An interesting commonality among the three examples you listed: they're all designed for a world when computing was a more solitary activity than it is now.
For Lisp and Smalltalk, image-based development is a genuine hurdle in the modern world. It complicates many aspects of modern highly-collaborative software development, including version control and continuous integration. I think that the language's respective hacker ethoses might also be a challenge in light of how often people switch jobs nowadays. I haven't used Smalltalk for pay money, but my experience has been that initially getting settled into a large pre-existing Lisp project does take more brain effort than it seems to with a language like Java. (In the long run I'd rather inherit a Lisp project, but I also acknowledge that first impressions are important.)
And BeOS was not a multiuser OS and didn't seem to have a clear path to becoming one. I'm pretty sure the main thing preventing it from becoming as much of a cybersecurity disaster as Windows 95 was is the simple fact that there wasn't any honey in that pot.
Image-based development was never good. So we pushed it back again and again, so that we nowadays have a single image component we named "database" and most of the work is free from its problems.
This largely occurs because the only real spec of rST is the Python implementation. And tools written in other languages are loath to include a Python library just to support one document format. While writing a new compatible implementation is much more work given the larger scope than it is for Markdown.
So every language has a markdown implementation, but if you want to use rst in your Rust based static site generator or your PHP based CMS or whatever, it's a lot more work.
Every language has its down markdown - but they are not compatible with each other unless you stick to the very basic which doesn't do much. Which is why every implementation has extensions - it isn't hard to add extensions and there are a lot of obviously missing things from the basic.
Yet at the same time I'm able to write Markdown that parses and renders correctly in VS Code, Obsidian, and the Rust-based static site generator I use. Sure, Obsidian has incompatible features I could use like [[Wiki Links]] but I don't have to.
That is easy enough as long as you are only writing a simple one page readme type document. To be fair that is the majority of what people write. However if you write anything more complex you will run into issues.
Is there any rich text format which is well-supported across multiple languages? The closest I can think of is HTML, but even that has its fair number of issues...
I have found myself feeling similar things. Something that I've done that has helped me is to find ways to nudge people further along the path of "hold[ing] themselves to high standards". That's easier said than done, but I hoped the thought might help you a little.
I wish I had more than one upvote to give you for this post.
> I’ve asked myself this question recently.
I suspect both are true. There are real complexities that have grown around you and working in the same way on the same stuff for so long has caused you to habituate to a few inefficiencies. I suggest shaking up your world view a little and seeing what falls out. There are probably a few big gains you could make.
I would approach it—at least initially—as a mental exercise. What are your assumptions about the role, the code, the product? How could you (in)validate those. What would it look like to take each thing you think you know and invert them one at a time? What if things that you think are bad are actually good? What if things you think are fast could be twice as fast? Etc.
For startup performance Wasmi and Wasm3 are both the fastest engines according to the benchmarks.
For execution performance you are right that generally JIT engines are expected to be faster than interpreter based Wasm engines.
Also, as stated in the article, on Apple silicon Wasmi currently performs kinda poorly but this will be improved in the future.
On AMD server chips Wasmi is the fastest Wasm interpreter.
No I do not but it is a very interesting question and probably not even answerable in practice because not every instruction takes the same amount of time to execute to completion. An outlier in this regard are for example host function calls which could do arbitrary things on the host side or bulk-memory operations which scale linearly with their inputs etc.
I really like the PR-role-play interview, too. I do worry that it can devolve into the classic mind-reading interview—i.e., there is an extremely subtle bug (or perceived deficiency) in the code that a candidate is dinged for not seeing.
Something I don't see in keyboard layouts often is mouse buttons. I use a trackball between my keyboard halves and prefer using mouse buttons on my left hand while moving the trackball with the right.
An embedded trackball/buttons at the sides of a split keyboard like the Advantage 360 would be great. But my bigger issue with that is that I would like the thumb cluster itself to be on the sides, towards which the thumb curves naturally.
I think I do understand why the other people in this thread wrote what they did. It's true their worldview is probably extremely different from mine.
I find the extreme wealth inequality we witness to be a great tragedy. That people are destroying their minds and bodies to be given the privilege to exist on this planet, while people lucky enough to be rich can simply order 99% of other humans around, and convince them that it's a good thing. That it's fair they're giving away their health, their sexuality, their blood or all of their time, as they are getting paid money in exchange. Something that to them is only achievable by hard work and extreme sacrifice, and in small quantities, while the same amount represents a minuscule value to the person on the other side of the deal.
Adding to that legally selling your organs, is inconceivable to me. What's next, selling babies for adoption?
I'm sorry if this seems poorly thought out and weakly formed argument, but I don't even know how to begin expressing my opinion on this matter. I can't see how I can be convinced this is all OK and something to be intensified.
I'm reminded of all of the alternate worlds that didn't quite come to fruition, but could have (Lisp, Smalltalk, BeOS, etc.).