junk_disposal

1. Sometimes being able to ship is more important than being perfect 2. Sometimes I don't care if it's perfect. If I need something for in-house use, Go (and Python) is quite enough for my needs.

>I don't understand people who hate generics. They are just types and they are here to help the developer write compile time type safe code. interface {} everywhere isn't compile time type safe.

You're right, and the FAQ explicitly says that the designers aren't happy with the choice either.

If there would be a one time compile penalty for generics, it may work. The issue is that if large code-bases (Go's reason de'etre) will now take an hour to compile instead of five minutes, it's just dead in the water.

Also, it looks like they want to make Go a language where all code looks the same. So you won't find team A writing C++ like in 1980, team B writing C++ in OO mode, team C writing C++ in FP mode, etc.

It's so fanatical, that the spacing is standardized.

What's the advantage of DDG over StartPage? They both rely on outside sources of data and both anonymize your searches.

In reality, that's why I think that neither Go nor Rust will ever replace C (Maybe C++, Java or Python), because nothing can replace C.

C worked in the 70s, when a naive compiler + asm would work perfectly.

Honestly, Optimizing compilers will kill C.

It killed the one thing C was good at - simplicity (you know exactly what happens where, note I'm not saying speed, as C++ can be quite a bit faster than C).

Now, due to language lawyering, you can't just know C and your CPU, you have to know your compiler (and every iteration of it!). And if you slip somewhere, your security checks blow up (http://blog.regehr.org/archives/970 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/nativeclient/issues/detail?id=24...) .

>This comes down to one of the key differences between Linux and BSD: BSD "owns" its userland—the people who develop the kernel, or some system utility, can literally decide to change something, and then do a global search-and-replace on all usages of that something across all consuming projects. Because all those projects are "part of" BSD in a very literal sense. You can decide that ifconfig(8) should work differently, and bam, there you go, now it works differently. Now the tools that call it and parse its output work differently, too. Everything works differently; but everything still works. Document the new behavior in the man(1) pages.

1. Linux doesn't care about ifconfig et. al. It's Debian/RedHat/Arch/Gentoo/Slackware that does. And they can do the same grep across their codebase.

They don't now for the same reason BSD doesn't just run in and change things, because lots of admins have scripts which aren't maintained by BSD which depend on existing config.

2. I would assume that the BSD ifconfig came first, so why didn't existing distros copy their system? Is it a BSD vs. SysV thing?

>The Linux community was way more trying to run on everything.

In contrast to some opinions, I like this sometimes.

For example, would the world come to an end if FreeBSD came with neovim?

If the prompt out of the box showed pwd?

I know that some things are controversial (ahem systemd), but when learning a new system, little things matter and make your system popular.

(And, as a side rant, in contrast to some who like to use haskell on nixos (Which I actually like!) running on an obscure chipset, popularity is good. If someone asked me what Unix should he learn, I'd send him to Linux and not FreeBSD, since it's going to be much easier to find noob help online. Then, this noob will go on to become a sysadmin, he'll recommend Linux because he knows it and will be able to find others who do.)

>Debian doesn't always just work, because a lot of packages are very old.

If you need new packages, you don't run stable.

You run stable if you need things, well, stable and "just works".

>you can easily run your own pkg repository with binaries compiled for multiple architectures (with build enviroments isolated with "jail") and providing the full range of compilation customization included in the ports tree.

Sure, if you're running a few servers. It doesn't help if you're running one though.

And it still takes time to compile and build.

That's the FreeBSD line, but I don't think it's so simple. The lawsuit ended in 1994. That was before RedHat, and one year into Debian.

At that time, the majority of Unixen were proprietary, so if you wanted your programsto run, you couldn't assume GNUisms or Linuxisms.

In my opinion (mostly Debian user with a bit of FreeBSD playing), people use Debian as a server for the same reason a lot of people like MacOS over Linux - It Just Works.

1. For many years, the only way to install software was ports. Now if you're a full time sysadmin with time on his hands, it's great. But if you just need something up and running fast (and if you don't know your software internals, and don't know if you'll need perl's FLAG_ABC) , it's horrible.

It just feels like Linux in the 90's (been there), where recompiling the kernel/freex86 was a right-of-passage into Linux hackerdom. Nowadays, most of the time it's just not worth it.

2. apt vs ports/pkg. This is actually the biggest thing keeping me on Debian - stable + backports.

If I'm running my server, I want things to be stable. Now I know that there's no other project the size of Debian, which can backport security fixes to two year old software (and sometimes four year old software), but there's nothing like apt update && apt upgrade and 99% of the time have everything update without a hitch.

Yes, FreeBSD is more elegant (why couldn't GNU/RedHat have just modeled ifconfig rather than ifconfig, ifup, ip, etc.). Yes, FreeBSD's man pages are amazing (which is quite important, as there's not as many FreeBSD blogs around), but if you're learning a new system (coming from Windows), Linux isn't that much harder to learn than FreeBSD.

EDIT

And RedHat?

They work like Oracle - You pay them, and they'll hold your hand, and (unlike Oracle) they release their software under an OS license.

If you're a non-tech Fortune 500, that's very important.

Note, by the way, that those two distros have the vast majority of GNU/Linux installs.

Can you say that traits are like Go interfaces?