miffy900

I have a similar sentiment, but generalised to any file format. No one should be hand writing parsers or parsing code for XML, JSON or any other format for that matter. It’s 2022; data needs to come in a structured format with a schema. And preferably with tooling to generate code or parsers for said schemas.

17% of learners report not using version control. I'm surprised that isn't higher TBH.

But who are these 1.38% of professional developers who self-report that they do not use version control? Please rethink your life...

True, yes, but when they do that, they also leave out some key features. A lot of users of Final Cut Pro kept using the old version because Final Cut Pro X left out a lot of features.

> The idea that Safari is anywhere near what IE was is ludicrous.

People forget that Microsoft disbanded the IE dev team from 2001 for at least 5 years - IE6 remained unchanged from 2001 to 2006 and received absolutely no feature updates, HTML rendering or JavaScript engine changes during that time (though there were security patches). The next version of IE wasn't until IE7 was released to coincide with Windows Vista in early 2007.

5 years between major versions! No browser since then, developed by Google or Apple (and even now, Microsoft) has had a gap that long without feature updates.

What you're talking about falls under Fair Use. Free speech protections don't provide any such right.

This reads like you’ve never written a serious app in either JavaScript or Typescript. Willingly using JavaScript over Typescript in 2022 is insanity. There’s a reason Typescript won out over Dart and Flow - and why Javascript preprocessor languages and type checkers like Typescript even exist. It all boils down to one incontrovertible truth: JavaScript really really sucks.

It would’ve been really interesting if WinFS actually was released. It had a very interesting type system. Probably would’ve been more suited for servers than desktops/clients.

> "does Apple’s walled garden prevent the creation of businesses that consumers would like to do business with if only they had the opportunity"

They already do prevent certain businesses from operating in the App Store anyway, irrespective of the regulatory scrutiny here. An example is present in Apple's review guidelines, where they specifically ban any apps that encourage consumption of tobacco products or vaping. See https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

> 1.4.3 Apps that encourage consumption of tobacco and vape products, illegal drugs, or excessive amounts of alcohol are not permitted on the App Store.

The same goes with all apps that feature pornography or facilitate prostitution and I'm sure many adult-entertainment businesses would love the opportunity to do business in the App Store. I'm not saying Apple should or shouldn't allow those types of businesses on the app store, mind you, but there's no law saying Apple must allow even dating apps on the App Store; if Apple decided they could probably ban dating apps altogether.

> Maybe / maybe not. It's relatively easy to translate C to unsafe Rust, which is a mostly automatic process.

This makes no sense; extending C code with Checked-C would still be easier as with Checked-C you wouldn't do any translation at all; it's a superset of C, in the same way that TypeScript is to JavaScript.

> It's a trap, in other words.

Usually with a trap, there's typically some sort of follow-through. Let's say I fell for Microsoft's .NET trap 10 years ago. What did Microsoft do, now that they trapped me?

1. Ported .NET to Linux and MacOS with .NET Core. 2. Rebranded the formerly paid-for standard edition of Visual Studio as the Community edition and gave it away for free, even for commercial use so long as your business revenue was below $1mill. 3. Completely open-sourced the .NET Core runtime, base class libraries, JIT and C#/VB.NET compilers. 4. Also open-sourced formerly closed tech like WPF, WinForms, ASP.NET.

Every new project now is just an open source project on github, like github.com/dotnet/machinelearning or example.

In a way, Microsoft still is trying to lock me into continuing to be a .NET developer - by just treating the platform and its developers really well. Gee, such a wild thought to think that maybe companies can change over time?

> I base this prediction on my study of similar situations in the past. The track record here is clear and unambiguous. Open, shared systems always beat out closed proprietary systems.

The author goes on to list examples in credit cards, computer OS's, ATM's etc, but all those things are cherry-picked. They conveniently ignore Apple's iPhone/iPad/App Store combination being wildly successful. And the mis-use of terms like 'open' and 'proprietary' lead me to conclude the author doesn't actually understand what those terms mean.

The comparison of Windows to Mac OS X is just laughable; calling Windows an 'open' and 'shared' operating system? Mac OS is 'closed' and 'proprietary'? Well actually they're both proprietary and neither are open. Also being ignored by the author is video game consoles. For more than 2 decades, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft have co-existed with their own proprietary hardware/software systems. According to the author, I suppose Google search must be 'open' and 'shared' just because it has 90% market share.

> There are hundreds of possible participants out there with valuable film, TV, or other intellectual properties, and they aren’t large enough to take on Netflix on their own. But if they combine their efforts, they will be formidable... > ...Can you imagine the power of a single monthly subscription that gave you immediate access to films, TV shows, music, video games, streamed live events, etc.?

The author hypothesizes about a product that DOES NOT EXIST and comes to the conclusion Netflix is doomed? Also what is the likelihood that all the players in the media industry are just going to decide to come together and hold hands? Even if they all decided to conduct a super-merger, that would never get legal/anti-competitive clearance. How does that not seem a bit outlandish? And yet the author writes about it as if it's some inevitability.

To be fair, they were at it for about 6 years before giving up (2009 to 2015); which is a really really long time to spend trying to get momentum going.

It is annoying, but CMD+? (help menu search) I think makes up for it. It's far more useful for when you're navigating an unfamiliar interface.

If you're going to use XML, I would consider it mandatory to also use XSDs (W3C XML Schemas).

XSDs is something I think people need to pay more attention to when dealing with XML; the type system that the W3C XSD standard lays out (when used effectively) really does relieve much of the pain that people experience with XML.

> I think they are shell shocked from vista and will never make drastic changes again.

Did you ever use Windows 8? Because that released in 2012, just 5 years after Vista. Drastic, un-asked for changes that ruined the user experience; hideous tablet/touch interface that was mostly unusable; sub-par touch/app development model that no one adopted.

Basically it was another Vista-like release all over again.

> ...it would basically hand the market over to Apple. They're the only company with the vertical integration to be capable of supporting all their hardware and software properly for this sort of time span.

Microsoft has no trouble supporting Windows and Windows Server for 10 years, and they're installed on innumerable number of different hardware configurations. The core issue is that Android's OS stack was built without a properly decoupled hardware abstraction layer (HAL), necessitating the phone's OEM, the SOC manufacturer and the carrier to all work together to prep an OS update. Google tried addressing this in Android 8 (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/google-hopes-to-fix-...), but even now, an OEM still needs a carrier's input when prepping a new Android OS update, and there's still simply no motivation from either.

What about Apple's fight with the FBI over iPhone encryption? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_d...

It's definitely not common, but it happens.

> • If something fails where you thought it would fail, that is not a failure.

Well, if you thought you'd get a negative result (or failure of something) and then a negative result occurs, the result is still negative, it's just that your expectations were not betrayed. You may have successfully predicted the negative result, but that doesn't change the result was still negative.

Can someone explain this? It doesn't seem to really make much sense.

> Plus you can't share UI code between Android and iOS. You still need to build the UI's natively with no code reuse.

Utterly false - Xamarin Forms is totally cross-platform UI; you're probably mistaking it for Xamarin Native, which is used as a target renderer for each platform. Look at this sample project: https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-forms-samples/tree/master...

The .iOS and .Android project folders target each platform respectively, with a single project shared between them that defines UI that is rendered onto each platform. You claim to have experience with using it, but obviously haven't done anything even as simple as a HelloWorld.

I may be misreading your comment, but in case you're not aware .NET 5 supports Windows 7 as a deployment platform: https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/main/release-notes/5.0/5...

And it does not specifically require any paid extended support contract from Microsoft to actually install and run.

They haven't announced supported platforms. They probably won't though. Windows 7 exited extended support more than a year ago, so I wouldn't be surprised if they dropped 7.

I would argue it's definitely not a fad (at least in the sense it's something that's been happening only very recently); people have been fasting for literally thousands of years, though mostly for religious reasons.

It has an aura of being a fad nowadays since some modern research has indicated it actually does have health benefits, which I think some people have been a bit too quick to pounce on.

So you offer a free tier, then the next tier is $200 a month? Seems a bit steep does it not? What about a $50 plan for like say 10 million rows?

I live in Aus also, and there are people here who work full-time and still need to avail themselves of local charities, for food boxes and such, but the relative size of that demographic seems to be smaller here compared to the US.

>I have a $3000 1 year old laptop, and sometimes slack gets so slow I have to kill the browser process and start over again. The issue is not hardware.

Keep in mind, the 1st gen iPad was single core and only had 256MB of RAM, which was the same RAM capacity as the then current iPod touch. Compare it to any PC with a single core Intel CPU and the experience will be largely the same, except of course the Intel CPU will require x10 more energy to run.

And yes, it did have a really great CPU for it's time. It's core CPU architecture remained largely unchanged for 2 more generations. The iPad 2 added an extra core (A5), and with the iPad 3rd gen, Apple gave it more GPU power in the SoC (A5X).

Nope, not true. Steve Jobs initially envisioned the iPhone as a device with no 3rd party app support. Even internally, Apple execs at the time had to lobby him to change his mind: https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...

This seems like a weird thing to say, considering Windows Phone (specifically v8) introduced the whole flat-design thing.

> Indeed, Wikipedia defines the very term as follows: “Alternative medicine describes any practice that aims to achieve the healing effects of medicine, but which lacks biological plausibility and is untested, untestable or proven ineffective.”

OK, what? The author completely lost me at this point. This seems like a very reasonable definition of the term 'alternative medicine'. If it was tested and/or proven effective then it wouldn't be alternative - it would be just medicine.

.NET 5 unifies Mono and .NET Core, not .NET Core and Framework. Previously Mono and .NET Core had different base class libraries and machine code generators (Mono using LLVM).

I'd say it seems like a kind of re-invention of the UI for SharePoint lists. I wouldn't be surprised if the backend for this was really just some generalization of the existing code base that implemented SharePoint list functionality.