I agree with the article overall, but disagree with one part.
The “lower-level languages” part is often true right now, but it doesn’t have to be. Switching to expressive and safe languages will not magically solve all security and maintenance problems, but it can eliminate whole classes of bugs and allow people to focus on things that matter.
We’ve had Ada for decades, and we have Rust now. I have written shared libraries in OCaml. The ’70s are, thankfully, over. ;)
Companies like Collabora (and Igalia?) manage to get enough revenue from consulting that they can straight up employ people to directly work on upstream projects. Maybe what the world needs is a hundred Collaboras, yesterday?
I agree with the article overall, but disagree with one part.
The “lower-level languages” part is often true right now, but it doesn’t have to be. Switching to expressive and safe languages will not magically solve all security and maintenance problems, but it can eliminate whole classes of bugs and allow people to focus on things that matter.
We’ve had Ada for decades, and we have Rust now. I have written shared libraries in OCaml. The ’70s are, thankfully, over. ;)
I’ll read this as a claim that Rust will also be happily ignored, just like its predecessors.
Companies like Collabora (and Igalia?) manage to get enough revenue from consulting that they can straight up employ people to directly work on upstream projects. Maybe what the world needs is a hundred Collaboras, yesterday?