Of course I wouldn’t write in raw machine code, or even assembly. We invented higher level languages that are more powerful and easier for humans to use…
But the purpose is still to make machines so stuff!!! I’m not just writing code so that other humans can marvel at my algorithms.
This is so freaking dumb.
Make computers do stuff for what purpose?
For whatever task you’re trying to get them to do. Predict the weather, solve an equation, format a document, etc. Computers can do useful things. We program them so that they do those things.
This is the most ELI5 thing I’ve ever written. If you actually understand programming and you don’t realise that it exists to make computers do things then you’re surely just being deliberately obtuse.
This is stupid. The whole point of programming is to make computers do things. Before computers, “code” was just hand wavy equations. Sum from 1 to n stuff.
Yes it is designed so that humans can understand it, but the point is to make computers do stuff. Very obviously.
Code is primarily to communicate from human-to-human, and only incidentally for computers to execute
Uhm what? No. That is a stupid thing to say. It is primarily intended for computers to execute, but in a way that humans can understand.
Yeah… I mean they should have just copied whatever video conferencing platforms do because they all work fine behind corporate proxies and they also don’t suffer from this “increasing delay” problem.
I haven’t actually looked into what they do but presumably it’s something like webrtc with a fallback to HLS with closed loop feedback about the delay.
Though in fairness it doesn’t sound like “watching an AI agent” is the most critical thing and mjpeg is surprisingly decent.
That is not actually a “data race”. It is a race condition for sure, but a data race is a very specific thing - where two threads access the same location at the same time and at least one is a write.
That could be unsafe in Rust because it might lead to reading “impossible values” like an enum that isn’t equal to any of its variants. Therefore safe Rust must prevent it or there’s a soundness hole.
Doesn’t say anything you didn’t already know. Probably written with AI.
Also the conclusion is wrong:
Neither approach is universally superior.
The Rust approach is obviously superior.
Squarespace is very different to Wordpress.
But also you didn’t really specify how serious this site is. Is it meant to be a proper business or just someone’s personal site? For the latter Squarespace would be fine. E.g.
As for maintainability, it depends on whether the customer wants to pay you again every time they need to modify things. Many wouldn’t want to.
Uhm no? What makes you say that?
Yeah I wouldn’t necessarily recommend wordpress. Probably Squarespace is better.
Building from scratch, I’d use Fresh. It has two things I’ve always wanted but not seen elsewhere:
Impossible to say how much you could charge for that without way more details. Tbh there are a ton of off-the-shelf solutions like Wordpress that can do that already so probably not very much at all.
Sounds like observability, proper load testing, etc. beat a system without that. Saying that spaghetti code beat clean code makes it sound like it won because it was spaghetti code.
I haven’t watched the video, nor am I going to with a clickbaity and apparently misleading title like that.
it has modules for everything
Not everything. PyYAML, Pydantic and Typer are things I commonly want in scripts that aren’t in the standard library.
Simply do pip install anything. But best practice is to use a python virtual environment and install packages into that one.
It’s more than “best practice”. It’s mandatory on many recent Linux distros. And yeah setting up a venv and installing dependencies is not something you want to have to do for each script you run.
Its one of the slowest to write code in.
It depends what your goal is. If you want robust code that works reliably then I would say Rust has the edge still. Yes it will take longer to write but you’ll spend way less time debugging it and writing tests.
That’s kind of the point. You can do it in most languages, so why use a shitty one like Bash? Use a good language like Rust!
Also there are aspects of languages that make many languages less suitable for this application though. For example Python, because you can’t use third party dependencies (or at least you couldn’t; I think uv has an equivalent of cargo script now). Java would be a pretty awful choice for example.
Not necessarily - look at Starlark for example. (I’m also not a huge fan of that but it does demonstrate that you don’t have to have a weird functional language to avoid the issues of side effects.)
Right, I’m not saying it isn’t simpler in terms of syntax. The point I was making is that the syntax is simpler but in a way that makes it worse because while it’s easier for computers to read, it’s harder for humans.
it was only later discovered that they can be compiled down to native code.
That sounds extremely unlikely. I think you’re misinterpreting this quote (which is fair enough; it’s not very clear):
Steve Russell said, look, why don’t I program this eval … and I said to him, ho, ho, you’re confusing theory with practice, this eval is intended for reading, not for computing. But he went ahead and did it. That is, he compiled the eval in my paper into IBM 704 machine code, fixing bugs, and then advertised this as a Lisp interpreter, which it certainly was. So at that point Lisp had essentially the form that it has today …
As far as I can tell Lisp was always intended to be compiled and executed. That quote is about compiling the eval() function (which was just meant to explain how Lisp is executed) into a binary and using that as an interpreter.
Also I skimmed the paper that is from, and in fact Lisp was intended to be targeted by AI (in the same way that we get AI to write and execute Python to solve problems), which explains a lot. It wasn’t designed for humans to write, so why bother with nice syntax; just have the machine write the AST directly!
(I expect that was only part of the motivation tbf, but still!)
This comment perfect captures why I don’t like Lisp. Essentially “it’s simple, this easy to read code transforms to this AST”. Lisp basically says “we can make parsing way easier if we force programmers to write the AST directly!” which is really stupid because computers can perfectly well parse syntax that is easy for humans to read and turn it into ASTs automatically.
It makes it easier to parse for computers at the cost of being much harder to parse for humans, which is really the wrong choice in most cases. (The exception is if you’re DIYing your compiler, e.g. if you’re teaching how to write a compiler then Lisp is a good target.)
I’m not a fan of Lisps either. But I also thing the Nix language is kind of awful… So maybe in comparison it’s ok?
Yeah it’s great for little scripts. There’s even a cargo script feature that’s being worked on so you can compile & run them using a shebang.
I’d use a shell script if it is literally just a list of commands with no control logic or piping. Anything more than that and you’re pointing a loaded gun at your face, and should switch to a proper language, of which Rust is a great choice.
I mean yeah I guess that’s its primary purpose if you totally ignore the fundamental thing it’s meant to be doing.
It’s like saying the primary purpose of a seatbelt is to be easy to fasten and unfasten.