glv

First.io | Back-End Engineer | Rails/Postgres | Durham NC or Remote | Full-time

First is a venture-funded startup at the intersection of artificial intelligence and real estate tech. We identify when people are going to move, and develop products to change the game for real estate professionals.

* 5+ years of developing Rails applications in production

* SQL and relational database experience (not just using a database through an ORM; Postgres a plus)

* Experience in building APIs (REST at least, GraphQL a plus)

* Generalist mindset, excited to jump into many parts of the stack to ship working software

* Clear, effective communication skills, both written and verbal

* Experience with agile practices, including TDD/BDD, continuous delivery, object oriented design, etc Comfort with asynchronous development: pull requests, chat, email, etc

* DevOps and AWS skills a plus

Read full job description and apply at https://boards.greenhouse.io/first/jobs/1562700

First.io | Back-End Engineer | Rails/Postgres | Durham NC or Remote | Full-time

First is a venture-funded startup at the intersection of artificial intelligence and real estate tech. We identify when people are going to move, and develop products to change the game for real estate professionals.

* 5+ years of developing Rails applications in production

* SQL and relational database experience (not just using a database through an ORM; Postgres a plus)

* Experience in building APIs (REST at least, GraphQL a plus)

* Generalist mindset, excited to jump into many parts of the stack to ship working software

* Clear, effective communication skills, both written and verbal

* Experience with agile practices, including TDD/BDD, continuous delivery, object oriented design, etc Comfort with asynchronous development: pull requests, chat, email, etc

* DevOps and AWS skills a plus

Read full job description and apply at https://boards.greenhouse.io/first/jobs/1562700

The point about partial programs is a particularly strong one, especially when it comes to test-driven development. Being able to write a test for a method or function before that method or function even exists may seem like a small thing, or even pointless ... but that flow and rhythm of "write the test, make it pass, refactor" is so strong and natural (once you've grown accustomed to it) that having to break that flow for brand new methods feels quite disruptive.

Ah, OK. (And yes, I remember you. You ran the FW JUG for a while?)

Ah, good to know. But at the time, they were mostly valid criticisms.

Well, right. Tcl was an early example of a trend where key data structures were built into languages and fairly well encapsulated as "one size fits all" abstractions. Computers had become fast enough that for many purposes you didn't have to build a custom list or hash table.

That all seems normal to us now, but it was uncommon back then.

I'm pretty sure that was Chris Morris. (He and I were both regulars at that group.)

There was a semi-rebuttal … I think in a post from Brent Welch. Tcl does have things called "arrays", and you use them much as you'd expect. Tom Lord confirmed later that what he and RMS meant by this was that it didn't have "true arrays" that are laid out contiguously in memory, to be much more efficient. That's a valid criticism: Tcl's arrays are basically dual-use hash tables, much the same as JavaScript's arrays.

The other two things are totally valid. Tcl has no references, so you can't build your own linked list. And all values are (at least semantically) strings, so numeric operations are slow.

But of course, a lot can be done to optimize those things in the implementation, and over time at least some of that optimization was done.

Two things about it make me think that RMS actually wrote it (probably after consultation with Lord). The first is this sentence in that post by Lord: "Who cares if a post occurs under my name that I didn't post so long as I more or less agree with it -- this isn't about ego."

The second is writing style. The Tcl War post is classic RMS. Compare it to this reminiscence from Lord and it's hard to imagine they were written by the same person.

Heh. In a recent overhaul of my site, I considered taking these pages down. But they do still get a reasonable amount of traffic, and I hate broken links.

Thanks to amelius for the "Tcl the Misunderstood" link. I agree with that, for the most part. I haven't written Tcl in many years, but I don't think it deserves the reputation that it has.

It did later come out that Tom Lord wrote it, but not as a prank; he was working with RMS to build Guile, and this was the opening salvo in trying to build the case for it. RMS did post it under his own name.