pajuc

Why is there no light to be shed?

This is a perfectly reasonable question to ask. And a straight simple answer might be that no, they didn't. Or not initially but later it was too late. Or here are the circumstances in leadership, historical contexts that led to it and we find those in other projects as well.

That would be interesting to hear.

What's the difference between "choosing pretty syntax over speed" and "start with syntax without considering speed"?

So they didn't focus actively on good error messages and fast compile times when designing a new language?

It's really hard for me to read past Lattner's quote. "Beautiful minimal syntax" vs "really bad compile times" and "awful error messages".

I know it's not helpful to judge in hindsight, lots of smart people, etc.

But why on earth would you make this decision for a language aimed at app developers? How is this not a design failure?

If I read this article correctly, it would have been an unacceptable decision to make users write setThreatLevel(ThreatLevel.midnight) in order to have great compile times and error messages.

Can someone shed some light on this to make it appear less stupid? Because I'm sure there must be something less stupid going on.

Great short read on a concept we can find in many places, including software engineering or even UX design in general.

Could you explain what you see in more detail? I don't quite understand what you mean and I'd like to fix it.

Generally, scaling is based on the shorter edge of the frame. The edge length of the largest square is about 30% of that. All other squares follow in a similar fashion.

The article asks a fair question. The comments here raise fair points. At the end though, all of this activity is nothing else than doing philosophy.

Because what else would it be?

The article is a critique of some aspects of contemporary philosophy. Like many others did before (greeks). It can't be a dismissal of doing philosophy itself. Because asking about the worth of philosophy is a philosophical question.

True, and this has real effects on jobs.

There was a similar dynamic with translation market and Google Translate. It didn't matter that human translation was superior. What mattered was that Google Translate (or similar) brought down prices so much that it effectively destroyed the market for everyday-type of translations. Why? Because customers said that, well, just use Google Translate and then improve it a bit.

Thinking of a project where 1 person knows how to admin something with quite a bunch of Postman setups on their own computer.

At least provide CLIs.

Great article, very true.

"For some reason, corporate legibility tools often have poor UX for those who interact with them who are not administrators."

That's because administrators decide which of these tools to use and buy. Tools then focus on pleasing them first. This reminds me of a similar situation with doctors. Some years back there was a great article in the New Yorker called Why Doctors Hate Their Computer. There is a similar dynamic where doctors waste hours on documentation that is then read by hospital administrators who then base their decisions on that. To the administrators this is great, they can see patterns and react to them. To the doctors, not so much.