Extension modules are implemented in C because the interpreter is written in C. If it were written in another language, folks would write extension modules for that language instead. Also, it would be less relevant if people used portable C bindings like cffi, which are portable to PyPy and other interpreters… but they don’t.

You tried to apply far too much pressure over too large a surface area. Either make a more focused approach by not chasing Free Software and XMPP supremacy at the same time, or find ambient ways to give people options without forcing them to make choices in the direction you want. In particular, complaining about bridges usually doesn’t get the discussion to a useful place; instead, try showing people on the other side of the bridge how wonderful your experience is.

Also, I get that you might not personally like IRC, but you need to understand its place in high-reliability distributed systems before trying to replace it; the majority of them use IRC instead of XMPP for their disaster recovery precisely because its protocol jankiness makes it easier to wield in certain disaster situations.

By induction, that will only make your user base stupider.

They have two. If the complaint is that neither wiki is as rich as the Gentoo or Arch wiki, consider that perhaps NixOS users don’t need as much supplementary advice for configuring their systems.

It’s been two decades. What kinks do you think NixOS has yet to iron out?

It has nothing to do with knowing the language and everything to do with what’s outside of the language. C hasn’t resembled CPUs for decades and can’t be reasonably retrofitted for safety.

Your hands and wrists must not hurt yet. You’ll eventually come to see writing code as tedium.

Other way around, actually; C was one of several languages proposed to model UNIX without having to write assembly on every line, and has steadily increased in abstraction. Today, C is specified relative to a high-level abstract machine and doesn’t really resemble any modern processing units’ capabilities.

Incidentally, coming to understand this is precisely what the OP meme is about.

C’mon, I think you have better reading comprehension than that. He’s a professional data scientist specializing in machine learning. He went to grad school, then to big industry, then to startups, and is currently running a consultancy. He is very clearly not “on the side of the road.” He’s merely telling executives to fuck off with their AI grift.

Sarcasm needs to be humorous; you’re merely rattling off insults. Anyway, it’s pretty uncommon that somebody literally “can’t contribute code;” anybody who can learn how to use a computer and post juvenile horseshit to Lemmy can learn how to write code. I’m a former professional musician; writing code is my backup career, taking less practice and effort than playing the piano. I encourage you to try putting in some effort; for the same time it takes to write around 500 comments/month on Lemmy, you could probably build a program that automates or simplifies some portion of your life.

And seriously, by doubling down on the idea that being Neanderthal is bad or deficient, you’re spouting some nasty rhetoric. It doesn’t matter whether you’re serious or not; eventually, you’ll forget that you were being ironic. “Those who play with the devil’s toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword” and all that.

As a hardware hacker, I’ve experienced Apple’s anti-FLOSS behavior. I was there when Apple was trying to discourage iPodLinux. In contrast, when we wanted to upstream support for the Didj, LeapFrog gave us documentation and their kernel hackers joined our IRC channel. It’s the same reason that people prefer ATI/AMD to nVidia, literally anybody to Broadcom, etc.

Your “entire fucking point” is obvious from the top-level comment you replied to; you’ve taken offense to somebody pointing out that writing FLOSS on Apple hardware is oxymoronic. And it’s a bad point, given that such a FLOSS hacker is going to use Homebrew or Nix in order to get a decent userland that hasn’t been nerfed repeatedly by an owner with a GPLv3 allergy and a fetish for controlling filesystem layouts. Darwin is a weird exception, not one of the easy-to-handle BSDs.

Also, what, are you not anti-Apple? Do you really think that a fashion company is going to reward you for being fake-angry on Lemmy?

You’re literally posting from the SDF’s instance. If you’re not going to support FLOSS, then consider migrating to a server which reflects your beliefs. (Also, go take an anthropology course so that you don’t embarrass yourself by dehumanizing people online.)

Mattermost is the most obvious option; it’s a clone of Slack. IRC is another good option, although I know a lot of people hate it because they prefer features to freedom. I cannot recommend Matrix; the UX is fine but the cryptography has a few issues, as documented by Soatok here.

You’re cheering for exploitation of a commons.

And for anybody thinking of implementing M-expressions, look at Wolfram Mathematica, which is the only popular M-expression-oriented language. It turns out that high-level graph-rewriting semantics are difficult to make efficient! (If you want to try, you might also want to look at GHC or other efficient graph-rewriters to see what the state of the art is like outside Planet Wolfram.)

Well put. And this is a generic pattern; for example, GPUs are only faster than CPUs if the cost of preparing the GPU and retrieving the result is faster than directly evaluating the algorithm on the CPU. This also applies to main memory! Anything outside of the CPU can incur a latency/throughput/scaling tradeoff.

There are subfields of computer science dedicated to this question. A good starting point for the theory would be Pessimal algorithms and simplexity analysis, which lays out two concepts:

• The time & space simplexity of an algorithm indicates best-case lower bounds on resource usage, and
• An algorithm is pessimal if no equivalent algorithm wastes more time/space/etc.

For example, common folklore is that sorting has O(n lg n) time complexity, depending on assumptions. In the paper, they give that sorting has Ω(n ** (lg n / 2)) time simplexity; any algorithm which takes more time, like bogosort, must do so through some sort of trickery like non-determinism or wasting time via do-nothing operations.

You can help by gaining points on multiple SE sites and participating in elections. Please vote!

If it’s on Stack Exchange, you can help us keep the community decent by assuming good faith and being patient with newcomers. Yes, it’s frustrating. And yeah, sometimes, it’s basically impossible to avoid sarcasm and scorn, just like how HN sometimes needs to be sneered at, but we can still strive for a maximum of civility.

If all else fails, just remember: you’re not on Philosophy SE or any of the religious communities, it’s just a computer question, and it can be answered without devolving into an opinion war. Pat yourself on the back for being a “schmott guy!” and write a polite answer that hopefully the newbies will grok. Be respectful of plural perspectives; it’s a feature that a question may have multiple well-liked answers.

Yeah, this list of sites is making me think of asking for a book by loudly asking a library, a series of coffeeshops, a chud microbrewery, and an 11-year-old bully. Try quietly reading in the library first, I guess.