Somewhere in the history of computing between around 1970 and 2010 there was a tiny, fragile moment where we could have chosen sanity, and instead we chose C.
In our defense, sanity was hard work that nobody could agree on, and C was free.
Anyway, because we chose C, which cannot be made secure, now every corporation is legally mandated for cybersecurity insurance and compliance purposes to hand all their data to Microsoft and ask the big AI in the sky to check whether any evil bits are set, or any words on the naughty list typed.
Probably nothing bad will ever come from this state of affairs! It's going to be just fine. The central mainframe in Seattle will know all, judge all, and love all. Flowers will bloom in every heart.
Don't ask what happened to "Cortana" though, or what "rampancy" is.
It probably won't happen again.
Language architectural design would be a lot easier if binary compatibility and interacting with existing operating systems wasn't a requirement.
Linux+C got us past the 1990s. But at some point maybe we'll get a different OS/language combo that can take us into a nicer future.
We'll lose a lot of old installed software to get there I guess. And we might be doing it against a backdrop of failing global supply chains that make replacing old hardware and software very difficult.
Writing a language is easy. Making it run on today's constantly changing near-infinity of OSes and hardware is then the crazy-making part.
I guess the biggest thing the original writer was complaining about is that "C ABI" is the common interface between all languages and OSes, yet doesn't have a precise machine-readable specification, other than the C language itself, which is Turing-complete and literally requires a compiler to parse.
It would be nice if this situation got better.
Yes, if we create our own new hardware, or restrict ourselves to a very narrow window of OS/hardware combinations, then a lot more things become possible.
I should have a play with CollapseOS!
Cool! WebE also looks interesting.
Yeah, it's recreating that old 8-bit experience that's attracting a lot of us oldies.
At the moment the project I'm working on is a very simple thing, currently targeting Javascript (because Node) but which I'm finding helpful for my own note-taking. So I hope I can find out if it works or not.
The idea is "what if RDF/XML for JSON, but intended for humans to write in a textfile"
- replies
- 0
- announces
- 0
- likes
- 1