VBScript did catch on originally, though. When IE had over 90% market share, it was nearly as popular as JavaScript was. It only dropped in popularity when other browsers became more common. Back then, most scripting was just to enhance the page, and the page still had full functionality without it, so a lot of developers just didn’t care about making it fancy for the 5-10% of other browsers.

“AJAX” (XMLHttpRequest) was originally an IE-only, VBScript-only feature. It was originally implemented using ActiveX, which only VBScript supported originally.

I’m hoping that more DOM and BOM APIs become accessible in WebAssembly without having to go through JavaScript. There’s a few frameworks that let you build web apps in other languages (like Blazor for C#) but they still need some JavaScript to interop with the browser, and going through a translation layer (WASM to JS to browser) adds some overhead.

Even visual basic for the web would make sense

This is exactly what I did for a few years before switching to JavaScript: VBScript. It was pretty common back in the early 2000s when Internet Explorer had 90%+ market share. The few remaining Netscape users would just get a page without scripts. There’s a lot of features missing in VBScript that exist in JavaScript though, even basic things like closures and first-class functions.

That was just an example. There’s all sorts of automated traffic that shouldn’t count as a view. A human loading the page but not actually playing the video (like if they disable auto playing of videos) shouldn’t count as a view either.

My employer is trying to get people to use AI more, too.

I’m skeptical of AI, but I’m finding it useful for menial tasks - things that you’d otherwise automate using an AST-based codemod tool (like jscodeshift, libcst codemod, etc), a hacky find/replace, or do by hand (boring, tedious work that I’d rather not do). Giving the AI system an example patch for something like migrating away from a legacy API, and saying “do this same thing across these 200 other files”, can have pretty good results.

In general, it seems like a good tool for things where the entire process is well-defined - the prompt and context provide all the info it needs - and I include example code in the context.

I don’t trust it for brand new code in a large existing codebase… Even the best AI models still get a lot of things wrong.

Let me preface with a fuck microsoft.

Yet you’re praising copilot, and likely using an editor built and maintained by Microsoft (VS Code). I’m confused.

I wonder if it could be fooled with video clips.

Thanks for the info. I haven’t used BASIC in a very long time and can’t remember much about the syntax. Must be over 20 years ago now. I switched from VB6 to C# when .NET Framework 2.0 was released.

Page loads don’t count as a view though, because otherwise things like search engine indexing would count as a view. It’s only considered a view if the video is watched for at least 30 seconds.

YouTube only counts a view if it’s longer than 30 seconds, but clients like Newpipe don’t send the tracking data to Google for them to track this.

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of at least one dialect of BASIC that allowed subroutine calls to lack their parentheses

Did sub calls normally have parentheses in BASIC?

I’d say 9/10 aren’t doing proper backups given most people don’t actually do DR runs and verify whether they can fully recover from their backups. If you don’t test your backups, you don’t have backups!

Which containers do automatic DB backups? Normally the database is a separate container, unless the app is using SQLite. Is there a MySQL or PostgreSQL container that does automated backups?

Where’s the MySQL option? Some of my servers are running MySQL instead of MariaDB because it allowed binding to multiple IP addresses (although I think Maria has implemented this now), and some query plan optimizations were implemented in MySQL but not MariaDB.

You still need to know what database system is being used in order to make backups of the database. You can’t just snapshot or backup the data directory while a database is running, because you might end up with an inconsistent state that won’t restore properly. You need to either stop the DB before doing the backup, or use the relevant DB-specific tools to perform a backup.

I’m a C# developer and run .NET apps on Linux all the time. I usually work on CLI and server apps, but recently released my first Linux desktop app written in C#: https://flathub.org/apps/com.daniel15.wcc

Even before .NET Core, I was using Mono to run C# apps on Linux. There used to be quite a few GNOME apps written in C#.

There’s .NET and then there’s .NET Core which is a mere subset of .NET.

Nope. The old .NET Framework has been deprecated for a long time. The latest version, 4.8.1, is not very different to 4.6 which was released 10 years ago.

The modern versions are just called .NET, which is what .NET Core used to be, but with much more of the framework implemented in a cross-platform way. Something like 95% of the Windows-only .NET Framework has been reimplemented in a cross-platform way.

The list of .NET stuff that will actually run on .NET Core (alone) is a barren wasteland.

All modern .NET code is built on the cross-platform framework. Only legacy apps used the old Windows-only .NET Framework.

If you get the free community version of Visual Studio and create a new C# project, it’ll be using the latest cross-platform framework. You can even cross-compile for Linux on a Windows system.

Thanks, this is a good insight.

That’s a very old way of thinking of things. C# has been cross platform for a long time.

Almost everything ever written in C# uses Windows-specific APIs

Not really. Most C# apps use .NET (since the framework and standard library is quite feature-rich) rather than direct Win32 calls, and .NET is cross-platform. A lot of web services are written in C# and deployed to Linux servers.

basically no one installs the C# runtime on Linux anymore

You can compile a C# app to a single executable that doesn’t require the framework to be installed.

Are you running Jellyfin, the *arr suite, slskd, or Technitium DNS? They’re all written in C#.

Yeah it’s definitely not possible to reach 50MB with a Node.js Docker image, but <150MB should be doable with a distroless base image + compiling the app into one JS file (for example, using Parcel or esbuild).

It’s possible to reach ~50-60MB Docker image with a C# app. Rust and Go definitely produce more compact binaries though.

This makes sense! You get the same advantage if the app uses Go or C# though, and both of those can compile to a single statically-linked executable too.