Our great sponsors
-
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
Personal computers have become a distraction, like TV sets. People watching TV are not very productive. Before the internet we referred to TV as "the opiate of the masses".1 Not only do we now have a figuratively worse opiate than TV in the form of today's www,2 we have the legalisation of literal opiates for the masses thanks to Purdue Pharma.
1 https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,809673...
2 Circa 1996 https://github.com/mikemurr/nc110/blob/master/scripts/web
"The web sucks. It is a mighty dismal kludge built out of a thousand tiny dismal kludges all band-aided together, and now these bottom-line clueless pinheads who never heard of "TCP handshake" want to run commerce over the damn thing. Ye godz. Welcome to TV of the next century -- six million channels of worthless shit to choose from, and about as much security as today's cable industry!"
I am still using original netcat every day to deal with the dismal kludges band-aided together, now run by pinheads. Although I use scripts I write myself instead of those of the author, netcat's simplicity and reliability over 26 years is nothing short of spectacular. In the rare chance he still uses the www and reads HN, thank you Mr Walker for one of the best programs ever written, not to mention the entertaining source code comments.
> I am doing mostly Ruby and code in Atom, or Sublime before that. I don't have noticeable starting times for my editor.
That's interesting, because there have been articles that indicate that Atom has not only comparatively worse startup times (which may or may not matter to people), but also really bad typing latency: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
In particular, this image gets the point across well: https://pavelfatin.com/images/typing/editor-latency-windows-...
> Ruby is not native, but we'll portable. My point is this 'boring' work style is here, people just choose to not use it.
This is a good point, though! As far as I know, plenty of people still use Ruby (typically on Rails), or also other "batteries included" solutions like Python and Django pretty successfully.
That said, most of these languages have pretty severe limitations in regards to their performance and resource usage: https://jaxenter.com/energy-efficient-programming-languages-...
Some lovely benchmarks seem to confirm that, in relatively real world conditions: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
Admittedly, that doesn't matter for all projects, but why couldn't we have the ease of use of Python with the performance of Rust?