> "because C is such a small and simple language (and one which, as you suggested, often feels like a bunch of syntactic sugar over PDP-7 assembly)."
I didn't describe such qualities of C in my previous post. At all.
And to be clear, I didn't mean "devs who learned how to program in the 1990s". I meant "devs who were active in the 1990s", which would have mostly been devs who came up in the 1970s and 1980s (where learning BASIC, then assembly was common).
I also made no claim about first languages in my previous statement. I only said there was a likely progression from assembly to C or C++ (for a C++ dev).
My point was, the talent pool in the 1990s would be able to handle the downsides of C++, and the upsides would have been a bonus. Whereas modern devs aren't used to the downsides, thus C++ is a step back for them.
What I should have added is that for devs in the 1990s, there would have been very few large legacy C++ codebases.
I'd phrase it differently, C++ was a set of power-to-performance trade-offs that were optimal in the 1990s.
Time has moved on.
More importantly, a typical 1990s C++ dev was likely someone who learned assembly, then C or C++. Meaning they already knew how to control hardware / memory allocation, and C++ was just a new set of abstraction tools. It was a step forward for them.
To modern devs, C++ is a step backwards. And a tough one at that.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
"For example, the current cities Waymo operates in do not have appreciable snow fall, and as a result neither the Waymo nor the human benchmark data include this type of inclement weather."
I'm happy to see this acknowledged, and hope it's a sign that they appreciate the difficulties of winter driving.
Could you elaborate (hopefully with real examples) of what it's like to be in the out group with few connections (or perhaps no connections) in regards to a particular good / service?
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was established in 1982. We're still in the process of figuring out what it means (and as a living document, the interpretation will change over time).
It's messy. But I'd much rather that than need to ask "What would Pierre Trudeau think of this situation?"
The "bre" in "libre" is pronounced similarly to "zebra". Kinda. It'll get you in the ballpark, which is good enough for an Anglo.
"This Hour has 22 Minutes" had a great sketch where both a Francophone (Gavin Crawford impersonating Chantal Hebert) and an Anglo (I forget who) were stumbling over proper nouns from the opposite language. The joke was that both were trying too hard to pronounce things "properly". It came off as inauthentic and awkward.
Insane question, asked for the purposes of discussion: Would it make sense if those GPUs were top-of-the-line for years? Like if TSMC were destroyed?
Even then, I don't understand why being a landlord to the place were AI is trained would be financially exciting... Wouldn't investing in NVIDIA make a lot more sense?
> I'm sure there's alien civilisations that are more aggressive than us, but also ones that are less so.
What is the minimum amount of aggression necessary to evolve sentience? What is the maximum amount of aggression in an interstellar space-faring species? Where is humanity on that scale?
A super-aggressive species would likely self-annihilate before possessing sufficient energy to travel interstellar distances... So the jury's still out on us.
"you can write perfectly fine code without ever needing to worry about the more complex features of the language. You can write simple, readable, and maintainable code in C++ without ever needing to use templates, operator overloading, or any of the other more advanced features of the language."
You could also inherit a massive codebase old enough to need a prostate exam that was written by many people who wanted to prove just how much of the language spec they could use.
If selecting a job mostly under the Veil of Ignorance, I'll take a large legacy C project over C++ any day.
Consider a spoon-fed spectrum for AIs working in large codebases, where is state-of-the-art AI?
"Here's a bug report, fix it."
"Here's a bug report, an explanation of what's triggering it, fix it."
"Here's a bug report, an explanation of what's triggering it, and ideas for what needs to change in code, fix it."
"Here's a bug report, an explanation of what's triggering it, and an exact plan for changing it, fix it."
If I have to spoon-feed as much as the last case, then I might as well just do it. The second last case is about the level of a fresh-hire who is still ramping up and would still be considered a drain under Brook's Law.
I suppose the other axis is: How much do I dread performing the resultant code review?
Put them together and you have a "spoon-fed / dread" graph of AI programmer performance.
Wouldn't it be nice if popular libraries could export to .so files so the best language for a task could use the bits & pieces it needed without a programmer needing to know python (and possibly C)?
Were I to write a scripting language, trivial export to .so files would be a primary design goal.
I didn't describe such qualities of C in my previous post. At all.
And to be clear, I didn't mean "devs who learned how to program in the 1990s". I meant "devs who were active in the 1990s", which would have mostly been devs who came up in the 1970s and 1980s (where learning BASIC, then assembly was common).
I also made no claim about first languages in my previous statement. I only said there was a likely progression from assembly to C or C++ (for a C++ dev).
My point was, the talent pool in the 1990s would be able to handle the downsides of C++, and the upsides would have been a bonus. Whereas modern devs aren't used to the downsides, thus C++ is a step back for them.
What I should have added is that for devs in the 1990s, there would have been very few large legacy C++ codebases.