jact

This is highly misleading: https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/

No product except tulips :^)

It is “just code.” It’s good at what it does too.

Although for my purposes, I find myself reaching for xquery a lot more often which is a very good and elegant programming language and template language although it was billed as “SQL for XML.”

XSLT versions are backwards compatible.

It certainly isn’t impossible to write good code in Go. Perhaps the code base I was working on was bad — it didn’t seem obvious to me that it was. Go is not a bad language in the way that brainfuck is a bad language.

I think Java and C# offer clearly more straightforward ways to extend and modify existing code. Maybe the primary ways extension in Java and C# works are not quite the right ones for every situation.

The primary skill necessary to write modular code is first knowing what the modular interfaces is and second being able to implement it in a clean fashion. Go does offer a form of interfaces. But precisely because it encourages you to be highly explicit and avoid abstraction, it can make it difficult for you to implement the right abstraction and therefore complicate the modular interfaces.

Programming is hard. I don’t think adopting a kind of ascetic language like Go makes programming easier overall. Maybe it’s harder to be an architecture astronaut in Go, but only by eliminating entire classes of abstraction that are sometimes just necessary. Sometimes, inheritance is the right abstraction. Sometimes, you really need highly generic and polymorphic code (see some of the other comments for issues with Go’s implementation of generics).

I think with C or C++ devs, those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

I would criticize Go from the point of view of more modern languages that have powerful type systems like the ML family, Erlang/Elixir or even the up and coming Gleam. These languages succeed in providing powerful primitives and models for creating good, encapsulating abstractions. ML languages can help one entirely avoid certain errors and understand exactly where a change to code affects other parts of the code — while languages like Erlang provided interesting patterns for handling runtime errors without extensive boilerplate like Go.

It’s a language that hobbles developers under the aegis of “simplicity.” Certainly, there are languages like Python which give too much freedom — and those that are too complex like Rust IMO, but Go is at best a step sideways from such languages. If people have fun or get mileage out of it, that’s fine, but we cannot pretend that it’s really this great tool.

I worked briefly on extending an Go static site generator someone wrote for a client. The code was very clear and easy to read, but difficult to extend due to the many rough edges with the language. Simple changes required altering a lot of code in ways that were not immediately obvious. The ability to encapsulate and abstract is hindered in the name of “simplicity.” Abstraction is the primary way we achieve simple and easy to extend code. John Ousterhoust defined a complex program as one that is difficult to extend rather than necessarily being large or difficult to understand at scale. The average Go program seems to violate this principle a lot. Programs appear “simple” but extension proves difficult and fraught.

Go is a case of the emperor having no clothes. Telling people that they just don’t get it or that it’s a different way of doing things just doesn’t convince me. The only thing it has going for it is a simple dev experience.

OCaml’s object system is unfairly maligned by its users. It’s unfortunate because object types allow for some of the most useful kinds of polymorphism and people don’t reach for them often enough.

However, OCaml’s first class modules are frequently a useful and serviceable alternative. I think they’re a precise middle ground between what we here call “objects” and “data.”

This is profaning the temple of St iGNUcius

I think that many of the problems of this are solved by abstract types and good module interfaces to interacting with those types.

If the business logic changes, the internal type representation can be modified or a new module that fills the same signature but uses a different internal type can be written.

Modularity matters most. If you have to do massive refactoring of code because of a change in type representation, there’s an issue with the modularity of your design. Good modularity prevents refactoring from impacting the rest of the system unless you need to change your module — that’s something that’s true even if you have no static typing.

Some media really is objectionable.

This is true — which is why simple version control should be de rigueur in any important application where it’s feasible.

The move to put everything in /the cloud is irritating but probably in part driven by this consumer complaint. Not that the boomers will ever learn.

They don’t have arbitrary power - power is never exercised unilaterally. I can’t imagine they would succeed for very long at say, shutting down all the grocery stores in the world. They wouldn’t even dare try from the hell they would have to pay.

And the payment processors aren’t “book burners.” They’re acting to restrict an unsavory market that potentially hurts their business. They have no agenda or incentive to promote censorship as such.

We certainly sanction hate speech because of the psychological and physical damage it causes to its victims. Pornography is harmful to everyone involved, from producer to consumer. In the case of video games that don’t depict real people this is attenuated somewhat, but not in the way that counts. By consuming or producing pornography, you are blowing your own human dignity to bits.

If you would prefer, I’d say it’s an “affront” to human dignity.

My opinion is that sexuality is something that shouldn’t be commodified in any way, shape, or form. When we package it and promote it as a commodity or for entertainment, that practice as such is harmful. There’s simply no such thing as “healthy” pornography because the very preconditions for pornography to come into existence are rooted in an unhealthy and disordered understanding of human sexuality. I think MacKinnon and Dworkin were absolutely right on this front.

I’m far more afraid of the world we currently live in, where we treat sex/sexuality as something that exists for entertainment value and can be commodified — than I am of this form of censorship. At least our overlords are making the ethical call here.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a good thing? Pornography and obscenity should not be protected speech. It’s violence against human dignity akin to hate speech.

Yes, this is extremely accurate. Many people are very afraid to explore or experiment with any software program out of fear of breaking things.

Nothing I said was nonsense or a non-sequitor. You’re citing a bunch of historical myths to support your point, so I am pointing those out.

As for your point itself, I don’t think “religion” is a meaningful category. It’s unclear to me Christianity and say — Shinto have some common trait that holds them together. Even Christianity and Islam have vastly different goals and ideas about what the purpose of “religion” is. So I don’t think it’s meaningful to say “religious people tend to care about intellectualism.”

Communist Russia cared a lot about intellectualism — they promoted and persecuted many intellectuals and academics, just like the Catholic Church. The common denominator between the Soviet Union and the Catholic Church is surely not that they were both religious. To assert that communism is a religion would only further prove my point above.

The Catholic Church during the counter-reformation, its most highly censorious and intolerant period, was, like the Soviet Union, a society experiencing intense paranoia and saw itself under siege by foreign and internal enemies and needing to protect itself. This was an attitude that lead to atrocities, but it’s difficult for me to see how this has anything to do with religion as such given that the same pattern happens in secular culture all the time. Politically powerful people (or those with political ambition) tend to care about these things is the real thing going on here, especially if they perceive potential threats from the intellectuals. Intellectuals are not unique targets in this respect.

Many “religions” promote having a literate class to be educated in both their scriptures and in wider philosophy because it’s necessary to socially reproduce their own teachings. In that sense they care about intellectualism but we do the same thing to reproduce American, French, British, etc. secular culture, and good luck to public school teachers who want to buck the curriculum (I don’t particularly think they should, but they’ll have issues).

Hypatia’s murder had very little to do with religious conflict against a free thinker and everything to do with class alexandrian class politics.

https://historyforatheists.com/2020/07/the-great-myths-9-hyp...

Bruno’s execution was of course evil and wrong but it’s also wrong to depict him as some kind of martyr for science and that the Catholics were setting back intellectual progress. Bruno was not a scientist, he was a mystic. He did not carry out experiments to try to prove his beliefs nor even believe in the ability of math to explain nature. The conflict that lead to his death was between two different religious/mystical traditions and not between “intellectualism” and religion. If he were alive today he would be more comparable with Deepak Chopra than a real scientist

Christians simply did not “extirpate” knowledge of the hieroglyphs or “scatter Egyptian priests.” Hieroglyphs were already falling into disuse since they were the writing system of a tiny elite of priests. There was no abolition or persecution of the hieroglyphic using class. The fading of hieroglyphs has its roots in the Hellenization of Egypt centuries before Christianity began. As Egyptians became Christian, the Coptic script came to be dominant for writing the Egyptian language. In the same way very few people bother to learn how to write JCL anymore, very few people were interested in retaining knowledge of hieroglyphs.

There’s an implicit idea here too that Christians were some kind of foreign interloper in Egypt instead of being themselves Egyptian — this is simply not the case. Egypt was one of the early hotbeds of Christianity and the modern-day Copts are essentially the people most closely culturally and genetically related to the ancient Egyptians.

Can confirm that cool kids are definitely using Fossil

Dune is a very powerful and good build system — it can do some very magical and useful things. The only problem is most of these useful features are very poorly documented…

Is this a joke? We are supposed to get excited about the (alleged) best minds of our generation spending their talents on better ways to kill people? The idea that beatniks and college professors control America now is something asserted by these types but never proven. Seems like a vibe-based judgement.

I’m amused by the main character of this article who’s building cloud seeding technology too. I admit I have no idea if such technology is safe but surely nothing could go wrong from more Promethean attempts to master the Earth. Has this man not heard of the Tower of Babel?