writing this reply on a 13 inch macbook air...

There must be plenty of people who "accept" it in a fatalistic manner, where the final result will not be a surprise.

Go with Sum types and no nil pointers would be fantastic! Is it too much to dream of? It feels like Gleam gets pretty close but it flies off in a bunch of other directions.

vlang is pretty much this

what's to stop them from <prompt>Recreate this library so that I can use it in my project without fear of copyright violation.</prompt> in their very own claude code?

For small enough codebases, that seems like an inevitable reality, eventually.

If you have nearly limitless compute to throw at an issue and a good enough model, then it should be able to create enough test cases to cover most aspects of the codebase (iterating thousands of times until it gets it right) and then eventually write a new implementation in a new language or a slightly different tech stack that passes all of the original tests, alongside a few more hundreds of iterations of refactoring.

I give it a decade until large orgs are doing that to avoid licensing restrictions and other liabilities.

It might even be a boon for security that many organizations have independent implementations of core code projects, even possibly the OS. In such a hypothetical world, security issues that are implementation dependent would not affect such large swaths of the installed software.

If you feed it the library to recreate then this seems like it would necessarily be a derivative work and thus copyright infringement. Proving that they did it may be a challenge...

please name some open source (or lower priced) alternatives that support: comments on documents, database functionality to a similar level, publishing websites, scripting for properties. I'm very curious!

The unix operating environment.

I was going to say git, but really you need the whole environment.

Heh. I remember back in the comp.lang.perl.misc days, where newbies would show up and ask "What's the best IDE for Perl development" and all the longtime greybeards would reply "Unix".

Lots of mapping apps have no equivalent, especially with an interface optimized to work on a phone

https://github.com/LucasPickering/slumber is also a good TUI alternative

Surprisingly my experience of GitLab is even worse! How's yours? BitBucket wasn't much better from memory either. Seems like most commercial offerings in this spaces suck.

I've been using Sourcehut. I respect Drew's commitment to open source, but I think that a lot of the UX misses the mark. For most things I really don't want an email based work flow and some pieces feel a bit disjointed. Overall though it has most of the features I want, and dramatically less bullshit than Github.

I did something very similar with https://github.com/kellpossible/avalanche-report/ we started with Google Sheets because it allowed us to quickly iterate with data entry workflow. When paired with a server this also allowed us to generate custom charts/diagrams via the IMAGE function with a crafted URL query. Reads are cached in a local sqlite database.

We're in the process of migrating away from Google Sheets now as it's a little painful to set up and it's impossible to completely prevent users from editing the wrong fields in our use case. But it has served very well so far and would highly recommend this approach to start with for anyone!

It's max a couple of hours work to cache in some local database like sqlite or in memory.