Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

What happens when the underdogs get together and try to factor out their efforts to beat some evil dominant power, sometimes victoriously.

Or when startups use the cheapest stuff available and randomly become the next big thing, and decide to keep maintaining the open stuff to get features for free from other companies, or because they are forced by the Holy GPL.

Open source frees employees. When you change jobs, a large part of the specific knowledge you acquired about closed source a project with your blood and tears goes to the trash. When companies get bought, projects get shut down, and closed source code goes to the trash. What sane non desperate person would sell their life energy into such closed source projects that could die at any moment? Working on open source is the single most important non money perk a company can have to attract the best employees.

Open source is worth more than the mere pragmatic financial value of not having to pay for software or the ability to freely add new features.

Its greatest value is perhaps the fact that it allows people study it, to appreciate the beauty of the code, and feel empowered by being able to add the features that they want.

That is why Ciro Santilli thought:

But quoting Ciro's colleague S.:

And "can reverse engineer the undocumented GPU hardware APIs", Ciro would add.

While software is the most developed open source technology available in the 2010's, due to the "zero cost" of copying it over the Internet, Ciro also believes that the world would benefit enormously from open source knowledge in all areas on science and engineering, for the same reasons as open source.

A language that allows you to talk to and command a computer.

There is only space for two languages at most in the world: the compiled one, and the interpreted one.

For 2020 now, when you have a choice, you must go for:

Those two are languages not by any means perfect from a language design point of view, and there are likely already better alternatives, they are only chosen due to a pragmatic tradeoff between ecosystem and familiarity.

Ciro predicts that Python will become like Fortran in the future: a legacy hated by most who have moved to JavaScript long ago (which is slightly inferior, but too similar, and with too much web dominance to be replaced), but with too much dominance in certain applications like machine learning to be worth replacing, like Fortran dominates certain HPC applications. We'll see. Maybe non performance critical scripting languages are easier to replace.

C++ however is decent, and is evolving in very good directions in the 2010's, and will remain relevant in the foreseeable future.

Bash can also be used when you're lazy. But if the project goes on, you will sooner or later regret that choice.

The language syntax in itself does not matter. All that matters is how many useful libraries and tooling it has.

This is how other languages compare:

Ciro Santilli's definition: softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/151610/what-exactly-is-system-programming/399625#399625

Ciro's tutorial: Linux Kernel Module Cheat.

Once upon a time young Ciro Santilli spent lots of time evaluating the features of different terimnals. The many windows of Terminator. The pop-uppiness of Guake/Yakuake.

But then one day he met tmux, and he was enlightened

Terminal choice doesn't matter. Just use tmux.

Cheatsheet on HTML, Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript.

Old cheat on separate repo: web.

Now moving to either:

Examples under: