The article contrasts Python to Perl, saying Perl is purely interpreted while Python has compilation. This is factually incorrect.
Perl is transformed into an AST. Then that is decorated into an opcode tree. The thing runs code nearly as fast as C in many instances, once the startup has completed and the code is actually running.
If all they wanted was to prove you were over 18 or over 21, those can be checkboxes rather than birthdates. It’s clear the bill’s author is an idiot or insincere.
I like Ada. I can’t believe this whole discussion about how types are handled missed the entire ML family of languages. ML, Standard ML, Concurrent ML, Caml, OCaml, and more have structural types, supported and enforced by the compiler.
Ada has one of the same primary issues as PL/I, PHP, and Perl. As much as one might like it, it’s a huge language with loads of syntax and semantics baked into the core language. The article keeps saying that’s a selling point. To some extent and to some people that’s true. However, it also touts the annexes as something wonderful. That’s also true, and more true in my opinion. If only more of the language had been in standardized annexes with a smaller core it may have seen far more adoption.
As far as I can tell you cannot create your own bounded Integer/Floating point types in any of the ML languages. That's one example of one of the core Ada type features. Most people have never experienced a type system like Ada and you will be surprised by how it helps you write higher quality software that is also more reliable.
Ada isn't a huge language by modern standards. I would say that it's smaller than modern Python and considerably smaller than modern C++. It's also relatively syntax-free preferring keywords and standard library.
Ada came "fully specified" in an era when languages were either not formally specified or were much smaller. C wasn't formally specified, for instance, until 1989 (six years after Ada) and the spec was sparse compared to Ada. For instance, Ada put binary compatibility rules into the language while C's standard didn't worry about ABIs at all. Using two different C compilers could create different ABIs because they aren't part of the language spec.
It will no doubt be challenging. Some US companies have offices in Australia. Many others hire only in the US or maybe also in one or two other countries. This is usually to do with labor law differences and the difficulty of keeping up with tax obligations in multiple jurisdictions for just one or two new employees.
One thing I’ve seen multiple companies do is hire people overseas as contractors. Sometimes they’ll do it as independent contractors. Sometimes they’ll only do it as a company-to-company contract, but in countries where it’s easy to set up a corporation or other type of business of some kind that can be a company consisting of a single employer/owner.
If you’re interested in deep support roles like an SRE/Platform engineer, being in another country in another timezone can be an advantage rather than a disadvantage. I keep telling my boss that my next hire I’d like to be in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, or so for clock coverage. If you’re looking for more traditional application development, the clock can be a tricker thing.
You might end up working for a US company but spend most of your time with other overseas people closer to your time zone. You might end up working unusual hours for your type of work to coordinate with US staff. If you’re lucky and you enjoy a more asynchronous form of collaboration than Slack messages and Zoom calls, there are some teams and even some companies that do work that way.
The board might not even be the right place. They’re watching children in minimal dress athletics. I think the DA or the AG’s office might be the right place.
I have 5 Gbps symmetric at home. I and my fiancee both work from home, so our backup fiber connection from another provider is 2 Gbps. We can also both tether to cell phones if necessary. We can get 5G home wireless Internet here, too, and we might ditch our 2 Gbps line in favor of that as a backup. We moved from Texas back home to Illinois last year, and one of the biggest considerations was who had service at what tiers due to remote work. Some of the houses we looked at in the same three-county area in the Chicago suburbs didn’t even have 5G home available (not from AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile anyway).
My parents have 5G wireless home as their primary connection, and that was only introduced in their area a couple of years ago. Before that, they could get dial-up, 512 kbps wireless with about a $1000 startup cost, ISDN (although the phone company really didn’t want to sell it to them), Starlink, or HughesNet. The folks across the asphalt road from them had 20 Mbps Ethernet over power lines years ago, and that’s now I think 250 Mbps. It’s a different power company, though, so they aren’t eligible.
Around 80% of the US population lives in large urban areas. The other 20% of the population range from smaller towns to living many kilometers from any town at all. There’s a lot of land in the US.
Here in dense NYC, most apartments I've lived in have but a single ISP available. It's common to hunt for apartments by searching the address on service maps.
I'm pretty sure one landlord was cut in by his ISP, as he skipped town when I tried to ask about getting fiber, and his office locked their door and drew their shades when I went there with a technician on two occasions. The final time, we got there before they opened and the woman ran into the office and slammed the door on us.
That’s pretty common in apartments to have a single provider, especially in high rise ones or ones built before broadband was common. It’s unfortunate, but the cost of running wiring for multiple providers through old buildings can be prohibitive. The providers won’t pay to install it for a single unit. Other tenants might not like the disruption if they’re not going to use the new service. If you get a big enough block of tenants to pre-sign then it becomes a conversation more worth having for the provider and the landlords.
Residential ISPs don’t work financially unless you oversell peak time full-rate bandwidth. If you do things right, you oversell at a level that your customers don’t actually slow down. Even today, you won’t have 100% of customers using 100% of their full line rate 100% of the time.
Back in the late 1990s we could run a couple dozen 56k lines on a 1.544 Mbps backhaul. We could have those to the same extent today, but there’s still a ratio that works fine.
We still have some repos in Subversion and most things in git. It’s still exciting for every repo we get migrated out of svn. That’s a high bar to cross if we’re talking further improvements compared to git though.
Those are mostly more traditional data centers. 20 or 30 kilovolt racks with separate cages for different tenants, some meet-me rooms, and a bunch of telecom gear are the order of the day.
Internet traffic requires routing and switching. That’s all traditional DC equipment in terms of power and cooling. They don’t require 80 or 100 kilovolt racks like something stuffed full of AI accelerators.
Perl is transformed into an AST. Then that is decorated into an opcode tree. The thing runs code nearly as fast as C in many instances, once the startup has completed and the code is actually running.
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