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Pre-wealth, Notch was friendly, kind, and downright jolly! Even as he started to accumulate wealth, he was donating huge sums of money to various indie games. Whenever a Humble Bundle dropped he would top the leaderboard for the amount he paid for the games. Things took a major turn for the worse after the acquisition and after he left Mojang. That's when he ran out of purpose and turned to drugs and conspiracy theories.
You never “need to” learn much of anything, but I think it would give you a different perspective. You don’t know what you don’t know.
This is fine advice for a personal project, but I don’t recommend proliferating a new custom framework if you expect other people to join and ramp up on your codebase. It’s nice to be able to join a shop that’s using something you’re already familiar with.
Oh! This erratum is the point I’ve been trying to get across. It sounds like we agree on this?
This isn't really the point I'm responding to.
I am responding to this idea:
If you are relying on testing for correctness, you have already lost. In any language. As Dijkstra noted, testing can only prove a program wrong. The way to get correct programs, in any expressive-enough language, is by construction. At each level, do only operations that are well-defined by the level below. Expose only well-defined operations to the next level up.
I believe this idea is naïve. CPUs contain undocumented instructions, and they expose implementation details via speculative execution and timing attacks.
So... by this metric, we have already lost.
I think I also take issue with the idea that there is a stable C++ dialect. GCC, Clang, and MSVC have always disagreed on how they interpret the C++ standard.
If you want portable code, there is no substitute for testing your program with every compiler you support and on every architecture you support. Proofs won't save you and the standard won't save you, because both proofs and the standard assume that we started from a bug-free foundation that doesn't actually exist.
C++ is even less well-defined than C, though. We find defects in the standard and inconsistencies between Clang/G++/MSVC every day.
You’re demanding a rigor that is not possible with a modern technology stack.
You do know that every operating system and CPU in existence has ill-defined operations, right?
The best-defined software I know of is SQLite. Every function is carefully documented with a description of all failure modes and returned error codes.
But also... SQLite has one of the most comprehensive test suites in existence, so I guess they lost? https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html
It seems to me like TypeScript's soundness hole in #4 could be fixed.
1. I'd want TS to show an error on the line where the aliasing occurs, encouraging me to clone the list if I want to change its type from a distance.
But if your program is single-threaded, you don’t need an `Rc` type. The whole point of `Rc` and `std::shared_ptr` is so an object can have one owning pointer per thread, in cases where you’re not sure which thread will finish using the object last.
Uh... Instagram is a Django app...
Keldon Jones’ Race for the Galaxy AI is brilliant. Every line is documented C. It trains and deploys a neural net. It has a fast and functional GUI. Most diehard RftG players have cut their teeth by losing to Keldon a few dozen times before really learning the game.
Keldon was contracted a few years later to develop the RftG apps on iOS and Android, which are easily worth $4.
Source: https://github.com/bnordli/rftg
Precompiled binaries: http://keldon.net/rftg/