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I wish people stopped conflating web programming with the whole realm of software development.

If you ignore Android / iPhone, where language choice is limited, practically all other development is web.

Most of your electronic devices work with embedded software. Production lines, transport gates, cranes, computer hardware, ships, planes, rockets, cars, e-bikes, smart lights...

There is also scientific programming, that feeds research and analysis. Weather reports? Statistics, etc.

And there is gaming.

Devops, infrastructure? Databases? Tools for artists? Most of those aren't web. And yes I've heard of Figma.

There are probably tens of categories I'm missing.

Web is still bigger probably, but I have a problem with the saying "practically all other development is web".


I really doubt you’re using .NET (it literally is named in the dotcom style and refers to the interNET) in embedded software.

In an article about .Net its fair to talk primarily about creating APIs and other internet focused uses.


And you just deduct that from the name? Was .NET created with a focus on web? It seems to me like a generic application framework.

ASP.NET is the web part, no?


I didn’t deduce it from the name. I deduced it from over a decade experience working primarily with .Net.

Since I can’t presume the reader has equivalent experience, especially in HN, pointing to the name, which should be a good signifier of what something does (to be fair, MS really, really sucks at naming), is a good shorthand.

The real reason .Net isn’t good for embedded devices is because MS didn’t develop it for embedded devices. They’ve only added low level memory management in the past few years.

Until recently you couldn’t even create a fully statically compiled executable.


> practically all

Define “practically all”. I would accept “clear majority”.

But practically all? Nah. I mean the hot new areas for funding right now are AI and robotics neither of which are web!

I’m coming up on 20 years professional experience. Exactly none of it has been mobile or web! The programming field is so much bigger than HN likes to pretend.


The majority of software is probably Excel macros.

This probably isn't true but I want to read a super geeky dark sci-fi novel that explores this topic.

It's not obvious to me that it isn't true. The number of excel spreadsheets world-wide probably vastly outnumbers the number of software projects.

Excel spreadsheets with macros on the other hand aren't THAT many, no? :)

>I mean the hot new areas for funding right now are AI and robotics

Most developers are not in such startups. There is a lot of boring software out there which is a website. Even for AI, the first company that comes to mind OpenAI is known for ChatGPT, a web product. Most of the AI companies are building web products.


That is software with a web interface. Only a small part of OpenAI's work deals with web related things.

how dare you, i summon 10 js engineers from openai to downvote you (they have 6 only)

I won't fear them teaming up with their FastAPI Python team.

They are serious parts of chatgpt experience. But still not core of the work.


It's web in a (limited) sense that there's probably a web frontend somewhere, but this "somewhere" is usually pretty far away from where most of the code is developed.

Most of the backend logic is not related to serving data for the browsers, it's doing actual backend stuff - communicating to databases, APIs, etc.

Is Google search backend a web app? I think it's really stretching the term.


Sure isn’t.

> practically all other development is web

This is a pretty ignorant take.


Get out of your bubble.

> (1) Most modern languages discourage or forbid symbol/emoji characters in identifiers

> (2) When it comes to color,

Call me boomer if you wish, but if you can't grasp the value of having your code readable on a 24 rows by 80 columns, black and white screen, you are not a software developer. You are not even a programmer: at most, you are a prompt typist for ChatGPT.


While I agree that, if the function at hand can’t fit in a 25x80 window it most likely should be broken in smaller functions, there are kinder ways to say that.

I also joke God made the VT100 with 80 columns for a reason.


... For the reason that IBM made their 1928 card with 80 columns, in an attempt to increase the storage efficiency of Hollerith’s 45-column card without increasing its size?

That said, ~60 characters per printed line has been the typographer’s recommendation for much longer. Which is why typographers dislike Times and derivatives when used on normal-sized single-column pages, as that typeface was made to squeeze more characters into narrow newspaper columns (it’s in the name).


The fact that the claim is wrong on multiple levels (IBM punchcards, VT100 did 132 columns as well) is part of the fun.

23x75 to allow for a status bar and the possibility that the code may be quoted in an email. Also, it’s green on black. Or possibly amber.

And yet I still have a utility named "~/bin/\uE43E"


\uExxx is in the private use area. What is it?

That’s private, obviously.

> Microsoft is first and foremost a business oriented company, and what matters to them most is feature set, compatibility, support etc. As long as things mostly work, it's fine. Usability is at the bottom of the list.

Blame their customers. Those people accepted random reboots for decades.


> which typically helps me.

Uhm, how can you get to that conclusion? I mean: how can you compare the evolution of a cold with and without the vitamin surplus?


Very well could be a placebo


Reminds me of the old, with treatment, most colds will be cured in just 7 days! Without treatment they generally last about a week.

That said, do not underestimate the health benefits of the placebo effect. It can help a lot. Particularly with anything to do with stress.


So your statement should have been, "it seems to help."


And still there are coders who prefer non-statically typed languages, tsk tsk...


Explain how static typing would avoid this problem.


If you use the standard typescript linter, it will fail if you pass a Promise to an if statement.

https://typescript-eslint.io/rules/no-misused-promises/


The problem was the framework's bundler was transforming those functions to return promises, a linter would need to understand next.js's specific transforms to catch this.


A function returning a boolean cannot return a Promise. As simple as that!


Sure but if the framework also changes the signature of the function, there's nothing compiler can do. Unless you want it to catch `if(promise)`


> Why would anyone willingly agree to be tracked?

To avoid paying actual money, even the smallest sum of it.


Good thing that it's not an option with the GDPR. Pay or consent doesn't allow informed, free consent.


s/Syria/Libya/


Oups I'm so sorry you're right.


which really makes me skeptical of the whole thing


I apologize for my mistake it is lybia in fact and not syria.

If you want to read about it in english, mediapart (one of the leading investigative journal on that case) has translated many of its articles : https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/dossier/sarkozy-gadd...

I believe there is a complete recap somewhere but sadly can't find it


> eventually would reach Lake Ontario

You mean Lake Erie, don't you?


I'm pretty sure they mean Lake Ontario. It's been a while since I've been there. But I believe the water falls from Lake Ontario into Lake Eerie.


From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niagara_Falls :

The Niagara River flows north from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, forming part of the border between Ontario, Canada, to the west, and New York, United States, to the east. [...]

The river [...] is approximately 58 kilometres (36 mi) long and includes the Niagara Falls.


Thx! I had always thought it was the other way around.


> Yet people seem to like making useful things in it so it must have gotten something right.

I'm not commenting on Rust, seriously! But I couldn't help to notice that this sentence is a non sequitur. Something right has been developed in PHP and Visual Basic, even in Javascript and Go; still, those developers who freely choose to use those abominations, they do deserve to be pointed at and made fun of.


Go is a great language.


The hate was not against IE, but against a popular tool that fought against shared standards.


It was worse than IE not adopting standards. It was a capricious browser, would crash and misbehave for arbitrary reasons, and had an almost perverse implementation of web rendering.

People try to equate it to Safari now but that's just not comparable. Safari will render something badly or not support a CSS decorator that you'd really like to use, but it will rarely crash, go into an infinite URL-fetching loop, or arbitrarily fail to recognize random HTML tags.


IE didn’t fight anything; it merely existed. There was no constant barrage of features that you ‘had to’ make use of to ‘keep up with the times’. Microsoft correctly decided that the Web was done in ~1999. They even had ‘Electron’ in the form of HTAs, except it wasn’t remotely as bad.


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