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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • The first part is confusing what “middleware” means. Rather than “duplicating” functionality, it connects libraries (I’m guessing this is what you meant). But that has nothing to do with a language being compiled versus “directly executed”, because compilation doesn’t connect different services or libraries; it just transforms a higher-level description of execution into an executable binary. You could argue that an interpreter or managed runtime is a form of “middleware” between interpreted code and the operating system, but middleware typically doesn’t describe anything so critical to a piece of software that the software can’t run without it, so even that isn’t really a correct use of the term.

    The second part is just…completely wrong. Lisp, Fortran, and other high-level languages predate terminal shells; C obviously predates the shell because most shells are written in C. “Most original code” is in an actual systems language like C.

    (As a side note, Python wasn’t the first scripting language, and it didn’t become popular very quickly. Perl and Tcl preceded it; Lua, php, and R were invented later but grew in popularity much earlier.)






  • I agree that it’s a “cop-out”, but the issue it mitigates is not an individual one but a systemic one. We’ve made it very, very difficult for apps not to rely on environmental conditions that are effectively impossible to control without VMs or containerization. That’s bad, but it’s not fixable by asking all app developers to make their apps work in every platform and environment, because that’s a Herculean task even for a single program. (Just look at all the compatibility work in a codebase that really does work everywhere, such as vim.)








  • For anyone else wondering, here’s the text of the actual email cited as the CoC violation:

    Michal, if you think crashing processes is an acceptable alternative to error handling you have no business writing kernel code.

    You have been stridently arguing for one bad idea after another, and it’s an insult to those of us who do give a shit about writing reliable software.

    You’re arguing against basic precepts of kernel programming.

    Get your head examined. And get the fuck out of here with this shit.