I think it's great, nicely done! Tools like this to condense and cross-reference complex information to something you can reference easily is very useful to a human like myself.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
If you are selecting for anything besides competence, your chances of getting competence is effectively random. It says nothing about one group of people being more or less competent than another.
I have observed that selecting for competence leads to diversity, and I believe that diversity is a strength. But it is best achieved organically.
Personally I think the shortcomings we have with achieving diversity is in the framing stage, not the hiring stage.
Can you speak more about the framing? I think diversity should be encouraged, but I also believe to some extent that people of color have been left out of STEM education and jobs due to poor education and opportunities. Maybe a middle ground is to hire for both. Bring in women, people of color, and others who may not be as educated or experienced, but make a serious effort to pair them with more experienced employees and train them up to where they should be. Rather than hire and replace, as some have suggested, hire and partner to diversify and holistically improve the entire organization.
I think you are right about starting early in education and exposing disadvantaged children to things they wouldn't otherwise have available to them, and supporting them throughout their education. This would benefit organizations that want to achieve good performance and is worth them investing in themselves, although government support is a decent second option that I agree with. However it's important to note that this is primarily an economic differentiation, not a racial one.
Training can help but it is not sufficient for many tasks. You also need aptitude and desire.
Culture is more about what is valued and rewarded in a society, and I think the primary driver of the desire component.
What I meant about framing was that our economies, governments and businesses are framed in a cultural context, anglo-protestant american capitalism in this case. African-american/black communities have a challenging relationship with this for obvious reasons. Certain immigrant populations can integrate or interoperate more effectively than others. I think the key to achieving better results as a society and a planet is to incorporate more cultural diversity, allowing a broader range of desires and outcomes to be seen as valid and worth pursuing. I'm sorry I don't have more time to go into this right now, I hope it gives an idea what I was referring to.
emacs works great on windows. I'm not sure if there are things notepad++ does that emacs can't but I've never had any windows-specific issues with emacs.
I think there is a lesson here, something I have learned once or twice as well. Just because all incentives, reasoning and wisdom align with your position, you need to be prepared that people will take actions against their own interest out of shortsightedness, ignorance or just plain carelessness.
It will be very interesting to learn the real reason why this all went down. The core uncertainty and disagreement around openai's mission must have played a key role.
I'm not a lawyer but their original announcement seemed very close to libel and I would think Sam has some legal options should he choose to pursue them.
The article is well-written and detailed, however I was taken aback by the claim that meson is 'widely used for C & C++ projects'. I've come across bazel more often than meson. I guess because meson is written in python it seemed like a good choice for SciPy, and it worked out in the end so congratulations.
But yeah, I think CMake is still the gold standard despite all its quirks, complexities and problems.
Edit: Caution: This statement is incorrect--It can generate CMakefiles as a backend. It can also generate build files for MSVC. It can also generate standard Makefiles.
Edit: Corrected downstream. CMake can make Ninja files which Meson also makes. I got this backwards but kept the edit so people won't get confused.
CMake is NOT a gold standard. CMake is an agglomerative disaster.
For example: try getting CMake to accept zig as your compiler. "Oh, your compiler command has a space in it? So sorry. I'm going to put everything after the space in all manner of weird places. Some correct--some broken--some totally random." If you're lucky CMake crashes with an inscrutable message. If you're unlucky, you wind up with a compiler command that fails in bizarre ways and no way to figure out why CMake is doing what it did.
This is my experience with CMake every damn time--some absolutely inscrutable bug pops up until I figure out how to route around it. If I'm really unlucky, I have to file a bug report with CMake as I can't route around it.
Sure, if some unfortunate soul has beaten CMake into submission and produced a functioning CMakefile, CMake works. If YOU are the poor slob having to create that CMakefile, you are in for worlds and worlds and worlds of pain.
Same. By now I almost have an allergic reaction to thinking about using it.
I know the basic thing I'm trying to do is not going to work, and that I'm going to wind up opening 20 browser tabs that alternate between (1) trying to understand from first principles how to do it properly (and getting frustrated going around in circles through their labyrinthine yet thoroughly incomplete docs), and (2) just desperately searching the rest of the web for the right incantation to whisper (and getting frustrated by all the blog posts and forum answers that describe how to do the thing before they went and changed how everything works).
Feeling the rage and despair build as hours roll by, and you're still staring at a screen full of the most cretinous syntax ever excreted into the world.
One thing that's noticeable is most of those projects are Linux-only and many of them are around GNOME / GTK ecosystem. Most of those projects have no Windows versions. The ones that have them have really bad compatibility with it (e.g. GIMP, GTK3). Meson has a preference of simpler code bases leaning more on the C-heavy side. That's usually not the case with big, old and commercial C++ code bases.
The programs that need complex build systems that require things like compiling a code generator first and then compiling the rest of the project with the generator etc. are quite common in C++ world to tame the language's shortcomings. Libraries like Qt, Protobuf and GRPC often introduce a crazy amount of build complexity.
CMake's complexity is directly result of that and it is currently the only build generator that can cope with that using basically every compiler in existence (including proprietary ones like ARMCC, ICC, MSVC and very limited ones like SDCC). Even Bazel cannot handle the same number of compilers and feature sets. That's the thing that makes CMake gold standard not its string-driven scripting language.
CMake shares quite a bit history with C++ and you hear sentences like "it's the only thing that works for this level of complexity" for both.
I thought conan was the standard? Or what about hunter? Vcpkg? And now with modules getting added to the language and being supported ro varying degrees by all these options, I don't understand how the c++ ecosystem won't fracture into a pile of unusable garbage.
If you’ve ever wished that CMake’s ExternalProject pattern could be lit on fire, launched into the sea, fished out of the sea and then incinerated via tactical nuclear strike before bundling up the ashes that are then launched into the sun, vcpkg is definitely something you should look into.
I’m no Microsoft fanboy. I’ve been in software dev for roughly 20 years at this point so generally view anything from Microsoft with genuine suspicion, so I get the hesitation to take it seriously. But it works across the big three (Windows, Linux, macOS) and is MIT licensed so I’d definitely recommend giving it a whirl.
The only serious knock against it is that they went the OG Homebrew route with a single Git repo containing all of their ports (equivalent to Homebrew Formulae). And then whoever designed the Git repo approach also knew slightly too much about Git internals and leveraged tree-ish refs as part of the versioning design which is just weird and confuses anyone that’s not spent time tearing into Git’s object model.
So basically, vcpkg is honestly a good tool that does what it does fairly well. It may not do everything you need, but if it can it’s amazing.
Also, the buried lede here is how vcpkg handles binary caching. Think of it like sccache but at the dependency level. I’ve seen it drop CI runs from over an hour to 10m purely because it helps skip building dependencies without resorting to bespoke caching strategies.
I know orojects that have chosen it for linux only work, but I got the feeling they regretted it. Conan is what I was using before I switched to cargo, and it was fine as long as everything in your tree was conan. Dependencies you could wrap, but dependents were a headache.
That's pretty cool.
I notice how MS has become so much more respected as they have embraced open source. Is the next frontier for companies to become open process where the best companies attract the best people because of their open processes?
I’ve actually been exploring this concept myself with a blogging side project I’m working on.
Things were “mehhh” for developer interest for the first month or so, as a I was working off of an internal todo list. I didn’t think anyone cared about my 300 line long todo.txt file, but then I started to wonder if I should find a way to put that doc out in the open for developers to follow, and possibly jump in and contribute.
I had a hinkling that I could use GitHub issues to help with this, but I believed the title “issues” would hurt my project. I was under the impression that a new open source project with a single contributor, and a ton of open “issues” would look bad to developers.
I started to inquire with devs on IH and hear about using issues for feature tracking. Much to my surprise, I got an overwhelming “yes, you need to use issues”. I was also told not to worry about the misleading “issues” title, and that enough developers were knowledgeable enough to know they weren’t just bug reports.
As I started to open issues, and ask for help; surprisingly I started getting traffic and interest. The more issues I opened, and the more open I was online about my code and plans for it; the more followers and contributors I’ve gotten.
My plan at this point is to just follow Gitlabs model, and go full open transparency with everything.
i think ultimately this will not be entirely possible. if a company posts transcripts with real names of people that can be damaging for the people (they moght misbehave simply due to company culture, pressure not visible through the open process etc.) which then would give a company a cheap way out (emplyee scapegoat). since this is a possibility, i think employees amd unions etc. would resist. despite if it was an honest afair it would be awesome, and that (possible but improbable) future looks super cool :)
