Agreed that it’s an entirely acceptable position to try and avoid being stuck in the crossfire of cyber warfare. Let’s be clear though, cyber warfare is already going on and Russia+China are pulling no punches routinely wiping American and European servers in various ways. Anyone on the front line of cybersecurity sees them knocking ceaselessly.

Whether it is being offered to the end users as free (as in freedom) software or as paid closed source has the usual implications. Ease of use, accessibility measures and support impacts inclusivity. Supported languages (natural and programming) will influence further who uses them or not. What constitutes the user base will determine what’s it’s used for and in turn will apply pressure to the editor to take a certain direction.

Political impact is not always obvious and not every single grain of software will be infused with a powerful one. The point is that our choice is either to ignore it or to acknowledge it. We can’t opt out of the world; blind neutrality is as political as any other position.

I would like to offer as a counterpoint that everything is political. Tech is no exception. Tech is a tool, a tool comes with a specific affordance and an affordance suggests to the wielder a certain worldview. To wilfully ignore the social and political impact of one’s work does not protect it from the world’s turmoil.

The wikipedia page you linked to actually states that the term is being pushed by industry (Google, Meta, OpenAI) and that its use is criticized by some researchers.

Another big advantage of getting a dev environment setup is if you can get step by step debugging in place as well. You can then use that to follow the trail of a user action from the UI triggers all the way down.

Holy crap that’s a lot of devs 😳

Team of three. We do the feature branches, pull requests and code reviews. With the right culture, it keeps devs informed about the various projects and gives a nice space to discuss about the practice.

EDIT: we do automated linting and formatting checks too. Keeps things coherent.

A lot of sectors need custom software and some of them have a mission more noble than profits. Government, education, science, culture… IT jobs in non-tech places can be rewarding too and you’ll get to have plenty of colleagues that aren’t your classmates. Being knowledgeable about various open source software can be valuable as well career wise.

This is an advertisement for a commercial editor. The blog author is the CEO of said product.

If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.

Was that blog post stored on punched cards just in case? I’m nowhere near pretentious enough to waste effort on making whatever I’m doing readable in a century, whatever method that may be. Nobody knows what computing will look like in one hundred years. Trying to solve problems that don’t have any guarantee of ever existing is bad practice.

Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service.

Personal devices die at least as fast as the servers making up the cloud. Someone’s iPhone is not a place to store stuff for posterity.

These days I write using [yaddi-yadda] It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last.

Plain text might be great for a writing app, but it’s not doing anything for video, graphics or audio.

Author should take their own cue and stick to chiselled stone tablet given the obvious importance of their work for the future of humanity.

No biggie! The birth of JS is told in numerous different places (and ways) on the net, if you’re curious you should definitely look it up.

JavaScript was created by Brendan Eich for the Netscape Browser. The job said to embed Java in the browser, but Eich was a Lisp guy and wished he could actually embed Scheme instead. Scheme is about as far as Java as one can get in terms of paradigm. Eich must have been stubborn because the result was JavaScript which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Java. Lulled by the seemingly familiar syntax, decades of coders have been baffled by the wild prototype-based object paradigm and the functional style hiding underneath.

JavaScript being somewhat like Java was an arbitrary constraint that was pushed by marketing and that was very partially honoured during implementation. The kinship between the two languages is slim at best. When explaining tech issues to the layperson, it’s important not to sweat the details and get to the point. Here the point is: JavaScript and Java are like car and carpet.

Also, chill. You have a lot to learn. We all do. Stop saying your colleagues look like idiots.