It won't be. Even an extinction level asteroid or comet impact will be easier to handle on a planet with breathable atmosphere, water, and other resources. Colonizing Antarctica is a few orders of magnitude easier than Mars and we've barely progressed with that. Still, Mars would require much more self-sufficiency than we've ever attempted. It's worth the effort to expand human exploration.
> Colonizing Antarctica is a few orders of magnitude easier than Mars and we've barely progressed with that
I hear this somewhat often, and I find it a bit disingenuous since it's not like we're trying that hard to colonize Antarctica, we're mostly preserving it as well as we can, no? And the existing Antarctic bases aren't total hellholes or anything, AFAIK the larger ones are relatively normal spaces with power and normal food and heated water.
I do agree with the overall point though for sure.
I always found it amusing that KSR's Greens were the side that would have in effect have destroyed the natural environment of Mars (by terraforming it), unlike our Greens who in general want to preserve the environment.
That's true, but the other professions don't tend to be associated with (or clearly vindicate) the “above-the-crowd/holier-than-thou” attitude – and I say that as an ex-scientist, for the same reason (among others) as the poster above.
> I'd be at a loss to think of an example of an engineer who's been publicly pilloried (having been highly regarded for great work) for the failings of their company. Perhaps you could cite and example?
Because these guys and gals are not famous enough to warrant large coverage, and because the phenomenon is unfortunately so widespread that noone is going to cover every case.
Thanks, really appreciate the concrete examples. They're not quite what I was referring to (developer praised by company / media - then attacked for issues with the company beyond their purview), but they do point to a (largely invisible from outside the industry / twitter bubble) truly worrying and frightening level of animosity and aggression pointed towards devs that I wasn't sufficiently aware of.
I don't think you need a case quite this specific because of the following:
> then attacked for issues with the company beyond their purview
Ultimately, whether an employee is praised or not is completely irrelevant to the nutjobs taking their anger out on them because of something their employer did.
I agree. It's bad in either case. No issue with a game or game engine should ever result in threats of violence or harassment. It's vile to publicly shame, cancel, still less attack individuals for the mistakes of their companies.
My initial skepticism was based in the voluminous amount of false allegations of harassment and misportrayal of valid criticism as harassment that happened at one point several years ago in the games industry.
> that's what "skill issue" means in this context.
“Skill issue” definitely does not means “mentally deficient”. It comes from the videogames world, where it is used to disparage the lack of training/natural ability of other players; frequently accompanied by “get good”, i.e. continue training & grinding to up your skill.
Do I have to put the pieces together for you? What is the relevant skill in programming? Problem solving. It's not aim or timing or hand-eye coordination lmao.
It's plenty fast compared to commonly used languages such as JS, PHP or Python, but can easily be let in the dust by Java and C#, which arguably play in the same court.
And AOT-compiled, no GC languages like C++, Rust or Zig just run circles around it.
> You are comparing quality of implementation, not languages.
But comparing languages in a vacuum has 0 value. Maybe some alien entity will use physic transcending time and space to make TCL the fastest language ever, but right now I won't be writing heavy data-processing code in it.
At the same time, comparing without acknowledging that it is an implemenation issue, it is also not being fully honest.
For example, comparing languages with LLVM based implementations, usually if the machine code isn't the same, reveals that they aren't pushing the same LLVM IR down the pipe, and has little value for what the grammar actually looks like.
> comparing without acknowledging that it is an implemenation issue
Because that's implicit at this point – I'm not going to prefix with “because Earth geometry is approximately Euclidian at our scale” every time I'm telling a tourist to go straight ahead for 300m to their bus station.
Just like when people say “C++ is fast”, of course they refer to clang/g++/msvc, not some educational university compiler.
That's false though. All deep dives in the topic find that the core issue is the sheer amount of unoptimized IR that is thrown at LLVM, especially due to the pervasive monomorphization of everything.
Well it is arguably Rust's worst issue and it has remained it for most of its life.
Are you really going to try and convince people that this is completely incidental and not a result of pursuing its robust static contracts? How pedantic should we about about it?
On the one hand, you talk about being upfront and honest about trade-offs. On the other, you yourself are being less that credible by phrasing wild speculation as if they are facts.
It's not about static contracts at all, it's about keeping performance of high-level APIs high. It's all just about templates and generics, as far as I'm aware -- the same problem that plagues C++, except that it's worse in Rust because it's more ergonomic to expose templates in public library APIs in Rust than C++. Well, and also the trait solver might be quite slow, but again, it has nothing to do with memory safety.
When I left the field, the latest hottest thing was diamond (https://github.com/bbuchfink/diamond).