Right, just like Trump's strategy. Immigrants are bad for 'merica. Don't mind the details or ask for proof. It's the story that counts, and in the story they are all rapists taking the jobs of hard-working 'mericans.
> Domestic mismanagement in India can hardly be called a sanction by the U.S.
There is more to this.
The partition of India in 1947 divided Punjab in such a way that most of the fertile land went to Pakistan. Food shortages were soon a reality that would take decades to resolve.
There is also this theory that explains the partition of India in terms of the (then) looming Cold War. Creating Pakistan and supporting its claim on Kashmir prevented the USSR direct access to the Arabian Sea through Afghanistan and then India.[1][2][3]
> [Jinnah] was backed by British imperialists, notably Winston Churchill, who believed Pakistan would prove a faithful friend to the West and a bulwark between the Soviet Union and a socialist India.
> independent financial system
It is not a question of the financial system in particular, but of attitudes. The US has historically not shied away from using every available tool in order to achieve its geopolitical goals, be it finance or aid. But these actions cast long shadows that have to be dealt with generations after the people involved are long dead and buried.
I'd rather claim that the main reason is that the author seemed drawn towards proprietary tech stacks that the companies behind them wanted to fully control and that contributed to their demise. It was clear from the start that Flash and VB and ColdFusion and all that wouldn't last long, just because no open ecosystem could form to keep them adapting and vibrant.
I feel that's substantially different with Python, Go, JS and ... C/C++.
This comment helped me realize that part of what I instinctively dislike about golang comes from ColdFusion PTSD. I just realized that golang reads to me like ColdFusion in the worst ways, including and especially its terrible approach to error handling.
I doubt though that error handling makes or breaks a language. How the ecosystem works seems to be what counts, and as long as Google doesn't close it down any further, it can stay with us for a long time.
I agree that Go is special in this list. If Google pulls the plug someday, then it would all depend on whether a strong community takes over the compiler and language maintenance itself.
Error handling absolutely breaks the language for me. I understand why many don't like exceptions handling in many contemporary languages like C#, but I think that if you are going to do a sum type instead and force handling errors as a result type from functions you could at least use a proper Either monad and some form of monadic binding to remove boilerplate and enhance composition. (This was a problem with ColdFusion too. I can go on at length about some of the terrible "circuit breaker" boilerplate in that language and how tough it made handling errors correctly without killing entire applications.)
As for the ecosystem, most of what I've seen is a language that seems built for supply chain accidents (random github.com main branches as far as the eye can see) built by a company with a track record of developer tools that provide terrible developer experience that live in their own little bubble divorced from most of the rest of computing. (These are also things that seem very familiar to me from my brief horrifying time with ColdFusion.)
If golang works for you then that is great, but it upsets me to look at and right now you'd need to pay me a lot to have any interest of maintaining code written in it. I have enough scars from terrible things like ColdFusion on my resume.
> Error handling absolutely breaks the language for me.
I think you missed my point. This is not about whether I personally like go (I don't) or its error handling (I don't). It's about which aspects, historically, tend to lead to a language's demise over a few years. The claim is that error handling is not one of them.
C isn't great with that either. It's still heavily used.
The supply chain issues are more relevant, but the key question then is whether the language and ecosystem evolve to avoid this. Golang has shown to be flexible and generics were unthinkable not too long ago. Now they are there.
Neither golang nor C are my favorites, and you can argue all you want why golang is not for you, but that misses the point entirely.
We are definitely having two different conversations.
I don't have much to say on the possible longevity of golang or not. Longevity is sort of guaranteed as soon as you write code in a language used in Production. Today's hip programming language is always tomorrow's terrible "legacy code" language. Someone has to support that long after the fact, whether or not the language itself ever remained in support or "alive". That sort of longevity is inevitable, per the law of averages.
I'm mostly just commenting on the ways that writing ColdFusion, in a brief window where it was a supported "alive" language, actively "hip" among certain types of baroque Enterprise development and developers, it still felt (to me at least) like prematurely writing "legacy" code. Single (arguably bad) vendor, bad error handling leading to lots of ugly boilerplate, bad development tools, bad ecosystem, et cetera. That's a lot of orthogonal concerns compared to longevity. ColdFusion had a longer supported longevity than is often credited for, but that doesn't really give a sense of how much it felt like a "dead man walking" even in all those supported years. ColdFusion to this day has a massive "legacy" longevity that is likely invisible to much of HN, but still likely fills plenty of ugly legacy code niches in dark matter Enterprise development even for a dead language, even despite it being a dead language, but the difference between today and when the language was "alive" doesn't feel all that dissimilar because it was always a zombie language in a zombie ecosystem.
Golang seems to me another "born (un)dead" language in that way, that even while it is actively supported certain things about it feel to me like "a dead language walking" (and all code in it feeling like "legacy code" even as it is written) and I think that's what I've been trying to find the right words to say for months now of seeing Go code in increasing places and having a bad gut reaction to it.
In that feeling of "born (un)dead", I don't see C there at all. It's impossible to argue that it isn't an alive language, with plenty of multi-vendor support and nearly always has been (even if it is definitely not the best language to work with in 2023). (Objective-C, rather than C, is easier to argue has had many decades of seeming "born (un)dead". For another modern example, I think you can make a case that Swift also fits closer to "born (un)dead", even though I like its error handling better, mostly, I think it seems healthier than Objective-C in some ways, and I don't hate looking at Swift example code in the same way that golang gives me the heeby jeebies.)
This advice is gold. It's not just about writing. Anything you want to accomplish long term, you need a consistent "at least a little step every day" approach. No matter if it's a new language or fitness goals or learning an instrument or whatnot. A step every day. Consistency is key. It doesn't help to make one big chunk of time once in a full moon.
Time aggregate is a huge leverage and immensely undervalued.
Directly in the beginning, without even scrolling, it says:
> Raven has chronic back pain, spinal stenosis and vertigo. His feet hurt so much — from bone spurs and calluses — that he runs with his New Balance sneakers untied.
"Running" for 3 hours a day likely contributes to all that. Mixing it up would be an idea. Biking, swimming, kayaking, rowing, tennis, badminton, taking walks, there is so much you can do.
Being stubborn is not a healthy character trait, even though sometimes people hail it as "inspiring". What this guy inspires me to be is to ensure I never turn into him.
It's incredible, no question about it. But it's also incredibly sad. I mean, you have one life. One. And you spend 2-3 hours every day on the very same f'ing route? Life has so much more to offer.
Besides, 3 hours for 8 miles, that's not running, it's slowish walking. Not judging here, I'm not 70 yet, but I'm wondering how much of his health problems are actually causally related to this stubbornness. In a bad way.
That's quite different. It's not the same gym for 50 years, what they do in the gym changes over time etc. I'm personally in the gym 2-3 times a week. Very different from running the same route for 2-3 hours every day for 50 years.
