And when people started writing books instead of memorizing epic poems.

Had to work with a fixed string format years ago. Absolute hell.

Something like 200 variables, all encoded in fixed length strings concatenated together. The output was the same.

…and some genius before me used + instead of stringbuilders or anything dignified, so it ran about as good as lt. Dan.

And there are some truly magic tools.

XSDs are far from perfect, but waaay more powerful than json schema.

XSLT has its problems, but completely transforming a document to a completely different structure with just a bit of text is awesome. I had to rewrite a relatively simple XSLT in Java and it was something like 10 times more lines.

Python caches bytecode, so the translation happens only once.

Java loads everything immediately and keeps it in memory. All beans, all connections, etc. That takes up a ton of memory.

Of course, but I’m not productive in it.

If I have to do everything myself, it will take more time to get it done. The trade-off is of course always control/speed vs convenience, but C is definitely too inconvenient for me.

Not that limited. Limited means an old thin client, not a microcontroller. I already set up a small web server on a pi pico with mpy, so it’s quite impressive. But from what I understand, the interop with “MacroPython” is not that great.

Did you use mpy for x86 devices? Are the limitations worth it?

But that would mean either using Graal/native image or going full Scala, right?

I only used Scala for Gatling, where it’s obviously very java-y.

There’s nothing to really grow. It’s mostly just small helpers. Aggregate sensor data, pull data from A and push it to B every hour, a small dashboard, etc.

C is too involved for my case , I want to be productive after all.

Rust is already rather low level, though there are some cool looking frameworks.

The long-term goal is for Rust to overtake C in the kernel (from what I understand

Your understanding wrong. Rust is limited to some very specific niches within the kernel and will likely not spread out anytime soon.

critical code gets left untouched (a lot of the time) because no one wants to be the one that breaks shit

The entire kernel is “critical”. The entire kernel runs - kind of by definition - in kernel space. Every bug there has the potential for privilege escalation or faults - theoretically even hardware damage. So following your advice, nobody should every touch the kernel at all.

Germany has a Sovereign Tech Fund for exactly this, and while it’s not perfect, it’s one of the better uses of my tax euros.

Replacing C with Rust in the upstream kernel is akin to replacing the engine in a car while it’s running or being used every day.

That’s in no way what’s been proposed. Rust is used in a very well defined niche, nobody wants to get rid of C.

But it’s just that sentiment that got us here, you’re arguing against a non-existent threat, and thus reject the whole proposal.

And it’s a bad argument anyway. You’re only good at memory management until the first bug takes down production.

Rust isn’t a panacea and certainly has problems, but eliminating an entire class of potentially very dangerous bugs is a very good argument.

And DBAs. I’m currently working on a project where I said from the very start, I can set up this DB in k8s and I can get it to work decently, but I have neither the knowledge nor the time to get it right. Please give me someone who knows how this works.

No, don’t worry, it’ll be fine, we don’t need that, this kuverneles thing I keep hearing about handles that!!!

Six months of hard contact with the enemy on production later:

Well, we’re currently looking for someone who actually knows how DBs work, because we have one of those issues that would cost a proper DBA 5min and me 5 months.

To be fair, a lot of roles simply disappeared over the years.

Developers today are much more productive than 30 years ago, mostly because someone automated the boring parts away.

A modern developer can spin up a simple crud app including infrastructure in a day or so. That’s much much more productive than 1995. We just cram a lot more of the world into software, so we need 20x the amount of developers we needed back then.

It’s really weird, though, that nobody really created a language/tool to bridge these two world. It’s always just generating one representation from the other, mostly in a bad way.

I’d argue, that for many problems, a graphical view of the system can help reasoning. But there simply is nothing in that regard.

One of our customers does that. It happened multiple times already that one dev fixed an issue in production, and the next regular deployment overwrote everything.

But fortunately, it’s just critical infrastructure and nothing important.

No, I’d argue you simply didn’t want to invest in the other tools.

Think about it, you probably spent hours on customizing and automating vim, and then say you’re faster in that. Well, that’s called a habit.

IDE are objectively more powerful and since you can actually see options and navigate quickly, you don’t need to memorize every obscure feature.

All the terminal editor enthusiasts are actively holding us back, because they insist everything outside vim is garbage for enterprise and kiddies.

If your tool of choice is actively hostile to new users for no reason other than “that’s how it’s always been, and thus it’s better”, well then you’re digging a moat to automate your gatekeeping.

I understand it very well. And that’s exactly why I’m writing this.

Ok, I can see you have no idea what you’re talking about.

Then say, grandmaster delusion, what purpose does vim serve, where it is actually the best tool? Writing code? Hardly, it’s way too limited and requires a ton of upfront investment and headspace. Writing config files? Hardly, because if you write these by hand, you’re living in the 90s, that’s what Ansible, Terraform etc are for.

You just don’t want to admit, that vim is nothing more than a habit. Muscle memory.

You’re using the terminal, because you’re used to it. It is not the better tool, it’s simply what you happen to know already.

People who argue with productivity because of some key bindings live in the world of the 80s. You don’t just sit there and type code 12h a day, that’s not how modern software development works.

And all those blockheads down voting me are caught up in their weird superiority complex. They are the powerful superhackers, and don’t understand that we are just highly qualified plumbers.

…so your infrastructure is outdated.