Go is like snakes: you’re hatched from an egg and pretty much effective from the get-go. The older you get, the bigger prey you can eat, but otherwise things don’t change much since you were hatched. Your species can thrive in almost any environment, you’re effective, you have all the tools you need straight out of the egg.
Rust is like humans. There’s a huge incubation period, and you’re mostly helpless when you’re born, but the older you get, the more effective you become with the tools nature graced you with. And you, like Thanos, are inevitable, even if it does mean the death of billions.
Python is like beaver. Everyone has an opinion about you: some think you’re cute, some think you’re wierd. You’re perfectly suited to your environment, but things get awkward outside of your natural habitat - you can function, but not as well as when you’re in your comfort zone. And when people encounter you where they’re not expecting, they can be unpeasantly surprised, and you can cause them trouble.
C++ is like platypus. You resemble some other more simple, some might say sane, animal, but developed into a sort of frankenstein monster creature made from a jumble of parts and a stinger that, when it kills someone, comes as a shock. Every part of you serves some purpose, even if it seems tacked-on and out of place.
Then there’s Node. You are everywhere. You are legion. You fill up ecosystems. People try to defend you, claiming that you serve some purpose in the foodchain, but there’s scant evidence. Attempts to eradicate you fail. You often spread deadly disease. You breed, rapidly, persistently, relentlessly. You age widely hated, and yet everwhere.
So then I guess C is salamander. Also lays eggs and lives by a pool, but doesn’t do anything extra, and is a necessary step before most of the other modern languages.
COBOL is a coelacanth. To everyone’s surprise, they’re still out there. We thought they were an old, very extinct example of a non-terrestrial lobe-finned fish, but they actually hung on in some odd environments. They cause massive indigestion to anyone that has to consume them.
If Node is a mosquito, Javascript itself is another hymenopteran: the yellow jacket wasp. Just as hated, and with a tendency to injure handlers, but widely successful and defended as filling an actual useful role in nature. They build delicate, arguably pretty nests.
I especially enjoyed your COBOL metaphor. Nicely done!
Nobody who has seen a yellow jacket nest in person would argue they’re pretty.
I literally have one in a jar on a shelf, actually. I find it kind of delicate and wispy. The inside parts are uglier, but still very interesting.
Interesting
In other words, node = mosquitoes or invasive ant species?
I thought roach myself.
Roaches don’t spread nearly as much disease as 'squiters, and IIRC are actually important in some ecosystems.
For sure! I was just thinking of a species that’ll outlive humanity. :D
Did I find another Sanderfan in the wild?
These are excellent.
I need to add Perl.
Perl is a honey bee. You are unassuming and pragmatic. You fill every niche. Your buzzing carries meaning, but only to other bees. In theory, your ecosystem niche is filled by many competing solutions that are more fit to purpose. But somehow we all know in our hearts that if you disappear, all life on the planet will probably die soon after.
May I acquaint you with the Evil Mangler, historically used by GHC to compile Haskell via C. It would go through the assembly gcc generates and rearrange whole blocks and deletes instructions, such as function prologues and epilogues.
Holy shit. This thing sounds insanely awesome, but also quintessentially Perl. Like, the perfect holotype for Perl.
And, damn, but I’m impressed. I’ve seen code that I admired; elegant, inspired, wise code… but the Evil Mangler leaves me in awe.
There is a very strange, and maybe unexpected, cultural overlap between Perl and Haskell: It’s definitely possible to produce write-only Haskell, and once you get good enough writing Haskell it becomes very inviting to do so. It’s generally going to be a tiny bit more robust, probably a bit slower, and do dirty things with syb regexen could never dream of. While Perl will rip a DFA through a html file while hoping for the best, Haskell will respect the tree structure and then bend it into eldritch knots, leaving you with a file that’s like 50 lines of parser combinators (“it works on my files”) and then five lines of completely inscrutable magic doing the actual processing.
Node isn’t a language though.
Node: You fill up
ecosystemshard drives.Go is like snakes in that some divine creator decided that unlike all the other animals, you don’t need legs, because legs are hard to make and they keep you down anyway. You can do everything legged creatures can do just fine by bending and twisting in the right ways, and anyone who suggests legs could be useful is a fool who doesn’t understand what they’re talking about. Sometimes, after the complains of many snakes, the creator buckles and gives you the ability to grow legs, which are still completely useless despite all of the noise and the decision not to include legs has always been the right one.
Like many snakes, Go also has some incorrect beliefs about how windows are supposed work, but like all other facets in life, they can squirm up against them as if there are no windows to worry about.
Amen. I couldn’t have said it better.
Didn’t it only recently get generics? How was stuff even done before then?
It got them back in 1.18. Not every project and library has upgraded to that yet but at least modern tools have generics.
Things were done the Go way, with specific implementations. You had maps, slices, and arrays, and those were all the generics in the language. Supplement the lack of generics by stuffing functions using generics into interfaces and then implementing those interfaces for every type you need to call the function on.
interface {}- which is the equivalent of C/C++’void *.
C holding a gun: “if you segfault it’s your own fault”
Assembly (Octopus swimming alone since birth): “compiler? what’s a compiler”
Rust: “Oh honey you aren’t ready to compile that yet”
I love “unimplemented!”
Or its alias,
todo!()
I think your comment embodies Rust more than any I’ve seen before
And there’s haskell compiler
If you’re using C++, why not use streams?
I wasn’t personally using C++, I was using relatively modern C which has had an homegrown object system added to it.
Yes, fprintff is a C thing.
Well, that means that it’s also a C++ thing, but streams are an even slicker concept that aren’t a C thing, making higher-level code look nice and shiny - and abstracting away loads of I/O pain points while encapsulating useful features.
C++ streams are ugly in their own right, but C++ preferred practice these days is to treat it as its own language rather than as a C superset. That is, lots of crufty old C stuff still works in C++ for legacy reasons, but using it when you don’t have to is considered inappropriate.
The real fun about treating C++ as a superset of C begins when you run into cases where the languages differ.
I’m not talking about classes and templates and stuff like that either, I’m talking about relatively simple syntax that people expect to be present in both languages.
if (1) int a = 42;is valid C++, but will not valid C. That’s because the definition of a what a statement is differs between the two and has since the 80s!
Dew it!
The meme will be completely different after writing a few lines of rust for a week 😹
@stsquad
— Is my program about 1,000 lines complex?
— Yes, sure!
— Here you are my about 1,000 lines of ‘printf(“Hello, World\n”);’.Cannot agree with compiler part of cpp. Linker errors on the other hand…
as a non programmer, but someone involved in fields intimately similar in fundamental manners.
Honestly i get the feeling that languages are compilers are going to stop babying the user and go RISC-V at some point.
Who needs complex structures and tons of rules when you can just use a turing machine instead!
???
a language with all the good parts of something like assembly, and without all the bad parts of more modern, complex, and “safe” languages.
One major rule for designed functionality is simplicity. The second you add another rule, the amount of things that can happen grows immensely. And that only scales worse the farther you go. The simpler something is, the easier it is to be intimately familiar with it. Which is what allows people to make proper use of something.
Okay, I get it. It makes a lot more sense now. Honestly your first comment was word salad.
As a non-surgeon I think doing a heart transplant without bypass shouldn’t be that hard if you’re fast enough. I mean you can cut arteries quickly with bolt cutters right?
depends on how precise those bolt cutters are. Knipex? Yeah probably.
I don’t understand. You mean everyone goes back to assembly? I could get on board with that.
think assembly, but without the assembly part.
All the good parts of shit like assembly without all the bad parts of more involved languages like js. Or god forbid front end development frameworks.
You mean C?
pretty much. C but if it was better somehow, basically.
So like Rust?
What’s wrong with it? It’s about as close to assembly as you can get.
You can certainty do this, yet it’s not time- (and hence cost-) efficient.
Use streams, or fmt. fprintf is for C. It’s like people buying a cheap android phone, then going for an iPhone.
I don’t blame you though, C++ carries a lot of baggabe. Modern C++ is pretty nice, though, as is Rust.
How does Python at all help? I don’t understand
C++ compiler:
Error: missing ‘;’ on line 69
Warning: two statements on same tabulation depth after if without curly brackets on line 123. Are you sure you want this?
Sql errors: there be a syntax error roughly over there I think. Or maybe it’s a semantic error somewhere else I’m not entirely sure. Listen man all I can say is that this one comma there definitely has something to do with it probably, and the error is most certainly either to its left or to its right.
JSON parsers are getting me recently. The error is somewhere on or after row 1, char 1. Maybe.
Possibly it’s a BOM issue, or someone used double quotes typed on a Mac keyboard. Good luck.
A quick
-Werror=format -Werror=format-nonliteral -Werror=format-securitywill solve all yourprintfwoes.C++ and C compilers are much more friendly now a days
can’t wait to use templates and have the compiler spit out a 120 page autobiography
