verstra

There are only two hard problems in computer science:

• naming things,
• cache invalidation,
• off-by-one errors.

I'm afraid you've fell victim to the problem 2.

Well, no. They are not certainly using int, they might be using a more efficient data type.

This might be for legacy reasons or it might be intentional because it might actually matter a lot. If I make up an example, chat_participant_id is definitely stored with each message and probably also in some index, so you can search the messages. Multiply this over all chats on WhatsApp, even the ones with only two people in, and the difference between u8 and u16 might matter a lot.

But I understand how a TypeScript or Java dev could think that the difference between 1 and 4 bytes is negligible.

Maybe checkout Pixelfed, which is (from what I gather) similar to what instagram was 10 years ago

I hate that the pleasant news about standardization of CSV come with the let-down that is using two bytes for new lines.

Or a pair of boots, a great backpack, hiking trousers, helmet, harness and a "via ferrata cable kit".

~10 manual mid-range tools and enough wood to make a nice looking jewellery box.

Dan Luu. From summary of summaries:

I suspect I might prefer Rust once it's more stable.

Just because we cannot prove something, doesn't mean that we can treat strong claims the same way as proven hypnosis. If we cannot prove that UBI is overall beneficial, we just cannot believe it with the same certainty that we would if we had a bunch of studys on our side.

Look, I'm not saying that we have nothing - I'm just saying that what we have are educated guesses, not proven facts. Maybe "open question" was too strong of a term.

Well, you can conclude anything using your reasoning, but that does give the high degree of certainty that is sought after in the studies reviewed in the article.

Again, I'm not saying that I don't believe static type checkers are beneficial, I'm just saying we cannot say that for sure.

It's like saying seat belts improve crash fatality rates. The claim seems plausible and you can be a paramedic to see the effects of seat belts first-hand and form a strong opinion on the matter. But still, we need studies to inspect the impact under scrutiny. We need studies in controlled environments to control for things like driver speed and exact crash scenarios, we need open studies to confirm what we expect really is happening on a larger scale.

Same holds for static type checkers. We are paramedics, who see that we should all be wearing seat belts of type annotations. But it might be that we are some subset of programmers dealing with problems that benefit from static type checking much more than average programmer. Or there might be some other hidden variable, that we cannot see, because we only see results of code we personally write.

The original author does mention that they want to try using rust when it becomes more stable.

This is why any published work needs a date annotation.

Damn, this actually looks really good! Is there an estimate on when this will be useable-ish as a main phone for non-dev users?

What about acid and web spitters?