brianberns

I don't see what freedom of the press has to do with the article or with my point.

I can't tell if you're serious. If so, do you really think that makes my statement fundamentally incorrect somehow?

I agree. It's called Linear Algebra for a reason. :) That said, I still like the presentation given in this article.

Legally, you may be right. However, this same term is used politically to give corporations the right to free speech, and hence to make campaign donations, which is ridiculous.

They should call the class “Concrete Nonsense” (since category theory itself is sometimes described as “abstract nonsense”).

> the current consensus is that the various social causes aren't important enough to pay for them

No, the only consensus I see from this article is that this particular approach to solving a very important social problem doesn't work.

I think it would make more sense for them to unionize, rather than recreate the entire platform from scratch.l

> The finished product is shipped in packs of five to VW dealerships all over the country, who then gift it to customers after a successful sale.

> In 2017, Volkswagen sold nearly 7 million sausages

Wait, so are they sold or gifted?

This is an interesting idea, and well presented.

I think the conventional explanation of the low entropy state of the early universe is a brief period of “inflation” that resulted in an extremely smooth and uniform density throughout the universe. Does the theory presented in this article replace inflation?

So buy a jacket then. This is about co-branding.

Amazon nearly doubled its profits to $11.2 billion in 2018 from $5.6 billion the previous year and didn’t pay a single cent of federal income taxes.

> Astoundingly, at the end of the minute, there will be a quick-talking ant that will actually say the "last" digit of pi!

This is incorrect. There is no last ant in an infinite line of ants, just as there’s no last digit of pi.

As an F# developer, I get very jealous when I read articles like this. F# needs typeclasses!

Amen. I stopped reading when I saw the casual caffeine addiction. Red flag. No thanks.

Easier said than done. You probably end up with something that's essentially a toy problem anyway.

> Here's an entirely novel concept for evaluating if somebody can write code that solves actual problems. We could ask people to, IDK, write code that solves actual problems. They're there for a day. A good coder can solve some pretty interesting problems in a day.

You mean solve an actual business problem that the interviewing company has? The ramp-up time to be productive in any real business that I've been associated with is significantly greater than the time available in a single interview (usually an hour or so). This is why toy problems are used.

Another issue is that it's not really fair to ask an interviewee to solve your company's problems for free. In fact, without some sort of contract, the interviewee technically owns her own work, so even if she manages to solve a real problem, the company really shouldn't use it.

(BTW, 5K interviews at one hour per interview is 625 eight-hour workdays. Assuming 50 work weeks of five days each in a year, that's 2.5 work years devoted to nothing but interviewing in your career. Yes?)

Inherent instability in a commercial aircraft seems like a very bad idea. Safety has to the top priority. The military has very different priorities.

Smalltalk is great. I haven’t used it in years, but I miss the feeling that everything is part of one big Smalltalk environment.

This is native to Visual Studio now. You don’t even need Resharper.

Why are we assuming that language = creative, and mathematics = not creative?

That's true, but for someone like me in a C# shop, I can slip F# code into our apps seamlessly. No one would say the apps are written in F#, but several key components are.

Hopefully, FP will take over the world soon and Haskell and F# will both be at the top of the charts! :)

I don't mean to knock Haskell at all. It's a fine language with a great community around it.

That said, the number of commercial applications developed in Haskell is very small, because, I think, it doesn't integrate as well into the larger ecosystems around it. It seems like it's a beautiful island all by itself.

Honestly, C# has replaced C++ for the large majority of Windows application developers. Developing C# apps in Visual Studio is basically frictionless in a way that C++ will never be. C++ as a language (regardless of IDE) is a major pain in the butt.

No, it has single dispatch virtual methods, a la C++.

See my reply elsewhere in this thread.

I don't have a lot of recent experience with other ecosystems, so take what I say with a grain of salt. With that disclaimer in mind:

* Visual Studio is the best IDE, bar none. It's a pleasure to use and Microsoft keeps it up to date so it's usually bug free for normal use. I don't even know what its serious competitors are. Eclipse? VIM? Forgive me for not knowing. :)

* C# is the best OO programming language (if you don't need the raw speed of C++ or, I guess, Rust). Java is a disappointing mess controlled by, yes, Oracle. Python and other dynamically typed languages are fine for scripting, but not for developing complex professional software.

* F# is the best functional programming language for getting stuff done. In fact, it's the best language for getting stuff done, period. Haskell is amazing for its mathematical purity, and I've learned so much about FP and category theory from the Haskell community, but F# gives you immediate access to the zillions of packages created for the .NET ecosystem and is totally compatible with C#. You can also use F# for imperative OO programming when you need to (which is almost never).

* SQL Server is the best RDBMS. Oracle is painful. The open source databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.) have come a long way, but still don't have SQL Server's combination of power and ease of use. NoSQL databases are interesting, but seriously lacking in important features. I've yet to come across a use case where I would actually want to use one. (Special demerit to MongoDB for using JSON as a query language. Good lord.)

* Windows is fine. It's not Unix/Linux, but it lacks for nothing.

If I had the time to investigate other ecosystems, I'd like to pick up Rust and Haskell. I'm afraid that Python and JavaScript will eat the entire world, before then, though. :)

All of the above is massively IMHO, obviously.

I'm an F# coder in a company of C# "dark matter developers". (Thanks for that term!) There's no ecosystem I'd prefer to be working in than .NET.

Microsoft’s development ecosystem (e.g. SQL Server, .NET) is top notch, even if you hate Windows and Office.

Read all the way to the end thinking that it was remarkably well written, like an Oliver Sacks essay. And then I read the byline... Sacks was a treasure. What a gifted man.

Hah. Now that’s a Zero day Zero server exploit. :)