__sr__

Yeah -- that is a bummer. It may have been acceptable if the OS were free, but not when you paid the full price for the license.

I did -- but IMO it is less outrageous (but outrageous nonetheless) than what the top three (Google, Amazon, Facebook) are doing. And there is always a certain amount of risk when you putting your data on someone else's servers.

Just to be clear, I use Windows only when I have to -- never by choice.

That said, my point is that even if Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub turns out to be a bad thing, I'd wait to see how things go before migrating en masse.

Can you elaborate? Among the giants (Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft), I’d like to think Microsoft is the 4th on the least trustworthy scale - right ahead of Apple, and behind the other three.

Wow! Did not realise people hate/distrust Microsoft so much! Balmer’s Microsoft - sure, but I thought that under the current administration, they were seen as a lot more friendly company.

I’d say tablet sales are approaching their stable values.

It’s more like cell phones have created unreasonable expectations for sales. People change phones once ever 12-24 months. Tablets, on the other hand, easily last 3-4 years. In that sense, tables have more in common with laptops than phones. People who need them, buy them all the time. It is just that not as many people need tablets as phones. Initially a lot of tables were sold because of the hype. But then people realised that not everyone needs a tablets — and theat tablets can be shared among the family — unlike phones. Hence the so called “decline”.

I like to think that tablet sales are reaching their stable values rahpther than just declining.

Definitely. Text is good for “lazy” communication — so is email. By lazy, I mean, I sent you a text and you can respond whenever you like. But if the communication is real time - i.e. the sender expects a quick response and vice versa, voice call is usually better. In fact, unless I know the person very well, I usually send a text asking if it is a good time to talk.

I guess that varies from person to person. My iPad Pro, for example, is my most used personal device. I prefer it over my phone whenever possible. In fact, I like phones small - it’s a pain to pull out a brick every time I want to talk.

It’s a matter of personal taste, I guess.

Good riddance! It’s not like they have actively been developing Android to support tablets. In fact, it is the other way around. The older versions had better support for tablets. Even Nexus 9 was a half hearted attempt at best — and the rest is history. Google’s lack of interest in nowhere more evident than their own apps — many of them were just scaled versions of phone apps. And if Google is not bothering to optimise their apps for tablets, what motivation do third party developers have?

Strictly speaking, Android tablets never even competed in the same arena as the iPad. Samsung is an exception, but they don’t control the ecosystem — which makes things much harder for them — even if we ignore their atrocious software.

> Why do you need to audit dependencies you don't use? Don't use `is-odd`, nobody is forcing you too.

So should I audit every dependency of every single package I use? Every time I upgrade every single package? Nobody is forcing me to use anything, but I can't very well use the ecosystem if I avoid every single package either.

> The existence of garbage doesn't mean the system is broken, or that the ecosystem is "chaotic and insecure".

That is exactly what it means. If you allow anything and everything with no quality checks, you gain "quantity" but lose out on "quality".

> It means that it's inclusive, and anyone can make a package, no matter how terrible you might think it is.

Would you be comfortable someone who can't drive being your chauffeur? Or perhaps someone with know experience with civil engineering building your bridges? Or perhaps someone with no knowledge of finance being your banker? All in the name of inclusiveness, of course.

Why is it any different for software? The things we are talking about are the integral components of The Web -- something we relay on more than we care to admit -- it is not some toy.

Be as inclusive as you want, but not at the cost of quality -- at least not for something that affects the entire world.

And everyone can make a package is like saying everyone can build a bridge. But would you use it?

> Awk has it's uses. If you use the command line you'll probably use Awk occasionally.

Agreed -- I use awk all the time in shell pipeline.

> I don't get the Perl hate.

The problem is not with writing Perl -- I don't mind using Perl to write scripts and tools. In fact, I like it better than Python for writing glue code.

Reading Perl code -- especially if the code base is old and has been worked upon by multiple people -- now that is a real pain. Don't get me wrong, I have seen some really well written Perl code and have had the good fortune of working with some really smart Perl programmers. But the majority of Perl code I have encountered has been unreadable mess that makes me want to pull my hair out. There are times when I feel it is more productive to rewrite the code in Python than to spend time on the existing code.

> If you follow clean code principles Perl is fine.

Agreed -- except most Perl coders don't. Worse, they make a large chunk of people who contributed to CPAN -- something which was one of the major reasons behind the popularity of Perl.

> Use the tool that fits the job. I have no loyalties to any programming language.

Couldn't agree more.

> A ground-up rewrite for... window snapping? :-)

No, but it does need to be brought on par with the state of the art in UNIX world — things like process sandboxing, container support, process limits (like cgroups), a modern development environment (like .net is for Windows), better package management (App Store is a bad joke), cross platform development between for iOS and macOS, stability, performance enhancements etc. In fact, I am OK with the UI — it could do with some modernisation and new features, but for the most part, it is very usable.

And the tooling could definitely do with an upgrade. They are still using an ancient version of bash, for example. If they can’t use newer bash because of GPL, they could write their own shell, for example. The fact that something like Homebrew is the go to package manager tells the story of a major gap.

Yeah — not to mention the lack of keyboard controls like Windows 10. Sigh!

I am talking about the Split View mode described at https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT204948

macOS does have — kind of — window snapping, doesn’t it? The split window mode? Or am I missing something? Although I agree that it should be more flexible and should have better keyboard controls....

Microsoft brought their essentials — kernel, filesystem, API etc. — up to scratch in mid 2000s. Vista and and 8 may not have been successful, but they played an important role in the evolution of Windows and Microsoft is now reaping the rewards in the form of Windows 10 — an OS which was dubbed as horribly unstable at launch and yet has become rock solid with updates — except for some unfortunate decisions like forced updates, privacy concerns, ads etc.

Apple did something similar when they switched from Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X - a transition which helped them stay alive and eventually bounce back when almost every one had given up on them. The transition indirectly led them the ultimate success of iOS and iPhone.

Microsoft was left behind in the smartphone race because they were late to the transition — the smartphone revolution started when they were still going through it and they were caught empty handed. They had nothing to show when they desperately needed an OS for smartphones. Had they launched the equivalent of Windows Phone 8 in 2009 or 2010, the history may have been very different from the one we know.

But the world has come full cycle, while the Microsoft Windows ecosystem is still relatively young and can probably keep going for another decade or two, Apple’s OS is starting to show its age. It’s not just the age of macOS — it is much older then that. Apple finally decided to overhaul their filesystem, but other things like the kernel, the API etc. still need the treatment.

Why would you use Java when you could use C++ which has a ton of extra features? Or Haskell which has a lot of neat abstractions? Or Python which is super easy to use? Or Lisp which is extremely flexible?

Simple, they all serve a particular purpose. Scala serves a particular purpose, so does Kotlin.

I have found Kotlin to be an easy to use modern language which the JVM ecosystem was IMO lacking. That said, I am not a Kotlin advocate. I’d use if I had to choose from the JVM languages. Otherwise there are plenty of other languages and ecosystems to choose from.

No one likes small enhancements over an existing language in a new language - it is usually not worth switching over. Remember D? IMO, Kotlin developers have made sensible choices in most cases while retaining full Java interop - something I consider an achievement.

Well, I don’t live in Silicon Valley, and as a result, the company I work for is not a Silicon Valley company. If I am going to convince the management to invest in Elixir, I need to be able to answer questions like this. Pretty much everyone I have spoken to about Elixir, inevitably brings up this point.

Is it me, or does the article feel like it is written by someone who didn’t actually bother to learn Kotlin. Instead they learnt the bare minimum syntax and tried to write Java in Kotlin.

The author complains a lot about how Kotlin is different from Java. Err.. it is a new language — it is supposed to be different — otherwise why bother?

> I have my favorite set of JVM languages. Java in /main and Groovy in /test are the best-performing duo for me. In summer 2017 my team started a new microservice project, and as usual, we talked about languages and technologies. There are a few Kotlin advocating teams at Allegro, and we wanted to try something new, so we decided to give Kotlin a try.

The opening lines set the tone for the article. The author tried Kotlin because other people wanted to — not because he found it interesting. Most people learn a new language by writing a toy project or two. They don’t start with a real project. And of course it will take time to get used to a new language and be as productive in it as as you were in the old one. The friction is always there, no matter which language you are switching to.

I am sorry, but I can’t take this article seriously — I feel that it’s written for the sole purpose of venting author’s frustrations.

Is Elixir being used extensively outside Silicon Valley? Can you list some well known success stories? Looking at job listings and open source projects, it doesn’t seem to be widely used. In fact, I don’t know anyone outside Silican Valley who has built anything non-trivial in Elixir.

I am not saying it is bad. But I’d like to know about it before I dive in.

Qt? Although it has its own problems, the end product is often way better than Electron.

I am not faulting you - IMO, you did the right thing.

As an end user, I am concerned about the software I use being easily exploitable because of a bug which could have been avoided using the right tools. At the same time, I don’t want my editor to consume all my RAM and CPU. This seems like a step in the right direction to me.

As far as I can tell, this editor is aimed at tech savvy people like developers, sys-admins etc. They may not care about the exact language or framework, but I can assure you, they do care about things like security and performance.

Rust is one of the most discussed topics in the developer community these days. I can’t fault the OP to use it to highlight the post. Had they said something else, I’d likely have ignored it as Yet Another Text Editor like Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, Atom etc. IMO, they did a good job highlighting how it is different.

That may be true, but I am not complaining.

Note that I do not fully agree with the parent.

Agreed - I’ve seen far too many who got into programming because of paycheck or peer pressure or something similar, but we’re not really cut out out for it. They ended up hating it not a long time later. Eventually these are the people who are responsible for all the “coding is a horrible job” perceptions. Worse, they do everything they can to get out of coding - and more likely than not become managers who manage real developers.

[Read the Hacker News guidelines about posting links to videos, PDFs etc]

I said “significantly” — macOS and Linux have existed for ages, yet Microsoft is starting with WSL just now. Also, as far as I know, WSL is a by-product of the Poject Astoria - not something Microsoft set out to do. They probably thought, “We’ve done most of the work anyway, might as well get something out of it.”

> Did Linux succeed because other UNIXes were bad?

No, it succeeded because there was a need for a UNIX like OS not encumbered by lawsuits (like BSDs) or costing a fortune (Solaris, SGI etc.).

Linux is a clean room implementation that doesn’t borrow any code from proprietary AT&T UNIX, ensuring that it has future. That, and the backing of FSF means it is not going to be sued into oblivion - something that could not be said for BSDs and other free variants back in 1990s. No one wants to invest into a something that may be shut down anytime. It is the fighting thtpat hurt the BSDs the most — causing them to be overshadowed by Linux despite being superior in many ways back in the days. Some would argue that they are still technologically superior in certain areas — but that is debatable.

>It lights a fire under M$'s asses to make windows competitive

Err... no. Not unless the installed base reaches a critical mass. And certainly not when the market share is not even 0.1%. macOS (or even desktop Linux) has a higher installed base and they don’t bother Microsoft significantly.

I’d be more optimistic if the OS had not been around for two decades. It had its chance when the likes of Vista was released. If it didn’t make a dent back then, it is not going to make one now - especially since Windows is at its best in terms of usability. Sure there are concerns about privacy, but those didn’t prevent Google from acquiring a (almost) monopoly in mobile market. Microsoft’s own attempts went nowhere — and they have infinitely deeper pockets compared to people behind ReactOS.

And even if it does gain momentum, I am fairly sure that Microsoft will find a a way to sue them into oblivion.

> One of Go's biggest strengths is that anyone can pick up the language and be somewhat productive in it after a week.

And then what? They find themselves duplicating the same code again and again because Go doesn’t provide good abstractions to reuse code. Or that they write a ton of code to do what could be achieved in a few lines in a reasonable language.

You learn the language in a week because there is not a lot to learn. Shell scripting is simple to learn as well, but nobody is building anything beyond short scripts using it.

An ideal language should allow the user to be a productive after a short time, but should have have enough power for advanced users as well.

One of the things I hate the most about Go is that source code generation is considered an acceptable solution to many problems. Perhaps I should go back to C — the preprocessor can be used to generate code as well as anything. In fact, the predecessor to C++ was a preprocessor used to generate C code that simulated C++ like behaviour.

I totally agree, in case it wasn’t clear. Go, like many others, was designed by people who thought the users of the language are not as smart as themselves. They seem to have forgotten that after writing a few thousand lines, even a novice can become a power user and start demanding more of the language.