I’m a staff software engineer at Sunrun, the USA’s largest residential solar installer.

I mostly work with kotlin, but also java, python, ruby, javascript, typescript. My hobby is picking up new hobbies. Currently bird photography and camping.

  • 0 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 2023

help-circle


  • our black cat once ran under the ladder of a bunk bed, crashed into a mirror leaning against the wall, causing it to fall against a shelf and knock a salt shaker off (we were in college, gotta keep your food stuff in your room and whatnot). The mirror crashed to the floor and broke. We didn’t believe in curses and that fully cemented that belief for us.


















  • Forking is a foolish idea. The core principle of computer-science is that we need to live with legacy, not abandon it.

    what a crazy thing to say. The core principle of computer-science is to continue moving forward with tech, and to leave behind the stuff that doesn’t work. You don’t see people still using fortran by choice, you see them living with it because they’re completely unable to move off of it. If you’re able to abandon bad tech then the proper decision is to do so. OP keeps linking Joel, but Joel doesn’t say to not rewrite stuff, he says to not rewrite stuff for large scale commercial applications that currently work. C clearly isn’t working for a lot of memory safe applications. The logic doesn’t apply there. It also clearly doesn’t apply when you can write stuff in a memory safe language alongside existing C code without rewriting any C code at all.

    And there’s no need. Modern C compilers already have the ability to be memory-safe, we just need to make minor – and compatible – changes to turn it on. Instead of a hard-fork that abandons legacy system, this would be a soft-fork that enables memory-safety for new systems.

    this has nothing to do with the compiler, this has to do with writing ‘better’ code, which has proved impossible over and over again. The problem is the programmers and that’s never going to change. Using a language that doesn’t need this knowledge is the better choice 100% of the time.

    C devs have been claiming ‘the language can do this, we just need to implement it’ for decades now. At this point it’s literally easier to slowly port to a better language than it is to try and ‘fix’ C/C++.