zellyn
It’s not too hard if you try, once you get in the groove :-)
The value proposition is an average of 270 commits a day, for $4000/month, and the dramatic improvements to the game Yegge described. Even supposing 2/3 of them are burned on the scaffolding, 90 commits/day (assuming they’re of mostly good quality) would cost multiple engineers, one of which would cost much more than $48k/year.
As another comment said, the ultimate proof will be in the pudding. But I don’t think the value proposition claimed is complicated.
The Roc and Zig folks probably have actual numbers.
So while Lisp may not be purely functional, the culture hewed that way.
Also, using it as a schema doesn’t totally suck. There are others but proto is… fine.
I have lots of opinions, but don’t feel like spinning up to a full rant here :-)
It's also a great early example of the massive win you can get by replacing hardware with software (and "software" -- in the form of a state transition table encoded in a small ROM).
It's also one of the reasons there were so many fascinating and weird copy protections for Apple II software: since so much of the behavior was in software on the computer, it was malleable. (Since it uses the CPU for tight timing loops, the Apple II couldn't really do much else while using the disk.) The write-ups by 4am on IA are fun reading if you're into this kind of thing: https://archive.org/details/apple_ii_library_4am
There are some fun projects to record disks at the level of magnetic flux transitions. I'm mostly familiar with https://applesaucefdc.com by the amazing John Keoni Morris, which came with a new file format too, and some lovely UI software.
It was the first thing I coded entirely with Claude, and absolutely blew me away. (Mostly, it turns out other people already did all the hard parts -- the inspiration was running across a reddit post where someone said they wired together pyiodide and the Ace editor in a few hundred lines of javascript).
This was my first experience of "if you know what you're doing, LLMs can build things well and incredibly quickly". I think MVP took one evening, and then two more rewrites pushed it out to a week or so. (One after I realized fully offline was a worthwhile idea, the second after I realized the backend could be a dumb key/value store with only prefix iteration.)
As mentioned, it's local-first: everything should work perfectly offline after loading it once. Saving is limited to my kid’s school domain at the moment, but it’s super simple to host: just compile the Go binary and put it behind Caddy or something.
Code (which I literally have not read) is at https://github.com/zellyn/trifling
[Edit: p.s. try the avatar editor!]
In reality, the programming language tells you all kinds of subtle things: probabilities about the way the software will feel to use, how stable it’s likely to be, how fast, what the author is likely to focus on.
I found one of the best jobs of my life in 2015 by asking “who’s doing interesting things in Atlanta in Go?” Not because I was uncompromisingly settled on Go, but because in 2015, using Go (often) connoted a certain approach, a certain type of engineering, a certain constellation of values.
So please stop pretending the whole gestalt of programming languages and their communities don’t deeply affect the resulting software.
(I say this with no unkindness intended, mostly to all of hackernews)
I also ported it to JavaScript (linked from above page)
One note: you can authorize regular phone numbers for them to be able to call, but only if you pay the subscription ($10/month I think? We didn't do this...)
I know I could build the same thing out of esp32's but it would be a big hassle, and I'd have to build one for all their friends too!
I grew up with borrowed ZX Spectrum manuals that detailed the Z80 assembly language, (a clone of) a Red Book that came with the (clone of a) Apple II computer that had assembly listings, and fold-out circuit-board diagrams for the whole computer. I taught myself C++ from the manual that came with Borland Turbo C++ and the Waite Group C book. I laughed out loud at footnotes in the Camel book, which I read from the start through to where it becomes a reference. I read Sedgewick's Algorithms cover to cover for fun when I found it in a local library as a teenager. I borrowed the ancient "build a flight simulator" book from a friend in high school.
I've bought books by Kleppmann, Julia Evans, and Hillel Wayne's in-progress book on proofs. I owned the gang of four design patterns book (although I won't pretend -- like everyone else -- to have done more than skim a few patterns!)
And yet.
For many, many years now every time I've wondered into a bookstore, and meandered over to the fondly-remembered computer books section with a sense of nostalgia, I've just been deeply disappointed and sad. If you're lucky, you'll find one or two books that look worth reading, and the rest is just the product of some giant publishing machine whose sole purpose seems to be to fleece unsuspecting neophytes of their money by pushing on them hastily written books on whatever the current fad is. Often when you look at the publication date and compare it to the release date of the software, it's obvious you couldn't write a _good_ book that fast.
And they're all huge. The C Programming Language, Javascript: the good parts, and The Go Programming Language are just about the only three examples I know of where concision was considered a virtue. Most are just fluffy as hell, which is offensive to the kind of mind that wants to learn a programming language.
Add to that the observation in the article that paper books for programming languages are inherently weird.
So yeah, nobody cracks open a programming book anymore, but there are lots of compelling reasons beside AI, reasons that make you grateful if AI can save you from having to wade through an ocean of dreck.
I can imagine a heavily curated shelf of programming books, and it would be a thing of beauty, a collection of potent fireworks shot into the dark of the unknown. But, like, who would go to Barnes and Noble or whatever and actually see it, and actually buy something?
Happy to share source if you like, but it was nothing complicated: - ask aistudio.google.com to draw a bunch of dragons - trace one to svg - make the bracelet a little smaller