chessturk

Can I ask how recent that was? I'm a total outsider, but I've heard China's changed like crazy.

Can you elaborate / link me to more info on this? I'm curious about this WebAssembly-PWA-everywhere land I don't live in.

Makes sense to me, thanks for answering.

As someone who worked in a crap-hole telemarketing firm where we called them "Communal Cubicals", this is one hundred percent a major issue. Company-wide Swine Flu happened.

Taking a total shot in the dark, but I imagine AAA video games constitute a crap-ton of C++ codebases larger than Firefox, but I wouldn't know for sure.

> Put another way: not all specs are equal. Some are formal, some are informal.

So is the argument that the language reference is as good as many existing language specifications, and my complaint is only one of semantics?

I'm curious if you consider Nim or Golang to be a small language that is a "better C". If not, why?

Sincere question, I didn't realize that Rust didn't have a specification. How can folk say Rust guarantees safety when it doesn't guarantee an implementation? I don't see how you could have one without the other.

Now, admittedly, the lowest level language I've used is Go!, so fairly abstracted (and no memory management), so I might be mistaken, but it doesn't seem like you can have safety without a specification.

My understanding is that the Chinese economy is an "artificial" Free Market economy to bridge the gap between Maoism and here-to unforseen Communist Utopia. Hegelian/classical Marxist thinking requires a society to pass through a capitalist phase in order to industrialize to the point that the populace begins demanding socialist concessions.

It was my understanding that the Post-Mao creation of free-market-like conditions in China was an admission by Communist leadership that the Hegelian model of history could not be short circuited (as Lenin and Mao attempted), and capitalist style economics was required to industrialize, but that the capitalist economics was a temporary solution.

I could be mistaken though, and I'm curious why you thought they arrived there by luck.

This is exactly my feeling about Typescript. As a Go! developer, I'm fully for strong types, even to the point of restriction, but only if they are enforced.

I'm currently maintaining a massive spaghetti code TypeScript nightmare that escape-hatches with @ts-ignore and `any` about every other line. I'm not sure why they even chose to give up all of the imperative, dynamic power of JS and then not even adhere to the pre-processor's own rules.

I think there's an argument for imperative and functional approaches, but I also think trying to change an imperative language into a functional one is a bad idea, and trying to shoe-horn in type safety into a language that doesn't have it is just foolish.

I feel like languages come with trade-offs inherent in their design (Go! trades DRY for type safety, JS trades data validation/type safety for convenience), and if you don't like the trade-offs of the language for your project, then you are probably using the wrong tool for the job. However, when it comes to JS, you usually don't have a choice (unless you go with Dart or WebASM, which I admittedly know very little about).

I suppose TS could have a place (I particularly understand libraries that attempt to improve their data contract using it), but then I wish it didn't provide such wide variety of ways to escape or ignore it's restrictions. I feel like they are fake guard rails and provide a false sense of security.