Baldur Nil

I think we’re naturally a bit suspicious of freeware as “misleading” because so many old software used to be just vectors to install malware (mostly spam) alongside it. At least for me, I only trust it either if it is open source or it has a sustainable business model.

This is a troll’s or a teenager’s line of thinking.

Kinda reminded me back in college I had a friend who I’d describe as a genius in computer science and programming. I was always so jealous how he was so knowledgeable about everything teachers talked about to the point of correcting them sometimes (and hurting the ego of some of them, which isn’t very smart).

He was like a C++ nuts to the point of having some of his code on the Boost library (which was impressive for a 20yo), but when Rust started getting popular back then, he really got into it and quickly became an “evangelist”. For some years, everything was about Rust, if you stopped to talk to him.

I met him year later and asked if he was still working with Rust, and he said after using it for enough different use-cases, he actually started to dislike it and pointed out a lot of problems and flaws that I wouldn’t possibly remember. I think he also said the community was very toxic and was taking the language to a direction he didn’t like. I suspect nowadays he is just another fella using Lua and C++ for his personal projects.

Even if it was, there’s no way to know, people can just lie. It’s not like it will be obvious, some people might have a feeling it is (based on their experience playing with LLMs) but won’t be able to point exactly why.

Besides what other people said, one example is classes being closed by default (you need to explicitly set a keyword to make them open to extension). That was done to prevent inheriting from classes that weren’t designed to be inherited, and forcing you to use composition instead.

Only chatGPT has these kinds of comments as if you’re seeing code for the first time. 😆

I’m not against adding comments where is needed: in the company I work for (a big bank) my team takes care of a few modules and we added comments on one class that is responsible to make some very custom UI component with lots of calculations and low level manipulations. It’s basically a team of seniors and no one was against that monster having comments to explain what it was doing in case we had to go back and change something.

For 99% of the code you just need to have good names though.