And a whole lot of content that I frankly would have preferred not to have seen.

When you’re 12 and your parents have no idea what you’re doing, you’ll end up in very dark corners.

And when people started writing books instead of memorizing epic poems.

There’s no hope anymore. Simple as that.

For a pretty long time, probably starting even before WW2 in some countries, there was this hope “tomorrow will be better, my children can have a better life”. And that hope was at least somewhat true.

But it’s gone now, and the children understand that. What is the positive narrative for a 16 year old child now? They know exactly that they’ll have a worse life than their parents in many regards.

And you didn’t even mention climate change.

I’m in my early 30s, so I experienced cooler summers, but also the crises in 2007 and the following years (where basically every Eurozone country south of the Alps almost collapsed).

I also experienced the refugee “crisis” in Germany and obviously covid.

What I learned is, that the only thing our governments can do is throwing money at rich people. Literally nothing else. Every single crisis, conflict, bad situation was met with utter incompetence, corruption, and often enough some new way to blame poor people.

I can’t speak for other countries, but ask yourself, what actually changed for the better in the last 20 years thanks to any government action? Rents? Still high. Education? Educate yourself. Healthcare? Here’s aspirin, good luck.

The young people of today see that our entire society is moving in an extremely dangerous direction of collapse, and they feel like they can do nothing against it. They feel powerless against a system that ostensibly is super open and democratic. That’s why so many (not only young people) are voting for extremists. They want to see everything burn.

Had to work with a fixed string format years ago. Absolute hell.

Something like 200 variables, all encoded in fixed length strings concatenated together. The output was the same.

…and some genius before me used + instead of stringbuilders or anything dignified, so it ran about as good as lt. Dan.

And there are some truly magic tools.

XSDs are far from perfect, but waaay more powerful than json schema.

XSLT has its problems, but completely transforming a document to a completely different structure with just a bit of text is awesome. I had to rewrite a relatively simple XSLT in Java and it was something like 10 times more lines.

Python caches bytecode, so the translation happens only once.

Java loads everything immediately and keeps it in memory. All beans, all connections, etc. That takes up a ton of memory.

Of course, but I’m not productive in it.

If I have to do everything myself, it will take more time to get it done. The trade-off is of course always control/speed vs convenience, but C is definitely too inconvenient for me.

Not that limited. Limited means an old thin client, not a microcontroller. I already set up a small web server on a pi pico with mpy, so it’s quite impressive. But from what I understand, the interop with “MacroPython” is not that great.

Did you use mpy for x86 devices? Are the limitations worth it?

But that would mean either using Graal/native image or going full Scala, right?

I only used Scala for Gatling, where it’s obviously very java-y.

There’s nothing to really grow. It’s mostly just small helpers. Aggregate sensor data, pull data from A and push it to B every hour, a small dashboard, etc.

C is too involved for my case , I want to be productive after all.

Rust is already rather low level, though there are some cool looking frameworks.

Train nerds are a weird bunch.

Please never change.

The long-term goal is for Rust to overtake C in the kernel (from what I understand

Your understanding wrong. Rust is limited to some very specific niches within the kernel and will likely not spread out anytime soon.

critical code gets left untouched (a lot of the time) because no one wants to be the one that breaks shit

The entire kernel is “critical”. The entire kernel runs - kind of by definition - in kernel space. Every bug there has the potential for privilege escalation or faults - theoretically even hardware damage. So following your advice, nobody should every touch the kernel at all.

Germany has a Sovereign Tech Fund for exactly this, and while it’s not perfect, it’s one of the better uses of my tax euros.

Just to play devil’s advocate: Mario is without a doubt the oldest recognizable character that still has some modern appearances. You can’t really take pong and some shitty mobile game as a comparison.

Replacing C with Rust in the upstream kernel is akin to replacing the engine in a car while it’s running or being used every day.

That’s in no way what’s been proposed. Rust is used in a very well defined niche, nobody wants to get rid of C.

But it’s just that sentiment that got us here, you’re arguing against a non-existent threat, and thus reject the whole proposal.

And it’s a bad argument anyway. You’re only good at memory management until the first bug takes down production.

Rust isn’t a panacea and certainly has problems, but eliminating an entire class of potentially very dangerous bugs is a very good argument.

And DBAs. I’m currently working on a project where I said from the very start, I can set up this DB in k8s and I can get it to work decently, but I have neither the knowledge nor the time to get it right. Please give me someone who knows how this works.

No, don’t worry, it’ll be fine, we don’t need that, this kuverneles thing I keep hearing about handles that!!!

Six months of hard contact with the enemy on production later:

Well, we’re currently looking for someone who actually knows how DBs work, because we have one of those issues that would cost a proper DBA 5min and me 5 months.

To be fair, a lot of roles simply disappeared over the years.

Developers today are much more productive than 30 years ago, mostly because someone automated the boring parts away.

A modern developer can spin up a simple crud app including infrastructure in a day or so. That’s much much more productive than 1995. We just cram a lot more of the world into software, so we need 20x the amount of developers we needed back then.

It’s really weird, though, that nobody really created a language/tool to bridge these two world. It’s always just generating one representation from the other, mostly in a bad way.

I’d argue, that for many problems, a graphical view of the system can help reasoning. But there simply is nothing in that regard.