so many peripherals now come in external boxes that communicate _incredibly quickly_ over Thunderbolt 4/5 that the need for PCIe is marginal, while the cost to support it is significant.
It's clear that we're entering a new era of copyright _expectations_ (whether we get new _legislation_ is different), but for now realise this: the people like me who like copyleft can do this too. We can take software we like, point an agent at it, and tell it to make a new version with the AGPL3.0-or-later badge on the front.
no, it isn't. The point of the GPL is to grant users of the software four basic freedoms (run, study, modify and redistribute). There's no restriction to distribution per se, other than disallowing the removal of these freedoms to other users.
I’ve been making the case (e.g. https://youtu.be/uL8LiUu9M64?si=-XBHFMrz99VZsaAa [1]) that we have to be intentional about using AI to augment our skills, rather than outsourcing understanding: great to see Anthropic confirming that.
[1] plug: this is a video about the Patreon community I founded to do exactly that. Just want to make sure you’re aware that’s the pitch before you do ahead and watch.
As the submitter, I want to point out that I submitted this post with the original title. The one that makes it clear a16z are behind the social media astroturfing. The mods changed the title.
These modern times that literally began in 1769. Oxford English Dictionary, “literally (adv.), sense I.1.c,” June 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9189024563.
Article author here. Your idea "gluing together things that don't know necessarily know about each other" is basically what the GoF book means: composition is "this object has a reference to that object and uses its public API". They don't mean "this object ontologically contains an instance of that object" in the sense that a car "has" an engine, which is a narrower definition of composition that people frequently use.
It's that broader version of composition—particularly in its extreme realization, delegation—that underlies a lot of the behavioral patterns in the book. For example, the State and Strategy patterns boil down to "this object relies on another object to fill in the behavior here, and there are ways to choose what that other object is", which is something it's easy to arrange with subclassing and the only point of the pattern is to avoid subclassing.
Author here. I wrote “ But even a modestly more recent language like Java has visibility attributes that let a class control what its subtypes can view or change, meaning that any modification in a subclass can be designed before we even know that a subtype is needed.” which covers your situation: if you need to ensure that subtypes use the supertype’s behaviour in limited ways, use the visibility modifiers and `final` modifier to impose those limits.
The fact that Java had to add a whole extra set of keywords to control this indicates that this is a site of complexity. Since it isn't needed for composition, it's a site of unnecessary complexity.
What you lose by using composition is that the composing object is no longer a subtype of the constituent object, so you can't use it as a "decoration" of the original object in a program that expects an instance of the original.
It can be, if the composing object re-implements the constituent object's interface. This way, code reuse and polymorphism are orthogonal features, which I think is better. If you want both, you can do both, but inheritance pushes you toward using both even when you only need one.
Dijkstra also advocated for proving the correctness of imperative code using the composition of a set of simple rules, and most programmers ignore that aspect of his work too.
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