78 karma · joined September 13, 2022
I'm mid 40s & in the same boat. Entrepreneurship probably is the only option. It is what it is.
Adopting the features he values is not free. A toll would be paid along a different axis.
Rusher is full of s** though. It isn't really a case of, "this one was ahead of it's time, this one's behind". It is a case of trade-offs. I can dash off all kinds of cool stuff in Racket or Clojure, in record time w/ minimal lines of code. Good luck getting someone else to understand it though, and good luck getting me to understand it after a year away from it. With a larger code base, built-in compile-time type enforcements are huge--and as an afterthought, with macros, on an opt-in basis does not count. Aaron Swartz had Reddit re-written from lisp to python for similar reasons--not strict types, obviously, but having more syntax than parentheses is a big win when new hires are trying to understand the system.
Same story with APL: brilliant as a desk calculator on steroids, clumsy for nearly everything else. Or C, the indispensable bit-twiddling language; only a sadist would want to write an application in it, but it's still pretty darn indispensable for the tight spots where performance matters (drivers, AAA video games, AI maths, crypto, etc). I'd say that all the way up until the late 80s, all of the spots were "tight spots."
It's like the Bret Victor cult--a demo of a game-maker program that used javascript as its intermediate representation. It had been done hundreds of times before with different IRs, and the model is entirely appropriate for making 2D video games. Raise the dimensionality, or change the problem, and the model breaks down, but he conveniently ignored that, because it is more fun to get up on the podium and play programming prophet than to do the work of making a language that actually has legs.
https://preview.redd.it/mmksakh888t21.jpg?auto=webp&s=f4dc90...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscalar_processor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_(computing)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_instruction,_multiple_d...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_predictor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_execution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core_processor
Since RAM (slow) and/or cache access is involved in nearly every step--which becomes increasingly complicated when trying to preserve cache coherency across multiple cores--improvements in the next two are a big deal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_management_unit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_hierarchy
Executive summary: Work smarter, not harder, & the ultimate measure of performance, is performance (which may sound stupid, but it's in the textbook, because it's true!).
I would also add that more cores aren't necessarily better. The utility depends upon the nature of the task & how memory-hungry it is. If the task is inescapably sequential, it doesn't really matter how many cores are on the die. Same story with parallelizable tasks that pound RAM: at any given time, one core is hogging the memory bus, and the rest are waiting their turn. They may take turns, but at any point in time, it's essentially single-core performance.
The place where multi-core really shines is when you have a highly parallelizable task, where each thread grinds really hard over a smallish data set that fits comfortably in the core's cache. In that case, you can definitely max out all cores. Though from what I see in the wild, that is a rare case.
A lot of the industry is really just gaming benchmarks at this point, which are, for the most part, bullshit. I think Apple will remain in very good shape on this front, if only because of their customers (i.e. normies instead of gamers; people who haven't fallen completely into the quantity cult). They will complain when it stops feeling fast (the only measure...), instead of taking it as a challenge & wasting their lives on overclocked water-cooling bullshit.
Getting a firm grasp on such things made every language I deal with "click". Knowing how the sausage is made--if only at the kindergarten field-trip level--brings all of the trade-offs language designers have to make into relief. With this knowledge, you'll know where the sharp corners are to begin with--the ones that were unavoidable due to the limitations of the medium. This is much better than beating one's head against the wall over a syntax error while being pissed at the language for not being a miracle.
Since two of the languages you've mentioned are compiled, they should be giving you specific line/column/error information on syntax errors. If it's taking you a day to de-cipher explicit error reports from the compiler, it's probably time to better familiarize yourself with compiler lingo (most people recommend "the dragon book").
https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text
I think the classic approach is to use something like lynx or w3m with networking disabled, but I wasn't impressed with the output.
Patching over the old work--hopefully without breaking anything--always is. I'm just stating that much of the hostility toward C++ comes from the fact that we have so many superior options to choose from now--options which profited from the lessons C++ learned the hard way, and incorporated them into v1 instead of patching them in as options at v23.
And this is not to strikeforce anyone with a "Rewrite it in Rust!", but to suggest that C++ is maybe not the best choice for new work in 2022.
Small infractions by small operators, perhaps so. Small infractions by big operators, hell no. Thanks to class action, civil suits are perpetual hearburn & lost sleep for them. There's always a batch of aggressive trial lawyers ready to take the case on contingency, and even if the original plaintiff's damages are very small, it still adds up to big money when you include payouts to the rest of the class, & of course, punitive damages--which can exceed the damages by orders of magnitude.
> It also would rely on a judiciary that can't be bought
Buying off judges and juries is a costlier & dangerously more sensitive task than promising a comfy board position to an agency head over drinks and a meal at a restaurant in DC.
> It hasn't failed.
The microplastics in our bloodstreams and the glyphosate in our cheerios say otherwise.