Life is Tetris @tetrislife@qoto.org

several good bits here, I note this as one key for me

I know Wirth was horrified by the repulsive syntax choices of today's dominant languages; he could never accept that a = b should mean something different from b = a, or that a = a + 1 should even be considered meaningful. The folly of straying away from conventions of mathematics carefully refined over several centuries (for example by distorting "=" to mean assignment and resorting to a special symbol for equality, rather than the obviously better reverse) depressed him. I remain convinced that the community will eventually come back to its senses and start treating language design seriously again.

https://m-cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/279178-niklaus-wirth-or-the-importance-of-being-simple/fulltext

#niklaus_wirth #pascal #simplicity #design

Thoughts on 3 months of #ObjectPascal #FreePascal usage (in #NeoVim):

- Easy to pick up and read
- Good libraries
- Generics
- No closures
- Binaries aren't small
- LSP (pasls) isn't complete, but better than nothing; #Treesitter + #Periscope really help
- Docs are frustrating
- Good forums/community
- Targets SO MANY platforms (#HaikuOS, 32-bit #DOS, #Amiga, #Z80, #baremetal)! More than Rust, Go
- A *lot* of historic books and projects

Would I use #Pascal again? Absolutely yes, without doubt.

#FORTRAN and #COBOL are dead.
Long live modern Fortran and modern Cobol.

Modern Fortran is indispensable for high-performance, scientific computing, like weather simulation on supercomputers. Modern Cobol is indispensable for high-throughput, business computing, like financial transaction processing on mainframes.

But Fortran and Cobol suffer from the image problem. Young #programmers will not devote their careers to these seemingly dead languages. As such, many Fortran and Cobol shops are desperately trying to translate their codebases to C++, Java, Python, and the like.

This is a mistake. A weather simulation that takes a couple of hours for a Fortran implementation that runs on a 1000-CPU super computer will take months for a Python version that runs in an enterprise cloud. Analogous examples abound for Cobol. These niche systems are cloud-proof—they will not succumb to the false charms of cloud computing.

New language features and implementation techniques are continuously, albeit gradually, being integrated into Fortran and Cobol, and new supercomputers and mainframes are still being designed and manufactured. Yet, there is no injection of new blood.

A sensible approach, then, is this. Design new languages—with dependent type system, algebraic types, memory safety, and all the accoutrement of modernity—that target standardised Fortran and Cobol, much like TypeScript and ReScript targets standardised JavaScript.

@samharrison7 Also they estimate that Visual Fox Pro, a niche language discontinued 16 years ago, is more popular than TypeScript. There is no useful data in TIOBE. It’s a horoscope for programmers.

I fell in love with #BeOS the moment I saw a screenshot of it on a magazine in 1998. It took me by a storm, for some fateful reason. A year later I was running BeNews, the main news site for it, and the year after I met and got married to one of its engineers, my beloved @jbqueru, and moved to the US. At its height in 2000, BeOS had ~100k users. I hope its spiritual descendant, the #openSource #Haiku, makes it larger, and proliferates.

BeOS had #soul, it felt alive.

#OS #operatingsystem #foss

@twallutis @eugenialoli I ran Multiplan in 128kB indeed. I'm not sure it's laziness, I've worked on one of the heavier web pages out there (one that can hit 1GB of RAM) and nobody around me was lazy. Wrong priorities, probably, indirectly because capitalism.

@pomegranate_stew @elysdir Also convenient they block legit addresses but the spam flows from Gmail like a river.

@alison @joeyh @elysdir someone doesn't seem to know the difference between SPF, DKIM and DMARC... Sigh

@numist packaging is rarely appreciated right up until its the most important thing. Then it's the centre of attention for 10 minutes, then ignored. Like everything is

@codinghorror the heat death of the universe is inevitable but I don't think it should feature in our career plans.

We put round pizza in a square box and eat it in triangles.

@mhoye @dodgytheories it's honestly a genius FAANG tactic to sponsor open source that handicaps any small business that tries to adopt it

Download Dynebolic 4.0.0 Beta, and help hunt the bugs!

🔗 https://dynebolic.org 👈🏾

@Adam_Cadmon1 @Oggie @HeavenlyPossum @Adam_Cadmon1 @Oggie @HeavenlyPossum I think there's a certain ingrained memory of colonial era looking-aghast at the "rude and uncivil nature of the barbarous [insert other culture here]" going on. So much self-congratulation at the wonders of our own modern existence that we must (serious faces everyone, it's a faux humble moment) remember that, but for the grace of God, there we would be too. Etc, etc. Also present in renaissance scholars looking down very long noses at the middle ages, and so on. In short, I reckon it's an old falsehood.

The idea of human beings as rational utility-maximizing particles with insatiable hedonic desires is very much the product of an ideological project to justify capitalism as “natural” and has virtually no relationship to how actual human beings live but a lot of people have genuinely internalized it.

Trying to derive “human nature” by observing people under capitalist modernity is like looking at a bored, depressed wolf obsessively pacing a circle in a tiny zoo enclosure and concluding that this is “wolf nature.”

Another great meeting this week! Check out our Matrix or mailing list for how to attend next week: sandstorm.org/community

Jake released vagrant-spk 1.2.

He also helped a user to resurrect an old proprietary app that hasn't been built for a long time. We saw a demo of it.

We also discussed in general how distribution of proprietary apps might work for a business.

On that note: We're starting a mailing list for businesses that use sandstorm. If you'd like to join, reach out to @ocdtrekkie

Sometimes work on old legacy code feels like

"Ah time to make dinner. Oh wait there is a leak in the kitchen, I better re-roof the house first."