nobleach

Obviously some will find this a silly opinion but the one thing that turned me off the most about the Nim programming language was its use of significant whitespace. The same is true with F# (and of course Python). Having had apps with YAML for config, and having had nightmares trying to copy/paste config directives from various sources, I just find whitespace to be unwieldy.

Now that's a strong opinion, (weakly held - as a language can't be judged based on this design decision). But it does sour my interest a bit.

Seeing tests written by Claude/Gemini really frustrate me sometimes. They'll go to great lengths to make tests pass. Somtimes even just testing console/stdout logging. On the other hand, when I've written failing tests and told the tools to write implementations to make the tests pass, I've had some really good results. Sadly that's the part I enjoy the most so I really don't want to delegate that to a tool.

I spent the last half of the 90's and the first part of the early 2000's building computers. Like the author, it started with a massively thick Computer Shopper catalog. Motherboard from TC Computers, 1.3GB Dirt Cheap Drives, 16MB of 72pin DIMMs from my dad's old Compaq. 486DX4 from some other seller. Man that was such a rush cobbling that thing together. But the bug stuck with me and eventually got me a job - which got me installing Novel, WindowsNT and eventually Linux! Then my boss sprang the big one on me, "you know, the real money is in software development". What a great trip down memory lane.

Perhaps I'm misreading the person to whom you're replying, but usefullness, while subjective, isn't typically based on one person's opinion. If enough people agree on the usefullness of something, we as a collective call it "useful".

Perhaps we take the example of a blender. There's enough need to blend/puree/chop food-like-items, that a large group of people agree on the usefullness of a blender. A salad-shooter, while a novel idea, might not be seen as "useful".

Creating software that most folks wouldn't find useful still might be considered "neat" or "cool". But it may not be adding anything to the industry. The fact that someone shipped something quickly doesn't make it any better.

Well, every browser engine that is part of WHATWG. That's how working groups... work. The current crop of "not Chrome/Firefox/Webkit" aren't typically building their own browser engines though. They're re-skinning Chromium/Gecko/Webkit.

I think we could compare hardware AND software.

Hardware: Apple announced an ARM based CPU and started shipping. It was _mostly_ a seemless experience thanks to Rosetta2. The performance on these well-built machines was outstanding. Even the Intel-based machines previously had really strong performance. The machines themselves (on average) were among some of the most well-built. Yes, there were outliers with the butterfly keyboards. Yes there were outliers with silly features like the touchbar. We're talking on average.

Software: Apple's OS is just a boring Unix that works. Yes I realize that Unix is in name only - but on top of that XNU microkernel really is a lot of BSD. Having the GNU tools available AND Sound/Fingerprint Reader/HiRes Display that actually scales... that is still not the reality in Linux. (I still love Linux btw - I keep multiple machines around the house running it) So not having to spend a great deal of time fiddling with config files when I plug in an external monitor actually is a big deal. Most folks don't want the hassles of messing with pavucontrol just because they switched to their external audio setup. Most folks will appreciate when they drag a window to that exterinal monitor that the HiDPI didn't cause text to go wonky.

So those are the areas where Apple is just massively superior. They nailed it in the "it just works" department. They've nailed it in the "quality hardware" department.

Windows also does fairly well in a lot of these areas.

As far as running Linux on Apple hardware? I had a buddy come into a meeting running Gnome+Ubuntu on his MacBook Pro back around 2017... as soon as he plugged into the projector, it was a mess. I'm sure it's gotten better since then.

If that's what you "mostly" remember, your memory is awfully selective. It's totally fine for you to have a bias, but you're overlooking decades of massively successful products and services.

Having owned plenty of Thinkpads (Linux), Dells(Windows and Linux) and plenty of Macbook Pros, I can say, Apple's superiority of hardware is so far beyond the rest. Having an OS with a BSD-ish experience is really nice as well. I've spent 27 years in engineering and during most of that time I get the random "Linux is far superior", "I like Windows better" folks... but by and large, yes, Apple's tech has a ton of good will.

But I've yet to meet a person that said, "Oh, Rachel and Chandler from Friends... maybe Windows IS cool!". It wasn't cool, it wasn't anything. Apple was trendy with the designers and creative types, and Windows was what you probably used at your doldrums day job. The only place where MS has ever been "cool" is with gamers. I think your "Walmart" analogy is a perfect one.

My dots are open to anyone who cares to view my GitHub. I do tend to keep employer specific aliases/stuff in an `.employer.zsh` file that is sourced by my main `.zshrc`. But my NeoVim config is completely open for inspection. I'm not doing anything all that extraordinary though. I don't share my dots on Reddit simply because I don't feel like using my real identity on that platform.

When it comes to consuming the dots of others, I just switched to AxOS for Linux... and am auditioning Celestia (https://github.com/caelestia-dots/shell). This means that in 3 months, my desktop will likely look like everyone else's. I probably won't even commit any of this as it's not really my stuff.

I know that was the reasoning for the Records/Tuples proposal being shot down. I haven't dug too deeply into the pipeline operators other than to get a feel for both proposals.

Most of the more interesting proposals tend to languish these days. When you look at everything that's advanced to Stage 3-4, it's like. "ok, I'm certain this has some amazing perf bump for some feature I don't even use... but do I really care?"

In France, I always thought it was customary to leave the change from l'addition. (I'm not French though, so perhaps I was commiting a faux pas)

I can confirm in Italy almost no one will even accept a tip. (Taxi drivers, wait-staff, hotel staff)

Honestly, my only gripes with TMUX have been:

1. Having to zoom a window before copying multiple lines of text (Kovid brought this up in the interview that was mentioned in this article)

2. The weirdness of copying text from the scrollback buffer into the clipboard

I've tried so many things for the second one over the years. I think I have it working okay-ish these days. But there are still plenty of times that I say, "aw screw it", and literally use the terminal's copy command.

Every other solution to my multi-terminal workflow have been worse though! i3/bspwm with multiple terminals were okay. It was just hard to have "projects". I'd have to visit each terminal and switch to the proper directory, launch servers/docker-compose/etc.

Zellij felt like too much "hopping out into manipulation mode, manipulating, then hopping back into work mode". Those milleseconds were enough to halt my flowstate.

Single terminal with built-in tabs/splits felt clunky as I couldn't get the keyboard shortcuts into muscle memory (perhaps more time would help)

I gave Zellij a shot a few months ago. It really felt too "modal" for me though. I've been a Vim user forever so I'm not exactly modal-averse. But TMUX has always felt more like Operator Pending mode in Vim. Having Zellij feel like full-on Normal mode was frustrating. After I gave up, someone told me they had their Zellij configured just like TMUX, and I should give it another shot with their config. I still haven't gotten around to it.

I agree. It's also true of nearly any program. If you do not set its configuration properly, it may not work as expected.

In the case of TMUX, it can be a bit annoying because it's not immediately apparent _why_ things look wonky. But I'm not sure what the solution is. Default to 256 colors?

I was an OMZ user pretty much since I adopted ZSH many years ago. I never really experienced much of the slowdown(s) that people tend to complain about. Even still, getting my dotfiles set up on a new machine was always a little bit of pain. I'd try to install OMZ from my OS' package manager, remember that that rarely worked perfectly, gone back to OMZ's webpage and copied the cURL command... the fought with FZF shell integration for about an hour. Finally one Saturday I just stripped it all out. I went with raw ZSH and Antigen for the few plugins I care about. Spinning up new machine is now painless. And I always like simplifying things.

Definitely Mise! I was an asdf user for a couple of years and Mise was such a nice replacement. I have to juggle several other languages, and each having its own tool for tool version management was a non-starter.

If anyone is building using experimental features that are either flagged or unflagged in Chrome, that's NOT on Chrome. For example, if I built a feature based on Chrome's weird Observables, sure, I could do it... it would work nowhere else. If you're actually seeing this happen, who do you blame in this situation?

IE flat out refused to implement features that were agreed upon by standards bodies. They pushed for VML development and ignored SVG. They ignored CSS3 in favor of their DirectX filters. Chrome does indeed put experimental features out there AFTER they support the standards. Firefox also has agreed to a set of web standards and is simply behind on implementation.

Having lived(as a developer) through IE4 - IE9, I reserve that title of "the new IE" for the worst offenders.

I did this once! I was given a "create Battleship" take-home assignment. Normally, I'd say, "yeah, I don't have time for this". But I happen to really like that game and had never thought of how to model it in code. So I took up the challenge. I spent time whiteboarding classes, interfaces, writing tests... in the end, I had a solid solution. I submitted my code and as I was doing so, I thought, "you know, this really could be handled by a couple of Set data structures. After hitting send, I did a quick follow-up with, "you know, this has a very simple solution" and typed some example code right in the body of the email. I love it when I can't just leave a problem alone. The hiring manager appreciated it too!

Isn't this kinda the idea behind TinaCMS? Using git/files instead of a database? It's been a long time since I've looked.

The "sweet spot" really depends on the use case. If you're wanting to give content control to folks that couldn't write HTML, or to folks that want to quickly update what content flows into pre-built structure, almost any headless CMS will do. In my case, I need a CMS that can do this:

* Schedule content release * Preview content in the actual pages * Store drafts

I hate to say it but, Drupal can do all of that. I hate Drupal. I've considered writing my own but got no further than a save/read set of endpoints. (https://github.com/nobleach/cobaltcms) Who has time to write yet another headless CMS??

Oh absolutely! I'm just mentioning why CSV is chosen over Protobufs.

Extremely hard to tell an HR person, "Right-click on here in your Workday/Zendesk/Salesforce/etc UI and export a protobuf". Most of these folks in the business world LIVE in Excel/Spreadsheet land so a CSV feels very native. We can agree all day long that for actual data TRANSFER, CSV is riddled with edge cases. But it's what the customers are using.

I'm guessing the poster is referring to AOSP and custom ROMs. If so, yes, it is entirely possible, but not something I'd expect any normal human being to do.

Having worked in the graphic design industry during the 90's, no. There's no way I'd have just slipped a font I didn't own on a disk and sent it off to a printer. When it comes to fonts for coding... sure there was that ONE time I snagged Operator Mono for an extended "trial". I still believe in paying for things that I use on a daily basis, so I switched back to Sauce Code Pro or something.

Just here to bask in the nostalgia. I hit up bash.org from time to time just to remember what was... and what will probably never be again.

The entire JVM ecosystem is built around "we all know you're using an IDE, right?" I among most folks who use Kotlin are aware of the Community Edition of IntelliJ. The price isn't the thing keeping me from using it. 1. an employer _should_ be covering that cost. 2. The tools is truly outstanding and well worth the 500 bucks (I'd argue it's not worth 500 bucks a year but...) With all of that said, I really don't enjoy the IDE experience. I do tend to write Kotlin + Quarkus in NeoVim... but the LSP is a volunteer effort. Meanwhile Rust and Go's LSPs are incredibly.

My biggest complaint against the JVM community will alwyas be, "don't expect that we can auto-import... document where methods/constant/imported vars come from".

Oh no doubt it's my favorite backend way to build an API. Just toss in SpringBoot or Quarkus and it's very nice. The only thing that bothers me is that it's a pain to use with NeoVim.

Kotlin really got lucky with Google choosing it for Android dev. While Google is known for relegating some of its tech to the dust bin, Android is too big at the moment. Flutter + Dart was a little surprising though. If they hadn't chosen Kotlin, I couldn't have seen a real path forward for JetBrains. It was basically a much nicer Scala (and I'd argue, a really nice Java) But they keep it locked up with IntelliJ. This, by the way, is why none of us are writing SmallTalk these days. Having to purchase and use a particular IDE is not how we do software these days. (Feel free to tell me how AMAZING IntelliJ is... it's not my cup of tea)

I just had this same thought this morning. I sure do with OCaml was far more popular. Right now, if you're planning a startup, you want something that you can just snap together a bunch of well-tested libraries. You want DB libraries, S3, message queue stuff, Kafka stream stuff. OCaml does have a lot of these things but they just aren't well known. If they exist, they're just poorly documented. This is why people opt for Java/Typescript/Ruby/Python. It's easy to hire devs, and the tools they'll use are fairly well understodd.

OCaml suffers greatly from a lack of unified practice. There's a YouTube playlist, a Udemy course... an Apress book and those two other ones with camels on the cover. That's about it for stock OCaml. If you want to learn Jane Street flavored OCaml, there's Real World OCaml.

I've had a few hits from recruiters lately that mention Ruby on Rails. My experience in the Salt Lake City valley was that several successful businesses started with that stack and now it's just sort of "entrenched". Some have been working to move to Elixir, but they still have to turn wrenches on the old (money-making) stack. It's kind of created this microcosmic COBOL dev-like niche. We still need folks who know this stuff. With all that said, I do think there are new startups that still choose Ruby on Rails for its quick time-to-market ability. So demand definitely varies by location.

XP was the last that I really REALLY used. I've had Windows 7 (on my work machine that I didn't use) and I have a Windows 10 machine that I boot from time to time when I want to mess with recording gear. But I kinda fell into "they're all bad, I was just used to them".

I'll give my prime example. I used to know Device Manager/Control Panel SO well. I could just get things done. Now I have to hunt around forever to do any sort of hardware related task. In their attempt to make it "so easy, even your grandma could use it" they've alienated power users. My grandma still has to call me to help her attach a printer... but now I have to say, "I dunno... let me watch a YouTube video and pray that it matches the sub-version that you're using".