Insert “use Linux” joke. But I’m absolutely serious when I say that using my company’s M365 stuff using the web versions in Firefox on Linux is pretty pleasant.
Nope, I’m not sure I even looked for one yet. I don’t need auto sync and/or backup for my work since that’s mostly in GitHub and JIRA and the like. But it’s still convenient to be able to throw a file in there at times.
Modern php is not bad actually. Still kinda slow and dangerous, but A LOT better than it used to be :')
That said, i wouldnt build a web service with php still lol
Pretty much all of the command line coreutils programs I use daily are in C; cd, ls, pwd, touch, rm, etc. If I want to write some small utility I’ll usually reach for a scripting language first like bash python ruby etc, but if it needs to be small and fast I’ll use C instead.
Inertia is a mofo. I did embedded programming for industrial automation almost thirty years ago, building upon and expanding an existing nightmare of C code… and I bet there’s still some of mine running something out there to this day.
The thing with C is that it’s almost always going to be the fastest high-ish level language and it has an extremely stable ABI. Self contained code written 30 years ago will likely compile with only minor (and sometimes no) tweaks today. You’re lucky to go 3 years on C++ without something fairly big breaking due to changes in the underlying language and ABI.
This is a really good post about why C is so difficult to seriously consider replacing, or even to avoid by using a different language for certain projects: faultlore.com/blah/c-isnt-a-language/
It isn’t just a language, but it is a language - as it eventually gets around to saying, but it starts off by saying that it isn’t, then later corrects itself to say that it is, etc. I feel like the focus of this ignores the historical context of what C was written to be for - at the time there was like Assembly, BASIC, Fortran (?), other long-dead languages like was it A and/or A* or whatever, there was a B language too! (developed by Bell Labs, if Google can be trusted these days), etc. - and C was developed to be better than those. So saying that like it lacks type conversions is very much missing the point - those were not invented yet. A lawn mower also lacks those, but it’s okay bc it doesn’t need them:-) I am probably nit-picking far too many points, I suppose to illustrate that the style of the article became a hindrance to me to read it b/c of those reasons. But thank you for sharing regardless.
I don’t really like the title either, but the article does demonstrate how unfortunate it is that we’re effectively locked in to using the ABI at some level of nearly every piece of software.
That said, there definitely were languages with better type systems prior to the invention of C. Pascal is a frequently-cited example.
The ecosystem is really it, C# as a language isn’t the best, objectively Typescript is a much more developer friendly and globally type safe (at design time) language. It’s far more versatile than C# in that regard, to the point where there is almost no comparison.
But holy hell the .Net ecosystem is light-years ahead, it’s so incredibly consistent across major versions, is extremely high quality, has consistent and well considered design advancements, and is absolutely bloody fast. Tie that in with first party frameworks that cover most of all major needs, and it all works together so smoothly, at least for web dev.
I want to save to onedrive. So I can create it from my desktop, modify it from my laptop next week when I’m out of town, and send a link to it to the printer shop that’s gonna print me some copies. Why are you like this?
We used to do this with thumb drives. You can get a 128G usb3 thumb drive these days for like 20 bucks in the checkout line of most electronics stores. Cool things about a thumb* drive is I don’t need to pay a subscription fee for it, it doesn’t need an Internet connection, and it isn’t liable to be rifled through by Microsoft unless Bill Gates comes to your house and steals it from you.
Hey, no one is trying to stop you from doing that. I’m sure it is very convenient for you.
My point of view though is that automatically uploading my personal files to some corporation computer on the other side of the world should not be the default when I try to save something. Maybe sometimes I’ll want to use that feature, but there are a variety of reasons why I don’t want it most of the time. And I definitely don’t like having to jump through hoops just to avoid it.
Also, JavaScript…why are you the way you are? Does anyone have advice for learning it so it makes sense? I can’t even get tutorial projects to run properly…
Because they didn’t want to train their JS developers and didn’t want to cause friction for new projects. They get to say they’re using TS, with basically none of the real advantages. (Apart from general rational error checking.)
And that probably requires not going with a tutorial. Because the JS ecosystem scorns at “simple”. Just make some HTML scaffold and use MDN to understand the DOM.
I like Douglas Crockford’s talks about the “good parts” of JavaScript. They’re old and probably a bit outdated, but he explain quite well the history and why JavaScript is the way like it is.
It clicked for me when I saw them the first time. Still hate JavaScript though.
What Crockford did was enable a lot of devs to realize there was a viable development platform built into the most prolific and open network client in the world. For that he should be commended but it should have never been taken as “this is a viable general purpose language”.
He also showed that JavaScript has more resemblance to functional programming languages rather than object oriented ones. If you try to treat it as an object oriented language like Java (like the seem to imply), you will have a bad time.
Can it even make sense tho? To me JS is an example of a not too good thing that people started too eagerly so now they’re trying to make it make sense.
Had that happen at work. I just drag-and-dropped a file into the Outlook web-UI, thinking it’d attach as an e-mail. Turns out, they recently changed that feature and you now have to drop into the right half of the area. If you drop into the left half, it uploads into OneDrive.
I accidentally did that. The document had personal data inside. That’s a breach of GDPR. Fucking ace.
(I’m not sure that attaching to the e-mail isn’t also a breach of the GDPR, since my company switched Microsoft 365 for various things. But yeah, I certainly would have liked a confirmation dialog.)
Maybe next year Xbox cloud gaming should team up with Outlook and Onedrive for the “Ultimate” cloud computing conversion feature:
When you drag and drop a file into Outlook, Windows mail, or Exchange, the file bounces around like in the window like in the game Breakout. You can only attach a copy if you hit every word in your email message. If you let the file fall past the signature line, it makes a Onedrive link automatically.
My favorite Windows drag-and-drop feature is that if ever I drag a file over the left pane of Explorer on its way to another window, the whole thing freezes up for a minute or so. I think it’s polling all the network drives just in case I might decide to drop it there, and since my NAS is turned off (it broke) it just waits until the connection times out. Of course in traditional Microsoft style this locks up the UI thread. I have to remember to drag everything off to the right and then go around.
I would argue that ASM isn’t “powerful”. It’s direct. You can access advanced features of a CPUs architecture with the trade off limited portability. Sometimes it’s necessary but power comes from being able to express complex control and data structures in a concise and readable amount of text.
The subjective topic of what “concise and readable” means is where the language wars come in.
When I hear powerful language, I think of languages that are good at intensive tasks like assembly, c, rust, Python (because of numpy, pandas, pyspark, cuda, etc.).
Sure, but there are good and bad frontends. JavaScript has a tendency to silently fly off the handle in mysterious ways due to the crazy type system. Python will typically fail more predictably, and is famously easy to write. I know nothing about FORTH, honestly.
if its acceptable to force javascript onto the backend and everywhere else, then why not write the frontend in rust, or anything else than can compile to wasm ?
Sorry, I’m not sure what your point is. I realize that you can almost completely avoid JavaScript, but the point I’m making is merely that there is a real technical limitation that limits the choices developers can make for front-end code, and although WASM is making great strides in breaking down that barrier (something I’ve been thrilled to see happen, but which is going much more slowly than I had hoped), the limitation is still there. Conversely, such a barrier has never existed on the backend, except in the sense that C limits what all other languages can do.
javascript is great for the frontend. not just because it’s the only choice, but it’s also a lot easier to write code for ui than say, C or rust.
however i do not see a reason why it needs to run on servers or desktop apps, bar a few cases. i know node is popular, but i think fullstack devs just like to have everything in the same language, even if it makes it harder to use and slower to run.
likewise C, rust, go, whatever, are great for backends, embedded etc, but they shouldnt be ran on in the browser, unless there is a specific reason like heavy computation with little dom interaction.
just because a barrier does not exist doesnt mean that we should write programs in a language not designed for the domain.
I’m honestly not convinced JavaScript is good even for the front-end, because it’s intentionally designed to swallow, ignore, and otherwise minimize errors; which is not helpful at all for development of any software. My point is that the only reason JavaScript is dominant in front-end development is that, prior to WASM, it was literally the only option; if that hadn’t been the case, I doubt it would have become nearly so widely used.
i actually agree, but i think its more the issue that modern websites are designed like desktop apps. having a weakly typed and flexible langauage like js is fine when youre only adding a little interactivity to an otherwise mostly functional website.
I was a professional C++ developer for several years, and came to the conclusion that any professional C++ developers who don’t acknowledge its flaws have a form of Stockholm Syndrome.
This is true of every language. If you can’t think of things you don’t like about the language you’re working in (and/or its tooling) you just don’t know the language very well or are in denial.
Ehhh, I mean this more strongly. I’ve never met people more in denial about language design problems than C++ adherents. (Though admittedly I haven’t spent much time talking to Lisp fans about language design.)
It’s made worse by the fact C++11 made a lot of solutions for the deep problems in the language. As the C++ tradition dictates, the problems themselves are carefully preserved for backward compatibility, the solutions are like a whole different language.
And Lisp is small - the first Google result provides a Lisp interpreter in 117 lines of Python code.
C++11 also introduced new problems, such as the strange interaction between brace-initialization and initializer-lists (though that was partially fixed several years later), and the fairly arcane rules around move semantics with minimal compiler support (for example, it would be great if the standard required compilers to emit an error if a moved-from object were accessed).
I know Lisp is minimal, I’m just saying that I expect there are Lisp fans who won’t acknowledge (or would excuse) any shortcomings in the language, just as there are C++ fans who do the same for C++.
Oof, slow compile times to target, of all things, the JVM? Implicit methods? Some(null)? Function call syntax where the difference between a tuple argument and a sequence of non-tuple arguments can be determined by whether or not there’s a space before the parentheses?
There are definitely some major issues with Scala.
I think that’s good when the objective is to improve the language. One key thing that holds many languages back is that they’re stuck with historical baggage, and it can be pretty difficult to replace/remove “outdated” stuff without breaking everything.
I do not want to be stuck using Python 2, or Scala 2 (although there exist people who use Scala 2 instead of Scala 3).
Where I’m working we’re heavily using Spark, which kind of blocks us from upgrading. There seem to be ways to get Scala 3 to work, but we also have old terribly written baggage code no one understands. Just upgrading between 2.12 to 2.13 was a journey.
I agree that the slow compile times are pretty bad (maybe even deal-breakingly for large projects). I think it’s kind of necessary for a language with as powerful of a syntax as Scala though, it’s pretty absurd how expressive you can get. Maybe if it didn’t target the JVM, it’d be able to achieve way faster compile times – I don’t really see a point of even targeting JVM other than for library access (not to say that that isn’t a huge benefit), especially when it has relatively poor compatibility with other JVM languages and it’s nearly impossible to use for Android (don’t try this at home).
Even more so, I think that null handling isn’t nice – I wish it were more similar to Kotlin’s. One thing I’m really confused as to why Scala didn’t go all-in on is Either/Result like in Rust. Types like that exist, but Scala seems to mostly just encourages you to use exceptions for error propogation/handling rather than returning a Monad.
A more minor grudge I have is just the high-level primitive types in general – it’s pretty annoying not being able to specify unsigned integers or certain byte-width types by default, but if it really is an issue than it can be worked around. Also things like mutable pointers/references – I don’t actually know if you can do those in Scala… I’ve had many situations where it’d be useful to have such a thing. But that’s mostly because I was probably using Scala for things it’s not as cut out to do.
With the tuple arguments point, I get it but I haven’t found it much of an issue. I do wish it wasn’t that way and it consistently distinguished between a tuple and an argument list though, either that or make functions take arguments without tuples like in other functional languages or CLI languages (but that’d probably screw a lot of stuff up and make compile times even LONGER). I saw someone on r/ProgrammingLanguages a while back express how their language used commas/delimiters without any brackets to express an argument list.
I think an actually “perfect” language to me would basically just be Rust but with a bunch of the features that Scala adds – of course the significant functional aspect that Scala has (and the clearly superior lambda syntax), but also the significantly more powerful traits and OOP/OOP-like polymorphism. Scala is the only language that I can say I don’t feel anxious liberally using inheritance in, in fact I use inheritance in it constantly and I enjoy it. Scala’s “enum”/variant inheritance pattern is like Rust enums, but on crack. Obviously, Rust would never get inheritance, but I’ve found myself in multiple situations where I’m thinking “damn, it’s annoying that I have to treat <X trait> and <Y trait> as almost completely serparate”. It would especially be nice in certain situations with const generic traits that are basically variants of each other.
Plus, I’ve always personally liked function overloading and default arguments and variadics/variadic generics and stuff, but the Rust community generally seems to be against the former 2. I just really hate there being a hundred functions, all a sea of underscores and adjectives, that are basically the same thing but take different numbers of arguments or slightly different arguments.
The custom operators are a double-edged sword, I love them and always use them, but at the same time it can be unclear as to what they do without digging into documentation. I guess Haskell has a similar problem though, but I don’t think Scala allows you to specify operator precedence like Haskell does and it just relies on the first character’s precedence. I would still want them though.
How it goes now, though, is I use Scala 3 for project design/prototyping, scripting, and less performance-sensitive projects, and Rust for pretty much everything else (and anything involving graphics or web). Scala has good linear algebra tooling, but honestly I’ll usually use C++ or Python for that most of the time because they have better tooling (and possibly better performance). I would say R too, but matplotlib has completely replaced it for literally everything regarding math for me.
Sounds like we’re actually in agreement about most of this.
I’m okay with languages limiting their “expressive” power in order to provide stronger correctness guarantees or just limit how “weird” code looks; but this is largely because I’ve worked on many projects where someone had written a heap of difficult-to-understand code, and I doubt such limitations would be appealing if I were working strictly on my own.
I also don’t really see the appeal of Java-style inheritance, but to be honest I didn’t use Scala for long enough to know whether or not I agree that Scala does inheritance “right”.
It does make sense that Rust provides mutability in some cases where Scala doesn’t. Rust’s superpower, enabled by the borrow checker, is effectively “safe mutability.” I hope other, simpler languages build on this invention.
(Jokes aside, all programming languages have their good and bad things. Some just have more bad than good. And i say that as a C/C#/typescript/asm developer :p
I’ve run into this a few times. If the culture and benefits are good but we can’t level on pay, I let them know that I can’t accept the offer but I refer them to a colleague with less experience for whom the pay would be appropriate. After over a decade in leadership I’ve had many employees, and I’m always looking out for ways they can step up the ladder. We’ve gotta have each other’s back in this job market.
These jobs are all pushing 6 figures tho. Not sure what kind of job would try to push 36k on a professional position.
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