SomethingOrNot

What better way to refute elitism by mentioning “even janitorial work”; the job so derided by ostensibly successful people that it is the stand-in trope for “low-status employment”.

> There is the matter is that blue collar professions slowly become extinct because they are replaced by robots and automatic machines. Now whole factories are ruled by a few engineers and skilled technicians. This is good because no industrial work should be done by hands more than once. And that is especially true in programming, because in programming non-creative work can be automated very easily. The present world does not need more blue-collars, because machines do their work very well, it needs more scientists and engineers who will invent our future. Likewise, the world does not need more low-skilled programmers (even though they are not blue-collars in any sense) because they will be replaced very quickly by smart machines and programs. Instead, the world needs more high-skilled programmers, true engineers, who will change our life, making it better, safer and longer.

Engineers can be idealists, too.

You apply pressure to the system. Not just elements (individuals?) that make up the system. The most enlightened human being could become a CEO (insert your favorite mythical person) of an oil/coal company; they would still simply be fired if they didn’t do their job.

This is reductive. Systems are not merely sums of their parts (people): they have emergent properties.

Systems don’t change because people as individuals decide to do things differently. That’s not sociology, that’s just individualism. Unfortunately(?) there is no way to avoid analysis at the systemic level. Neither individuals nor “smart contracts” can get around that.

The world doesn’t change by “getting things across” to CEOs and politicians. If a CEO’s enlightenment gets int the way of his fiduciary responsibilities, he will simple be replaced.

It’s about systems, not Great Men.

Seems like you are going for a two-staged language with homogeneous metaprogramming. As opposed to heterogeneous metaprogramming (macros). I like it, I must say.

> Btw, I encourage you to keep at Zig for diversity in systems, language space.

I don’t think that “Basically like C but a tiny bit better” deserves to be associated with the word “diversity”.

He doesn’t have a programming language. He has a series of YT videos.

Until he open sources the code (or at least lets someone else try it/look at it) discussing his “language” is giving him too much credit.

> The software ecosystem is not well served by everyone being focused on the same few familiar programming approaches. Sure there are economies of scale—better tooling, programmer fungibility—but there is less intellectual diversity.

Then it seems that the problem has more to do with political economy than with programmer culture. Capital and managers want programmers to be cogs, not artisans.

Can’t expect programmers to change this political problem, either. Especially considering that the nerdier the technologist, the less political he or she is.

You’re affiliated with Stanford? If so, also with the developer of Terra?

Have read some of it. Maybe I should read more of it.

Those middle class progressives sure are easy to spot. Unlike you, with your innovative counter-arguments like “homogeneous country v.s. diverse America”, “some people just wanna be addicts”, “street lifestyle”—you are a real original.

> Normally programming language blog posts get started with grammars and syntax and parsing and all sorts of stuff like that. I can't be bothered with all of that,

And I can’t be bothered with C++ for compiler construction.

*rooting

> More than just minorities, the wasted talent problem extends even to the elite. Ivy League students aspire to work in investment banking and management consulting. The finance industry is one of the biggest modern-day brain drains.

The elite is supposed to be a net drain on society. Or else they would not be “elite”.

> The wasting of talent does not always look like someone languishing in a position below their abilities. Waste of talent can also look like someone expending their creativity pushing addictive services or building products for an audience of pampered elitists.

Oh, my heart bleeds for Silicon Valley-type (the TV series) programmers. Sniff.

You’re like the main character in Hurt Locker at the end of the movie. He has come home from deployment and is standing in a supermarket. The mundane, everyday reality of First World civilian life seems meaningless in contrast.

So he goes back for another deployment. Another deployment in a pointless and meaningless war, yet another racket that has everything to do with the interests of the powerful and nothing to do with sentimental crap like serving your country. But he feels that it is meaningful.

“War is a racket”

> Also I find the hyphen surprisingly wide (in the proportional version). In fact so wide that I keep thinking it's an en–dash ...

So did I! At first I thought that they had inserted en-dashes by some mistake.

ML has been around for 40 years, but only lately have algebraic data types been catching on somewhat.