Found it on TechCrunch. Reads like a markov-chain-generated series of buzzwords | Hacker News Reader

Found it on TechCrunch. Reads like a markov-chain-generated series of buzzwords

techcrunch.com

90 pointslukaseder19 comments

If the title is changed, currently it's "Found it on TechCrunch. Reads like a markov-chain-generated series of buzzwords."

Funny and mostly accurate retitling but probably should be changed to correct title.

That would miss the point of this submission. But you can submit it again with the actual title... The discussion will certainly be different if there's any discussion at all.

It probably wouldn't have gotten this far up if it was the original boring title

I think there may actually be some real content there, but it certainly is ...dense prose.

I thought it was a model of simplicity and clarity myself.

It reads like the sort of project proposal I would write, and I don't mean that in a good way. ;)

I thought you were joking. This is terrible.

Seriously, though, it sounds a lot like Meteor. What is the compelling difference?

From what I can tell (I could be wrong), Meteor has templates (view layer) that are reactive to data model changes. Espresso on the other hand both doesn't seem to impose a view layer but also introduces reactivity WITHIN the data model.

The article contains a lot of enterprisey gibberish. However, from what I inferred from the few meaningful passages, I suppose Espresso Logic could be quite useful.

Unfortunately, the sign-up process currently only returns a blank page. If the description in the article and on the website is correct though, Espresso Logic does for database-backed business processes what AngularJS does for front end logic or what Excel does for spreadsheets:

It allows you to create REST services from database tables. These services can be used for composing more complex business processes. The software watches changes to the data and propagates these changes to each process that uses said data.

Pretty much like when you change a cell in Excel that change is reflected in each formula that makes use of that cell's data.

If done correctly and in a usable fashion this is huge stuff along the lines of Bret Victor's reactive documents paradigm: http://worrydream.com/Tangle/

>The software watches changes to the data and propagates these changes to each process that uses said data.

Reminds me of self-tracking ORM entities...

It's applying the the idea of reactive programming to the CRUD web app world. It sounds like a pretty reasonable thing to do. What is hard to understand about that?

Here is a reasonable introduction to reactive programming (albeit focusing on Cocoa): https://github.com/blog/1107-reactivecocoa-for-a-better-worl...

It's not the idea that's bad, it's the prose.

It's the danger from leaning too closely on the press release—a good journo's job is to make sense of stuff, not add to the cruft. The headline is as clear as mud; it needs a good editor.

It should be noted that the article was posted by TechCrunch's enterprise writer, Alex Williams, who's a less-frequent author. (not to be confused with other TC writer-with-a-similar-name Alex Wilhelm)

Other articles by Williams have a similar style of prose, although with fewer buzzwords:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/02/neo4j-a-graph-database-for-...

http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/01/a-billionaire-jewelry-king-...

Replace "JSON" in their diagram[0] with a variable and you can describe every webapp ever.

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/07/espresso-logic-raises-1-6m-...

The question is: if TC reporters were replaced by buzzword spewing software, would the article quality get better or worse?

relevant: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

Glancing through this, I think you have a point. Even tech reporting needs a little creativity in writing to make it palatable...

Huh. This software is pretty handy.

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