kluck

Their main worries with open-source seem to be:

1 Fear of losing control (over their vision and centralized design of computation and representation of the Wolfram language).

  This is just false, as they would be in control over their project even if open-sourced.
  Forks would be possible but would not influence the original source (if not wanted).

2 Fear of lack of innovation.

  I cannot see why this would be true.

3 Fear of ignorance towards hard/boring dev. topics.

  I see how that could be a problem. One solution would be funding (s. point below)
  to pay devs for the boring stuff.

4 Fear of lack of funding (because dev. costs money... surprise).

  Their main point (and probably a big issue of a lot of other companies
  thinking about open-sourcing their software) and a very valid one indeed. 

So I guess they just have not got a business modell ready involving open-sourcing their software. Wolfram seems not so much against open-source from a philosophical point of view but they clearly think they would not be able to fund their dev. efforts without their software revenue.

@Wolfram: The most important assets of Wolfram are the devs. working there, not the software itself. Given this huge knowledge base around the topics covered by the Wolfram language, the support-business-modell could very well work! Also from a philosophical point of view: Wolfram claims to unify disparate fields of all of science which kind of is a scientific achievement on its own. Scientific results should be available for all people of our society.

I never know when they talk about "Wolfram" whether they mean the company or the person. And then I think what an egomaniac one must be in order to name an invention/creation after oneself.

Sort of Wolframs reply to why Wolfram is not open-source: https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op...

fyi, I found an old HN thread on a similar topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626491

Good analogy!

btw. I asked the question a year ago whether this whole "boss as a service" was viable and I think it is one of those things that you can't really imagine until you tried it out. I am glad there is now the opportunity to do so ;)

s. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13498466

- Concentrate on one thing.

- Make something you need and would pay for. If it already exists somewhere, find a good reason why you need to do it at all (and not just use the existing thing).

- No donations, let people pay for it.

Thanks! I am reading HN for this kind of hints.

Do not get blinded by enthusiasm. Think on your own.

I had a startup, co-founder persistet on bad tech, never stood up to him. Startup failed - and all for the wrong reason. I basicly had two choices: speak up or leave and I did neither, dragging along. I will never do that again!

Thank you for stepping in and trying to clarify. English is not my native language - that is why I sometimes struggle to explain myself better. The most valuable stuff you learn in CS study is the theory and that is exactly the stuff you miss out in an actual job (exceptions are possible of course).

I see this more clearly in hindsight. By pure accident I ended up in software development: My mother found this university, I did not have anything else on my mind at the time, just started studying, graduated and here I am 10+ years later professional sw dev. In school I was much more into arts and crafts so I never really anticipated that I would end up. All because of a small decision back then... ridiculous really ;) Some people really think they are in control of their lives ...

I would argue it is not about the little facts, such as specific sorting algorithms, but its more about learning how to approach a CS task, how to abstract and how to reason about code. The colleagues I know that were not as lucky and could not study CS, often they just hit a "wall" when they would have to argue about a certain SW architecture for example or when they were presented with an abstract problem, such as implementing some generic behaviour. And learning how to do this is a process that continues after the study, but it is important to get a basis. It is hard to really be specific here but if you do not have a good foundation of knowledge in a field, you will sooner or later (if you are not self-delusional of your abilities) regret it.

Studying does involve a big chunk of practial work, so you get both theory and practise. If you don't know the basics it would be very hard to do any "real-world development". So why do you think, 4 years are better spent trying desperately to coble some scripts together with a boss behind you than spending those 4 years surrounded by experienced teachers and like-minded students in an environment that focuses on learning?

This seems optimized for creation of small apps (and is also presented very well). But what striked me watching the intriduction video: When you revisit your a written app, it seems hard to understand whats going on and also hard to get a feel for if all functionality have been implemented and works. How does testing your app with this tool work? How does it help with maintaining a written app to lets say add a new functionality (when you have forgotten all about where your data is stored, where it is read from, what your queries where when you wrote them etc.).

It seems programming bottoms up is the only way to go - consider coding with your bottoms down, quite embarrassing.

This.

Be a highlevel programmer: know enough languages to pick the right one for the task at hand. Do not take part in language wars.

I am grateful that my father was using Linux exclusively pretty much from the mid 90s on and we never had another OS at home.

Danny Wallace - Yes Man

Clifford Stoll - The Cuckoo's Egg

Physically a BitCoin is, when you look at it with your own eyes, nothing, not even air. And probably everyone knows what a fork is (metal thingy for eating stuff) ... so here is your answer. Everyone else who says otherwise, is probably employed by Bitcoin ;)

You are in a very good position: you can pay your bills AND you have some more time on your hands. Start an own side project instead of working for someone else. This is from a father who thinks this would be a dream come true ;) ... use your time as long as you have it and create steady side income!

> ... it's not a great language;

Yes it is.

> it's a clusterfuck of "cleverness" which lets "clever" people implement horrifying glass cathedrals that shatter as soon as you open the door.

It is clever, so are most other languages. It lets do people do horrible stuff, as well as wonderful stuff, same as in most other languages.

The Perl code from other programmers that I usually come across is mostly using established popular CPAN modules and/or frameworks that encapsulate the "clever" parts. I think you are right in that you mostly get to see Perl code that does need help, rather than the better maintained Perl code that does exist as well.

I begin to find the constant bashing of Perl amusing. Such a great language, people just use it and it gets stuff done. I have no explanation as to why people hate it, other than because most people just don't understand Perl.

The problem is, money loss through poor software quality is (and maybe can) not be calculated in a way that, for example time (for development) can be measured. Often the arguments for increasing software quality, for example through refactoring parts of a codebase, are therefor not fact-based, but mostly vague. This is often not enough to encourage the decision-makers to invest in good software quality.

Apart from that some people might deliberately choose to not care about good software quality. But in my opinion this is often a sign of missing/poor education/experience.

As far as I can tell this is not open source. It seems to be a toolkit/framework and is supposed to be the basis of actual applications with focus on augmented reality. I don't think it will become widely used if the developers are not able to inspect its code, especially when the code comes from Apple. They do have a track record of adding hidden "features" one would like to deactivate.

I watched the video some time ago and what bothers me is that the author pretends to have hacked Perl while in fact he just found that some people are using a commonly used Perl module (DBI) the wrong way whereas the right way is well documented. A similar thing would be to blame PHP for allowing SQL injections through unescaped user input: I am sure it happens a lot, but who would blame PHP.

Honestly, you are asking the wrong question. How can two turing complete programming languages even "compete"? I though about this a long time and came to the conclusion that it's not worth the effort to come up with an answer unless objective metrics are beeing found.

Reading through the changes it becomes abvious how rich a language Perl is. Just look at all the edge cases and fine tunings that this long time of development and improvement has generated. Its impressive. Anyone starting their own little programming language should really consider how big a task that actually is. This is not to stop anyone or discourage them.

Passion to me is when you come back to some activity weither you plan to or not, e.g. you think about a programming problem out of the blue while in the shower or walking the dog. The things you are passionate about are always there in the back of your mind, presenting themselves when they wish. So passion is an attitude or state of mind regarding an activity.

Creativity on the other hand is when you come up in an idea or a solution to a problem. When you let out the stream of thoughts regarding a given topic, unfiltered by rational thinking. So creativity is the process of getting rid of your prejudices and looking a topic from different angles.

I guess they are both very different kind of concepts.

Creativity can be a passion, see artists, musicians. But also the most un-creative activity, e.g. sorting stamps, can be a passion.

Revenue is about $6000 per month and the costs for running the site are probaly quite low, minus the costs for the owner himself, so maybe monthly profit is around $4000? So given the formula for non-internet companies which are valued around 2-3 times the annual profit, the company would be worth around $120000.

Additionally consider these facts: the site is quite popular and has gained some traction but is still primarily interesting for a specific niche (startup founders). I would say the price for acquisition is at least $500000 and may very well be around or above 1 million which is even more likely because the owner has agreed to continue work on the site and growing it even more.