4 ms·

JS isn't much better. It's as if toy languages are suddenly used to make the backbone of our lives.

direwolf20 9mo ago
How did that happen? How did toy languages start getting used for serious work? I can understand JS to an extent because of first class functions, but Lua is like a better, properly designed JS and also has them.
- paganel 9mo ago
  > How did toy languages start getting used for serious work? Because those "toy" languages delivered the goods, while the "serious" ones fumbled their way big time. It was very funny seeing how lambda-the-ultimate.org forum was a Drupal installation (meaning both PHP and said Drupal).
  - pdimitar 9mo ago
    So they just got there first? Not an impressive feat then. We all had to make do with shoddy stuff just to get a project done (and I am not talking only in programming but also in meat-space). But to then hold on to it with a death grip, yeah, these people I don't respect.
    - paganel 9mo ago
      Nobody is stoping anyone on putting a quick project up-and-running using Rust, let's say. But good luck finding people to maintain it in the long run. And good luck finding the "batteries included" stuff. And good luck on many other things. We're all building bazaars, not cathedrals, and that's ok, even though we oftentimes seem to forget that.
      - pdimitar 9mo ago
        True, nobody is stopping anyone and that's why I am gradually moving my stuff from bash/zsh to Golang and might even further migrate it to Rust in the near future -- LLMs make these things almost trivial and my only hurdle was how verbose can Rust feel for a basic CLI app. That hurdle no longer exists. But don't look at me, I never liked Perl, PHP, Ruby. They were, and still are, hacks. I was aiming at people who just accept the status quo and shrug.
Nextgrid 9mo ago
I think the problem is the legacy Unix-style concept of shared libraries and how anything touching native code is deeply intertwined with the OS itself.
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  Funny thing: I never liked shared libraries. There is something fundamental about them that is broken: it changes the execution context from the one that you had when you were testing your code prior to shipping. The space savings argument only made sense for a little while, what they should have done instead is build a much better linker that only includes the smallest subset of code that your program should have access to. That as well as a predefined set of file system bits which system calls you are allowed to make and which you are not.

How did that happen? How did toy languages start getting used for serious work? I can understand JS to an extent because of first class functions, but Lua is like a better, properly designed JS and also has them.

paganel 9mo ago
> How did toy languages start getting used for serious work? Because those "toy" languages delivered the goods, while the "serious" ones fumbled their way big time. It was very funny seeing how lambda-the-ultimate.org forum was a Drupal installation (meaning both PHP and said Drupal).
- pdimitar 9mo ago
  So they just got there first? Not an impressive feat then. We all had to make do with shoddy stuff just to get a project done (and I am not talking only in programming but also in meat-space). But to then hold on to it with a death grip, yeah, these people I don't respect.
  - paganel 9mo ago
    Nobody is stoping anyone on putting a quick project up-and-running using Rust, let's say. But good luck finding people to maintain it in the long run. And good luck finding the "batteries included" stuff. And good luck on many other things. We're all building bazaars, not cathedrals, and that's ok, even though we oftentimes seem to forget that.
    - pdimitar 9mo ago
      True, nobody is stopping anyone and that's why I am gradually moving my stuff from bash/zsh to Golang and might even further migrate it to Rust in the near future -- LLMs make these things almost trivial and my only hurdle was how verbose can Rust feel for a basic CLI app. That hurdle no longer exists. But don't look at me, I never liked Perl, PHP, Ruby. They were, and still are, hacks. I was aiming at people who just accept the status quo and shrug.

Nextgrid 9mo ago

I think the problem is the legacy Unix-style concept of shared libraries and how anything touching native code is deeply intertwined with the OS itself.

jacquesm 9mo ago
Funny thing: I never liked shared libraries. There is something fundamental about them that is broken: it changes the execution context from the one that you had when you were testing your code prior to shipping. The space savings argument only made sense for a little while, what they should have done instead is build a much better linker that only includes the smallest subset of code that your program should have access to. That as well as a predefined set of file system bits which system calls you are allowed to make and which you are not.