" not "collects useful info to help the developer".

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#59

Post by shadowgovt »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #38
jchw wrote: post #23

My response to the plea in this article is simply "No thanks." If Go gets that bad, I'd be happy to use an ungoogled fork of it, or migrate to another toolchain or language, or whatever needs to happen. But until then, 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. I want production quality toolchain and runtimes. Tha…

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.

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 volunteer armies (Lua comes to mind, last I checked), but TypeScript, Go, and Rust are supported / maintained by corporate money and it's hard to compete with that because a corporation can throw money at a language that isn't done yet while it's harder to get volunteers excited about a broken toolset.

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