> Or a third option can be to write your hot loops in one such language; and continue using Go for everything else. Problem solved.
Or use Go and write ugly code for those hot loops instead of introducing another language and build system. Then you can still enjoy nicety of GC in other parts of your code.
I can see that being an option in a small team that works closely with one another and wants to keep things simple.
Though it is my personal opinion that forcing a GC-based language to do a task best suited for manual memory management is like swimming against the tide. It’s doable but more challenging than it ought to be. I might even appreciate the challenge but the next person maintaining the code might not.
I think similar remarks can be made in regard to Jupyter notebooks and their popularity among scientist, engineers and data people. Yes, they are still more in the conventional programming realm, where the code is in the foreground, yet to some extent they bring more immediacy. The fact that you can look and investigate at the data you are dealing with at every step (print the table, make a plot etc) is powerful.
Another thing would be of course powerful REPL environments.
And there are also visual environments like Matlab's Simulink and Modelica. Can you write control algorithm or a bunch of differential equations in any language? Yes. But control engineer can just take a quick look at screenshot of a Simulink model and already have a good idea on what is going on there. This cannot be said about the code.
This may be rather unpopular among hackers, where TTY clones and vi emulation rules everything, but computers and software seem to me most powerful and enabling outside the usual coding context of putting streams of characters into the source file using a keyboard.
As developer starting coding in the 1980's, that always valued high level approaches to computing than plain bits and bytes, I find this a kind of tragedy, given that productive tools helps everyone.
I love a quote from from some VB folks, that while others laught of them using VB, they were laughing all the way to the bank themselves.
My only complaint about visual environments, is that not all offer modular tools, the EEE IC version of a module or function, some are quite primitive only allowing one screen for the whole flow.
I wonder what place will be left for the TTY clones and vi emulation folks, when everything on the system is driven by systems programmed in agentic tools, command line wizardry replaced by MCP like tools and such.
Even just regular matlab gives you some of that data immediacy because you can just ctrl-enter on a block of code which will execute just that block and show you results in the console. Very handy for seeing what various bits do to the data.
I am glad that there is such comment among countless that try their best to convince that Rust way is just the best way to do stuff, whatever the context.
But no, clearly there is no cult build around Rust, and everyone that suggest otherwise is dishonest.
Problem is not with nerds or Silicon Valley, even if Thiel is a lunatic.
Problem are, and always were, obscenely wealthy people destroying the society that created them. In the world where greed is not considered sin anymore, or even a character flaw, they don't even need to pretend anymore.
Crazy to live in a time less moral than the robber baron age. That said, our society made a joke of children making our shoes in miserable conditions, so we have been conditioning ourselves to be ok with this on our own and for a long time.
It does, by its very nature. Power is not magic, nor is it the Force. It's not a quantity you can stockpile and own - power is leased, it's granted to you by other people. It comes with expectations on how you will wield that power, and usually can be taken away just as quickly as it was granted, if you exercise it in ways they don't approve[0].
Power is obtained through meeting people, gaining their favor, entering deals, providing them services, eventually joining their ranks and advancing to the next level on the ordinal scale. Especially in politics, "power corrupts" by definition; by the time you gain any, you're so thoroughly entangled in mutual deals and friendships with other players you're no longer an autonomous entity - and if you're not willing to do that, you will never be given the opportunity to advance.
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[0] - Yes, there are caveats and strategems one can use to hold on to power - usually by playing people against each other to coerce ongoing support; every history period and every movie with a villain has plenty of examples. It's another discussion; my focus here is on what power is, and where it comes from.
Whenever I heard that expression I have never perceived people to mean "so don't obtain power". More like, "if you do get power be careful". Or "even if he seems like a nice guy, we should maintain a separation of powers".
Like it's more a force than a destiny. Gravity pulls the moon down every day yet it doesn't fall on our heads.
False dichotomy; power is not a stockpilable quantity, it comes from other people and their willingness to defer to you or entertain you. Compromising is not a temptation to get power quicker - compromise is power, it's how you acquire it. The more you want to lean on the system to help you, the more aligned you need to be with it, eventually becoming one with it; you sacrifice autonomy at every step of the way.
I've read plenty, thanks. The difference is that while I have read plenty of works by Marxists and their apologists, I don't just read books by such people. Maybe you should do the same.
Any ideology which says "the ends justify the means", or that it alone is scientific, is going to end up with a high body count.
Or use Go and write ugly code for those hot loops instead of introducing another language and build system. Then you can still enjoy nicety of GC in other parts of your code.
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