johtela

There is something captivating in these old pictures that elevates them to pieces of art rather than just computer graphics. The sheer amount of work that went into crafting them makes each one special.

My sentiments exactly. The problem is that also traditional media now amplifies this negativity. A bleak world view is now the norm. Things have been much worse in recent past but still people didn't fall in to apathy. Objectively things are not nearly as bad as the common discource leads to believe.

S.P.Y. Special Project Y ad is my absolute favorite. Maximum 80s vibes : - D

Being old enough to have used both Microsoft and Borland development tools back in the 90s, I think Borland was clearly ahead of the game in Windows development. GUI development with MFC was clunky and tedious. Tools generated ton of boilerplate code that you had to understand and maintain. Borland on the other hand offered much more developer friendly experience, especially when Delphi 1.0 came out on 1995. That was hands down the best development tool for Win16. They maintained the edge in Win32 development as well with Delphi 2.0. So, seeing all the dirty tactics MS employed to steer developers to using their tools just reminds me what an a-hole company they used to be.

You can agree or disagree about the design decisions made by people contributing to Haskell language, but you have to admit that it's a pretty clever bunch of people. Haskell has contributed more to PL research in past few decades than any other language. That alone makes it a language every programmer should learn. Not because they should use it daily, but to learn what functional programming is in its purest form.

I live less than 100 km away from Olkiluoto nuclear plant, and I have never been worried about its safety. I wonder why this incident ever got any publicity outside Finland. Even here it faded away very quickly.

For sure there is need for programming language research. Language designers benefit greatly from the work done by the academia - for example in the area of type systems. But, OTOH, scientific community is not very tuned in the everyday problems programmers have. That is why some of the popular languages are basically hobby projects spawned from some lone programmer's personal itch.

I think we should have the best of both worlds; people enjoying the mathematical rigor should do PL research. And hobbyist language designers should pursue whatever ideas they might have. But both camps should acknowledge that the other side is equally important.