and that burden is as far as I’ve seen being forced on those long term contributors.

This is not what is happening. The current long term contributors were asked to clarify semantics about C APIs, so the Rust maintainers could take it from there. At no point were the C maintainers asked to help maintain the Rust bindings.

Of course, I’m a user too, but I don’t think Linux’s UX is that bad. It may be bad in some areas, but it’s not bad across the board.

I also don’t think Linux is only for developers. It’s great for developers, but it’s also great for people with only basic needs of their computer, those that don’t need much more than a browser, an email client and maybe an office suite. The UX is totally adequate for them, as evidenced by ChromeOS.

I think where Linux lacks is mainly for the users in between, those who are not full developers or tinkerers, but do want to mess around and do so from a perspective of expectations of how things worked in the Windows world. And I won’t deny there’s a plethora of legitimate enterprise use cases for which there is no equivalent in Linux today. But those are not UX issues, those are mainly matters market support. Linux is not great there, maybe it never will be. Or if it does, it’ll take a long time.

First example that came to mind was actually Mac users who struggle with external monitors/projectors and things like screen sharing too. I agree they’re things that are so basic they should just work. Reality is often different even on other OSes.

Of course if you have a Windows home and everything works and then you try Linux and it struggles with a piece of equipment, it’s easy to blame Linux. You wouldn’t even be wrong. But you are oblivious to someone else’s experience who uses Linux exclusively and everything works for them, how many of those things wouldn’t work or work well with Windows.

Personally I’m a developer, so I care a lot about integrating parts of my development stack. A lot of those things don’t “just work” on Windows, or even Mac, so I’m happy to stick with Linux instead.

I agree with your examples and it’s certainly true there are plenty of rough edges on Linux. Then again, how many examples are there for things that should “just work” and do on Linux but don’t on Windows? There’s enough that make me not use Windows at all, because it has a subpar user experience. I even used a Macbook for a few years, mainly for work, and there were too many small things that annoyed me about it, so it too had a subpar user experience.

Seems it’s mostly a matter of perspective which issues are more important to you.

0° being “very cold” and 100° being “very hot” is intuitive.

As someone who’s not used to Fahrenheit I can tell you there’s nothing intuitive about it. How cold is “very cold” exactly? How hot is “very hot” exactly? Without clear references all the numbers in between are meaningless, which is exactly how I perceive any number in Fahrenfeit. Intuitive means that without knowing I should have an intuitive perception, but really there’s nothing to go on. I guess from your description 50°F should mean it’s comfortable? Does that mean I can go out in shorts and a t-shirt? It all seems guesswork.

As a junior with no clue how to write production code, is Clean Code going to provide with a decent framework I can quickly learn to start learning my craft, should I throw it out completely because parts are bad, or should I read both Clean Code and all its criticism before I write a single line?

I see what you’re getting at it, and I agree we shouldn’t increase the load for juniors upfront. But I think the point is mainly there are better resources for juniors to start with than Clean Code. So yeah, the best option is to throw it out completely and let juniors start elsewhere instead, otherwise they are starting with many bad parts they don’t yet realize are bad. That too would increase cognitive load because they would need to unlearn those lessons again.

I absolutely agree with you. If I can avoid NPM I will indeed do so. Sometimes that means using Deno, but sometimes it can be a valid reason to avoid using the language altogether. And sometimes we have to suck it up 🤷‍♂️

As much as people like to make fun of JS/TS, I think you’re right, especially compared to the languages you mentioned. It’s my second-favorite language after Rust.

I think I would put Swift above it as well, except I don’t really use it since it’s too domain-specific in practice.

If you just have one or two required fields, with the rest being optional, it can also be a good middle ground to just pass the required fields to new() and use methods like in your example for the optionals.

PS.: A common convention for these methods is to prefix them with with_, like with_max_depth(max_depth: usize) -> Self.

Sure! The other day someone called it emergent architecture. I guess it goes by multiple names :)

Thanks! This mirrors quite some experiences I’ve had over the years indeed. And for what it’s worth, I think the way you’re handling that is not bad at all.

As someone else mentioned in the comments on Mastodon, one of the hardest things about mentoring is articulating the lessons you may not even realize you’ve learned. I don’t think anyone can be blamed for failing to teach or convince someone else, since people are simply too different to be able to teach and convince them all. As you say, you have to pick your battles, and as long as you let your teammates do their work respectfully in their own way, that alone is a great achievement!

For a little bit I thought this library might be a subtle joke, seeing the #define _SHITPRESS_H at the start. That combined with the compress() and decompress() not taking any arguments and not having a return value, I thought we were being played. Not to mention the library appears to be plain C rather than C++… surely the author should know the difference?

Then I saw how the interface actually works:

// interface for the library user, implement these in your program:
unsigned int SPR_in(); // Return next byte from input or value > 255 on EOF.
void SPR_out(unsigned char); // Output byte.

This seems extremely poorly thought out. Calling into global functions for input and output means that your library will be a pain to use in any program that has to (de)compress anything more than a single input.