4 ms·

- a windows-first programmer who sees interoperability and composition as an encumbrance that satisfies “nerds who like to do weird shit that i don’t understand

- a windows-first programmer who sees interoperability and composition as an encumbrance that satisfies “nerds who like to do weird shit that i don’t understand in bash” reading from stdin isn’t challenging, nor writing to stdout. if someone can’t imagine why that might be useful, then i’d argue their journey as a software engineer is either at its end, or right at its beginning. at the cost of potentially sounding inflammatory, “get good”.

ddulaney 4y ago
> reading from stdin isn’t challenging, nor writing to stdout. Unless you're Kernighan and Ritchie, who semi-famously wrote a buggy hello world program and used it to educate a generation of C programmers: https://blog.sunfishcode.online/bugs-in-hello-world/ https://blog.sunfishcode.online/bugs-in-hello-world/ Obviously an exaggeration, but when's the last time you checked the return value of printf? I know I don't. And that's not even a memory safety bug, just basic logic. I hope nobody trusts those guys around malloc and free :)
jeroenhd 4y ago
> reading from stdin isn’t challenging, nor writing to stdout Every time I dabble in C, I need to look up what method I need to use these days. getline? scanf? Do I need to allocate a buffer? What about freeing it, is it safe to do so from another thread? What about Unicode support, can I just use a char array or do I need a string library for proper support? What's a wchar_t again and why is it listed in this example I found online? How do I use strtok to parse a string again? Sure, these things become trivial with experience, but they're not easy. Other languages make them easier so we know it can be done, yet the POSIX APIs insist on using the more difficult version of everything for the sake of compatibility and programmer choice. (Modern) C++ makes the entire process easier but there are still archaic leftovers you need to deal with on nix if you want to interact with APIs outside what the C++ standard provides. At that point, you're back to POSIX APIs and nix magic file paths with *nix IOCTLs. Gone are your exceptions, your unique_ptrs, and your std::string, back are errno and pointers.
gjm11 4y ago
The author, George V Neville-Neil, may be right or wrong but definitely isn't a Windows-first programmer with no understanding of Unix-like systems. He cowrote a book about the innards of FreeBSD: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/design-and-implementation/9780133761825/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/design-and-implementati... (ignore the first paragraph of the description, which is presumably a copy-and-paste error). He has been on the FreeBSD Board of Directors: https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/george-neville-neil-joins-board-of-directors/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/george-neville-neil-joins... He's presented a bunch of papers at FreeBSD conferences: https://papers.freebsd.org/author/george-neville-neil/ https://papers.freebsd.org/author/george-neville-neil/ All of which is perfectly compatible with his being incompetent, or wrong about this in particular. (For what it's worth, I don't think he is incompetent.) But what he easily demonstrably isn't is "Windows-first", and I suggest that any mental process that led you to that conclusion needs reexamining.

ddulaney 4y ago

> reading from stdin isn’t challenging, nor writing to stdout. Unless you're Kernighan and Ritchie, who semi-famously wrote a buggy hello world program and used it to educate a generation of C programmers: https://blog.sunfishcode.online/bugs-in-hello-world/ https://blog.sunfishcode.online/bugs-in-hello-world/ Obviously an exaggeration, but when's the last time you checked the return value of printf? I know I don't. And that's not even a memory safety bug, just basic logic. I hope nobody trusts those guys around malloc and free :)

jeroenhd 4y ago

> reading from stdin isn’t challenging, nor writing to stdout Every time I dabble in C, I need to look up what method I need to use these days. getline? scanf? Do I need to allocate a buffer? What about freeing it, is it safe to do so from another thread? What about Unicode support, can I just use a char array or do I need a string library for proper support? What's a wchar_t again and why is it listed in this example I found online? How do I use strtok to parse a string again? Sure, these things become trivial with experience, but they're not easy. Other languages make them easier so we know it can be done, yet the POSIX APIs insist on using the more difficult version of everything for the sake of compatibility and programmer choice. (Modern) C++ makes the entire process easier but there are still archaic leftovers you need to deal with on nix if you want to interact with APIs outside what the C++ standard provides. At that point, you're back to POSIX APIs and nix magic file paths with *nix IOCTLs. Gone are your exceptions, your unique_ptrs, and your std::string, back are errno and pointers.

gjm11 4y ago

The author, George V Neville-Neil, may be right or wrong but definitely isn't a Windows-first programmer with no understanding of Unix-like systems. He cowrote a book about the innards of FreeBSD: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/design-and-implementation/9780133761825/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/design-and-implementati... (ignore the first paragraph of the description, which is presumably a copy-and-paste error). He has been on the FreeBSD Board of Directors: https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/george-neville-neil-joins-board-of-directors/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/george-neville-neil-joins... He's presented a bunch of papers at FreeBSD conferences: https://papers.freebsd.org/author/george-neville-neil/ https://papers.freebsd.org/author/george-neville-neil/ All of which is perfectly compatible with his being incompetent, or wrong about this in particular. (For what it's worth, I don't think he is incompetent.) But what he easily demonstrably isn't is "Windows-first", and I suggest that any mental process that led you to that conclusion needs reexamining.