kamaal

This keeps coming up in the context of India as well. The Urban centers are so people dense you yearn to escape this life and live somewhere you can enjoy Mountain perspectives, lakes and tall trees. But here is the catch, I go motorcycling often. While you do feel nice riding out in the Sun, see stunning things. You begin to realise why it might not work.

There are no schools, hospitals, shopping centers or everything that makes modern life possible. Plus there is the additional fatigue of getting bored of the same things. Honestly how long are you going to enjoy the Mountain view?

I do have relatives who live in far villages and have not travelled and seen the world(In fact not travelled more than 100 km radius from place of birth), they also know very little of the world, except for latest insta reels and whatsapp forwards. To be frank they do seem more happy. They might not be rich, but there is a slow and peaceful cadence to their lives which honestly feels attractive.

>>Prolog doesn't look like javascript or python so:

Think of this way. In Python and Javascript you write code, and to test if its correct you write unit test cases.

A prolog program is basically a bunch of test cases/unit test cases, you write it, and then tell the Prolog compiler, 'write code, that passes these test cases'.

That is, you are writing the program specification, or tests that if pass would represent solution to the problem. The job of the compiler to write the code that passes these test cases.

More importantly even if you do want it, and there are business situations that support your ambitions. You still have to do get into the managerial powerplay, which quite honestly takes a separate kind of skill set, time and effort. Which Im guessing the academia oriented people aren't willing to do.

Its pretty much dog eat dog at top management positions.

Its not exactly a space for free thinking timelines.

Whatever merit alternatives have, the reality is these make long, like very long migration arcs, these days you will have so much team churn, maintenance rabit holes and regular tech debt and feature requests that its fair enough to say any project that starts to move out of Mainframe tech will never see the finishing line.

You are better off maintaining what already works. Either way why do you want to migrate when things are just working fine as is?

>>But when you hit some critical outage, edge case, etc., those people running the systems have such a different relationship to the system having simply maintained it vs. built it.

Long stays in most companies are practically non-existent these days, apart from a few folks who are present for long, unfortunately these people are often called lifers, coasters etc.

Simply put, no one person can say they contributed most to the building of a system. Barring very few rare projects.

So you already need the runbook, documentation model to run things, for the reason people themselves work along those lines.

>>I've been doing my daily journaling and task management on Emacs for while now

Trust me, move to Google Docs.

This is simply a whole larger and easier universe compared to anything Org-mode will ever evolve to be. Its also backed up online, pictures are embedded in the document itself. And several other features come out of the box. You also don't have spend years learning to use it, and can get productive from minute 1.

>>Houses shouldn't be investments.

People keep saying things without understanding what that means. Only reason why anyone even wants a home is because its profitable to them on the longer run. Else renting works.

Either way the demand for home ownership will be way less if you simply tell people they will make big losses on that purchase.

That said, now imagine how housing works in a world where no one wants to buy a home, but everyone wants to rent one. That is you want to rent a resource which no one is building at the first place.

>>Where do you think the money that is accrued by the most wealthy will be spent/invested/parked?

In most advanced economies today, that's equity. The ordinary person thinks of wealth as money lying around in the bank, which the rich person refuses to spend on anything useful. And instead either hoards, or spends on luxury things which cause resentment to the remainder.

The real question is for most people today its easier than ever to invest and then give it to their children. Why aren't people doing it?

In time Mainframes of this age will make a come back.

This whole idea that you can connect lots of cheap low capacity boxes and drive down compute costs is already going away.

In time people will go back to thinking compute as a variable of time taken to finish processing. That's the paradigm in the cloud compute world- you are billed for the TIME you use the box. Eventually people will just want to use something bigger that gets things done faster, hence you don't have to rent them for long.

Nah, your parent comment has a valid point.

Nearly entirety of the use cases of computers today don't involve running things on a 'personal computer' in any way.

In fact these days, every one kind of agrees as little as hosting a spreadsheet on your computer is a bad idea. Cloud, where everything is backed up is the way to go.

>>Clojure programmers earn the most?

All the best finding a Clojure job though.

Im guessing they pay all that much, while simultaneously cursing themselves for not using Python instead, and swearing to never use Clojure again.

I know that as I have seen people do and say similar things about Perl and Erlang in the last decade.

>>It’s the Terry-Gilliam-level of absurdity of the billing process. Absolutely no one will tell you how much things are, and when you ask, they sass you that it is a ridiculous question.

Here in India when my dad underwent bypass surgery, I checked the bills the breakdown is insane. This how a charge goes, Nurse comes to see you, so she wears a pair of gloves, that gloves is billed. And often something like 10x the price those are available in the regular pharmacy. Each and everything is billed, and you would be surprised just how many things like these can be be billed.

>>You’ll be asked to take a diagnostic not knowing whether it will cost $10 or $15000 . Even if you try to be responsible and call the provider (who isn’t your doctor, clinic, or hospital ) – they won’t be able to tell you.

Often some 'visiting doctor' comes to see you. Like in the case of my dad we were billed for a diabetic consultation, despite clearly telling them he wasn't diabetic, even more so, the same doctor came in the day before and had to told the same. We didn't need it. But you will see they bill you like 2000 rupees just for the person to enter the room say 'Hi' and exit.

>>The only thing I’m sure of is that there has to be tremendous amounts of incidental and deliberate corruption . Auditing a single patient’s billing is impossible – so a population’s worth is a goldmine .

In these situations most people are so stressed and anxious often people just have no mental bandwidth to fight side battles.

Its really a corrupt system to the core, and I don't see hospitals and doctors giving all this up anytime soon. Or even ever.

I know of Indian immigrants who suffered for decades/years on H1B, endless anxiety and tensions, eventually make it to GC, then a passport.

Then all of a sudden fall ill, lose everything and return back to India.

People keep forgetting the US society is a giant stack/pyramid ranking system, the structure keeps getting narrow as you move upwards. You get pushed off the sides, in the ever narrowing funnel, and you need increasing levels of luck at every level to survive.

BTW, this is not just with regards to health care. You could lose your job, suffer from ageism. Lose your home, run out of money. A million different things can happen, that can cause the above said phenomenon.

>>I'm seeing a lot of frustration at the leadership level about product velocity- and much of the frustration is pointed at internal gatekeepers who mainly seem to say no to product releases.

If we are serious about productivity.

I helps to fire the managers. More often than not, this layer has to act in its own self interest. Which means maintaining large head counts to justify their existence.

Crazy automation and productivity has been possible for like 50 years now. Its just that nobody wants it.

Death of languages like Perl, Lisp and Prolog only proves this point.

If you look at programming language list- Apart from Python, Java. Most are targeted to specific platforms(databases, browsers, embedded systems) or tech(SQL for database).

The general purpose programming languages today are still- Python, Java, and Perl. Make whatever of this you will.

Larry Wall at one point said, if you make something very specific to a use case(like awk, sed, php etc), it sort of naturally starts to come out of general purpose use.

Its just that Kotlin, Rust, Go, SQL, Julia, SQL, Javascript etc. These are not general purpose programming languages.

>>Perl enter the top 10 suddenly this year but I do not see any new developers.

Perl is almost as active as Javascript. And more useful than Python.

https://metacpan.org/recent

I write Perl to do all sorts of thing every week. Its strange its not in the top 5 list.

>>Forth is a million languages that solve almost nothing." :-P

That brings us to the question, when it was invented and people did use it. What kind of problems were they solving with it?

Im not sure how this is a negative merit for React.

Besides if you are a small company, or a start up, your job is to get things done. Not to embark on a global technology crusade to push your favourite tech.

By and large the best thing about react is the overall ecosystem, libraries, talent and ubiquitousness. And thats a good thing.

>>Companies tend to assume that somebody else is paying for the development of open-source software, so they do not have to contribute.

I think if you are a billion dollar company using these tools, sponsoring maintenance isn't a lot to ask.

Curiously enough this came up even during the days of Perl.

I don't think Perl got its due, especially given the fact that even until most recently almost everything of importance was done with Perl. Heck internet was made possible because of Perl.

>>there’s often some financial incentive there.

I know managers that were let go because it appeared like their only job was being host to that one stand up meeting everyday, and nothing else.

I guess they just want people to return to save their own jobs.

>>Be glad you didn’t work in the development office of a bank in the 1990s, you’d be expected to wear a suit and tie to work.

Priorities matter.

I worked for a India IT services firm that mandated neck ties. They would even enforce it with fines.

Eventually we saw the whole company had been reduced to these cosmetic pedantry about neck ties, badge-in/out times etc.

Nobody every got anything done, because this was all that was left of their ideas to make the company win.

>>doesn't seem too farfetched

Far fetched? Its somewhat like a farmer complaining about rain and sun.

Its impossible to build anything at all, if you were to go entirely by the book.

Wasn't the whole point of America being allowed to color outside the lines ?

On a more serious note, here in India most millennials/boomers remember taking a Engineering Drawing class in second semester Engineering courses. It would involve using a real drafter, real calculations and making real drawings. Isometric projects and all.

I remember it took me like 4 nights of standing to make Isometric projections of a landing gear strut. I wondered if pursuing an Engineering degree was even worth it. Some of my classmates did quit, as years went by.

These days they just let you use CAD software to make things work, and based on what I hear kids just Copy paste files and are done with the assignments.

I mean we all have these Kids these days talk, but somethings do matter. Making all these tasks easy has allowed lots of people who would have other wise failed in the previous generations pass.

There is now an unemployment and low pay crisis all over India due to so many Engineers passing. Sometimes when I hear the newer generations complain about how hard it is to buy a home, or get a good job. Im inclined to think, perhaps hard things should have been kept hard for a reason.

>It's amazing how everyone can massage numbers when they're trying to sell something.

More like massage words.

Like one fairly smart person told me- Doing math with words is pointless.

>>Agreed, as an OO scripting language it's lovely, especially compared to Perl where the OO features never meshed quite right.

Back then the whole OO crowd was with Java though.

Python's Moat was beginner friendliness to write simple scripts, which at the time- Perl was more like a thermonuclear scripting language. Most people who never wanted to graduate to that advanced stage of writing mega million lines of Perl code over a week(which was literally the use of Perl then), realised they needed some thing simpler, easier to learn, and maintain for smaller scripts- Kind of moved to Python.

But then of course simplicity only takes you that far, and its logically impossible to have a simple clean interface to problems that require several variables tweaked. Python had to evolve and is now having the same bloat and complications that plague any other language.

Having said that, I would still use Java if I had to start a backend project.

>>Have you even ever watched someone experienced using Emacs or you're making assumptions on your (I suppose limited experience)?

I am one of those experienced Emacs users myself. Wrote more stuff in Emacs and even vim than most devs today will even write code over their careers.

Its just vscode now does simply too many things out of the box, you obviously can recreate that in Emacs, but its a pointless exercise. Time consuming, and distracts your from your real job. My job is to write code, not build emacs to write code.

I totally stopped using Org-mode, because Google docs do it way better.

At some point you have to move on. For some people like that point arrived a little early.

Its strange you have to write this.

In India most of the banks now have apps that do nearly all the banking you can do by visiting a branch personally. To that extent this future is already here.

When I had to close my loan and had to visit a branch nearly a few times, the manager tells me, significant portion of his people's time now goes into actual banking- which according to him was selling products(fixed deposits, insurances, credit cards) and not customer support(which the bank thinks is not its job and has to because there is no other alternative to it currently).

Most people don't notice but there has been a inflation in headcounts over the years now. This happened around the time microservices architecture trend took over.

All of sudden to ensure better support and separation of concerns people needed a team with a manager for each service. If this hadn't been the case, the industry as a whole can likely work with 40% - 50% less people eventually. Thats because at any given point in time even with a large monolithic codebase only 10 - 20% of the code base is in active evolution, what that means in microservices world is equivalent amount teams are sitting idle.

When I started out huge C++ and Java code bases were pretty much the norm, and it was also one of the reasons why things were hard and barrier to entry high. In this microservices world, things are small enough that any small group of even low productivity employees can make things work. That is quite literally true, because smaller things that work well don't even need all that many changes on a everyday basis.

To me its these kind of places that are in real trouble. There is not enough work to justify keeping dozens to even hundreds of teams, their managements and their hierarchies all working for quite literally doing nothing.

>>They also don’t bother to announce a Vim or Emacs one either.

vim has a universal and in many ways a eternal use case. You have to edit a file at some point on a server, be it a self hosted or even on ec2. Thats kind of the only real use case for vim.

In these days of AI assisted coding, no one really 'edits' code. A lot of editor short cuts and fluency related concepts kind of in many ways are not relevant in this paradigm.

The thing is vscode just works, like just works, for nearly all the usecases. In case of emacs, learning it and mastering it takes lots of time in ones career. In case of vscode you don't have to do this, you can straight away work on the project that you want to get done.

emacs is some what like a massive distraction from the actual task you want to achieve. Instead of writing code to build a project, you have to first write code to make emacs work, then use emacs to write the project code. In vscode you just write project code.