Working with a variety of AI models (Claude, Grok Build, various locally run models) and agents, I am scratching an itch.
When people deploy python and perl code, they have to either export their entire environment, or build a container. The latter is not possible in a number of deployment cases, and the former carries all manner of dependency radius gotchas.
So I am building (ok, I am prompting/testing/reviewing, the agent is doing the heavy lift) compilers for each of python 3.14.x [1] right now, and perl 5.42.x [2], that can generate static code.
Early stages, perlc does work well, pyc is a work in progress.
Look for llmfit on github. This will help with that analysis. I've found it reasonably accurate. If you have Ollama already installed, it can download the relevant models directly.
Teams regularly fails at video conferencing. It complains of low network bandwidth at random times, and I check my firewall (OpnSense with fq_codel enabled and reasonable bandwidth limits) to note that it under very light load.
I am not sure if this is a server side thing at Microsoft, or a problem with the application itself. True under Windows, Linux, via local app, and via the web app.
For larger meetings (> 50 people), we use zoom. Unlike teams, zoom generally just works. Quite well in fact.
Teams is simply crap software, forced upon us. If we could jettison that and Outlook, I would be grateful. Though our IT looks at us in an unblinking stare, if we ask them to allow us to use any of the better clients on mobile, laptop, desktop, windows or linux. Its almost as if our third eye in the middle of our forehead opened up.
I've used ddd for debugging statically compiled code, C C++ and Fortran. It is quirky. Its weirder with MPI, as you get lots of debug windows.
For dynamic languages, Perl Python and others, I use komodo from ActiveState. Been a customer of theirs since 2007 or so. Excellent tool, though with a few quirks as well.
Julia has/had a native debugger, and an atom plugin, but seems to be moving towards vscode. Vscode is many things, and is highly opinionated. I've gotten the debugger to "work", albeit not being helpful for the Julia I was working on. I tried the C/Fortran plugins for it and was disappointed.
I wasn't aware that totalview went OSS. I thought it was closed.
Yeah ... most of my 2-company-ago's software stack was written in Perl. Worked very well.
The specific example cited
while(<>){ $h{$_}++ && ... }
is quite understandable to anyone who has used Perl for more than a few weeks. Its a common pattern. Complaining about this, which is, for the uninitiated, looping over reading each line from STDIN until EOF, incrementing a hash variable indexed by each line, etc.
This is a very common pattern in perl. Draw your own conclusion as to whether complaining about idiomatic language from a "skilled practitioner" is something one should take without a grain or two of salt.
And of course, being Perl, there are many ... many ... ways to accomplish the same task. Leveraging CPAN modules. I'd leave discovering some of the as an exercise for the reader.
I don't have laptops with older AMD. My current laptop has the ability to switch between CPU and discrete GPU, but it doesn't work well even under windows, so I disabled it in BIOS.
AMD drivers have been hit and miss for a while, which is one of two reasons I tend to prefer NVidia cards. NVidia took time to make sure their whole stack works reasonably well.
This is a Sager Notebook NP8156. There are newer models, including better NVidia cards. Up to 64 GB ram. I bought mine with 16GB and added 32GB. Very expandable. Battery life is 2-ish hours, though can be increased by reducing brightness.
Lenovo has a 32 GB max model, and HP has a 64 GB max model.
I've not had obscure graphics or bluetooth problems for like 4 years now. Graphics problems have not been a problem for the last decade.
I've been running linux desktops and laptops for about 20 years, starting with early/pre-RHEL redhat, and moving around to many others. My first laptop was a pentium thing at 75 MHz, and I triple booted Linux, OS2, and Windows/DOS on it. I wound up kicking off the last two, as I used them only infrequently.
Battery life is an issue for me, but its not linux specific. The laptops I have, all have power hungry ram and GPU cards. I get 2 hours on them, or if I play with the brightness and other things, I can stretch it to 4 hours. My old 2010 laptop (still in use, still running linux) is a 16GB ram, 0.5TB SSD affair with an NVidia GTX560m card. My 2018 laptop is a 48GB ram, 1.5 TB SSD (0.5 + 1.0) with an M2 256GB SSD for the included windows 10 home, and a GTX 1060m card. Windows 10 on the newer laptop lasts about 2.5 hours before it shuts down. I now run the pre-installed windows 10 via a kvm with passthrough of the M2 into the instance.
All of these are currently running late model Linux Mint 19.2 with accelerated graphics.
Work laptop is a Mac 16 GB ram, 512GB SSD with an intel/AMD hybrid graphics bit. This will last 5 hours with significant tweaks to aggressive power off, and me not running any builds on it.
I like the mac for its physical fit and finish, weight, etc. But I need to bring the power supply with me, as I can burn through much of the power in a 2 hour meeting.
I like the linux machine for work, and everything else. It just works. The drivers just work. The networking just works. Single/multi displays just work. I have cinammon (display manager) set up to a very comfortable configuration.
I am hopeful that the day job will enable me to trade up to a bigger machine with linux and nvidia graphics at some point ... 32GB is bare minimum for a functional machine for me, 48->64GB is better.
My home office deskside is an older Sandy Bridge machine with 16 cores, 128 GB ram, old GTX750ti card, running the same environment as on my laptop.
When people deploy python and perl code, they have to either export their entire environment, or build a container. The latter is not possible in a number of deployment cases, and the former carries all manner of dependency radius gotchas.
So I am building (ok, I am prompting/testing/reviewing, the agent is doing the heavy lift) compilers for each of python 3.14.x [1] right now, and perl 5.42.x [2], that can generate static code.
Early stages, perlc does work well, pyc is a work in progress.
[1] https://github.com/joelandman/pyc
[2] https://github.com/joelandman/perlc