211–220 of 394 posts
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> I really wish the languages preserved their original culture and philosophy. You mention a couple of lisps as being similar to this. I wonder if there is any more programming languages that could be considered complete? Forth? C? ASL?
I think Lua is a good example. It has stayed simple and avoided change because of its position as an embedded language and strong leadership. Another good one would be Smalltalk.
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If you’re making $25mil in revenue why is it out of the question to pay for licenses?
Why would you? License requisition is a real pain, they have to be factored into the budget, depreciated, etc. If you can instead simply pull in OSS and hide it behind a SaaS implementation (thereby complying with licenses) you can leverage it to make money. I don't think Stallman saw this coming. Some companies do better than others. For example, FAANG level companies typically have teams that do give back. In some…
sorry, but you can do that shit anymore:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_License#Network_dep...
> I’m also having affectionate memories of JavaScript and Python I am afraid, things are equally messy in JavaScript and Python too. "X language isn't fun anymore" is exactly how I feel about X = JavaScript, X = Python, X = C++, X = Java and many other languages. There was a time when I found Python and Js to be very fun languages. But recently the ecosystem has been becoming a mess. Build breakages on dependency upg…
I couldn't tell you exactly why (though I have some ideas), but Lisps seem to settle into amazingly stable languages. Even Clojure, with all its initial trendiness, has been remarkably resistant to bloat and churn. Such things as it's added have largely been either standardisations of things that people were doing anyway, or very natural extensions of ideas that were already there, and it still generally passes the "…
Lisps are built around being a simple base supporting in-language extensibility (it's the killer feature that has kept it alive as a language family, and there is lots of experience with how to do it in Lisp which means new Lisps tend to get it right from the start), which means that there is relatively little reason to break it to add features, you just build on top.
Of course, the downside of that is that it is very common for projects to have lots of code in what amounts to a project-specific DSL that is both close enough to be confused with and different enough for that confusion to be dangerous compared to how any other project does many of the same things.
Having tried to use Scala only indirectly via a DSL and having given up for various build issues, I thought it was only due to my ignorance of the system. But having said that, this paragraph jumps out as completely perplexing: "We’re left with the Scala FP communities, which yield awesome libraries and are awesome people, but the ecosystem is essentially a microcosm of the US political landscape. I’m guessing all pr…
All nontrivial groups of humans end up with political camps. If you don't notice it in a space, it probably means that there is one dominant political camp and it is the one you are in.
I actually think Scala is in the best position it's ever been. There is a commitment to making the language simpler, easier and cleaner. On the backend, ZIO ( https://zio.dev ) is the best concurrency library on any platform. On the frontend you have really interesting Scala.js projects like Laminar ( https://laminar.dev ). The biggest issue really is the tooling. SBT is simply awful.
granted ZIO is excellent. Scala.js is a dead end that almost no one should be investing in. Who can honestly say that the best possible dev path for them (product/business) is to need Scala devs to do their JS frontend? Even just the economics of the pay-gap in those two skillsets is untenable. We've been through this before any number of times in JAVA, give up it's an awful choice no one will thank you for. I'm also…
However, I've been using the above mentioned laminar for my personal frontend project needs and it really is a unique approach to the 'reactive' frontend with no vdom actually using reactive streams to track what needs to be updated. The dsl is easy to read and write and i can actually read the underlying code. For me it's scaled well too large datasets generating svgs. I think it's worth the scala.js barrier to entry.
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We are still in the phase where concepts are settling. Pretty sure nobody in a 100 years will think that Monads are a good idea.
Monads are like numbers. You can think they are not a good idea, but they are just a matter of fact and existence. Also, in a 100 years maybe our brains will be completely different. How do you optimize your programming language for that? I don't think you can.
Anyway, what we currently have as programming languages are all workarounds. Necessary for now, because how else would we program? But in the end we need to converge programming, math and logic, and once this is done, we will be ready for anything. And we won't need monads as a crutch, forced upon us by a type system. I am sure the concept of number will outlive the concept of monad in terms of popularity.
> We’re left with the Scala FP communities, which yield awesome libraries and are awesome people, but the ecosystem is essentially a microcosm of the US political landscape. This sentence puzzles me. Does anybody know what the author could have meant with it? As a European Scala FP programmer, I have no idea.
[1] http://meta.plasm.us/posts/2020/07/25/response-to-john-de-go...
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Okay, are you going to give reason or is it more of a Thought leader style pronouncement?
Haha, I guess you are right. The reason why it is a mistake is because it is essentially trying to solve the rpc problem once again even though it has been tried many times without success. There just is a difference between making a synchronous call within your own OS thread vs. making such a call against anything else (the filesystem, the network, ...). Because you can assume that a synchronous call either succeeds…
First of all, the difference between threads is not nearly as severe as the difference between (remote) machines. There is an analogy to be made, but that's all it is - an analogy. Most applications don't care about nitty gritty thread-management performance.
Second, people said all that shit about network calls and yet... here we live in the age of distributed computing and it keeps getting more distributed. It's rapidly getting to the point where remote boundaries are something you consider as an optimization step. Most boring old business applications are "fast enough" even though the XyzService lives on another machine.
Having tried to use Scala only indirectly via a DSL and having given up for various build issues, I thought it was only due to my ignorance of the system. But having said that, this paragraph jumps out as completely perplexing: "We’re left with the Scala FP communities, which yield awesome libraries and are awesome people, but the ecosystem is essentially a microcosm of the US political landscape. I’m guessing all pr…
Nope. Well, politics is pervasive because politics is just the word we have to describe how people in groups interact. I'll summarize the situation:
There's a very small minority of prominent Scala people that are fine giving space and a platform in the community to people that are known white supremacists. [1] It's unfortunate that they're decided to inject their brand of politics into the Scala community. The community has had to respond by adopting codes of conduct that compel members to act with basic decency and morality.
[1] http://meta.plasm.us/posts/2020/07/25/response-to-john-de-go...
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Java has the same dependency issues? I vividly remember spending days on jars shading in Maven. Basically, a single approach that would solve this, irrespective of the language, would be isolating dependency trees of every library from each other, essentially duplicating the code of many common libraries in RAM (like Docker, but for libraries inside the same process). There's an option to do that in Maven, but it's n…
I have personally spent so much time fussing with runtime ClassDefNotFound and MethodNotFound errors in Java that I am no longer able to respond to assertions that Java is type-safe with anything but an incoherent stream of cursing and rage tears. But Scala somehow seems to take all of that and intensify it. I have heard that Scala 3 is supposed to improve this, but I don't anticipate being able to adopt Scala 3 befo…
Scala just adds more drugs to the cocktail.