The difference is apple doesn’t let you modify your device to use other services. Their contractual obligation goes beyond the service itself. That’s why EPIC won this case.
A fun anecdote - a lot of people may remember Roomba from forever back with their automated little vacuums. Roomba's market share declined significantly because they failed to adopt Lidar technology as quickly as their competitors, instead they depended on the bumper for as long as possible. This put them at a disadvantage in navigation and efficiency as their competitors started using Lidar. Combined with aggressive pricing from rivals, expiry of its patented roller in 2022, a weird insistence to not combine vacuum and mopping into one device, Roomba (or iRobot now) is a just little fish in the sea it made.
https://maticrobots.com/ - Lidar seems like a stopgap, check out this robot vacuum which works with vision only. I am not conflating a car and a vacuum, but it's an interesting technological exposition.
The reason I brought up roomba wasn't to talk about Lidar or vision necessarily. It's more a story about how the first-mover in a technological space became entrenched in what works and became resistant to investing in newer technologies. The result was rival companies taking away marketshare from a market roomba once defined. Roomba has since incorporated lidar and other innovations after being stagnant for a decade, but its too late - their competitors now dominate the market.
To complete the analogy, Tesla is invested in vision-only technologies, while its competitors are making gains with Lidar and other tech that Tesla refuses to acknowledge. It's very reminscent of Roomba in the mid 2010s.
100%—I enjoy telling life-long Roomba users about how far behind the technology is when they try to convince me to buy one! I've been using Roborock for a long time and it's pretty astounding how far ahead they are; full on item analysis + avoidance (including poop!) being the big one for us, let alone just knowing their exact location within the house. And there's a number of others that have pushed it a whole bunch... the folks at Matic seem to have pushed it even further (not ironically, with just vision, which actually feels appropriate here) it's a shame it's not available in Canada and no obvious plans to roll out here, would love to buy one: https://maticrobots.com/
Meanwhile Roomba seems to have done...pretty much nothing? Reminds me of the death of Skype when everyone transitioned to literally everything else while they floundered around.
Ignoring 95% of a uniform market to target the 5% of users who all have niche and conflicting preferences is a ridiculous strategy for stability, growth, and profitability.
Only the first letter being case-sensitive is a major strike against readability, one of four major pillars. While I’m sure the Nim developers are probably used to it by now, it just seems like a bad design decision Nim is probably burdened with as the result of legacy/interoperabilty.
Even just reading your foobar example
at a glance took a moment for me.
And case insensitivity is also generally frowned upon. To have a language with both sensitivity and insensitivity is the worst of all worlds with none of the benefits.
If you want to understand why at a deeper level I would recommend reading readability or the case insensitivity sections in any programming languages book. Personally, I enjoy Programming Languages, Principles and Practice (Louden & Lambert)
EDIT: Yes, I get it, it doesn't affect YOU. But it doesn't mean it doesn't affect other people. Non-english languages and/or speakers are an easy example. It also eliminates a whole class of human error, and maybe that only affects non-experienced juniors, but they exist too. There are other issues with symbols being case insensitive and string values being case sensitive. If you want a practical example a classic one is HttpsFtpConn vs. HttpSftpConn
As a powershell user I have never had an issue with case sensitivity at the language level as Sigils provide separation of concerns between language constructs (keywords/variables/types). You’re using an IDE with autocomplete most of the time and many other languages have linters/formatters.
All I have personally experienced of case sensitivity is an added layer of friction any time I go to use a REPL for Bash/Python/Javascript/etc or some awful ‘allowercasewords’ gets cemented in place barring a total refactor since you can’t correct files piecemeal.
And case sensitivity in the language doesn’t even help with case sensitivity at the OS level when you’re writing cross platform code =/
The theory says that it hinders readability but in practice it doesn't. Nim has a prescribed style and if you use the linter when compiling your code has a consistent style.
Like cardanome said, in practice it's awesome for FFI.
Very good example. I didn't even know about first letter sensitivity and the rest insensitivities. That's real big problem.
Also since nim is very ninche and used by very little perscentage of the world they haven't encounter much of production scale coding. Well that may be reason nim never get pass weekend hobby projects..
I agree that sometimes linters can enforce code styles that are more of hassle to deal with than offer any real concrete gain to new developers. But I disagree that only senior developers should use linters. Especially if you are learning a new language, it can introduce you to common conventions in that language, writing cleaner and more idiomatic code, and helps form good habits off the jump instead of building bad habits you will eventually have to change in a professional setting. Sure it can be overzealous at times, but I think on the whole it is a net positive.
> But I disagree that only senior developers should use linters.
I'm on the same boat. I started using python ~1 year ago, because it is the main language I use at my dayjob. And I didn't really use python before this (although I was already proficient in other languages).
In the beginning my code was very messy and I spent much time searching for how to do things the 'correct' way.
And ruff made this so much easier, and it made me look at some python topics more thoroughly. And now I'd say I have a very good understanding of python and its best practices, and I'm now one of the most proficient python developers in my department (it's not a high bar, we have many data scientists, which are most of the time only proficient in their libraries/tooling they use, and I'm one of the few that is not a data scientist).
I'm not saying that solely ruff was the reason I'm now in proficient in python, but it made it easier + I would have never looked into some things without it.
For example, I also type my python code, and before I used ruff I had many problems with circular dependencies. But ruff could fix it with a simple automatic fix by using from __future__ import annotations and if TYPE_CHECKING.
And the ruff documentation also gives more explanation on the why and how for most of their rules, which is also very valuable.
The idea that “attention is all you need” here is a handwavy explanation that doesn’t hold up against basic scrutiny. Why would Google do something this embarrassing? What could they possibly stand to gain? Google has plenty of attention as it is. They have far more to lose. Not everything has to be a conspiracy.
Probably just hamfisted calculation. Backlash/embarrassment due to forced diversity and excluding white people from generated imagery < backlash from lack of diversity and (non-white) cultural insensitivity.
