This is definitely an age gate I’ll stand behind. C++ has unimaginable power to ruin the minds of our young children.
Kid: "I AM NEVER USING RUST, I HATE MEMORY SAFETY AND I HATE YOU!" door slam
http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...
The question occurs to me because I feel like I just spent 30 years on forums like HN reading nothing but effusive praise for the cleverness and elegance of C and Unix.
It isnt that these are GOOD ideas, it's just that no one has come up with better ones.
That a technology stack can be the basis of an entire industry and still be unappealing and lacking for people that are obliged to interact with it directly/regularly.
It's brave to say that no one has come up with better ideas than Unix and C because it's bound to rile up users of (your favorite platform + language here).
I also think that someone saying that there aren't any better ideas than Unix and C might just have different values/interests in computing.
All progress is change. All change is not progress.
A programmer or someone presuming to opine on programming, who overlooks a thing like that, exposes and advertizes that their opinions in such a domain are of questionable value.
You seem to think that a firm consensus definition is needed for something to be considered progress, which exposes and advertises that your opinion in the domain is highly combative and dysfunctional.
Fossil fuels are widely implicated in climate change, opponents want to see them phased out, but I doubt they would deny that their use has ushered progress for humanity.
Your reply suggests you might be feeling hurt that someone has picked on your favorite tech stack or that you're getting bullied at work by people who see you as closed minded. They might be on to something.
Because a rigorous operational definition of “progress” is not provided in this brief post, you assume it is missing, just to heckle someone making the uncontroversial claim that there will always be people on both sides of initiatives intended to foster progress in a given area. A hilarious thing to be triggered by.
How would “achieving an organization’s mission statement within budget” or “improving working conditions for knowledge workers by creating more accessible tools” or “using fewer labor hours on repetitive tasks” or “creating custom tools tailored to specific tasks and using less electricity”.
But maybe any of those non-technical goals can all be achieved using the same old tech, and it’s people complaining about their feelings of disconnection from ancient telecom vestiges that are really impeding progress. Maybe the it is the masses that don’t get it, and it is the select few that truly understand things that get to define progress, while insisting that the power is kept in their hands, and that the work is done in their preferred paradigms.
Or maybe I am projecting all of this onto you to return the favor lol
The reality is that any tech decision can later be replaced with "something better".
Much of the debate is bugs and daffy screaming "duck season"... "rabbit season" at each other.
They both were extremely important on the popularization of computers and on unlocking the huge amount of value they provide today. But not due to any quality that we value today.
We hacked most of the advantages of anything newer back into them, in a haphazard way, and kept them because as a sibling pointed out, nowadays they are open. And openness is a very important feature. (It's just not why they were adopted, people cared so little about openness that Unix was born open and mostly closed up later.)
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."