Since when are contractors lower pay? Companies waste fortunes on them.

They don't need to support Windows 10, they just need to not artificially block the installation of Windows 11 on old hardware.

I feel like they could ask way more interesting questions. Probably the only really interesting thing here is people's top complaints about Rust, which is to be fair a really great list.

I would really love to see something similar for other languages. Imagine if you could see ranked pros and cons for every language!

I don't know why you're being downvoted. It literally starts with the word OPINION in bold red caps.

Ugh, I was working on a DIY smart lock. "I'll use Matter!" I naively thought.

Ok you need a border router for Thread support. No problem, I'll buy one. Should be cheap right since an ESP32 can handle it. Nope! You pretty much can't buy a standalone border router. All the articles are "don't worry, you might have one already if you have a Nest Hub or a Home Hub or...". Well I don't have one.

Pretty lame. I guarantee if they make a vendor neutral border router dongle you can just plug into your router's ethernet port and sell it at cost price (like £5) they'll see triple the uptake.

PDF writing isn't too bad IMO, since you don't need to understand the whole spec. I've written a PDF writer for maps from scratch and it was fairly easy and not too much code.

PDF reading though... Yeah I'm happy to leave that to people with more time and use their libraries.

A modern format would be nice, but I don't think it would be anywhere near nice enough to give up how universal PDF is.

They seem exactly the same to me: when a variable is assigned a value, it’s equal to that value now.

Yeah it's confusing because in maths they are the same and use the same symbol but they are 100% not the same in programming, yet they confusingly used the same symbol. In fact they even used the mathematical equality symbol (=) for the thing that is least like equality (i.e. assignment).

To be fair not all languages made that mistake. There are a fair few where assignment is like

x := 20

Or

x <- 20

which is probably the most logical option because it really conveys the "store 20 in x" meaning.

Anyway on to your actual question... They definitely aren't the same in programming. Probably the simplest way to think of it is that assignment is a command: make these things equal! and equality is a question: are these things equal?

So for example equality will never mutate it's arguments. x == y will never change x or y because you're just asking "are they equal?". The value of that equality expression is a bool (true or false) so you can do something like:

a = (x == y)

x == y asks if they are equal and becomes a bool with the answer, and then the = stores that answer inside a.

In contrast = always mutates something. You can do this:

a = 3
a = 4
print(a)

And it will print 4. If you do this:

a = 3
a == 4
print(a)

It will (if the language doesn't complain at you for this mistake) print 3 because the == doesn't actually change a.

Yes because you used static type annotations. This thread was about code that doesn't use static types (or static type annotations/hints).

That appears to not support comments. How they made that mistake after JSON is a mystery.

Make sense. Firmware is also extra difficult to debug so it's nice to use a language that significantly reduces the amount of debugging you need to do.

OMG they finally noticed how bad the REPL is. It's it going to let you paste indented code now?

Yeah I think that's what he meant. You don't want CI editing commits.

I use pre-commit for this. It's pretty decent. The major flaws I've found with it:

• Each linter has to be in its own repo (for most linter types). So it's not really usable for project-specific lints.

• Doesn't really work with e.g. pyright or pylint unless you use no third party dependencies because you need a venv set up with your dependencies installed and pre-commit (fairly reasonably) doesn't take care of that.

Overall it's good, with some flaws, but there's nothing better available so you should definitely use it.