Autocad costs that much because Autodesk behaves anti-competitively and has locked firms into their proprietary tooling / file formats / training and the firms have no choice but to keep paying them.

Their predatory behaviour towards the engineering industry is literally why I taught myself programming and switched to software development.

They are a prime example of why you shouldn’t build your company around closed source proprietary software, but open source software that can be forked or self hosted in a worst case scenario.

This is a really good interview, and does a good job highlighting Javascript’s biggest strength: it’s flexibility.

“It was also an incredible rush job, so there were mistakes in it. Something that I think is important about it is that I knew there would be mistakes, and there would be gaps, so I made it very malleable as a language.”

He cites the “discovery” of asm.js inside of JavaScript, calling it “another thing I’m particularly proud of in the last 10 years.” It uses the bitwise operators that were included in the original JavaScript which are now the basis for a statically-typed language with machine types for high-speed performance. “If it hadn’t been in there from 1995, it would’ve been hard to add later. And the fact that it was there all along meant we could do incredibly fast JavaScript.”

He tells InfoWorld it’s “this very potent seed that was in the original JavaScript from the 10 days of May in 1995.” JavaScript’s 32-bit math operators (known as bitwise operators) trace their lineage all the way back to the C programming language — and to Java. This eventually led to WebAssembly — a way to convert instructions into a quickly-executable binary format for virtual machines — and the realization that with a JavaScript engine, “you can have two languages — the old language I did with the curly braces and the functions and the shift operators, and this new language which is a binary language, not meant for reading by humans or writing. But it can be generated by compilers and tools, and can be read by tools…”

Fair point, I would argue that it’s not e entirely fair to compare a mobile OS that basically eschews backwards compatibility, for a desktop OS that can still run 30 year old applications, but it’s not entirely unfair either, they’re still both OSes and lots of the complaints have nothing to do with the burden of legacy support.

Oh I don’t think it remotely is. I just find it irritating that someone sees lots of complaints about the most used thing and takes that as an indication that it’s bad, and ignores the indication that it’s not (it being the most used thing).

Lots of complaints about something popular literally means nothing on its own. The content of those complaints have validity, but there’s nothing to learn from their metadata.

React Native’s new architecture is not that bad.

You basically just got a single lightweight JavaScript thread that runs your update loop around which components should be rendered and updated, but then all the components are bound directly to underlying C++ native components.

I would still expect the start menu to be aiming for zero dependencies and as fast a start as humanly possible, but it’s not that crazy compared to something like Electron (which itself is not as inherently bad as most people make it out to be).

The real problem with slow web apps has less to do with the architecture of the apps, and more to do with them letting developers build apps really quickly and easily, meaning that you often have apps built by developers who don’t entirely know what they’re doing, and they introduce tons of inefficiencies like double rendering etc.

Yes, the most popular OS on the planets used by the most people on a daily basis, also has a high number of memes about it. Shocking. What information you’ve gleaned.

I really wish Vercel would put more effort into the static site generation side of Nextjs, but they won’t because that inherently makes them no money.

We use copilot literally every day and it’s extremely helpful, literally not a single developer at our company disagreed on the most recent adoption survey.

Maybe you’re trying to use it to do too much, or in the wrong way?

Oh I’m glad you’re the be all know all arbiter of all software developers, and not just some grump on the internet.

Its not about writing easy entry programs, it’s about writing code robustly.

Writing out test code where tests are isolated from each other, cover every edge case, and test every line of code, is tedious but pays dividends. AI makes it far less tedious to write out that test code and practice proper test driven development.

A well run dev team with enough senior people that manages the change properly should increase in velocity if they’re already writing robust code, and increase in code quality if they’re not.

Pointing this out in company wide meetings is a fun past time.

It does save a lot of time and effort, and does lead to better code in the hands of a skilled developer. Writing out thorough test code and actually doing proper test driven development suddenly becomes a lot less onerous.

Their graph also has no numbers and is just there to help visualize the difference they’re referring to.

Read the article before commenting.

The literal entire thesis is that AI should maintain developer headcounts and just let them be more productive, not reduce headcount in favour of AI.

The irony is that you’re putting in less effort and critical thought into your comment than an AI would.

I started my programming career teaching myself to script and code to write tools to automate large aspect of my electrical engineering job. Eventually I hit the point, where my tools were getting huge and complicated and I realized that my professional software skills were lacking and I couldn’t just keep producing this untested spaghetti code and hope to actually get things done in manageable way.

I then left for the world of professional software engineering, and in the time since, I’ve seen two companies that actually build software properly, and three companies producing worse code with worse practices than my self taught code from years ago.

Quite frankly the world of software development is downright embarassing to work in at times. I don’t think we necessarily need to gatekeep software development with engineering degrees, but I do think that all developers should be required to take engineering ethics courses to understand their own responsibilities to push back and say no, this is not done and shippable until it’s properly built and documented.

It’s not even particularly accurate or nuanced in its history of Microsoft’s actions and the doc formats, it doesn’t mention any competitors, it doesn’t mention anything about the history of type setting generally or more advanced projects like LaTex, and at a fundamental level, it’s edited worse than my first year essays.

It spends like 2000 words just to say markdown good because it focuses on intent rather than a particular style.

Yes, I would describe it as bad.

Honestly, this is a pretty badly written and researched article for someone that likes writing so much.

Like, just the opening two paragraphs about Microsoft controlling document formats … They repeat the same information in both paragraphs and give a rather incomplete history of document formatting.

It’s also wild to write that many words about Markdown and never discuss its connection to HTML and its foundation in formatting via declarative intent rather than imperative formatting instructions (i.e. in markdown you dont style your title by saying bold / underling / font-size:20, you declare your true intent which is this is the top level title / heading, but that all comes from the underlying structure of HTML which markdown is basically just a simplification of.

I use utilities like unlock origin, a pihole, etc to block trackers and ad network requests without blocking literally all logic that can run on a page, which works great as an interim solution.

And the long term solution to advertising and tracking is legislation, not throwing out a computer’s ability to compute.

Lmao, oh yes, let’s go back to the golden age of every app having all of its logic running on centralized servers, rather being able to easily create cross platform client side distributed applications.

The “no-js” philosophy is fundamentally at odds with a future of distributed, OS agnostic, application development.

It remembers the web when the web was simpler, and ignores that that was the era of dll hell and applications being locked to specific OSes. The modern web is the most successful cross platform development framework by orders of magnitude,it’s all based on open internationally agreed on standards, and it is vastly simplifying and detangling the overall computing environment / platforms that we used to be locked to.

Just use a framework like Nextjs or it’s open source off shoots / clones and get the best of both static pre rendering and dynamic on the fly rendering.

This one.

I mean, in an overall sense yes, but that’s like saying climbing Everest is easy because on average the world has very little elevation change.