I think the most interesting development isn't an actual development, but the fact that there hasn't been a major breakthrough in making traditional computing faster in software. The fact that for reliable performance, C is the language that teams go to.

I recently watched a presentation from Scott Meiers on youtube which summed it up nicely. Essentially, the speed of any program regardless of language is determined by how well the compiler can optimize the code so that the CPU can branch predict and keep relevant data in CPU caches instead of main memory. Nothing revolutionary has changed this. We can distribute data over different clusters if the problem can be parallelized but at the end of the day if the algorithm that runs on each node is constantly causing cache misses and pipeline flushes then the code is going to run slowly.

There's things we can do in software to help make better assemlby, like use a well written compiler or testing different variants of algorithms to see which run better. For example in Scott Meier's video he talks about a Row-Major traversal of a 2d array vs a Column-Major traversal. The two styles of traversal look almost the same in code, but when one uses significantly large data sets one algorithm will take exponentially increasing time because one algorithm jumps all over memory and causes cache misses while the other stays in contiguous (easily cacheable) memory and plays nicely. At the end of the day that determines performance for any nontrivial amount of data and we cannot figure out a way to get around this by using pretty things in software.

This isn't exactly a "languages" development but it gives us guidance as software engineers on how we should code, regardless of language. No one wants to program in assembly for each target and we shouldn't, better processes exist. But programmers shouldn't ignore the underlying implementation of their software. The best way to make a language perform is not just understanding and using every idiom of a given language (and in cases like C++ that would be terrible/impossible) but to understand what the compiler is going to do with it.

For a more language specific example I actually just watched a talk from DConf, where Walter Bright talked about a solution to dynamic memory management and problems with cache coldness which really just avoids allocating heap memory. I drag my feet when at the end he suggests that templates are the future (maybe I'm just not where he is in developer maturity) but otherwise I find that his implementation's strategy to avoid garbage collected memory a noteworthy take on a low footprint array-like container.

I forgot to answer your other question regarding the github "drama" type content.

I'll start with saying that I find the ability of publicly hosted FOSS projects to stay on topic and not degrade to political quibbling impressive and admirable. It isn't unreasonable to expect that a programming forum should exclude politically charged pieces from either side of a controversy and focus on technology. It's almost guaranteed that any discussion about politics regarding things like the github posts degrade the quality of a "programming" sub because a post like that will inevitably be 98% circlejerking against SJWs and 1% complaining that the sub has gone to shit. I think the remaining 1% is worth it: discussion about the invasion of political correctness not just in the workplace (where it can be a good thing) but in online communities where it has no place, and ways to mitigate the effect that SJW censorship types can have on programming communities, whether it be switching hosting platforms or taking some sort of activist role (the organization of which would definitely be off topic and should be required to move to a different sub than this).

There are two main reasons why I disagree with starting an entirely new "programming news" subverse to segregate politically charged content. The first being that even though news like github's CoC + related recent events aren't 100% on the topic of programming, I think they are stretchably enough to permit, as long as they are upvoted by the community. The second reason being that suggesting a certain type of post be segregated into a more specific sub is often a thinly veiled way for a mod to say "I'm tired of seeing this content on my sub so I am going to take a hand in segregating it instead of letting votes decide." Obviously that's not the sole intent here, @Craftkorb might be tired of political posts but he has been commendably patient with posters posting things that he reasonably views as off topic to the sub.

But forcing posters to segregate themselves to a smaller more specific sub is often the death of any poster's hope for visibility. look at /v/githubinaction. The posts on /v/programming concerning github are some of the most upvoted in the sub's history! That sub should be booming right now! Github has gone off the deep end, throwing out their stance on meritocracy, adopting a blatantly racist left wing SJW code of conduct which they intend to force all their service's users to comply with which amounts to thought policing more than it does making the community be friendly to one another, and they forced a repo to remove the word "retard" when you can search github for objectively more offensive terms and get pages of search results. NSFW example Some topics just aren't broad enough to give users a want to subscribe. They just want to occasionally discuss (and circlejerk). The solution, I think, is to let the posts run their course in popularity (even if it happens over months) because these things do rise and fall in popularity. I think the best way to control topics like SJW drama in software communities is to contain it to a megathread because that way, the posts are still here and its still the same community that wants to have their circlejerk/anti SJW discussion, and posters get almost the same visibility as if the topic is popular enough at the time then the megathread will be huge. I think its part of our job as mods to keep our ears to the ground and know when to pull the trigger on things like a megathread (or just set an automatically recurring one), so that topics that are barely appropriate but still popular can be nipped in the bud before we end up with /v/programming being dominated by anti-Github articles.

The other reason is that I don't really think the current github will invariably be accessed by any programmer at some point in their career for the forseeable future, and it is an icon of the open source community. I don't think political topics are necessarily off the topic of "programming." For example, something that might get a ton of traction and be a one hit wonder post is the event where a Congressman who studied computer science in college put different prosecutors/law enforcement who were requesting backdoors into encryption systems on blast. That sort of post has nothing to do with any specific programming technology but I definitely think it is relevant to programming and something that might be allowable as a one time thing here especially if it gets votes, because even though it doesn't have a single LOC a congressman actually agreeing with and articulating the views of the crypto community and calling prosecutors out for being overzealous rights tramplers is a wonderful if minor success for programming. But obviously a post like that is 100% deletable and off topic, it depends on how soon you catch it and what the consensus is between mods/users.

TLDR: off topic posts that become too popular for the sub's liking should either be segregated to a megathread or let run their course instead of having a delete and repost to a smaller community policy. I definitely take the free market/conservative stance when it comes to modding by saying let the community decide with votes and eventually things will return to a state of equilibrium as long as its clear we're not being brigaded by an outside entity. If for example we proved that the folks at /v/kotakuinaction were the ones inflating SJW post counts on /v/programming, then delete and ban. But in my experience those guys don't rely on malicious methods to spread their views. just a hypothetical.

a simple example would be assuming I don't understand the difference between a java abstract and interface class, and I googled it but most of them were textbook answers that were overly complicated or very vague. People on /r/programming would tell you to go to /r/learnprogramming or google and do a copy and paste of the textbook answer. And people on /r/learnprogramming either aren't sure themselves or copy and paste an answer from google. This isn't always the case since it's just an example but does happen a lot of times or are left unanswered.

I'm active but I try not to make a comment unless I have something to contribute or a question for something to keep the quality of comments high, I guess i can try to comment more? since my CCP is ~75 right now so im not that far off. Regarding the fairness question I guess I don't really have an opinion since rules are rules and I'm just trying to contribute to the community since I have so much time from working from home and not everyone has the luxury to do so. But if I had to give an answer I'd say not fair, as I mentioned above I try to make my comments quality over quantity, so I don't think I should get penalized for it. I don't mind not modding(less work for me) if it means other candidates are more qualified and/or has just as much to offer the community, but if everyone thought like that then no one would volunteer to be a mod. Either that or you'd just get left with power hungry people volunteering.

Could you elaborate on why voat is superior? Technology-wise, we're far behind. We don't have much tools.

Maybe, in terms of tools, but we still have specific up/down vote counts, moderation logs, ability to block subreddits, a better karma system, better userpages, and some RES-like features built in (expansion of image links in comments for example). But as well as that, the community is better and the moderators in most subs (with some serious exceptions) seem to be more reasonable people. Most importantly, Atko seems to have his head screwed on right, if you ask me. Will Voat remain that way in the long-term? I don't think it's impossible, actually.

Could we maybe overcome the current shotcomings using creative work-arounds?

Isn't that the essence of being a programmer? :D I would hope we could try. :P

Do you think that it's okay, unfair, or maybe sometimes required, to have internal 'meetings' on /v/programming without letting the community know about their outcome?

It's hard to give a definitive answer because of course it all depends on context but as a general rule I'd say... No. It's okay to have internal meetings but then the outcome should be made public, and discussed within the community. We're not here to coerce the discussion or make behind-the-scenes rules; we should only really be here to help nurture the growth of the sub (and remove bogus content like blogspam).

As for what I'd do if I had a disagreement with the outcome of those talks - honestly, if I thought it was serious I'd probably post a metapost (trying to reason with the other mods notwithstanding, of course). :)

What would you propose to further growing the subverse?

There's the good, 'ole grassroots method of word of mouth and appropriate referencing in other subverses. Front page posts concerning technology can easily handle a quick reference to a subreddit that can help explain topics.

There's submissions to subverses of the day and advertising in general(although the lack of sidebar ads makes that difficult. heh). A good push in an askvoat thread will drive traffic towards this subverse.

There's growing a network of subverses, ala what's happening with @LittleBobbyTables . By creating a network of related subs, when someone wants to explore a topic, they can follow the rabbit trail.

Finally, there's simply good discussion. Good discussion means folks are going to come back and talk about it elsewhere, heck maybe even a front page post will crop up from time to time.

Any idea to promote discussion over downvoting? Should one just disable downvotes altogether?

The best way to promote good discussion is to have quality content. If there's easy/low effort content to grab, folks will flock to that. However, a careful pruning will ensure such low effort comments can be removed. What constitutes a low effort comment? Beyond a 'know it when I see it' deal, it's comments that's along the lines of 'this' and 'Iama lama ama baaaaaaa' . Neither of those two statements add something to the conversation, they are simply filler.

As for downvoats...that's a tricky topic. Without downvoats, there's no way of letting a comment sway visibility, in a way. Downvoats make it so content isn't a one way trip, always going up. Even if people read a comment, the best they can do is remove an upvoat(if you have downvoats removed). With downvoats enabled, a user can help direct the post/content away from the front page, especially if it's within the mod rules, but not necessarily entirely relevant. That's a tricky part. However, downvoats are often going to be used as a 'don't like' button, or worse, a brigading tool to force specific content up.

How do you stop that? How do you keep it so folks aren't gaming the system. No one but the abusers want that. It means good content does get hidden while 'promotional' content is seen.

Personally, I would always disable subreddit CSS(most felt quite garish to me). With voat, subverses can set minimum comment requires for downvoating...but that limits it from v/all. Ultimately, I'd recommend growing with quality is one of the primary goals of this subreddit right now, which means exposure, which means being hidden from whatever /v/all exposure is bad. So, I'd simply use CSS to hide the downvoats and run polls from time to time on the matter to get the community's thoughts on the matter. Hopefully Atko can develop some tools to combat the inevitable issues that will arise from bots and brigading(not that I expect much on /v/programming).

We can't moderate why a person gives a downvoat, only they know why. However, we can make it more difficult to give a downvoat at all.

What's that? How should do the moderators know if such a rule is met? And how should one explain it to community members posting heated comments that this one submission was allowed, but that other one was not? Is that censorship, or is it not? Or is maybe some kind of censorship allowed?

An example of a political/drama post that could get through: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/08/all-android-operating-systems-infringe-java-api-packages-oracle-says/

How is it relevant to programming? It's an article on the topic of java and two large producers of code, Oracle and Google. It's referencing the changing nature of Java and an ongoing legal conflict, who's outcome will affect the average coder.

However, it is not directly related to coding. It doesn't offer new techniques, it doesn't offer a new technology for development. It's about the people who produce such things and the laws surrounding it. I admit, it's a bit loose about the relation to programming, but I would allow it on the thought that if I didn't like it, but the community was willing to upvoat it, it should be allowed. Just because I don't like something, as long as it doesn't explicitly violate the rules, the community should have a say(note:I recognize this is a tricky and very gray area to start traveling down. Judgement /is/ required).

Now, I admit to having pulled this off r/programming, which currently has two top posts on the subject. Two different articles, yes, but they're both about the same thing. I'd probably go first come, first serve, based on reading the article. Better sourcing would affect this prioritization.

Sadly, you can't please everyone. The heated comments from being deleted will be difficult to handle. Folks don't necessarily want to admit they're wrong or that they chose poorly(myself included). The only way to truly show the community that it was the best choice is communicating with them. Not just saying 'deleted-duplicate" or whatever, but by explaining to them "hey, this article is about the same subject as the one we chose, only the one we chose has better sources and better writing".

Is it censorship? Some would say yes, some would say no. Isn't that the purpose of mods to ensure quality discussion and content by censoring the useless and wrong bits? A bit of philosophy there. However, in the provided example, not really. If one of the articles was for and the other was against, I'd let them through. If they're on the same side, I'd block one.

Importantly, it's up to mods to be willing to admit mistakes. Sometimes things will get modded when inappropriate and sometimes they'll won't get modded when they should be. Hence why explanations are good and communication with the user base is important. If there's a flaw in some reasoning, it should be pointed out(in a manner that is not insulting) and rectified.

I'm interested in applying, but I want to be able to compliment the other mods, rather than just hope to match it later. I'm UTC-5, a bit on the inverse.