no_future's comments

Sounds like snake oil to me.

How can Julia be "on par" with C when it is itself implemented in C?

Oh wow, another person evangelizing about X obscure language from inside their pseudoacademic ivory tower yet providing no examples of anything useful they've done with it, or anyone has done with it for that matter.

Everytime I see this BS I think of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrp57IAlh84

It's fine to say something more reasonable like "I have high hopes for this very early stage language in the future", but this kind of fanfare is the reason why stuff like Java got so big.

The inconsistency is that I don't think anyone would say Google isn't one of the most if not THE most successful web era companies, and according to pg the founders weren't driven by a "spirit of benevolence" which in the current essay in question he attributes the most successful founders with.

I remember reading somewhere that they use the Foursquare API for something.

How exactly did Microsoft hold back the internet?

The idiom "nice guys finish last" isn't an idiom for no reason, Paul. Just because you're good at picking out people who you want to give money and support to doesn't mean that their niceness has any correlation with the hundreds of other founders who you don't, much less the business world in general.

I've read most of pg's essays and he seems to contradict himself a lot:

From this one:

"There is also a complementary force at work: if you want to build great things, it helps to be driven by a spirit of benevolence. The startup founders who end up richest are not the ones driven by money. The ones driven by money take the big acquisition offer that nearly every successful startup gets en route. [1] The ones who keep going are driven by something else. They may not say so explicitly, but they're usually trying to improve the world. Which means people with a desire to improve the world have a natural advantage. [2]"

From "Why there aren't more Googles":

"Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world.

Google, despite serious interest from Microsoft and Yahoo—what must have seemed like lucrative interest at the time—didn't sell out. Google might simply have been nothing but Yahoo's or MSN's search box.

Why isn't it? Because Google had a deeply felt sense of purpose: a conviction to change the world for the better. This has a nice sound to it, but it isn't true. Google's founders were willing to sell early on. They just wanted more than acquirers were willing to pay.

It was the same with Facebook. They would have sold, but Yahoo blew it by offering too little.

Tip for acquirers: when a startup turns you down, consider raising your offer, because there's a good chance the outrageous price they want will later seem a bargain. [1]"

Though, I guess when you're that rich you can't help but think that anything that comes out of your mouth is a golden gospel, even if it is at odds with your previous statements. It sure is easy to play the whole holier-than-thou "I don't care about money I care about changing the world" game when you're already loaded.

The person who wrote this seems reasonably intelligent. Why did he work at Radioshack for so long if it was so horrible?

Google confounds me. They are one of the largest tech companies as far as just pure reach, they own the top search engine, email service, and mobile operating system, as well as a host of other properties both hardware and software(and a huge pile of money that they're sitting on), yet still to this day make 99% of their revenue from assaulting people with ads on Youtube and in their search results. They attempted to get into hardware by buying Motorola, but later ended up selling it to Lenovo at a loss. They have the capital and resources to expand into pretty much any field that they so desire(including taking another crack at hardware), so why do they put all their eggs in the advertising basket?

How old are you geezers? Do any of you actually use Snapchat/know people who use it? If you did you would know that nobody actually uses it to send nudes because if people get nude photos they would actually like to keep them because surprise surprise - there isn't much you can get done in 10 seconds. The whole sexting thing is a load of drivel concocted by the media because like any good story, it strikes fear into the heart of middle america.

The actual reason it got popular, which a lot of other people in this thread have mentioned as well, is because it was much faster than MMS because the photos were low quality(and at the time I don't think Apple had introduced iMessage), and the photos didn't stick around on your phone after they'd been sent, so it was perfect for sending silly/mundane things that don't need to be preserved.

If companies get swallowed up by the Google/Facebook behemoths like so many do then investors usually get their exit, to make an example of 2 from your list Tumblr was bought for $1bn by Yahoo and Snapchat allegedly had multibillion dollar acquisition offers from Facebook and Google. Apparently the megacompanies don't buy these smaller companies for the value that could be generated by revenue streams from them(when and if), but more a combo of the "strategic advantage" - so their competitors don't snap them up first, or out of a fear that one of them could end up being a direct competitor to them one day, as is the case with the Facebook Instagram acquisition and attempted Snapchat acquisition.

They're both multibillion dollar backed companies, so more likely the opposite will be true: any regulation against them will be lobbied out of existence.

Whats wrong with building toys for rich people? Rich people need to play too.

>The people native apps benefit the most is OS vendors, because of lock-in

C and Java can run on any platform(far more than HTML and JS which were developed to run in browsers), what lock in?

Sure there are languages that transpile to C, but they don't run as well as hand written C. I wasn't saying that compilers couldn't write C, I was saying they couldn't do it better than a human.

>it's like complaining that assembly is useless because nobody uses it directly

Everybody always tries to make this comparison(WELL IF YOU WANT IT TO RUN SO GOOD JUST WRITE IT IN ASSEMBLY), and it really goes to show how little they know. Programmers don't write things in assembly because today's compilers can write much better assembly than pretty much anyone. No compiler can write C better than even a mediocre programmer, which is why if you want to write something that runs very smoothly or requires high performance stuff, you write it in a C-family or JVM language. That aside, specifically your comparison makes no sense to me. Everything is assembly underneath, so I don't think anyone would say that it is useless unless they had part of their brain stem missing. HTML and JS have no place on mobile(aside from fools trying to shove them on there, hence my rant), they could be completely removed from the equation and nothing would change, and people who actually want to build good products rather than SHIP AS FAST AS POSSIBLE AT THE LOWEST COST POSSIBLE ON EVERY PLATFORM SIMULTANEOUSLY SO WE CAN MAKE THE MOST PROFIT POSSIBLE FUCK IF IT RUNS LIKE SHIT could chug along making great products, with languages designed to make great products on that platform. The developers that feel they "aren't that bad" are probably ones who haven't used anything else and don't even care to try, which is why they are trying to make them work on mobile.

C-family languages are still the best languages for systems dev, they've aged well, and Java is good for it as well. Systems dev hasn't changed much since they were developed, mostly just more transistors and cores were shoved into processors and more RAM became available. And it still stands that pretty much you can do with a computer, you can do with C. This is NOT the case with JS/HTML. HTML was developed during the time of static webpages, and JS was literally cobbled together in 10 days, and meant to provide functionality where webpages could talk to a webserver off in the background and not have to refresh, and to make HTML more dynamic.

The rich web applications that have become standard today are not what HTML and JS were designed for, hence, as I said before, the deluge of frameworks and compile-to languages that try to put bandaids over Javascripts warts. Even huge players like Google push stuff like Dart because JS is so bad.

Few people have tried to develop a replacement for C(aside from fringe projects like Rust), mainly because it's good at what it does - anything you can do with a computer. Yes, Swift is meant as an ObjC replacement, but it seems more aimed at improving programmer productivity than fixing anything wrong with ObjC.

HTML AND JS WERE NOT DEVELOPED TO RUN NATIVELY ON DEVICES! WHY WOULD YOU WANT THEM TO RUN ON DEVICES?

What a dreadful notion, I hope this never happens. Development on mobile devices is a great way to develop on a web connected platform that reaches lots of consumers, but instead of using horrible, ancient tools that are expected to do things today that they were never designed to do at the time of their inception(HTML/CSS/Javascript), you can use capable systems languages like C(and now Swift, which I have no experience with but have heard generally good things about) and Java.

That I call traditional frontend web tech ancient and out of place today isn't even really an opinion - the deluge of Javascript/CSS frameworks, compile-to languages,and lists of best practices would suggest that something is wrong there. Web stuff is just way easier to get into so there are a huge amount of developers available, especially the types who spend more time yapping on their blogs about the latest overhyped software trend than actually writing software.

I don't know about animations and whatnot, but for games and image processing i.e. 2 enormous chunks of all mobile software, Javascript isn't replacing anything anytime soon.

I don't understand why someone would want to spend hours trying to optimize languages which weren't designed to run native software on a platform to be as effective as the ones that were when you could just write the software in the native language, to me this just seems like an exercise in futility. Even moreso considering the fact that Javascript and HTML are horribly unproductive languages, though I suppose since so many people know them well they can be more productive in them than in a language they don't know.

Though a lot of people seem to love Wired(I used to read their magazine, back when those were a thing, and they did have some really nice layouts), for a while now their articles have been shameless, overhyping, clickbait. Every single headline is THIS IS GOING TO CHANGE THE WORLD/BE THE NEXT BIG THING/MAKE X ESTABLISHED THING OBSOLETE, and it turns out to be a whole lot of nothing.