Best Open Source Software Identified By InfoWorld Listicles (infoworld.com) 63
An anonymous reader writes: InfoWorld announced the winners of this year's "Best of Open Source Software Awards" -- honoring 68 different projects, spread across five categories. Besides the 15 best software development tools, they also recognized the best cloud computing software, machine learning tools, and networking and security software (as well as the best databases and analytics tools).
"Open source software isn't what it used to be," writes Doug Dineley, the site's executive editor. "The term used to conjure images of the lone developer, working into the night and through weekends, banging out line after line of code to scratch a personal itch or realize a personal vision... But as you wend your way through our Bossie winners, you're bound to be struck by the number of projects with heavyweight engineering resources behind them... Elsewhere in the open source landscape, valuable engineering resources come together in a different way -- through the shared interest of commercial software vendors."
More than 10% of the awards went to the Apache Software Foundation -- 7 of the 68 -- though I was surprised to see that five of the best software development tools are languages -- specifically Kotlin, Go, Rust, Clojure, and Typescript. Two more of the best open source software development tools were Microsoft products -- .Net Core and Visual Studio Code. And in the same category was OpenRemote a home automation platform, as well as Ethereum, which "smells and tastes like an open source project that is solving problems and serving developers."
"Open source software isn't what it used to be," writes Doug Dineley, the site's executive editor. "The term used to conjure images of the lone developer, working into the night and through weekends, banging out line after line of code to scratch a personal itch or realize a personal vision... But as you wend your way through our Bossie winners, you're bound to be struck by the number of projects with heavyweight engineering resources behind them... Elsewhere in the open source landscape, valuable engineering resources come together in a different way -- through the shared interest of commercial software vendors."
More than 10% of the awards went to the Apache Software Foundation -- 7 of the 68 -- though I was surprised to see that five of the best software development tools are languages -- specifically Kotlin, Go, Rust, Clojure, and Typescript. Two more of the best open source software development tools were Microsoft products -- .Net Core and Visual Studio Code. And in the same category was OpenRemote a home automation platform, as well as Ethereum, which "smells and tastes like an open source project that is solving problems and serving developers."
Why give attention to little-used languages? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why do these little-used programming languages like Kotlin, Scala, Go, Rust, Clojure and TypeScript get so much attention?
I can't think of any notable software that's written in Kotlin, Scala or Clojure. Shit, I don't even know why they're in a list for 2017. Scala and Clojure were hyped several years ago, and the hype died out soon afterward. I don't even think Kotlin has ever gotten much hype at all.
TypeScript basically just makes JavaScript a less-stupid language. It's not like it extends JavaScript in any real way. It just provides some hacks to hide really glaring flaws in JavaScript.
Rust is a fucking joke, I think. I can only think of two things written in Rust: the Rust implementation and Servo. Having used both, I am not impressed. When I used it, I found the Rust implementation to be slow and bloated. I think that Servo is a total failure, too. Rust code is really awful to read and understand, even for people experienced with a complex language like C++. It's like the community is more obsessed with codes of conduct and social justice than they are with creating a useful language, too.
Out of all of those languages, at least Go has gotten some use. It's still a shitty language, in my opinion, but at least it's not a total failure like the others that were listed.
None of these languages deserve even a fraction of the attention and hype that they've been getting. We still see pretty much all important software being written in languages like C++, Java, Python and C. Even C# and PHP are more important than the languages that were chosen as being the "best" in 2017.
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> Why do these little-used programming languages like Kotlin, Scala, Go, Rust, Clojure and TypeScript get so much attention?
Perhaps because their survey approach gets responses from young, eager programmers far more than from anyone with a few years of experience, and from those who have completed successful projects. I visit Slashdot for the occasional high interest story, and the occasional opportunity to share insights and experience. But I certainly don't spend my time on market surveys or ranking of
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I think the reason Rust gets so much attention is because of the promise of safety and some additional nice to haves.
As an embedded systems programmer I look at rust and wish that C had some of those features.
C++ already do. Everything in Rust is basically a best-practices of C++ programming mid 2010s. It is just inverted, where in C++ the simplest code is the unsafest, and you have to make an extra effort to follow best practices, in Rust those are simplest primitive, and the unsafe primitives are move verbose to use and only there for integration with other code.
So Rust isn't bad, but it is also kind of pointless if you are already a good c++ programmer.
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I think enforcing best practices in the compiler, and making it explicit when and why you are breaking them can be useful.
Also, I'm not a C++ programmer, so I can't be sure, but doesn't C++ have the same problem with enums that C does?
Sometimes, but C++ is actually stronger typed than C, and you can add warning to all type-casts of enums to int. Also in C++ enums won't cast to other enums, only to and from int or whatever there underlying type is.
As for all the stuff you don't want to learn. You have to learn it for Rust anyway. The efficient safety of the language is build around the same advanced tricks as in C++, so move semantics like rvalue-references, are there, and are in fact even more complicated with temporary ownerships and bo
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*yawn*
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That's funny, I've been making a pretty fair living using nothing -but- FOSS for the last 20 years.
I just bought a second home on a nice lake in the Southeast US. With money I didn't have to spend on Windows licenses.
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Re: Not relevant (Score:3)
Funny. I stopped using a Mac in college. I stopped using Windows earlier, when I learned there was anything else - at all - available.
Advertisement (Score:1)
Clicked on first link. Saw it was a bullshit slideshow rather than a list. Fail. Don't care enough to put up with that.
So great to see Rust getting some recognition! (Score:4, Interesting)
The Rust programming language made their list of top dev tools and this is great to see! Rust really deserves this recognition because it is one of the few languages really pushing ahead the state of the art. C and C++ and Java were good for writing the kind of software we've used during the last 50 years, but Rust delivers what we'll need to write software for the next 100 to 200 years. Rust is built from the ground up to handle large software systems running on computers with many CPU cores and in hostile environments like the Internet. It's well positioned to meet our current and future programming needs. The community is also one of the friendliest I've ever dealt with. They know their stuff and they're always willing to help. Rust is the future and getting this recognition is just what it needs for more people to learn about all that it can offer.
Re: So great to see Rust getting some recognition! (Score:1)
And yet its evangelists are all morons. How can that be?
Re: So great to see Rust getting some recognition! (Score:1)
Too bad it's distributed under a contaminated license.
The next 100 years... (Score:2)
Shared memory architectures probably won't be relevant all that long... Limitations in hardware make cache synchronization hard, and limits the number of cores... Even today having multiple cores using shared memory is super slow. The future of safe multi-processing belongs to message passing, the over head is a bit higher, but the hardware will scale for decades to come.
As for safe zero-cost a
Re: So great to see Rust getting some recognition! (Score:2)
The big complaint I always here about Rust is the toxic community. They have a reputation for intolerance, bigotry, and dogmatism. Whether that reputation is deserved I cannot say. It's bad enough to make me not really want to explore The Rust ecosystem.
conjuring images (Score:5, Insightful)
"Open source software isn't what it used to be," writes Doug Dineley, the site's executive editor. "The term used to conjure images of the lone developer, working into the night and through weekends, banging out line after line of code to scratch a personal itch or realize a personal vision...
Pffft. Not sure what planet you were on. I was using gcc-1.33 or so and X11R3 way back in 1989. Both were too big to be done by lone developers and that not withstanding they were clearly the work of many people.
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Of course, open source software is a bug fest.
And as a corollary, proprietary software (like Windows) would then be practically bug-free?
Of course (Score:3)
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Eclipse didn't receive any mention, strange. Yet I've encountered few who didn't know how to use it.
As for Machine Learning? Not a single one was used for learning to interface to people. Maybe some more learning needs to happen there.
bah! (Score:4, Insightful)
No love for g++?
bash?
grep?
ssh?
openvpn?
I use those things infinitely more than I'm ever going to use 'Rust' or 'Visual Studio Code'.
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It's like they kicked us right in the listicles by omitting our favorite programs.
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p.s. haha. Slashdot knows what's up. Captcha: naughty
Stopped reading at "slideshow" (Score:5, Insightful)
Slideshows need to FOAD ASAP.
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Usually when I hit a "1 of 10" page, next click goes to "close tab".
I find ^w to be faster.
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I find ^w to be faster.
Not so sure, if you're still holding the mouse...
I Wish ... (Score:2)
Go is not ready for prime time (Score:2)
I re-built a known-to-work project and it failed when I tested the new build (where the program written in Go was maybe one thousandth of the total code size.) A few hours of debugging later I found that the Go developers had made a "breaking" change in the SSL client code a few weeks earlier.
Re: Go is not ready for prime time (Score:2)
That's more a tooling/ecosystem problem than a language issue. But frustrating all the same.
It's a bit surprising that a language with such a gleefully anti-democratic core team hasn't been able to settle on a package management solution yet.
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This is a _very_ common problem for systems that re-invent versioning for their projects, especially when they ignore the very robust GNU numbering scheme. That major.minor.trivial numbering scheme 's described well at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
It's been a large problem with older tools as well, and it is why industrial operating systems do _not_ upgrade core components to major new releases. It's been devastating to projects that say "just build the code when you need it", because components in the
More than 70% of IP traffic is video! (Score:1)