snovymgodym

Python is not uniquely dynamic to a degree that would prevent an efficient implementation.

V8 predates strict mode, and handles all the exec/eval, monkey patching and object system abuse you can do in JavaScript just fine. Common Lisp is one of the most dynamic languages in the world and allows you to do ridiculous things in terms of meta-programming and essentially building domain-specific languages into your program, yet it too manages to have ahead-of-time compiled implementations that are very performant. Also PyPy exists.

There are definitely some technical aspects that make it hard to make Python fast, but they are not insurmountable. The reason CPython is slow today is simply because performance has not historically been prioritized by its developers.

It clearly isn't hurting Python's popularity, but man the performance of the reference implementation is embarrassing.

V8 made JavaScript fast in 2008, soon that will be 20 years ago.

Perhaps I live in a bubble, but so much of the production Python code I see is fully type-hinted and makes used of an aggressive linter & type checker to the point where it might as well be written in Go/C#/Java/TypeScript so that it can actually take advantage of the performance gains instead of being loaded into a runtime that turns everything into heap-allocated PyObject pointers.

In my opinion, Docker is probably the defining computer technology of the 2010s.

I know that containerization on Unix-like systems didn't begin with Docker, but I definitely think Docker was the first accessible interface for it.

I think app containerization is something that has so many benefits and it's the obvious correct approach for its use cases once you wrap your head around it. This was already understood at big tech companies pre-Docker (e.g. Borg, Tupperware, user app sandboxing on iOS and Android), but I think it really took something like docker to make it mainstream.

As far as I'm concerned, you can probably consider yourself like the Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie of your era in terms of the impacts of your contribution.

Despite recent social developments, the tendency in academia and "polite society" is still to dance around or engage in pretty blatant doublespeak when it comes to anything that sounds like bioessentialism.

That's the system we live under here.

You either have a government capable of controlling its corporations or you get corporations capable of controlling the government.

I've been wondering recently whether Netflix has any sort of competitive advantage anymore.

I see that they're still the largest streaming service by market share, but the ability to provide a streaming service these days seems very commodified.

It's societal and not economic. Look at a global map of total fertility rate by country and that much is abundantly clear.

I'm guessing he is posting from somewhere like Spain or Portugal where the youth unemployment is really high.

It's good.

Try to get a modern translation if you're not reading in original language.

A really toxic part of online interactions is that it's very common for people to see a tiny snippet of another person's life and then project all of their own personal resentments onto them.

Frankly, many of these things should just be public utilities.

Impressive technology I guess, but god things are trending in such a soulless direction.

I think this article conflates GitHub and Git a few times, though the author definitely knows better.

For better or for worse, I don't think Git is going anywhere. A lot of the recent developments in source control amount to providing a better user experience for git repos.

We might well see companies move away from GitHub as source of truth in favor of alternate forges with better SLAs or self-hosting, but dethroning git itself at this point feels very unlikely.

That being said, Git has two big weaknesses: non-text files and handling massive repositories. This is why you see continued use of centralized version control systems (e.g. Perforce, ClearCase) at organizations that need these things. Git LFS tries to address large non-text files, but in my experience teams tend to prefer VCS systems that handle this natively.

At a few big tech companies that decided to use huge monorepos 20 years ago, they've since hand-rolled custom non-git version control systems tailored to their unique scale. These systems usually work by combining a centralized version control server (similar to SVN or Perforce) with a virtual file system that selectively populates code paths based on the current checkout.

But the vast majority of orgs don't need massive monorepos or large amounts of non-text files checked into their repo.

> theoretically

In case you haven't noticed, all that our current system is able to do with increased efficiency is cutting staff and/or increasing the percentage of money that gets siphoned up to capital holders.

With H1Bs you get people who will do anything to keep their jobs because that's what keeps them as a legal resident of the country, i.e. people you can underpay and exploit.

If you try to make some College kid work 10-20 hours of unpaid overtime a week they'll just walk.

The entire point is exploitation and downward wage suppression.