I’m a staff software engineer at Sunrun, the USA’s largest residential solar installer.

I mostly work with kotlin, but also java, python, ruby, javascript, typescript. My hobby is picking up new hobbies. Currently bird photography and camping.

  • 13 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Forking is a foolish idea. The core principle of computer-science is that we need to live with legacy, not abandon it.

    what a crazy thing to say. The core principle of computer-science is to continue moving forward with tech, and to leave behind the stuff that doesn’t work. You don’t see people still using fortran by choice, you see them living with it because they’re completely unable to move off of it. If you’re able to abandon bad tech then the proper decision is to do so. OP keeps linking Joel, but Joel doesn’t say to not rewrite stuff, he says to not rewrite stuff for large scale commercial applications that currently work. C clearly isn’t working for a lot of memory safe applications. The logic doesn’t apply there. It also clearly doesn’t apply when you can write stuff in a memory safe language alongside existing C code without rewriting any C code at all.

    And there’s no need. Modern C compilers already have the ability to be memory-safe, we just need to make minor – and compatible – changes to turn it on. Instead of a hard-fork that abandons legacy system, this would be a soft-fork that enables memory-safety for new systems.

    this has nothing to do with the compiler, this has to do with writing ‘better’ code, which has proved impossible over and over again. The problem is the programmers and that’s never going to change. Using a language that doesn’t need this knowledge is the better choice 100% of the time.

    C devs have been claiming ‘the language can do this, we just need to implement it’ for decades now. At this point it’s literally easier to slowly port to a better language than it is to try and ‘fix’ C/C++.





  • If you’re the kind of helpless person who has to be spoon fed answers, then perhaps Linux or FOSS isn’t for you, and other alternatives exist that have professional support staffs.

    you’re the exact kind of person making FOSS look bad to the majority of people. Since you don’t seem to realize, I run the programming.dev instance. I most likely have been working in tech longer than you. This kind of attitude you have towards “people should just learn everything about every piece of software they use” is why people like you shouldn’t be near open source software at all. You make it fucking impossible for people like me to get anyone to even try FOSS because all they remember are morons like you saying “just figure it out”. I’m not going to teach my mother in law what a fucking flatpak is and there is absofuckinglutely no way that she is going to be able to google it and figure it out. It has nothing to do with learned helplessness. It has to do with the fact that she’s a painter, not a tech guru, and gatekeeping FOSS by purposefully making it hard to use is such an idiotic thing I have no clue how you could even defend it. Your actions make big tech companies become more entrenched in people’s lives. It is by your hand that people don’t want to use things like Firefox.


  • I making a point that you seem to be missing. If you have to point out some way to get around a problem that any given user will have with a piece of software, then that’s why your software is not being used. This is the continual problem with the Linux community, they think that everyone wants to learn this stuff. Most people just want their software to work. They don’t want to have to do any sort of googling to figure out why it’s crashing or why it’s running slow or why it doesn’t have this or that feature. Every time someone like you tries to point out that someone can just google something you lose another person that may have been willing to use FOSS in the future. Instead, maybe go try to fix their problem because they sure as hell aren’t going to.