https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

Nope, 65th place, slightly behind the US and the country of old men: Albania.

And a whole lot of content that I frankly would have preferred not to have seen.

When you’re 12 and your parents have no idea what you’re doing, you’ll end up in very dark corners.

It’s the same in China.

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

What’s really baffling to me is how completely irrelevant most ads are to me.

And I’m not saying “ads don’t work for me”, I get ads for products that I will never buy. I’m a man and YouTube recommends me tampons, lipstick and perfume. I also won’t buy a car anytime soon, yet I get tons of ads for cars.

Even in the mindset of an ad person, that can’t make sense. Sure, there is the off chance that I’ll buy lipstick for my girlfriend, but how likely is that and how much revenue will materialize from bombarding thousands of men with ads? That cannot be economically viable.

The actually infuriating part is, that we’re still paying for it. And the vendors as well. Only Google profits. If a company spends more on ads than necessary, their products will get more expensive, and those who buy their products will have to pay for it. So essentially I’m paying money for being advertised to, so Google can rake in billions.

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.