This is possibly one of the more cursed single sentences I've ever seen in a job posting

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Honestly, I suspect half the startups throwing "LLM" or "AI" in their company descriptions are basically just an elaborate funding scam in one form or another. I'm sure some business types without a foundation in the field they're attempting to wade into genuinely don't realize the technology literally can't even; I'm sure others will quietly pivot away from LLMs for it (it's possible they're not even seriously considering them); and then some others probably have some sort of money loop where the money goes to contracting all their friends or who knows what the fuck.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I should just learn COBOL and then get funding to create COBOL 2: COBOLLIN' since it seems like there's a lot of money to rake in there.

I mean how hard could it be*

Xandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

@aud @SnoopJ @glyph @ireneista COBOL has classes now.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] wait, if I want funding, I don't think I even have to know COBOL before pitching "CO-BALLIN'"

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] oh good, I'll take one*

*(this is a joke; I assume you mean in the OO sense)

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] (I'm just going into founder mode)

Xandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

@aud @SnoopJ @glyph @ireneista http://www.coboloncogs.org/HOME.HTM

Irenes (many)

@aud @SnoopJ @glyph @xgranade yeah when we did our DB/C thing it was very interesting because you could see how four decades of new innovations in programming languages had been retrofitted onto it one by one

Xandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

@ireneista @aud @SnoopJ @glyph What's that about FORTRAN?

Xandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

@ireneista @aud @SnoopJ @glyph What's that about C++?

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Is this a riff of ruby on rails?! Because that's kind of amazing

Could do a whole ass sequence on that!
Python on Pipes
C on the Sea
PHP on PCP

Irenes (many)

@xgranade @aud @SnoopJ @glyph haha siiiiiigh

there was a time when NASA was still using FORTRAN for new code; we don't know if that's the case today. compared to C it didn't have pointer-aliasing problems, which meant it could apply optimizations more often in numeric code

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] "no no, C++ is good now, you just need to use C++46!"

Irenes (many)

@xgranade @aud @SnoopJ @glyph you know how in tarot, death represents change?

yeah sometimes in technology a system just gets too large and inflexible and there's only one type of change left that it can really experience ><

(but also see our recent blog post "The Cybernetic Bias", because we do think that bias is in play here)

Xandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

@aud @SnoopJ @glyph @ireneista There is Python on Pylons, and I'm pretty sure I've seen one for PHP as well but I forget the name.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] pylons? not enough minerals for that.

Xandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

@ireneista @aud @SnoopJ @glyph Yeah, the pointer-aliasing thing is real as fuck. I mean, BLAS and LAPACK are still mostly FORTRAN for a reason.

I have spent far too much of my life getting F2Py working for precisely that reason.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] huuuuuuh. And of course, the fool represents the beginning, which is basically what everyone thinks of you if you start a new language

SpookJ 👻

@ireneista @xgranade @aud @glyph my direct supervisor in grad school wrote F95 like it was a second language, ended up with a parallel track of development of a Runge-Kutta solver that would do the same thing as the "normal" C++ code I was trying to press into the task we needed.

My stance is that FORTRAN is Good, Actually. The design scope was the right size to begin with, and there's just no arguing with what it takes to compete with LAPACK et al.

Fun to write, though? Absolutely not.

Xandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

@SnoopJ @ireneista @aud @glyph If it was zero-based, had a sensible syntax for declaring function parameters, didn't have the weird function/subroutine split, and didn't hard crash if you add print statements inside a function called from a print statement, then I'd likely even agree.

There's a lot to like about FORTRAN, but it just has too many papercuts stemming from being one of the first languages period, imho.