I remember in early 2000 trying to recompile some small tool written by esr on an sgi and never reaching the speed of the binary. The makefile he provided was doing something strange with the source files I never bothered to understand. The readme was hawking his services as a developer. I decided this guy was a full of shit extractionist and subsequently cought much flak from my "friends" for shitting on CATB.

I was sooo smug the last years

@hllizi @mhoye

Also why Perl? Portable.

Only langauge sorta close to it in that area is rust, but it so needs a hell of a lot of maturing to do in terms of feature stability(very much suffers constantly introducing stuff that can't be counted on to be available in the version of rust available in the package repo for Debian or the like).

Why? I need something well supported and portable. That is frankly Perl.

Also honestly don't remember that being a Perl community take about it being difficult to parse etc. I remember that largely being slander pushed by the Python community to try to make up for how shit python was at everything for the longest time. Basically a lie pushed at the academic level and as a meme on forums based around trotting out the worst code imaginable treating it like it was the language was only capable of.

It is was/is the intellectual equivalent of taking C or Python code written for a obfuscation contest and telling people this is what the language is and only how it can be written.

Also holy fuck? Human ergonomics and python and ruby? From a tooling/dev/admin perspective I think the only thing worse I've encountered is node.

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.

@mhoye@cosocial.ca ‘Extremely low’! The words you are looking for are ‘extremely low’. <img class=“not-responsive emoji” src=“https://jam.xwx.moe/emoji/Gutkatoj/gutkato_post_muro.png” title=“:gutkato_post_muro:” />

I don’t consider “direct hostile intervention” to be proof of “they couldn’t subvert it” but rather of “they decided this was the easiest way to subvert it.”

There is some truth to that, but it’s also just a relatively effective way of stopping work even if they didn’t have a use to subvert it to.

I’ve also seen cryptocurrency become the opposite of what many had hoped it would be in the early stages.

It enshrined capitalism and scarcity at its core. There was never a chance of liberatory potential. At best it could be a poor substitute for hawala for the ones that have anonymization.

(Hawala is still subject to a lot of the harmful dynamics of capitalism.)

It’s why most anarchists reject anarcho-capitalism as an oxymoron.

I now tend to think that technological features are secondary to the social and material features around them.

Technologies are instanced applications of social features. Pure technical mechanisms don’t really make sense unless considered within their context of operation or the notion of what problem they solve.

The closest is abstract mathematics, and that semi-frequently turns out applicable to things one hadn’t expected.

By "useless in that regard" I meant "useless to the diseased system."

I don't imagine one can keep a secret forever, so I expect my work will leak eventually if it ever becomes interesting enough. I'd like there to be a real, coherent system rooted in material reality in place to challenge the incumbent 3/

I've also seen cryptocurrency become the opposite of what many had hoped it would be in the early stages. I now tend to think that technological features are secondary to the social and material features around them.

I am happy to share my work and to work in community with others, but I 2/

The overthrow of capitalism will not come purely from any single thing, no. A struggle dependent on technology controlled by its enemies will not get far, though.

My work is not so strongly ideologically pointed that it can't be put to other ends. Most work is not, IMO. Tools have bents, but you can never say "this tool is useless to the enemy."

1/

Without those next 5 years will be tough as many IT engineers will land on the streets with huge debts and burnouts.

@hipsterelectron @mhoye @froztbyte @lykso