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Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

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Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#101

Post by tekknolagi »

steveklabnik wrote: post #50
pailey wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few weeks/months before _why published this book, this page appeared on his "public print queue" on his site, hinting that the print queue would become active on April 18: https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE/blob/master/PDF/DESO... A day or two before April 18, this page appeared containing a hand-written OCaml script you could use to hook up your own printer to _why's public print queue: https://github.com/ste…

I am still kinda sad that the only place I kept the video of my printer printing out pages was Vine. Oh well. EDIT: I am now realizing that, ironically, maybe that is appropriate...

As far as I can tell, many (all?) Vine videos are still available if you have the link

Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#102

Post by steveklabnik »

tekknolagi wrote: post #101
steveklabnik wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still kinda sad that the only place I kept the video of my printer printing out pages was Vine. Oh well. EDIT: I am now realizing that, ironically, maybe that is appropriate...

As far as I can tell, many (all?) Vine videos are still available if you have the link

Oh wow! Okay hmmm, thank you, I will see what I can do...

Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#103

Post by DocSavage »

throwanem wrote: post #72
q845712 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly at the time I remember getting weird twee/precious vibes from the Ruby community and I wasn't particularly interested in it or Rails. I only discovered _why's poignant guide later after I had to learn Rails on the job, and to be honest I never finished it. I still strongly prefer the worldview, circumstances, mindset, etc. where that kind of content is written, read, and celebrated over today's focus on Infl…

I don't. Even in the terms of the false dichotomy you've constructed here, I would much rather participate in a community of professionals who've organized themselves around sufficiently overlapping shared intents, than one accreted around the kind of twee, precious narcissism that characterized the early days of Ruby and Rails. That comparison is informed by direct experience with both, and is the precise reason why…

> I would much rather participate in a community of professionals who've organized themselves around sufficiently overlapping shared intents

I thoroughly enjoyed my involvement with early (US) Ruby and Rails folks from the first Rails conf to _why's unusual entertainment to Matz's calm and humble demeanor. People bounced ideas off each other and just enjoyed coding up interesting things. Dave Thomas and the Pragmatic Programmer group wrote what many of us used, not so much _why's guide which was still a fun read. I moderated a Ruby panel at the old Odeo HQ just before they pivoted. I didn't know the group gathering at that Ruby SF meeting would include not only Twitter but Github founders as well. At the time, tweets seemed pretty absurd to some of us but guess what happens when you try out ideas in a community that was into exploration?

Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#104

Post by spc476 »

preseinger wrote: post #69
rcme wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming, objectively speaking, is nothing like balancing equations. When balancing equations, there is only one right answer. When programming, there is a goal and a series of subjective choices need to made in order to reach the goal. There are many right answers. The art and craft is in those subjective decisions. You might not care about the craft in those decisions, but, objectively speaking, I don’t think yo…

[flagged]

What type of programming do you do? Because in my experience, programming is as much an art as it is a science (or mathematics). In my previous job, I had to classify phone numbers as either 1) valid NANP [1], 2) invalid NANP [2], or international, and it wasn't clear cut like balancing equations. I was surprised that the Oligarchic Cell Phone Company (our customer) didn't even send us valid phone numbers!

[1] North American Numbering Plan, 10 digits, with a three digit area code, a three digit exchange and a four digit number. From what I was able to understand (there wasn't a single document that described this), the three digit exchange had to start with 2-9, and the second two numbers couldn't be 1 (so no area code like 211, 311, 411, etc., but 201, 210 were valid), and the same for the three digit exchange, EXCEPT maybe for toll-free numbers (like 800-xxx-xxxx or 866-xxx-xxxx) where the exchange could be 211, 311, 411 (I never did get a clarification on that point).

[2] A number that might present itself as a NANP but doesn't follow the actual NANP specification.

[3] In telephony, there are two concepts, international numbers that can be dialed world wide, and "local", which can only be dialed from inside a region (like North America) or country. A number that starts with a "+" is considered international, which should be followed by a country code (one to four digits, starting with 1 to 9, with no rhyme nor reason as to length). If it doesn't start with a "+", it's a "local" number, limited to, as I stated, a region or country.

There is also no requirement that a "local" number be related in any way, shape, or form, to an international number. For instance, a "local" NANP number like 305-867-5309 can be represented as a international number as +1-305-867-5309, but for several countries, just taking the "local" number and adding a "+" won't work. Different rules for different regions/countries.

Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#106

Post by Tainnor »

throwanem wrote: post #72
q845712 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly at the time I remember getting weird twee/precious vibes from the Ruby community and I wasn't particularly interested in it or Rails. I only discovered _why's poignant guide later after I had to learn Rails on the job, and to be honest I never finished it. I still strongly prefer the worldview, circumstances, mindset, etc. where that kind of content is written, read, and celebrated over today's focus on Infl…

I don't. Even in the terms of the false dichotomy you've constructed here, I would much rather participate in a community of professionals who've organized themselves around sufficiently overlapping shared intents, than one accreted around the kind of twee, precious narcissism that characterized the early days of Ruby and Rails. That comparison is informed by direct experience with both, and is the precise reason why…

Speaking as someone who started out with Ruby and Rails and has since migrated to other stacks...

I would never conflate Ruby and Rails.

Ruby is a language that took interesting ideas and developed them in a unique way. Today, it doesn't align with my goals 100% anymore (I do like Ruby's focus on expressivity, but not when it comes at the expense of predictability), but I don't think that's Ruby's fault.

Rails, by contrast, is software that did a few things right (things should work mostly out of the box, automated migrations, testing built in) and way too many things wrong. Design and architecture are dirty words for much of the Rails community (and this thought very explicitly originates with DHH who still maintains that you don't need anything besides models, views and controllers), autoloading is hot garbage, "magic" libraries that start monkeypatching your code just because you add them to your Gemfile are a thing, the biggest auth library, devise, is an opinionated mess, writing proper (fast) unit tests is difficult and goes against the framework, and so on.

I would say that most of the good ideas that came with Rails have now been incorporated by better frameworks (even in Ruby itself, but in particular also in other ecosystems), so it's good that it was there, but I wouldn't recommend it any more.

But Ruby didn't originate with Rails. To my knowledge it's still used today by Japanese developers who don't particularly care about Rails.

Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#107

Post by throwanem »

DocSavage wrote: post #103
throwanem wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't. Even in the terms of the false dichotomy you've constructed here, I would much rather participate in a community of professionals who've organized themselves around sufficiently overlapping shared intents, than one accreted around the kind of twee, precious narcissism that characterized the early days of Ruby and Rails. That comparison is informed by direct experience with both, and is the precise reason why…

> I would much rather participate in a community of professionals who've organized themselves around sufficiently overlapping shared intents I thoroughly enjoyed my involvement with early (US) Ruby and Rails folks from the first Rails conf to _why's unusual entertainment to Matz's calm and humble demeanor. People bounced ideas off each other and just enjoyed coding up interesting things. Dave Thomas and the Pragmatic…

I mean, it's usually preferable to be part of an ingroup than of its outgroup, sure. Otherwise, what value in the distinction? But the iron law applies here, too.

I wouldn't be so quick to claim Twitter, either, even among zero-interest-rate phenomena more generally. It might be easy to forget these days, but that's been harmful to society on net since long before Musk bought it.

Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#108

Post by jhbadger »

preseinger wrote: post #41
booleandilemma wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason one of the most famous computer scientists and programmers titled his series of books "The Art of Computer Programming".

it's definitely possible to model programming as an art, and there is value in that model, but (imo) that model is neither productive nor accurate in most programming contexts

Knuth doesn't mean "art" as in "fine art to be admired" but rather "art" as in a description of something about which it is not possible to be purely scientific about.

Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#109

Post by throwanem »

Tainnor wrote: post #106
throwanem wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't. Even in the terms of the false dichotomy you've constructed here, I would much rather participate in a community of professionals who've organized themselves around sufficiently overlapping shared intents, than one accreted around the kind of twee, precious narcissism that characterized the early days of Ruby and Rails. That comparison is informed by direct experience with both, and is the precise reason why…

Speaking as someone who started out with Ruby and Rails and has since migrated to other stacks... I would never conflate Ruby and Rails. Ruby is a language that took interesting ideas and developed them in a unique way. Today, it doesn't align with my goals 100% anymore (I do like Ruby's focus on expressivity, but not when it comes at the expense of predictability), but I don't think that's Ruby's fault. Rails, by co…

If I've conflated Ruby and Rails, it wasn't by intent.

I do think Rails was like it was in large part by direct derivation from, and enshrinement of, Ruby's allergy to rigor - which isn't to say they're the same thing, but that the latter directly predated and heavily informed the former.

Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#110

Post by Tainnor »

throwanem wrote: post #85
hereonout2 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a lot of quirkiness and egotism then, the cult of personality was rife, not just with project leaders such as DHH but ancillary dramas from folks like Zed Shaw. The stuff from _why was always wacky but some of their projects were also really inspiring for younger programmers, of which I was one. I could take or leave the cartoon foxes but I remember seeing the code for the Camping framework when it was rele…

Ruby itself was tolerably well documented, but that was a rare bright spot, and of limited utility when Rails leveraged the malleability of the language into near incomprehensibility even by the language's own low standard. And while you're not wrong that by spending enough money it was possible to obtain halfway decent documentation for Rails that if you were very lucky might still be mostly applicable after a coupl…

Hibernate predates ActiveRecord, if I'm not mistaken, and to this date I can't decide which of the two I hate more. They both do different things very wrong. So I'm not sure if you can blame ORMs on Rails.

Also I'm not sure what you mean by the documentation criticism. I criticised Rails elsewhere in the comments, but I can't really fault it for the documentation, which IMHO was always excellent. And then you also had Michael Hartl's excellent Rails guide (which was available online freely, at least at the time) which was what basically taught me modern backend development (including what automated testing is).

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