chillpenguin

When he said the average programmer is too stupid to program in a brilliant language, I don't think he was referring to C++. I think he was referring to non-mainstream languages that require totally different ways of thinking (there are many, and I don't know which ones he had in mind, so I won't list any examples). So he designed Go to be very familiar to average programmers, instead of embracing more powerful ideas (which average programmers would have a hard time with).

That was my understanding at least. If you have evidence that he was referring to C++, I'd love to see it! I'm open to being wrong, and it would totally change how I interpreted the situation if he was indeed referring to C++ as a brilliant language.

For those not familiar, here is the quote by Pike that is being referred to, where he infamously implied most programmers are too stupid to use a good language:

"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt."

I ran into this a few years ago (or I ran into a very similar bug). I started backing up my history file regularly because it was so annoying to lose all that history. I'll keep backing it up, but this fix is appreciated!

I basically feel the same way. In a way it is very liberating. All of those esoteric languages that were on my ever-growing todo list are now things I can let go of. Ultimately we have to ask ourselves how we want to spend our time, and now it is much harder to justify spending countless hours studying one programming language after another. We still can, of course, but we are now more "free" to do other things instead.

It's sort of sad, but really I think it is a weight off my shoulders.

I'm glad to find out it's not just me! My homelab has a lot of domains on .home.arpa, and I was getting issues related to this.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. What keeps me on mac, however, is the hardware seems so much better than the alternatives. I'd love a macbook quality linux laptop.

Smalltalk was the lisp machine of the future. Of course, now even Smalltalk is a thing of the past.

Why are all of the comments about the name? The author literally said this is a toy project for educational purposes... There are thousands of projects on github. This isn't even the only other project named "vanta" on github (I just checked and there is an animation library for javascript called vanta). So, seriously, who cares?

If OP was an actual company, that would be different. But this is quite literally a toy project.

Anyway, congrats OP! Your project looks really cool.

This article is insulting. It is trying to paint the picture that all of us who go against the mainstream are deluding ourselves if we think it is anything more than the digital equivalent of wearing a leather jacket.

Very often mainstream stuff really is actually worse than obscure stuff. I don't have to explain this to the HN crowd, I'm sure.

The article is pretentious (which is ironic since it is arguing for adopting mainstream technology).

The fact that this exists shows that there is a serious problem in the python ecosystem. I'm sure it solves a real problem, so I'm not knocking the author. It's more of a "state of our industry" problem.

shoutout to Mithril! Has always been an under-appreciated gem.

From the abstract: "Evidence links lifestyle factors with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We report the first randomized, controlled clinical trial to determine if intensive lifestyle changes may beneficially affect the progression of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or early dementia due to AD."

I took that as hyperbole. Hard to tell how intentional it was, whether it was a joke or not... But yeah, obviously it is not true at all.

Smalltalk, by far, is the best in this category.