laumars

You are comparing Go to Python, JS, and C++, arguably the three most complex languages to build.

No, I'm comparing to more than a dozen different languages that I've used commercially. And there were direct references there to Perl, Java, Pascal, procedural SQL, and many, many others too.

There are languages out there that are easy to build, have a reasonable std lib

Sure. And the existence of them doesn't mean Go isn't also simple.

and don't offload the complexity of the world onto the programmer.

I disagree. Every language makes tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs always end up being complexities that the programmer has to negotiate. This is something I've seen, without exception, in my 40 years of language agnosticism and part-time language designer.

As someone who's written commercial software in well over a dozen different languages for nearly 40 years, I completely disagree.

Go has its warts for sure. But saying the simplicity of Go is "just virtue signaling" is so far beyond ignorant that I can only conclude this opinion of yours is nothing more than the typical pseudo-religious biases that lesser experienced developers smugly cling to.

Go has one of the easiest tool chains to get started. There's no esconfig, virtualenv and other bullshit to deal with. You don't need a dozen `use` headers just to define the runtime version nor trust your luck with a thousand dependencies that are impossible to realistically audit because nobody bothered to bundle a useful standard library with it. You don't have multi-page indecipherable template errors, 50 different ways to accomplish the same simple problem nor arguments about what subset of the language is allowed to be used when reviewing pull requests. There isn't undefined behaviour nor subtle incompatibilities between different runtime implementations causing fragmentation of the language.

The problem with Go is that it is boring and that's boring for developers. But it's also the reason why it is simple.

So it's not virtue signaling at all. It's not flawless and it's definitely boring. But that doesn't mean it isn't also simple.

Edit: In case anyone accuses me of being a fanboy, I'm not. I much preferred the ALGOL lineage of languages to the B lineage. I definitely don't like a lot of the recent additions to Go, particularly around range iteration. But that's my personal preference.

Not just using it daily, but I have scripts I've written literally a decade ago, and which haven't been modified at all, which still work just as well as the day I wrote them. Whereas there's a whole plethora of Python projects I've had to abandon in that time because they were never ported to Python 3.

I didn’t read the GPs comment as a justification.

That’s only a modern day theory and feels somewhat retrofitted interpretation of the facts (from what I’ve seen when researching this myself). There are various spellings of the surname, since names often didn’t have a formal spelling in the early days of book keeping. And some of the spellings begun with a ‘T’.

So the more likely scenario is the name was only picked because it sounded similar to their original German family name while being an English-styled spelling.

Given we are taking 30+ years ago though, the best we can do at this stage is speculate.

However even if the card game theory were true, it still doesn’t make Trump a powerful name in the U.K. because the fart connotation is still more prevalent.

I wasn’t judging anyone. I was just saying Rust isn’t exactly flying under the radar.

Where I live we also call it “trump”. Which is why many of us never understood why people would claim that Donald Trump has a “powerful name”.

However it did amuse use that a man full of hot air would be named after the expelling of warm but noxious air.

I was with you right up until “quietly doing it without much fanfare”.

Personal opinions of Rust aside, it has gained so much fanfare that “rewrite it Rust” is now practically a meme.

It absolutely does. What do you think https://www.nicalis.com/ as a studio does? They take hobbyists' indie games, acquire distribution rights, and polish them so they can see console release.

They're not the games studio doing it, so it literally proves my point. These people could just as easily do it for the GB games too but they know there's no money in it.

...why not? I think you're setting your expectations too low. People pay for (polished) Steam and console releases of RPG Maker games; and those often have far less effort or thought put into the gameplay, replayability, etc. than these games do.

Because those games are cheap as chips and don't require an original Gameboy to play them. Given your point was about polished cart releases, the requirement to own a Gameboy is a pretty big hurdle for people who are only casually interested in retro games.

Then there's the other points I've already outlined: Gameboy graphics, much as I loved them at the time, haven't aged well. Even modern pixel art is very different to the 4 toned shades of grey on a 160x144 matrix.

Though the real point of comparison that should be made, is the market for indie commercial homebrew releases for non-portable consoles; which is thriving even among non-retro-gamers, in a way that the market for portables, isn't.

Thriving is over-stating the market. There's a lot of resellers driving the prices up but the market for actual retro gamers is a lot smaller than the market bubble suggests. A lot of non-retro gamers bought their NES or PlayStation "mini's" but then went back to their current gen PlayStation/Xbox a few weeks later; leaving their retro system to collect dust. Even the emulators bundled with Nintendo's Switch Online membership mostly gets played by people who are already retro gamers, while the rest of the Switch's demographic prefer either Nintendo's first party games or the range of indie offerings.

And even if we take your comment at face value, you're still ignoring my point that the Gameboy has aged probably the worst of any console. Except maybe the Atari 2600. Don't get me wrong, I do love my Gameboy. But serious concessions were made in it's hardware design to facilitate it's long battery life. This made the device a fantastic handheld in the 90s but a terrible platform for modern gamers who aren't already bought into retro gaming. Sure you might get the odd non-retro gamer pick it up for nostalgia purposes (like with the NES Classic) but that's not going to be a sustainable source of income.

Consider: there are more people out there commercializing just the ROMhacks of Super Mario World (by doing full engine rewrites of games that were already full asset replacements, to get away from Nintendo's IP, and then selling the results on console stores!) than there are GB/GBC/GBA game authors attempting to commercialize their games.

Are there? Do you actually have some data to back up that claim? Have you done any in-depth analysis here or just pulling guestimates out of your arse? And even if you are correct (which I doubt), what difference does it make? The two aren't related. They're not even mutually exclusive.

Consider: there are tons of game streamers, speedrunners, genre-specific content creators (e.g. horror-game Lets Play-ers), etc, who play new console retro-games if and only if they come packaged in some accessible format. So they'll play Steam or console-store releases of these retro games; they'll play PC-accessible downloadables like Mario Multiverse or PokeWilds; but they won't touch a raw emulator. And, by-and-large, the developers of these new old-home-console titles are aware of that, and produce/port/polish their releases so that they can be consumed in this way, and so can generate virality. I don't see anything like that happening in the new old-portable games space.

There are absolutely shit loads of retro gamer streamers out there too. In fact I'm doing a stream myself tonight.

Disclaimer: as well as being a retro gamer and streamer myself, I know a number of relatively high profile people in the gaming and retro-gaming circles. Some who are resellers, some who are games researchers and some who are games journalists too. A couple of which are also really big fans of the GB, GBC and GBA so frequently get sent new games for review (albeit those games don't usually get published in magazines because, and I quote "not enough people are interested in the Gameboy". But they will publish reviews online).

Rather, I mean that nobody's fabbing GB game carts, printing glossy color manuals for them, putting them in boxes, and shipping them to Kickstarter backers.

Maybe not Kickstarter specifically, but they are doing the other stuff.

Nobody's translating these games into 10 languages.

That's a little unreasonable ask. Given how little money these games will bring in you can't expect that.

Nobody's QA-testing the heck out of them to ensure they don't have any obscure edge-case bugs. Etc. (This was why I brought up Planet X3: it's an example of a modern retro-game that is polished in exactly this sense.)

There is QA testing happening but like with the above, you can't expect smaller operations to pay people to QA. So you end up either having "QA" be demo builds, in which case most people end up with a copy so you can't do the premium carts that you're also asking for. Or you just have to accept that QA is a smaller operation but still have the beautiful hardware copy.

Even really well polished games on other platforms with much bigger audiences, like Xeno Crisis for the Mega Drive / Genesis, have had their share of bugs too. Even in the original days of these consoles, when games from big studios with big budgets to spend on testing, we'd still see new releases with bugs-galore.

But a desire to go through all the effort to create polished modern GB games, is the sort of thing that requires market demand — a willingness to spend real money to buy new GB games (whether digitally or physically.) No hobbyist game developer is going to spend a year on "things that aren't programming" to make a nice shippable product out of their game, if that isn't going to result in at least breaking even on their effort.

This doesn't even happen with new games on current generation consoles. So I don't understand why you're expecting it to happen with retro-consoles.

And a prerequisite for that demand, is public awareness of the fact that modern GB games are being created — and, more importantly, a public "brand" awareness for the people creating them!

I don't think awareness is the problem. I think most people just don't care. If you're a retro gamer you are probably already aware, and if you're not then you're never going to play these games anyway. And I honestly can't blame people for not caring. There's so much content out there these days that GB games (with all the warts that the GB hardware had, by modern day standards) simple aren't going to appeal to most people.

I think you're setting your expectations far too high.

Indie game jams are great and all; but they don't create brand awareness

Again, there are plenty of releases that aren't the results of game jams.

Exactly my point. People in here are conflating popularity with it being better

The previous solutions ignored that, and assumed the target audience is mildly competent sysadmin, not a developer that has no idea what UID is, let alone the rest of ops stuff.

But that doesn't mean that the previous solutions weren't popular for others outside of the developer community. The comments here are heavily developer orientated but that's only part of the story in terms of the wider container ecosystem.

Just like with other things, PHP got popular because it was easier than anything CGI related, "just write code inside your HTML", Ruby got popular off Rails and 15 minute blog engine demo, Python being just all around easy to learn.

The point I was making wasn't that "Docker doesn't deserve popularity" nor any confusion as to why it's popular. It was saying that the stuff that came before it was also easy.

Your example about languages here is a apt because PHP is an easier language for people from a zero coding background. But if your background is in C then PHP is going to be much harder to use compared to learning Nim, Zig or Rust.

Saying the containerisation solutions that came before were garbage, as people have done, isn't accurate. I'm not being critical of Docker; I'm defending the elegance of Jails. It's just that elegance is exposed in a different way and for a different audience to who Docker targets.

I agree however the question asked was specifically about preference.

Same here.

I find I need to listen to most of his albums a couple of times before I fall for them whereas Syro clicked first time.

Daft Punks first two albums weren't like that. They were a little darker and had a rawer production value with very simplistic (read: not very diverse) sounds running through them.

To be clear, this isn't a dig at Daft Punk. I love their early stuff. I'm just making a point that you cannot distill an artist or genre down to a single sentence and use that as an explanation for why you like something.

You cannot explain it though.

I could say I'm drawn to Aphex Twin because it all sounds really diverse but someone else would say they disagree and prefer rock music because Aphex Twin sounds really samey.

The problem with conversations about personal preference is it's not a rational decision. You either like something or you don't. Someone could try to intellectualize why they like something but ultimately that reasoning only applies to them.

Why do some people prefer Daft Punk to Led Zepplin? Or Tchaikovsky, Frank Sinatra, Taylor Swift, Bolt Thrower, Sex Pistols, Tupac or any other artist?

People like what they like and are interested in what they're interested in.

A thousand people could post intellectual insights into their personal preferences but a thousand more could cite the exact same arguments as reasons why they don't like the same music. It's just part of the colourful tapestry of human culture.

Oh I never meant any of my comments to undermine Docker. While I do have some specific frustrations with Docker, the same is true with any technology stack: Jails and Zones included.

I'd never describe Docker as being a marketing gimmick. It was definitely a "right time, right place" tool. But that speaks more about how the market (and particularly Linux) was yearning for something better.

Thanks for the interesting conversation :)

If anything this is testament to the failure of previous solutions to popularize it.

Maybe. But I'd rather not argue about popularity in a conversation about technical merit. The two aren't mutually inclusive and popularity is a subjective quality. Nothing good ever comes from conversations about popularity and preference.

Every solution before that required a bunch more knowledge.

I'm not sure I fully agree with that. Docker has a lot of bespoke knowledge whereas the previous solutions built on top of existing knowledge. Where they differed was that Docker was an easier learning curve for people with previously zero existing systems knowledge. Which is something I didn't really appreciate until reading these responses because (possibly because I'm an old timer developer. I want to understand how my code works at a systems level so made it my job to understand the OS and even hardware too - though that's gotten harder as tech has progressed. But that was expected of developers when I started out).

Which people ? I never seen anyone saying Docker makes it easy to run cross platform stuff, and it was always one of it's pain points.

The comment I replied to said: "get someone on Windows or Mac transparently install the image and run it with a few cmdlines"

I was with you right up until this part:

The fact that it's 2022 and there's still people that are going "hur-dur Solaris zones, BSD jails amiright" as if any of those technologies have any relevance is ridiculous.

Having diversity in the computing ecosystem is a good thing, not bad.

I'll take your point that Docker brought containers to the developers (frankly, I made that point myself) but that doesn't mean that Jails doesn't solve some problems that Docker (currently) struggles with. Nor does Docker's success mean that a little competition isn't healthy for the wider industry.

Dismissing the stuff that went before it as "systems administration garbage" because it was targeted at a different audience to yourself is a really poor attitude in my opinion. Especially when there are countless examples of when audiences different from developers also need to make use of software. Frankly, I thought by now we were past the sysadmin vs developer flamewars. But clearly not.

Aside from that minor rant, I do want to thank for your post. It was an informative read.

and what I really dislike is dissing a technology because piece of it had existed in other forms before.

How am I "dissing" Docker here? The comments before me are saying other technologies weren't easy or as feature rich. I'm saying they were. That's not a criticism of Docker. It's just a fact about other technologies.

yes, zones on solaris offered a lot of the modern SDN networking stuff. was it popular? no.

Popularity means jack shit about the quality of a product. Reddit, Twitter and Facebook are popular but the UX is appalling on each of them. Just as plenty of really well built technologies never gain traction.

I suspect the reason Zones wasn't popular was because Solaris wasn't popular. Had Zones or Jails existed in the Linux mainline kernel at the same time as they had in Solaris/FreeBSD then we might not have seen a need for Docker. Or maybe it might still be around and popular...who knows? It's pointless to speculate over why something is popular because it's unscientific and unprovable. But we can discuss the UX and capabilities.

yes, with zfs, in theory, you could ship a binary file and the other side can load it nicely (if you're thinking send/recv). was it popular to ship things like that in the open, public, in an easy to use fashion? no.

I can't speak for others did or did not, but I certainly did. (also see my comment above regarding popularity).

just admit docker popularized a lot of these and let's move along.

I wasn't arguing that Docker didn't popularise these things. I was arguing against the point that the other tools were sub-par.

while the tech might have existed, the previous ecosystems sucked and docker changed this for good.

And here's the crux of problem: you're conflating popularity with technical excellence. They're two unrelated metrics.

Running Docker on non-Linux platforms requires a Linux VM to run in the background. It's not as cross platform as people make out. The other container technologies can be managed via code too, that code can be shared to public sites. And you can run those containers in a VM too, if you'd want.

What's more, with ZFS you could not only ship the container as code, but even the container as a binary snapshot, very much like Docker's push/pull but predating Docker. Even on Linux, for a long time before Docker, you could ship container snapshots as tarballs.

Also worth mentioning is that early versions of Proxmox even had (and likely still does) a friendly GUI to select which image you wanted to download, thus making even the task of image selection user friendly. This was more than 10 years ago, long before Docker's first release and something Docker Desktop still doesn't even have to this day.

Because docker container are called container for this reason. That comes from the boat container analogy.

The term computer "container" predates Docker by a great many years. Containers were in widespread use on other UNIXes with Linux being late to the game. It was one of the reasons I preferred to run FreeBSD or Solaris on production in the 00s despite Linux being my desktop OS of choice. Even when Linux finally caught with containerisation, Docker was still a latecomer to Linux.

Furthermore, for a long time Docker wasn't even containers (still isn't strictly that now but it at least offers more in the way of process segregation than the original implementations did). Albeit this was a limitation of the mainline Linux kernel so I don't blame Docker for that. Whereas FreeBSD Jails and Solaris Zones offered much more separation, even at a network level.

If we are being picky about the term "container" (not something I normally like to do) then Docker is the least "container"-like of all containerisation technologies available. But honestly, I don't like to get hung up on jargon because it helps no-one. I only raise this because you credited the term to Docker.

---

Now to be clear, I don't hate Docker. It may have it's flaws but there are aspects of it I do also really like; and thus I do use it regularly on my Linux hosts these days despite my original reluctance to move away from Jails (Jails is still much nicer if you need to do anything complicated with networking, but Docker is "good enough" for most cases). However what I really dislike is this rewriting of history where people seem to think Docker stood out as a better designed technology - either from a UX or engineering perspective.

I personally think what made Docker successful was being in the right place at the right time. Linux was already a popular platform, containers were beginning to become widely known outside of the sysadmin circles but Linux (at that time) still sucked for containerisation. So it got enough hype early on to generate the snowball effect that saw it become dominant. But lets also not forget just how unstable it was, for a long time it was frequently plagued with regression bugs from one release to another. Which caused a great many sysadmins to groan whenever a new release landed.

(sorry for the edits, the original post was a flow of thoughts without much consideration to readability. Hopefully I've tidied it up)

Making containers was easy long before Docker came along:

- FreeBSD Jails

- Solaris Zones

- Proxmox (which was an abstraction over OpenVZ, back before LXC came along)

In fact because of all of the above, I was a latecomer to Docker and didn't understand the appeal.

What Docker changed was that it made containers "sexy", likely due to the git-like functionality. It took containers from a sysadmin world and into a developers world. But it certainly didn't make containers any easier in the process.

I can’t speak for the country you work in but here in the U.K. not every company has salary ranges and even those that do, a great many will try to negotiate salaries down rather than up (salaries are a businesses largest expense after all). Thus having a lower published salary gives you less bargaining power to negotiate a higher starting salary.

This isn’t a universal problem even in the U.K. but just an illustration of how the GPs point isn’t as inaccurate as you claim.

As I said, I’ve personally been bit by feature and know of others who have. So I’m not talking about a theoretical risk.

Things might have improved since I was last managing Cisco gear. try/commit wasn’t available back then and maybe those stupid commands (like “administrator-full-port-shutdown”) have been since removed to prevent ambiguous shortenings. But I did quickly learn that it’s better to be explicit rather than implicit. And frankly, I still think that’s good advice given the IaC methodologies that are now commonly practiced. If nothing else, you should be writing your config so that others can read it, and storing that config in version control.

Running a business on an Apple II is at least as silly as running it on an iPad since any kind of hardware failure is going to be harder to quickly resolve (unless you’re the kind of business that has electrical engineers to hand. But even then, it’s still not as quick as buying a new stick of RAM from the local computer store).

There is a sane middle ground between your experience and running CP/M on a 40 year old computer.

software that's had 30 years to eliminate every last bug

Bugs can exist in hardware too. Plus I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that every last software bug would be fixed. For starters any bug fixes in that time could introduce new bugs. And there are often bugs that are time specific (like epoch overflows).

The abbreviation convention on networking gear isn’t a good thing. It allows for typos to become completely different command, thus introducing unexpected behaviour. I’ve heard so many horror stories (and had some of my own too) because of this.

It’s been a few years since I’ve ran Android but I remember it was possible to have silky smooth animations via custom ROMs. The problem was a lot of OEMs slapped crap loads of bloat on an underpowered handset.

This might not be the case any more, it’s been years since I’ve ran Android, but there once was a time when running cyanagenmod (I think it was called) on a HTC handset gave you a better experience than iOS on an iPhone.

You can follow the same steps in Linux as you did for macOS too (OBS is also available for Linux, in fact that how I personally run OBS).

The reason the Linux instructions are more verbose is because Linux also supports writing directly to a virtual camera via the command line. Something that’s not so easy to do with macOS. So you can save yourself a lot of lag and system resources by doing so rather than using OBS.

I assumed they meant older in terms of heritage. But it’s still an unfair comment given how nice ale is.