>>Python is more likely to make the average programmer happy.
Its a weird place to be. I was making ChatGPT write lots of Python code to do some analysis on the Stock market, and it was crazy how much code I was able to write in a day. I'm talking like a million+ lines of code. In a day.
To that end, it also means the cost of Python code today is $0 given how much can be generated so quickly.
Its a useful language, but pretty much anything you do with it today doesn't have as much value.
Ruby adoption has been low to non existent for as long as I remember. Lets say, 15+ years now. Python kind of took over scripting space. That also means Perl ceded its space to Python as well. But man Perl does one thing really well, and that is acting as a glue language for anything Unix. So it will always have one good use and it does that really well.
Ruby revival was a thing during the time of Rails, but that went away with React + Node taking over the frontend world almost entirely.
>>TIOBE has many issues, but ruby was doing better in the past there, so something changed.
Tiobe indeed has its issues. But their results do not surprise me. Perl is in the top 10. Python is no. 1. Out side of these things you are going to write SQL for database. And mostly Java for apps, and C for embedded systems. C++ for performant applications. And JS for anything on browser.
Ruby just doesn't have a space and a sufficient following in that space.
There is also that problem of not having a Killer app.
A lot of bootcamps taught Ruby and Rails in the mid-2010s, so it hasn’t been stagnant for 15 years, maybe since 2017-2018. Then Python (with DS and ML domains exploding) and JS/TS (with Node and React) left Ruby far behind.
Whole point of being rich is to have freedom to do whatever you want. Including fancy dress like poor and eat like them for personal marketing at times.
>>Here are some things Buffet has done that I admire (notice that phrasing):
Perhaps the best thing Buffet has managed to do is to live long. Most of compounding magic begins at ages 60-65, a time where most investors start to die out.
Second best thing he did was to start/acquire a insurance firm. The 'float' helps them to run a kind of in house index fund on other peoples money, without having to pay TERs/Fees. Thats basically no effort bogle style compounding. Even if you end with a situation where you have to return ALL the premiums collected, you still get to keep the returns.
Other wise everything else is just fairly normal, if you are sitting in front of charts for long, its impossible to miss something that's going up on a weekly timeframe for long periods of time. You just pyramid upwards and wait, patiently.
The real issue is waiting doesn't work too well for most people as you start to die out after 60.
> Most of compounding magic begins at ages 60-65, a time where most investors start to die out.
Percentage-wise, few wealthy investors are dying out at ages of 60-65. In the US, males that make it to age 60 have a life expectancy of 81-82. But that's across all men - life expectancy is strongly correlated with wealth in the US, so a man in the top 1% could very reasonably expect to live to very late 80s/90s.
Nevermind that Buffet was still fabulously rich when he was 60, so none of your logic makes any sense to me.
Nobody doubts how compounding works. They doubt the logic of using that to argue that someone achieving a sustained CAGR of nearly 20% over decades and being recognised by peers as the greatest money manager of the twentieth century when he was already one of the world's richest man in his sixties actually achieved "fairly normal" performance mostly down to living a long time.
I think people who are looking at long term wealth building are better off looking at John Bogle's work. The key is this, you absolutely must stick to investing in the index as a whole, but the issue there is fees you pay is a percentage of your investment, even if small, over years compounds against you. That might look small, but its a double digit percentage if done over decades. Hence picking a fund that charges you the lowest is the key.
Buffet does this better. He basically takes the float from insurance business(Geico) and invests in the index his company manages. This basically sets you up for a long compounding cycle. Translation- You are basically investing in the US economy.
Apart from this there are some base businesses in an economy that's under long term multi year climb. Now anybody who is staring at stock charts(weekly) will tell you eventually you do learn to 'Pyramid upwards' on stocks that are clear winners. Lots of literature has been written on this.
All said and done, you can be rest assured there only at best 10 such stocks in any economy. Once you find them, you do periodic audit if the companies are holding up good and just keep putting in money as time passes.
I don't remember where- but I remember reading, Fidelity found out the most profitable accounts belonged to people who were dead. That says two things. 1) You have to hold stocks for long periods of time, like really long periods of time(Index, and some of its constituents that are carrying most of the freight) . Most people won't make it. 2) Live long enough.
Quite literally once you gain the skills to pick stock. Next single biggest skill you can master is to be healthy and live long. These things take lots of time to work.
Buffet was richer than most nonagenarians put together in his fifties, and has been consistently generating 6x the US economy's growth over long periods. Insurance float is a neat source of capital if regulators will let you put it into equities and six decades of return usually beats four, but it's bizarre to pretend that BRK's outlying returns compared with other financial institutions come from longevity and access to capital. On the contrary, others have typically started off earlier with more, and generally donated rather less than Buffet over the last couple of decades...
The "index funds and live long" advice is sensible precisely because even the average savvy investor isn't likely to time value investments as well as Warren Buffet did.
Index doesn't go up. Individual stocks do. I mean a small section of the stocks within the index contribute to most returns. This is of course different in a bull market where lots of them go up at once. But even in choppy and bear markets, its a small section of stocks that do most of the upward movement.
You need to study index carefully, like pick each stock and study it. You will see Buffet isn't exactly investing outside the index, his investments come from inside the index.
You are not looking for needle in a haystack here. More like a thick loaf from a pound of bread. If you squint enough, you find them.
There have been methods to reduce overhead available over the history of our industry. Unfortunately almost all the times it involves using productive tools that would in some way reduce the head counts required to do large projects.
The way this works is you eventually have to work with languages like Lisp, Perl, Prolog, and then some one comes up with a theory that programming must be optimised for the mostly beginners and power tooling must be avoided. Now you are forced to use verbose languages, writing, maintaining and troubleshooting take a lot of people.
The thing is this time around, we have a way to make code by asking an AI tool questions. So you get the same effect but now with languages like JS and Python.
>>Feynman was a uniquely gifted teacher that made things intuitive and simple.
I think explainers like Neil deGrasse Tyson have a job harder than people imagine. Historically the problem with science education has been, that, as the conceptual universe gets bigger and complicated there's a tendency to assume the common person is too stupid and beneath the subject to understand it.
To simplify and demystify science to a point to get people interested in it as a intuitive iterative process helps a lot in increasing participation of the general crowd.
>>I think the reason python won was that it was easy to learn and read and was batteries included.
This is also a big reason why AI assisted programming will wholesale replace Python programmers.
If your are optimising for people who wish to remain at beginner levels all life, and that replaced people using power tools to solve harder and bigger problems. It shouldn't be surprising that now some automation will replace you.
Every programmer worth their salt must learn to use power tools, and also train to work beyond the beginner-intermediate levels, that has now become the permanent situation in our line of work.
Nobody should be spending a day writing Python to do work that can be done using a vim macro in like 5 mins. Or spend a year doing in Python what can be done in a week in Perl.
There are lots Perl one-liner patterns, once you learn to write them. You are basically saving yourself writing many dozen man-hours of Python/Java coding work.
I remember telling my manager during the Perl days. A 10 year Java experience guy looks great, but thats basically a junior Perl dev with 6 months experience.
There is nothing to feel great about wasting effort and more importantly time.
>>Not sure your time-saving thing really works, especially if 99% of problems you have are not solved by a perl oneliner.
That's because if you don't have a paradigm of thought, you are not likely to reach for a tool that works there.
Most of the times, I have seen Java programmers watch in total awe that their pet weekly project, that took 40+ hours to accomplish, was basically a vim macro that they could have done in like 3 - 5 mins.
That was my whole point I made, when I said, when a Java dev says they have like 10 years of experience, thats barely a Junior perl dev.
I'm guessing most Python/Java programmers would find it impossible to work in project which doesn't involve a database, XML, or json. Those languages are not designed to work with a data or a compute paradigm outside of these formats.
This might be the stupidest comment I've ever read on HN. There's not a single case where using Perl is the right call. As others have joked it's a "write only"language. The garbage you write in Perl is illegible to everyone else and will be illegible to yourself once you move on to the next project and have to come back and debug your old Perl in 18months+. You think you're being clever with your Perl one liners and mini scripts but you're actually sabotaging your team. My honest opinion is that anyone who knows this and still writes Perl needs to be fired because they're actively undermining the team and the organization with code that is essentially legacy technical debt the minute it's committed to the organization repos.
You use a real language for these projects because it allows someone besides yourself to collaborate and maintain the project
>>As others have joked it's a "write only"language.
The pet project you write to replace that Perl one liner is also write only once project. The only difference is you waste years of your life doing what we do in minutes.
There is nothing to boast about wasting your life doing things that don't even have to be done.
As you get to the downswing of your career, you should have already worked and made enough mistakes to have most of your experience. You must cruise on that experience when you are older.
When you are old, that is not the time to work and make mistakes.
That is, most of the heavy work must be done as early as you can. Eat that frog.
I agree. When new programmers come from uni they sometimes barely did any programming. So at some time in their life they got to actually put in the time and learn how to be a competent developer. It is obviously great if you can do it on somebody else dime in a 9 to 5 but if you can’t get that you should just put in the time and learn. In the end you can at best get paid for the value you can create and if you are incompetent that is not going to be a lot
>>Being focused on the goal you defined 30 years ago is almost certainly wrong for most people.
I think there are certain things that are not likely to change, and must be aimed for. For starters, being healthy, proactively working towards a retirement nest egg, so that you don't end up homeless and starving in case things go south too fast.
There are many such things I hold as things I would want several years from now. Good health, free time and enough money to not need a job to just put food on the table, and a roof above my head.
Its a weird place to be. I was making ChatGPT write lots of Python code to do some analysis on the Stock market, and it was crazy how much code I was able to write in a day. I'm talking like a million+ lines of code. In a day.
To that end, it also means the cost of Python code today is $0 given how much can be generated so quickly.
Its a useful language, but pretty much anything you do with it today doesn't have as much value.
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