That's certainly the pragmatic call, but while admittedly I'd never heard of Braid or his other games before he started showing up my YT feed, his takes on programming culture are very opinionated and compelling. He could have focused on making games and lobbing criticisms like so many of us do, but he chose to act. I'd say that's worth something.
Sometime in '85, my mom is an administrative assistant at the local University.
She's an absolute wiz on her office's newly modernized setup with these "PC" things running Wordperfect all creating beautiful documents on nascent HP laser printers. She'd let me show up after hours to hunt'n'peck the final draft of my high school term papers on the setup. I knew so little about computers then, but i firmly believe the magic of this simple process and things like "reveal codes" planted the seeds for finding deeper insights into speedy software on slow hardware and how file formats work. She was so sad when it inevitably went to windows :-) Rest in peace Bruce, thank you for .. you.
I always feel like NASA has mastered the basic "under promise, over deliver" philosophy that keeps the lights on and the next missions funded. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at who they get to tap dance in front of the congressional committee or how they schmooze the decadal people to rise above the rest.
I started uni in 1990 and went from a kid in his basement banging away on a PC clone with Turbo Pascal 5.x to a place with this thing called "usenet" on a "VAX" running "BSD" off of tapes and the map of the "Internet" could just about fit on a whiteboard. I sponged off the sysadmins all I could learning about renoe, tahoe and all things in between. I had no cognizance at the time that the death of this amazing world was getting thought off just when i thought it was the greatest stuff in the universe. I read the demon book cover to cover when I had no idea what most of it meant. BSD, whether alive or "dead" will always hold a special place in my mind. It's only with the long road since those days that I can appreciate the tone of this article. Thanks OP for posting it here.
Agreed with this general notion however, I'd argue that unlike a standards body, a big driver for JSON's ascent to defacto standard were the legions of javascript developers working at every layer of a tech stack using it as a low-friction means to an end.
Absolutely agreed. I've watched lots of his long-form videos on all those topics and initially I was always scratching my head as to why he'd want to reinvent all these wheels from the molecules up, but as I watched more, I realized that he's a journey guy, not necessarily a destination guy. To his credit, he's attracted a similarly-minded following of contributors along the way.
The first half of the article started to feel like the XKCD "15th standard" meme, but at the end, the more nuanced point was presented: If you're already using Rust, stick with Rust. Carbon is positioned as successor language for those with large C++ codebases difficult to convert to Rust.
Interesting tact, and at face value that concession might undermine adoption given that Rust has a big head start and not hinged to a corp with a well-earned reputation for killing projects.
Technologies like WASI are coming on right now to do exactly this kind of access in the context of a sandbox. From what I can tell, they're going through a lot of the same progression of JVM and .NET IL back in the 90's and early 2k's but for whatever reason seem to be more openly embraced in all the places where WASM is gaining a foothold.
I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that this one sticks .. oh and, please make WASM run in a browser without JS :)
Yours is a fair question. Theories:
* Cheaper to invest in your tools than overhauling your people/codebases/etc
* Sense of wanting to give back to your core tooling
* The decision maker(s) for the investment just really love Ruby?
I used to often reach for xfig for a quick tech diagram (boxes, circles, lines, etc). The "fig" file format, being text, is easy to drop into source control. It's fast and gets the job done. The feeling I get from peers, especially those who've never understood that unix/linux on desktop has long been a thing or really lived that far out of the Win32/MacOS ecosystem, look at you sideways when the file extension isn't .docx, or .ppt or whatever. Maybe SVG supplants fig in all the ways, but I still hope tools like xfig keep their place for quite some time.
I was one of those people downloading 386BSD to floppy disks in my university computer lab in '91 or so. The prospect of running a "real" Unix on my PC hardware was really a way out of the prospect of saving up all my pennies for a SunOS workstation (north of 4kUSD at the time!). Linux (0.99?) was released around these times and took off way faster for all the reasons outlined by responses in this thread. It seems like Linux was inevitable with or without 386BSD and its descendants.
Regardless, for me personally, I'll consider Jolitz's work seminal in my own thought and evolution when I was stuck in the mindset that only options were the big old klunky PDP 11/780's or the pricey SGI/Sun workstations that surrounded me in the same lab. He was part of that revolution of folks breaking those molds for that, thanks you Bill Jolitz.
To continue the Java bytecode prior comment, at one point, java was in all browsers of the time (i.e. Applets). However, it lost, and seemingly removed with extreme prejudice with no nods to backwards compatibility.
Java also enjoys multiple HLLs that target its bytecode (Scala, Kotlin, Groovy, Jython, etc) and there's nothing in the runtime capabilities that tie it to any kind of constrained platform (threading, IO, async)
Don't get me wrong, I'm really hoping that WASM succeeds but I'm concerned that the same set of slam dunks we thought back in 1996 don't result getting posterized (again) by DOM/JS.
The early Doom 1 and 2 being software renderers, used ray casting (386 protected mode FTW to boot!) The later versions though, were part of the first wave of games to leverage GPU cards. I don't know if those newer releases still kept any ability to render purely in software though.
In the context of the original article addressing Java 8, in the java.time.format package, there's a DateTimeFormatterBuilder that removes the sub-language element of the issue. With those builder methods, you can construct the fields in the order you want, with whatever precision, with padding, etc.
A few years back, I refactored a memory/time-intensive task of an application to leverage AWS lambdas. Once the code got into production, it ended up working out fine and we were able to side-step OOM issues that were plaguing the prior incarnation. Takeaways:
* being able to scale on a per-request basis and understand your burst usage of resources is pretty useful
* the top-level comment regarding CAPEX vs OPEX was spot on. Our higher-ups always had their eyes on the AWS bill and not having to pay for instances (either spot or elastic) appeased them.
* at the time at least with Java-based lambdas, the local tooling was really clunky and slow with that nasty startup. You might have better success with node or python in that area.
* otherwise, like any other tech, there's gonna be tradeoffs. Something good to keep in your toolbox, but like most things they're no silver bullet.
There's all kinds of non mission-critical software that gets made with little life/death consequence on how it gets made. There doesn't seem to be the same notion of the "bridge that barely stands" in software either since compute power can be thrown at something way cheaper than a rewrite. Thus, when it comes to the people that make software, there's a wild amount of interpretation on what "good" means and here we are.
And if I can opine on your Spring Boot example, unit testing can sometimes be easier for mock purposes if you have a set of interfaces (vs concrete classes) to work with.
Where you say "just leave your house in the morning..." really drives home the significance of what Lachlan's Alt Tour particularly means for French people. Wanna ride the whole darn route just like your favorite pros? Get your bike up to snuff, just leave your house, grab some snacks... you can refill and do laundry on the way!
More broadly, without all the resources, cars, gas, etc of a full "race" or event, you can still have meaningful experiences. That lesson seems like a great takeaway from the whole thing.
Ha, your comment is ironic since I still remember from back in the 70's/80's that "nobody got fired for buying an IBM". The quote might even be older than that, but I had first heard that quote when Microsoft was still on the rise handing IBM their butts in the fledgling PC marketplace.
Some interesting reasons: the proverbial "2nd genesis", panspermia possibilities of our own planet, and answering lots of questions on formation of life on ours and any other planet we might encounter.
I was thinking the same. I spent many of the formative years of my career (late-80's, most of the 90's) HATING microsoft but to see them now and all the relatively "open" stuff that they not only embrace but can't really extinguish is refreshing. I think some of that attitude put Satya in place, but he's run with the ball under the same ethos.
I got the 2-for-one variant of this with my 2016 MBP where I purchased a replacement battery assembly from iFixit to replace the swolen ones. In the kit, they include: the tools, a link to their iFixit video on the steps as well as some protective gear to do the job. Highly recommended! Replacing batteries is a way more involved task on MBPs, but while you're there in the early stages, you can vacuum or take compressed air to anything you see.
is it idiomatic in the JS world to always express dependencies in the "version X.Y or higher", vs "version X.Y"? Most of my experience is from the java/maven world where you're playing with fire if you don't just make it "X.Y".
I love these kinds of projects! Any description of it that has me cackling by the 2nd sentence is gonna be a gem. Good thing i brought my FAT32 driver.