TUI are often inferior to GUI from a user perspective, but not necessarily by much.
On the other hand, they are easier to build in a cross platform manner.
Linux is probably the most difficult platform to build GUI for, because of all the fragmentation, X11, Wayland, all the different flavors of GUI toolkits, driver issues, window managers issues, font issues etc.
TUI are a bit like web apps in that regard, using the terminal instead of a browser to abstract the platform.
a lot of boomer and millennial dev users love TUI bc that's what they grew up with. part of A\'s early success is hit that sweet spot and triggered a culture shift late last year.
as those age group phasing out, web ui will be dominant
Zig seems to be most prominent C alternative today, well funded, with some high-profile support, excellent engineering and both a loyal fanbase and haters.
That said, as longtime C user, I've been tempted by Jai and Zig and C3, but I am not ready to make the switch yet. The benefits are simply not big enough.
And there is something new that was not apparent in when this article was written: a lot of code is LLM written now, giving old and mainstream language an undeniable advantage. Also, Rust, with the built-in safeguards, is pretty AI assistance friendly.
As some respectable C developer I know says: the issue with the C "killers" is that the people that already know C, have years, decades and experiences they are unwilling to let go. They can jump across any major systems programming project out there and feel at home.
So to win these people you need to have a killer feature that can win them, Rust offers it. The Jai, C3, Zig, etc, do not.
Sure, they are better Cs, but that's not enough to switch.
So eventually, all those C killers will keep growing, among newer system programmers, but not much among seasoned C devs.
> Sure, they are better Cs, but that's not enough to switch.
It's also not always clear they are "better". The Handmade Community, from which this essay and several of these "better C" languages ultimately spring has some weird ideas about what constitutes "better".
Handmade is Casey Muratori's thing. If you understand it as "This one guy did a video essay series and it all got a bit out of hand" it makes more sense. A twenty first century "Life of Brian" but for software engineering. He's not the Messiah, he's just some guy who was asked his opinion.
They're certainly different which is a key requirement to be better that is often not met by "audiophile" technologies, so that's something. Several of them have some Spatial Memory Safety features (ie bounds checking), which is a thing C doesn't provide out of the box for example [but see Fil-C].
I spent decades writing C for money and for pleasure, and I don't write C any more, I write Rust. But then I was never Casey's audience. For one thing of course, by the time "Handmade Hero" was published I was a long way into my career as a programmer, so it's not really "for" me even if I wanted to make video games (I do not want to make video games).
François Chollet made an interesting geometric analogy on Twitter. We tend to view Intelligence as something unbounded, like the height of a pole. But it could be something closer to the roundness of a polished sphere. Once close to the limit, incremental improvements are less and less significant.
The intuition we have about the nature of cognition and its whole shape and limits is almost entirely built by looking at ourselves and our peers, comparing that to an ant. I feel this is largely naive and misguided.
I've been interpreting AI task solving capabilities as a search problem: being smarter lets us prune more of the tree and try out different things more efficiently. I think this fits into the sphere analogy quite well: at the limit, we need to experiment, use the experiments to create new abstractions and build on them repeatedly. This doesn't necessarily require more raw intelligence, but the time or resources to find how the pieces fit together.
I admit I was a little bit curious about DOGE and its outcome, as a software guy I've seen huge amount of bureaucratic inefficiencies, sometimes wondering how some companies could survive wasting all that money for nothing.
I've also often be irritated by the slow and sometimes absurd processes of French administration, and I am pretty sure the whole thing is far from running as efficiently as it could.
That said, I gave way too much credence to Musk and his clique, turned out the efficiency theatre was nothing more than a smoke screen to cover a different style of operation.
I am not sure they even tried to cut waste in a meaningful way, or if they had the competence to do so.
Chesterton's Fence, even if there is actual inefficiency there might be a reason for that. It might not be a good reason mind you, but even a bad reason is still a reason. You cannot cut inefficiency without understanding the reason first. It would take multiple years of research to understand and uncover all the inefficiency that has built up over the years. Otherwise you just end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
I believe the current administration is a ploy to dismantle and destroy the government from within. There was no serious plan to address any of our problems. They are ideologues waving their little MAGA books and threatening anyone perceived as reactionary by weaponizing the Justice Department. Their only answer to any issue is that we simply didn’t believe in the Leader hard enough.
We had a significant reduction in government workforce during the Clinton administration.
The stark difference is that THAT effort was handled with careful planning and through the proper channels. The way any mature, thoughtful, and responsible person would approach something like this.
One thing has been made very clear with Trump's terms - if there is no detailed plan on how they intend to do something, it's going to be a disaster. You can't just wing things and expect everything to work out.
Unless you just want to disrupt, punish, hurt, etc., in which case this is working as planned...which some may claim was the actual plan all along.
Zuckerberg was barely adult when he started Facebook. And he probably bumped into a few older guys who thought they knew better than him, and history proved them wrong.
He likely developed some irrational belief that clever and young beats anything else, and saw an echo of his own bravado in Alexandr Wang.
Turns out his heuristics were not calibrated properly.
I dunno if it’s exclusively his innovation, but Zuckerberg’s insight was that you could actually lie to your users by presenting yourself as trustworthy, while having malicious intent to violate their privacy by selling their data to advertisers, and there are no business repercussions for doing so.
Instagram ads are the most consistently interesting ads I see online, and by an enormous margin. Ads suck, and I resent that their inherent purpose is to manipulate me, but they accomplish their goal better than any other ads I've ever seen.
I don't mean it in a "super bowl commercial" way; the products in Instagram ads are the consistently interesting part. It seems like a safe assumption that the advertisers for plenty of uninteresting products are trying to buy ads on Instagram, and that the advertisers for plenty of interesting products are trying to buy ads elsewhere. That means that Instagram's targeting is the differentiating factor.
I guess my argument is that it's not innovative or "hard" to sell ads to people who have given you massive amounts of personal and demographic information (voluntarily!)
Something something even Apple wants 10s of billion$ a year from it… building the big money machine is an innovation of a kind when only a few entities can really do it.
> We're not saying many ex or current Meta employees talking about their experiences here, even if I am sure that HN is pretty popular among this crowd.
This is just false I think. I'd have to search for it, but in some of the recent stories about how morale at Meta is at an all-time low due to the layoffs and fiefdom-building I recall seeing a number of current and former Meta employees comment.
Plus, my guess is that the vast, vast majority of Facebook employees just aren't privy to outright illegal acts, and most people aren't going to break their nondisparagement clause just to break the latest bitchy thing somebody said regarding Zuck.
That's because you pretty quickly catch downvotes from people with sour grapes whenever you talk good about working at big tech. Quadruply so for companies much more hated than average like Palantir/Meta/Oracle. It's just what echo chamber downvoting culture gives you it doesn't really have to do with what's happening internally. They're very very happy to spill beans and talk about the current environment on Blind which is a lot less hostile.
> They're very very happy to spill beans and talk about the current environment on Blind which is a lot less hostile.
This is funny, Blind is even more negative on the general company sentiment than this place. People are saying the current morale right now is the worst it's ever been.
> I've worked in Big Tech and I know for sure the team you're on makes a big difference, regardless of the CEO.
Yeah this is true, but also if the company wants to make everyone suffer, they absolutely can. When companies have a bad reputation, people should believe it
If you are a former employee you don’t have much to gain by commenting here. If you say anything that isn’t unequivocally negative you will get downvoted into oblivion.
But from the few interactions I had with him I would say he is quite abrasive, stubborn and probably somewhat on the spectrum.
But there is a special kind of unpleasantness in writing/debugging netcode for large projects, I don't think you can be agreeable and still you your job correctly.
If anything, in immature engineering organizations, preserving netcode invariants to successfully deliver a multiplayer project might benefit from a little of that disposition.
On the other hand, they are easier to build in a cross platform manner.
Linux is probably the most difficult platform to build GUI for, because of all the fragmentation, X11, Wayland, all the different flavors of GUI toolkits, driver issues, window managers issues, font issues etc.
TUI are a bit like web apps in that regard, using the terminal instead of a browser to abstract the platform.