I do not want to have to ask again.

Don’t go complaining that C++ is “too complicated” and then be hauling its complexity into C, because all you’ll end up with is a bloated schizophrenic mess that is neither a good C nor a good C++ [alternative].

Hey, standards committee’s gotta eat.

'defer'? I occasionaly use it in Swift to clean up resources; s’okay there, I guess, though I’m not convinced it’s better than Python’s 'with' block. But in C?

One of C’s few distinguishing strengths is that the language is relatively† small and stable, and well understood. For that kind of cleanup there is already 'goto', which again is small, stable, and well understood. I just used it for that the other day: it works, it’s fine; I’m a grown-up.

Yeah, sure, 'defer' is “safer” and “more elegant”… did we mention this is C? That ship sailed fifty years ago. Don’t try to make C into something it’s not: that’s C++’s job so go fill your boots there instead.

I just posted Tony Hoare’s excoriation of ALGOL68 the other day, but clearly it’s needed again:

http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs422/2011/bib/hoare81emperor...

Simplest solution: track down the ruddy C standards committee and beat them in the head with a leather-bound copy of Zawinski's Law (wrapped around a large gold brick), till either they’re dead or they leave C be. It does what it was designed to do, and that along is reason enough not to dick with it just because they’re bored and struggling to justify their continued existence.

The only thing C needs to do is keep on working. That will only get harder the more crap they pile on top. A good artist knows when to stop.

Which brings us to…

“panic/recover”

K&R give us strength! Tell these frustrated wannabe language designers to go make their own damn language, instead of screwing up someone else’s!

Okay, now I’m done. And get off my lawn!

Could’ve made a great, and timely, horrible-warts-n-all show about freedom of speech and those who’d manipulate it, but Cook is not one for such exuberant boldness. Hey, I’m fine with that: last thing I want is a desire to spend any more money on their overpriced tat.

Guess it’s The People vs Larry Flynt for movie night tonight. Now where did I put the DVD…

This really needs to be stated on its front page. Right now it’s all “Hows” and no “Why”.

First question anyone looking at it asks: What problem does it solve?/What need does it fill? A real-world use case provides an easy relatable answer.

Incidentally, with existing links to protobuf and no halting problem to worry about, it sounds like you’re halfway to having a remote query language a-la SQL too.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221553413_Safe_Quer...

Honestly, programmers have been railing against progress ever since the first machine coders shook their canes at those ghastly upstart programming languages now tearing up their lawns.

Meanwhile, what often does pass for “progress” amounts to anything but:

https://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-emperors-old-clothes

--

“It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don’t learn from our successes.” – Keith Braithwaite

See also Kodak (invented the digital camera in 1975!), Xerox (We’re a photocopier company! We sell photocopiers!), Microsoft (owned the entire global PC market for damn near 20 years—till Apple overnight redefined what “Personal Computing” meant). All caught out while sitting atop their laurels.

The only thing today’s successful product is good for is funding the development of tomorrow’s—because if you don’t disrupt yourself first then sooner or later your rivals will do it for you, and then it’s already far too late to do anything about it.

Glad I did it. Not happy about that particular outcome, but at least now I know it’s harder than it looks and some of the errors to avoid in future. And hopefully once I’ve finished dusting myself down I’ll be back up on another horse to try again.

It’s real easy to sit in the peanut gallery pontificating loudly. I’ve more respect for those who actually do it, even if they are assholes as people (but really, who isn’t?).

Look, if they just want to be another D then by all means have at it. It’s great that they have a personal hobby, but at least have the good grace to put up a notice saying they’re making this thing to please nobody but themselves. That way anyone else looking at it knows not to invest their own time into a toy project that doesn’t even take itself seriously, never mind have the chops to make the rest of the world believe in it too.

Oh, and by the way, I’ve said nothing about Vale that I’ve not said of my own projects… right before I’ve pulled the plug on them for failing to hit their overall objectives. And the best of that work’s been technically excellent, with sitting users royally pissed that I’ve just chucked their investments on the scrapheap along with my own. But I’m a realist; and it’s better to pull the trigger now and move on ASAP to the next thing, than drag out a slow but inevitable death and then have to junk an even larger investment further down the line. See also: sunk cost fallacy.

You want to ask other people to believe and invest in you? You’d damn well better bring more than just a tick list of features and your delicate feels. Else you’re just messing them around for your own personal ego.

/fin

--

TL;DR: When someone offers you difficult questions and brutal honesy, take it and ask for more, ’cos that’s the best gift they can offer. But if all you want is a pat on the head, then go ask your mom as I’m sure she thinks everything you do is wonderful.

So once again: What is Vale’s USP†? Because it isn’t on their frontpage; which it would be had they thought to ask that question of themselves.

--

TL;DR: Goddamn it, all you noobs, but learn How To Sell already. Some of us are just too damned old and tired to want to hold your diapers till you learn to grow up. Try making our lives a bit easier for once; not just to benefit us but your own products as well.

.

(† And if you don’t even know what “USP” means, well there you are. As someone who has already tried to bring truly groundbreaking new tech to market and flubbed it, and is just about to roll up sleeves and try, try again, I’m not asking these questions just to be obtuse but to be helpful. However, if you’d rather just insult than ever amount to squat then by all means carry on.)

If you want to get into the science of it then I’d suggest you start with general courses in biochem and physiology at the undergrad level and build your way up from there†. Expect to invest a good hard 10-20 years of your life getting up to speed, with no hard guarantees of success at the end of it.

Or, if you just want to help people right now, go get yourself involved in charitable fundraising for an organization that’s already working the problem. Still no guarantees, but at least they’ve got a big head start. Just don’t end up on a list like this, ’kay:

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/?s=immune+scam

--

† Courses I flunked myself, BTW, but at least I learned just how much I don’t know—an insight I’ve subsequently found both invaluable and frighteningly scarce in tech.

Look, this is not hard to understand: the increasingly fascistic US Right and its Qanon sturmtrupplers are using their “deep state cannibal pedophiles” narrative (amend as appropriate) as a modern-day blood libel in which to paint all their enemies. Mignonnes is simply one more convenient hook upon which to hang the greater attack. To fixate on the film is just one more layer of misdirection, to keep people angry, active, and blind to the big picture. You cannot understand anything until you understand that.

There is nothing innately anti-pedophile abould US Conservative culture; if anything, it’s proved one of the great hiding places for abusers (51st Speaker of the House, anyone?), precisely because it controls what gets said publicly and what is kept private, cultivating and misdirecting popular rage onto its political enemies, and edging ever closer to repeating the great atrocities of history, from the blood libel-stoked slaughters of first European Jews by Catholics, then of those Catholics by the new Protestants, through to the ethnic executions of the Bosnian war and the wholesale genocide of Rwanda, and everything inbetween.

Now I consider myself European despite being stuck here on reactionary backwards Airstrip One. My granddaddy was Antifa back in Africa and Italy. I also know firsthand how much damage one can do just by choosing a pleasing lie over a painful truth. I have few illusions about how bad things can get, and all it take to get it underway is for enough people to buy into a Big Lie to justify everything that comes next. I have the limitations but also the benefits of an outside perspective on what’s happening in the US right now, and I’m legit worried for the future of our whole damn planet as a large chunk of America charges proudly towards a Russia-like one-party state.

If you don’t wish to repeat humanity’s bloody history (which I can assure you won’t spare the children from anyone else) then you really need to start paying attention to who is spinning the popular narratives and to what goal. Starting in a mirror—because if you can’t be brutally, rigorously honest with yourself about your own understanding and motives, then what makes you think you can defend yourself from others’ deceptions any better?

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/10/watching...

https://www.adl.org/education/resources/glossary-terms/blood...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-26875506

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5eFubO_iLM

--

“Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches.” – William Pannapacker

Perhaps you’re confusing it with Dance Moms? Or preteen beauty queen pagents? Both of which are obvious targets of this film, being an attempt (whether good or bad) to criticize that culture. And both of which are also, I’d wager, solidly red state phenomena.

Besides, at this point it’s pretty much a given that everything the Titular Right accuses its enemies of is what it’s balls-deep in itself, so outrageous hypocricy there is no surprise either. See also: alt-right incels, Qanon’s 21st-century blood libel, Kentucky and Oklahoma Trump campaign officials currently serving time for child sex trafficking, undocumented kids stolen from family and locked in cages, and so on.

None of which should Netflix’s appalling advertising campaign nor its lousy attempts to suppress the right-wing tweets attacking them, but let’s not pretend all these Twitter “critics” are suddenly thinking of the children. Obvious propaganda war is so obvious that even a passing student of history can see exactly what’s going on.

Meantime, the Trump family kleptocracy is nuts-deep in its graft on the taxpayers’ dime and the fanbois don’t raise so much as an eyebrow because calling that out just isn’t exciting or self-serving enough. This is how democracy dies, drowned beneath addlepated addicts grasping at their next fix and just don’t care about anything else.

Counterpoint: Python format strings. (I think there’s four or five different built-in ways to do those now.) Python’s “batteries included” may have helped it to win vital audience early on, but it’s also locked in a ton of deadweight that’s seriously slowed down its own evolution since, while bloating its feature complexity to such a level I could not recommend Python as a good language for beginners now.

Which suggests there’s a more general meta-problem waiting to be solved here: how to [automatically] mass-migrate code written against interface A when a superior successor B comes along. I have many gripes about Apple’s #SwiftLang, but seriously appreciate that this is one requirement they’ve given some thought to. Having seen the decade-long logistical horror of Python’s relatively minor 2-to-3 upgrade, Xcode’s ability to auto-update projects written for one Swift version to another has let them evolve the language with minimal pain.

And while I’m not a fan of Lisp itself (a decent first attempt that should’ve been vastly bettered by now), I think its metaprogramming model an obvious foundation for such an automated migration system. Thus, rather than bake in all the libraries, keep the libraries external and build in a standard mechanism for migrating codebases written for one onto another. In essence, automated refactoring by “recipes”, where these recipes are as common and easy-to-use as the libraries themselves.

..

Of course, this still leaves the other (larger) problem of how to sort out current trash houses like PyPI, NPM, LuaRocks, et al, where contributors’ enthusiasm is not necessarily matched by their knowledge, competence, and ability to savagely critique their own work before inflicting it on the world (you know, the “Science” bit in “Computer Science”). Preferably without destroying that enthusiasm in the process, since there’s no point having a wonderfully polished platform without bums on seats as well—a perennial Lisp failing, it should be noted.

This is not merely idle speculation on my part. Many years ago I cut my teeth on AppleScript, which makes the stdlib-starved Lua look like fat Python 2, and tried to bootstrap a library ecosystem for it more than once. Good practice. Zero success†.

And now I’m trying to devise a “stealth Lisp” successor to them all (https://github.com/hhas/iris-script), I realise cracking the greater library problem is what will make the next generation of languages. A platform is only as robust and dependable as its weakest component, and for as long as a buggy or withdrawn left-pad function can tip the whole stack over then it’s not robust at all.

But this is as much a sociological challenge as a technical one, and not one I’ve got answers to yet.

--

† After which I realized it’d be far easier just to port the useful bits of AppleScript to Python instead. Which almost worked too… but that’s another story.

A pity Bliss wasn’t their role model instead, but that’s the value of market positioning: you don’t need the best product, just the product that everyone knows.

That’s very different to just dicking with the company codebase for one’s personal amusement. That’s the bloke with the dozen rusted automobile shells sitting on bricks in his front yard, while he’s in his shed “busy working” on number thirteen. He’s not productive, he’s just playing with himself. And making the whole place look like trash while he’s at it.