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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • I was curious about the Python connection because multiple comments mentioned it, but I’ve worked on multiple Python projects over the past dozen-ish years and never seen that operator.

    Turns out it was introduced in 3.8, released in 2019, so it was much too late to inspire Go, and most of the projects I’ve worked on were written to target an earlier Python version. It also has a substantially different meaning than in Go.

    I don’t know if there’s an “official” rationale for the Go syntax, but := is a fairly common (but not ubiquitous) math notation meaning “define the thing on the left to be equal to the expression on the right”, i.e. to distinguish it from the other use of =, i.e. “the expression on the left must be equal to the expression on the right.” Go’s usage matches this mathematical meaning of introducing a new variable definition pretty well.











  • Compiled code is already effectively write-only. But I can imagine there being some efficiency gains in not always shelling out for arithmetic, so possibly that’s a future improvement for the project.

    That said, my reaction to this project overall is to wonder whether there are really very many situations in which it’s more convenient to run a compiled Bash script than to run a compiled binary. I suppose the Bash has the advantage of being truly “compile once, run anywhere”.




  • No, I agree that a package manager or app store is indeed safer than either curl-bash or a random binary. But a lot of software is indeed installed via standalone binaries that have not been vetted by package manager teams, and most people don’t use Nix. Even with a package manager like apt, there are still ways to distribute packages that aren’t vetted by the central authority owning the package repo (e.g. for apt, that mechanism is PPAs). And when introducing a new piece of software, it’s a lot easier to distribute to a wide audience by providing a standalone binary or an install script than to get it added to every platform’s package manager.