porgamrer
@porgamrer@programming.dev
- Comment on Pulsar, the best code editor 8 months ago:
Counter-point: Atom is terrible. Its electron competitors are terrible. Big IDEs are terrible. Simple text editors are terrible.
If you are under 50 and chose to learn vim or emacs, there is a 100% chance that you were also forced to learn latin at school and honestly it’s not your fault that you turned out this way.
These are all the options. Sometimes all the options are terrible.
- Comment on How to be a -10x Engineer 8 months ago:
Here’s one I learned from a past manager:
Stress that everyone needs to pitch in and make themselves useful at all times, but do not share any information at all
Make sure the work is not broken down into clear tasks. Make sure nobody else has access to the stakeholders. Make people ask separately for every single account or access credential they need, and respond with incredulity that they don’t already have it.
Give the impression that there are no processes. When someone submits work, criticise them for not following the process.
Each day, schedule meetings so you are impossible to contact until the early afternoon. That way you can interrupt any request for information by asking the person what work they did in the morning. The goal is to close the loop by making people scared to talk to you, so they blame themselves for not knowing anything.
- Comment on How to be a -10x Engineer 8 months ago:
I don’t need this level of introspection on a tuesday morning
- Comment on I had to design a simple general purpose language for university, so I tried creating "ZoomerScript" with Jetbrains MPS 8 months ago:
Zoomers are like the steve buscemi “fellow kids” meme, but somehow everyone in the scene is young
Anyway, nice compiler. Might feel basic to you, but writing a back end for a low level IR format is not that much harder.
- Comment on Our Vision for .NET 9 - .NET Blog 9 months ago:
Rewriting bits of the kernel makes sense. I can’t imagine them porting much C# to Rust though, beyond very small, self-contained services.
Everyone likes a dramatic headline, but in my estimation there is 0% chance of Microsoft pushing widespread Rust adoption over C#.
In the long-term I’d guess they are more likely to continue extending C# with features that make it possible to optimise hot loops. They already added NativeAoT and ref structs, and they have done a lot of research into memory regions and capabilities (an alternative to Rust’s affine types).
Eventually it may be possible to opt into a clunky language subset that gives Rust-like performance without giving up memory safety.
They are also quite likely to use OS-level intervention to safely sandbox C++ code inside a .NET process without giving up performance. They’ve done a lot of research on this, and now they can steal notes from webassembly too.
- Comment on What are some common misconceptions about programming that you'd like to debunk? 9 months ago:
Or adding a single non-corkscrew pipe out of principle, which all the other corkscrew plumbers now have to maintain for 20 years
- Comment on What are some common misconceptions about programming that you'd like to debunk? 9 months ago:
eh, more like self-important plumbers
- Comment on What is OOP, really? Why so many different definitions? 9 months ago:
It’s similar to any tech buzzword. Take “agile” for example. Agile was successfully sold as being a great idea without really being well-defined. Suddenly anyone selling a development methodology had a strong incentive to pitch it as being the real way to do agile development.
In the 90s and 2000s every 10x california tech gury agreed that OO was the future, but apparently none of them actually liked smalltalk. Instead, every new language with a hint of dynamic dispatch suddenly claimed to represent the truest virtues of OO.
There are also people who argue that smalltalk is not true OO. They say that by Alan Kay’s own definition the most OO language is Erlang.
I think it’s most useful to learn about that history, instead of worrying about people’s post-hoc academic definitions.
- Comment on [deleted] 9 months ago:
If I went back to the early days of C, it would be because John Connor sent me there in a time machine to destroy the first compiler before it could become self-hosting
- Comment on RIP Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth 10 months ago:
He won computer-science boffinry’s highest possible gong why must british journalists write like this? even in an obituary!
- Comment on Does this compiler exist? 11 months ago:
I mentioned it elsewhere here but I think the Terra research language has explored this area more thoroughly than Rust, just because that its only purpose. The website and academic papers are definitely worth a skim: terralang.org
It’s basically a powerful LLVM-based compilation library exposed where everything is exposed through Lua bindings. The default Terra compiler is just a Lua script that you can pull apart, extend, rearrange, etc. It’s all designed for ease of experimentation, whereas Rust has to worry about being a rock-solid production compiler.
- Comment on Does this compiler exist? 11 months ago:
If I understood correctly, the closest thing I know of to what you are describing is probably Terra:
It is an academic project with various papers presenting case studies that do things like change the whole programming paradigm the language, or the execution model, or the syntax.
The wider paradigm is called multi-stage programming. The other obvious languages to mention are the lisp family, and more recent spin-offs like Julia.
- Comment on What's the biggest change you would like to see in computing/tech? 11 months ago:
LLVM is ironically a very slow compiler back-end, whose popularity has contributed to a general slow-down in compilation speed across the whole industry (it’s even slow at doing debug builds for fast iteration).
WASM has some promise though
- Comment on What's the biggest change you would like to see in computing/tech? 11 months ago:
This is just like, my opinion, but here you go:
If you live in the western sphere, the US tech giants control half of your critical infrastructure and invade every aspect of your personal and professional life. If you live outside the US, they do not answer to you or to anyone you can vote for. They lean on your government for permission to turn your whole existence into a series of transactions, and then extract as much value as possible from each one. The money doesn’t swirl around your community making everyone richer. Instead, 5% goes to pay a few nice salaries in your biggest city, and the rest of it gets funneled straight out of the country and into california.
Even Europe - their imperial mentor and favourite uncle - is treated like shit. Europe built half of their technology but controls none of it. There is not a single european tech giant. Every last one is american, with extensive ties to the US government and security apparatus.
- Comment on What's the biggest change you would like to see in computing/tech? 11 months ago:
Three things off the top of my head:
- Unionisation
- Way more stuff publicly funded with no profit motive
- Severe sanctions on US tech giants all around the world, with countries building up their own workforce and tech infrastructure. No more east india company bullshit.
- Comment on If you had to choose one programming language that you had to use for the rest of your life, what would it be? 1 year ago:
You could write a compiler for a low-level language in anything. Honestly makes little sense that most people do it in C++ when they’re only going to replace it anyway.
- Comment on Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly 1 year ago:
Yeah it’s a super hard problem, but my point is that in the specific case of a city building game most of the models are going to be extremely small on the screen 90% of the time, so you can get away with pretty terrible automated LOD in a way you can’t in most other genres; you just don’t swap to low-poly versions until stuff is extremely far away.
- Comment on Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly 1 year ago:
You’re right, but you totally could make a game engine generate LOD levels for you. Especially for a game like this, where you could get away with a very crude LOD simplifier for tiny, distant objects.
In their case they can probably plug some open source library into their unity asset pipeline without much difficulty.
Honestly I’m just surprised they implemented so much complex stuff but didn’t fix something so basic. Makes me wonder whether these blogs have correctly diagnosed the problem.