292 karma · joined October 25, 2009
Cross platform and the ease of integrating to other codebases (both extension and embedding) are two parts. Perl's transition to Perl 6 seemed to hurt/fragment that community more so than python 2000 did to python. TCL seemed to slowly die except for a couple niche applications - possibly expedited by Sun's slow demise. Guile never really ran well on non-*nix systems.
Fundamentally python had more C/pascal flavor than Ruby's smalltalk's flavor. That made it easy to teach/adopt. A couple big name universities moving from scheme to python for intro CS helped too.
Where python falls down is the flexibility - if you aren't careful it's write only.
It is pretty amazing productivity-wise.
https://ad.easa.europa.eu/blob/2020-06-14.pdf/AD_US-2020-06-...
They also had pretty liberal hobbyist/non-commercial license which let you learn the toolchain and develop with some of the middleware. That all went away when RIM (blackberry now) bought them.
Re: manuals - QNX Cookbook was also pretty good read. The documentation from that era were published as real books.
As a software guy who occasionally does a test or automation fixture, I find the workflow of most EDAs a bit strange. It seems to actively discourage reuse.
Everyone seems to have their own stash of footprints and known good circuits.
But it's very unusual to split it over an RPC/IPC boundary - it's usually just linked in.
Xi had specific design goals of allowing multiple independently developed front ends. There are use-cases for this type of development but it's largely not worth the effort (YAGNI).
The typical application architecture is going to depend on your use-cases. I.e a db app is going structured different from a game or a CAD program.
Bear in mind there are some other technicalities with i-bonds. They are all documented on the treasury direct website:
- you have to hold it for a minimum of 12 months
- there are two parts of the bond a fixed rate (currently 0%) which is set for the lifetime of the bond, and the variable rate which is tried to inflation
- if you hold it for less than 5 years when you withdraw there will be a 3mo interest penalty
- you're limited to 10k purchased per SSN, you can get over 10k if you get your tax refund in i-bonds.
The bond rates are set per 6 month window - but you get it relative to the purchase date. So if you buy before the last possible day before the rate change date you would get 7.12% (annualized) for 6 months then 9.6% (annualized) for 6 months. If you buy after the rate change, you would get 9.6% (annualized) followed by some yet to be determined yield for 6 months.