Posts by flayman

Re: "Serious attacks"? What attacks?

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If you have to "defend" a language that means it's probably on the way out already. If you feel a language is subject to "attacks" you haven't understood how computer languages evolve in the field of software development.

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That's assuming that the attacks make technical sense. As others have pointed out, the urging to move to memory-safe languages offers false promises. Rust can be made to operate unsafely, and the risk of migrating legacy code seems to have been understated. I don't agree that this is an existential threat. C++ is not going away. But this is an annoying reputational one.

Re: An evidence based approach

As I said, compliance is about ensuring that the sort of content that is for the most part already considered illegal is recognised and that there are suitable processes for dealing with it. If you run such a service and you don't have a risk appropriate process or you fail to comply with an enforcement notice, you are liable. Proscribed content making its way onto your service does not constitute a failure to comply. It is to be expected. How you deal with it is what matters. The penalty everyone mentions is the maximum available and would surely be reserved for gross and wilful noncompliance. How about we all just relax a little bit. It hasn't even started yet and some of you are predicting the end of days.

Re: Desert

I'm sorry, but this is rubbish. We'll see. Give it a year. I'm sure you will be proven wrong. The Act will catch actors who are not being conscientious. It is attempting to ensure that everyone understands what sort of content is proscribed, most of which is common sense, and to assess the risk of such content a) getting onto their platforms and b) not being swiftly removed and dealt with in a compliant manner. In so doing, they will look at whether they have adequate procedures in place. The people who are worried about it are already doing the things they are meant to be doing.

On the other side of the Atlantic, major social media providers are shrugging off their responsibilities and just saying it's the wild west. Maybe Facebook and X.com will stop doing business in Britain. I honestly could not give a shit.

Re: I am all right jack

There is so much FUD around this. It's not minimum fine. It's up to £18 million or 10 percent of qualifying revenue. Read this explainer: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act-explainer/online-safety-act-explainer#how-the-act-will-be-enforced

I just can't see good faith errors being punished. Wilful failure to engage with OfCom is of course going to incur penalties.

Re: Just another example...

I will begin by admitting that I have not looked very closely at the requirements that come into effect in March. But my limited reading of the gov.uk's explanation of the Act and how it is to be enforced suggests to me that a small forum that is actively moderated does not have much to worry about. Inappropriate content will be quickly removed and appropriate actions taken. Adequate controls are therefore already in place, and it is just a matter of noting this. It might seem a bit arduous in the first instance, but that would be a one-off cost, as the conditions year on year would remain stable until and unless the forum becomes much larger. GDPR creates a similar nuisance for small data controllers, but with the initial assessment exercise out of the way, it's become mainly a yearly box ticking exercise.

The article points to a four year old post in a small forum as an example of how this Act adversely affects small online communities. They're still freaking out about it and are talking about moving to Discord, but one wonders whether this is an overreaction. The fact is that there is this law, and forum providers need to comply with it. The degree to which one must comply is proportionate to the risk of harm. In theory, a risk assessment would show a negligible risk of harm on an efficiently moderated forum which has been operating for many years and has never seen an example of such harm, or has demonstrated swift removal of potentially harmful content. In practice, I hope this risk assessment does not create an undue burden. I can practically guarantee that OfCom are not going to over-prosecute this because they do not have the resources.

Re: No, of course I've no idea if this remotely resembles the actual syntax used...

If an AI can't already do it, there will be one soon that can do it with passable reliability. That's at least a starting point.

Re: No, absolutely not

Insurers can decline coverage when the insured has violated the terms of the policy.

Re: Legality of paying

That would be paying for goods and services or making donations, not paying someone who mugs you. Where duress is involved, I seriously doubt there could ever be the necessary intent ingredients, i.e. mens rea, to establish a crime.

Re: Let that be a lesson

"Paying a ransom (unless authorised as part of a credible police sting) needs to be a criminal offence"

I think that's taking it too far. You might as well say that in relation to any extortion attempt. Paying the mafia to take out the garbage in your office building should be a criminal offence. Yeah, well failure to do so will get your legs broken. This is the nature of duress.

Re: License?

Hang on. Let me Google that for you. It's licensed under its own open source license called the PSF (Python Software Foundation) LICENSE AGREEMENT, the terms of which you are free to read. You can always submit patches to the maintainers if there is source code available. They are under no obligation to merge them. There is of course source code available, otherwise the project could not really even pretend to be open source.

Not sure what point you were trying to make.

Re: It's 2024

Downvote me all you like, but that quote is incredibly insulting to the millions of people all over the world who are involved in Python one way or another. Not just Python, but any language effort that is not statically typed. It manages to be both woefully ignorant and elitist at the same time. This is like a debate at a student union. Plenty of old time programmers like myself have found our way to Python and we use it responsibly. The problem that this article mentions turns out to have nothing at all to do with Python. It was a locale issue. The Python 2 program, the language for which is four years out of support, still actually works. That's saying something.

Statically typed languages are great. I like C#, and dotnet runs well now on Linux. We mostly deploy apps to GKE here. We have some containerized stuff that was migrated from Windows server. It's fantastic that we could do that. And TypeScript is a good improvement over JavaScript. But mostly it's Python for the backend, and there is really no problem at all with that. Pytest makes it fun to write unit tests. They get run by the CI pipeline and ruff checks the formatting. JupypterLab is wonderful for prototyping. Application development has been steadily moving in the direction of cloud native for the past decade or so, I want to say. Desktop applications are on the way out. And Python is among the tools of our trade, so just deal with it.

I wouldn't use Java for anything. Certainly not Oracle Java. I have programmed in Java, but now I don't. It's extremely verbose and its class loading commands its own circle of hell. There are better alternatives.

Re: It's 2024

"Dynamically typed languages are for the lazy / uneducated."

Pure idiocy in action.

"The reason Python is "popular" is because it's the first language you learn on contemporary CS courses. A few years ago it was Java for the same reason. JavaScript is also very popular, but it just seems like Stockholm Syndrome for programmers where they've just spent too long unaware of the alternatives and their relative strengths or weaknesses."

No, I think you've got that backwards. You learn about it because it's popular and good, and you're likely to be using it professionally. I didn't learn about it in school. I'm 30 years out of education and Python has become my favourite language for most work. One of the reasons it has taken off is that it seems to have been very well suited for data science, and as a result the data science support has blossomed. What you say about scientists is true. I work with a lot of data scientists and they are not the best coders. But that's nothing against the language. You think this is bad? Try PHP.

On testing, you're off the mark there. Pytest is the best testing framework I've ever seen. No contest. And if you take a test driven approach, then you're writing tests at the same time or before you write your code. I'm a senior software engineer with over 25 years experience on all sorts of languages and platforms. I love Python and FastAPI for anything on the server and I love React with modern JavaScript for front end work. I don't know what you're talking about with testing the language rather than the logic. That has not been my experience, but again, if you approach unit testing and integration testing properly then that's not an issue. Every language has features that you're probably better off not exploiting. It comes down to experience.

As for OOP, it does have its issues and it's helpful to recognise them. Functional programming has a lot of inherent advantages. Interestingly, Python alleviates one of the problems with OOP by supporting multiple inheritance.

Python is the most popular programming language for a reason. Python 2 is not a good experience at all. Sorry about your miserable year, but I've been loving working with Python and all its great tooling for about five.

You're full of shit, anonymous coward. You would put a black mark next to anyone who was born in Russia. We've seen this before. It should not be countenanced.

This kind of attitude frankly makes me sick. So we can't trust anyone who might know someone who lives in Russia? Is it worth all this?

"Doesn't JetBrains have ties to Russia?"

Oh for fuck's sake. Is this like don't use 7-Zip because it was written by a Russian? I have a Russian co-worker. Does that mean I have ties to Russia? What is this, 1958?

Re: Is It Even Worth That Much?

I just don't see it. You don't get to be the world's richest man (off and on) by being stupid with your business arrangements. Piercing the corporate veil is very difficult with publicly traded companies. In any case, there needs to be a demonstration of egregious actions taken by a shareholder or shareholders, usually an actual fraud. He'll just take the company into bankruptcy, escaping personal liability, and the former employees to whom he owes three months severance would have to join the queue. It wouldn't at all surprise me if all of this past year was just a deliberate plot to ruin Twitter because of some personal vendetta, but it would be really hard to prove.

Re: Is It Even Worth That Much?

You're wrong about the valuation, but they'll never get at his personal assets. That simply doesn't happen. I can't even think of a motion that you're alluding to for the owner(s) or directors of a corporation to be personally financially liable for its failure outside of malfeasance. They can be held criminally liable.