There's a perverse irony that Google is as responsible as anybody for cramming a crazy amount of new stuff into the HTML/CSS/browser spec that everybody else has to support forever.
If they were one of the voices for "the browser should be lightweight and let JS libs handle the weird stuff" I would respect this action, but Google is very very not that.
> Because I sometimes get similar letters from the Google Cloud Platform. They look like this:
>> Dear Google Cloud Platform User,
>> We are writing to remind you that we are sunsetting [Important Service you are using] as of August 2020, after which you will not be able to perform any updates or upgrades on your instances. We encourage you to upgrade to the latest version, which is in Beta, has no documentation, no migration path, and which we have kindly deprecated in advance for you.
>> We are committed to ensuring that all developers of Google Cloud Platform are minimally disrupted by this change.
>> Besties Forever,
>> Google Cloud Platform
> But I barely skim them, because what they are really saying is:
>> Dear RECIPIENT,
>> Fuck yooooouuuuuuuu. Fuck you, fuck you, Fuck You. Drop whatever you are doing because it’s not important. What is important is OUR time. It’s costing us time and money to support our shit, and we’re tired of it, so we’re not going to support it anymore. So drop your fucking plans and go start digging through our shitty documentation, begging for scraps on forums, and oh by the way, our new shit is COMPLETELY different from the old shit, because well, we fucked that design up pretty bad, heh, but hey, that’s YOUR problem, not our problem.
>> We remain committed as always to ensuring everything you write will be unusable within 1 year.
But if you live in a capitalist country with a free market, several competitors should pop out and suggest migrating your system into their cloud for free, shouldn't they? No way capitalist overlooks an unoccupied market niche.
I've pretty much embraced PowerShell for scripting. The language is warty as hell and seems to be entirely made of sharp edges but I've gotten used to it and it does have a lot of excellent ideas.
Yeah I'm toying with nushell which is like Powershell but with a less offensive syntax.
But when I say "scripting" I don't mean shell scripting. I mean stuff like complex custom build systems or data processing pipelines. I would never do those in any shell language.
Actually while I use it heavily for shell scripting, it's also also my go-to for python-style scripting too. Mostly because it's the one I'm most familiar with because of professionally doing DevOps on an MS stack with a lot of legacy stuff, but still:
It's just object-y enough to be excellent at filtering and shunting and translating records from API endpoints to CSV files to SQL data rows, etc. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anybody to pick up because of all the sharp ends (eg it uses Javascript falseyness except SQL NULL has the ADO.Net "DBNull" which isn't falsey) but because I'm so familiar with it I find it quite good at that stuff.
As much as people bag on the syntax (like the operators all starting with hyphen, and all the .NET functions speak with an accent), the real problem is how many edge-cases are in there, like strange behaviors of the error stream, overcomplicated scope rules, FileSystem providers for the registry and SQL server and other objects no reasonable person would ever want to use as a "file", empty-array objects getting silently converted into null, etc.
Python was established as a fun and sensible language that was usable and batteries-included at a time when everything else was either expensive or excruciating, and has been coasting in that success ever since. If you'd only coded in bash, C/C++, and late-'90s Java, Python was a revelation.
Lists comprehensions were added to the language after it was already established and popular and imho was the first sign that the emperor might be naked.
Python 3 was the death of it, imho, since it showed that improving the language was just too difficult.
My other big dream would be allowing multiple WHERE clauses that would be semantically ANDed together because that's what would happen if you filtered a result set twice.
Yes, by whatever clauses I also meant repeating ones.
SQL has a conceptual issue with repeating group by clauses, so maybe not that one (or maybe we should fix the conceptual issues). But any other, including the limiting and offset ones.
Anybody who replaces the hoary old albatross of SQL without throwing out the relational algebra baby with the bathwater gets my support. I hope this goes far.
SQL's shortcomings aren't just syntax and the convention of SCREAMING KEYWORDS. There's the lack of algebraic types (particularly galling given the bizarre three-value boolean algebra created by its strange null-handling), the poor composability (why is creating a reusable predicate filter so hard?), the lack of any coherent module system, etc.
The fact that something as simple as a tree is such a nuisance in a "relational" database is ludicrous.
If this was just Android that would be an issue between Google and their developers/users, but this is everybody.
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