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Google Search is not to blame for SO's decline.

Toxic deletionists are part of the problem, yes. But they are the literal dregs at the bottom of the bottle when all the good experts have left or burnt out or converted to deletionists. There's no way to find great questions that would make their talents shine.

And here we come to the next point - the company behind SO stopped investing dev time in improving the core experience. Yeah, they were also overrun by vitriolic politically motivated folks, but this is only a lateral plot line. Rearranging CSS, coming up with brand-new bug-ridden editors, concocting impossible get-rich-quick subsites parasitizing on the main site's popularity against the opinions of old-timers - here are just a few examples of brainless PM activities over the years.

As a consequence, Stack Overflow is dead. As in, still twitching from a combination of ideological / greed-fueled Cordyceps firing up random neurons. But yes, mostly dead.


So many comments doubting the validity of the claim.

Kinda fishy, but the touchstone is simple:

- Does Facebook have an IRB?

- How are experiments documented and vetted?

We did not know about Plutonium Files, either (for the record, these were the experiments where plutonium and other radioactive compounds were injected into pregnant women, prisoners, mentally disabled children etc etc).


> on the basis of mountains of backbreaking and incredibly impactful work

I can spot (maybe unintentional) ambiguity from a mile away. Whose backs were broken, and who did the work.


Can you spot a metaphor?


These devs are, quite plainly, gaming the system (I'm talking about F-Droid specifically). They have found that being on top of 'last updated' list leads to more installs, and are churning out versions.


> if they are given a carte blanch for revival of militarism and left unchecked.

Japanese militarism has been going on for quite a while on slow burner. They can assemble nukes in half no time, they have aircraft carriers called 'destroyers', and they've changed the doctrine to first strike in response to NorK's missile tests. We are rapidly falling into the abyss.


Haskell, Julia, Rust, Lisp, and Forth are 'esoteric' enough to create an in-crowd, who are quite often deluded by imagined miraculous solutions to people's problems.

Please repeat after Fred Brooks: there ain't no silver bullet.

To a certain extent this goes on outside programming languages per se: OOP, Gang of Four, Agile match the pattern as well.


Feel APL similar in-crowd member too, though perhaps even more niche


Yup. Also HolyC (literally a religious undertaking), but the crowd had only one person, and he is no longer with us.


Went to a better place, one hopes. Maybe one where he is appreciated, and not considered mad.


The "in-crowd" vibe is very different from religion. We admire a language for its strengths, but worship it for its faults. APL is beginning to shade into theological territory.


Souyz isn't intended to land in Russia.


> Souyz isn't intended to land in Russia.

Ryanair 4978 wasn't intended to land in Belarus, either.


Zaentz was a serial... entrepreneur. His passing away was lamented by musicians and artists all over the world (as in 'why dint it happen sooner?').


Maybe xdotool [0] is what you're looking for.

[0] https://github.com/jordansissel/xdotool/


Not from inertia, but from the overwhelming hubris of those who aimed to supplant it with something new.

IPv6 and Wayland have a lot in common.


Wayland seems more in line with Python3 than IPv6. With Valve now helping with the development and nearly all other issues addressed... seems it will be the default on all major distros within the next few years.


X runs on so many more platforms than Wayland, even if every single Linux distribution switched tomorrow there would still be good reason to support X. Python3 is strictly an improvement on every platform, I don't think they're analogous because there really is no good reason to keep Python2 around.


> X runs on so many more platforms than Wayland [...] Python3 is strictly an improvement on every platform, I don't think they're analogous because there really is no good reason to keep Python2 around

X runs on more platforms than Wayland because...it was ported to them. Just like things use Python 3 because they were ported to it.

This is also understating the reach of X I think: it's widely used in the embedded world, is seeing increasing support in BSDs, and has even been used on macOS (https://github.com/owl-compositor/owl). People have even used it to embed an entire compositor inside a GTK app (https://github.com/alexlarsson/wakefield).

That isn't to say that libwayland has a lot of Linux-isms in it, but afaik they're not really structural as much as there is lack of interest to generalize things more. Heck, the protocol-oriented architecture would even make it easier for anything Linux-esque to be removed in favor of alternative protocols.


Wayland is actually much better for embedded use cases and is actively used by several car companies in their car displays.


Framebuffer+kms+SDL2 (or embedded QT) would be better.


IPv6 maybe, but Wayland's protocol choices were IMHO caused by that part of the UI stack getting nigh zero resources. So every iteration from XFree86 ended up deprecating and removing features, and Wayland turns not having features into a 'feature'; Actual standards move into Desktop environments where (some) investment was happening. The standard following economics, as it were.


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