When I was a kid, my CRT sometimes switched to a wrong resolution (it got narrower, so squares became slightly rectangular, for example). I say "my CRT", because that was a hardware, not software issue. I know, because kid-me solution was to smash the (hard, brick) wall with that CRT. And it worked. I still don't know why, I was too young to investigate - and hey it worked so why bother.
My parents were less impressed, when after a few years the screen was moved and the wall was scratched everywhere.
I'd like to hear your alternative. What do you propose? That we stop even trying to tackle this problem, and all libraries are sequentially or date-versioned? And you can pin to, for example, library version built from march last year to today?
That would be a huge mess, IMO. Of course for non-libraries semver is fairly pointless, but for libraries it describes a contract and that contract works well in practice. But maybe there is a better way - hence my question.
>Time is sequential. Otherwise, sequential build numbers are kind of hard to orchestrate in a distributed architecture
Time is sequential, but this means that just building an older version is now a production breaking incident. That's weird to me, but I'm not a CD person.
And, as we know from Hyrum's law[1], every change might be breaking ;).
Oh, you added a bar() method to Frobinator? Shame, this other project depends on the fact that Frobinator only has one public method. And that project distinguishes Frobinators and Barinators by checking bar() method existence.
And you fixed a bug where username returned from API had a space appended at the end? But my frontend developers used that for layout and now my site is broken.
Written partially in cheek, but it's true that every change is breaking for someone if you have enough users.
[1]See https://www.hyrumslaw.com, Wikipedia entry, recent discussion on HN, and of course that one xkcd.
You are downvoted (probably for saying "nope"), but my account was recently banned for being a bot. I used it almost exclusively for lurking, rarely for commenting or upvothing something. I guess I'm too botlike.
I know we all have our pitchforks out, and I hate tracking as much as everyone else here, but "tracking" is a very broad term, and is not always malicious. Unless you want to outlaw access logs, for example.
I see nothing wrong with outlawing access logs. They were invented and standardized at a time when the IP address field did not map 1:1 to the building in which you and your children sleep.
Which is why it should be defined in the law. The GDPR and the ePrivacy directive define what counts as tracking and what is acceptable. See for example:
I didn't downvote you (I'm just reading this thread for the first time), but I don't get your original argument. Usually benchmarking two languages means either:
* microbenchmarks comparing speed of doing stupid things (like adding 10000 integers or sorting a list with bubblesort 1000 times)
* 'real world'-ish benchmarks comparing idiomatic solutions in two languages doing the same thing
In both cases it doesn't matter (much) how big a standard library is. If you want to compare two languages doing something complex, you need to have -standard or not- implementation of that something for both languages.
But maybe I (and possibly others) have missed your point?
Well, people who write such benchmarks have no business writing benchmarks, and the comments to such comparison would usually say as much.
Such benchmarks don't compare anything in a meaningful way, and, in the second case, don't even compare what they claim to compare (you don't compare the languages if you run some third-party code on top of it, which has nothing to do with how the language itself is implemented).
These "benchmarks" just score some holly-war points for people who either irrationally like, or irrationally hate a particular language...
Language either has a standard that defines what the language is (and isn't), or it has something similar to a standard (which makes the definition more vague). In either case, there will be some sort of a document accepted by the majority of the language users that states what is and isn't the language.
If the language's document states that the language has arbitrary precision operations, then the authors of the language are free to implement it however way they want, let it be monkeys with abacus, it's still part of the language.
So we're in a "no true Scotsman" situation then, where no benchmark is ever useful.
I kind of disagree on the meaningfulness of microbenchmarks, they give a feel for the performance, even if it's not a perfectly useful apples-to-apples comparison.
Like, if decoding a large JSON takes 3 milliseconds in one language and 2 minutes in another, that's signaling that the second language is a worse fit for certain projects. Even if the benchmark isn't super rigorous.
How did you get this impression? No, we are not in a true Scotsman situation.
In order to establish that some language is faster than the other, you can devise a convincing metric. It will have to state what are the aspects that you are going to take into account, what are you baseline assumptions about measuring speed. Those using your experiment then will be able to practically use your results because they will be able to interpret your meaning of speed of the language.
The test in OP doesn't give anything like that. It ignores a lot of common testing practices by failing to control for many obvious confounds, by failing to provide any kind of sensible explanation of what is meant by the speed of the language, by using unreliable measuring techniques. It's just a hands-down awful way to test anything by the standards of people in the field of performance testing.
To further illustrate my point. Suppose you trust OP when they say that Python and JavaScript are roughly similar when it comes to the speed of calculating Fibonacci numbers. You then take a 16-cores server and run 16 processes of Python program calculating Fibonacci numbers and in another instance you take the same server and run 16 JavaScript process doing the same... only to discover that, eg. JavaScript now does 16 times better than Python (because Python decided to run all programs on the same core).
Note, I'm not saying that that's how Python actually works. All I'm saying is that the author doesn't control for this very obvious feature of contemporary hardware and never explicitly acknowledges any baseline assumptions about how the program is supposed to be executed. This is bad testing practice, intentionally or not it can be used to score "political" points, to promote a particular program over another.
Hyrum's law is specifically about how every change is a breaking change if you have enough users. So it's always a bit subjective. No sane person considers changing an error message a breaking change in context of semver. It's just go going above and beyond to take care of backward compatibility.
I assume you never tried to add a contact form to your website.
Explanation: I did, and within a few days bots started sending me spam using that form. I just added a trivial captcha (hardcoded '2+3=' question), but if my scale was bigger that would be untenable. Think also of PM spam, autoregistering accounts to abuse free tiers, etc.
I guess I just wouldn't have an open unauthed form and require a CC to use the free-tier. The contact-me form can just be a mailto: link and let the spammers go through the spam filter like everyone else. There are places where captchas is all you can really do but it's not like common use-cases don't have other options.
My parents were less impressed, when after a few years the screen was moved and the wall was scratched everywhere.