WSJ not tryna be found negligent in any social-media addiction trial.

"Rule 6: Don't waste time on syntax highlighting unless you're incompetent."

You don't think AWS is internally built on massive amounts of open source?

That's what it would mean to place them above unpaid developers in the illustration, yes.

Isn't this the same debate as airports post 9/11, whether you can have both privacy and security? Seems conclusive, no.

And starting fires or making coats used to be forms of art, now we just buy a Zippo and a London Fog and call it an afternoon. Jobs evolve to specialize. I call that progress.

And yet there's a difference between a cheaply made coat from an Asian sweat shop and one made with quality materials by a skilled tailor.

And a difference in price that amortizes about the same.

That’s true for the consumer's wallet, but the 'amortization' breaks down when you look at the systemic cost.

In software, the 'cheaply made coat' equivalent (bloated frameworks, unoptimized dependencies) creates a massive technical debt that doesn't just affect the buyer—it affects the entire ecosystem's energy consumption and hardware requirements. The Seawolves devs weren't just saving money; they were respecting the constraints of the medium. When we treat resources as infinite because they are 'cheap,' we stop being engineers and start being assemblers.

Exactly. The 'Asian sweat shop' vs. 'skilled tailor' is a perfect analogy for the state of software today. We’ve optimized for speed of delivery (Zippos and fast fashion) but we’ve lost the durability and resource-efficiency that comes from a tailor-made approach.

It’s fascinating that in 2026, we’re needing more and more powerful hardware just to keep up with the bloat of basic applications, whereas the Seawolves devs were finding ways to squeeze 'art' out of 64 kilobytes.

You’re absolutely right!

Many of us would love a TypeScript analogy for Lua.

There have been some attempts:

Luau (5.2k, last week, https://luau.org/, https://github.com/edubart/nelua-lang)

Nelua (2.3k, 8 months ago, https://nelua.io/, https://github.com/luau-lang/luau)

Terra (2.9k, 3 days ago, https://terralang.org/, https://github.com/terralang/terra)

Teal (2.7k, 2 days ago, https://teal-language.org/, https://github.com/teal-language/tl)

The Luau author is always on the official Lua mailing list, and it has twice as many stars, so it seems likely to win the long term popularity contest.

Note that some of those can't run on a regular Lua runtime.

Luau is a separate implementation of a Lua dialect. However, it's backed by Roblox and being increasingly used in high budget games such as Alan Wake 2, and tools like Rive.

And Terra is more of a low-level language embedded in regular Lua for metaprogramming, than a statically-typed Lua.

In this vein there's also Pallene, which integrates better with regular Lua on a slightly-patched Lua runtime.

https://github.com/pallene-lang/pallene

(BTW the links for Nelua and Luau repos got mixed.)

Also it looks like[1] Luau is the official Roblox Studio scripting language, and is baed on Lua 5.1 (possibly LuaJIT?) which means it's behind mainstream Lua.

Not sure which Lua versions the others are based on.

[1] https://create.roblox.com/docs/luau

It uses refcounting, and GC for cycles. Sounds good. Why don't more Lua-likes?

The article says it's repurposed.

Human history is full of cases where silly mistakes became precedent. HTTP "referal" is just another example.

I wonder if there's a wikipedia article listing these...

It's "referer" in the HTTP standard, but "referrer" when correctly spelled in English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer

In this case not only the naming was a mistake but the existence of the header itself.