I had a similar experience. I only moved from xfce when my nvidia board kept killing my X session in creative ways. I'm pleasantly satisfied with kde, but I only have high praise for xfce usability.
To answer the question in the title, I don't think that Microsoft is even remotely trying to commit suicide. I think they realized that they are so freaking huge that they can nuke the equivalent of an entire year of revenue and still be in no danger.
So they can just try stupid shit left and right and see what happens, if they get lambasted for it, it's no big loss. If it works they will be genius visionaries, stock prices go up, investors are happy.
Cool tip! I learned that reading other people's code and seeing how much they could get done with far fewer lines of code and much faster than I cause they didn't over-engineer from the start. I got the bad habit of making a big architecture from the beginning because I read many books from academics talking about beauty and elegance, while I admired people in the industry the could get cool things done.
Now I have the experience that most of my projects I only understand after months (or years!) of development, observing the users and testing. Only after I have experience in the project I can actually know what should be the focus of my engineering.
I understand that binary libraries can be owned by a different company. But if you strip all that could the resulting code still be infringing the copy rights of third parties? I never worked at a company where someone else's source was integrated to our tree so I can't tell.
If my freelancer friends are anything to go by. Many companies, including some big-ish ones, will go with what's the cheapest option that looks good enough.
I think that your law of convenience is spot on. One thing that got by talking with commercial systems devs is that they are always under pressure by their clients to make their systems as cheap as possible, reducing the database stored and the size of the computations is one great way to minimize the client's monthly bill.
Great stuff. I hate having to write bash scripts and this seems like a great way to create scripts that will run on even old linuxes. Seems that there are a few sections missing in the documentation, stuff like the standard library and the extended documentation about handling failure, very alpha indeed :^D. I'll definitely be keep an eye on this one.
I've spent a good amount of time (and money!) trying to replicate in me the joy that other people seem to have playing games on phones. Then I discovered novels (stupid, I know) and I never looked back if I'm too fidgety to read another chapter, honestly I'm probably not going to enjoy doing anything else at that moment.
So this is my recommendation for people that haven't quite enjoyed playing games on phones in the past and wonder if no-bullshit games are the solution. Maybe give a different medium a try!
My initial reaction to the first few excerpts from neohaskell's website was: "Wait?! Are you guys already forking Simple Haskell[1] before Simple Haskell even has any traction??"
In one hand neohaskell is not that dumb, but on the other hand it's not much better either. I believe that if you are going to make a claim that ambitious you need to post more than a website and a discord, you need an actual PoC.
Ah right, thanks for pointing that out. For some reason I read it as several emails sent from tech giants addressing the public concerns about themselves.
Docker is my perfect example of a OSS being poisoned by excessive money.
OSS needs money to survive but too much of it (a too heavy burden to turn a profit) can poison it leading to significant issues being ignored because either the paying customers are not affected or because the issue is an integral part of the business model.
I wished someone were able to fork docker and strip off all of the extra fluff (mainly service stuff) but I don't think anyone without deep pockets can support such massively complex software.
I think that a lot of the discussion of python problems is steered by the infinitely many python book writers and course instructors that have profited significantly by the current trend of "everyone must learn to code!".
If the recent changes to python syntax were to python educators would be the most affected ones since they would have to update their material or see it obsoleted. Of course there's the moral issue that they would have been misleading students if they were to say that python is as simple as it can be.
Every developer whom I spoke have similar feelings about the changes, they are minimal and if they use it, very frequent boiler-plate code could be dropped. These are of course developers that have been working with python for years and have significant code bases to maintain, novices are likely to feel otherwise.