Transcript:

20 years ago, I was advocating for JavaScript. My story was that JavaScript is a much better language than anybody knows and that if we use it properly we can do amazing things about it and it can change the world and in fact, that happened.

But now my evangel is that we should stop using JavaScript. That it has so many congenital defects it really is a smelly language. There's just a lot of crap in it.

And it's still maybe for its field of application the best language in the world for doing that kind of stuff but that's not good enough. We should be moving on to the next generation of languages.

It used to be that we'd get new computer languages about every generation. I started with Fortran and then C and C++ and Java and JavaScript and so on and then it kind of stopped. There are still people developing languages but nobody cares. One person can make a programming language, a really good one, but you can't get adoption for it.

There are lots of terrible mistakes in the way that the web works, in the way our operating systems work, and we can't get new ones. We're just stuck with this crap and they keep piling new features on everything and the new features always create new problems and it doesn't have to be like that. We could be using really clean operating systems with really clean languages and really clean runtimes and doing all this stuff in a much more reliable way. But we don't seem to want to do that.

I've done JavaScript for a generation. It's time for the next thing. And I don't think that should be considered a radical point of view. I think it should be a normal evolutionary view.

I bolded main points

no no no, this is the wrong way around

because sales and marketing sell it before it even exists

DuckDuckGo

I don't see how it solves the mentioned issues. Instead, federation introduces new issues of complexity, multi-layered moderation, and potential for distributed inefficiency, confusion, or more malicious attacks.

I think we can see on Lemmy some of the problems it introduces. But for an Encyclopedia, which is supposed to be a source of truth, I think it's much worse.

If you depend on instance admins as curators, it's not that different from Wikipedia roles, which at least has open governance and elections.

They say other projects didn't reach critical mass. I don't think spreading your contributors thin - even while connecting them to some dynamic degree - is how you reach critical mass.

Commenter on Reddit (OP there) gives a talk link and summarization:

In the talk, Lars mentions that they often rely on self-reported anonymous data. But in this case, Google is large enough that teams have developed similar systems and/or literally re-written things, and so this claim comes from analyzing projects before and after these re-writes, so you’re comparing like teams and like projects. Timestamped: https://youtu.be/6mZRWFQRvmw?t=27012

Some additional context on these two specific claims:

Google found that porting Go to Rust "it takes about the same sized team about the same time to build it, so that's no loss of productivity" and "we do see some benefits from it, we see reduced memory usage [...] and we also see a decreased defect rate over time"

On re-writing C++ into Rust: "in every case, we've seen a decrease by more than 2x in the amount of effort required to both build the services written in Rust, as well as maintain and update those services. [...] C++ is very expensive for us to maintain."

Is it because c++ devs need half their day for recovering from the trauma of reading and writing c++? /s

I scale by dropping requests

I see, TIL. That's different from Germany, where Ingenieur is a protected term.

Driving a train is engineering?

Turned into a skeleton in 10 minutes

The site name’s a play on “The Onion” so it’s gotta be satire, right? I couldn’t find an about page to confirm.

Yes, it's satire.

The page is run by one author https://www.theolognion.com/about and no description or goal described

Runs on "substack" platform (standard software)

The story reads like a story, and the mentioned company does not exist

January 2023, Futurism brought widespread attention to the issue and discovered that the articles were full of plagiarism and mistakes. […] After the revelation, CNET management paused the experiment, but the reputational damage had already been done.

So the "AI experiment" is not active anymore. But the damage is already done.

It was also new to me that Wikipedia puts time-based reliability qualifiers on sources. It makes sense of course. And this example shows how a source can be good and reliable in the past, but not anymore - and differentiating that is important and necessary.