HN user

oxryly1

668 karma
Posts2
Comments237
View on HN

A chunk has already switched to C# with Unity. Most other engines (proprietary, Unreal, etc) have decades of C++ that would require too much effort to migrate to anything new.

Nothing wrong with it per se. The externalities of it are a disaster, though: carbon depletion and pollution, traffic congestion, traffic related injuries and death, feeding the automotive industrial beast, less time for family and community commitments, less sense of belonging, etc etc...

And frankly these discussions on HN always dance around the special protected class of persion - people who use urban real estate as an investment vehicle slash secondary home.

I think a lot of these discussions are inspired by California (SF in particular) where the average homeowner is this person and votes in their financial interests -- to preserve (at all costs) neighborhoods that rarely have the historical cache of Boston brownstones.

Well, I guess its more accurate to say it's the only thing that homeowners will even tolerate -- they do in my city. It's the landlords that hate it, but fortunately they don't get a lot of sympathy in my town's electorate.

Now if you talk zoning and granting permits, that's where the hate really begins.

And yes, I'm referring to CA where the housing-as-investment vehicle has distorting things more than most other places.

It persists because it's the only remotely affordable housing positive legislation that appeals to both renters _and_ homeowners.

New market-rate development that would keep pace with demand is consintently zoned and voted out by the electorate. It's an issue in every city in CA for sure.

You left out the strongly anti-development electorate in Santa Monica. There was a measure on the ballot last year to restrict all development over 32 feet to require a city-wide vote. It was only narrowly defeated.

Rent control is just a scapegoat against that.

Racket has a few issues that make it hard to put into a production environment with a team of devs.

* Poor editor support. Apart from emacs and vi, many widely used editors support syntax coloring, but few do any proper indentation, and none (AFAIK) will do anything like intellisense. Only DrRacket really goes the distance on all those points and it hasn't kept up with the likes of Visual Studio Code or Sublime etc. You may say, just use Emacs! But if another dev doesn't use it they'll just ask for the language plugin for their current editor and then be mystified and frustrated at why they can't be productive.

* Poor performance. Out-of-the-box new Racket code will be slow. You can "precompile" it using Racket's built-in tools, which is great. But the process is complex and error-prone, and deploying your "precompiled" Racket code across a team in heterogeneous environment is not straightforward. My teammates are regularly stumped by how to keep our code running quickly. Racket also lacks effective profiling tools to address this.

That said, as Bjarne Strousup opined: "There are languages people complain about, and there are languages no one uses." I have used Racket in production environment for many years.