You should check out zig, its compiler can even be used for c/c++. If you have time to listen to an interview, this developer voices interview on zig explains some of the advantages of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_oqWE9otaE&t=3970s

object oriented

Python does have OOP but you are not at all forced to use it. You can write code in a functional or even procedural style.

typing

I do hate that python doesent have proper support for typing but I think weakly typed variables will actually help beginners as it is less to think about to start off with.

indentation

I think there are pros and cons here. In other languages it is considered good style to use indentation anyway.

I’m sure it is difficult to teach a large class like that though. It was hard enough for me to learn with a much more favourable teacher to student ratio than you probably have. Sorry but honestly I do sympathise with admin as well.

Could you link to the Lemmy style app please, I haven’t heard of this before

Why? It is the same power dynamic as any other open source project that is primarily built by a company.

From what I read in the HN thread the token is only used for governance (and possibly also fundraising), it is not baked into the actual platform. I am happy to be corrected though if anyone knows more/has more details.

I agree that Forgejo looks good as well and is likely more usable than Radicle right now. But I do think there is value at looking at P2P solutions.

From what I read in the HN thread the token is only used for governance (and possibly also fundraising), it is not baked into the actual platform. I am happy to be corrected though if anyone knows more/has more details.

Sorry about this. I just found the video interesting when it popped up on my feed.

I don’t know about the history of this creator, I just found this particular video interesting when it popped up. Sorry if this creator is known to be untrustworthy.

In this regard, AI-generated code resembles an itinerant contributor, prone to violate the DRY-ness [don’t repeat yourself] of the repos visited.

So I guess previously people might first look inside their repo’s for examples of code they want to make, if they find and example they might import it instead of copy and pasting.

When using LLM generated code they (and the LLM) won’t be checking their repo for existing code so it ends up being a copy pasta soup.

I think helix (or some derivative) has good long tern prospects. It has a fairly large communuty abd It is much more accessible than (neo)vim.

You could also consider: https://helix-editor.com/

It does more than vim out if the box and it has similar but different key bindings. The key bindings are more intuitive and easier to learn in my opinion.

It is missing a few features still (e.g.plugins) but I have been using helix for a while and it is really fun.

Nice, I hadn’t heard of that before, will check it out!

I just see it as less practical than maintaining a toolchain for devs to use.

There are definately some things preventing Nix adoption. What are the reasons you see it as less practical than the alternatives?

What are alternative ways of maintaining a toolchain that achieves the same thing?

That seems like an argument for maintaining a frozen repo of packages, not against containers.

I am not arguing against containers, I am arguing that nix is more reproducible. Containers can be used with nix and are useful in other ways.

an argument for maintaining a frozen repo of packages

This is essentially what nix does. In addition it verifies that the packages are identical to the packages specified in your flake.nix file.

You can only have a truly fully-reproducible build environment if you setup your toolchain to keep copies of every piece of external software so that you can do hermetic builds.

This is essentially what Nix does, except Nix verifies the external software is the same with checksums. It also does hermetic builds.

Related, this article talks about combining nix and direnv: https://determinate.systems/posts/nix-direnv

Using these tools you are able to load a reproducible environment (defined in a nix flake) by simply cding into a directory.

Are you saying that nix will cache all the dependencies within itself/its “container,” or whatever its container replacement would be called?

Yep, sort of.

It saves each version of your dependencies to the /nix/store folder with a checksum prefixing the program name. For example you might have the following Firefox programs

/nix/store/l7ih0zcw2csi880kfcq37lnl295r44pj-firefox-100.0.2
/nix/store/cm1bdi4hp8g8ic5jxqjhzmm7gl3a6c46-firefox-108.0.1
/nix/store/rfr0n62z21ymi0ljj04qw2d7fgy2ckrq-firefox-114.0.1

Because of this you can largely avoid dependency conflicts. For example a program A could depend on /nix/store/cm1bdi4hp8g8ic5jxqjhzmm7gl3a6c46-firefox-108.0.1 and a program B could depend on /nix/store/rfr0n62z21ymi0ljj04qw2d7fgy2ckrq-firefox-114.0.1 and both programs would work as both have dependencies satisfied. AFAIK using other build systems you would have to break program A or program B (or find versions of program A and program B where both dependencies are satisfied).

You might be interested in this article that compares nix and docker. It explains why docker builds are not considered reproducible:

For example, a Dockerfile will run something like apt-get-update as one of the first steps. Resources are accessible over the network at build time, and these resources can change between docker build commands. There is no notion of immutability when it comes to source.

and why nix builds are reproducible a lot of the time:

Builds can be fully reproducible. Resources are only available over the network if a checksum is provided to identify what the resource is. All of a package’s build time dependencies can be captured through a Nix expression, so the same steps and inputs (down to libc, gcc, etc.) can be repeated.

Containerization has other advantages though (security) and you can actually use nix’s reproducible builds in combination with (docker) containers.

I have a framework laptop and really like it.

The main benefit is that it is fairly future proof, so you could get one the of the cheaper ones now and then upgrade if you need better ram/CPU/apu