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sema4hacker

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I developed and shipped one product with monthly releases for decades and always simply bumped the version by one: 1, 2, 3..

Anything fancier doesn't really tell you exactly what features changed when, so a table in the documentation spelled that out for each version.

I was refreshing one of our services. Part of this process was to migrate codebase from Scala 2.13 to Scala 3.

My first question was: why?

Evoking a vibe is what artists try to do. Visually enticing buyers of your product is what graphic designers do. Either use a designer or copy from the millions of expertly designed sites that already exist. You'll have to change it all anyway in a decade or two when styles and fashions change.

"Splitting the universe of intellectual tasks" would be a gigantic job. Various AI implementations already fail at so many tasks it seems reasonable for skeptics to claim the AI is not yet thinking, and the burden is on the implementers to fix that.

I'm amazed that city, county, state, and federal tech projects never want to clone best-of-show systems instead of starting from scratch. City needs a web site? Clone the best one you can find amongst the tens of thousands of cities already doing that. County jail needs tracking of inmate transports? Clone the best one you can find amongst the thousands of counties already doing that. State needs a sales tax system? Clone whatever other state system is the best. VA needs a system for hospital records? Don't develop from scratch, start by cloning the best system you can find amongst the thousands of existing hospital networks, and customize from there.

This 13-year-old article lists problems after a language has been implemented. Well before that happens, a big red flag would be the creator created the language more for the challenge of designing and implementing a language, rather than filling some real need for a new language. Also, even if a language doesn't have the flaws the article lists, a decent language is still doomed if it doesn't have the necessary critical mass of actual users.

To quote an AI lookup: Sources like The Historical Encyclopedia of Programming Languages list thousands, with some estimates reaching close to 9,000. The TIOBE Programming Community Index tracks over 100 actively used languages based on popularity.

That's a lot of competition.