Yes, I would and it would be true too.
71 karma · joined March 29, 2018
I was talking about actual business opportunities. Good luck getting anywhere by being friendly to the, quick frankly, annoyingly arrogant sysadmin. Sure, some of them are nice - although most of them aren't because of the nature of the job, but that's not the point. We all are "nice" people, that does not pay the bills.
I've done it both. Our Go + Angular project slaughtered Django and now I was dealing with services running at 25MB RAM with single digit CPU usages instead of the disgusting gluttons that Python and Ruby produces with memory usage measured in GBs. Production servers can have specs rivalling Raspberry PIs instead of IBM Blue Genes. Quite refreshing.
The illusion of power that Django (and all fat frameworks) create works OK if you work with a narrow set of very specific web applications in a static environment with a team of Django specialists. Anything else and the project turns to shit.
Actually, I overreacted and I agree with you here. "Depression" is actually quite well defined by the DSM, but the common use of the word covers a lot of ground indeed. So, I read "clinical depression", but I should have read what was actually in the article: just "depression", being "depressed".
Excuse me, for me it's a delicate subject.
I want to point out that your episode is not to be compared with actual sustained major depression, which will _eat you alive_. So utterly and completely will your soul be crushed that taking your own life will feel redundant, unnecessary. You have literally no idea of how deep this rabbit hole goes, thank god, but your advice trivialises the depth of depression and I have to wonder how this got so high on HN.. This is a blog with one post, one.
Yeah... that's not how it works.
Yesterday you had zero wifes. Today, on your wedding you have 1. Thus, just plotting the trend, tomorrow you have 2. You'll soon have dozens.
It is a flying something, but that does not sound cool. Cars _are_ cool, so we call it flying car.
I'm personally working on a concept called the driving airplane. It cannot fly, but it will drive.
But still, yeah.
> So the UNIX philosophy was the only possible way computing could have gone to result in a diverse set of systems that communicate with each other?
I don't know and it is not relevant. If you're so inclined you may come up with another paradigm. Anyway, Pharo in particular is not such a paradigm, it's a fancy tool. Fancy, but a tool and it should behave as such and should co-operate, and it doesn't and that makes me very, very, very angry. And upset. And hurt. :-)
> Alan Kay and some others have thought programming would be more productive if it took place at a higher level than manipulating text and files.
I understand, but saying "text manipulation" is quite derogatory. It is _symbol manipulation_, that is what we are doing. The underlying mechanisms of the OS, filesystem and various media are irrelevant. What if I don't work with files, but "symbol maps" or whatever the F* some academic can come up with in his own custom fancy GUI tool. It doesn't change one bit. I still have to manipulate symbols and it still needs to be encoded somewhere. Increases on the fancy-dimension mean decreases on the is-robust-and-useful-in-a-general-way-dimension, not to mention the works-at-all-in-20-years-dimension.
Text files are just low common denominators. They are simple to understand and work well, not only across space, but more importantly, time as well.
> Well, ask someone with a lot of VB or Smalltalk experience how much the environment slows them down in comparison. Because you often hear the opposite.
I know, but that's not the point. I'm not saying Pharo is bad at what it does, being an excellent IDE. It's wonderful. I'm opposed to the ideology of throwing away all UNIX lessons and integrating everything into one God-system. I guess I've upset not only the Smalltalk, but now also the Windows people. Sorry.
> I guess debuggers, refactoring and class browsers aren't useful, then.
These are aids, typically implemented graphically, but not always - Vim has excellent autocomplete, refactoring and class-browsing plugins. Yes, some tasks map excellent to the visual metaphor. Scanning hierarchies and seeing high-level overviews are indeed useful abstractions, but that is not the point. The point is that if you want an excellent debugger, use an excellent debugger. If you want a good refactoring tool, use a good refactoring tool. Don't throw it all in one system and call it a day. That is not the UNIX way and yes, I am saying that is the superior way. In all of its vulgar, plebeian ways, the UNIXes have stood the test of time and I'd seriously reconsider dumping that.
~ Angry, but generally peaceful if slightly anxious and over-caffeinated Engineer
My OS and all of its rules, tools and configuration, the UNIX philosophy, the POSIX standard, all of its history and convention: _that_ is my dev environment and it's as LIVE as anything can be.
Not some one-off unicorn IDE - no matter how awesome it is, sorry guys.
My entire toolchain in all of its diversity is one big living ecosystem. That is not, as you eloquently hinted at, a bunch of refined steam engines. It is maglev-level awesomeness. Some pointy-clicky IDE where you can inspect objects with trivial properties is not impressive. It was in the 90s, but now now. Ironically Pharo itself, to me, evokes the admittedly beautiful image of a bunch of refined steam engines. A beautiful thing of the past. Impressive, but obsolete - not unlike France itself.
You have to interact with dozens of systems for even the simplest applications now. Databases, HTTP APIs, knowledge systems, OS'es, all kinds of IoT and machinery, all of which have their own standards, their own philosophies, their own tools, their own way of doing things. None of this would ever work if one tool decides it has the Truth and all other should conform to it. Without the UNIX philosophy none of this would even get off the ground. Because that is wat Pharo is, a tool, _inside_ an already living ecosystem. That is exactly why you get programmers asking, why can't I use my tools, why can't I use the "shell", do this do that.. This tool does not fit the UNIX mindset: it's just another tool, but it pretends to be an entire ecosystem that handles everything. An OS inside an OS. This does not make sense to anyone (but the Smalltalk people apparently). Also, as an aside, that is exactly why emacs sucks (take that HN!!).
For some reason some people think programming is hard because you have to create some classes and struggle with basic syntax. Inspecting trivial object and deciding the value of its sole attribute is "2" or "A" is not what makes our work hard.
And yes, UI _is_ a crutch. Only visual tasks need visual interfaces, think Photoshop. Visual UIs slow you down, that's just a physical fact - how fast is you hand? - and it is totally reasonable for new/incompetent users and/or users that perform visual tasks, but programming is not a visual task. Programmers think in abstractions, in symbols. GUIs have their place to be sure, without autocomplete I would be useless, so there's that, but beyond that, nope, useless crutch for incompetent users. Take that, society.
~Angry Engineer
Yet, this is exactly what is expected of healthy staff when people with, for example, Asperger join the team and I believe it is not fair and not right. If they cannot interact in a reasonably normal way, they should be let go or isolated. There is no other way.
Folks in wheelchairs have totally different, physical, problems that are way easier to deal with from the POV of a company.
I apologise in advance for this non-PC and possible offensive remark, but I see nice people in our company dealing with these types and it's starting to bum me out.
The obnoxious types me and colleagues have dealt with are, in _my personal opinion_, pretty obviously suffering from some type of Asperger and/or general social maladaptive malady and while they should be treated with dignity, it is not up to the rest of the company to adjust to _their_ problems.
Just because Amazon sucks, does not mean we need to retreat into full-on anarchy over this. Craigslist is also a marketplace and it isn't the behemoth Amazon is.
Also, Amazon provides a lot more than just a market-place. Everything from "inventory tracking to tax collection to credit card processing". These are no trivial features.
You could have started a regular, centralised, open market-place - by the community, for the community type of deal - and get the same benefits. Of course, selling "medicine" would be difficult.. but we all know that is not what this is about, right?
These corporations are so huge, because you buy stuff from them. That is the only reason. You bought and still buy stuff from them, because you preferred convenience and cheap stuff to integrity. Now they've grown so huge there is no way to control them. We will pay the price now, thanks.
We don't need another child-porn and weapons distribution channel.