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Yikes.. I'm going to have to reread this later to grok it better. I think it's nice that the language has added all these new features (though the macros at the end tell me it's not enough..) - but I keep feeling like the direction of the language post-C++11 has been steered by library developers with these more and more difficult to digest features. Features that you don't end up using every day, and so they never really sink in.

There are plenty of simpler things I'd like them to tackle before. Just in the past week of work two examples come to mind (just to illustrate that there are still issues)

- I was trying to get some function calls to inline and had to fight the compiler for half the day to get it to inline them for me (I still don;t understand why it's okay that the compiler ignored the inline keyword. Can't we assume that I as the developer will know what's best if I explicitly put the keyword there?)

- Then the next day I had the opposite problem where a branch was being inlined even though I wanted a if(/rare event/){ jump to some method}. Again the language provides no tools for me to accomplish that

There are tons of issues with the standard library containers and data locality that have been ignored too.

C++ is THE high performance language - can we spend some time on performance and stop pretending that there isn't room for improvement on that front?

So is this a program that makes it easier for people to change jobs after coming to the US on an H1B? Doesn't sounds like they're gaming anything, but it does sound like something that's sorely needed.

As and aside, with all the offtopic comments going one: while the H1B program is definitely flawed I think it's amazing that no one stops to consider the ethics of draining the 3rd world of its talent.

If there are all these amazing talented programmers in India or wherever, then maybe YC should open an office there

The Asus Flip has very similar hardware (same chip) and it runs Arch ARM. http://kmkeen.com/c100p-tweaks/index.html

So almost definitely yes...

I'm gunna defend the otherside here. As a recent post on HN pointed out, when Google Maps happened people were outraged that you could look into their yards. Same thing with Street-View. Zuckerburg just understands that we're moving into a post-privacy world and they're really pushing the envelope here. For example I think people were outraged by Graph Search, but I think if they were to have released it in 2 years it would have been received differently. People were at first creeped out by Google Now and Amazon Echo, but now most people don't mind.

The thing they should worry about is pushing the envelope too far and too fast. I think for-instance WeChat would have totally destroy Facebook if it weren't for its Chinese-gov't tentacles. It has a much saner privacy model where you only see things from your friends ( not to mention it has a much simpler and nicer interface )

To the first point, I think this might be controversial... but try to avoid people you work with directly. It seems like it's better at first glance - b/c you interact with them more - but the reality is there are whole layers of professionalism and competing interests between you and them which actually kinda preclude you from building a system of mutual trust.

Maybe "trust" isn't quite the right word, but I'm struggling to find a better one. The difference between an acquaintance and a friend is that you can implicitly know they will help you and that you will help them. This involves being willing to do thing while expecting nothing in return. In a work setting that usually leads to bitterness

But that's just like my opinion man...

I think an OS class isn't meant to prepare you for working on the operating system. The vast majority of people that take an OS class aren't going to work on OSs, but they should appreciate how everything works. Using a language optimized for communicating "how everything works" clearly should be a priority!

If it's only for education purposes, why C? Wouldn't you want to choose a more "clear" language to get the ideas across?

I think this is part of a larger issue of people making programming their lives. Our profession encourages obsessiveness more than most - and making your work your life is something people seek out! (just look at startup culture)

I find it makes finding professionalism a lot harder. Most companies expect you to be friends with your coworkers/boss/etc. and then leverage that to exploit their workforce.

I like the artist alternative he proposes. With github you can now take ownership of your work/contributions. You can go into an open source project and make a contribution and then never touch that software again - yet your accomplishment is something that's tracked and stays with you

Sorry I misattributed that. I swore I saw the same style somewhere in his book. I still think it's horrible =) (sorry)

I remember one of the other preset themes was a lot better (though I have a lot of trouble trying to find a list of them)

I absolutely love your libraries and all that you've done with R. You've really transformed data analysis for me. Thank you.

I don't really like the fetishizing of Tuft's style.

If you actually read his books, what he actually does is present a mental model for what to take into account when designing. But his style isn't meant to be the end-all of typesetting or data presentation! The books aren't saying "see, I made this design for the following reasons. Now everyone should emulate me!" It's just one solution in the realm of all good design solutions.

One example I would immediately point to would be ggplot2. A wonderful library in a lot of respects, but the defaults are absolutely horrendous!! The default grey background with white lines was just pulled from one of Tufts's books without a second of thought b/c these grey backgrounds are horrible waste of ink when printing and are actually chart-junk b.c most of the time you have a white background - for-instance in a powerpoint (<- that was a funny b/c Tuft hates powerpoint)

Here too, the cream colored background looks gorgeous on paper and just weird and out of place on a webpage.

Just to be clear, [as far as I understand] it is a template library that does static analysis using the compiler. Kinda the best of both worlds...

here is the tool https://github.com/Microsoft/GSL

Introduced in this year's cppcon https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/CPP/CppCon-2015/Writing-Goo...

You should watch the cppcon2015 keynotes

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/CPP/CppCon-2015/Writing-Goo...

static checking of the core guidelines is the entire reason they are writing them. This isn't just a nice literary exercise

The static checker is found here (obviously still under development) https://github.com/Microsoft/GSL

It's started to lag and be very clunk for me recently (though maybe I just need to close some tabs). It used to be incredibly more responsive than facebook.com

There seem to be so many things wrong with this.

How about if the person didn't deliver? Would the project be delayed and reauctioned?

Haven't the problems of lowest-bidder quality been illustrated over and over?

Wouldn't they garner a lot more good will if they just ask for volunteering?

gamification of altruism

Has a dirty feeling to it, but I don't see why it can't work =)

I mean, it's only "necessary" because it would be a catalyst for the proletariat revolution. The Russians and the Maoists generalized on the idea and showed that it's more an issue of getting the disenfranchised organized - whether they be factory wage slaves or farmers that don't own the land they work

but Craigslist's anachronistic static-HTML feel is so charming...

However this eliminates a company's ability to retrain workers. Though maybe a modern company should anticipate high employee mobility

that's kinda a separate issue... that's maybe a problem with the tax system in the US?

Says the man who doesn't work in defense.

95%+ of the work done is thrown away. I'm not talking about cutting edge R&D projects that happened to not work out, but literally work will be done and then never evaluated and throw into the trash. Agencies have so much money that they need to spend that they will have no idea what they want and will just throw half a million at you to go do whatever you want for a year. Then they will look at a powerpoint of what you did for maybe 20 mins, nod their head and scratch their chin and then pretend the whole thing never happened.

The Phase I to Phase III ratio has go to me like 100:1

Or you know.. set aside money for retirement on your own terms?

I feel like recent history has shows that pension plans plans are a disaster for companies b/c you're just offsetting costs into the unknown future when you may not be able to afford it. (see american car companies and unionized labor)

It also seems to attracts complacent people ie. lifers (see gov't sector)

Though there are irritating artificial tax benefits, I always would rather get cold hard cash

Am I alone in thinking corporation tax is idiotic?

I think corporations are incredibly immoral institutions (due to skewed incentive structures), however - ultimately it's a collection of investors, owners and employees.

Why not be honest and tax the corporations on the outflow of capital? ie. dividens, wages and sales tax

Corporate tax is ultimately a populist hidden tax on the whole economy b/c no one "feels" it. If you raise it everyone will whoop and cheer (b/c fuck big co!) and not appreciate it's impact on salaries or retirement funds.

Maybe I'm missing something?

Surely if you're that large then you could invest in some in-house domain-specific solution. There are whole programming languages dedicated to doing statistics on datasets.

I just think the service hasn't evolved much since they started streaming nor have they really branched out.

Their success is due to their ability to secure rights to TV shows and movies - so thanks legal team

I guess it's a matter of opinion but I think you're wrong that you have to redesign stuff. Most of the guarantees in essence already exist b/c of best-practices (like RIIA) - they're just not guaranteed by a validating program.

Don't diminish it, b/c the presented solution is non obvious/trivial. If it was, it would have been done ages ago.

So either A - The Mozilla folks may have not thought of this solution

B - At the time of Rust's development C++ was stagnant and not evolving as it is right now. There wasn't a lot of hope for fixing it at the time. It's thanks to the work of several people that the C++ standards committee now is a fast moving organization.

If Mozilla were considering starting the Rust project in 2016 I don't think they would have gone ahead with it

Rereading your comment it feels like you've moved the goal posts and are being overly cynical. (This presentations essentially addressed your previous concern by providing interoperability between new safe code and existing code that doesn't have safety guarantees)

These are valid concerns, but you're being very dismissive of the benefits

I think confining errors to libraries is generally a good strategy. In effect you are guaranteeing that you're not going to introduce any new unsafe code.

It might uncover errors in the existing code.. but that's a much smaller issue and one that fades with time (esp if you're talking about libraries that a lot of people are using)

Is this "good enough" for a brand new aircraft-control/heart-lung-machine system? Maybe not. Maybe then you should start from the ground up using either Rust or C++/GSL entirely. But I think for most use cases this is sufficient and brings huge immediate benefits now. And of course with time libraries will be updated to include safety guarantees (which for the most part seem like it wouldn't involve a ton of work)

This is more of an organic process that basically in some form preserves the millions of man hours people have invested in C++ and less of a clean slate solution. As I've said before, you gotta make a living now in the current reality with the current codebases and the current tools. You can't just judge languages in a vaccuum.

We should be seeing completely safe C++ code soon.

Take a look at Herb Sutter's CppCon talk this year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEx5DNLWGgA

Reinventing the wheel isn't entirely necessary. Though if you're a SysAdmin and you write your codebase in Rust.. that's some nice job security. ;)

sounds like a bunch of platitudes with a lot of HR speak (a lot of which I REALLY disagree with)

And for having the "top talent" they have little to show for it on the technical side

I don't really see the catch 22. The gov't could have the best if they payed appropriately (which they don't, and they end up with a lot of lazy people that are there for the retirement benefits)

The governement ultimately does have experts, but there are too few and they're spread too thin. They end up not having enough knowledge to make unilateral decisions

They also are often in semi-indepedent roles competing again the small businesses. Think of the JPL or all the "Labs" (Lincoln, Lawrence etc.) or the teams at MIT. They have their own agendas which doesn't hold technology acquisition as it's focus ( it's more about supporting the funding of their lil corner)