You don’t have to imagine it; you can browse the Linux Kernel mailing list!

That’s called a mailing list

/s

TypeScript is a language, and traditionally languages are considered separate from their implementations. When I first saw the headline I hoped maybe it meant a non-JS runtime for compiled TS, and I’m well aware of the difference. Yes, that would be a much larger undertaking than porting the compiler to a new language, but the headline doesn’t indicate how large a project this is, and Microsoft certainly has the resources to write a new backend (even a native-code one) for the TS compiler.

In addition to not actually being correct, I don’t think the information you’ve provided is particularly helpful in answering OP’s question.

The first part is confusing what “middleware” means. Rather than “duplicating” functionality, it connects libraries (I’m guessing this is what you meant). But that has nothing to do with a language being compiled versus “directly executed”, because compilation doesn’t connect different services or libraries; it just transforms a higher-level description of execution into an executable binary. You could argue that an interpreter or managed runtime is a form of “middleware” between interpreted code and the operating system, but middleware typically doesn’t describe anything so critical to a piece of software that the software can’t run without it, so even that isn’t really a correct use of the term.

The second part is just…completely wrong. Lisp, Fortran, and other high-level languages predate terminal shells; C obviously predates the shell because most shells are written in C. “Most original code” is in an actual systems language like C.

(As a side note, Python wasn’t the first scripting language, and it didn’t become popular very quickly. Perl and Tcl preceded it; Lua, php, and R were invented later but grew in popularity much earlier.)

Pretty much all languages are middleware, and most of the original code was shell/bash.

What? I genuinely do not know what you mean by this.

Yeah, I was particularly glad to see the change in loop variable semantics become a stable part of the language. That was a terrible footgun.

There are other things I dislike about Go, but I do think it’s improving while maintaining its better qualities, which is no small feat.

It is similar to old error codes, but I feel that this makes one always have to be mindful of error handling and the non happy path

Technically you need a separate linter (errcheck) to ensure you don’t just ignore errors. This is…not great. (That should have been a compiler error.)

Yeah, consistency is good, which is why it’s good to follow the spec. I’m saying that the decision to make errors be flat strings in the spec was a bad one. A better design would be what you have, where code is nested one level below error, plus permitting extra implementation-defined fields in that object.

The spec requires errors to be a single string, and also mandates using the space character as a separator? I’m not a fan of deviating from spec, but those are…bad choices in the spec.

Doesn’t prolog already “not work half the time”? (Disclaimer: I haven’t used it.)

The article is more about the behavior of members of the C++ committee than about the language. (It also has quite a few tangents.)

I understand what you’re saying, but I want to do whatever I can to promote the shift in attitudes that’s already happening across the industry.

And being late or never delivering out of fear of shipping buggy code is even worse.

From a business perspective, yes, usually true. But shipping buggy software can also harm your company’s reputation. I doubt that this has been researched enough yet to be quantifiable, but it’s easy to think of companies who were well known for shipping bugs (Microsoft, CD Projekt Red) and eventually suffered in one way or another for it. In both of those cases, you’re probably right; Windows was good enough in the 90s to dominate the desktop market, and Cyberpunk 2077 was enough of a technical marvel (for those who had the hardware to experience it) that it probably bolstered the studio’s reputation more than harmed it. But could Microsoft have weathered the transition to mobile OSes better if it hadn’t left so many consumers yearning for more reliable software? And is Microsoft not partly to blame for the general public just expecting computers to be generally flaky and unreliable?

Imagine if OSes in the 90s crashed as rarely as desktop OSes today. Imagine if desktop OSes today crashed as rarely as mobile OSes today. Imagine if mobile OSes crashed rarely enough that the average consumer never experienced it. Wouldn’t that be a better state of things overall?

I care about types not just because I like having stronger confidence in my own software, but because, as a user, bugs are really annoying, and yes, I’m confident that stronger type systems could have caught bugs I’ve seen in the wild as a user.

You’re not wrong, but not everything needs to scale to 200+ servers (…arguably almost nothing does), and I’ve actually seen middle managers assume that a product needs that kind of scale when in fact the product was fundamentally not targeting a large enough market for that.

Similarly, not everything needs certifications, but of course if you do need them there’s absolutely no getting around it.

But how does the alternative solutions compare with regards to maintainability?

Which alternative solutions are you thinking of, and have you tried them?

Rust has been mentioned several times in the thread already, but Go also prohibits “standard” OOP in the sense that structs don’t have inheritance. So have you used either Rust or Go on a large project?

Modev says they’ve been using C for 25 years, and used Rust for several years as well! Their whole schtick baffles me.

I also hope that some of the people reading this realize that OP is also the person posting all of the “stop trying to suppress C” posts.

Rust feels like entirely the wrong target for that sort of criticism, especially regarding “energy and resource intensity”. Rust is well-known to be comparable to C in its efficiency.

I haven’t told you to keep calm. I’m just confused about you repeating the same points, in the same words, over and over, even after being told that you don’t have your facts correct.

I’m not saying you can’t learn or talk about other languages; I’m confused by the mismatch between your posts criticizing people for promoting newer tech stacks and the ones where you seem to be promoting newer tech stacks yourself.

25 years of experience is certainly enough to have strong opinions, but until your last comment I had the impression that you had a year or less of experience in C, hence my question.