551 karma · joined June 15, 2013
The GCL designers made several mistakes in its design, but the worse was the lack of a versioning that would make language evolution easier, as well as interoperability between different versions. GCL2 solved some issues, mainly cleaning up the interpreter. Still, BCL is IMNSHO by far the best infra language there is.
In 2015, the SRE org started project "Prod 2020", with the goal of unifying the SRE stacks and modernizing the web tools. It was quite successful.
If by "web tooling" you mean the tools for producing public-facing HTML services, those were used by a surprisingly small percentage of developers.
> But BCL is still the worst language I've ever used.
I'm an SRE and I think it's quite likely the best infra language I've ever seen.
Maybe, but that still doesn't answer the question. In my many years working for a FAANG in Europe, almost all good managers were non-US, even in the sister teams on the US side. On the US side, the best managers I've worked with were, with a few exceptions, first generation immigrants from India, Iran, Lebanon or various European countries.
In practice, this would seem to be false, according to the admins of said sites.
You say you aren't good at it, but have you ever tried ? I suppose not, so you'll never know if you'd have been good at it. This is not a quality that comes innate, it's something that one must learn and cultivate.
The important thing here is the observation that engineering companies used to be filled with engineers that were both *technically competent* and *willing to become a manager*. That's much rarer nowadays. Why ?
I see complaints about companies not promoting from within their ranks, and choosing MBAs for managers, but the grim reality is that the engineers themselves don't want to step up and grow up.
Why would the latter be better than the former ?
No. LLMs and blockchain are the same kind of shit.
No they're not. The four freedoms apply only to software licences.
Yes, that's true and IMO the main reason why even people with the money end up buying the same bad products: they often don't have the time to learn and form a taste.
* Naked and Famous (Canada): https://nakedandfamousdenim.com. They also have a cheaper brand that uses the same Japanese denim but the garments are made in China (https://theunbrandedbrand.com), which is still better than Levi's.
* 3Sixteen (US): https://www.3sixteen.com
* The Flat Head (Japan): https://privateandco.ca/collections/the-flat-head
* SugarCane (Japan): https://sugarcanejeans.com/
* TCB (Japan): https://tcbjeans.myshopify.com/
Most of the Japanese brands are hard to get outside Japan, and flying to Tokyo is often the best way to get one, otherwise you're stuck with buying online but you have to know well what you're doing because Japanese denim is almost always unwashed, meaning it will shrink after use so you really have to know how much higher a size to order so that it will fit you well after 6 months.
They can, but people wouldn't want to pay the price. When adjusting for inflation, clothes today are much cheaper than 30 years ago, and the main producers of high-quality cotton (Kazakhstan and Egypt) are having continuous drought problems so the best raw material is even more expensive.
The combination of customer expectation for low prices, and more expensive raw materials, exacerbated by lower production volume, means that very few would be willing to buy. As an example, take a look at the high quality jeans market: there are a few niche companies in Japan, Europe, US and Canada producing jeans at the same level of quality as 50-100 years ago, in some cases the exact same model as, say, a 1950's Levi's. Those jeans start at $200 per pair, but go even up to $400-500 and the manufacturers are barely surviving.