luciole (he/him)

Pick GDP, manufacturing output or whatever metric and look it up: Russia is not even close to the US. China is the one playing in the same league as the Americans.

As for open source being dominated by the US, the stats for Linux development don’t give that portrait at all.

I hope you work in a field where worrying about your integers hitting larger values than 9 quadrillion is justified.

The JavaScript Number type is implemented as an IEEE 754 double and as such any integer between -2⁵³ and 2⁵³ are represented without loss of precision. I can’t say I’ve ever missed explicitly declaring a value as an integer in JS. It’s dynamically typed anyways. There’s the languages people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

Floating-point arithmetic is important to understand at least vaguely since it’s a pretty leaky abstraction. Fortunately, we don’t need a “✨Member-only story” on Medium to get acquainted with the underlying concepts.

sapped by design

That is a lot of bile even for a rant. Agreed that it’s nonsensical to blame the dev though. This is software, human error should not be enough to cause such massive damage. Real question is: what’s wrong with the test suites? Did someone consciously decided the team would skimp on them?

As for blame, if we take the word of Crowdstrike’s CEO then there is no individual negligence nor malice involved. Therefore this it is the company’s responsibility as a whole, plain and simple.

Agreed that it’s an entirely acceptable position to try and avoid being stuck in the crossfire of cyber warfare. Let’s be clear though, cyber warfare is already going on and Russia+China are pulling no punches routinely wiping American and European servers in various ways. Anyone on the front line of cybersecurity sees them knocking ceaselessly.

Whether it is being offered to the end users as free (as in freedom) software or as paid closed source has the usual implications. Ease of use, accessibility measures and support impacts inclusivity. Supported languages (natural and programming) will influence further who uses them or not. What constitutes the user base will determine what’s it’s used for and in turn will apply pressure to the editor to take a certain direction.

Political impact is not always obvious and not every single grain of software will be infused with a powerful one. The point is that our choice is either to ignore it or to acknowledge it. We can’t opt out of the world; blind neutrality is as political as any other position.

I would like to offer as a counterpoint that everything is political. Tech is no exception. Tech is a tool, a tool comes with a specific affordance and an affordance suggests to the wielder a certain worldview. To wilfully ignore the social and political impact of one’s work does not protect it from the world’s turmoil.

• C++ is fine
• Python is fine
• C# is fine
• PHP is fine
• JavaScript is fine
• C is fine
• Java is fine

I could go on

Also chaotic neutral: prioritizes issues by curiosity.

Only part I miss from going at the office. It’s not the same when you have to bake your own bribes.

If it listens and nods to the unedited, director’s cut version of my woes and frustrations, I’ll give it a cookie.

Or a crab.

It’s fascinating how s-expressions are both data type and language syntax. Such power. Only other time I saw something remotely like this was XSLT & XML, which I admittedly do not miss one bit.

Are passionate about the development lifecycle of other engineers and their pain points.

If you’ve been coding for 55+ years, you’ve almost gone through a whole engineer life cycle and you most probably know a lot about pain points.

How do you produce the coffee to power the rust users?

Holy crap that’s a lot of devs 😳

Team of three. We do the feature branches, pull requests and code reviews. With the right culture, it keeps devs informed about the various projects and gives a nice space to discuss about the practice.

EDIT: we do automated linting and formatting checks too. Keeps things coherent.

A lot of sectors need custom software and some of them have a mission more noble than profits. Government, education, science, culture… IT jobs in non-tech places can be rewarding too and you’ll get to have plenty of colleagues that aren’t your classmates. Being knowledgeable about various open source software can be valuable as well career wise.