nukem222

Right. Good luck finding people who want to maintain that. It just seems incredibly short-sighted unless the current batch of maintainers intend to live forever.

Notably, they forgot to improve on readability and maintability, both of which are markedly worse with perl.

Look I get people use the tools they use and perl is fine, i guess, it does its job, but if you use it you can safely expect to be mocked for prioritizing string operations or whatever perl offers over writing code anyone born after 1980 can read, let alone is willing to modify.

For such a social enterprise, open source orgs can be surprisingly daft when it comes to the social side of tool selection.

Would this tool be harder to write in python? Probably. Is it a smart idea to use it regardless? Absolutely. The aesthetics of perl are an absolute dumpster fire. Larry Wall deserves persecution for his crimes.

Eh, finger pointing does nobody any good, emphatically including this comment. Finger pointing towards someone who actually found a vulnerability is just bleak. I would not willingly associate with anyone who engaged in such behavior.

Maintaining software is hard, but this does not imply a right to be babied. People should simply lower their expectations of security to match reality. Vulnerabilities happen and only extremely rarely do they indicate personal flaws that should be held against the person who introduced it. But it's your job to fix them. Stop complaining.

I agree with all of this. I want to offer a tiny bit more hope, though:

> There have been a lot of bold promises (and genuine advances), but I don't see a world in the next 5 years where AI writes useful software by itself.

I actually think the opposite: that within five years, we will be seeing AI one-shot software, not because LLMs will experience some kind of revolution in auditing output, but because we will move the goalposts to ensure the rough spots of AI are massaged out. Is this cheating? Kind of, but any effort to do this will also ease humans accomplishing the same thing.

It's entirely possible, in other words, that LLMs will force engineers to be honest about the ease of tasks they ask developers to tackle, resulting in more easily composable software stacks.

I also believe that use of LLMs will force better naming of things. Much of the difficulty of complex projects comes from simply tracking the existence and status of all the moving parts and the wires that connect them. It wouldn't surprise me at all if LLMs struggle to manage without a clear shared ontology (that we naturally create and internalize ourselves).

Readers should note that it's super buggy. Occasionally your music will be unavailable, even though it can match it to tracks that ARE available on apple music (it just says "not available in your region" and is greyed out). Sometimes it also "matches" to the clean version of the music (may god damn people who think that censoring music is a good idea) and there's no way to correct it. I've lost an impressive amount of music just forgetting what's mine and accidentally deleting it when trying to figure out why it's not playing.

It was half-baked when they shipped it and it still has the same launch bugs. Still, it's better than spotify.

> Even a relatively minor hit on the radio is valued more than a super-popular song in clubs because it is guaranteed to have a higher play count.

Well that just seems broken.

Eh i've also used since the beginning. People love to complain. I put zero weight on this hypothesis.

Other interfaces at the time were just as bad if not worse.

> They've turned it around

Eh, the same complaints are the same as always. Expectations have improved, tho! I think that's what we're seeing here.

Yea but this only matters if you're considering fatness as a factor. This factor disappeared long before the headphone jack did. I have never in my life heard "i won't use that phone cuz it's too fat". Apple just irrationally hates wires. God forbid someone ask for a button!