de_keyboard

How do you think we got to this state? It didn't happen overnight. Society used to be orientated around walkable neighbours. Sprawl is a relatively recent development and a product of auto-mobilism. I don't think it would be impossible to walk things back.

They are testing your ability to jump through arbitrary (and sometimes challenging) hoops.

What else can be done?

In order to reach climate change targets we must reduce car dependency. How can we do this without nudging people away from cars? And how can we nudge them without taxes?

I'd strongly suggest looking at https://github.com/isomorphic-git/isomorphic-git

It's a newer Git implementation but it has loads of features and it's easier to read than most. An excellent project.

There are clearly jobs that require high talent and have a shortage of labour that pushes up salaries. This includes things that require mathematical talent, like quantitative finance, but it also includes skills like motivational speaking or playing sports to a very high level.

However, I think most jobs are ones that, frankly, anyone could do if given the opportunity and a bit of training, but access to these jobs is controlled via gateways such as fancy schools, culture, family connections, your accent, etc. There's a kind of mediocre upper-middle class filling seats at large organizations but not really doing much. These are sometimes referred to as bullshit jobs.

But this is just speculation... I would like to see some data around it.

The number of people doing start-ups is a blip. This is not how most people accumulate wealth.

I don't think we can eliminate fossil fuels usage entirely, but we can dramatically reduce our usage. Consider that the carbon output per person in the USA is roughly double that in Europe. Europeans live pretty comfortable lives imo. And besides, something has to give eventually. It is much better to manage the change than have it forced upon you.

I think it's tooling. But tooling follows from adoption in most cases.

> why did OCaml not get widely adopted in finance?

I think it has been pretty successful. The bigger success story in finance is F# though, which takes a bunch of ideas from OCaml.

I think so too... but the political fallout from the job loses is too great. It reminds me of the oil industry in America. It's clearly harmful, it and clearly needs to be reduced going forward, but no one wants to be the one to do it, so the can just gets kicked further down the road.

How do you handle cases where strict synchronization is required?

Banking app is a classic example.

I think the problem is we keep using the same crappy tools because people are scared to be an early adopter.

Meanwhile, there are things sitting on the shelf that solve these problems in a principled way and make things simpler:

- ML languages

- Nix

- Bazel

- Erlang

- Rust

Some tools that are great and have large adoption:

- Git

- Terraform

Clojure is such a different school of thought! Most of the arguments I have heard for Clojure (immutability, thinking in data, etc) also apply to ML though. Still, I hope to try it out properly one day!

I wonder what is easier for a strong OOP developer to learn, Lisp or ML?

I want a statically typed functional language with a big ecosystem. I want to use the same language across front-end and back-end.

What are my options?

- PureScript on web and Node.js

Can use NPM packages! Node.js as a run-time lacks features like shared memory across threads. PureScript is still too early IMO.

- Scala on JVM and web using Scala.js

Not a bad option, although the language is very complex. More towards the OOP end than the ML end in the spectrum of language design. JVM can be a good or a bad thing, depending on what you are doing.

- F# on .NET Core and web using Fable

Simple functional language with access to the .NET ecosystem. ASP.NET has great performance. Access to NPM packages on web. Lacks some advanced type-system features in Haskell, OCaml and Scala. However, the community has a pragmatic focus as a result.

- OCaml and ReasonML

ReasonML has limited backing from Facebook. OCaml has support from a few financial institutions (e.g. Jane Street) but it's not on the same level as what a big tech company could provide. Tiny (but high quality) community and ecosystem. OCaml has great single-threaded performance but mult-threading is not quite ready. Already small community split by compiler extensions and standard libraries.

- Haskell and GHCJS

Again, tiny community and ecosystem. Beautiful language, but lazy evaluation has bit me too many times. Steep learning curve since newcomers cannot fall-back to OOP and imperative code.

- Elm

Tiny ecosystem, tied to Node.js (see PureScript). Interop story with NPM modules is worse than PureScript.

For me, F# is the clear winner.

If you aren't particularly interested in functional programming - maybe you just use some delegates here and there - then C# is a fine choice. Otherwise, C# quickly becomes awkward compared to F#. Besides, C# to JS options are not as mature as Fable.

Nix looks great, but you have to go all in on Nix. Sometimes it's simpler to install a few tools locally but not control the entire environment.

I have to downvote to hide this.