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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The ending: "Things can be better. I'll show you how."

It's just an intro for clickbait.

The prime criteria for being clickbait is if it is sensationalized, deceptive, or intentionally misleading. This strikes me as none of those things. It's the last sentence of a blog post.

It's something where you have to read the introductory material, and then find out the important part is elsewhere. In this case, in a blog post yet to come.

It's the first (and only) blog post on that site: https://wryl.tech/log/index.html

If only they had unveiled the single unifying abstraction of everything :(

> If only they had unveiled the single unifying abstraction of everything :(

Here you are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_theory

;-)

Oh that's a solved problem since 1969. It's called "unix". Everything is a file which can be processed as a byte stream. Composition is a breeze- can't be any more general than that!

(I kid, mostly :)).

- UNIX: everything is a file.

- LISP: everything is a lambda.

- Tandem: everything is a database.

- QNX: everything is a message.

- IBM System/38: everything is a capability.

That's the worse-is-better grand unified abstraction.

The Right Thing, as any Lisp programmer can tell you, is lambda.

An actual Lisp programmer will tell you that the right thing depends on the situation. The right thing can be a lambda, a string, a symbol, a structure, a class object, a hash table, a vector, a list, a call to a foreign function, a syntactic abstraction, a bitmask, a load-time value, a pattern matcher, ...

Richard Gabriel:

https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html (1991)

https://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html (2000?)

Ad Hominem? Or are you just stating that as a fact and not questioning the veracity of the arguement?

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