Yeah, this is a really nice feature; on the couple of rare occasions where an update completely borked things I was able to go from unbootable to everything back up and running in half an hour.

I’d be interested in hearing what it is about the language that has gotten you so excited about it.

I can’t speak for other distributions, but Pop!_OS has had a “Refresh Install” option for a while now that does exactly this. This hasn’t happened often, but there have been a couple of times when something borked my system to the point of making it no longer boot, and re-running the installer in “Refresh Install” mode got everything back and running within 30 minutes while preserving all of my non-system files; in particular this meant that I didn’t have to re-download my Steam and other locally installed games, which is significant because they are the largest apps on my system.

Is the main advantage of RISC-V’s that it is a free and open standard, or does it have other inherent advantages over other RISC architectures as well?

It is hard to see how the explicit goal of not receiving updates too early is reconciled with the goal of not sacrificing security. Shouldn’t there be no such thing as “too early” when it comes to security updates?

Because that way you can use it wherever something accepts WASM. In particular, as mentioned in the linked article, Javy started its life as a way for you to submit code to Shopify Functions in JavaScript, as Shopify Functions lets you submit code as WASM so that you can program in whatever language you prefer.

No, Erlang has a completely different paradigm than Prolog, it just looks superficially similar because the people who created Erlang liked Prolog’s syntax so that’s what they used as the basis for Erlang instead of the more standard ALGOL-derived syntax that most of us are used to.

I don’t know much about Void Linux. What is it’s selling point that makes it unique?

Nah, at this point his only option is to cancel Starship and redirect all of its development funding into building a time machine so that he can dramatically increase the amount of weed he was smoking at the time he got the brilliant idea to buy Twitter so that his brain is made incapable of actually following through with it.

It can be nice not to have to worry about types when you are doing exploratory programming. For example, I once started by writing a function that did a computation and then returned another function constructed from the result of that computation, and then realized that I’d actually like to attach some metadata to that function. In Python, that is super-easy: you just add a new attribute to the object and you’re done. At some point I wanted to tag it with an attribute that was itself a function, and that was easy as well. Eventually I got to the point where I was tagging it with a zillion functions and realized that I was being silly and replaced it with a proper class with methods. If I’d known in advance that this is where I was going to end up then I would have started with the class, but it was only after messing around that I got a solid notion of what the shape of the thing I was constructing should be, and it helped that I was able to mess around with things in arbitrary ways until I figured out what I really wanted without the language getting in my way at intermediate points.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that this is the only or best way to program, just that there are situations where having this level of flexibility available in the language can be incredibly freeing.

And don’t get me wrong, I also love types for two reasons. First, because they let you create a machine-checked specification of what your code is doing, and the more powerful the type system, the better you can do at capturing important invariants in the types. Second, because powerful type systems enable their own kind of exploratory programming where instead of experimenting with code until it does what you want you instead experiment with the types until they express how you want your program to behave, after which writing the implementation is often very straightforward because it is so heavily constrained by the types (and the compiler will tell you when you screwed up).

Interesting, but are those commits to the glibc library itself or commits to the Debian package of it? The link makes it look like the latter, but I could be wrong.

Huh, is glibc really only maintained by a small number of people? I would not have expected that.

In what way do you think it would feature python development?