Big Clodsire with Tiny Balloon @wallhackio@cat.family

@vaporeon_ @monorail the syntax is lambda <arguments> : <return value>. The splat syntax is python's way of expressing variadac arguments--however many argument are provided to the function will be stored as a list in the name to the right of the splat.

@vaporeon_ @monorail I love python but lambda is python's horrible anonymous function syntax and I hate it

@The_T @vaporeon_ excellent.

@vaporeon_ Lol. I don't mean to praise rust. I have no strong opinions on Rust, I have nowhere near enough familiarity say whether i like it or dislike (I regret to inform you that my gut reaction, from what I've seen, is that I would like it a lot. But we'll see.)

I just wanted to point out how interesting that Bjarne chose to focus on C++ in "the now", and now feels pressure from a viable competitor in the 2025 present.

@vaporeon_

@vaporeon_ In 1994, Bjarne Stroustrup wrote "Within C++ is a smaller, simpler, safer language struggling to get out." (The Design and Evolution of C++). In a talk from 2015 at CppCon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OEu9C51K2A&t=232s) he repeats the quote, and then later says

"Let's get it out. Let's get it out, now. A lot of people's solution to getting thing better and safer is to invent a new language. But that's not now. If you invent a really good new language now, a large number of people will be able to use it in ten years, if you succeed. The success rate for new languages is basically--for general purpose languages--is basically zero, so let's do it now.

...I think we can do it. And I think we can do it, I know that I can't do it alone... And no single company can... so please help."

I agree with Stroustrup that there is a good subset of C++. I also agree with Stroupstrup that teaching this subset is an inordinately difficult task that will require unprecedented coordination from the programming community at large. Where I disagree with Stroustrup is that it is worth the effort. I wish the work done used to develop C++11 and promote effective "modern" C++ was instead focused on creating a successor language.

Funnily enough, the first stable release of Rust was published in May 2015, just a few months before Bjarne gave the talk previously quoted. Now, in February 2025, he released public statement claiming that C++ is "under attack" (https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2025/p3651r0.pdf). This paper mentions Rust (not by name, but by implication). Rust is the rare new and successful language, and 10 years after it was introduced it is actually being used just like he said a successful, new language would (about 11% of professional programmers in the 2024 StackExchange survey purport to use Rust, compared to the approximately 20% who purport to use C++).

@vaporeon_ Peter Seibel, the author of a 2009 book called "Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming," has a blog (https://web.archive.org/web/20171110061643/https://gigamonkeys.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/coders-c-plus-plus/) where shared some comments from people he interviewed for the book. I cannot express my feelings on C++ better than Ken Thompson did from that blog post:

"It’s way too big, way too complex. And it’s obviously built by a committee.

Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. And he said “no” to no one. He put every feature in that language that ever existed. It wasn’t cleanly designed—it was just the union of everything that came along. And I think it suffered drastically from that."

@pikuma@mastodon.gamedev.place i love that main is recursive lmao

@cam very difficult choice

@cam the paradox of choice

caesar's greatest miscalculation was inviting a courier to his camp who had recently looted a rocket launcher

@cam oh no the art is cute oh fuck

@murz google's random number generator

@murz 5, because I ran a random number generator from 3-5 and it picked 5

@aschmitz vaporeon showed me a snippet of code from unix source that used the variable "gorp" and i thought it was funny so now i use it

@aschmitz I had no idea it was a word lol

@vaporeon_ never in production code lol

?????

@vaporeon_ it's even worse than you think! javascript has what is effectively a preprocessing phase where it looks for every single value initialized as a var and initializes them, and then the interpreter runs on the code like you would expect

this means you can use a variable before it is declared if you declare it with var! real javascript code out in the wild actually does this!!!!

@vaporeon_ @aescling no clue i just think the idea of storing project versions on laserdisc funny