Appreciate all sibling comments, they encouraged me to dig further. Read Joe Armstrong's book "Pragmatic Erlang" and the section on gen_server was nothing short of breathtaking. What great and terrible power!!!
1,418 karma · joined December 17, 2022
Footnote one validates your assumption.
It seems like the key contribution here is the discovery that anthropomorphizing genetic programming is more optimal for clicks/funding.
Saying it is optimizing some code sounds way less interesting than it is optimizing its own code.
Having written one of these[1] a decade ago and inflicting it (with the best of intentions) upon production code in anger, I can tell you this often leads to completely unmaintainable code. It is impossible to predict the effect of changing a method, tracing a method, debugging a method (where do I put the breakpoint??).
The code reads beautifully though. Pray you never have to change it.
The reason I say "just use haskell" instead of lisp is bc lisp generics suffer from this same problem.
Btw if anyone has a solution to this "generic/multidispatch maintainability in a dynamically typed language" problem I would love to hear it.
[1]: https://github.com/jjtolton/naga/blob/master/naga/tools.py
"Am I missing a key, is the value in the hashmap nil, or was there an upstream error or error in this function that is presenting as nil?"
FWIW-- I resist this mindset, but I am sympathetic to it, I understand where it comes from. Pearls before swine and whatnot.
Much appreciated, I'll keep you informed :)
Thanks for this, brother. This translated through the internets and punched me right in the feels.
Priceless XD
Thanks kappasan!
For instance, you won't find any mention of the "Skipjack Skydiving Club"[1].
It would be interesting if they released statistics for the suicide rate within the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program vs. the rest of the population. Anecdotally I would guess 30x.
[1]: "Skipjack", named after a Naval Vessel, is the name of the tallest dormitory at the Goose Creek Naval Weapon's Station Nuclear Power School. I'm sure you can do the math on where the club name came from.
Please HN do your thing and prove me wrong or tell me the benefits to society outweigh the cons, because otherwise it's a depressing take.
In these areas, if you happen to secure a job that makes in the 30k's, you are several standard deviations above the baseline and you are probably taking care of your entire extended family.
These areas are, by and large, completely ignored and abandoned by our country. They are things we don't want to look at, because it hurts our sense of national pride and national identity. It hurts our narrative of the "American Dream", because the American Dream does not exist or apply here.
This is not to say that the people here are not hard working and industrious, as much as they can be. But the lack of economic mobility in these areas is intense.
It's hard to understand the difference an unconditional 500 dollars per month would be here.
Perhaps you think most people would waste the money. Even if you are right, some would not -- and the some who would not are now not responsible for those who choose not to, and those bright stars can possibly break free of the situation they are in.
Huge kudos to the author for beating all the odds and still remembering where he came from.
If you have it in you, I would invite you to visit Charleston, WV sometime. Get a car and drive around. It is beautiful country, the area could use the tourism revenue, and it will certainly not be an experience you will forget.