I love the idea of an AI assistant for coding -- the ability to check references on the fly, the ability to not have to sift from through Google and StackOverflow which aren't that useful these days, is a great idea. BUT at this price, we need proof this is better than what we have. A week isn't enough. I'm not asking Jetbrains to give it to us for free as part of the package, but I can see 60 days unlimited use. It needs to be used in a large project, not just played with. It's important to remember, Jetbrains already has issues with thecloud-based IDEs now -- not everything is on the desktop. If they want me to keep paying every year, I need a strong reason to pay more than I do now.
Another item (HN won't let me post a long reply), is a programming environment called Onyx. (After my grandson in Africa, who has NO interest in it whatsoever as he intends to be a pilot -- but this is OK as, unless she works for Airbus, we're ignoring the ladies for a few more years. Sosongo Abasi as his father would say!) Onyx is a language designed for 13-17 year olds who may not have the best command of English -- we can work in the language of the Igbo, the Yoruba and Erik. Doesn't matter to my parser. And it will all be free, documented, Github'ed and built with free tools. Education is hard over there..
Well, a very long time ago, in a company funded far far away (and since defeated by the empire), I had the "joy" of working with Sendmail. For you youngsters, back then, back when we had dial telephones (tell us more Grandpa!), there were multiple "mail networks", not just this fancy Internet you kids have. Sendmail was a mail processor that could not only arrange to send and receive mail, but it could translate addressing between the different networks (ARPA, Bitnet, CSNET, UUCP, etc.) The problem was, reading a sendmail config file was something like reading assembly code except you weren't allowed to by vowels. It was nearly all symbols -- executable line noise.
I got tired of working with it - so I wrote my own sendmail compiler/de-compiler of sorts just to work in English prose. Got me my job at Sun.
These days, I'm not sure if it will let me keep my job, or be the justification for my losing it, but I'm working on a programming language for teens called Onyx (after my grandson, who has NO interest in this as he's intending to a be a pilot, but it means unless she works for Boeing, I'm safe for a few more years
I used to work at Sendmail, it was my first job. The entire premise of the company was "Sendmail is so hard to use, let us run it for you". We had software that added a GUI for configuration and management, and Pro Services to set up big installs.
But also we had all the top maintainers of Sendmail. And we ran Sendmail for our corp mail.
Once we had a problem with the network, so we had to reroute corporate mail over a phone line. One of the maintainers came down, typed what looked like line noise for five minutes, and all of a sudden all the mail was working again.
It was crazy to watch him basically read and write raw Sendmail configs. He didn't even use m4.
I used to do this at Uni, and I actually enjoyed it. It was like a complicated puzzle, and the thrill of solving it was powerful. I remember spending days getting a SunOS <-> Lotus Notes gateway working the way I wanted it to.
Ironically, M4 felt over-complicated and abstracted, so I did not want to learn that. Direct edit all the way.
vi /etc/sendmail.cf
This seemed like an obscure parlor trick that vanishingly few people could appreciate. I was totally OK with that.
And I was truly shocked to later learn that there were people willing to pay for this service. Ah simpler times.
Not directly related, but I'm working on some short stories inspired by some of the hacker/cyberpunk literature from the 80's and since I grew up and learned programming in the late 90's early 2000's, I feel completely inadequate at writing cheesy hacker stories.
Another candidate for the old-time stories would be Internet before the public Internet. Back then, as noted, we have several "nets" connected by everything from fixed circuits, to dial-up telephones (I still know where my Telebit trailblazer is), and radio. And you had to know how to traverse it all. (I had the wall maps that were about as complex as colossal cave -- albeit no vending machine or Dr. Pepper bottles). Back then, kiddies, people actually communicated, they did more than just consume -- in fact, I'm told, I am responsible for the Anishinaabe word for Internet. (I helped bring their place on line years ago.) It supposedly means "The place where people talk who have never met"
That depends on what we mean by feature of course.... let's assume we mean concepts... here's my list:
Believe it or not, Cobol's formatting for printed reports -- we still do print and formatted output worked well there. Modula-2s imports -- C++ is getting there, but imports just worked. Lisp's macros had their day. I think we could benefit from stepping away from "make a better C++" and ask "what is this language trying to do?" There's no universal "best" language, but one immediate benefit I'd like to see -- let's finally agree on a universal calling convention, at least on Linux for example, so every language can call another? Let's give credit to Microsoft's CLR on that one. Also, golang's getting the idea with structure tags, but how about structs that serialize to a universal format -- see Corba is not dead!
I want a really nice macro assembler for people who love assembly language (not gas!) tied to a theorem prover. It runs into the problem though that you kinda need portable code in 2023.
Absolutely it is -- your talking to a neuroscientist who did just that, sort of....
But it does help to take the classes. You can learn a lot of music theory in books, but until you play music in practice, you never get close. You can learn neurosurgery theory, but it doesn't change the first day when you actually perform it. They're quite different!
The classes are an accelerator. You can learn it all on your own, but the classes can, in many cases, offer a short-cut to learn things you might not find in the books. For example, you will find many sorting algorithms in books, but will you discover what leftist-trees are? Or needlesort? These are "tools" in the "toolbox".
Don't get me wrong, you can do it, but you'll be buying a lot of textbooks on your own. Again, notthing wrong with that -- we both know most college classes you do the work and the lectures are there to assit - you can skip the lectures if you desire. So, you can teach yourself -- it just takes longer. A history buff turned system admin once put it to me this way....
"I learned CompSci myself, but added the degree later to be accepted. You can it yourself and become expert in your field in about five to ten years - or take the classes and learn a lot in two. That being said, even an old history major can do it."
There was another reason Usenet died -- people want other people to do the work. Oh, they'll pay for it to a degree, but Usenet wasn't plug-and-play. To make Usenet work, everyone had to cooperate and most people just don't want the work. AOL wasn't even close, but it was someone else's problem to run and maintain. Hostly, my own vies here, but if Reddit just had an NNTP bridge, people would flock to it and never know the differece. I remember running a node -- it was a constant battle to maintain space on the spools and deal with my own users. And, for what? It cost us money and while everyone said they wanted it, no one wanted to help with the work or pay for it. Add to that the number of groups that just want "zombie" on us, and it died.
> If Reddit just had an NNTP bridge, people would flock to it and never know the differece.
I never really looked into it, but if someone were to make a NNTP bridge for reddit, Hacker News, and other similar websites, would it be against their respective TOSs?
Per the whoe whietspace idea -- techniaclly not a feature, just a policy statement. "This language has chosen manditory tabs at three spaces. It's not that this is better than anything else out there, but we gave you all a choice and you couldn't make up your minds, so as your mother would say, this is what it's going to be! Be happy we let you have this!" Also, on style, all code must be in capital letters -- comments are in mixed or lower case. That way you can easily tell wehre actual code is. Every line, and we mean EVERY line must have a comment. If you don't add one, WE WILL. Granted, it may not mean anything but no one reads them anyway?
And now that I think about it, other than negative lifetimes, where variables reappear in code after a defined time because you might need them again, I propsoe the hidden segments feature -- with this feature, you can write code, and hide the block (something like an invisible #define) so when your coworker comes along and tries to "help" by changing your code that you told them SHOULD NOT be changed because it actually works now, when you run the code with the --no-manager flag, the code compiles the way YOU want it.
And of course, let's adopt Rust's logic with our new "Borrow Nagger", or just "Everything Nagger". When it compiles your code, it analyzes it, sends it out to a Reddit group and collects the comments and displays them as warning and error messages. No one is saying they'll make any sense relative to code, but if you've used C++ and templates, you'll feel right at home.
Abd of course, there's "syntax quality hightlighting", where we highlight your code in various colors based on what we think of the quality of it. Red = Really bad idea, Yellow, not good, but good for now, you'll refactor it later, green, good because you won't be at this job long anyway, and black on black or white on white if it's actually OK.
(Per the comment on refactoring, there's probably a note on the pyramids 'Pharoh - yeah, this is a hack, but we were in a rush, we'll fix it later. Bandaids for now'
A correction on another comment -- this is not a multithreaded language -- it's transthreaded-- a radically new concept where your code may or may not, run code in your thread, or someoen else's thread, without your knowledge. Errors in your code show up in their program, and their errors, in yours - see? Now bugs aren't your fault anymore!
And don't forget the KvetchGPT option. It's doesn't so much as complain about your code as you go along. It's like pair programming with your manager but you can turn them ofF.
