I'm not sure about the title, which just seems weird.
But I think the broad point in the short post is right. Objective-C may look horrible today, but compared to the other choices at the time of its debut; it looked pretty damned good and even better because it was what NeXT was attaching its UI tooling to -- and compared to what was around at the time InterfaceBuilder was unreal good.
Certainly the overwhelming view of HN is that they're morally equivalent, but that's more an indictment of blinkered HN groupthink than a statement of fact.
Agreed. Apple is by no means perfect (far from it), and neither is macOS. But anything user-hostile in macOS is relatively minor in comparison to Windows.
And for anyone who hasn't used macOS, it's not a locked-down walled-garden like iOS is.
I was a pre-teen when I first learned to program on a TRS-80 Model 1. I was, at the time, an expert in BASIC and Z80 assembly.
At the same time I was asking my parents for quarters to play space invaders. And that's where I feel this article.
These are the shoulders I stood on. There were people who made that first generation of video games and personal computers. I benefited from their work. Their work launched me into what has been a great career.
But they are aging out and dying. Their work was foundational. And, at least to me, inspirational.
One of the smartest things I've done in recent years is to buy the complete Calvin and Hobbes and put it prominently on a table that I walk by daily.
I turn a page a day...
In the morning before I get coffee usually, though it's often too dark and I'll come back to read the two facing pages later. Depending on the day that means I'll read a Sunday strip and three daily strips or six daily strips. Once in a great while it's one Sunday strip and some custom art -- I presume from one of the books. Those days are a little disappointing but it's still one page turn a day.
I'm re-reading Calvin and Hobbes at somewhere around 5x original speed but somewhere about 50x slower than if I were to sit down with it and turn pages willy nilly. I've been doing it about six months and I'm still in the first book of the three that comprise the complete set.
It's a real added joy in my day and will be for some time. Some of the best money I've spent in a long long time.
I've had The Complete on a bookshelf, unread for a decade. And yesterday (!) I decided to start reading it, but man, is there a lot there. About 1500 pages, with each either a Sunday strip or three dailies.
I like your idea a lot, but I'm wondering if leaving such an enormous book open to a page would break the binding. Any trouble with that?
My personal opinion is that books are there to be used in the way one finds most convenient, not art sculptures to be kept pristine. If that breaks the binding, then so be it.
So far it has not broken the binding but then I didn't buy it as a collectors piece and if it does break the binding, that's OK with me.
Not deriding book collecting. :) I've been there. I've just decided on this one that I don't care about the book. I care about the experience. I bought it to do this exact thing with.
My oldest has read it multiple times, and my first grader has started reading it (struggling with all the big words). One of the longer lasting Christmas gifts I bought.
I think I got my first Calvin and Hobbes book when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade. I think over the years I collected all but one or two of the books, and read them almost religiously. It largely shaped (or reinforced) my worldview as a kid
They're right now working on shrinking the size, with the "portable compendium vol 1" out now with more on the way. I love the original books but they're a bit unwieldy for me to just pick up and browse, so I'm buying these as they come out.
My sentiment exactly mirrors yours. I own a 2017 S100D. It has turn signal stalks, and wiper stalks, and has been (and is) a good car. My only complaint is that I hate the HVAC being on touch screen.
New Tesla's are literally worse to my thinking. Would I like more range? Sure, I guess, but truth is that 70% charge on the S is reliably enough range that unless I'm traveling cross country, the car just tops up every night.
I will buy another EV. It's very unlikely to be a Tesla both for their ergonomic design and Elon's very public display of policy positions and opinions that I disagree with.
I'm not sure: "I drove with the radio blaring so I could not hear the siren" is something to brag about. More sensors == better. And the fact that LiDAR costs have come down two orders of magnitude since Tesla made this decision suggests that some of the economic drivers for such a decision have changed.
Part of the reason I've owned FSD since 2017 and yet spent exactly zero minutes in my car in the expressway, in light traffic, in good weather, in the middle of the day reading a book is because of the lack of an entry on the posted timeline saying something like: "Tesla states it will accept liability for any crashes that occur while FSD was engaged."
After all these years, it's fair to say: "In the 7 years that Tesla has accepted money from customers for FSD, Tesla still requires human supervision in all cases."
So far they have proven they are asmpytotically approaching something that drives badly and is in danger of hitting things.
> One of the primary metrics for leadership success at Google is how many people you have under you.
I mean ... you get to choose how you play the game.
If your goal is money and you are a manager then in any organization (not just Google) it's likely that income is going to be O(number of reports). More reports == more responsibility == more money.
But if your goal is to get something done and enjoy your job; you can play that game instead.
Perhaps one of the most life improving insights I've discovered about myself over the years is that I like managing engineers more than managing managers of engineers. The conversations in my week are just more interesting.
Now if I want to get a thing done that really takes 70 people then I either have to deal with it, or let someone else do it -- but just because "more comp requires more people" does not mean you have to aspire to more people. It's OK to like your work and want to get meaningful things done without aspiring to play the "more people, more money" game.
> If your goal is money and you are a manager then in any organization (not just Google) it's likely that income is going to be O(number of reports).
Income linear in the number of reports? Increasing with reports, sure, but way less than linear. Logarithmic is usually a good guess with this sort of thing.
I don't think the author's point is that "C is not a good language for systems programming." You are not going to have an equivalent to volatile int *dma_register = SCATTER_GATHER_BASE; in Haskell.
The author's point is that the drive to make C and other "model the von Neumann machine" languages execute quickly has made the compiler very complicated (the author is implying that "low level requires simple compiler") and that processors built to make such code run quickly are also very complicated. And those complications carry costs.
In many ways this is a "call to programming model action" and cites GPU as illustrating the potential when "new programming model" and "silicon to support it" are done in concert.
