What you say works 100% for trivial CRUD applications. Which is also, where SCRUM is still a bad framework, but at least SCRUM works on this trivial level of software development.
When a project is about non trivial projects, people, especially developers can not be easily replaced, because no one can replace a specialist with several years of experience on the spot. What I can archive in one day and what somebody else can archive on a day highly depends on what it is. Write a field to the database? Works. Write a rule engine? I'll probably be a factor of 10x more productive than an average developer. Write some GUI/CSS? A frontend developer is 10x more productive than me.
There are only relative few startups or non startups which need complex infrastructure from a technical point of view...
In reality, there is a strong bias in favor of complex cloud infrastructure:
"We are a modern, native cloud company"
"More people mean (startup/manager/...) is more important"
"Needing an architect for the cloud first CRUD app means higher bills for customers"
"Resume driven development"
"Hype driven development"
... in a real sense, nearly everyone involved benefits from complex cloud infrastructure, where from a technical POV MySQL and PHP/Python/Ruby/Java are the correct choice.
One of the many reasons more senior developers who care for their craft burn out in this field.
Sorry, you lost me there. I am CS and literally every single one colleague in IT with an electrical engineering background where subpar compared to CS students. (Of course I don't claim that is true in generell or for that there are no electrical engineers who can be great developers.)
One background I will respect is mathematicians, it is always a joy to learn from them and the can model very nice abstractions. Again, in my personal experience, no claim how general this is or that there are no exceptions.
I used MermaidJS for diagrams in one of my projects.
Initially it was fun, although MermaidJS lacked support for the diagram types I used at that time.
What stooped to be fun, is that MermaidJS needs a whole Chromebrowser engine to render the diagrams and it is built on Node.js.
Trying to generate my diagrams in another environment again was a total PITA and not worth the time.
I would love if the MermaidJS devs would port everything to another tech stack, don't use a whole browser engine to render their diagrams and make diagram creation easy and reproducible for build piplelines.
I am not too very happy that we need at least CSS/HTML/Javascript (ok, HTMX...) for web applications and would love to have a simpler tech stack.
For me, the biggest concern is CSS/HTML/JavaScript do not go away and it seems to me, when I choose FastHTML I still need a descent understanding of these AND need to understand how FastHTML transforms Python code on top of it. Templates show me mostly what I will get once they are rendered, which means less mental work for me.
Templating w/o embedded logic like Mustache are acceptable for me and I found good use cases for them. Once templating systems become obviously Turing Complete I see a problem. ;-)
Hi Jeremy, congratulations for the launch and the website looks very nice indeed.
I am honestly mostly interested in your reason, to mix HTML/CSS generation into the Python code. Disclaimer, I am very biased towards separation of concern and like my backend just returning JSON/XML/whatever data and a templating system.
Of course this increases the ramp-up time to learn a framework, but then it is IMHO very powerful, flexible and fast.
Could you perhaps elaborate on your choice for FastHTML and what tradeoffs you see?
The base system does not need a Firewall, according to them, and they might be correct about that or not.
IMHO the point of having a firewall which simply denies all incoming connections is, that once a user starts installing a few programs, sooner or later some of them might open ports, even w/o malicious intent.
If they want to provide an easy to use and secure system, IMHO there should be a firewall and each port has to be opened explicitly.
In the end, this is really down to opinion and there is no objective true answer, so I'd rather use Fedora-Atomic if I need immutability.
Second, getting everything from flatpak would be a good idea, if the software I need would be available as certified flatpaks. Downloading random flatpaks is IMHO the same as downloading random executables.
Third, the AARCH64 version is not distributed anymore (this was the version I tried/used), AFAIK because the initial install script could not download the non-existent Firefox for AARCH64 flatpak (thanks Mozilla).
In the end I still like the idea of Aeon and hope they change their positions concerning firewalls. Points two and three are obviously not Aeons to fix, so I hope we as a community (and Mozilla) get there in time.
Linux desktop user here, and you ask a very good question which frustrates me to no end.
You are 100% correct, everything which is executed with your login user users rights, can happily upload everything from your home to some random servers or exfiltrate information in other ways.
That Open Source solves the problem because the source code is available shows a blatant misunderstanding of the software supply chain, software supply chain attacks and the economics of Open Source. (e.g. the code you see on gitlab or github does not have to have any resemblance to the code your binary was build with, even if the code you see was used you don't know about compiler backdoors etc.) Further, all Open Source projects/distributions are understaffed and bad payed unless we speak about server Linux which is another story.
Why does Linux not keep up? IMHO several reasons
- There is no money in Linux desktops (Seeing how MacOS/Windows try to upsell users with every second click should give you an idea how bad the situation with Linux market share is
- People with the security and programming skills are quite senior and in high demand of companies (or running OpenBSD :-P)
- The Linux community is one of the most toxic/opinionated community in IT, so every Open Source initiative will have to fight for years an uphill battle (Look at Flatpak/SNAP, all the discussions/misunderstandings and crazy ideas people have)
- For servers we have SELinux and AppArmor, which could in theory also work for Linux desktops, but even for a security affine Linux user like myself it is too cumbersome/complicated to setup/maintain, outside of enabling it for browsers and other highly exposed programs
- Whenever I submit a patch/PR for an Open Source project which affects me on Debian, the maintainers literally beg me to take care of maintenance or at least Debian packages. I cannot even understand how illusional people are who want every software on earth as a native package for their variant of Linux of the week. We are far beyond the breaking point and the only people not seeing this are not contributing to Open Source, but complaining very loud and visible in online forums. Flatpak/SNAP are the only solutions we have if you want up to date software which was build from the original authors. (Remember the time a Debian maintainer broke SSH keys? Yeah, I do.) Especially security relevant software must be build by the authors and not some random maintainers who might or might not have a clue what they are doing.
There might still be a bright future for Linux desktop security, IMHO it depends on immutable systems/flatpak/SNAP. Given the current adaption rate and BS discussions, I expect around 2040 we will be there with a broken implementation and not ready for next generations exploits. :-P
I might be able to add several points to this discussion:
- For me, caffeine has really bad impact on my sleep quality, and it is an accumulative effect: After being abstinent for 1-2 weeks, I can drink 2 cups of coffee in the morning, and I will have good sleep. After 1-3 days of daily 2 cups of coffee, my sleep quality goes down
- Most research about safety of coffee is done with young, healthy adults w/o any medical preconditions. Which translates to, everything found in the research is objectively true, still it totally cannot apply to your, your health and life circumstances
- Finally, I observe people around me which can tolerate higher amounts of caffeine w/o any side effects. To the best of my knowledge there are very individual tolerance levels for caffeine and also very individual metabolization speeds
tldr:
- caffeine is known to increase anxiety, heart rate and disturb sleep
- YMMV and it even might vary depending on your age, phase of life, other activities
- if you observe feeling stressed, problems with sleeping or winding down, try to avoid caffeine/alcohol/etc. for a few weeks and observe if you feel better
Sadly I totally agree: Open Source is the playground of people who can afford it.
I benefited a lot of Open Source in my career, life so I am very thankful for all contributors (and try to give back in money/time, when I can afford one or the other).
What really annoys me, that my government does not mandate that software build with tax money must be Open Source.
That would go a long way to fund Open Source and improve the quality.
Let me elaborate: Scala failed hard in the sense, that it was IMHO a far superior language compared to Java around 2010 (! JDK 7/8 times) and basically is dead now for new projects (unless there are some die hard Scala fanatics on a team, and even they are moving for greener pastures), also see how Kotlin succeeds everywhere at the moment.
What I totally don't get is, that Scalas failure was _not_ surprising at all, and there were a lot of kind people giving constructive feedback, why Scala fails in the industry (example: https://gist.github.com/alexo/1406271):
- Slow compile times
- No binary compatibility even between minor updates
- Every feature under the sun was stuffed into Scala, making it impossible to transfer projects to 'industry programmers' w/o too extensive training
- Tooling support (like IDEs) was extremely lacking/slow/bad
- Not to speak about the community infights about the right way(TM) to approach a problem
Personal experience from me: Scala was too slow/cumbersome to use with subpar tooling. And I consider myself a target group: In love with FP but forced to deploy on the JVM. Besides my own experience, I saw teams of Scala developers fail to materialize any significant benefit in real world projects over 'dumper' programming languages, not even speaking about transferring Scala projects to non academic 'elite' teams.
I like some ideas in Scala 3 and IMHO it is sad that Kotlin (which is IMHO just syntactic sugar over Java) gets so much attention, but in the end Scala hat plenty of years to fix its problems and its failure comes as no surprise, because there was plenty of feedback. Are there still some Scala projects around? Yes, mostly Scala 2 because, surprise, libraries still don't have binary compatibility etc. For Scala 3 I have neither seen industry adaption or any enthusiasm from a wider community.
IMHO the keyword is 'microservice': Compile times of 30sec for a microservice are not acceptable for me, btw. The projects I am referring to were bigger, and the time to compile/open projects in IDEA where _not_ acceptable at all. (Btw.: I am speaking about Scala experts, not some new grads which didn't know what they were doing.)
Concerning your type erasure example, the id function obviously doesn't need to know anything about types. In the real world, types have traits/interfaces/expected attributes etc. and type erasure prevents the compiler to verify this when using binary dependencies, which is obviously _not_ what one wants in a statically compiled language.
Nice writeup, the IT industry is fashion driven for at least 2 decades now, and in the echo chamber of the internet bullshit like 'exceptions == bad' are repeated w/o any real world experience.
Checked exceptions in Java are an excellent example: They make total sense, once a more complicated program gets developed. Not that I love them, but I don't know of a better way to solve the problem of exceptions/errors when one cannot simply restart a process w/o problems. Checked exceptions are brilliant for showing the developer, where error handling needs to go. (IOException in my business domain? Doesn't look right, how can I solve it?)
The other thing which really annoys the hell out of me in the criticism of Golang is, that most people don't understand that Golang is part of a bigger system/approach to software development and complexity. Again, Golang makes much more sense for real world software which has to be maintained over a decade, than comparing a feature to another languages feature. Real world software is not written in a language, but on a platform consisting of standard libraries, documentation, a community and idioms. The Go community succeeded here in an impressive way, especially compared to other communities which are more concerned about ideology/politics/holier than thou RUST.
Funnily enough, exceptions is the one thing which I really miss in Golang, but I am afraid they will never be added.
Scala failed hard because it is kitchen sink of every half baked feature someone wanted to write a PhD thesis about. The graphs of the interdependencies of the standard library are an excellent example of a totally insane design, the Scala data structures have been at least an order of magnitude slower than the JVM native ones. Don't get me started about the tooling, which is too slow for any real world projects.
(The only ones I regularly see to use Emacs are Scala developers, because opening projects in an IDE like IDEA could take up to 30 min on high end workstations.)
Wirth valued clean design, speed and simplicity. Odersky wants to compete with C++ for complexity. As the article stated, for Wirth a feature would have to pay for itself regarding complexity, speed and usability. If someone can demonstrate how Scalas features came to pay for themselves, I would appreciate a pointer.
Finally... generics in Java are a shit show, thanks to type erasure. Fair enough, Odersky was probably forced for this implementation, thanks to backwards compatibility, still, nothing to be proud of.
I am not a big fan of Linux and it has its share of problems, but your comment just shows severly misunderstandings.
1.) Linux is rock stable as a server/embedded os, given the right distribution (Debian, RHEL)
2.) On the desktop Linux sucks (but sucks IMHO much less than the commercial competition), still, it is common knowledge that KDE and its applicacations have lots of problems with stability. KDE is not Linux, it is just a community desktop environment.
3.) Debian is not a good desktop operating system, unless you know what you are doing, which is also widely known within the community.
If you want to use a Linux on the desktop, use Ubuntu with Gnome or Fedora with Gnome and see if your experience is better. Xfce is another solid choice with high stability, especially compared to KDE, but that Gnome has payed developers and Xfce has not, is quite obvious.
When a project is about non trivial projects, people, especially developers can not be easily replaced, because no one can replace a specialist with several years of experience on the spot. What I can archive in one day and what somebody else can archive on a day highly depends on what it is. Write a field to the database? Works. Write a rule engine? I'll probably be a factor of 10x more productive than an average developer. Write some GUI/CSS? A frontend developer is 10x more productive than me.