This is potentially a inflection point for windows being the dominate OS. If Google, who now have Android working on desktop, and can market it well enough. Since half of the mobile users in world would be less afraid to try something they are familiar with on their phones.
> If Google, who now have Android working on desktop, and can market it well enough
Too little, too late.
Everyone's switching to Linux now, in droves. Microsoft have hit that Trust Thermocline[0] and that has made perfectly ordinary people like your parents or the guy you sometimes chat to in the pub or your plumber go "You know what, fuck it, I'm going to give this Linux thing a go", and they actually are doing that.
We're at a point now where most people do everything in a web browser, for better or worse, so the OS that your browser runs on is pretty much irrelevant. It's been that way for years, but it's taken Windows to get to a point where it's not just that people don't like it but they actively distrust it.
I think the initial surface look makes scheme give a bit of an 'oh crap' response. But since minikanren is actually a small program and scheme doesn't really have syntax the language should be less of a problem than initial concerns might make one think. Grokking the actual logic in any language is going to be the bigger challenge. I guess I am trying to encourage just rolling with lisp if you can, but I totally get the initial reactions toward scheme though.
That's somewhat comforting! But on the other hand, it means also that some of the folk who would be perfectly able to understand the big idea are getting gatekept by just the look of the parentheses, even though host's concrete syntax is of little importance. Which is a darn shame.
Yes, I agree, and understand the point better. Totally a great thing if this can be made accessible to a wider audience and not expect them to do all the work to grok it, especially if there are easy/easier ways to bring it to a wider audience. The parentheses don't usually remain a problem after the initial bump, I had the same issue when I started clojure but after a short while it doesn't continue to be jarring. I think after about 90 minutes it just started to be "natural" perhaps that the wrong word, it was just something that was like ok after a bit and didn't notice too much.
I don't know about other people's experience, but from mine, I see a lot (most) devs abstracting too early in the name of clean code. I guess engineers gonna engineer when simple boring repetition is sufficient and those premature abstraction are unnecessary.
Yea lets build a whole docker setup for this little Sudoku app that never will have more than 100 users. I mean, for fun overengineering small projects can be a great learning experience but for work? Keep it simple, stupid.
(In case it wasn't clear, im agreeing with your point and just giving some example)
> lets build a whole docker setup for this little Sudoku app that never will have more than 100 users.
Looks good on the CV though and managers who hire-by-cv-not-sense love that kind of thing. You'd be amazed at how many interviews I've failed by pointing out that following the latest trends and over-engineering isn't always a good plan.
Also means there's a constant supply of work for contractors who can unpick that kind of gibberish back into reliable systems which is nice.
But do you really want to work at a company with managers that have zero technical experience? To me it always has been extremely annoying working with people that can't imagine the magnitude of work, that some "small" changes come with.
My current boss and company owner is also a programmer and its far easier and good for my nerves. He just doesnt have the time to code anymore.
If I had a penny for every time I try to dissuade a dev from busing a huge k8s system for a business that does not have a single user yet - I would have a bunch of pennies
I work for a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider and I dissuade people as well, it's so anti-climatic when embarking on a k8s journey and then having more pods which are overhead than the actual customer pods.
Yeah but what does simple mean? I struggle with that a lot. In my experience, keeping it simple means not being flexible when requirements change. Adding new features becomes tedious or even a mess. Keeping things simple is an art, certainly not an easy one.
Its extremely easy. Just dont overthink, implement the stuff you gotta implement and move on. Simplicity generates flexibility. Its also easier to refactor if your app isnt a architectural docker mess.
Boring repetition is a bad fit for the human brain. Working memory is very small. Mistakes per line are frequent. It wants to see patterns that are not quite there. Even when it works out, it's millions of times slower than having the computer fill in grunt work from a more concise and readable spec of the problem.
Unfortunately, I don't feel confident humanity has the ability not to destroy the environment that sustains our life. We are simply too selfish, unable to adjust our thinking to new information sufficiently, lack compassion for others, and/or just don't care about things that don't affect us directly.
I think it’s possible. There are many innovative and compassionate people in the world trying to solve a variety of crazy hard problems that touch this topic.
But maybe we land in a middle ground. Maybe we make it to another planet.
And if we don’t, we will adapt.
P.S. Watch George Carlin save the plant for a laugh.
So compassionate people should clean up after selfish people? So why
should a selfish person even care, when they know that a compassionate
people will clean up after them?
This is a road for compassionate people to become slaves of selfish
people.
I think that the only way for "persuading" selfish people to clean up
after themselves is to somehow force them to do it.
Seems an odd way to frame it imo. compassionate vs selfishness. Those are the only two kinds of people? And why is selfishness so bad? People are both.
People have and can innovate solutions for themselves, their own interests, and even for profit. Those solution can and have helped everyone.
I agree with you in a sense. Let’s take a big global human problem. Obesity. How the heck does that get solved? Force everyone to eat what we tell them? Force them to exercise? Good luck.
Ozempic is an innovation with lots of pros and cons. It isn’t a panacea. But I bring it up as an example of an out there solution never before possible that WILL change millions of lives. It maintains people agency to live how they want (selfish or not) while giving them a solution to a problem they aren’t able to tackle on their own or don’t care to other than take a pill.
Is ozempic made by compassionate people or selfish people. Prob a mix of both. I think the solution has a lot of compassion in it.
A selfishly or compassionately made company aiming to solve the problem of trash in the ocean, doesn’t require people to change their behavior. Solutions built around people NOT having to change are promising imo. Both can happen at the same time though. People changing habits, new innovations that don’t require change on their part, and a mix of both working together.
Forcing people to stop eating meat, prob not gonna happen. Creating an alternative of lab grown meat (tastes like shit for now) will change behavior over time without forcing anyone.
Also, if the compassionate people solve the problems and are happy doing so, so what. Problems solved for everyone. The compassionate people I know, would never frame themselves as being slaves to other people.
Do we have enough time, idk. 8 billion years if we manage to survive till then ;)
I mean, selfish vs compassionate is a huge philosophical problem, and we
can use a shortcut and just say that the only real behavior is a selfish
behavior, because even compassion ultimately fuels our own selfishness
(it's about making us feel good when helping others).
I didn't want to go that road. Just wanted to highlight, that sometimes
the act of ensuring that we live in a good environment forces us to make
sacrifices. This is what I meant by "compassionate behavior". And a
selfish person lives in this environment, but doesn't sacrifice anything
-- they live like parasites. So my remark was about being a slave to the
parasite, by having to sacrifice something personal (energy, resources),
so that others could live in the same quality environment, without
sacrificing anything. For me that doesn't seem like a good deal.
By the way,
> I agree with you in a sense. Let’s take a big global human problem. Obesity.
> How the heck does that get solved? Force everyone to eat what we tell them?
> Force them to exercise? Good luck.
Obesity is mostly a calorie intake problem.
Introduce sugar tax. Regulate sugar ads aimed to kids. Introduce health
risk information on sugar products (like it was done on cigarettes).
Increase the cost of healthcare if the obesity problem is not addressed
for an extended period of time. Stop allowing promotion of "heathly at
every size" agenda.
Force it, because obese people apparently aren't able to think straight
in this area.
I'm not saying that it's possible to eliminate obesity down to each
individual, just like it's impossible to eliminate the use of drugs by
even criminalizing them, but there's certainly a lot of things that can
be done.
> Ozempic is an innovation with lots of pros and cons.
I think that Ozempic treats the result, not the cause. So I don't think
it shouldn't be seen as a solution to anything.
It's a different kind of "denialism" when people think the magic solution will come somehow, someday soon (i.e. denying how fucked we are, or lying to ourselves that we have the resource budget to produce millions of EVs when in reality all car production needs to be ended, or denying that interplanetary salvation is just too god damn far away timewise):
The selfishness is now apparent, hey someone just got reelected promising it'll be better for "us" and that we're going to get rid of "them", and the fuck-the-poor-hungry-climate-catastrophe-victims rightwing populism is rising in Europe too.
No magic needed. We invented vaccines, we made it to the moon, on the way to recovery of the ozone, created other energy alternatives, etc. big innovations!
I agree with you, evs are not the solution lol. They have many huge cons. Cobalt mining etc.
The problem maybe insurmountable. Even if they are, there is still work to do to make the best of the shit we find ourselves in.
This humans are a terrible species, selfishness reins supreme, we aren’t capable of anything else, everything is bad, there is no hope, we are doomed mentality is a load of shit.
What is your proposed solution? Don’t try? Don’t innovate?
I've certainly given up on the idea that my fellow man is going to make the collective good choice. And this now influences my own decision making going further. I doubt I'm alone.
Pure functions, i.e. that are 1) idempotent 2) have all their arguments passed in 3) cause no side effects as a by product of evaluating the function are fundamental to functional programming.
But not fundamental to the definition of a functional language. F# isn't pure, but most would call it a functional language - so purity is surely not 'fundamental' - in fact most functional languages aren't pure.
That's why I prefer to stick to the 'expression oriented' concept, it seems to be the thing that captures most, if not all, functional languages. But I guess just like there are plenty of people that wouldn't call Java OO (and would prefer the Alan Kay definition), there are plenty that will disagree with any definition of 'functional'
(preparing for the inevitable 'functional first' comment).
