tl;dr:“Their achievements are unmistakable: we must offer them our gratitude and admiration for decades of accomplishments in establishing and advancing our cause. The principles of software freedom are more important than ever, and the products of these institutions remain necessary and useful – the GPL license family, GCC, GNU coreutils, and so on. Nevertheless, the organizations behind this work are floundering.”
tl;dr:"Everyone is frustrated with Python packaging. I call on the PSF to sit down for some serious, sober engineering work to fix this problem." Drew believes that Python packaging neglects the needs of Linux distros.
tl;dr:"Postgres stands today as one of the most significant pillars of profound achievement in free software, alongside the likes of Linux and Firefox. PostgreSQL has taken a complex problem and solved it to such an effective degree that all of its competitors are essentially obsolete, perhaps with the exception of SQLite."
tl;dr:"Software projects can, and often should, draw a finish line. Or, if not a finish line, a curve for gradually backing off on feature introduction, raising the threshold of importance by which a new feature is considered." This creates stability.
tl;dr:Software should be (1) robust, handling edge cases, various user inputs (2) Reliable, working for an extended period of time "under design conditions," and outside those conditions too. (3) Stable, not changing in unexpected ways. (4) Simple enough to meet the other 3 goals, nothing more.
tl;dr:"At some point" browsers need to "stop adding scope and start focusing on performance, efficiency, reliability, and security at the scope" that already exists.
tl;dr:C clearly stands out as the "single most important and influential programming language." However, as you work with other languages a tension arises - "you’re stuck either writing bad C code or using poorly-suited tools to interface badly with an otherwise good API."
tl;dr:Drew counts the number of syscalls a language performs when printing "Hello World." This should take 2 syscalls but, for most languages, there's a lot more happening under the hood.