jernfrost

Dynamic and static languages are fundamentally different. There is no more or less.

I've tried to elaborate here why annotating variables with type doesn't make a dynamic language static:

https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/dynamically-typed-languages-ar...

You can't look at the presence of type information to determine if a language is static or dynamic. What matters is when and how that type information is used. In static languages expression have type. In dynamic languages values have type.

The implication is that you can't know the type of something in a dynamic language until the expression has been evaluated at run time. With a static language we can determine the type of every expression at compile time, which requires full knowledge of the whole program. It is why dependencies becomes much more problematic in static languages and why they are so poor as glue languages.

Looks like how a lot of languages already work out of the box. E.g. whenever I create a data type in Julia I automatically have such a constructor.

Static languages such as Go and C already essentially let you do this through initialization through braces.

Exactly. Here in Norway e.g. the non-market oriented political ideologies would be represented by at least 5 different parties: communists, socialists, social-democrats, social-liberals, and liberal-Christians.

Although the social-liberals and liberal-Christians are not usually considered pro market, although they don't seem to be the American sense of pro-market. Like they are not actively pushing privatization as a major focus. Rather they are more against state infringement on individual rights.

As a foreigner I must say Americans are rather blinded in their thinking about ideology from having a political system which doesn't allow for more than two parties.

Yes sure legally speaking there can be more parties, but due to the winner-takes all form of voting, there is no practical way for a third party to ever enter politics.

The existence of the republican and democratic party in the US for such an exceedingly long time has created a very ingrained sense of what politics and ideology is in the US.

People naturally have a much wider spectrum of ideologies than those represented by democrats and republicans. Yet there is no way to express that at the voting booth. Hence whatever people vote wouldn't really reflect the ideological divide.

Seen from my Norwegian perspective, if Norway was a city in the US, then Hillary Clinton would likely have gotten 90% of the vote. However that doesn't mean there is a lack of ideological diversity in Norway. There are 9 major parties in Norway and several much smaller ones, representing quite a diversity of opinion. The democratic party would have been quite an outlier politically in Norway, yet Donald Trump and republicans are even more extreme that people would naturally vote Hillary.

That a diverse set of people vote on some common lesser evil doesn't really make them all that similar.

Yes there is something fundamentally limiting with GUIs that I struggle with trying to express in a comperhensive way to people.

You see with almost any task. I see it when working with IDEs e.g. You got complex project management and there is always something you need to do which the designers of the IDE never had in mind.

However GUIs make a lot of things easier to do, so I think the ultimate solution is always something that allows you to mix and match GUI and programming/plain text solutions.

I think the problem today is that we make these GUI behemoth tools, when it would have been better with a collection of much smaller tools with more dedicated usage.

Government is already developing most of the drugs to my knowlege. Univerisites research drugs with public money. Universities then work with companies to commercialise it.

As far as I know the most productive research places like xerox-parc was pretty open ended. There was not clear profit driven goals.

We also see massive success with open source projects which suggests to me that there are other ways of organizing this research which we have done very little to explore.

Not strange since there is a mssive profit incentive by industry to lobby us against ever trying alternatives.

I read about this recently with respect to GMs invention of planned obsolence for cars. They managed to give cars to all Americans which lasted a good time. To continue sales they had to reduce quality and do frequent style changes.

I guess it was really just a reinvention of what the fashion industry had been doing for a long time. Get people to throw away perfectly good clothes and biluy new ones because it no longer matched fashion.

We really ought to rethink this madness. Companies are already able to make really durable products but there is no economic incentive to do so.

How can we change the incentives?

I am not sure if that is possible in a regular free market economy, as one kind depend on sort of perpetual growth

It is an excellent example of why health care is fundamentally at odds with capitalism.

Now I don’t see this as black and white. The free market is a useful tool one can use in healthcare WHERE it makes sense.

However that is not nearly as many places as the conservative free market fan club thinks it is.

This ought to be a reminder that more market does not equal better. More market thinking in health care is to the contrary going to bring worse results.

It is an extremely difficult problem to solve which means they only way to deal with it is through experimentation, tinkering and data gatering. Not through ideological silver bullets.

Disagree. Microsoft keep making new APIs and depricating old ones. With Mac you got cocoa which goes back to 1989 and you can still use.

It might not be backwards compatible but from a developers perspective it is nice to be able to reuse old knowledge.

I think Apple has been much better than MS or Linux in continously modernizing and upgrading what they have. On windows and linux things tend to become dead ends as new flashy APIs appear.

Sure old win32 and motif apps might still run but nobody really develops using these APIs anymore.

On windows I first use win32, then MFC, then it was WinForms. Then all of that got depricated and we got WPF, silverlight and then I sort of lost track of what was going on. Meanwhile on Linux people used tcl/tk for GUIs early on. And there was motif, wxeindows. KDE and Gnome went through several full rewrites.

If we look at MacOS X as the modern version of NeXTSTEP the core technology has been remarkable stable.

Sure they have broken compatibility plenty of times but the principles and API are at their core the same.

Really excited about this. Maybe good old Europe can have a SpaceX moment in the future.

If we don't up the game, European Space agency will be utterly incapable of competing with SpaceX. Perhaps this is what people are starting to grasp which is why Sabre is getting more funding now.

I was a big BeOS fan too back in the day. But in retrospect I’ve realized NeXT was simply much better technology. Unlike BeOS they had vector based UI. Objective-C was a better language for GUI apps. Pervasive mulithreading that BeOS went for was a mistake

Must be something about a particular way you are working. I have never experienced this as a problem.

Why would losing focus on one window be a problem?

Why would you need to create all these directories in multiple parts of the tree?

I can't quite comprehend what sort of work flow of work you do which require these things?

Perhaps I don't see it because I use the Finder and Terminal a lot together. I don't use one exclusively for very long periods.

But I am curious what you're workflow is like, because I see a lot of Finder hate, but don't really get what people's problem are, and how they are using Finder which is causing them so much problems.

Sounds more like you are not familiar enough with using a Mac. Putting two finder windows next to each other is easy, and so is quickly creating a directory.

Finder also supports tree view you know. OTOH does windows have as good filtering tools, smart folders, labels etc?

Drag and drop almost anything into the CLI produce a sensible result. Open command works as if you double clicked the item in Finder, which means it can be used to open directories, launch a program associated with that file etc.

In addition because mac use commad+C, command+V for copy paste rather than ctrl+C and ctrl+V as Linux and Windows, you feel no different working from a CLI than from any other app. You don't have to mentally jump in and out of two different ways of working.

This extends all the way into GUI apps. Typical CLI commands keys work in all mac GUI apps. I can use readline keys such as ctrl+a, ctrl+e for moving the cursor e.g. Works even in office apps like Keynote and Pages.

It is very frustrating to not be able to use these Unix conventions on Linux!!

There are lots of little things like this which makes a superior experience IMHO.

And what are your processing times like? I use my Mac for video editing, but I have never had any problems doing that smoothly even on much weaker Macs.

Only issue I have on Mac is compiling large programs.

What exactly is it you do in Excel which is quicker than Numbers?

Numbers excel at what a spreadsheet application should be about. Once you get very complex sheets you are much better off using more specialized software such as DataGraph, R, Julia, Matlab, Numpy, SAS

Odd I find hotkeys much better on Mac. They follow a more logical predictable pattern and are much more standarized. E.g. what is the standard windows hotkey for getting info/properties of an object. Never found one.

Also if an app doesn’t have configuration of hotkeys you are screwed. On Mac hotkey config is OS wide.

The command console experience on windows is horrible.

Office apps are better on Mac. Pages, numbers and keynote offer me a totally superior experience. The ribbon interface on Windows is a disaster. You spend too much tome hunt around among a zillion incompethensible icons.

In fact I do GUI design at work and use MS Office as an example of how to NOT design a UI.

Not sure why you complain about Finder. You got plenty of alternatives on Mac. I use Terminal and Finder a lot in combination and they interact with each other a lot better than on Windows. E.g. does windows have an “open” command yet?

Strange, I have the complete reverse experience. Mac is by far the best. Windows is worst.

I use Linux at work daily but miss my mac. It is much more unstable and unpolished. The app selection is really weak and the integration between gui and console is weak although better than on windows.

Windows is an utter mess these days as Microsoft is jumping between so many different UI paradigms.

"People buy computers to run software. If they can't run their existing software on it"

Obviously, but my point was that this mattered more in the past. Apple has so many tools and arrangements in place today to make a transition less painful. They got fat binaries and bundles. They got bitcode. They have really strong control over the app delivery process by having it all go through their app store. Almost everybody use xCode which they also control.

I can't remember ever running very much on PPC emulation on last transition. Usually I used fat binaries. Apple has been through so many of these transitions and gotten better at it every time. This will likely be quit smooth.

"But now, a significant number people are using Macs as hosts for x86 Linux and Windows virtual machines."

Really? I've been a Mac user since OSX came out and have very rarely encountered people who do that. I think this user group is too small for Apple to care. Anyway Linux should work fine, and I believe Windows also runs on ARM although not all software so I think this is not as big of an issue as you might think.

I would say that is more about the boxes they use than CPU. The difficulty of adding your own hard drives, memory, graphics cards etc to a Mac is the biggest problem I think.

What pro task, really requires high single thread performance? I imagine Apple could match intel by simply using more cores on their ARM CPUs.

That is what I explain in the link. I saw this move coming two years ago when I wrote that article. I noticed how regular users were using iPhones and iPads for almost everything they do. I noticed how office apps like Pages, Keynote and Numbers worked without any performance issues on iPad.

I concluded ARM was fast enough for 90% of users. Once you don't have the restriction of battery life and small enclosure it is not hard to imagine that Apple could beef up ARM a lot for their desktops and laptops.

Why run multiple CPU architectures when one does the job and is much cheaper?

I've been thinking hard about what kind of workload ARM can't handle and I can't think of anything. Ok... there is one 1st person shooter games. But iOS is a more successful gaming platform than Mac.

Nah... back then single thread performance mattered a lot. Today most users can do most of their work on something with the performance of an iPad.

Apple will not suffer in 2020 from having lower performance than intel. It wont matter. Form factor, screen quality, memory speed, memory size, touch pad, battery life etc will matter so much more.

Multi threading is also so much more common on pro app which require performance. They can just match intel by using more cores. ARM is way cheaper than intel so I don't see how they can lose this game. PPC was an entirely different world.

I believe Lattner said there was interest in making a CPU architecture independent bitcode though. At least bitcode is part of the way.

That would definitely be an interesting and very surprising development. Like I would really like to hear Apple's rational for developing an x86 CPU.

x86 is a far more complex CPU architecture which they have zero experience in making. ARM in contrast they have experience with all the way back to Newton, and it has a nice licensing preposition.

I can't see them doing something different than ARM and x86. That would be an enormous undertaking to come up with an entirely new CPU architecture.

x86 really has nothing going for it architecture wise. It just has a market because Intel makes fast chips that run existing software. ARM is a better architecture, and Apple already has the toolchain to make software run on that architecture.

If you asked two equally competent chip makers to make a fast chip, and one was given x86 architecture and the other ARM, I am certain the ones who got ARM would win. x86 is just winning today because intel is filthy rich and can pour insane amount of money on x86 to make up for all this short comings.

Agree this was obviously something that was going to happen. My prediction was 2019 tough. My thoughts was that they probably wanted to get more developers over to using bitcode first as well as ARM being almost at desired performance but not quite there yet.

In 2020 I doubt anyone will see any problems with ARM performance on a desktop or laptop.

It will obviously be an ARM transition not x86: https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/in-3-years-apple-will-switch-f...

This is such an obvious move, that I predicted it 2 years ago: https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/in-3-years-apple-will-switch-f...

My prediction in 2016, was that Apple would switch to ARM based laptops in 2019, so it looks like I am off by just 1 year.

A quick summary of my argument back then was that ARM was getting fast ENOUGH, but are considerably cheaper. Standardizing on one CPU architecture for all their products makes sense. In addition it allows them to differentiate themselves from competitors.

The only choice I am still uncertain about is the Mac Pro lineup. Since performance will matter a lot more in this segment it is harder to see a transition away from intel. A possible solution would be for apple to go massively parallel and simply use a lot of ARM CPU cores. Sure single thread performance wont be able to compete with intel but they might not need to.

A lot of the stuff you need a Mac Pro for like compiling large programs fast, video processing etc is likely very paralelizable.

Man the US just disgust me. Land of the free my ass. The amount of inhumane policies is just staggering. The most brutal and unjust “justice” system in the free world.

That American put up with this system is the biggest puzzle. It seems like the only freedom Americans care about is to carry a gun. Any other freedom they are cool with flushing down the toilet.

Sorry for the angry rant, I know there are lots of good and decent people in the US, but how on earth can you stand by year after year and be so chill about the inhumanity of the system?

I think you treat his thesis in a too m literal sense. He is speaking of broad patterns. There will of course always be various other factors playing a part. If you look at several areas of the world his ideas seem to stack up quite well. The lack of animal domestication in the Americas and its consequences seem like a strong point to me. He also offers a plausible explanation why there was so little domestication.

How can that be racist? What is the alternative non-racist way?

I can only see one alternative and that is “luck”. Luck however os a pretty shitty explanation for anything.

If you rule out luck or geography as reasons for European supremacy then the only thing left is biology, which would most definitly be the MOST racist explanation.