generic_user

The claim that Corporations have some fundamental opposition to how online advertising works with tracking and spying and personal data collection is total baloney.

No one has made any demands to change how these networks work or to stop collecting data.

What they want is essentially a demonetization blacklist. So that a handful of billionaires who own these companies can hand youtube, facebook and who ever else a list of people and organizations with the 'wrong opinions' and have them demonetized, delisted and otherwise disappeared.

Who gets to decide what is fake news? And who gets to decide what is and is not 'hate speech' and 'extremism'. The Billionaire board members of a few multinational corporations? That's not democracy, its corporate fascism.

This is how the one percent fights back against populism. These people have been given some nasty black eyes in the past few years and there not use to it. There use to running things in the background and now there not getting what they want and the democratic process is not working in there favor. So there going to fight back in any way they can. Including attacking the internet and the ability for people to have there voices heard.

A non commercial University research group and commercial Corporation research group can be focused on solving very different problems.

I think Pike and the other designers skew more towards corporate research (Bell Labs). And surely the development of GO as well as other Google research projects are intended to win in the market place.

I believe there is a crate they can use to prevent date bound out of bounds fun leaks. (can't find the link atm)

I'm disappointed they did not consider COBAL given its vast superiority and flawless track record for April first rewrites.

China is a Communist Country. Business and Government are managed and controlled by the same bureaucracy. Chinas largest corporations are owned in part or in whole by the State.

I agree that there is still a spectrum of quality. And certain Journalists and publications can still establish a reputation for reliability and quality.

But the problem is the business model. No one has been able to come up with a solution to make money on quality. Its all volume advertising. NYT is competing with BuzzFeed for eyeballs. Its a competition to come up with the most clever hook and target peoples emotions to drive traffic.

In the print days there was a small number of publications and it was very expensive to start one. The more serious publications published monthly. Its totally different now.

Think about that up until just a few years ago serious Journalists had to produce about one piece a month and they had supporting staff and a budget.

There is very little now that comes close to the quality and analysis that there use to be.

I think online journalism as a whole has turned into a form of trolling.

Or maybe we are in a post Journalist world now.

The value of a story is based on how many clicks it gets. Thats what makes these sites money. It does not matter if you click because the story makes you angry or you think its insulting just so long as you click and you get the advertising. And as far as standards go there are none. Just make up some stuff that riles people and come up with a click bait headline and on to the next story.

Are you sure its bots? The Russians could have very easily hacked your computer and planted a virus that tracks you and injects personalized propaganda based on there secret profile of you.

Your being down voted because voices of moderation and reason can often cause a disruption in the field surrounding the tinfoil hat and there for let in Russian mind control signals.

So the alternative is to keep a population held together with a narrative manufactured by the central state along side a brutal military police apparatus to manage compliance.

I think the real culprit is that the masters of the universe who crashed the economy have not been able to put humpty dumpty back together again. And only managed to make the upper 1% fabulously wealthy why the rest of the population has a sinking standard of living and lower long term wealth prospects.

Even tho its ugly what we have now its the best thing that could happen. If the states and regions reassert there rights and set there own policy independent of federal government the result is more power to the state citizens. And a smaller circle of corruption with more accountability.

And if the Russians are involved then they have complete control of both federal parties because the main source of friction comes directly out of the ideology of both parties that use division to try to segregate the electorate and practice scorched earth on the other side.

I don't work on phone software as was explained. And POSIX is still very widely used and important in many industries.

People have been attacking POSIX almost as long as C/C++. But unsurprisingly no one has put forward anything that could replace it.

Given the fact that you don't seem to care that the OS or system libraries are written in C/C++. And you don't care that there are industries that produce C/C++ software that have nothing to do with mobile and more closely resembles system programming. Who exactly is the internet safety strike force trying to evangelize? And more importantly why do you feel the need to lecture developers in other industries on what language they should use even tho you have no experience or stake in those industries?

It just annoys people and makes them less likely to try the new meme language. And makes the internet safety strike force look like armatures with to much time on there hands.

You don't see C/C++ programmers running around the internet brigading functional programming languages with nonsense. Even tho most of those languages are total crap. Maybe we are to busy trying to write software. Maybe that's why everything is written in C/C++?

The internet outrage professionals need there daily quota of clicks and its a slow news day.

I really have no idea what your trying to argue.

OSX is a certified UNIX.A bunch of BSD people ended up over there. Android and ChromeOS use the Linux kernel and Redhats C lib. The one time I checked it looked like most of there compositor and components are also C/C++, skia etc. Windows is written in C++ and you have WinAPI. And of course vanilla Linux is C and all the GNU libs are C.

So its WinAPI and Linux system interface with a preference for POSIX. With lots of other irreplaceable Libraries that are also only written in C/C++. High performance high memory usage that needs to run stable at full load and maximum memory for days at a time.

Keep in mind that there are large industries that have usage and development patters that your oblivious to. And that claims of safety espoused by language developers based on criteria that they themselves have created are so low on the priority stack that there simply non existent in specifications.

What should we do? Should Google and Microsoft and The Linux foundation rewrite there whole stack in XYZ meme language? Or is it just all the other companies that that should switch to a language they don't need or care about just for the hell of it?

Sorry, I can't think of any off of the top of my head. The only thing that comes close is once in a while you see a C project switch to C++ but that's not really an example of what your looking for. Like when GCC switched over to C++.

Those Millions of C/C++ programmers have certainly accomplished more and have happier lives then the Tens of armchair safety experts groking internet drama.

In my experience the people who wring there fist at C/C++ are generally people who at one point tried C/C++ and either got frustrated and quit or got told they suck or turned down at job interviews. Or they are people trying to sell you the new hotness and have some personal gain to accomplish. People I know who did some C/C++ and now work with other languages could care less about replacing C/C++. They just do there thing.

And honestly, academics and busybodies have been whining about safety and memory and hating on C/C++ for decades. We need to get rid of it. It smells, its bad for your teeth etc. Creating a never ending stream of total crap programming languages that no one wants to use. That never actually do what there creators propose that they do. And that never replace what the say they want to replace.

Even some crusty C++ programmers still hate on C coders and how did that work out for them :)

Everyone who has has tried that approach soon after decided to leave the company so they could spend more time with their families...

And your right that compilers etc, do not absolutely need to be written in C/C++. But all of this is taking place in the context of the market. Open source operates in that same market.

If you have two teams working on compilers in different languages and one is using C/C++ its probably going to be much faster with fewer dependencies. 90% of the business is going to go that way and the other team is going under. And so it goes all the way up the stack.

On the other hand what about the kernel and the system libraries? Even if you replaced the whole tool chain with another language but still have a C/C++ kernel and system interface everybody is going to want to use the native interfaces and therefore work in C/C++. So whats the point of adding another layer.

Given what we have now and what peoples expectations are I just don't see 'a replacement for C/C++' ever happening until You can wipe your drive and install a new OS with a kernel and system libraries in a totally different language and never have to touch C/C++ again for the projects developed for that OS.

Pretty much all of OS development, low level libraries, device drivers etc, are atypical. So are compilers assemblers linkers. Programs that need to allocate and release tens of gigabytes at a time, high performance parallel code etc.

Any language that wants to present themselves as a replacement for C/C++ hast to have at least a reference implementation of all those things so people can start to evaluate (the system).

No one is going to invest the time or the resources into a language to replace what we have if its not an actually up to the task. No one needs another programming language sitting on top of C/C++ that kind of makes things a little better for one class of bugs but will never really replace C/C++ and our our system interfaces.

There is a long list of languages that have made that claim and most of it has turned out to be hot air and marketing.

A game engine is not a school bus.

Good point. A project with the full financial support of Google with a team including Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Russ Cox and others, in a language that they designed. And it still took a few years and was a huge and stressful process.

> We've gone from arguing "the security issues for C are overrated" to now arguing either "security issues don't have solutions I like" or "real programmers should be able to deal with these things" (I'm not sure which).

I don't think anyone was arguing any of those points. What was being explained is that C/C++ is designed to be flexible and simple and it was know from its inception that that flexibility lets the programmer 'shoot them selves in the foot'. Building out tooling to address any error patters in usage and keeping that basic simplicity and flexibility is desirable. More desirable then moving to a more complicated less flexible language that may eliminate some possible errors.

There are literally millions of C/C++ programmers and projects writing secure reliable code. Picking out a few open source projects and turning there bug reports into an internet drama is not going to convince anyone the sky is falling.

> In addition, you're arguing a strawman. Nobody says that direct memory access should be taken away permanently.

I think its fairly clear that the sentiment was.

"putting this responsibility in the hands of very imperfect programmers is precisely the problem and we should do the best we can to stop it."

This has been the justification for every misguided attempt to 'make things better' for a very long time.

A short list of unnecessary things that needed to be stopped thought the years. * Pointers * Manual memory management * Unconditional Jumps * direct access to machine words ie bytes * assembly instructions. etc..

I am fairly skeptical of arguments that suggest 'the programmer does not need that'.

Its even more obtuse whey back seat drivers exclaim, we should try and stop you from doing that! Its unsafe!

You could make the case that the reason why we have C/C++ and its still in use is because of the tone deafness of academic language designers.

Language designers have been arguing (mostly with themselves) since the 1970's that pointers are dangerous and memory management is bad and that programmers should not have those things.

We can go on using C/C++ and language designers can go on creating there new version of Pascal. We all know how that turned out.

> I think we have argued enough about that putting this responsibility in the hands of very imperfect programmers is precisely the problem and we should do the best we can to stop it.

System designers and those writing performance critical code program hardware. Not an abstract machine that the language designer thinks is good enough for lowly programmers.

Convince Intel and AMD, Nvidia etc, that they should make chips and instruction sets that have no access to memory, cores, vectors and so forth because 'we should do the best we can to stop it'. Lets see how many of there clients want to buy useless blobs of silicone.

A computer is a tool for computation not an adult diaper designed to prevent leaks.

That's a fair point. And for a large portion of software the benefits of C/C++ do not outweigh the potential costs and code should be written in a more protective language.

But that does not change the fact that C/C++ is preferable and often the best choice in certain domains.

> Choosing C over more secure options and subsequently attempt to minimize the security impact of this decision (not talking about Daniel here) will lead you to not addressing those issues effectively.

When you start a new C/C++ project in 2017 you can effectively and confidently address security and 'safety'. And it is done on a regular basis.

There is an entire infrastructure of tools and introspection refined over the past 30+ years for C/C++ that is part of the project from the beginning. Address sanitizes, Better compilers, Valgrind, Intel's tools etc.

All of the potential problems are known and there are tools to deal with them. But the responsibility is put in the hands of the programmer like many other things in C/C++.

I would also like to see these arm chair developers bootstrap a new set of compilers, operating system and tool chain with a native system interface written entirely in there super cool new languages that are going to replace C and C++.

For all the talk of 'a better system programming language' and replacing C/C++ there is curiously little interest or code written to prove that any of these new languages can be used to write systems from scratch and that the language and runtime can scale across architectures.

Thats before you even get to a comparison of efficacy and speed vs C/C++.

> I don't have the skill set neither have time to do/prove it, unfortunately. But that shouldn't prevent me from speaking out my opinion, should it?

Given the fact that programming language fanboy noise is a constant problem in language threads it would be nice to see less posts of higher quality then the same arguments that are always made. Its not really going to change anyone mind that has experience and the people who do argue are usually inexperienced with vapid counter arguments.

So I guess the answer is no. If you have an uninformed opinion then its better to not add noise and let the people who really know there topic enlighten us with a well argued not very noisy discussion.

I think the value of NH is very much quality over quantity.

> it could be a legacy and baggage if the authors resist to change.

Every few years there is a new batch of programming languages that come out and they all gain a small passionate community that tries to convince the internet how much better that language is.

They inevitably use the argument that code not written in the new language is 'legacy' and 'resistant to change'.

Neither of those assertions are accurate or enlightening unless you can provide a proposed replacement and prove the superiority of the new code.

Simply telling other programmers to rewrite there code in xyz language with such arguments is primarily a case of armchair development.

If you really think it could be done better then do it and prove it.

Excellent list, I had not seen some of these. Time to fire up Mathematica and get some coffee I suppose. And I'm sure the list is helpful for many others also.

Can you list the top five Influential research papers that have inspired you while working on Appleseed?

I have ACM library account so if they are ACM or Siggraph papers that is fine.

--edit

And thank you for making your project open source.

There has been quite a lot of work done. You can check the release notes to see precisely what has been improved.

https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed/tags