russtrotter

That's certainly the pragmatic call, but while admittedly I'd never heard of Braid or his other games before he started showing up my YT feed, his takes on programming culture are very opinionated and compelling. He could have focused on making games and lobbing criticisms like so many of us do, but he chose to act. I'd say that's worth something.

Sometime in '85, my mom is an administrative assistant at the local University. She's an absolute wiz on her office's newly modernized setup with these "PC" things running Wordperfect all creating beautiful documents on nascent HP laser printers. She'd let me show up after hours to hunt'n'peck the final draft of my high school term papers on the setup. I knew so little about computers then, but i firmly believe the magic of this simple process and things like "reveal codes" planted the seeds for finding deeper insights into speedy software on slow hardware and how file formats work. She was so sad when it inevitably went to windows :-) Rest in peace Bruce, thank you for .. you.

I always feel like NASA has mastered the basic "under promise, over deliver" philosophy that keeps the lights on and the next missions funded. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at who they get to tap dance in front of the congressional committee or how they schmooze the decadal people to rise above the rest.

i'm thinking two themes here: the X in xcurl and the famous MS-ism "embrace, extend, extinguish"

I started uni in 1990 and went from a kid in his basement banging away on a PC clone with Turbo Pascal 5.x to a place with this thing called "usenet" on a "VAX" running "BSD" off of tapes and the map of the "Internet" could just about fit on a whiteboard. I sponged off the sysadmins all I could learning about renoe, tahoe and all things in between. I had no cognizance at the time that the death of this amazing world was getting thought off just when i thought it was the greatest stuff in the universe. I read the demon book cover to cover when I had no idea what most of it meant. BSD, whether alive or "dead" will always hold a special place in my mind. It's only with the long road since those days that I can appreciate the tone of this article. Thanks OP for posting it here.

Agreed with this general notion however, I'd argue that unlike a standards body, a big driver for JSON's ascent to defacto standard were the legions of javascript developers working at every layer of a tech stack using it as a low-friction means to an end.

Absolutely agreed. I've watched lots of his long-form videos on all those topics and initially I was always scratching my head as to why he'd want to reinvent all these wheels from the molecules up, but as I watched more, I realized that he's a journey guy, not necessarily a destination guy. To his credit, he's attracted a similarly-minded following of contributors along the way.

agreed, Carmack's work ethic, opinions on work and opinions of how those around him work are legendary!

The first half of the article started to feel like the XKCD "15th standard" meme, but at the end, the more nuanced point was presented: If you're already using Rust, stick with Rust. Carbon is positioned as successor language for those with large C++ codebases difficult to convert to Rust.

Interesting tact, and at face value that concession might undermine adoption given that Rust has a big head start and not hinged to a corp with a well-earned reputation for killing projects.

Technologies like WASI are coming on right now to do exactly this kind of access in the context of a sandbox. From what I can tell, they're going through a lot of the same progression of JVM and .NET IL back in the 90's and early 2k's but for whatever reason seem to be more openly embraced in all the places where WASM is gaining a foothold.

I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that this one sticks .. oh and, please make WASM run in a browser without JS :)

Yours is a fair question. Theories: * Cheaper to invest in your tools than overhauling your people/codebases/etc * Sense of wanting to give back to your core tooling * The decision maker(s) for the investment just really love Ruby?

The old C bum in me says this should really be a bitwise AND with 1 but I'm sure modern compilers and JS JIT/V8 runtimes optimize MOD 2 to the same.

haha! glad somebody linked this! i love how the site presents itself just as any "framework" would :-) well-played vanilla-js

I used to often reach for xfig for a quick tech diagram (boxes, circles, lines, etc). The "fig" file format, being text, is easy to drop into source control. It's fast and gets the job done. The feeling I get from peers, especially those who've never understood that unix/linux on desktop has long been a thing or really lived that far out of the Win32/MacOS ecosystem, look at you sideways when the file extension isn't .docx, or .ppt or whatever. Maybe SVG supplants fig in all the ways, but I still hope tools like xfig keep their place for quite some time.

I was one of those people downloading 386BSD to floppy disks in my university computer lab in '91 or so. The prospect of running a "real" Unix on my PC hardware was really a way out of the prospect of saving up all my pennies for a SunOS workstation (north of 4kUSD at the time!). Linux (0.99?) was released around these times and took off way faster for all the reasons outlined by responses in this thread. It seems like Linux was inevitable with or without 386BSD and its descendants.

Regardless, for me personally, I'll consider Jolitz's work seminal in my own thought and evolution when I was stuck in the mindset that only options were the big old klunky PDP 11/780's or the pricey SGI/Sun workstations that surrounded me in the same lab. He was part of that revolution of folks breaking those molds for that, thanks you Bill Jolitz.