The Programmer Compass

Javascript being disruptive technology is.. A take for sure.

When your self driving car is written in react you'll understand.
- Self driving cars? Think human interface on spaceships!
  https://os-system.com/blog/javascript-in-space-spacex-devs-have-shared-crewdragons-tech-stack/
- When your self driving car is written in react you'll understand.
  I'll understand briefly, as my life flashes before my eyes? Haha.
8 frameworks and waiting for fingerprinting scripte to load just for the website to run at 1 frame every minute
- Isn't that more just website developers adding completely unnecessary shit that hog resources?
Disrupting my low ram usage
It always disrupted everything, and is getting only better on that with time.
It definitely is/was. Most user facing software these days is a web app, or native application using JS anyways. The event loop and async programming is also ubiquitous nowadays in most languages, especially server side.
I mean from inception until now it has been a huge change in programming. Node changed a lot of things. Typescript changed a lot of things. React changed a lot of things.
A long way since GWT which google was doing because its java devs hated js
- Exactly, disruptive does not have to be a good thing.
But the most disruptive technology of all is Steve Jobs's face.
- The most disruptive proprietary one, yes.
  Linus is down there too.
I'm guessing they started with the portraits and then built out a kind of mood board around them. Javascript is not disruptive in any good way, but people who like Javascript (and Apple and so on) might think they are.
well it was, a couple of decades ago at least
- True, but so was Windows.
It was like 7 years ago with all the JavaScript frameworks flooding in around Node.js
Now it’s just kinda standard

This is pretty much nonsense lol

It makes sense once you accrue 1000 hours on /g/ (10 years ago, it's a much dumber place now)

TIL I'm a hypedev

I use Arch btw
- We should reimplement it in Rust

How the fuck is C++ more traditional than C?

To me it looks like to position within each of quadrant want taken into account.
- It really seems like the creator didn't bother with spacing at all. Something that did consider spacing within quadrants wouldn't have its items this closely packed together.
I think it's not meant to be more traditional, the icon positions seem random and only the square they're located is important.
C was incredibly disruptive 50 years ago.
Tradition++

Where's the drunken conglomeration that is Scala?

Btw. It's my favorite language

People with the skill level necessary to create such memes don't know what Scala is

Ok, now ... where does TempleOS and HolyC belong on this chart?

It needs a Z axis for hobby vs enterprise.
- There we go, there, that actually makes sense to me, thank you!
  I want to know what a corpo hobbyist traditionalist language is though, lol.
  Like uh... I make vba / excel macros in my spare time for fun, lol?
Sigh*. Fine, let's introduce a z-axis specifically for Terry A. Davis.
- So what you're saying is that... he is either from, belongs to, or should be placed on...
  ... another plane of existence?
  lololololollool
Dead center with God
- Ah, so your idea is that they exist at a location with an imaginary component, they exist in an unvisualized, complex plane?
  teeheehee
Maximum freedom, and somehow joining the maximum points on the tradition and disruption axes, forcefully bending the chart into some sort of cylinder
- Hrm ok so your model is less of a defined space a point can exist in, and is instead a topology that a point must exist on.
- Eh, I wouldn't say TempleOS is disruptive. It was literally started off as a modern-day C64 successor. So, tradition all the way.

This is a very confusing image

Putting Apple under disruption not tradition lol

Author is either a troll or drank the apple marketing koolaid.

Uh, Linus Torvalds is a hypedev?

Btw, is this meme old?

Cowards are too afraid to place vi anywhere on these axes...

It’s open source and traditional..
- So you're say remove emacs and replace it with vi? I agree!
Vi is off the charts.
You would need entire new compass to place vi, vim, neovim, lazyvim, spacevim, lunarvim and so on on it.
- those are just neovim configurations it's like saying each hyprland dotfile is a different compositor
There is Neovim but yeah, not the same thing.
I've noticed that, too.

“Soydev”? This is fucking stupid.

Found the soydev
- What does soy mean though?
Agreed. Infantile and basically a slur on people because of their dietary choices. Part of a pattern of language that is basically alt-right bait for young insecure and disaffected men.
Edit: Adding a link to an article I saw on the orange site. The Four Dark Laws of online engagement are a nice little cheat sheet for the patterns you see repeatedly online. Negatively biased language that targets an out group has a virality amongst this audience: https://www.derekthompson.org/p/all-the-sad-young-terminally-online

What is this shit? I don't recognize half of this garbage. How is terminal + text editor not an option?

That's just the Emacs logo in the top-left. At least I assume Emacs has a terminal since there's that old "Vim proverb" about Emacs being a "great OS, it just lacks a good editor."
- Well you could code vi in it.

some one in the middle

Nah, vibe coders are definitionally reliant on highy disruptive, literally economy destabilizing 'AIs', that are made by the most gigantic of megacorps and foundations.
That would make them so far into soydev they are off the chart to the bottom right, and it would also mean you'd be grilling Impossible Burgers.
- But also super far into cogdev because the largest investors in those efforts by far are the established tech giants that have been around for years, so they are directly supporting the biggest players getting bigger
- yeah idk it was more of a from the hip impulsive thing. I'm a simple shitposter. I see poltiical compass and I just want to grill.
  Also:
  so far into soydev they are off the chart to the bottom right, and it would also mean you’d be grilling Impossible Burgers.
  I didn't realize there were going to be personal attacks.
One could argue that's heavily to the "disruptive" side, though.

Looking at how much of a reach some of the disruptive + proprietary stuff is... Yeah, there isn't a lot of recent innovative proprietary stuff, is there?

Although I would put Chrome under "disruptive". It absolutely was when it released decades ago, and even now it's still changing the browser landscape.

Chrome was disruptive.
Part of the reason for its disruption is that Chromium is open source (BSD licence), built on Webkit that was open source, which was built on khtml from the KDE project which was open source. That is how we got to Microsoft Edge also running on Chromium.
If it wasn't for the monoculture aspect and the actions of some of the companies using it, khtml->Chromium would be a great open source success story.
Eh probably the LLMs should be taking up most of that corner.
A lot of the systems are quite stabilized. No need for a new OS, a new browser, a new language.
Even if the old stuff isn't perfectly optimal, having to setup a fully-new ecosystem is so incredibly costly that it's just not worth it.
That's why you see new developments (e.g. Typescript or Kotlin) piggyback on older ecosystems (e.g. JavaScript or Java compatibility).
Typescript could have been better if it was a completely fresh development without being encumbered by the madness that is JavaScript. But without JavaScript compatibility and thus acces to the JS ecosystem, nobody would have switched to TS.
All these systems heavily benefit from network effects, which makes it hard to impossible for completely new systems to emerge.
This is doubly strong for consumer-facing software. Linux only became a viable mainstream option due to Wine/Proton/... allowing users to easily run Windows programs. Without Windows compatibility, Linux would still be at <1% desktop market share.
It's also the same reason why everyone's making chromium-based browsers: Because that way they all work the same.
Disruptive change happens when you get a completely fresh use case. Microsoft completely destroyed the likes of Commodore and IBM when home computers became something that everyone had in their homes.
Smartphones becoming mainstream allowed Google and Apple, who were both completely new to the mobile OS business, to win against established mobile OS companies, because nothing was entrenched in the late 2000s mobile OS landscape.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Midjourney and so on are wiping the floor with established software powerhouses in the AI space.
But after the disruption follows stabilization. A product that has reached market saturation will only be replaced by incremental, compatible improvements.

I started using git to track my dotfiles maybe one-ish years after I first fully adopted Linux as my daily driver.. I think it's been a little over 5 years and before I converted to nix that git history told a story of immense frustration of never being able to get my desktop and laptop to be identical. For some reason some projects only ran on one of the 2 machines. There was a period in my life when I didn't use my desktop for 2 months because it just didn't work well enough, OCD is really fucking painful. Nix saved my relationship with both of my computers, and my desk, and my spine. I haven't used my laptop and maybe a month and I may have changed my workstation a couple hundred times in this period, I will with absolute confidence say that the next time I decide to use my laptop I can just run git pull and nixos rebuild and my laptop will be just the same as my desktop (minus obligatory build fixes ¯(ツ)/¯)

NixOS answers that question I always had, "Do I have random residue from programs I uninstalled years ago lying around on my system?", with a resounding "No", and it feels amazing.

what are the concentric circles above Linus?

That’s Zen, a Firefox-based browser https://zen-browser.app/
- lol that's why it looked familiar. I use it but my icon has been broken for a while.

C++ is more traditional than C? 🤔

I think they just put them in quadrants with no attention to placement.

What is the software between Linus and rust? Never seen that icon before

Zoologist, it's a person that studies animals for a living. Hope this helps
Zig, a language for systems programming, alternative to rust.
Zig
It's Zig
Zig is actually pretty easy to get into. I got a Raylib game scaffold with scene switching running in a couple of hours from scratch, with no prior knowledge of the Zig language or ecosystem whatsoever.

I use C#, GitHub and arch...

(I am replacing GitHub once my homelab server is set up though)

I'm also replacing Github but I'm waiting for Forgejo to implement federation
- Is that something that's happening?

Love that the Guix logo is included!

I think there's a healthy amount of bs in there (Chrome, C# as traditional?), but some of it checks out. I like a mix of old and new but try to stay away from proprietary. Current favorites are probably Emacs, NixOS, and Rust.

rust is more proprietary than linus.

Amazing how RMS is now on the traditional end of traditional to disruptive.

Yeah well, it was convenient to dismiss radical free software ideas by telling everyone it's obsolete 🙄 thus calling that "traditional"

it's definitely generalized, but I'd say I fit the disruptive open source type, though i respect the trad open source guys a lot.. But, like.. as of currently, I can't even call myself an actual programmer seeing as I write stories instead of code nowadays..

Definitely would like to balance the two someday.

Language choice has nothing to do with foss vs proprietary.

That's not quite true. If you can't complete a build without a proprietary dependency, it's not really foss even if all the source code is freely available, because you can't exercise the freedom 1 (or 3). Similarly, if there's not a FOSS RTS, you can't exercise freedom 0.
"The Java Trap" from RMS was about this, IIRC.
- .NET CLI and msbuild are open source, and C# is awesome. And VS Code is open source.
Apple's preferred languages definitely have a smaller foss footprint than say c or rust or go

TS, JS, Java, and Codium are proprietary?

I don't think Codium is on this image
- Topleft of Soydev square? Or is that VS Code?

This whole chart should've been rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise.

Wouldn't that put Bill Gates on the "freedom" side?
- No, I mean the whole chart should be rotated, including the labels. I want "freedom" to be across the bottom and "proprietary" to be across the top, so that it matches "libertarian" and "authoritarian" on the political compass.
  ("Tradition" and "disruption" don't map to "left" and "right" quite as well, but if it were exact it would just be the political compass instead of just analogous to it.)

Emacs, icecat, guix, parabola, c, c++. Stallman. What are the others in that quadrant?

GNU Savannah and old thinkpads that can run with fully free software.
- on the main CPU 🙃*

Is bit keeper even still around anymore?

Freedom is to proprietary as libertarian is to authoritarian. Tradition is to distruption as political right is to political left. Better would be for the x axis to be left-to-right disruption->tradition and the y axis to be bottom-to-top freedom->proprietary. So, rotated 90° counterclockwise and then mirrored left-to-right.

Where does golang go?

In the trash where it belongs.
Ducks
- You know when you see some bait and go "that's bait" but somehow you're still angry? No? Well I do
Somehow it goes in both the cogdev and hypedev corners at the same time.
- That seems only appropriate for a language that's both typesafe and has any

I have no idea😒

What's the logo between Guix and C?

parabola linux

At work I'm the only dude that uses Windows and Linux. Everyone else uses Macs.

I'm shocked you have a choice at work.
- I had a couple of jobs that only allows Macs. It was horrible. The M1 Mac couldn't do 3 monitors(two side by side and main monitor). What kind of "PRO" system doesn't allow 3 monitors?!?!
We're stuck on Mac at work and I hate it.
- I had jobs like that. Productivity drops hard.

Who is the guy in the top left?

Richard Stallman
- Thanks. Thought it was Steve wozniak

What's between code berg and framework?

Neovim

I am offended that scratch isn't on here