Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Is software getting better? (for me default point of comparison is 2000). Programmers often say that later languages with higher level abstractions even if slower, allow to do things faster or do things that were previously not available.
Encodings problem (you know if you're use any languages besides English) is not anymore due to UTF-8, but it's not because software is better it's because hardware is better and Unicode is now a standard. LLMs and language translation (even before LLM) are much better now, but it doesn't seem that it has anything to do what newer languages offer. How do I use Shazam to find song that isn't playing now, but from some recording? I heard advice to use another phone and put one's phone speaker near other's microphone. If I watch youtube and get foreign word that I do not recognize, how would I feed it to, say, 5 different speech-to-text engines?
There is, say, Haskell with its lazy evaluation. Does it mean that if user accidentally triggered something resource heavy and cancelled immediately, it won't spend resources? of course not...
Yes but it needs taste. Go is nicer than C, python is nicer than perl and bash and php. Command line apps are blazingly fast.
Slack is built upon a tower of abstractions and it does have more functionality than IRC. It could have been better but the tower of abstractions means it was created faster.
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