esa

One rather obvious reason is that society has a lot of greybeards in general. The baby boomer generation was named that for a reason, and people have been living longer on average. Lots of countries are struggling with the demographic effects. There’s no reason to expect that tech or something even more specific like FOSS would be exempt.

Another aspect here is that FOSS is still kind of new in society. There’s just more people who have had the chance to age into FOSS greybeards than when those greybeards were young. (And they were thus likely to a lesser degree blocked by entrenched greybeards when they were getting started.)

This is the first I’ve heard something like that about Iceland; but I do know a little bit about Icelandic personal ID numbers.

Yeah, it’s essentially a weathervane or thermometer. You can indicate the state of a country by it.

At this point the US has joined the ranks of, well, grim theocracies. Not that the people at the top in the US worship anything but Mammon.

>What is C++? A miserable huge pile of "should"s

TIOBE literally ranks languages by search results. It’s at best a measure of SEO. It is, generally, a trash metric that shouldn’t be used for anything.

I’ve moved on from vim to neovim, and I think I’ll continue using something in that family in the future. It’s a pretty stable experience overall, but the inclusion of LSPs and tree-sitter have been good improvements too.

Ultimately editors are tools, similar to keyboards, os-es, screens, chairs, shoes and so on. There are some objective quality differences between a well-constructed tool and some slapdash nonsense, and there are a huge amount of subjective quality differences. What suits me may not suit you, and vice versa.

It’s generally good to try out some new (to you) stuff and see if you like it. If you do, great; if you don’t, well, now you know. I think my worst experience was with Acme (or Wily? can’t remember), during a phase where I experimented with Plan 9 stuff. Ultimately very not my cup of tea, but apparently Rob Pike (who made it) and some other gophers still enjoy it? Which is good for them, just like it’s good for me that I can choose not to use it. It’s just personal tastes, and I still think it’s good that I gave it a go.

The debate over holding down modifier keys vs modes is also a part of the Emacs vs vi debate from many decades ago. There might be some statistics for what works best for the most people now, but again, use what suits you. And try some new stuff when you get curious, it’s generally good for you.

That’s what the bloatee is for

Smells a bit Scandinavian to me. In Norwegian we also use “ur” that way, including “urspråk” (Ursprache, ur-language). We have a different word for origin (opphav), so ur remains a prefix that’s difficult for us to translate.

Going by Wikipedia however, the English translation for Norwegian urspråk and German Ursprache is proto-language.

I had to figure out how to do the factory reset at the gym after I got the blue triangle of death when leaving work. Oddly enough it synced the gym plan I wanted and leaving it connected to the phone didn’t seem to produce any other ill effects, but I stayed away from anything using GPS.

But yeah, the general advice for Garmins just now seems to be “just don’t” and hope it doesn’t triangle itself until the fix is out

Yeah, same. Post-metal or thereabouts towards jazz can work too IME. Stuff like Russian Circles, Earthless, Elephant9. But stuff like Waveshaper and Amynedd are often safer bets.

They’re stuck in a reboot loop, but not bricked. A factory reset works (but the problem may reappear on update).

Idunno, might just have ended up as an even more terrifying variant of cassowary.

Yeah, they’re a good example of conspicuous consumption.

Smartphones – and to a lesser degree, tablets – kind of are not a phenomenal programming platform.

[…]

But not everyone in 1990 had a personal computer, and I would venture to say that the group that did probably was not a representative sample of the population. I’d give decent odds that a lower proportion of the population as a whole could program in 1990 than today.

Yeah, and these things influence each other. Today we have a networked computer in our pockets, and depending on where you live, they may or may not be required or the standard way to do tasks like get a bus ticket, login to government websites so you can do your taxes and whatnot, transfer money, and a bunch of other tasks that to a degree are really sensitive.

So as we have a bunch of barely computer-literate people functionally dependent on these devices, we also need them to be locked down and secure. MS had some grand thoughts about “code everywhere”, which turns out is pretty awful security-wise, especially with gullible networked users. The users in this community have very different capabilities and needs than the users who might not even want a computer, but feel forced to get one because the government stopped using paper and bank and post offices no longer exist. (This is, essentially, what it’s like in modern Norway. We might be ending home delivery of snail mail soon; mail delivery every other weekday seems to be an unnecessary expense.) Beyond the lack of a keyboard, the platform has a bunch of constraints that don’t make for fun computing, but they absolutely need to be there. Unfortunately we also wind up with a split between the common restricted platforms, and the casual, customizable platforms, and not everybody gets to be exposed to the latter.

There are probably, in absolute numbers, a whole lot more people who know js or Python than people who knew BASIC in the 80s. In addition there are people who are pretty good at spreadsheet programming, and other tasks that are essentially coding, even if they’re not listed as regular programming languages.

Quotes are OK, shellcheck is happy, but, according to gtfobins, you can abuse tar, so running the script like this: ./test.sh /dev/null --checkpoint=1 --checkpoint-action=exec=/bin/sh ends up spawning an interactive shell…

This runs into a part of the unix philosophy about doing one thing and doing it well: Extending programs to have more (absolutely useful) functionality winds up becoming a security risk. The shell is generally geared towards being a collection of shortcuts rather than a normal, predictable but tedious API.

For a script like that you’d generally want to validate that the input is actually what you expect if it needs to handle hostile users, though. It’ll likely help the sleepy users too.

Yeah agreed on the 100 lines, or some other heuristic in the direction of “this script will likely continue to grow in complexity and I should switch to a language that’s better suited to handle that complexity”.

I’d interpret vertical content growth as content per area, deep story lines, stuff like that. It’s a common enough comment, see e.g. MMO players complaining about “content drought”.

I think I mentioned it, but inverse: The only data type I’m comfortable with in bash are simple string scalars; plus some simple integer handling I suppose. Once I have to think about stuff like "${foo[@]}" and the like I feel like I should’ve switched languages already.

Plus I rarely actually want arrays, it’s way more likely I want something in the shape of

@dataclass(frozen=True)
class Foo:
    # …

foos: set[Foo] = …

-e is great until there’s a command that you want to allow to fail in some scenario.

Yeah, I sometimes do

set +e
do_stuff
set -e

It’s sort of the bash equivalent of a

try { 
  do_stuff()
} 
catch { 
  /* intentionally bare catch for any exception and error */
  /* usually a noop, but you could try some stuff with if and $? */ 
}

I know OP is talking about bash specifically but pipefail isn’t portable and I’m not always on a system with bash installed.

Yeah, I’m happy I don’t really have to deal with that. My worst-case is having to ship to some developer machines running macos which has bash from the stone ages, but I can still do stuff like rely on [[ rather than have to deal with [ . I don’t have a particular fondness for using bash as anything but a sort of config file (with export SETTING1=... etc) and some light handling of other applications, but I have even less fondness for POSIX sh. At that point I’m liable to rewrite it in Python, or if that’s not availaible in a user-friendly manner either, build a small static binary.

At the level you’re describing it’s fine. Preferably use shellcheck and set -euo pipefail to make it more normal.

But once I have any of:

• nested control structures, or
• multiple functions, or
• have to think about handling anything else than simple strings that other programs manipulate (including thinking about bash arrays or IFS), or
• bash scoping,
• producing my own formatted logs at different log levels,

I’m on to Python or something else. It’s better to get off bash before you have to juggle complexity in it.