zogrodea

"Big Sky Dev Con", not "Better Software Conference" for those who were (like me) initially confused. :)

Someone commented in the past few days that the most impressive demo they saw in a conference was LibreOffice running on Fil-C, and I agreed.

However, this took the #1 spot from it (leaving that previous demo in #2) in my opinion. Very impressive, and nostalgic too.

Happy to learn about the concept today. It resonates with me.

I sometimes think of something Kant wrote, about how friction (hardship, etc.) elevates us.

In Kant's own words:

"Without those in themselves unamiable characteristics of unsociability from whence opposition springs-characteristics each man must find in his own selfish pretensions-all talents would remain hidden, unborn in an Arcadian shepherd’s life, with all its concord, contentment, and mutual affection. Men, good-natured as the sheep they herd, would hardly reach a higher worth than their beasts; they would not fill the empty place in creation by achieving their end, which is rational nature. Thanks be to Nature, then, for the incompatibility, for heartless competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess and to rule! Without them, all the excellent natural capacities of humanity would forever sleep, undeveloped. Man wishes concord; but Nature knows better what is good for the race; she wills discord. He wishes to live comfortably and pleasantly; Nature wills that he should be plunged from sloth and passive contentment into labor and trouble, in order that he may find means of extricating himself from them. The natural urges to this, the sources of unsociableness and mutual opposition from which so many evils arise, drive men to new exertions of their forces and thus to the manifold development of their capacities. They thereby perhaps show the ordering of a wise Creator and not the hand of an evil spirit, who bungled in his great work or spoiled it out of envy."

See the section titled "FOURTH THESIS" at the following link if interested.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Idea_for_a_Universal_History_...

As programmers and as engineers, we often seek objective metrics to judge the value of things, neglecting aesthetic value and value that cannot easily be reduced to objective metrics.

This accessible paper reminds us that reasoning is not dispassionate and that we should attend to aesthetic matters as well.

The paper itself is in the context of education and seeks how to convey to students the importance and value of a subject matter.

That's an interesting feature I didn't know F# had. It sounds similar to row polymorphism (which I found a good description of here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829766 ).

I'm just putting this Alan Kay question (from Stack Overflow) here because of relevance.

In that question, he's considered not with implementation or how good the execution of an idea is (which is certainly one type of progress), but in genuinely new ideas.

I don't think I personally am qualified to say yes or no. There are new data structures since then for example, but those tend to be improvements over existing ideas rather than "fundamental new ideas" which I understand him (perhaps wrongly) to be asking for.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-i...

That looks pretty great! I would love to use this at work if functional programming idioms were already familiar to the team and I didn't face resistance introducing them. Thank you for sharing and developing the library.

I think you're right. People describe Java as being colourless.

My experience with this is in .NET, which has methods like readFile (which is async) and readFileSync.

.NET doesn't really need to provide two separate utility methods like this though, because you can use Task.wait to block until the async task is done.

I had the same opinion with async/await, that it's nice to know a function performs IO and will wait before continuing. Makes it clearer when to use Promise.all to make multiple requests in parallel and wait for all of them to finish before continuing (faster than making calls sequentially).

I kind of wish the languages I use had Haskell's IO monad too, to separate functions in terms of the type system, but that's slightly different.

You might like this article (which is my personal favourite about function colouring). https://www.tedinski.com/2018/11/13/function-coloring.html

Integrating Defender sounds like it would create an antitrust issue? If I remember correctly, MS was in the past taken to court and forced to sell some product or other separately, when they previously provided it for free.

No comment about being able to move Defender to not require kernel hooks (I don't know).

I'm not doubting, but can you give a few examples of Microsoft trouncing others?

I do recall Disney (a main reason copyright laws last so long, and who didn't want Steamboat Willie to enter public domain).

I also think of Amazon (which the creator of the Elm programming language describes as having "the Jeff problem" because they steal smaller people's/team's ideas), although that's a different problem.

I can't say anything comes to mind right now about MS, though, which is most likely a failure of my memory/knowledge. So I'd appreciate some examples.

Great article. Reminds me of this quote from RG Collingwood about how pervasive copying has been throughout history, and how the famous names we know to have copied would be baffled about us being shocked.

"Individualism would have it that the work of a genuine artist is altogether ‘original’, that is to say, purely his own work and not in any way that of other artists. The emotions expressed must be simply and solely his own, and so must his way of expressing them.

It is a shock to persons labouring under this prejudice when they find that Shakespeare’s plays, and notably Hamlet, that happy hunting-ground of self-expressionists, are merely adaptations of plays by other writers, scraps of Holinshed, Lives by Plutarch, or excerpts from the Gesta Romanorum; that Handel copied out into his own works whole movements by Arne; that the Scherzo of Beethoven’s C minor Symphony begins by reproducing the Finale of Mozart’s G minor, differently barred; or that Turner was in the habit of lifting his composition from the works of Claude Lorrain. Shakespeare or Handel or Beethoven or Turner would have thought it odd that anybody should be shocked."

I do understand the desire to protect one's work too and find it hard to take a single side.

I remember you describing Ropey's author as a "lovely human" too, and want to say that "it takes one to know one/real recognises real". :)

This made me thing of part of RG Collingwood's Autobiography, when he spoke of growing up while many around him were artists of one kind or another.

"During the same years I was constantly watching the work of my father and mother, and the other professional painters who frequented their house, and constantly trying to imitate them ; so that I learned to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting, so far as the attempt has gone.

I learned what some critics and aestheticians never know to the end of their lives, that no ‘work of art’ is ever finished, so that in that sense of the phrase there is no such thing as a ‘work of art’ at all. Work ceases upon the picture or manuscript, not because it is finished, but because sending-in day is at hand, or because the printer is clamorous for copy, or because ‘I am sick of working at this thing’ or ‘I can’t see what more I can do to it’."

I'm inclined to agree with your sentiment, but the example given doesn't quite sit right with me.

"Often a sentence fragment missing a verb (like this)."

vs

"Often a sentence fragment missing is a verb (like this)."

Thanks for enumerating; I never heard of any of that except for the pandemic (and I honestly don't know either way how much better/worse someone else would have done in that position).

I think this is the best comment for helping me understand the aversion to him. Most of it is about the economy which is easy to understand the impact of.

I mentioned I never saw a difference in my daily life specifically, in response to a Trump presidency being called "dystopian". I was of course alive when Labour was in charge and have memories of that time, but people still went by their daily lives just the same from what I can tell.

The same goes for much on your list, except for increasing inequality which impacts people's standards of living. Some other comments produced better lists regarding the impact of his presidency (things I had not heard before and some which I wasn't think of like the pandemic - although I'mm not really sure either way how much better someone else would be in his place for that one).

(Brexit did shake things up when that happened - I was hearing about jobs being paused at the time and people being unable to work.)

That's a legitimate point. The referendum was 8 years ago and I was 18 back then so there might be some myopia on my part.

Thanks for the reply. I suppose I have a hard time seeing much happening that will be too bad for ordinary citizens either way. I recall people panicking about a Trump presidency in 2016, but I never saw or heard many negative outcomes (for individuals) about his presidency so I don't quite understand it and have a hard time measuring how justified people's panic is.

Would you mind explaining what the negative practical consequences would be in the event of a Trump nomination?

The worst thing I remember from him (an action which was truly horrible) was related to ICE separating children from their families.

In my country (the UK), I don't see a huge personal difference in my daily life when either one of the two mainstream parties is elected. So I'm interested in where your comment comes from.

I do have my own views of course, but neither seems significantly more dystopian to me than the other.

I remember my CS course using web tech (Codio) to teach coding, which doesn't seem like a bad option for educators, as far as dealing with cross-platform differences goes.

I think the FSF bent of open source is easier to identify as explicitly political because it tries to force developers to do something they may or may not want (disclose source code). There's some anti-corporate messaging there, because it's hard to make money from software if it's free[0], and that's a political view others may not share.

[0] I do know the suggestion to sell support for software rather than selling software itself but that's a political view as well, trying to persuade businesses to earn money one way rather than another.

Nice article that reminds me of that one Sherlock Holmes quote.

“I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

Value speculation is a neat trick. I was also surprised a low-level hack like this worked in a high-level language like OCaml.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35844078

I didn't downvote this comment, but it's a bit funny that a comment complaining about downvotes is itself being downvoted.

As someone trying to carve out a (non-commercial, for me personally) space for desktop apps, the author raises very good points and I believe they are right. (Although I still prefer working on non-web tech when I can.)

Your comment reminds of Haskell's motto, which may apply here as well.

"Avoid success at all costs" meaning, not to intentionally avoid success, but if you try to gain success/widespread adoption by compromising your other goals and principles, you have lost your way.

I remember this quote from a 1930s book when the topic of book reviews come up, and I think it applies to NYT in particular.

"There are critics and reviewers, literary and artistic journals, which ought to be at work mitigating these evils and establishing contact between a writer or painter and the kind of audience he needs. But in practice they seldom seem to understand that this is, or should be, their function, and either they do nothing at all or they do more harm than good. The fact is becoming notorious; publishers are ceasing to be interested in the reviews their books get, and beginning to decide that they make no difference to the sales."

The quote is about connecting writers with an audience interested in that kind of work, and allowing writers to receive feedback which will improve the writer's future output, which is a relationship beneficial to both.

Without it, writers may be "driven into a choice between commercialism and barren eccentricity". I'm not sure the NYT book reviews help; they may do more damage than there would be without their interference.

My understanding of the comment is that it’s in the context of saving an enumeration-object into a database.

Like Typescript might (for example) represent enums as integers like 1, 2, 3... at runtime.

What happens if you decide to store a “delivery status” enum in a database? You would just be saving a number into the database, which can be hard to understand.

If it’s a string, then the value stored in the database is clearer and doesn’t depend on you being lucky with the Typescript compiler that the same enum type is compiled to the same integers after new releases.

I only realised this issue now, but it’s what I understood after reading that comment.