The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign.
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Today the number of people under 50 who'll reach for perl or raku or who cares what it's called as their first choice of tool for anything new is zero. In practice Perl is an esolang now.
Torvalds' position is that contributing to the kernel should be _more_ difficult for everyone else, but, through LLM usage, easier for existing kernel developers.
Ted Tso's adamant position that "you can't make us learn Rust" is the same insularity.
If the kernel was a country, we'd recognize this.
@mhoye, incidentally, I was listening to a radio programme which, this week, happened to be discussing farming and the effects of climate change. There was mention of how the older people resist change and the younger ones accept it, regarding farming methods and which crops or animals do better and how these things are changing.
I'm seeing… certain similarities here; and once again, I'm reminded of how we tend to go from ”this is how it is” to “new shiny! must examine!” to “new stuff? who needs it…”
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The move to Matrix was partly driven by their open source commitments - hi, @matrix , hey yo, love you all - but they mostly won on the strength of two things. First that their accessibility posture was not just unrivalled in terms of FOSS forums but that their team jumped at the chance to work with us improve it.
But 2nd: the moderation tools are unmatched. Nothing else comes close.
Once you have tools and process in place to ablate harassment, nobody willingly goes back to not having that.
Like, OK, we've got clean running water now, we've got soap, we've got [checks notes] the forum management equivalent of an orbital ion cannon for dealing with the abuse or harassment of our community in our open forums., and I guess we're on our way to penicillin. We're going to be OK.
Being trusted to provide the foundations and tooling of that psychological safety to a team of the finest people I have ever worked with, and delivering on that promise, has been the high point of my career.
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@mhoye I am not a kernel contributor, yet, but I am currently in the middle of a massive personal push to get on top of C (which I consider a naively honest language, now that I'm learning about it in earnest) because mainly I'm tired of not being able to write my own device drivers, but other reasons too.
It's been difficult but I found a way to keep this going and track progress in a way that is not at the mercy of me not losing or misplacing a notebook. And basically, I'm doing it the ultra-hard way, studying the underlying math as math before I inevitably encounter it used in code - I dropped out of school, but grasping concepts was never the issue - and basically just acquiring this new mental toolset so I can have more agency in what I do with my computers.
Everyone, especially the capitalists, knew that others would just "hey I want this thing you handle the hard stuff" because we live in a world of opportunistic Idea Men who think their inherent genius makes them worthy of skipping the actual doing. That they were allowed to do this is obscene, of course.
Side effect, it's so much fun. And if anything ever felt like I was learning Deep Magic, this is it - you learn hacks as a fundamental exercise, because they save you cycles, and this stuff runs at the speed of god. C still has some genuine awe to offer in the results it can give you.
Now, I can see also the tedium in implementing things from this level of scratch, so I can see why experienced devs would want to pass off "write me a function that takes int x, char y, structedtype gerble, applies these operations, and returns whatever," and then look said fairly generic but also specific function over, rather than doing the tedious housekeeping all day.
I have a few GUI projects that will come in time, which I will probably do only the core functionality (DSP, 3D mesh operations, etc) in C, while implementing the UI in something easier and higher-level that only needs to run at human speed.
But if by that point I have a local inference model that can do that level of simple C code for me, hand off a function declaration with a comment that describes it, and thus I can implement everything in straight C, except with the tedium removed, I can't say I won't use it.
Fuck the datacentres, but this shit works, especially for code, and I don't think I need a datacentre for that, even with my crappy old 1070. Saying this is wrong is like saying we should do 3D animation exactly the same way they made the Money For Nothing video. It's a tool that automates complex operations quite reliably, in the hands of a discerning expert. Nobody opens Blender for the first time and makes anything more complex than a donut on their first day.
But any use of actual code generation would be long after I've finished learning how to understand Assembly, as well as finally getting my head wrapped thoroughly around how you write good, fast C code, along with all the mathymaths I will need to understand in order to do the things I want the apps to do. None of it is magic or a secret, it's just a lot of time spent getting the concepts into your head and building the muscle memory, like I did when I learned piano, and by necessity, music theory - you just put in the time and do the exercises, be they scales or math problems.
I'm happy that I've preserved enough of my brain that I can enjoy this now, and I mean, people who just don't want to learn are always going to be annoying, but at the moment they are enabled by the fact that technology is not run by technologists, it's run by rich manbabies exclusively.
The problem is the capitalists. The problem has always been the capitalists. Deal with them and everyone will be free to study Calculus for fun, and bring back the joy in computers.
@jpaskaruk @mhoye Have you looked at Zig? The tag line is basically "C with proper tooling"
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@mhoye sounds like a really shitty place to work if that behaviour was expected. was this via a public irc server or internal only?
@waffles The combination of the long running and deep seated cultural expectation of working in the open, the fact that for many years IRC was the only suitable tool for that and that later alternatives were almost all proprietary or otherwise closed meant we held onto it for very good, values-forward reasons, for a lot longer than we should have.
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@mhoye heh. Perl syntax never bothered me, and I still probably think about most programming problems as Perl problems, even if I'm using another language. This occasionally bumps me up against the ways other languages aren't as capable, flexible, or dwimmy as Perl, but I also have to be real about the fact that the gum I like just isn't coming back in style.
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The move to Matrix was partly driven by their open source commitments - hi, @matrix , hey yo, love you all - but they mostly won on the strength of two things. First that their accessibility posture was not just unrivalled in terms of FOSS forums but that their team jumped at the chance to work with us improve it.
But 2nd: the moderation tools are unmatched. Nothing else comes close.
Once you have tools and process in place to ablate harassment, nobody willingly goes back to not having that.
@mhoye Is there an inventory of the capabilities you & yrs found particularly valuable somewhere?
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@mhoye also I think almost everybody who regularly came to DC Perlmongers meetings in the day has moved on to other languages (if they're still programming at all), so it seems unlikely that even the olds who used to use Perl first would still make that choice.
@fedward @mhoye I'm an old who did a lot with Perl from 5.005 (SunOS
until, well, last week anyhow.I *also* use python. Perl was (and still is) my favorite tool that's absolutely everywhere.
Of the 20-odd languages I've used in the last 40 years, it's still #1 for quick in-place recursive file edits. My workplace is more sed/awk, but if you think perl is ugly...
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Like, OK, we've got clean running water now, we've got soap, we've got [checks notes] the forum management equivalent of an orbital ion cannon for dealing with the abuse or harassment of our community in our open forums., and I guess we're on our way to penicillin. We're going to be OK.
Being trusted to provide the foundations and tooling of that psychological safety to a team of the finest people I have ever worked with, and delivering on that promise, has been the high point of my career.
But again, there it's the same story. Matrix is still a _little_ convoluted as far as onboarding is concerned, but it beats the heck out of IRC's "learn a new OS and hope you don't get disconnected" cliffs-of-Dover learning curve, and the numbers again reflected that. Invest in community accessibility, and community safety and tooling ergonomics, and the line goes up.
Not a line made out of rageclicks, manipulation and misery, just the steady growth of a community worth being a part of.
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We gave the entire (well, no-PII, no active secbugs, etc) contents and history of Bugzilla to some very smart PhDs at uMontreal, and one of the things they came back with was this: somebody submitting their first bugfix was relatively unlikely to submit a second, but somebody on their fourth bugfix is quite likely to get to five, and six, and stick around.
I cannot emphasize enough how much you get from up front code ergonomics and human care in the early stages of the contributor relationship.
@mhoye And yet, Mozilla (Corporation) leadership doesn't care a bit about investing in fostering a community nowadays. Worse, they continue to put walls and working behind closed doors.
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@mhoye Is there an inventory of the capabilities you & yrs found particularly valuable somewhere?
@owen When we got it spun up, the weapon of choice was called Mjolnir. Today, you want to look at its successor Draupnir.
You need to know a _little_ about how Matrix communications are structured and work, but relatively little. Single-action org-wide banning, per-user or per-origin, is a delight, and retroactive redact was something that a few free-as-in-speechies objected to until the day I had to clean up a goatse flood, they came around pretty quick after that.
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@mhoye much earlier this year I basically gave up on an attempt to contribute to Matplotlib because the process was so painful. Like, the existing code also had issues, but that's never a big deal for me. But I would need day job money to deal with their CI setup or their patch notes process, let alone both. It's not that I couldn't soldier through it if I needed to. It's that I couldn't justify spending my life that way.
@MaddieM4 @mhoye I tried to contribute to firefox a decade ago (or so) and the level complexity with the use of multiple languages meant that after going through multiple layers it become clear that implementing the simple feature I wanted to add would far exceed the time I could afford. I could imagine contributing to the kernel, but I will like opt for a simpler kernel that uses C exclusively for similar reasons... Too much industry-level complexity in Linux already.
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But again, there it's the same story. Matrix is still a _little_ convoluted as far as onboarding is concerned, but it beats the heck out of IRC's "learn a new OS and hope you don't get disconnected" cliffs-of-Dover learning curve, and the numbers again reflected that. Invest in community accessibility, and community safety and tooling ergonomics, and the line goes up.
Not a line made out of rageclicks, manipulation and misery, just the steady growth of a community worth being a part of.
@mhoye man, I wish my experience reflected this
we have IRC and Matrix both as fully endorsed options and the Matrix route has dropped off significantly in the last few years; it's about a third or quarter of IRC at this point
(they're bridged together and the bridging experience is kinda shit from the IRC side but pretty seamless from the Matrix side)
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I think it's bang on.
Perl drove me up the wall, but it was the thing you did unix admin with.
Then config management tools happened, and they were both Ruby (yes I know, ansible. ugh) and our entire team cheerfully binned the perl junk and used a real language instead.
Perl made me feel stupid. Ruby allowed me to remember that I'd been a coder and had fun with it.
(modulo some truly hairy MIME-handling that only perl could cope with)
@JuliaRez But that's partially what I was going for, the languages don't matter that much, no matter what aesthetic criteria devs attribute to them, often in fits of narcissism of small differences.
You got a new tool, it was in a new language. That's usually how things work. Tool is good, people switch to using it, taking the language along.
Only very rarely is it because the previous language was that bad. If no good tool ever comes up again for the old language, it withers (e.g. Perl), but sometimes it gets a new lease on life (e.g. PHP, basically Perl--).
Programmers aren't esthetes. I mean, look at it, YAML and Rust seem to rule the world right now...
And most preferences go completely out of the window once money is on the line, and your choices are limited. Which is why I'm not worried about Linux-the-kernel surviving.
Linux-the-FOSS-community is another thing, but I have low hopes for community software in general.
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@owen When we got it spun up, the weapon of choice was called Mjolnir. Today, you want to look at its successor Draupnir.
You need to know a _little_ about how Matrix communications are structured and work, but relatively little. Single-action org-wide banning, per-user or per-origin, is a delight, and retroactive redact was something that a few free-as-in-speechies objected to until the day I had to clean up a goatse flood, they came around pretty quick after that.
@mhoye Thanks.
Going off a quick read, it seems like a lot of its underlying thesis is in the direction that if you have to moderate someone in one spot, odds are they've been up to antisocial nonsense in several, and you might want to act on them without having to individually find and adjudicate them. That tracks - but am I reading it right?
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@mhoye Thanks.
Going off a quick read, it seems like a lot of its underlying thesis is in the direction that if you have to moderate someone in one spot, odds are they've been up to antisocial nonsense in several, and you might want to act on them without having to individually find and adjudicate them. That tracks - but am I reading it right?
@mhoye (The background radiation of most moderation on the internet is to treat each incident as a one-off; tooling for addressing repeat customers is frequently weak)
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We gave the entire (well, no-PII, no active secbugs, etc) contents and history of Bugzilla to some very smart PhDs at uMontreal, and one of the things they came back with was this: somebody submitting their first bugfix was relatively unlikely to submit a second, but somebody on their fourth bugfix is quite likely to get to five, and six, and stick around.
I cannot emphasize enough how much you get from up front code ergonomics and human care in the early stages of the contributor relationship.
@mhoye montreal mentioned
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@srtcd424 Glad you like it, but as they say, be careful what you wish for. You might get it.
@paulmckrcu oh, on a personal level I think I've been round that loop a few times. A lot of what U. G. Krishnamurti said to people who thought they wanted to replicate his path has come back to me over the years!
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But again, there it's the same story. Matrix is still a _little_ convoluted as far as onboarding is concerned, but it beats the heck out of IRC's "learn a new OS and hope you don't get disconnected" cliffs-of-Dover learning curve, and the numbers again reflected that. Invest in community accessibility, and community safety and tooling ergonomics, and the line goes up.
Not a line made out of rageclicks, manipulation and misery, just the steady growth of a community worth being a part of.
Anyway: the Linux kernel could have that. Any community can have that, really. But the real work is the humility of admitting you might need it.
And a lot of people - not just proud but _justifiably_ proud, for all their accomplishments and success - can easily find themselves trapped in the kind of blind spot you can only be trapped in by the atrophy of that humility, from a mere failure to welcome and foster enough diversity and dissent.
Where you can no longer change without failing first.
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@mhoye Thanks.
Going off a quick read, it seems like a lot of its underlying thesis is in the direction that if you have to moderate someone in one spot, odds are they've been up to antisocial nonsense in several, and you might want to act on them without having to individually find and adjudicate them. That tracks - but am I reading it right?
@owen During my full-time involvement, it was still true that moderators had to generally keep track of disparate acts across forums, and communicate appropriately.
Early on, this was a lot of administrative work for me - most abusers get away with it by being perfectly nice to most people - but after a while I'd built up enough credibility that people came to value the safety of their colleagues in other fora very highly.
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A thing I said a lot in those first few years was: we are competing on the experience and ergonomics of being a part of this community. Every single person out there who is smart enough to turn the crank on a compiler and figure out how to send us a patch has thousands of options. The process complexity and hard-knock oldschool open source "culture" we believe is acting as a "filter" isn't selecting for brains or talent, it's selecting for a willingness to tolerate bullshit and endure abuse.
@mhoye I think this is a battle we are broadly losing in civil society: from open source to the local volunteer fire department, people need to look at all the other shit going on in their life and say "this is a community I'm going to make time for". And when we look at the broader economic picture---especially in the US---I think people increasingly *have* to say "no": they don't even have a choice.
