This is my favourite take so far from this post:

“Google’s own data from September 2024 shows that Android’s memory safety vulnerabilities dropped from 76% to 24% over just six years — not by retrofitting safety features onto existing C++ code, but by writing new code in memory-safe languages (Rust, Kotlin, Java). Google’s security blog makes a fascinating observation: vulnerabilities have a half-life. Code that’s five years old has 3.4x to 7.4x lower vulnerability density than new code, because bugs get found and fixed over time. The implication is striking — if you just stop writing new unsafe code, the overall vulnerability rate drops exponentially without touching a single line of existing C++.”

Starting to transition away is perhaps the best step if these stats ring true. Then actively seeking out bad C++ practices is probably going to quietly pay dividends as well.

Yeah, Oracle licencing has really taken the shine off Java and relegated it to the legacy dust bin.

Worst thing with databases. Used to quote to my interns, “No spooky action at a distance” logic has to be in front of you and in git. Anything else is a recipe for bugs and undetectable errors.

Yeah, if I heard a junior dev say that in earshot I’ll be pulling them into a room for the list-of-reasons-that’s-dumb. Even the AI code assistants would directly say it’s not advisable.

First thing I tell my interns: “The guys that made that database are smarter than you, they got PhD’s for the algorithms the database uses. You are going to use SQL properly, and query properly, because the database will always do it better than your python code.”

The “excuse” is more or less the 20 or so replacements that have been made and died. I think Microsoft alone is responsible for 5 over the life of Windows.

We’ve more or less kinda settled on HTML only because it’s already wide spread. But it’s not perfect so more standards for the standards pile. Don’t worry, react will end up buried by the next thing on the pile eventually.

The counter is that all of a sudden instead of windows 10 it was 10 from 2020, then 10 from 2022 and so on. Instead of only being the last version it became a succession of short lived versions that people still weren’t upgrading.