Readit NewsThere are already plenty of devices, from old phones to vacuum robots, where we have that or near enough.
Technically, we know how we could maintain/re-flash these devices.
Yet, we don't. Why? lack of standardization, specially the boot process in non-x86 platforms.
Having to maintain per device images is not really practical at scale.
Common mass produced products manufacturers have incentives to not mess-up too badly: recalls or warranties on such scales are a nightmare.
With military contracts, its a paid maintenance opportunity.
At the moment, it is nothing but pain if one is not already accustomed and used to building Debian packages to even get a local build of a package working.
I would recommend looking into the chroot based build tools like pbuilder (.deb) and mock (.rpm).
It greatly simplifies the local setup, including targeting different distributions or even architectures (<3 binfmt).
But I tend to agree, these tools are not easy to remember, specially for the occasional use. And packaging a complex software can be a pain if you fall down the dependency rabbit hole while trying to honor distros' rules.
That's why I ended-up spending quite a bit of time tweaking this set of ugly Makefifes: https://kakwa.github.io/pakste/ and why I often relax things allowing network access during build and the bundling of dependencies, specially for Rust, Go or Node projects.
It's a bit bloated, but it's free and works.
This stuff is a nightmare to manage, and with large code bases/products, you need a dedicated "devops" just to babysit the thing and avoid it becoming a liability for your devs.
I'm actually looking forward our migration to GHEC from on-prem just because Github Actions, as shitty as they are, are far less of an headache than Jenkins.
Man :| no. I genuinely understand the convenience of using Actions, but it's a horrible product.
Am I missing a truly better alternative or CI systems simply are all kind of a pita?
With an order of magnitude less money, I think they would have been more focused on improving Firefox rather than trying to diversify with projects like Firefox OS, VPN services or AI.
Even today, given their ~$1.5B in the bank, at the cost of a really painful downsizing, the interests alone could probably pay for a Firefox development focused on standard adherence, performance, quality and privacy.
Mozilla is not a company trying to reinvent itself to survive. If it becomes irrelevant because the Browser becomes irrelevant in the future, that's fine in my book, the organization would have fulfill its mission.
But it is sad to see it become irrelevant because of mismanagement and lack of focus.
1. It pulled away folks who would otherwise have spent time improving Perl 5 (either the core or via modules).
2. It discouraged significant changes to the Perl 5 language, since many people figured that it wasn't worth it with Perl 6 just around the corner.
3. It confused CTO/VP Eng types, some of whom thought that they shouldn't invest in Perl 5, since Perl 6 was coming soon. I've heard multiple people in the Perl community discuss hearing this directly from execs.
Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and all that.
Also, even if Perl 6 had never happened the way it did and instead we'd just had smaller evolutions of the language in major versions, I think usage would still have shrunk over time.
A lot of people just dislike Perl's weird syntax and behavior. Many of those people were in a position to teach undergrads, and they chose to use Python and Java.
And other languages have improved a lot or been created in the past 20+ years. Java has gotten way better, as has Python. JavaScript went from "terribly browser-only language" to "much less terrible run anywhere language" with a huge ecosystem. And Go came along and provided an aggressively mediocre but very usable strongly typed language with super-fast builds and easy deploys.
Edit: Also PHP was a huge factor in displacing Perl for the quick and dirty web app on hosted services. It was super easy to deploy and ran way faster than Perl without mod_perl. Using mod_perl generally wasn't possible on shared hosting, which was very common back in the days before everyone got their own VM.
All of those things would still have eaten some of Perl's lunch.
But being the first meant it got some oddities and the abstractions are not quite right imho.
A bit too Shell-esque, specially for arguments passing and the memory abstractions are a bit too leaky regarding memory management (reference management fills too C-esque for an interpreted language, and the whole $ % @ & dance is really confusing for an occasional and bad Perl dev like me). The "10 ways to do it" also hurts it. It lead to a lack of consistency & almost per developer coding coding styles. The meme was Perl is a "write only language".
But I would still be grateful of what it brought and how influential it was (I jock from time to time how Ruby is kind of the "true" Perl 6, it even has flip flops!).
In truth, these days, I feel the whole "interpreted languages" class is on the decline, at least on the server. There are a lot of really great native languages that have come up within the last few years, enabled in large part by LLVM. And this trend doesn't seem over yet.
Languages like Rust, Swift, Go, Zig or Odin are making the value proposition of interpreted languages (lower perf but faster iterations) less compelling by being convenient enough while retaining performance. In short, we can now "have the cake and eat it too".
But the millions of lines in production are also not going awywhere anytime soon. I bet even Perl will still be around somewhere (distro tooling, glue scripts, build infra, etc...) when I retire.
Anyway, thank you Perl, thank you Larry Wall, love your quotes.
This could have worked in Jobs times, because of the personality & vision of the latter, plus a rapidly evolving market.
But this was no longer possible once the dust settled, specially with a logistician/beam counter like Tim Cook.
Every bet he made was an abject failure, from the Apple Car to the Vision Pro.
His only success was the M series macs, a really good but by no mean revolutionary step-up on a now minority segments of Apple's main market (i.e. internet terminals).
Even the chaos relating to Apple's AI efforts seems to clearly indicate a clear lack of leadership and vision.
For me, he will probably be remembered like Apple's Steve Ballmer. But even with a Nadela-like replacement, Apple needs probably a good hard look at itself and its internal culture.
ChatGpt is also building other products/brands like Sora to capture more mindshare.
Linux is free and yet people use Windows.
I also don't get why people claim NT is "better." Linux is a modern kernel under very active development.
There are a few interviews of Dave Cutler (NT's architect) around where he explains this far better than I am here.
Overall, you have classic needs and if you don't care about OSS (either for auditability, for customizability or for philosophical choice about open source), it's a workable option with its strength and weaknesses, just like the Linux kernel.