Nobody is forcing people to upgrade - you’re free to stick with an older version of any OS, although possibly at the cost of the OS going out of support from the vendor. Why such a decision seems to lead to these long winded opinion pieces on the internet is weird - don’t these authors have something better to do than opine about how what they want doesn’t line up exactly with what some vendor is giving them for free?
That’s a relatively recent change. When I first learned MMA around 1995, it was just Mathematica. It was still just Mathematica 10 years later. Then in the last decade they decided to give the language a name independent of Mathematica: I assume with the rollout of their other services/tools beyond the desktop client that use the same language.
The NPR planet money podcast also had an interesting episode from 2012 that recently replayed that talked about the origins of the double entry accounting scheme. Pretty interesting history that I didn’t know.
Interesting, but I’m not sure why I’d use this over processing/p5.js augmented with a library to provide the fast compute part on an accelerator. I already do this for compute intensive things: I have a library for agent based models that I give to students that provides fast data structures and algorithms that they use from processing. I don’t see the benefit of a whole new language. The primary feature that it seems to add is live updating of the code, but I’m not convinced about that either (similar ideas have been kicked around for years in computational science contexts with respect to online tweaking/steering of models, and rarely have had any traction in practice.)
Yup. I dug deep into the technology recently when I taught a class on the science of sound at a local college. When you look at media not only from the mathematical perspective (Nyquist, etc), but the physical (grain density and size on tape), it’s pretty clear that past technologies did have fundamental limits. It’s hard to disentangle the technical appeal of certain recording media from the nostalgia for a rosier looking past when reading some of these articles.
They owe nothing for anything they legitimately use: that’s the consequence of open source licensing as a developer. If a developer expects a project to get a fair share of revenue from projects that use it, they are free to adopt a licensing model that dictates that. That is a perfectly reasonable licensing model.
I get it: I had an open source project that HP built a product around many years ago, but modulo a couple of patches from them, we saw nothing. Didn’t bother me: we knew when we open sourced it, anything that was done with it was out of our hands.
The best I’d expect from a company using open source is that they be good open source citizens and contribute back. Apple has. clang, WebKit, etc....
The fact that they set up the legal structure of the "App Store" in a more restrictive/monopolistic way than traditional GNU/Linux package repositories, is no excuse if they are going to start playing the "moral" card like in OP's link.
They benefit substantially from open source and give very little back in concrete financial terms, yet complain that Spotify is asking the same thing and portray them as freeloaders. In reality, Apple are doing far more freeloading off of other projects than Spotify is doing off of them, legal or no.
What Apple have created in the App Store (a software package repository on an OS platform) is a monopolistic trust over what should be a free marketplace, like how regular GNU/Linux package repositories have worked for decades. This is exactly what "anti-trust" is supposed to prevent and the DoJ need to have the balls to start breaking up tech companies for this shit, just like they almost did to Microsoft.
> In reality, Apple are doing far more freeloading off of other projects than Spotify is doing off of them, legal or no.
You cannot make any moral assumptions here because the whole point of many of these open-source projects is that people can use them freely, with no obligation - moral, or otherwise - to contribute back.
> should be a free marketplace, like how regular GNU/Linux package repositories have worked for decades.
Yup, this'll end beautifully. It won't devolve into a malware-ridden mess that destroys the privacy and security of users. The users that pay for a curated ecosystem and idiot-proof privacy/security.
Package repositories might be great for the HN crowd. But I think it's fairly blind to think it won't harm Apple's target audience.
I'm not making any moral assumptions. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of Apple's moral assumptions that they're making in their posting.
> It won't devolve into a malware-ridden mess that destroys the privacy and security of users.
Windows, GNU/Linux, and in fact Mac OS X itself, are all doing fine. The real security problem is elsewhere, it is disingenuous to use this as an excuse for monopolistic practises.
Apple's 'moral assumption' is that Spotify would like to 'freeload' off of their store. The App Store is provided with the intent that services which are based off of it contribute back to the App Store.
Open-source software is not provided with the 'moral assumption' that users contribute back.
There is no hypocrisy here. Apple is criticizing Spotify for trying to sidestep the moral expectations of the App Store, but Apple itself is not sidestepping moral expectations of the open-source products it uses.
> Windows and GNU/Linux are doing fine.
Are they? In what context? Do you really think Windows does "fine" for the average user, and that they are not at a huge risk of malware, terrible software, and more?
It's also disingenuous to say that security problems are not in large part caused by how open available distribution channels are. We have proof showing that the App Store has provided an objectively more secure environment for the average user than Windows or even the repository model.
> The App Store is provided with the intent that services which are based off of it contribute back to the App Store.
No, the App Store is provided to drive iPhone sales. If you couldn't install third-party apps on iPhones, no one would buy one nowadays. The market has changed drastically since the iPhone's launch, when a public SDK was still unavailable.
> We have proof showing that the App Store has provided an objectively more secure environment for the average user than Windows or even the repository model.
I'm not convinced that's true. Apple has also invested heavily into app/process isolation on iOS itself, and a permissions model that keeps apps away from sensitive data without the user's consent.
Not to mention the fact that it's more the review process that keeps malicious apps off the phone. Google Play Store is also an app store, but they don't review apps anywhere nearly as closely.
Either way, an app store is not a prerequisite for a review process.
Not really. With recent articles talking about their push more deeply into health, privacy is a core feature and basis of trust. Very different than the marketing speak we get from other gigantic companies that are fundamentally ad brokers: privacy is at odds with their core business. Privacy is not at odds with where Apple is or is going, so there isn’t the business incentive there for them to violate it.
Their core business is propagating vendor lockin to tastefully designed highly-priced hardware of middling competence (but very good inter-operability). Privacy is something of a sauce. It's there, some people like it, but if you took it away I'm not convinced it wouldn't still sell. Their core audience by and large doesn't care about it at all.
F# is extremely similar. To put it in perspective how similar, I just ported a project for work over from F# to ocaml in a few days - mostly adding "in" for let blocks and parenthesizing nested match blocks where necessary, and replacing data structures with their ocaml equivalent. Large chunks of that code base didn't require any modification - I'd drop a 500 line source file in, run it through the ocaml compiler and have to deal with a handful of syntax tweaks to make it go through.
Which would you recommend from an ecosystem/performance perspective?
I’m thinking hard about picking up a new language and I think it’ll be oCaml, but F# does have the .net ecosystem behind it... how is ocaml’s stdlib? Is it easy to find what you need in 3rd-party modules?
F# for ecosystem. Most stuff you’d need is available via nuget. Plus, interop with C# is trivial, so all of that ecosystem is there too. Ocaml has opam for package finding, but it’s a bit sparser.
That said, I don’t tend to use a huge number of 3rd-party modules, so it’s not a big differentiator for me. Too much of a liability to have dependencies on some rando from the internet: for work, we tend to stick to modules from trusted sources in the rare chance we use them (eg, Jane street).
