mr_00ff00

I think you are thinking about it all wrong.

COBOL code that has been working since the 60s is a lot more safe than new code would be. If it is commission critical and complex, keep it in COBOL where it works and pay lots of cash for additional features.

Rather then migrate it over in hopes you don’t have to pay for training, but then deal with tons of risk of systems breaking that haven’t broken in 50+ years.

In addition, I think the common saying “COBOL pays well, they are running out of COBOL devs!” is misrepresenting the issue.

I heard this on HN, so this hearsay itself, but I believe it’s not that these companies can’t find people that can learn COBOL, it’s that there are people with 30+ years of COBOL experience on their codebase.

The COBOL job security comes from being the only person who knows the codebase, not that somehow people can’t learn COBOL.

I feel like this is a bit unfair. Rust takes most of its names from C++ or OCaml.

You just are exposed to different languages than what was used as the base.

I think you vastly overestimate how much old politicians care about sending other people to die.

There are some (a lot of) changes that C++ should have inspired by Rust, but as the other comments have said. I really don’t feel like a smart pointer that acts like unique but copies by value is all that necessary.

That doesn’t seem to fix a memory bug (cause doing this with a unique ptr, then the compiler would yell at you for using copy), it seems to just make it easier than having to write `std::make_unique(*otherptr);`

> China is very aware that America's huge industrial mobilization for WWII is what pulled it out of the Great Depression.

I don’t think this is a valid point.

1. China’s economy is not anywhere near as bad as the US and the Globe in the Great Depression

2. Despite the fact people say this fact, it’s debated among economists if this is true. Many say the production of the war just “hid” the economic issues and that the depression didn’t truly end until after the war.

And most importantly:

3. That is very anecdotal. There are many many many examples of nations in economic turmoil and a major war making things way worse. See: Russia in World War I

Python is definitely the exception, not the rule.

I’d also argue the implication of the title is also misleading.

“Look Gates and Jobs ban their kids from what they made!”

Yeah and if someone brews beer but doesn’t let their kids drink it, I guess that also makes them a hypocrite?

What social media is Type 1? I feel like the history of the internet is social media apps starting close to Type 1 and becoming Type 2.

Bit harsh but I brought it up before. When the blackout started, Reddit users created a place to share blackout news and organize. It was a subreddit.

I have to imagine the CEO laughed when he saw that.

It possible did. I think coffee was created in Arabia in the 900s. Weren’t the Arabic countries way ahead of Europe in terms of technology for those several hundred years?

Don’t know if there is much evidence, but I have heard that the switch from the main consumed beverage from alcohol based drinks to caffeine based drinks may have possibly contributed to the Enlightenment.

Europe went from a depressant to a stimulant, suddenly lots of science.

Command-line murder mystery is just every segmentation fault

It’s brought up every time, but the only thing I don’t like about Val is that Vale and V are two other systems languages that are also new. Those three can so easily be mixed up because of naming.

This seems good, except that it would always push for the languages that produce now and leave bugs for production.

Python would beat anything by this measure, but static typing is amazing for stopping bugs.

I’ve only ever used pybind11 for C++ -> Python interface and must say, it seems pretty good.

Personally if I were to argue why rust error handling is better than Java it wouldn’t be the too much code part.

I feel the same way about Go vs Java or Zig vs Java, I think errors as values makes more sense.

It’s the laws of the universe breaking and control flow changing on errors that I think most people hate.

Slightly off topic, but is IntelliJ the best IDE for rust? I would have assumed Clion

It’s not so much C++ is slow as FPGAs are so incredibly fast.

The system programming languages (C / C++ / Rust) will always have more overhead than FPGAs.

A microsecond is fast for C++. It’s like an eternity for an FPGA.

To add to this, I think nowadays even C++ is too slow for some stuff. Many places use FPGAs

I have limited Zig experience, but actually zig is different from rust or go in this regard, correct?

Rust and Go have the pointer have the unified syntax, but I thought in zig it does differentiate between the pointer itself and the value it points to.

Rust and Go:

ptr.method_on_ptr() ptr.method_from_underlying_val()

Zig:

ptr.method_on_ptr() ptr.*.method_from_underlying_val()

Was gonna say, this easily could have been Steve Balmer saying the iPhone will fail because it doesn’t appeal to business customers.

Credit for going after a vision, but every CEO has a vision and acts like it will inevitably happen.

My understanding of malaria and its spread is essentially the winters are cold in the states and kill off all mosquitos in the winter. The larva (or whatever the correct term is) don’t carry malaria, so the mosquitos must grab it from an infected animal.

So the warmer the states get, the warmer the land south of the states get. More and more mosquitos survive winters closer to the states, and so smaller travel distance.

But based on what you just said it seems that understanding is not actually how it works?

Isn’t commented code no longer considered a good idea in most companies?

I used to work for a bank and the policy is no comments unless absolutely necessary, because comments become out of date. Doxygen is the only real comments allowed.

Great article. I’ve always wanted to try and build a toy language for the fun of it, great to see something that breaks it down so well.

Curious if anyone has any additional thoughts to add onto this for anyone who wants to build one themselves?

I have experience in C++, so will likely use that or rust (I imagine rust’s built-in methods might make it way easier at least for the parser, although idk if ownership rules get painful for work like this).

Right but isn’t that what they are claiming would drive people away from the big companies?

Why would you choose to not pay for the big tech products and then pay for a smaller version?

Except weren’t all these services running at a loss?

How would smaller companies do better?

I think the average accepted GPA at top business schools for MBAs is all the argument I need to see that academics has as much influence on career success as athletic achievement.

The CEOs are the future are more people skills related than anything else. If Harvard was all purely academically driven people, it would just create professors. Not exactly the college goal.

I would argue that recruited athletes maybe get a pass on being a “VIP lane.”

Sure, college is about academics, but someone who spends a lot of time mastering a sport (and is gifted at it) isn’t that different from someone gifted at math and working at it.

I feel like HN may disagree, but not all athletes are 2.0 GPA students who relied purely on height to get in somewhere and have never worked hard.

There are also tons of people who have claimed to see ghosts, tons of medieval peasants that saw witches, tons of people accused of summoning the devil in the 80s.

There are tons of people, the chances they misread something (kook or not) is high.