Should we come up with a language that's easy to teach for both computers and humans? A sort of generic human/machine DSL?

Would spacemacs work on Android?

In the Termux google group somebody reported an issue with it. I run spacemacs on android with Linux Deploy, Debian and a good ssh client.

> companies with 'absolutely no AGPL' policy cannot try the open source version of these DBs which puts these products behind others.

Many companies have dumb policies. They are the ones that need to change.

Why is it a dumb policy?

>Flatly, re-writing a several decade's old, matured codebase in today's flavor-of-the-week language is not a good idea. It's a waste of time and effort.

That's the sort of thinking we'd benefit from having less. Legacy is a terrible burden.

49% of US billion-dollar startups were founded by native americans?

The reason for that is that python2=>3 fixed several fundamental problems. 5.6 => 7 is just a incremental upgrade, whatever the version numbering tells you. Most of the PHP problems are still there.

> The reason for that is that python2=>3 fixed several fundamental problems. 5.6 => 7 is just a incremental upgrade, whatever the version numbering tells you. Most of the PHP problems are still there.

too bad for py3's fundamental problem: that it broke the interface so badly, people still don't use it. PHP7 has no such problem, and gets to add boatloads of new features (which will be immediately used/adopted) while deprecating old versions of the language.

You don't understand. To fix problems like python3 did, you have to break older code.

Php7 did nothing like that, that's why the "porting" process was so light. But it also means it didn't fix any of the big things.

> Php7 did nothing like that, that's why the "porting" process was so light.

This is nonsense, PHP 7 contains a long list of backwards-compatibility breaks:

http://php.net/manual/en/migration70.php

If PHP 7.0 didn't break anything, it would have been called 5.7.

The upgrade is easy simply because these breaks do not have as much of an impact as Python's did.

No, it's not nonsense. The things you listed in there are incremental fixes, not fundamental.

http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.type-juggling.php

How would you fix this without breaking most PHP code out there?

How would you fix ==, > and < behaviour without breaking most PHP code out there?

How would you fix Unicode without breaking most PHP code out there?

If PHP fixed things like this, it would be a decent programming language, but it would also break a lot of things. Kinda of like what python3 did, only that it didn't have to break quite so much, since python2 was already pretty decent.

imho python3 fixed the issue in the wrong way, so it will never have a great amount of users: down the road the choice will be upgrade to python3 or choose a more modern programming language like go with immense performance boost. I think people will choose to leave python.

So python will be better in version 3 and people will move to better languages? Sounds like a win-win to me.

5 to 7 does fix some big problems, however. In particular, it is the first release with uniform syntax for variables (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/uniform_variable_syntax) and an AST-based compiler. It also replaces a lot of PHP-style errors with exceptions.

> It's far more than web-based IRC

How exactly?

Inline animated gif support.

Mobile clients, persistent chat history when switching clients/devices, search, @mentions notify you when you're away from your desk, and easy integrations with lots of services.

P.S. I mainly use IRC everyday :)

Forever if you pay for it.

i.e. they have a revenue stream.

This echoes the "couldn't you just replicate Dropbox with x + y + z ..." mindset of the past.

Which takes time to set up, whereas it's already done for you in Slack.

Of course it does. But you get to keep your data for yourself.

Revenue

Perhaps it's slightly subjective, since I would place FreeBSD ports in between rpm and deb in terms of difficulty.

> But why improve performance by switching to a language that's well suited to the task at hand when you can do it by switching to a language that's hip?

Because your question is loaded?

php 7 is just as fast, or a teeny bit slower, than 5. Isn't that a rather interesting result, given how the php community has claimed huge performance increases in 7?

It's actually faster. My company was able to cut a lot of servers just by upgrading. And you can find a lot of testimonials around reddit and twitter. Best thing to do is not to trust me, or this horrendous benchmark suite, and test it yourself.

That's why I loathe TechEmpower's benchmark, or any similar service trying to benchmark the world. It's very misleading and error prone by nature. It's not like you're comparing two GPU cards doing the same thing.

Take PHP for example, one of the most popular frameworks is using version 4.2 (latest is 5.2, and there's also a LTS release). It was released in June, 2014 and it's before several major architecture changes and refactoring. And they'll probably say it's my fault for not contributing.