Comments by "Anony Mousse" (@anon_y_mousse) on "Is Protestware Healthy For Free and Open Source" video.

@lennymclennington I don't even play MineCraft, and if I did I doubt I'd need a launcher, but if I did, it sounds like PolyMC would be the one to use. Putting the code over politics is the way every project should be run. It's a huge part of why I hate Rustaceans. They make every conversation on the language a personal attack and repeat so much FUD it's not even funny. It doesn't help that the language itself sucks.
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@miguelguthridge If you're a programmer, &1 is just as easy to read and understand as %2 and takes the possibility of the compiler missing the optimization out of the equation. Also, the whole thread started as a discussion on JavaScript, so there won't be compilation because it's running in a VM which may or may not optimize that. Although I sure hope they do because otherwise I'd have even less faith in JS as a language.
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@Aeduo I suppose, since even C has functions in its standard library to pad strings, and has had for longer than some of these other languages have even existed, but I would hope that any good programmer know how to do it manually anyway.
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@miguelguthridge The problem with that thinking is that unless you actually check on these things you won't know what the compiler optimizes away. Sure, %2 is so common that every compiler by default now will convert it to &1, but it's also so common that it takes me an equal amount of time to understand both and if you write any code for older systems you might wind up with an older compiler that doesn't do what modern compilers do.
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@miguelguthridge I could understand that point of view if it was doing modulus by some weird amount by shifting and anding multiple times, but FFS, we're talking about an odd test which is quite frankly just as easy to read and understand with &1 and easier to type too.
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@miguelguthridge Finger placement. It's easier to type a key on the right side than the left side. Something like 90% of people are right handed. I had to backspace several times to type that percent symbol.
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I would consider a real legal difference in this case to be an ideological difference and thus call it protestware. But it's a protest that is actually good in this instance, even if the unnamed fungal language is excrement as a programming language.
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@robonator2945 But all of our laws are based on ideals, so protesting an unjust law is ideological, even if it does get you sent to prison.
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@robonator2945 You just said legal is nowhere near ideological. I disagree.
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While the term itself is new, I think in both cases you mentioned that it's valid. Protesting restrictions to be more free is a part of life and at least in the US is a large part of why the country was founded, even if it hasn't stayed in that direction.
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@stormshaman Except that a fork doesn't have to be a protest. It could just be someone wanting to take the project in a new direction or who wants to add features that the dev is being too slow to add. Or maybe even just them experimenting.
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Often that is true, but LibreOffice is a good example of a protest gone right. I personally don't think copyrights should be purchasable nor for that matter projects which were open sourced as the JDK and JVM were. Protesting Oracle's "acquisition" in this way seems like the right kind of protest, ensuring that what was previously free stays free. Of course there are many examples that went very wrong, such as PrismMC being forked from PolyMC.
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@priyapepsi And there's no reason to cater to the feelings of people that donate to scam groups.
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@priyapepsi Obviously anyone that donates to such groups. We shouldn't care about their feelings.
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@absalomdraconis I would argue that no matter how big the project gets it doesn't need a CoC. Everyone knows to be respectful to others and if they don't just take them aside and hash it out. The only reason to formalize it is to have the intent to kick people out that you don't like.
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@priyapepsi If by insane you mean rejected wokeism then whatever, just admit you're a leftist troll.
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@BrazenNL Someone in the comments posited that 80% of JS developers don't even know how to program. I think they were being generous and the number is actually 95%. Although, to be fair, string manipulation is a lot easier in C.
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@miguelguthridge But your argument is that you shouldn't optimize too soon, is it not? That's an incorrect way of looking at it. You should be thinking of optimization from the start. You can write performant code that's easy to read and I'll argue again that just because some people claim something is harder to understand doesn't make them right. If a programmer can't immediately understand &1 versus %2 then they shouldn't be programming anything at the systems level, possibly higher up as well. It doesn't even matter that every compiler will optimize that one specific thing at -O0, because there are other considerations that are far more important. Some things you might not even consider to be optimizations either yet very much are such as algorithmic and data structure choices. The wrong choice can facilitate writing your whole program in the wrong way and swapping from one pattern to the other isn't always a simple type swap.
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@miguelguthridge It's of equal intent. It's not like say N%256 versus N&0xff, but in the case of %2 and &1 the intent may very well be to show that you're acquiring that bit. Also, a good programmer doesn't do things to sound smart, they do it because it's both the right thing to do and makes sense. Bad programmers do things to sound smart, and that's why we get things like a[i++] = i; that cause so many problems.
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