chillpenguin

5 million lines of HTML?

Almost every competent and experienced developer I know thinks most crypto stuff (such as NFTs for example) is bogus. Out of the people that I know that ARE into crypto, most of them are recent bootcamp grads or not very experienced (but somewhat techie).

Anecdotal, I know. But, I think if you look around at the respectable people in the tech field, you will see that most of them are staying away from crypto for a variety of reasons.

Crypto is the worst kind of pop-culture fad tech.

Reading, Guitar, Piano. I used to go to the gym a lot too before the pandemic disrupted that hobby. I've been meaning to get back into it.

very cool!

Although I do like typed languages, I agree that we should leave python alone. I think this trend of adding types to everything is harmful. Just use a different language if you like static types! You'll have a better experience anyway.

I would recommend taking time off and then starting a software job at a new company. Find a company with different culture, new people, etc.

You might as well try this first before doing something more extreme. If it doesn't help then try switching careers.

I like The Economist. https://www.economist.com/

If you can't understand what people are trying to say, I recommend trying to experience it for yourself. Install Common Lisp along with Slime for Emacs, and try things out. Or try out a Smalltalk environment like Squeak or Pharo which would also give you the same "enlightening" experience.

I know you are skeptical because python has a repl too and so it is hard to see what these "live" environments like lisp/smalltalk are offering. But trust me (and the others) that there is more than what python offers.

I have written python professionally probably more than any other language I have used, so I'm not ignorant of python btw.

No one is trying to fool you. But you don't have to take our word, please try it out for yourself!

In the realm of spoken languages, they say for a language to become immortal, it has to die. Latin is the classic example of this. Languages that continue to evolve will continue to "break" so to speak.

In this vein, Standard ML (SML) is truly immortal, because the standard is set and it is "finished".

Just a fun thought!

I think you misunderstood one or both of the comments. The original commenter was saying that for certain use cases, the library tools are far superior to typical web search tools. Then the other commenter was saying they disagree, saying that the library tools are only good if you know exactly what you want, and how they prefer Google Scholar.

Perhaps it's a vocal minority or something that is giving this perception. The reality is far more projects are written in javascript than TypeSrcipt. Even greenfield projects.

I agree with you for the most part. They keep adding more and more to the language and it is getting more and more bloated. It's becoming a chore to keep up with, and the added power isn't that necessary. Much of what they add is just making the language more terse. I do prefer the terseness once I get used to a new feature, but having to relearn javascript all the time is pretty annoying.

I really admire small and simple languages that don't change much over time. Lisps, SML, etc.

But once again, many of the improvements are quite nice once you learn them and get used to them. I wouldn't want to give up arrow functions, for example, now that I'm used to them.

No problem. I actually haven't read it yet but it's on my list. Sounds like you recommend it. I'll have to check it out!

Are you thinking of "The Craft of Text Editing: Emacs for the Modern World" by Craig A. Finseth?

He mentions other things are more effective for leveling up (other things besides learning new languages). What are some of those things beyond "domain knowledge"?

Some things I can think of: databases, architecture, unix tools.

What else do people recommend doing to become a better programmer? I'll admit I've fallen for the "learn esoteric languages" trap for a large part of my journey as a programmer.

I highly recommend TiddlyWiki. The name puts a lot of people off, but it is really great. Supports backlinks and transclusion, among the more typical tagging and linking.

Great for creating personal wikis.

Usually when someone says something is unix-like, they mean it "embraces unix philosophy", which usually means something like it operates on stdin/stdout so it can be composed in a pipeline on the shell.

Which is why I was mislead in this case :)

Agree with the unix bit. I was expecting something "unix philosophy" but it turns out they just meant it looks retro.

The immense number of C bugs is not merely due to C's popularity. Other languages lead to less buggy and more secure code.

This is largely due to memory safety. However, immutability is also known to reduce bugs and be more secure (as many security related bugs are due to mutability). Lastly, superior concurrency constructs also have this bug-reducing effect.

That said I haven't looked into empirical studies. But I feel like it is just factually the case, at least for memory safety, that in most other languages you literally are unable to create entire classes of bugs that are possible in C. So just logically thinking about it, I don't even see why you'd need to see empirical studies. It should be quite obvious!

Although it'd be cool to see the empirical research too! Maybe someone else can reply with links to studies.

I'm pretty sure we are eating more calories than our grandparents did, too. Portion sizes for common things are much larger now. You can look at muffin sizes for example and how the average muffin is physically larger today. Same with burgers, soft-drink cup sizes, etc.

But yeah I agree with everything you said as well regarding lack of physical exercise.

I think it could be argued that the average software developer should know how PATH works and how to edit their shell's dotfile. So "most users" may not know how to do this, but they really should. It doesn't take that long to learn and it will help out tremendously. Compared to all the fancy web frameworks and complex languages, editing a dotfile is relatively simple and the skills involved are not likely to "go out of style" any time soon.

Yes exactly, I really do not like it when programs edit my bashrc/zshrc.

I will admit though that the PATH stuff was confusing when I was first starting out with programming. But now that I'm a unix nerd, I much prefer to have more control and set things up exactly how I like.

There's too many subfields etc. to make a suggestion. What areas in particular are you interested in?

Another relevant question is where are you in your journey so far? What have you already read? etc.

I haven't used it much myself, but I've watched a lot of Alan Kay videos and I've read his "Early History of Smalltalk" which I highly recommend. My take is that it is largely about creating a computing system from the smallest yet most fundamental/powerful building blocks. In smalltalk, "everything is an object", which means everything has the semantics of a "whole computer". These computers are networked together and can send/receive messages back and forth with each other. This creates a drastically different paradigm than simply creating a pipeline of functions to send data through (for example). It excels at modeling complex systems, it's really "OOP done right".

Of course there are other interesting features worth talking about, such as "images" and the introspection capabilities. Which are both great and often sorely missed in todays systems. But I think the big idea is to try to understand what Kay had in mind with OOP.

Another aspect of smalltalk that is important, beyond just the "language" is to recognize its role in advancing "personal computing". Smalltalk was essentially an operating system that empowered the user to create new media and tinker with the system.

If you want to see a modern web-browser based smalltalk-like system that uses javascript, check out Dan Ingalls' Lively Web. That will give you an idea into how smalltalk systems were meant to be used, in terms of "personal computing".

I took a year off due to burnout. At about the 6-8 month mark I started getting anxious that I should be working again, and started feeling guilty about not doing anything.

In retrospect I wish I would have traveled or done something more with my time. Instead I just sort of chilled out a lot at home. I did try to get out more and go see live music, socialize, etc. Also I entered into a relationship which is still going on. So overall it was probably good for me, but my advice would be maybe to have a plan for what you want to do so you don't feel guilty that you are wasting time or being unproductive.

You don't have the wrong definition, I had the same thought as you. They are definitely using a non-standard definition of that term, although I suppose it makes some sense if you look at it the right way (sort of like "metadata" in a way).

Is it true that they never achieved it? I thought they basically did. You can see the system in action in various talks by Alan Kay.

Good point about separating syntax and semantics. Maybe new languages should use something like lisp syntax to nail down the semantics, and then people could create their own syntaxes from there.

IIRC, Ohm (successor to OMeta) separates syntax from semantics!

I only get a new laptop once every several years. Doesn't really seem worth it to me personally. I also sort of like starting fresh in a way. Granted I have my dot-files on github to make that part easier. But I don't mind running the install command for things as they come up.

I'm curious if there are other benefits to this approach though besides just saving time when setting up a new machine. The article mentioned "you end up with (in my opinion) a much more flexible working environment." Any ideas what they might mean?

In some cases it has to do with the operating system cooperating or not. Modern operating systems don't allow certain things to work due to restrictions in what apps are capable of. Consider a Smalltalk OS, where you can dynamically link objects across "apps" in interesting ways (see Alan Kay's "Tribute to Ted Nelson" where he shows a demo of this). You simply cannot do such a thing with mac/windows/linux.

In the case of Hypercard, I cannot say whether or not this is the case. It could be that Hypercard is absolutely possible today. But I wouldn't doubt it if it was somewhat unusable on modern systems due to this "cooperation" issue I mentioned. It may need buy-in from other apps and/or the host OS for it to work fully as intended.

For another example, consider emacs. Emacs effectively gives you the lisp-machine experience, but the problem is it isn't integrated with the rest of the system. You sort of have to live in an emacs bubble. With hypercard, you could surely get it running, but would you be in a bubble? Ideally you could use hypercard to script the rest of your system as well.

What we should want is something like a "card" that could "link" to a specific cell in a spreadsheet, as an example. Or a card that could open a PDF to a specific page. The more the rest of the system "plays along", the more powerful something like hypercard could be.