Indeed, I had no idea there are multiple languages referred to as “APL”.

I feel like most people defending C++ resort to “people shouldn’t use those features that way”. 😅

As far as I can tell, pointer arithmetic was not originally part of PASCAL; it’s just included as an extension in many implementations, but not all. Delphi, the most common modern dialect, only has optional pointer arithmetic, and only in certain regions of the code, kind of like unsafe in Rust. There are also optional bounds checks in many (possibly most) dialects. And in any case, there are other ways in which C is unsafe.

True, but AFAIK they all sucked really bad.

That’s pure assumption and, as far as I can tell, not actually true. PASCAL was a strong contender. No language was competitive with handwritten assembly for several decades after C’s invention, and there’s no fundamental reason why PASCAL couldn’t benefit from intense compiler optimizations just as C has.

Here are some papers from before C “won”, a more recent article about how PASCAL “lost”, and a forum thread about what using PASCAL was actually like. None of them indicate a strong performance advantage for C.

• https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/3-540-09745-7_3.pdf
• https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/356869.356872
• https://www.deusinmachina.net/p/pascal-the-language-that-almost-took
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202666

C++11 also introduced new problems, such as the strange interaction between brace-initialization and initializer-lists (though that was partially fixed several years later), and the fairly arcane rules around move semantics with minimal compiler support (for example, it would be great if the standard required compilers to emit an error if a moved-from object were accessed).

I know Lisp is minimal, I’m just saying that I expect there are Lisp fans who won’t acknowledge (or would excuse) any shortcomings in the language, just as there are C++ fans who do the same for C++.

Ehhh, I mean this more strongly. I’ve never met people more in denial about language design problems than C++ adherents. (Though admittedly I haven’t spent much time talking to Lisp fans about language design.)

There were memory-safe languages long before C was invented, though; C was widely considered “dangerous” even at the time.

I mean to be fair, that’s a pretty useful tool.

I was a professional C++ developer for several years, and came to the conclusion that any professional C++ developers who don’t acknowledge its flaws have a form of Stockholm Syndrome.

Well, except “robust”, unless you have very strict code standards, review processes, and static analysis.

(And arguably it’s never elegant, though that’s almost purely a matter of taste.)

The logo and “join our Discord” text are more than half cut off for me. Is that the original cropping, or is it a client (Jerboa) issue?

Seconded. Wezterm seems to have a similar level of features and customizability as Kitty, but with Lua as its config/extension language. I migrated from Alacritty rather than Kitty, so I don’t know how Kitty’s speed compares, but I haven’t missed Alacritty, which is honestly saying something.

Perl programs are, by definition, text. So “paint splatters are valid Perl” implies that there’s a mapping from paint splatters to text.

Do you have a suggested mapping of paint splatters to text that would be more “accurate” than OCR? And do you really think it would result in fewer valid Perl programs?

No, you leapt directly from what I said, which was relevant on its own, to an absurdly stronger claim.

I didn’t say that humans and AI are the same. I think the original comment, that modern AI is “smart enough to be tricked”, is essentially true: not in the sense that humans are conscious of being “tricked”, but in a similar way to how humans can be misled or can misunderstand a rule they’re supposed to be following. That’s certainly a property of the complexity of system, and the comment below it, to which I originally responded, seemed to imply that being “too complicated to have precise guidelines” somehow demonstrates that AI are not “smart”. But of course “smart” entities, such as humans, share that exact property of being “too complicated to have precise guidelines”, which was my point!

…I didn’t say that it does.

We can create rules and a human can understand if they are breaking them or not…

So I take it you are not a lawyer, nor any sort of compliance specialist?

They aren’t thinking about it and deciding it’s the right thing to do.

That’s almost certainly true; and I’m not trying to insinuate that AI is anywhere near true human-level intelligence yet. But it’s certainly got some surprisingly similar behaviors.

Have you considered that one property of actual, real-life human intelligence is being “too complicated to have precise guidelines”?

That’s not a download button for the program. But there is indeed a link to the release page right on the home page of the project, so you’re still correct.

I think the “ten days” explanation has the merit of being charitable, because it implies that Brendan Eich wouldn’t have made such short-sighted design choices under more favorable circumstances.

(I do not believe that it’s a “sensible principle” to treat text as such a fundamental form of data that a basic language feature like the equality operator should be entirely shaped around it. Surely the consequences of building an entire language around text manipulation should be apparent by considering how awkward Posix-style shells are for any nontrivial scripts.)

It’s still pretty bad that the normal equality operator is as bad as it is.

I don’t think they’re interpreting that question as a gauge of how widely used nushell is in general. The comment below the result seems to be about how they should interpret the rest of the survey based on the ratio of users to non-users who responded.

Wow, of course he’s pretending the response is a misrepresentation of his opinion instead of defending it in good faith.