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As one who was interested by Nim and tried it out for some personal projects, I found that this was the biggest problem with the project. There's several options for any given need (including internal tools like LSP or installing the compiler) with very little clear way to choose between them. Each will have different (dis)advantages that you must discover primarily by digging through forum posts or GitHub issues.

In some ways it's the sign of a very strong language, like the curse of Lisp: someone can easily just write their own version of whatever they need. But as a user trying to navigate the ecosystem it is frustrating. I do keep meaning to try it out again though; the language itself is very pleasant to use.


The stakes of changing the way so many people work can't be seen in a short term. Could be good or bad. Probably it will be both, in different ways. Margarine instead of butter seemed like a good idea until we noticed that hydrogenation was worse (in some ways) than the cholesterol problem we were trying to fight.

AI company execs also pretty clearly have a politico-economic idea that they are advancing. The tools may stand on their own but what is the broader effect of supporting them?


Because it's rules for us and not for them. If I take Microsoft's code and "transform" it I get sued. If Microsoft takes everyone else's code and "transforms" it (and sells it back to us) well, that's just business, pal. Thomas's argument is completely missing this point.

EDIT to add, I said this more completely a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381996


You are probably thinking of this by Chris Lattner: https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgr... (on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30416070) Swift has always been developed by a team of course, but he was the lead and probably the most public face.


Swift is pretty clearly Lattner's baby. It's not usual for language parents to just stick around indefinitely, Bjarne Stroustrup's helicopter parenting of C++ is the exception not the rule. You won't find Kernighan at WG14 meetings, Eich isn't a key member of TC39, Hoare isn't in Rust's core team. van Rossum was BDFL for over 20 years, but did give it up.

I am reminded of the Black Mirror episode "Arkangel". Children are their own people, they're meant to go into the world and be themselves. A programming language isn't a person but its destiny is distinct from yours, and it deserves the opportunity to be its own thing and develop without you hovering over it constantly.


Did you just use analogy to childrearing as way to shame creators who bring in collaborators but then don't fuck off fast enough?

That's some A-tier manipulation tactics.


Mostly I was just snarking at Bjarne. My take is, Bjane wanted 1980s Unix programmers to like his semicolon language because it was kinda-sorta C compatible, but most of them didn't. And so, he's been trying to change their minds for ~40 years. It's not OK to still be here in 2023 trying to make it happen, a lot of them have retired, some of them are dead, it's not going to happen.


I seriously doubt he feels a gratification deficit, given how far and wide C++'s use for serious projects has been.


He tried leaving many times, and other people convinced him to stay in WG21. Your posts are nonsense and you know nothing of C++ history or semicolons.


"But for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it"

(Casca in Julius Caesar, however the play is in this case describing an event actually mentioned in Plutarch)


This feels like a needlessly hostile take. As someone who uses C++ daily, I am glad Bjarne is still around and contributing to the language.


There can be no clearer example than iTunes's downgrade into the awful Music and somehow even worse Podcasts. On the plus it has invogorated the 3rd party space.


I was never a fan of iTunes but at least I could usually wrangle it to do what I wanted. Music, on the other hand, is simply horrendous. I have never cursed the Apple ecosystem as much as when I try to put music on my iPhone.


> Perhaps biggest of all Swift doesn’t need a runtime like Obj-C

Swift most certainly has a runtime: https://github.com/apple/swift/tree/main/stdlib/public/runti... And most or all of it is written in C++, not Swift last I checked. Whenever you see a `_swift_fooBarBaz` symbol in a stack trace, that's the runtime.


> There's no reason to privilege any one of these, and Swift doesn't do this.

Strange thing to say: Swift String count property is the count of extended grapheme clusters. The documentation is explicit:

> A string is a collection of extended grapheme clusters, which approximate human-readable characters. [emphasis in original]


The length/count property was added after people asked for it, but it wasn't originally in the String revamp, and it provides iterators for all of the above. .count also only claims to be O(n) to discourage using it.


That was almost seven years ago now. It has been the String API twice as long as it has not been the API.


Without a source code license somewhere on site (I don't see any after looking around) you had better not copy-paste these into a next project. The default state if there's no explicit permission granted is that it's not usable: https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/


These are tutorial code snippets. I didn’t look through all of them, but the snippets are so generic that I think it’s okay to not worry about a license.


oh yes definitely need to include licenses!!


Also he's got to approaching retirement age at this point, and there is no backbench corps of other DTS who do what he does. Maybe another decade we'll have his help, then what?


I'm still not sure how I feel about the actual copyright issue, but this was a bad test case. Thaler is trying to have his cake and eat it too; his position is inconsistent (this similar to a previous comment I've made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783707).

He wants credit for creating the AI, and he wants to that AI to be recognized as autonomous and independent by getting the Copyright Office's imprimatur. But at the same time he wants to treat the art created by the AI as if it were his, or at least to act on behalf of the AI as if it were not autonomous.


If anyone wants a better test case

I've started using the best AI work I could find in all my works too, without attribution, and it makes me money. I recently added AI music to a website, which I found on youtube and got with a youtube downloading script, really drives engagement

I also don't care if someone does the same to works I generated in Midjourney, which I display in my various presentations. The Executive branch and now Judicial branch are pretty clear about this (so far), so its a free for all


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