• 31 Posts
  • 236 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2024

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  • The argument against it is founded on copyright.

    We fund copyright in order to enrich our culture, by incentivizing creative works.

    Blocking creative works preservation strips away the cultural enrichment.

    What’s left? People being compelled through taxes to fund profit police for copyright holders who aren’t holding up their end of the bargain.

    It’s worth noting that publishers, and especially the “rightsholder groups” that they hire, are not artists. They are parasites. They are paid more than fairly for their role in getting creative works out there in the first place. I can’t think of any reason why they should have continued control after they’ve stopped publishing them.






  • Unfortunately, I don’t think D is good enough to prove your point. From your follow-up comment:

    A language that for all intents and purposes is irrelevant despite being exactly what everyone wanted,

    As someone who uses D, I can attest that it is not what everyone wanted; at least not yet. Despite all the great things in the language, the ergonomics around actually using it are mediocre at best: Several of its appealing features quickly turn it into a noisy language, error messages are often so obtuse as to be useless (especially with templates and contracts in play), and Phobos (the standard library) is practically made of paper cuts. Also, the only notable async support is a fragile mess, and garbage collection is too deeply embedded into both the stdlib and the ecosystem.

    (To be fair, D could be vastly improved with better defaults and standard library. That might happen in time, as Walter and the other maintainers have shown interest, but it’s just wishful thinking for now.)

    Also, D is an entirely different language from C++, and as such, would require code rewrites in order to bring safety to existing projects. It’s not really comparable to a C++ extension.




  • Given how long and widely C++ has been a dominant language, I don’t think anyone can reasonably expect to get rid of all the unsafe code, regardless of approach. There is a lot of it.

    However, changing the proposition from “get good at Rust and rewrite these projects from scratch” to “adopt some incremental changes using the existing tooling and skills you already have” would lower the barrier to entry considerably. I think this more practical approach would be likely to reach far more projects.








  • And Perl both still exists and is actively maintained, so it “lost prominence” rather than “died”.

    Okay, but you’re the one who called out “the demise of Perl”. Have you changed your mind? I was just responding to your question.

    For what it’s worth, I think you were right about that: Perl is dead, in the sense of no longer growing or even maintaining the reach it once had. Other languages are overwhelmingly chosen for new code, while Perl has mostly fallen into disuse outside of people who learned it in its heyday and haven’t moved on, and irrelevance outside of legacy systems. It might not be quite as much a dead language as Latin (which also still exists and sees some use) but it’s well on its way there.