andrewg

JetA-burning piston aircraft exist - almost all Diamonds for instance.

Eric Schmidt was a developer - he wrote lex.

Early in my career I wrote Smalltalk in a GUI-based environment (VisualWorks/GemStone), with the browser, debugger, transcript, etc. It was an incredible experience.

Later, I used Common Lisp with SLIME and had a very similar experience, at least as productive, except that I was using my preferred IDE (Emacs) and saved the code to normal files so I could use more common tools like grep, SVN/Git, etc. I still built code into an image, which I could update live via the REPL.

I haven't used GNU Smalltalk personally, but I do like the idea of a Smalltalk that's less of an island, particularly if that makes it more palatable to a new generation of programmers.

Yes indeed - it's actually pretty nice. You just define a message for your configuration schema:

  message Config {
    repeated Server server = 1;
  }

  message Server {
    string address = 1;
    int32 port = 2;
    bool standby = 3;
  }

And then you use the text representation in a config file:

  # main instance
  server { address: "127.0.0.1" port: 4567 }
  # backup instance
  server { address: "127.0.0.1" port: 9876 standby: true }

And load it into a message instance:

  Config config;
  google::protobuf::TextFormat::ParseFromString(input, &config);

By the way, how did a luggage company convince the world they are a tech company?

It's the wing loading (max takeoff weight / sqft of the wing). The 747-400's is something like 155 lb/sqft vs. 124 for the 787-8. In general, the higher the wing loading the better the ride.

C++17 does - it's called std::variant.

  std::variant<int, bool, double> options;
  options = true;
  
  bool value = std::get<bool>(options);
  bool has_bool = std::holds_alternative<bool>(options);
  
  // or test which alternative is held
  if (auto i = std::get_if<int>(&options)) {
    // do something with int
  } else if (auto b = std::get_if<bool>(&options)) {
    // do something with bool
  } else {
    // do something with double
  }

Oh brother. People aren't work-producing robots, developers included. Different types of people bring different types of experiences, opinions, and viewpoints. So you'll make better products if you have a more diverse group of people making them. On a personal level, wouldn't you like to work with a more diverse group of people as well?

This would be impractical for really large monorepos like the ones Google and Microsoft have. They have virtual file system layers on top (MS open sourced theirs) to prevent checking out the whole repo.

In fact, it’s not just useful for the CI/CD pipeline - any developers making significant changes to base libraries or core infrastructure should be able to use the VFS in combination with a system like Bazel to run all (or a significant sample of) affected tests across the company.

Isn’t that true of kids in general?