Don’t go complaining that C++ is “too complicated” and then be hauling its complexity into C, because all you’ll end up with is a bloated schizophrenic mess that is neither a good C nor a good C++ [alternative].
“I can't believe the C standards committee is entertaining this.”
Hey, standards committee’s gotta eat.
'defer'? I occasionaly use it in Swift to clean up resources; s’okay there, I guess, though I’m not convinced it’s better than Python’s 'with' block. But in C?
One of C’s few distinguishing strengths is that the language is relatively† small and stable, and well understood. For that kind of cleanup there is already 'goto', which again is small, stable, and well understood. I just used it for that the other day: it works, it’s fine; I’m a grown-up.
Yeah, sure, 'defer' is “safer” and “more elegant”… did we mention this is C? That ship sailed fifty years ago. Don’t try to make C into something it’s not: that’s C++’s job so go fill your boots there instead.
I just posted Tony Hoare’s excoriation of ALGOL68 the other day, but clearly it’s needed again:
Simplest solution: track down the ruddy C standards committee and beat them in the head with a leather-bound copy of Zawinski's Law (wrapped around a large gold brick), till either they’re dead or they leave C be. It does what it was designed to do, and that along is reason enough not to dick with it just because they’re bored and struggling to justify their continued existence.
The only thing C needs to do is keep on working. That will only get harder the more crap they pile on top. A good artist knows when to stop.
Which brings us to…
“panic/recover”
K&R give us strength! Tell these frustrated wannabe language designers to go make their own damn language, instead of screwing up someone else’s!
Quite right: Apple is entitled to make (and not make) whatever products it chooses.
Could’ve made a great, and timely, horrible-warts-n-all show about freedom of speech and those who’d manipulate it, but Cook is not one for such exuberant boldness. Hey, I’m fine with that: last thing I want is a desire to spend any more money on their overpriced tat.
Guess it’s The People vs Larry Flynt for movie night tonight. Now where did I put the DVD…
“this is the language that powers Cloud Firestore / Cloud Storage security rules”
This really needs to be stated on its front page. Right now it’s all “Hows” and no “Why”.
First question anyone looking at it asks: What problem does it solve?/What need does it fill? A real-world use case provides an easy relatable answer.
Incidentally, with existing links to protobuf and no halting problem to worry about, it sounds like you’re halfway to having a remote query language a-la SQL too.
“I think the next leap forward in programming is going to offend the sensibilities of current programmers.”
Honestly, programmers have been railing against progress ever since the first machine coders shook their canes at those ghastly upstart programming languages now tearing up their lawns.
Meanwhile, what often does pass for “progress” amounts to anything but:
“But there's a big difference between little experiments and betting the company on an auto-cannibalization strategy. DEC didn't have the guts to go there.”
See also Kodak (invented the digital camera in 1975!), Xerox (We’re a photocopier company! We sell photocopiers!), Microsoft (owned the entire global PC market for damn near 20 years—till Apple overnight redefined what “Personal Computing” meant). All caught out while sitting atop their laurels.
The only thing today’s successful product is good for is funding the development of tomorrow’s—because if you don’t disrupt yourself first then sooner or later your rivals will do it for you, and then it’s already far too late to do anything about it.
Congratulations on so utterly missing the point. (Again.) 99% of web users do not want to edit HTML, because they have far better things to do with their lives. I don’t care how easy you find it, because you aren’t representative of any of them.
But since you mention it, HTML is reeking garbage. It has so many freaking rules, and special exceptions, and not-exceptions, and “<>”, and if you don’t get the punctuation just right then your actual content is going to get some degree of screwed up. Which, considering it’s the user content, not the machine markup, that is supposed to be the important part, is a thoroughly FUBARed set of UX priorities (or SOP for the nerdocracy).
But even if HTML was the very model of simplicity and clarity, very few end-users would want to type it themselves. I mean, what’s the fluency in Markdown outside of geek circles?
Oh, and let’s not forget that having broken the user out of her familiar web browser environment and, against all odds, somehow persuaded her to compose a correctly marked up HTML document in a text editor or something, she still has to get that document onto the web somehow, which means screwing with yet another obnoxious app and yet another arcane set of buttons and rules for using that app, all of which is almost entirely unlike their familiar web browser and how they use that.
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TL;DR: Computer nerds who arrogantly whine “well it’s easy for meeeee” put my back up like nothing else on Earth. So if you don’t wish to be burned to a crisp then don’t ever talk to me about “open web” when you’re the self-serving jackasses who closed it in the first place.
p.s. I am also very not interested in talking about dynamic menus and stuff, because of the billions of people who post their own content online via Twitbook every day, how much of that content includes custom codes they wrote?
The “open web” withered and died the moment Berners-Lee decided he’d cut some corners for convenience and released a web browser that was read-only.
Mosaic took that interpretation and ran with it, and a global information platform that should’ve been as easy for anyone to read and write as opening, editing, and saving a file in MS Word became the plaything of the technocratic elite while the ign’ant plebs looked on none the wiser of how they were robbed.
Can’t blame the Jacks and the Zucks for taking the opportunity that was handed to them on a plate. That’s what happens when you create gatekeepers and single points of failure.
“Just techie on techie.”
Oh bless your heart, child.
Once again, it was the techies who created this mess—and were perfectly happy with it too while they were the ones in charge. So until technies accept and acknowledge that they are the root of the whole problem, they’re not going to do a thing to usefully change it. ’Cos right now they’re one gang of children trying (futilely) to grab back a prized toy from another gang of children, to have all for themselves.
But as long as someone controls the read and write, the conditions that enable these vast walled gardens to take root and thrive will continue to exist. The only way to change that is by restructuring the platform at a fundamental level so that everyone controls their own read and write, and no-one else can just take that from them.
..
Personally I believe the first step should be reshaping Firefox into a full-blown WYSIWYG document editor, analogous to MS Word except that instead of reading and writing to a local filesystem it reads and writes them via HTTP[S] requests. And then go sort out the stagnant mess that is Apache et al so that they actually speak HTTP right, and provide that client with the “distributed filesystem” it needs to read and write to.
Read-write-publish-share. Simple foundational mechanics, and there’s no reason nor excuse why it shouldn’t all work correctly.
(Plus, Firefox desperately needs to differentiate itself from the Chrome/WebKit hegemony if wants to justify why it should continue to exist. Well, there’s a reason—and opportunity—right there.)
If geeks can make that bit work correctly then they might have a chance at resetting the balance of powr. It’s not a complete solution: there’s still the problems of document search (currently owned by Google) and name ownership (for he who owns your name owns you, and right now all our names are owned by the quasi-libertarian shakedown artists of DNS registrars and squatters), and others. And then there’s the questions of how do you sell it (and Dog knows most geeks couldn’t sell ice cream to Arabs). But it is the first step in the right direction: putting the control into the hands of the Users. All of them, this time.
I was a company director. Started the company, put in the major investment, brought in two other people I knew and trusted as fellow directors, and I still had to walk away 18 months later because all three of us—as first-time directors with more lofty ambition than hard, dirty experience—made a thorough cock of the business.
Glad I did it. Not happy about that particular outcome, but at least now I know it’s harder than it looks and some of the errors to avoid in future. And hopefully once I’ve finished dusting myself down I’ll be back up on another horse to try again.
It’s real easy to sit in the peanut gallery pontificating loudly. I’ve more respect for those who actually do it, even if they are assholes as people (but really, who isn’t?).
Why? Will the market be any nicer to them? They’ve failed to make their case as to why anyone should care that Vale exists; never mind actually differentiate it from the current swathe of robust, established Rust-style languages already in full production use and battling each other for the market’s next 20 years of attention. And they’ve barely reached v0.1, and expect to make a difference when make their grande entrance into that bullpen? Who’s fooling who here?
Look, if they just want to be another D then by all means have at it. It’s great that they have a personal hobby, but at least have the good grace to put up a notice saying they’re making this thing to please nobody but themselves. That way anyone else looking at it knows not to invest their own time into a toy project that doesn’t even take itself seriously, never mind have the chops to make the rest of the world believe in it too.
Oh, and by the way, I’ve said nothing about Vale that I’ve not said of my own projects… right before I’ve pulled the plug on them for failing to hit their overall objectives. And the best of that work’s been technically excellent, with sitting users royally pissed that I’ve just chucked their investments on the scrapheap along with my own. But I’m a realist; and it’s better to pull the trigger now and move on ASAP to the next thing, than drag out a slow but inevitable death and then have to junk an even larger investment further down the line. See also: sunk cost fallacy.
You want to ask other people to believe and invest in you? You’d damn well better bring more than just a tick list of features and your delicate feels. Else you’re just messing them around for your own personal ego.
/fin
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TL;DR: When someone offers you difficult questions and brutal honesy, take it and ask for more, ’cos that’s the best gift they can offer. But if all you want is a pat on the head, then go ask your mom as I’m sure she thinks everything you do is wonderful.
I’m not a Rust user. I have no particular nag in this race. What I do understand, or at least am start to learn, is the difference between a Technology and a Product, and between a Product and Success.
So once again: What is Vale’s USP†? Because it isn’t on their frontpage; which it would be had they thought to ask that question of themselves.
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TL;DR: Goddamn it, all you noobs, but learn How To Sell already. Some of us are just too damned old and tired to want to hold your diapers till you learn to grow up. Try making our lives a bit easier for once; not just to benefit us but your own products as well.
.
(† And if you don’t even know what “USP” means, well there you are. As someone who has already tried to bring truly groundbreaking new tech to market and flubbed it, and is just about to roll up sleeves and try, try again, I’m not asking these questions just to be obtuse but to be helpful. However, if you’d rather just insult than ever amount to squat then by all means carry on.)
Raising kids and battling the demon hordes are such obvious good practice for each other, I’m surprised all pregancy sticks don’t already come with DOOM on them as standard.
Be aware that on the scale of complexity, the immune system is at the deep end of the pool. Your motives may be admirable, but the chances of you jumping straight in and emerging with the Olympic gold medal are good as zero.
If you want to get into the science of it then I’d suggest you start with general courses in biochem and physiology at the undergrad level and build your way up from there†. Expect to invest a good hard 10-20 years of your life getting up to speed, with no hard guarantees of success at the end of it.
Or, if you just want to help people right now, go get yourself involved in charitable fundraising for an organization that’s already working the problem. Still no guarantees, but at least they’ve got a big head start. Just don’t end up on a list like this, ’kay:
† Courses I flunked myself, BTW, but at least I learned just how much I don’t know—an insight I’ve subsequently found both invaluable and frighteningly scarce in tech.
What people say and what people do are not the same thing. Society, when given a recent choice, declared outrage for the children then promptly chose the institution. Any other business with a child abuse record the length of the Catholic church’s would be publicly shunned, closed down, and its assets sold off to compensate its many, many victims. And yet, it’s as strong as ever; a bastion of conservative establishment “do as I say not as I do”.
Look, this is not hard to understand: the increasingly fascistic US Right and its Qanon sturmtrupplers are using their “deep state cannibal pedophiles” narrative (amend as appropriate) as a modern-day blood libel in which to paint all their enemies. Mignonnes is simply one more convenient hook upon which to hang the greater attack. To fixate on the film is just one more layer of misdirection, to keep people angry, active, and blind to the big picture. You cannot understand anything until you understand that.
There is nothing innately anti-pedophile abould US Conservative culture; if anything, it’s proved one of the great hiding places for abusers (51st Speaker of the House, anyone?), precisely because it controls what gets said publicly and what is kept private, cultivating and misdirecting popular rage onto its political enemies, and edging ever closer to repeating the great atrocities of history, from the blood libel-stoked slaughters of first European Jews by Catholics, then of those Catholics by the new Protestants, through to the ethnic executions of the Bosnian war and the wholesale genocide of Rwanda, and everything inbetween.
Now I consider myself European despite being stuck here on reactionary backwards Airstrip One. My granddaddy was Antifa back in Africa and Italy. I also know firsthand how much damage one can do just by choosing a pleasing lie over a painful truth. I have few illusions about how bad things can get, and all it take to get it underway is for enough people to buy into a Big Lie to justify everything that comes next. I have the limitations but also the benefits of an outside perspective on what’s happening in the US right now, and I’m legit worried for the future of our whole damn planet as a large chunk of America charges proudly towards a Russia-like one-party state.
If you don’t wish to repeat humanity’s bloody history (which I can assure you won’t spare the children from anyone else) then you really need to start paying attention to who is spinning the popular narratives and to what goal. Starting in a mirror—because if you can’t be brutally, rigorously honest with yourself about your own understanding and motives, then what makes you think you can defend yourself from others’ deceptions any better?
“Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches.” – William Pannapacker
Perhaps you’re confusing it with Dance Moms? Or preteen beauty queen pagents? Both of which are obvious targets of this film, being an attempt (whether good or bad) to criticize that culture. And both of which are also, I’d wager, solidly red state phenomena.
Besides, at this point it’s pretty much a given that everything the Titular Right accuses its enemies of is what it’s balls-deep in itself, so outrageous hypocricy there is no surprise either. See also: alt-right incels, Qanon’s 21st-century blood libel, Kentucky and Oklahoma Trump campaign officials currently serving time for child sex trafficking, undocumented kids stolen from family and locked in cages, and so on.
None of which should Netflix’s appalling advertising campaign nor its lousy attempts to suppress the right-wing tweets attacking them, but let’s not pretend all these Twitter “critics” are suddenly thinking of the children. Obvious propaganda war is so obvious that even a passing student of history can see exactly what’s going on.
At this point in time, it’s a fair assumption that anything the Titular Right accuses its enemies of doing, is what it’s doing itself. Even that notorious house of flaming liberals, the Wall Street Journal, concluded the Hunter Biden thing is nonsense. See also: Swift boating, Obama is a sekrit Kenyan Muslim with fake birth certificate, and so on. It’s the Roger Stone 101.
Meantime, the Trump family kleptocracy is nuts-deep in its graft on the taxpayers’ dime and the fanbois don’t raise so much as an eyebrow because calling that out just isn’t exciting or self-serving enough. This is how democracy dies, drowned beneath addlepated addicts grasping at their next fix and just don’t care about anything else.
I do not want to have to ask again.