The question doesn't seem specific enough to be meaningful. Does a unified FOSS community exist that can be said to desire any one thing? Do different people mean the same thing by simplicity?...
The question doesn't seem specific enough to be meaningful. Does a unified FOSS community exist that can be said to desire any one thing? Do different people mean the same thing by simplicity? Does pure anti-intellectualism exist anywhere?
I agree that "anti-intellectualism" is the wrong word here. That being said, I agree with the main thrust of the article, at least as I understand it: a lot of "simplistic" software is software...
I agree that "anti-intellectualism" is the wrong word here. That being said, I agree with the main thrust of the article, at least as I understand it: a lot of "simplistic" software is software that doesn't actually work. As an example, see the article discussed here, where the author can't get Bluetooth or ___ to work, but decides they don't actually help them compute -- though if those things did work, I'm sure they'd be used.
I think that "simplicity" or "minimalism" in software, as a trend, prioritizes the wrong things -- SLOC or low package counts or what have you -- since those are easier to measure than something nebulous, like "ease of use" or "expressivity," which is really the measure of an operating system or programming language. So not "anti-intellectualism," per se, but an oversimplification of the problems computers are built to solve.
I may not join them but I think it's good that someone is seeing if it's feasible to do without X for almost any X, and seeing what the alternatives and compensating advantages are. Sometimes the...
I may not join them but I think it's good that someone is seeing if it's feasible to do without X for almost any X, and seeing what the alternatives and compensating advantages are. Sometimes the rhetoric is a bit much, where they say everyone should be doing things their way. Often these things aren't ready for wide adoption. But it's still good to experiment.
Yeah, I've read about those cultural concerns before. There's also notably this thread where Stallman refuses to budge on dumping GCC's AST because it might expose some of GCC's work such that...
Yeah, I've read about those cultural concerns before.
There's also notably this thread where Stallman refuses to budge on dumping GCC's AST because it might expose some of GCC's work such that non-free programs could benefit from it. But this was already well after LLVM became prominent.
I'm wondering how relatively hard it is to make a new GCC front-end ― or maybe how hard it was. Clearly LLVM's API is far more well documented, but skimming through the Go front-end it doesn't seem too weird.
Maybe it's important that LLVM was always supposed to be used as a library, while GCC was always a monolith.
IR basically. LLVM's magic sauce is that it splits the processing into two parts. Its second magic sauce is that somehow its native C/C++ compiler every bit as good as GNU's compiler for most...
IR basically. LLVM's magic sauce is that it splits the processing into two parts. Its second magic sauce is that somehow its native C/C++ compiler every bit as good as GNU's compiler for most programmers, and offers valuable optimizations and tricks that GNU doesn't for very very performance sensitive programmers, which despite sounding not that hard is enormously so especially given GNU's strict licensing rules.
I think the resurgence of language design comes down mostly to a new generation of programmers being used to code reading more naturally to humans, allowing everyone to be programmers, as opposed to code doing exactly what you expect it to do at the cost of an extremely complicated set of rules and procedures you have to follow in order to get performance (C, C++). Its really been Python leading this front, with some languages finding minor niches. C/C++ is far from a general coding language for the vast majority of programmers unless you work in HPC, low latency, writing compilers, systems programming or do competitive programming.
The question doesn't seem specific enough to be meaningful. Does a unified FOSS community exist that can be said to desire any one thing? Do different people mean the same thing by simplicity? Does pure anti-intellectualism exist anywhere?
I agree that "anti-intellectualism" is the wrong word here. That being said, I agree with the main thrust of the article, at least as I understand it: a lot of "simplistic" software is software that doesn't actually work. As an example, see the article discussed here, where the author can't get Bluetooth or ___ to work, but decides they don't actually help them compute -- though if those things did work, I'm sure they'd be used.
I think that "simplicity" or "minimalism" in software, as a trend, prioritizes the wrong things -- SLOC or low package counts or what have you -- since those are easier to measure than something nebulous, like "ease of use" or "expressivity," which is really the measure of an operating system or programming language. So not "anti-intellectualism," per se, but an oversimplification of the problems computers are built to solve.
I may not join them but I think it's good that someone is seeing if it's feasible to do without X for almost any X, and seeing what the alternatives and compensating advantages are. Sometimes the rhetoric is a bit much, where they say everyone should be doing things their way. Often these things aren't ready for wide adoption. But it's still good to experiment.
I agree with you 100%!
I wonder if this is correlated with LLVM's popularity.
Why didn't this new generation of languages tend to use GCC as a backend? Licensing? API? IR?
Yeah, I've read about those cultural concerns before.
There's also notably this thread where Stallman refuses to budge on dumping GCC's AST because it might expose some of GCC's work such that non-free programs could benefit from it. But this was already well after LLVM became prominent.
I'm wondering how relatively hard it is to make a new GCC front-end ― or maybe how hard it was. Clearly LLVM's API is far more well documented, but skimming through the Go front-end it doesn't seem too weird.
Maybe it's important that LLVM was always supposed to be used as a library, while GCC was always a monolith.
IR basically. LLVM's magic sauce is that it splits the processing into two parts. Its second magic sauce is that somehow its native C/C++ compiler every bit as good as GNU's compiler for most programmers, and offers valuable optimizations and tricks that GNU doesn't for very very performance sensitive programmers, which despite sounding not that hard is enormously so especially given GNU's strict licensing rules.
I think the resurgence of language design comes down mostly to a new generation of programmers being used to code reading more naturally to humans, allowing everyone to be programmers, as opposed to code doing exactly what you expect it to do at the cost of an extremely complicated set of rules and procedures you have to follow in order to get performance (C, C++). Its really been Python leading this front, with some languages finding minor niches. C/C++ is far from a general coding language for the vast majority of programmers unless you work in HPC, low latency, writing compilers, systems programming or do competitive programming.
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense: LLVM grew with this generation, rather than conducting it.
I wonder if a comparison to artistic tendencies make sense? Like the difference between minimalism and maximalism, for example.