Four Years of Jai (2024)

> Software has been getting slower at a rate roughly equivalent to the rate at which computers are getting faster.

Cite?

This problem statement is also such a weird introduction to specifically this new programming language. Yes, compiled languages with no GC are faster than the alternatives. But the problem is and was not the alternatives. Those alternatives fill the vast majority of computing uses and work well enough.

The problem is compiled languages with no GC, before Rust, were bug prone, and difficult to use safely.

So -- why are we talking about this? Because jblow won't stop catastrophizing. He has led a generation of impressionable programmers to believe that we in some dark age of software, when that statement couldn't be further from the truth.

> He has led a generation of impressionable programmers to believe that we in some dark age of software, when that statement couldn't be further from the truth.

Have you actually used modern software?

There's a great rant about Visual Studio debugger which in recent versions cannot even update debugged values as you step through the program unlike its predecessors: https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U?si=t6BsHkHhoRF46mYM

And this is professional software. There's state of personal software is worse. Most programs cannot show a page of text with a few images without consuming gigabytes of RAM and not-insignificant percentages of CPU.

> Have you actually used modern software?

Uh, yes. When was software better (like when was America great)? Do you remember what Windows and Linux and MacOS were like in 90s? What exactly is the software we are comparing?

> There's a great rant about Visual Studio debugger

Yeah, I'm not sure these are "great rants" as you say. Most are about how software with different constraints than video games aren't made with same constraints as video games. Can you believe it?