It's interesting because you can still find interviews of Larry online how Perl is the first postmodern programming language but for perl6 they came up with a very top-down, modernist project

Very impressive to see Chuck Moore still going at it at the age of 87. I hope at that age I'm able to handle the minutiae of programming!

Totally! At 87 that's gutsy! My very first paid programming work was in Forth on a 6502 platform in the '60s, building a networked accounting and flow management program for a water company, but I'm now 81 and very glad to be retired.

Was your work on the 6502 perhaps in the 70s?

This was after and before the work on the time travel chip

My dad is in his mid 60's, and I'm pretty convinced he's going to be like that. He's not a software engineer, mostly a mechanical engineer, but it's pretty rare that I talk to him and he's not hacking on something mechanical.

I'm not talking just woodshop stuff; he is actually doing math and calculations for little things that he's building. He is an engineer by blood that happened to make a career out of it.

Methodology seems kind of dubious:

> We introduce a novel experimental methodology that lets us quan- tify the performance of precise garbage collection versus explicit memory management. Our system allows us to treat unaltered Java programs as if they used explicit memory management by relying on oracles to insert calls to free. These oracles are generated from profile information gathered in earlier application runs.

What specifically seems dubious about that? I thought it was quite a clever idea.

If you dig into the paper, on page 3 they find out that their null oracle approach (ie without actually freeing the memory) increases run times erratically by 12 to 33%. They then mention that their simulated approach should handle that case but it seems unlikely to me that their stats aren't affected. Also they disable multi-threading – again for repeatability – but that will obviously have a performance impact.

> As long as there is some form of memory access, any language can do basically everything that one can do in C/C++, but this doesn't make much sense.

No VB6 had really easy COM integration which let you tap into a lot of Windows system components. The same code in C++ often required hundreds of lines of scaffolding, and I'm not exaggerating

FWIW, the pywin32 Python package and win32ole Ruby package have streamlined COM integration for Python and Ruby. Not quite as easy as VB6, but it's pretty close. I was even able to tab complete COM names in the Emacs Python REPL, but I remember it being a little buggy.

It probably still sucks in C, but the C++ DX got a lot better. Importing the idl would generate wrapper functions that made calling code look much more like a normal function. It would check the hresult and return an out param from the function. They also introduced types like _variant_t that help boxing and unboxing native types. It still wasn't fun but it greatly reduced line count.

Nah, unless talking about C++ Builder extensions for COM, in Visual C++ land it still sucks big time.

For some reason, there are vocal teams at Microsoft that resist anything in C++ that is comparable to VB, Delphi, .NET, C++ Builder ease of use regarding COM.

Hence why we got MFC COM, ATL COM, WRL, WinRT (as COM evolution), C++/CX, C++/WinRT, WIL, and eventually all of them lose traction with that vocal group that aparently rather use COM with bare bones IDL files, using the command line and VI on Windows most likely.

Windows has a COM system. VB6 isn’t special. You can do that with VB.Net or C# too, C and C++. Windows COM is a thing. VB6 COM isn’t as VB6 only hooked into windows COM.

I'm just giving context as to why VB6 was much better than C++ back in the day for building windows apps. VB.Net and C# didn't exist in the halcyon days of 1998

Per-capita volume of miles traveled went up by 5x since 1950: https://enotrans.org/article/americans-drove-1-0-percent-mor...

> Actually, please don't do this resource burning with startups or other SMBs, unless it's clear they want to burn resources

Startups are fine scheduling candidates for 5-6 rounds of interviews, they should be fine with the occasional tire-kicker

> Startups are fine scheduling candidates for 5-6 rounds of interviews,

Not all startups are like that, and you might not know in advance.

Though, incidentally, I did find one about a month ago, and I will take this moment of inspiration to complain about it, constructively.

I bowed out of an imminent offer, because I thought that the CTO's gauntlet of evaluation steps was a sign of the day-to-day I should expect: that I would only be valued like an untrusted junior commodity worker.

(I have a lot of experience, my detailed resume shows that, and I'd been patient and met more than halfway with the process.)

Meanwhile, the initial pitch about why I might want to work there had worn off, after 5+ calls and a takehome. I wasn't going to invest any more time+energy+soul, submitting to the final grilling/hazing step, of a job I no longer wanted.

ProTip: Unless you are a FAANG, or are paying FAANG-like money, don't act like one towards prospective hires/colleagues. Otherwise, you should expect to hire only people who are moderately good at interviewing (good enough to pass your nonsense, but not the nonsense of the people who pay more). And you should expect them to hop without loyalty, because you do FAANG arrogance and nonsense, without paying for the privilege.

You can't know your market worth without putting yourself on the market.

Exactly — anyone who has worked in sales for a New York minute knows that any six figures deal will have a human account manager assigned to it.

Could you break down a bit more why this happened? From an external perspective it really sounds like some sales rep decided to pressure a non-profit to make their quota

It's a very common "gotcha" comment on HN unfortunately — latch on some specific definition of a term then dismiss anything that doesn't fit it. Not sure what we can do about it unfortunately