Yeah it was inspired by Powershell. But it also has syntax that isn’t completely awful.

Yeah but often their trick is to push through the idea. It’s easier if people are just like “eh fine, I can just lie”.

Then later they say “it turns out lots of people have been lying! Lying is bad, so we need to stop them.” - then they don’t need to debate the idea of age verification because everyone has “agreed” to it already. They only need to argue that people must be honest, which is way easier.

Not currently, but in theory that is better, true.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/13565

No. Closest is probably Zed but it’s still way way off from being a serious VSCode competitor. For example it has no settings GUI at all; just a JSON file. It can’t edit large files. Font rendering is still hit and miss.

Ask again in 5 years…

How “production” are we talking? Pretty bad idea if it’s an important work server. “Sorry boss, nobody could connect today because VSCode’s mojam.service hit one of its many many 100% CPU bugs”.

I think in theory there’s no reason it isn’t technically possible, but I doubt it’s set up to allow it because that’s a pretty odd thing to want to do.

Edit: oh you want to access it via Android. That makes vaguely more sense.

Well not nothing. Android apps are quite easy to reverse engineer so there would be a high risk of them getting caught which would be quite damaging for WhatsApp’s brand.

I wouldn’t say it’s a lot, but it isn’t nothing.

There is certainly nothing technical stopping them from doing it, but that’s true of Signal too.

Bad code will be unreadable in any language of course.

Yeah I’m talking about good code, or at least not bad code. Let’s not “no true Scotsman” this.

Even for good code you don’t need syntax highlighting to easily see which identifiers are function names and which are their parameters in Rust.

Rust. It has all the good bits of functional programming but basically none of the bad bits.

Good bits:

• Strong type system (though not quite as sophisticated as Haskell or OCaml).
• Map, filter, etc.
• First class functions (though lifetimes can make this a bit awkward)
• Everything is an expression (well most things anyway).

Bad bits:

• “Point free style” and currying. IMO this is really elegant, but also makes code difficult to read very quickly. Not worth the trade-off IMO.
• No brackets/commas on function calls. Again this feels really elegant but in practice it really hurts readability.
• Global type inference. Rust requires explicit types on globals which is much much nicer.
• Custom operators. Again this is clever but unreadable.
• Small communities.
• Poor windows support (not a fundamental thing but it does seem to be an issue in practice for lots of functional languages).

Clearly within the margin of error. Especially because they were obviously not just looking at Bulgaria.

Not for normal people.

Your tedious query if I had filed a bug report.

complaining in a random forum would change anything.

What gave you the impression that I thought it would?

Right but presumably they chose the names?

So did you file a bug report

It’s not a requirement to file a bug report before you comment on anything. Don’t be silly.

How does it work, then?

I’m assuming that’s a genuine question… Normally when people develop a feature they do it once and then it’s “done” and any changes to that feature have to go through the whole feature request -> it’s low priority -> wait 10 years cycle before they actually happen.

Essentially, you have to do it right first time or it might never be fixed.

It’s an alpha release.

You really think they’re going to revisit this? That’s not really how software development works.

It’s an alpha release.

I was talking about Flatpak.

It’s as easy as pie too; they show up right there on the boot menu: <screenshot of KDE followed by apparently random numbers>

I really don’t understand why people have this little awareness of usability. Show the freaking date normally! At least add hyphens.

We tried Dolphin and Konsole as Flatpaks for a while, but the user experience was just terrible.

Yeah I’m fairly sympathetic to Flatpak. It’s way closer to how software should be installed by users. But I have yet to actually use it successfully. Is it really ready?

We went past that point many years ago. This is way overdue.

They’re probably pretty good for CRUD apps, which do tend to be like 50% boilerplate, but also I also wouldn’t characterise them as “bullshit”. Boring maybe.

I think it’s both true that you can’t really write an entire app with just AI… At least not easily.

But also I don’t buy that AI doesn’t make me more productive. I’m not allowed to use it on my actual code but I have used it several times to generate one-off scripts and visualisations and for those it can easily save hours. They aren’t software I need to edit myself though.

China can even block that based on traffic analysis.