Yeah, it’s easy to forget sometimes that they were actually pretty good coders to get started. Obviously that doesn’t always translate to corporate leadership. But hey, assembly is far better than Zuckerberg’s start (PHP?)

Old school hardware hacking haha

This is because AI (vis-a-vis LLMs) became a religion to many, rather than a technology.

It’s going to be much much worse than just “hard to get a visa” – this shitball is rolling downhill and anyone brown should be considering another country.

First they came for…

Remember the free cupholder exe that opened your CD ROM drive? ;)

I found the most effective way to get a nerd into ham is: mention that ham radio is in the criteria to become an astronaut. Suddenly they’re doing the study courses all on their own. Granted, they have to already be a nerd. ;)

For the non nerds, the prepper angle seems to work with some.

The thing you have to deliver is the “why”, not the how. If they’ve decided they want to learn it, they will.

There have been attempts. With WebASM. There’s even an interesting compiler for it. Not super fast, but potentially useful. Good luck with gaining traction though. https://wasmer.io/posts/py2wasm-a-python-to-wasm-compiler

Does CTRL-ALT-ESC still work in Wayland (assuming KDE, might be desktop dependent)

MATLAB is basically a UI wrapper around Fortran’s BLAS and LAPACK – change my mind. ;)

print(eval(input(“Expression:”)))

Unsafe coding is best coding ;)

Insist they index from 1. Like God and Fortran intended it. ;)

Chicken and egg problem strikes again

I agree. And those decades of development come with huge advantages. Libraries. Patterns. Textbooks! Billions of lines of code you can cross reference and learn from!

It’s fun to bleed a little when you are tinkering. It’s not fun to have to reinvent the wheel because you choose a language that doesn’t have an existing ecosystem. That becomes and chicken-and-egg problem. The tinkerers fulfill this role (building out the ecosystem) and also tend to advocate for their tinkering language of choice. But there needs to be a real critical mass.

It takes decades to shift an entrenched ecosystem. Check in ten years if the following exist in languages other than C/C++: an enterprise grade database, a python(/etc.) interpreter that isn’t marked experimental, an OS kernel that is used somewhere real, an embedded manufacturer that ships the language as its first class citizen, a AAA game using it under the engine…

Like, in the last 15 years, I’m only aware of a single AAA game that used a memory safe language – Neverwinter Nights 2 used C# for part of the Electron Engine…

Rust is the most likely candidate here, although you see things like Erlang being used to make some databases (CouchDB). People see Rust being used on some real infrastructure projects that gain actual traction (polars comes to mind). Polars is an interesting use case though – it’s simply better than the other projects in its particular space and so people are switching to it not because it is written in rust at all… And honestly, that’s probably the only way this happens.

Certainly, if I had said that.

It’s like the Brits trying to convince everyone else to switch to their electrical socket. Sure, the design is better for higher voltage and current, has all these extra safety features, etc. But you cannot dramatically shift an entrenched ecosystem for free.

No.

C is going to be around and useful long after COBOL is collecting dust. Too many core things are built with C. The Linux kernel, the CPython interpreter, etc. Making C go away will require major rewrites of projects that have millions upon millions of hours of development.

Even Fortran has a huge installed base (compared to COBOL) and is still actively used for development. Sometimes the right tool for a job is an old tool, because it is so well refined for a specific task.

Forth anyone?

The rewrite-it-in-rust gang arrives in 3, 2 …

I think you effectively nailed it. It’s a small act that represents a person’s larger outlook on civilization. Are you participating in it or are you rejecting it.

It’s similar to a smoker that flicks their cigarettes in random places. Or spitting out gum on the sidewalk. Or many other small things that aren’t that important on a small scale, but if everyone does the same thing, then is sucks. But if (almost) everyone does the small thing to benefit the whole, the whole is better off for it.

A good contrast is something like Outer Worlds, where there is usually multiple possible outcomes. I think it comes from their Fallout lessons learned and GURPS background. Love the game design. (Dislike the combat, but that is a separate thing.)

I use old.reddit in desktop mode still, on occasion. Today I clicked on a screenshot of a game cause I wanted more detail. I was directed to the new Reddit interface. I right clicked on the image and chose “open image in new tab” and got the new Reddit interface. I tried CTRL-scroll to zoom in the image, and it made the UI elements larger and in the process shrunk the image. I left the site.

Or, hear me out, they went public and now they are making their product worse as enshittification takes its toll.

We are doomed