No, I'm comparing to more than a dozen different languages that I've used commercially. And there were direct references there to Perl, Java, Pascal, procedural SQL, and many, many others too.

> There are languages out there that are easy to build, have a reasonable std lib

Sure. And the existence of them doesn't mean Go isn't also simple.

> and don't offload the complexity of the world onto the programmer.

I disagree. Every language makes tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs always end up being complexities that the programmer has to negotiate. This is something I've seen, without exception, in my 40 years of language agnosticism and part-time language designer.

Go has its warts for sure. But saying the simplicity of Go is "just virtue signaling" is so far beyond ignorant that I can only conclude this opinion of yours is nothing more than the typical pseudo-religious biases that lesser experienced developers smugly cling to.

Go has one of the easiest tool chains to get started. There's no esconfig, virtualenv and other bullshit to deal with. You don't need a dozen `use` headers just to define the runtime version nor trust your luck with a thousand dependencies that are impossible to realistically audit because nobody bothered to bundle a useful standard library with it. You don't have multi-page indecipherable template errors, 50 different ways to accomplish the same simple problem nor arguments about what subset of the language is allowed to be used when reviewing pull requests. There isn't undefined behaviour nor subtle incompatibilities between different runtime implementations causing fragmentation of the language.

The problem with Go is that it is boring and that's boring for developers. But it's also the reason why it is simple.

So it's not virtue signaling at all. It's not flawless and it's definitely boring. But that doesn't mean it isn't also simple.

Edit: In case anyone accuses me of being a fanboy, I'm not. I much preferred the ALGOL lineage of languages to the B lineage. I definitely don't like a lot of the recent additions to Go, particularly around range iteration. But that's my personal preference.

So the more likely scenario is the name was only picked because it sounded similar to their original German family name while being an English-styled spelling.

Given we are taking 30+ years ago though, the best we can do at this stage is speculate.

However even if the card game theory were true, it still doesn’t make Trump a powerful name in the U.K. because the fart connotation is still more prevalent.

However it did amuse use that a man full of hot air would be named after the expelling of warm but noxious air.

Personal opinions of Rust aside, it has gained so much fanfare that “rewrite it Rust” is now practically a meme.

They're not the games studio doing it, so it literally proves my point. These people could just as easily do it for the GB games too but they know there's no money in it.

> ...why not? I think you're setting your expectations too low. People pay for (polished) Steam and console releases of RPG Maker games; and those often have far less effort or thought put into the gameplay, replayability, etc. than these games do.

Because those games are cheap as chips and don't require an original Gameboy to play them. Given your point was about polished cart releases, the requirement to own a Gameboy is a pretty big hurdle for people who are only casually interested in retro games.

Then there's the other points I've already outlined: Gameboy graphics, much as I loved them at the time, haven't aged well. Even modern pixel art is very different to the 4 toned shades of grey on a 160x144 matrix.

> Though the real point of comparison that should be made, is the market for indie commercial homebrew releases for non-portable consoles; which is thriving even among non-retro-gamers, in a way that the market for portables, isn't.

Thriving is over-stating the market. There's a lot of resellers driving the prices up but the market for actual retro gamers is a lot smaller than the market bubble suggests. A lot of non-retro gamers bought their NES or PlayStation "mini's" but then went back to their current gen PlayStation/Xbox a few weeks later; leaving their retro system to collect dust. Even the emulators bundled with Nintendo's Switch Online membership mostly gets played by people who are already retro gamers, while the rest of the Switch's demographic prefer either Nintendo's first party games or the range of indie offerings.

And even if we take your comment at face value, you're still ignoring my point that the Gameboy has aged probably the worst of any console. Except maybe the Atari 2600. Don't get me wrong, I do love my Gameboy. But serious concessions were made in it's hardware design to facilitate it's long battery life. This made the device a fantastic handheld in the 90s but a terrible platform for modern gamers who aren't already bought into retro gaming. Sure you might get the odd non-retro gamer pick it up for nostalgia purposes (like with the NES Classic) but that's not going to be a sustainable source of income.

> Consider: there are more people out there commercializing just the ROMhacks of Super Mario World (by doing full engine rewrites of games that were already full asset replacements, to get away from Nintendo's IP, and then selling the results on console stores!) than there are GB/GBC/GBA game authors attempting to commercialize their games.

Are there? Do you actually have some data to back up that claim? Have you done any in-depth analysis here or just pulling guestimates out of your arse? And even if you are correct (which I doubt), what difference does it make? The two aren't related. They're not even mutually exclusive.

> Consider: there are tons of game streamers, speedrunners, genre-specific content creators (e.g. horror-game Lets Play-ers), etc, who play new console retro-games if and only if they come packaged in some accessible format. So they'll play Steam or console-store releases of these retro games; they'll play PC-accessible downloadables like Mario Multiverse or PokeWilds; but they won't touch a raw emulator. And, by-and-large, the developers of these new old-home-console titles are aware of that, and produce/port/polish their releases so that they can be consumed in this way, and so can generate virality. I don't see anything like that happening in the new old-portable games space.

There are absolutely shit loads of retro gamer streamers out there too. In fact I'm doing a stream myself tonight.

Disclaimer: as well as being a retro gamer and streamer myself, I know a number of relatively high profile people in the gaming and retro-gaming circles. Some who are resellers, some who are games researchers and some who are games journalists too. A couple of which are also really big fans of the GB, GBC and GBA so frequently get sent new games for review (albeit those games don't usually get published in magazines because, and I quote "not enough people are interested in the Gameboy". But they will publish reviews online).

Maybe not Kickstarter specifically, but they are doing the other stuff.

> Nobody's translating these games into 10 languages.

That's a little unreasonable ask. Given how little money these games will bring in you can't expect that.

> Nobody's QA-testing the heck out of them to ensure they don't have any obscure edge-case bugs. Etc. (This was why I brought up Planet X3: it's an example of a modern retro-game that is polished in exactly this sense.)

There is QA testing happening but like with the above, you can't expect smaller operations to pay people to QA. So you end up either having "QA" be demo builds, in which case most people end up with a copy so you can't do the premium carts that you're also asking for. Or you just have to accept that QA is a smaller operation but still have the beautiful hardware copy.

Even really well polished games on other platforms with much bigger audiences, like Xeno Crisis for the Mega Drive / Genesis, have had their share of bugs too. Even in the original days of these consoles, when games from big studios with big budgets to spend on testing, we'd still see new releases with bugs-galore.

> But a desire to go through all the effort to create polished modern GB games, is the sort of thing that requires market demand — a willingness to spend real money to buy new GB games (whether digitally or physically.) No hobbyist game developer is going to spend a year on "things that aren't programming" to make a nice shippable product out of their game, if that isn't going to result in at least breaking even on their effort.

This doesn't even happen with new games on current generation consoles. So I don't understand why you're expecting it to happen with retro-consoles.

> And a prerequisite for that demand, is public awareness of the fact that modern GB games are being created — and, more importantly, a public "brand" awareness for the people creating them!

I don't think awareness is the problem. I think most people just don't care. If you're a retro gamer you are probably already aware, and if you're not then you're never going to play these games anyway. And I honestly can't blame people for not caring. There's so much content out there these days that GB games (with all the warts that the GB hardware had, by modern day standards) simple aren't going to appeal to most people.

I think you're setting your expectations far too high.

> Indie game jams are great and all; but they don't create brand awareness

Again, there are plenty of releases that aren't the results of game jams.

But that doesn't mean that the previous solutions weren't popular for others outside of the developer community. The comments here are heavily developer orientated but that's only part of the story in terms of the wider container ecosystem.

> Just like with other things, PHP got popular because it was easier than anything CGI related, "just write code inside your HTML", Ruby got popular off Rails and 15 minute blog engine demo, Python being just all around easy to learn.

The point I was making wasn't that "Docker doesn't deserve popularity" nor any confusion as to why it's popular. It was saying that the stuff that came before it was also easy.

Your example about languages here is a apt because PHP is an easier language for people from a zero coding background. But if your background is in C then PHP is going to be much harder to use compared to learning Nim, Zig or Rust.

Saying the containerisation solutions that came before were garbage, as people have done, isn't accurate. I'm not being critical of Docker; I'm defending the elegance of Jails. It's just that elegance is exposed in a different way and for a different audience to who Docker targets.

I find I need to listen to most of his albums a couple of times before I fall for them whereas Syro clicked first time.

To be clear, this isn't a dig at Daft Punk. I love their early stuff. I'm just making a point that you cannot distill an artist or genre down to a single sentence and use that as an explanation for why you like something.

I could say I'm drawn to Aphex Twin because it all sounds really diverse but someone else would say they disagree and prefer rock music because Aphex Twin sounds really samey.

The problem with conversations about personal preference is it's not a rational decision. You either like something or you don't. Someone could try to intellectualize why they like something but ultimately that reasoning only applies to them.

People like what they like and are interested in what they're interested in.

A thousand people could post intellectual insights into their personal preferences but a thousand more could cite the exact same arguments as reasons why they don't like the same music. It's just part of the colourful tapestry of human culture.

I'd never describe Docker as being a marketing gimmick. It was definitely a "right time, right place" tool. But that speaks more about how the market (and particularly Linux) was yearning for something better.

Thanks for the interesting conversation :)

Maybe. But I'd rather not argue about popularity in a conversation about technical merit. The two aren't mutually inclusive and popularity is a subjective quality. Nothing good ever comes from conversations about popularity and preference.

> Every solution before that required a bunch more knowledge.

I'm not sure I fully agree with that. Docker has a lot of bespoke knowledge whereas the previous solutions built on top of existing knowledge. Where they differed was that Docker was an easier learning curve for people with previously zero existing systems knowledge. Which is something I didn't really appreciate until reading these responses because (possibly because I'm an old timer developer. I want to understand how my code works at a systems level so made it my job to understand the OS and even hardware too - though that's gotten harder as tech has progressed. But that was expected of developers when I started out).

> Which people ? I never seen anyone saying Docker makes it easy to run cross platform stuff, and it was always one of it's pain points.

The comment I replied to said: "get someone on Windows or Mac transparently install the image and run it with a few cmdlines"

> The fact that it's 2022 and there's still people that are going "hur-dur Solaris zones, BSD jails amiright" as if any of those technologies have any relevance is ridiculous.

Having diversity in the computing ecosystem is a good thing, not bad.

I'll take your point that Docker brought containers to the developers (frankly, I made that point myself) but that doesn't mean that Jails doesn't solve some problems that Docker (currently) struggles with. Nor does Docker's success mean that a little competition isn't healthy for the wider industry.

Dismissing the stuff that went before it as "systems administration garbage" because it was targeted at a different audience to yourself is a really poor attitude in my opinion. Especially when there are countless examples of when audiences different from developers also need to make use of software. Frankly, I thought by now we were past the sysadmin vs developer flamewars. But clearly not.

Aside from that minor rant, I do want to thank for your post. It was an informative read.