jayvanguard

I agree, I think optional or gradual typing is the future for dynamic languages.

This post and the one that prompted it both seem to be begging the question. I don't see greater percentage use of static vs. dynamic languages now compared to ten or twenty years ago.

There is a lot of interesting research into strong static type systems but that has been going on for ages (ML family of languages).

In fact, I'd say if anything there is a big surge every decade or so in dynamic languages when a new problem space emerges.

90s - Perl, Javascript

00s - Ruby and Objective-C resurgence

10s - ES6 and JS related languages

Once an area matures, the paranoid static type people come in and harden things. Then people realize they're getting nothing done and add DSLs on top for flexibility. And on it goes.

Good stuff. A bit more accessible than this free online textbook:

http://www.dspguide.com/

The article you reference doesn't actually provide any evidence that the claim is false.

I'm Not on Facebook is the new I Don't Own a TV.

Despite your single article, I followed NAFTA and secrecy was not the dominant talking point. Specifics about industries affected were the focal point. Elected officials were actually involved.

Your other two examples are from last year and involve the same president driving TPP.

> All international agreements are generally discussed in secrecy.

People keep repeating this line with no evidence. I've been around for a number of international treaties and this is the first one I recall where the #1 issue is how secretive and un-democratic the process is.

Of course there are always backchannel discussions but with the TPP there has be little indication that ANY of the initiatives are actually being driven by the needs of the electorate.

When my elected official couldn't even see a copy for years (even in secret) and then was only able to when it was basically an all-or-nothing done deal about to signed something is very, very wrong.

I found the choice of terminology for this odd too. "Family Owned" makes it sound much more benign than the more common "Privately Owned".

> The hopes of private industry are that an entirely private corporation, in order to protect its brand's value, needs to avoid this sort of thing.

It's 2015, no-one believes this anymore.

This is quite likely an example, from a data modelling point of view, of an extremely slowly changing dimension driven by historical regulations, laws, and taxonomies.

It may still be meaningful for a few industries, but not in general.

Most normal countries aren't aiming for equality, they are just aiming for not-massive-inequality.

I was wondering about the private vs. public position of companies on this. Seeing Microsoft recently flip to the "good list" of companies made me very suspicious.

This man knows nothing of history, let alone physics.

Great summary and very needed at this time to make sense of a number of trends. A minor nit: I think it would be better if he didn't overload the long ago claimed term "Data Modeling" and specifically called it Generative and Predictive Modeling.

It was explicitly not a design goal to be backwards compatible.

"In exchange for breaking backwards compatibility, at least at the language level, Perl 6 offers plenty of high-powered language concepts that Perl 5 didn't support..."

http://www.perl.com/pub/2006/01/12/what_is_perl_6.html

Wasn't it Netscape 1.1? Everything looked so modern after that.

Some sound advice. Having worked with academics before, the ones who were most successful were able to switch gears between individual and team goals as he describes.

If you feel that your employer knowing about outside passions is going to be a problem then you need to find another employer.

> I believe the entire ecosystem of "hackathons" to be a scam for Billy like people to exploit naive developers.

Bingo!

I learned that she really _got_ the potential of computing and what it was going to be. In 1843. Crazy.

He is being perfectly fair and accurate, which is probably a first for anyone making futurist predictions, so kudos to him.

This is exactly why all futurists are full of shit (see Kurzweil) and predicting the future is impossible. Getting some aspects of your prediction right is virtually guaranteed if you generalize when you re-interpret later.

You'd have to make spectacularly bad predictions that are overly detailed and specific NOT to do half decently if we're going to allow post-hoc retrofitting of which broad trends kind of fit the original prediction.

Because 40 years ago people were convinced it would be popular one day. And 30 years there was roughly the same percentage of highly convinced, vocal people who thought so. And 20 years ago same thing. 10 years ago ditto.

I mean, what is going to take? 10 more years? 20? At what do you conclude that a language really isn't useful for general purpose programming? (not to say it isn't brilliant and useful for specific purposes, learning, etc.)

Yes, the blog author was pretty generous. He got almost everything wrong if you're being at all critical.

The smartphone market is at least 5 years out. 3 years later iPhone comes out and defines the market. Saying it didn't get really, really popular for a year or two is misleading. If you were betting on the market being _at least_ 5 years out you would have missed that boat.

+1 would read more.

P.S. Haskell is the new lisp. See you in 50 years when people are still predicting it'll get big anytime now.

> Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010

Let me lay the raw truth out for any lisp fans. It will never be popular or widely adopted. Ever.

It has been around for half a century. At no time was it ever widely adopted. It was always just pushed by a small group of fanboys.

That said, I love it and have learned a ton from as have many others.

It completely undermines it. You have the direction of your dependency arrows mixed up.

You're wrong on all accounts. The Objective-C dispatch model is based on Smalltalk.

Most OSX apps and services still aren't even written in Objective-C and many (most actually) platform APIs are still in C.

You can compile Objective-C using the gnu compiler and have been able to for ages.

Swift is an amalgam of many different programming languages and styles, including Rust. None of which have anything specific to do with OSX/iOS about them.

Neither are "inherently tied" to OSX or iOS. They may be practically tied due to who drives them and their competitors lack of incentive to ever invest in them, but from a pure language point of view they are agnostic.

According to Wikipedia:

  In 1934, Aikawa separated the expanded automobile parts division of Tobata 
  Casting and incorporated it as a new subsidiary, which he 
  named Nissan Motor Co., Ltd.

This guy knew exactly what he was doing in 1994. There are tons of people with the last name McDonald and I'm sure a few of them thought about starting some rinky-dink shell company to get McDonalds.com. Heck, I remember when it was still available and thought about registering it but I'm just not that sleazy.