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I vaguely remember that when Groovy became more typed (statically typed that is. I believe you could always put the types in but they were not checked.) there was a theory that it kind of hurt possible uptake of the language.

The reason being is that people felt well if we are adding types and a project is requiring it why don't we just use: Java, Scala, Kotlin etc. Like did Java getting more features or Kotlin coming really hurt Groovy or just that it became more of a typed language.

An analog (typed language stealing users) could happen to Elixer but I'm not really sure which language it would be.

> I think the new self-distillation technique for LLM and code generation as proposed by Apple

Speaking of Apple and eventual typing Dylan was an amazing language that just never got traction. Open Dylan still exists but few know about it. Its eventual typing is unique because Dylan does CLOS-like multimethod dispatch instead of pattern matching.

> People want big tech on their resume because it makes them look qualified.

I think I said that?

> People with top qualifications work at big tech because of pay.

Actually I am not sure if that is true. I think top qualification people work at these places because of other reasons than just money. I'm talking Carmack working at Facebook for example is because of more possibilities and less the pay. Like FB is we have this really smart team for you and this tech for you and you can make your own products etc.

After all there is academia and that mostly pays shit and plenty of qualified people there.

> If low quality engineers worked in big tech, it wouldn't be a coveted qualification.

And I think that is probably happening more now. The 10x developer was kind of a myth. More people for less money these days particularly with AI is becoming more of the norm.

I also hope it doesn't sound like I don't care for these developers who are being taken advantage of. They should be compensated fairly for their work.

EDIT I should add why I think it is a great point especially since I make recruiting software. The greatest increases in salary for most people is done by switching companies or jobs. If you don't want to leave the company because you really like what you do it would skew it so that salaries are lower.

~~Ultimately the goal is the same: make more money. So I disagree the motivation is "very different" its just a lot harder now to do a startup.~~

You kept editing your comment so disregard the above. I misread it the first time and then it changed. I left my response thats makes no sense now.

In fact since we are on hackernews that is kind of thing people wanting to be entrepreneurs do. Work at recognizable big tech company for a few years. Leave to be a founder of a startup. Investors ... well that guy came from google they must know what they are doing etc (the irony is they probably have less of the skills to start a company going that path).

That is a huge metric I care about.

You can figure out it somewhat by clicking on each language benchmark but it is not aggregated.

BTW as biased guy in the Java world I can tell you this is one area Java is actually mostly the winner even beating out many scripting languages apparently.

I have been looking at our bugs, logs and exceptions recently of the past 6 years and an enormous amount of bugs are caused by methods/functions that have multiple parameters with the same type (Java).

This happens because (my theory) we use java and java doesn’t have type aliases or value types as well as easy destructuring. It also doesn’t have named parameters (well there is a compiler option to retain the parameter name but it’s not like ocaml label parameter or python kwargs).

So often times in boring business programming you are dealing with methods with 5 to six strings so it’s very easy to mix up the parameter order.

Very few “hard” bugs were caused by NPEs where as the previous problem caused serious pain.

Every time someone downvotes me it literally makes me feel like shit for like a day.

This includes reddit as well.

I’m not saying I’m looking for upvotes and I’m not on Facebook so it’s not about being “liked”.

When I’m downvoted I’m so afraid I have offended someone or I said something extremely fallacious.

It has gotten to the point where I have contemplated not ever participating again which is a shame because I’m nervous (assuming I’m not an extreme fringe case) there is some sort of convergent sheep opinion when there should be diversity in thought.

So if someone came to me and said hire me and look I have xyz karma on xyz platform I might even be less inclined to hire given how much I feel it has poisoned my own thought.

Anytime I deal with new employees I am constantly focused on this bias.

EDIT and here is more of a general theory/subject on this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_cohesiveness

(a quick read)

I remember my dad and I scaling up the math (I was only 10 so I needed a little help) and I remember asking him why normal cars didn’t have batteries.

I don’t recall the answer but it was long... I also was quite distracted with my new RC toy car .. err tank (google fast traxx).

I’d like to think this would be good so maybe some one will comment how this won’t eventually go too far.

If altering starts happening which I would imagine it will at one point will be no longer human (and maybe that is a good thing).

Maybe at some point like in the Altered Carbon series it won’t even matter and it will just go back to money (or maybe it will always be the case as the ultimate grade).

And yeah I don’t have a problem with XML or JSON. Those two combined with some flatbuffer other men binary protocols cover most of my use cases... like really what’s with all the XML negativity.

- Andrew Tanenbaum Computer Networks, 2nd ed., p. 254.

I think all developers go through some experience where they want to just "unify" everything because that will supposedly make it easier for them and other developers.

Overtime as you become more experienced or I guess jaded you realize that reality of a "GUT" technology platform or programming languages is a pipe dream and the effort to get people to use said new format/language/tech is more effort than what you get in return.

Anyway to be short about it I think most should just pick the best tool for the job and stop rebuilding things that don't need to. And if you do please make sure you have a plan to how you are going to replace all the old working stuff.

Where did the 90% even come from?

I have seen this many times and they are actually usually talented developers that are just not used to working in groups....

but what I have seen more often (back when I did code reviews)... is lazy copy and pasting or something analogous.

I have to say it hit me and I was like... damn I should just do that. Forget all this blogging platforms and getting caught up in look and feel. Just write text files.

Even with Jekyll (and its variants) I got caught up on making it potentially look nice but this person just said ... f-it... let google and github figure out how to organize the content.

And you don't know mercurial if you think that.

Both are great and powerful and both have pros/cons.

> The "Git Book" is what you should read. And you read it once, you read it indepth, and then you're done. After that it's also only 5 minutes of googling, but you can do a lot more.

The problem with git on this is it is actually often sort of hard to find "the right" way to do things. This is in large part because of the popularity of git. There is so much content and a good deal disparate (e.g. Stack Overflow).

Mercurial on the other hand has far less content and it is maybe a little more consolidated and thus IMO slightly easier to find.

> At that point you can even program a simplified git if you want.

.... are you sure you are not trolling...

I guess in some ways I'm asking for the impossible (well for now)... I want a a system that comes up with ideas and just does everything for me :)

I have to imagine they say something like "we are doing this to protect" etc. etc. but maybe not.

I mean I'm used to the United States where almost anything the government does the government has an answer for it (albeit probably not good answers). I guess in large part the free press sort of forces this.

So are you saying the government doesn't issue an official stance and that they just do it?

General productivity of contacting people and writing up things is pretty easy to manage and in large part most of it is just getting it out of your head so that you can focus on other perhaps cerebral things.

But that is the problem. Systems like these aren't at the surface terribly helpful with creativity. However I do believe they can be used to help boost creative output its not terrible clear how.

I have tried to be systematic with brain storming and coming up with ideas to execute and its not been very successful. In some cases it even feels like it stifles creativity.

Anyway I like James Clear's blog on this kind of stuff. He has some great ideas.

Or do they not even explain it and just do it. Is it similar to USA where we say its to catch the "bad guys".

I guess they could argue they are "protecting" their citizens by perhaps lowering the security attack surface.

I was going to correct that technicality on observable but was on mobile earlier.

Also you can absolutely have a theory that explains the observable universe reliably (i.e. Verifiable) but at the same time makes suggestions about the unobservable universe (for example most cosmos theories say the actual universe is bigger than the observable). We just don't have the technology or time to observe it yet.