> 2. Forthcoming article, Kris De Decker, Low-tech Magazine.

The veracity of their claim is still in question, but based on that I'm going to assume good faith that they have facts to back up their claim. I haven't checked the rest of their citations yet, but based on their quantity I'm going to assume the rest of the article isn't sloppy either.

"Costanza asked Sussman why MIT had switched away from Scheme for their introductory programming course, 6.001. This was a gem. He said that the reason that happened was because engineering in 1980 was not what it was in the mid-90s or in 2000. In 1980, good programmers spent a lot of time thinking, and then produced spare code that they thought should work. Code ran close to the metal, even Scheme — it was understandable all the way down. Like a resistor, where you could read the bands and know the power rating and the tolerance and the resistance and V=IR and that’s all there was to know. 6.001 had been conceived to teach engineers how to take small parts that they understood entirely and use simple techniques to compose them into larger things that do what you want. But programming now isn’t so much like that, said Sussman. Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts. This is a fundamentally different job, and it needed a different course. So the good thing about the new 6.001 was that it was robot-centered — you had to program a little robot to move around. And robots are not like resistors, behaving according to ideal functions. Wheels slip, the environment changes, etc — you have to build in robustness to the system, in a different way than the one SICP discusses. And why Python, then? Well, said Sussman, it probably just had a library already implemented for the robotics interface, that was all."

https://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/2110/why-mit-switched-f...

Of course, it was only this year that I realized reddit even has these snoo avatar things on people's profiles. So maybe I'm wildly off

Considering it's been around longer than that, yes I think it will be around in 15 years

Stoll argued the tech will not be good enough, but paid little thought to the ramifications of the technology succeeding. The arguments against LLMs like Bard and ChatGPT that I have seen are assuming they'll be successful.

They'll become less stupid, but the problem is not that they are wrong but that they are, at present at least, unassailable. You cannot fact check through most of the normal means. You can not research the publication or the author or the date the words were written because that has all been stripped away.

You could check other sources (eg old fashion google) and put in the leg work, but as these get better that will feel less necessary - potentially exacerbating this problem.

That's not to say they aren't useful. I used Chat gpt the other day to get some work done and was impressed. However this was work easily verifiable because it was technical and had immediate feedback when the ai inevitably gave me slightly incorrect code. The same can not be said for facts, figures, and arguments of thought.

I dislike them primarily because of the additional complexity they add that isn't always justified. All of the more complex macros I wrote I regret, especially the one I did at my last job since now others had to maintain it.

Some macro use can be justified, eg serde. But I try to avoid using proc macros where I can (and certainly never try write one anymore)

However, I tried quite a few ways to make this safe and ergonomic. Perhaps some better way exists that I missed, but even if a solution exists the work needed to implement it is very, very boring.

wlroots is very much a C API, but I admit I was expecting it to be easier to use from Rust and is my current biggest criticism with the language.

Normal Rust is normally not this inscrutable - however it does have a lot of features that could make it as hard to read. It requires a certain amount of discipline that you don't see in simpler languages like Go. I for one never write macros if I can help it anymore.

That was never a goal, not for Sway and not for wlroots-rs.

I wrote that to port Way Cooler, it was no different from the other wrappers in other languages that exist.

It's not so much "Rust can't represent this ownership model" as "this ownership model is basically orthogonal to Rust's so you have to put much more effort in to write idiomatic Rust code compared to writing it in C". I would love for someone to come along and prove me wrong with a better wlroots wrapper.

Also, Wayland composites are much, much simpler than the Linux kernel, so that train of thought doesn't necessarily scale out.

I think there are good points you make that people should hear, but less people will listen if you turn them away by making grotesque comparisons.

Google isn't at the point it needs to be nationalized, but something needs to be done to limit the fallout that occurs when users are kicked off essential services with no recourse.