aryonoco

My favourite languages are F# and OCaml, and from my perspective, TypeScript is a far better language than C#.

Typescript’s types are far more adaptable and malleable, even with the latest C# 15 which is belatedly adding Sum Types. If I set TypeScript to its most strict settings, I can even make it mimic a poor man’s Haskell and write existential types or monoids.

And JS/TS have by far the best libraries and utilities for JSON and xml parsing and string manipulation this side of Perl (the difference being that the TypeScript version is actually readable), and maybe Nushell but I’ve never used Nushell in production.

Recently I wrote a Linux CLI tool for managing podman/quadlett containers and I wrote it in TypeScript and it was a joy to use. The Effect library gave me proper Error types and immutable data types and the Bun Shell makes writing shell commands in TS nearly as easy as Bash. And I got it to compile a single self contained binary which I can run on any server and has lower memory footprint and faster startup time than any equivalent .NET code I’ve ever written.

And yes had I written it in rust it would have been faster and probably even safer but for a quick a dirty tool, development speed matters and I can tell you that I really appreciated not having to think about ownership and fighting the borrow checker the whole time.

TypeScript might not be perfect, but it is a surprisingly good language for many domains and is still undervalued IMO given what it provides.

Car enthusiast here. I raced in Formula Ford in Europe in my younger days. I still dream about the day I drove a 911 GT2. Nearly every car I’ve ever owned has been a manual.

But with the ridiculous tax incentives here in Australia (at least while they last), my new car turned out to be an EV. Specifically the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N. And let me tell you, while the logical part of my brain knows that the gear shifts and the exhaust notes and everything about it is “fake”, when I’m driving it around a track or a challenging B road, every part of my body is fooled into thinking it’s real. And reluctant as I might be to admit it, it might just be the most fun car I’ve ever had

Is it perfect? No. I wish it was 10cm lower to the ground. I wish it was at least 600kg lighter. But it has completely disabused me of the notion that electric cars can’t be fun.

They don’t. It stays on the same side as it was. They don’t move the bonnet opening lever or the indicator stalk either.

Because capitalism.

As someone who has recently switched from Android to iOS, I can tell you uBlock Origin Lite on Safari on iOS is a poor man’s imitation of the real uBlock Origin on Firefox on Android.

Safari is the modern IE. the fact that PWAs didn’t take off in the last decade js purely due to Safari.

The only reason Apple has banned alternative engines and continues to hold back on major web technologies is anticompetitive behaviour.

I’m always on the hunt for single language cross platform solutions, and I thought I knew every player in the field but had not heard of Elements before. So I followed your link enthusiastically. But these are just some of the excerpts from the website:

Java Build code for any of the billions of devices, PCs and servers that run JavaSE, JavaEE or the OpenJVM.

.NET Core

The cross-platform .NET Core runtime is the future of .NET and will fully replace the current classic .NET 4.x framework when .NET Core 5 ships in late 2020.

It really seems like it was last updated sometime in the last decade. Not sure I want to base a future project on it.

Is this meant as sarcasm?

I run a bunch of services for friends and family, things like Immich, wallabag, mealie etc. Less than 10 users, but do you expect me to crate and maintain separate accounts for each one for every service?

The SSO tax is stupid. If your whole business model is based on putting SSO behind a paywall, it’s a sign of a broken business model.

It’s Firefox fork being developed by a bunch of Japanese students.

They do good work. I can forgive them for not being the best at naming things in English.

There are those. I pay to support Floorp.

But I also donate to Firefox and Thunderbird cause the forks wouldn’t exist without them.

MyGov works fine on Firefox but I do use incognito window with no extensions for them. I’d say it’s probably one of your extensions.

Not widely known but the original Binder, OpenBinder, was not even for Linux or Android It was developed for BeOS.

OpenBinder was one of the few pieces of code which was open sourced in Be Inc’s dying days just before it was acquired by Palm.

Many of the principal Be developers who worked on OpenBinder, Dianne Hackborn, Jean-Baptiste Queru, et al then moved from Palm to Danger, which was developing Android and which was later acquired by Google.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

I’ve found Claude (at least until Opus 4) would routinely fail at writing a bash script. For example it would end an if block with }. Or get completely lost with environment variables and subshells.

But those are exactly the same mistakes most humans make when writing bash scripts, which makes them inherently flaky.

Ask it to write code in a language with types, a “logical” syntax where there are no tricky gotchas, with strict types, and a compiler which enforces those rules, and while LLMs struggle to begin with, they eventually produce code which is nearly clean and bug free. Works much better if there is an existing codebase where they can observe and learn from existing patterns.

On the other hand asking them to write JavaScript and Python, sure they fly, but they confidently implement code full of hidden bugs.

The whole “amount of training data” is completely overblown. I’ve seen code do well even with my own made up DSL. If the rules are logical and you explain the rules to it and show it existing patterns, the can mostly do alright. Conversely there is so much bad JavaScript and Python code in their training data that I struggle to get them to produce code in my style in these languages.

Not many people use elm directly but it has influenced the design of so many frameworks and libraries.

Right now I’m toying with the idea of building a GNOME application in rust, and the framework I’m using is relm4 which provides elm like abstractions over gtk-rs.

Previously I’ve built web applications with F# and elmish, which again provides elm like abstractions for building F# applications.

I can assure you they are not.

Great news. HDMI can just go and die. If the HdMI Forum really thinks it’s bigger than Linux, it’s wrong. While category of devices in this space are just Linux only. Eventually, they’ll add a DP port, eventually (10 years later)

Same in Australia

Yeah I just implemented a new stack and noticed OpenTofu now supports client side encryption for the state files in with keys stored in Azure KeyVault (in the latest 1.11 release). AWS and GCP had been supported for a while.

Client side state encryption was one of the things which HashiCorp always gatekeeped for HashiCorp Cloud and never implemented in the Open Souce / Sourece Available versions.

M5 Max probably won’t, but M5 Ultra probably will

I make sure I read the little prince once every 10 years.

Every time I do so, I learn something new.

I put each docker container in a LXC container which effectively uses namespaces, cgroups etc to isolate them.

The whole Universal Blue image ecosystem is so polished, consistent and coherent. Bazzite is their gaming image variant, I’ve also recently switched to Bluefin which is their Gnome variant on my workstation and everything works so nicely together, it’s the most joy I’ve had using a computer in a long time.

If you’ve got nearly a billion users, and are multiplying your revenue on an annual basis, then yes. You’re effectively showing that you’re in hyper growth trajectory.

Hyper growth is expensive because it’s usually capital intensive. The trick is, once that growth phase is over, can you then start milking your customers while keeping a lid on costs? Not everyone can, but Amazon did, and most investors think OpenAI and Anthropic can as well.

.NET has always been both the biggest blessing and the biggest curse for F#.

We have access to millions of libraries. I look at BEAM languages and OCaml every once in a while but can’t quite drag myself over there, knowing that in .NET, just as an example, I can choose between a dozen JSON serialisation libraries that have been optimised and tuned comprehensively for decades.

But then, those libraries are also our curse. If you consume them, everything is OO so you either give up on functional purity and start writing imperative F# code, or you have to spend time writing and maintaining a F# idiomatic wrapper around it.

Similarly I was working recently on project to develop a library which was going to have downstream consumers. The problem lent itself really well to domain modelling in F#. But I knew that my downstream users would be C# devs. I could invest the time and write my library as “functional core, imperative shell”. But then I decided that since the interface would be OO anyway, I might as well just write it in C#.

Thankfully what keeps F# going is the wonderful community around it, not Microsoft. I know some people (outside of Microsoft) have worked on a standalone F# compiler but it’s still very early stages. Maybe one day.

I work at a large enterprise where most of our backend js .NET and I can tell you that the dev team is nearly half and half split between Linux and Mac, and nearly half and half split on using VS Code and Rider.

Most of our code is deployed on Kubernetes and runs on AWS.

Developer experience means many things to different people. Personally for my most recent project, I used F# and the IDE was Rider and my OS was a form of immutable Fedora (Ublue OS) with devpod and devcontainers and the whole system was the most joyous developer experience I think I have ever had.

What are you talking about C# being tied to Visual Studio? This is 2025 not 1995.

I do my hobby .NET development in Zed and my serious work in Rider. .NET is open source and MIT licences. I do most of my development on a ARM MacBook Pro, or using my workstation which runs Fedora.

We deploy our code on kubernetes clusters usually on AWS.

All of the tooling, compiler, libraries etc are open source and cross platform and free. Not a single one of the developers in my team uses Windows or Visual Studio.

No still the same.

VS Code with Ionide is okay but has many limitations for example in debugging or lack of support for F# fsi scripts.

If you’re serious about F#, investing in Rider or Visual Studio makes a lot of sense.

Having said that I wrote a Neo4J data extraction tool a few months ago and chose to write it in F#. At one point I observed how funny it was that I was developing in a Microsoft language and yet my dev workstation runs Fedora and my IDE comes from JetBrains and my code is running in kubernetes on a Linux cluster and there is not a sight of a windows machine in this whole pipeline.

I remember the days when the language, linker, compiler, IDE, the GUI components, everything was tied together. If you wanted the next version of VB you had to buy the new version of Visual Studio!

People used to say this about Amazon all the time. Remember how Amazon basically didn’t turn any real profits for 2 decades? The joke was that Amazon was a charitable organisation being funded by Wall Street for the benefit of human kind.

That didn’t last. People in the know knew that once you have a billion users and insane revenue and market power and have basically bought or driven out of business most of your competitors (Diapers.com, Jet.com, etc) you can eventually slow down your physical expansion, tighten the screws on your suppliers, increase efficiencies, and start printing money.

The VCs who are funding these companies are hoping that they have found the next Amazon. Many will probably go out of business, but some might join the ranks of trillion dollar companies.

20 odd years ago when I went to do a CS degree, I discovered that the university had these beautiful buildings called “libraries” and they were filled with all sorts of amazing books! I ended up splitting my time roughly evenly between learning C, SQL and Java and devouring every 19th century English literature book I could get my hands on.

I can’t claim to write as well, but weirdos like us do exist.

I can tell you that here in Australia we shut down 2G in 2011 and 3G in 2022-2023.

And yes many things broke, train ticket vending machines stopped working, smart meters stopped working, etc. But then the got replaced.

2G and 3G is a horrible waste of bandwidth compared to 5G. Keeping them on and wasting all that bandwidth is borderline negligence.