Oh really? How would an IDE go-to-definition on x.bar in this code?

def foo(x):
  return x.bar

Best it can do is heuristics and guesswork.

I assume you’re talking about embeddable languages. I’ve used Rhai and it’s quite nice but I wish it had type annotations.

Gluon is another option but IMO they’ve gone way too far into crazy and unergonomic ML-style syntax. Which is weird considering it’s implemented in Rust which has much nicer syntax for the same things which they could have copied.

I’ve literally never heard anyone say that

Well you didn’t listen then. Google the phrase.

I can tell you’ve literally never even tried this…

I do not need to try it to know that this is fundamental impossible. But I will try it because you can go some way towards proper type knowledge without explicit annotations (e.g. Pycharm can do this for Python) and it’s better than nothing (but still not as good as actual type annotations).

It’s also much more readable than bash, python, javascript, etc. so writing a readable (and runnable everywhere)

Bash definitely. Not sure I’d agree for Python though. That’s extremely readable.

You’re talking about rails.

Maybe other Ruby code is better, but people always say Rails is the killer app of Ruby so…

Use an IDE like I said and you can literally just “Find all usages” or “Jump to declaration”, etc.

That only works if you have static type annotations, which seems to be very rare in the Ruby world.

In any case, you shouldn’t be using any of these for large projects like gitlab, so it’s completely inconsequential.

Well, I agree you shouldn’t use Ruby for large projects like Gitlab. But why use it for anything?

Maybe, but I think the only app store that does vet apps is the Apple one, so that should be the default expectation.

And I think even they wouldn’t manually look for something like this. They’re mainly concerned about people breaking the commercial rules.

Ever tried to follow a large Ruby codebase like Gitlab? Absolutely nightmare. Not only does it not have type annotations, so you can’t follow code by clicking, but you can’t even follow it by grepping because Rubyists seem to love generated identifiers. Even the syntax of the language makes grepping worse, e.g. the lack of brackets prevents you from grepping for function calls like foo(.

Real moral of the story: STATIC TYPING!

Seriously so many people think it’s a waste of time, and then stuff like this happens.

Microsoft doesn’t have a vetting process for publishing extensions in the store. Maybe the failure is that people assume they do?

You can count Ruby out immediately. Terrible language.

Also replace JavaScript with Typescript. It’s strictly superior.

I don’t think Go has any mature GUI libraries.

For desktop GUI your main options are:

• Qt, via C++. Probably the best option but if you don’t know C++ that’s a huge barrier.
• Qt, via Python. Reasonable but Python is quite a shit language. It’s very slow and the tooling/infrastructure is absolutely abysmal. Be prepared to bang your head against the wall trying to e.g. get relative imports to work.
• Dart/Flutter. This is quite nice but not super mature for desktop apps. Also the Dart ecosystem is very small so libraries you want may not be available.
• Electron/Typescript. This is quite a good option. Nobody here will recommend this because nerds have a slightly weird hatred of Electron because the minimum download size is like 80MB. But normally it doesn’t really matter. Especially for big apps.

For the web frontend you basically want Typescript. For the backend you can use literally any language.

I would recommend Electron for the GUI and Typescript for the web frontend and Electron GUI. It means you can use the same language everywhere and you won’t need to even implement the same program twice.

If you’re worried about the download size / RAM usage you can look into Tauri which uses your OS’s browser engine. I’ve never used it though.

Yeah but be prepared for a lot of pain if you want to distribute your app. Python tooling/infra is abysmal.

Haven’t tried Mojo yet but I have tried Julia and it kinda sucked balls. Sorry Julia fans, but it did. My main complaints:

• It’s a research language like MATLAB, so the emphasis is on repl’s, trying things out etc. But the compilation model is like C++. When you import a package it spends like 2 minutes compiling it. I think it’s supposed to cache it but the second time it was still like 10 seconds for me just to import a package. I believe they’ve improved this since I used it but still, huge red flag.
• 1-based indexing. Come on guys. Anyone using this is smart enough to learn 0-based indexing. It’s like putting a steering wheel in a jet fighter because you worry about pilots getting confused by a joystick. Again, red flag.
• The plotting libraries (a core feature for this sort of language) kind of sucks. In fairness nothing comes close to MATLAB on this front. I ended up paying for MATLAB because of that.

There’s also this article which has more reasons.

I am leaving it a while longer before I try Mojo.

I mean… let’s just hope he isn’t doing this professionally.

Yeah possible, but this of the amount of effort that would take!

A recent notable example is xz, but there’s also event-stream npm package a few years ago that got infected with Bitcoin stealing code.

They’re asking if the entire project is somehow fake, not if it’s a real project that got backdoored. That’s obviously impossible to tell just based on stars, language quality, and similar heuristic signals.

Maybe all of the stars, forks, and discussions on the GitHub page are from fake accounts

All 9k stars, 10k PRs, 400 forks & professional web site are fake? Come on this is about the most obviously not fake project I’ve seen!

How do you know when a product like this can be trusted?

The same way you tell if anything can be trusted - you look at the signals and see if they are suss. In this case:

• Lots of stars
• Lots of real code in the repo
• Professional looking website with commercial pricing
• Lots of issues
• Good English

The amount of effort it would take to fake this for very little benefit is enormous.

Maybe I’m just being paranoid.

Yeah just a little!

Yeah definitely! I wouldn’t hold your breath though. Especially as that’s pretty much an escape route from POSIX. I doubt they’d be too keen to lose power.

That depends on how readable you want the output to be. It’s already pretty bad on that front. If you start supporting arbitrary features it’s going to end up as a bytecode interpreter. Which would be pretty cool too tbf! Has anyone written a WASM runtime in bash? 😄

Convincing rebuttal 😄

You don’t have to install it on the machine where the script is run. That’s the point.

If you can use an alternative then do that. This is for situations where you can’t use an alternative or don’t want users to have to install anything else.