This is kind of the opposite of Go. Not giving people what they are asking for.
There are pros and cons of course. You don't have 17 different ways to iterate over an array, so that's nice. But you also went 13 years without generics, despite them being one of the most requested features, because the designers didn't want that complexity inside Go.
Overall I think Go is better for this philosophy but there are times where the language is clearly written more for its maintainers than it's users.
Go shipped with generics (aka bounded parametric polymorphism), but only for built-in types: slices, arrays, and maps. That, with subtyping via interfaces, handled most demand for generics. The most common pain point was custom containers.
Go was first released in November 2009. Russ Cox posted "The Generic Dilemma" [1] in December 2009. The comments show the generics debate raging from the earliest days.
As a fun side note, I forgot I posted a comment on that post pointing to Ada's generics. I was in college, and Ada was our intro language.
> the designers didn't want that complexity inside Go.
Yes, with some nuance. Go's goal of writing server programs didn't require the type-system complexity and run-time hit of user-defined generics. [2]
> Go was intended as a language for writing server programs [...] Polymorphic programming did not seem essential [...] so was initially left out for simplicity.
>
> Generics are convenient but they come at a cost in complexity in the type system and run-time. It took a while to develop a design that we believe gives value proportionate to the complexity.
Some of the concerns around generics and why it took so long were for the users as well. One of the biggest draws to Go has always been that you get the performance of a compiled language and yet compile times are so low that it can feel like you're developing with an interpreted language. The design of generics needed to maintain the compile time advantage or else it wouldn't feel like Go any more.
> Yes, I get that this is a way to preserve the French language and they have all the rights to do that (in the end, they’re the ones putting the effort in these initiatives) but imagine how faster these ideas could be shared and diffuse in Europe if French understood this.
Isnt this just baked into the idea? The French are building an OS for internal use for their own interests.
If we then try to extend that or the Dutch OS to other countries we have the original problem of dependence.
I think you're mischaracterizing the article though. It doesn't claim it was all a big misunderstanding. It says the students didn't like the disruption to local businesses , simply because it was disruptive. It was viewed as a bunch of outsiders coming in and controlling their city.
Isn't that just the obvious explanation anyways? That a group of people come into your city and shut down your businesses is going to piss people off? Of course people are going to oppose outsiders shutting down people's livelihood.
If you take a look back at history, literally everyone would disagree. A strong England has done unimaginable damage to almost every other society on the planet.
How are those vaccines, antibiotics, and antiseptics working out for your nation? How many people would be dead in “every other society” without them?
Thank the Brits for that.
How’s the modern world in general working out for your nation? Would it be better off in pre-industrialised times? Do you enjoy being clothed and well fed; do you enjoy travel via bike, car, train, or plane and not needing to do back-breaking manual labour; do you like clean water and sanitation? Do you like to kick back and watch the TV after a long day? Or, listen to radio? Or maybe you prefer to make a long distance call to a friend? Assuming of course that you like turbines for power generation from coal, gas, nuclear, wind, or waves.
Yep, all of the above require the Brits again… [1]
Do you feel any pangs of irony when posting your dislike of Brits via the world-wide web, on a Turing machine based computer, powered by an ARM chip? ;)
Do you like sport? Music? Literature… ok I’ll stop now …
Not really sure who we mean by "people". "People" will do business with the UK but that's not the same as "like" and "trust". If you mean regular people like from SEA that you have spoken to, yeah those people are generally nice and will act nice to your face. But many of them from those I have spoken to hold their grievances.
Not my experience at all in South Asia. Why would they act nice about the British to someone who is from their country (or a neighboring country)?
My experience is nationalists (and bigots, and especially ethnonationalists) do have greivances, and some westernised intellectuals have ideas about decolonisation etc., but most people do not
I am beginning to enjoy how deranged HN’s hatred of the British is. I try to explain to fellow Brits how much Americans in particular now hate us and it doesn’t register with them.
If they were to do something positive with it then it would be nice.
Instead they are hell bent on criticizing and tearing down anyone that does, especially when their finance bros are invested in the legacy competition.
What sort of things are you building? What do you like about exe.dev? Just curious what teh overhead and $20/month subscription is enabling for you.
>I’ll be going about my day, have a random idea, launch a microvm on exe.dev with a prompt of my idea, and get a working thing a few minutes later.
This is my experience with Claude code on my local machine. I suppose maybe you are doing something that naturally has system side effects? Obviously sandboxes have advantages sometimes but I havent seen a need for what I'm building.
For me, the essential difference between exe and local harnesses is that they have really nice built in methods to take care of stuff like auth and inter-vm interactions, which makes it easy to build live internet-connected services that I can share with other people. There is no deploy step, which is a surprising amount of time savings. They also have nice things like email receive/send, the ability to issue phone notifications through their app, and just a ton of little things where it feels right.
FWIW, the $20/month subscription also includes $20/month of LLM credits. That’s obviously not sustainable, but it should make it easier to try out the service. I would stick with them even if they dropped it.
Here is an invite link for a 30 day trial (that benefits me too if you were to become a paying member):
Shelley is a fantastic agent and their batteries included vm image makes the most of it. It includes things like a browser for Shelley to check its own work. And Shelley has root and full access to them, so it can solve any problem and do pretty much anything you need.
This article is conflating two things. The US response to the Digital Duty of Care law and the US response to the algorithm opt-out provision.
The US did criticize the opt out provision.
But when the US says this, its about a different provision in DDC, which says platforms need to proactively remove harmful content.
>"We ask that Australia clarify how exactly 'harm' and 'risks' shall be determined... ensuring these definitions do not encroach on protected speech," the US said in its submission.
There are pros and cons of course. You don't have 17 different ways to iterate over an array, so that's nice. But you also went 13 years without generics, despite them being one of the most requested features, because the designers didn't want that complexity inside Go.
Overall I think Go is better for this philosophy but there are times where the language is clearly written more for its maintainers than it's users.
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