> Remote is not a challenge to overcome. It's a clear business advantage.
It's an advantage if and only if you overcome the inherent challenges, and despite this tagline they list disadvantages in the article. However, you structure the whole organization and its operations around dispersed, remote workers (as they seem to), especially emphasizing asynchronous communication, then I can see how this can avoid the traditional pitfalls of remote workers in a synchronized, co-located environment.
Speaking of async communication, it is ironic that many traditional organizations with standard work hours and co-located offices also rely so much on email, an asynchronous communication method that is incredibly painful in an office environment, yet it seems like such a clear benefit in a remote setting. That is, it's like the two long-existing constructs - email and the combination of colocating and synchronizing work hours - are in direct conflict.
I like remote work to an extent, but its not that simple, and whether programmers "need" something or what "can" happen is a really not the best point to argue, because for example you don't "need" anything more than C if you require portable code to do anything that pretty much any other general purpose language does. I've also done these volunteer projects. They work because timelines are pretty up in the air, there's often little or no funding to be concerned with, everyone is working on it because they want to, and they're only working when they are well-motivated to do so. There are many more constraints in a proper company and job. Remote communication doesn't even come close to the interaction of a roughly synchronized office environment. Of course, there are downsides to the traditional office setup too, but in eliminating those concerns you introduce more problems presented by remote setup. I know people who even have the option of remote work and choose not to, and I can empathize with that sentiment.
Does anyone in their work find that they are able to employ data structures like this, and if so, what do you work on? I've almost always had to delegate all my state to a database using default indexes, etc., which is productive, yet a little disappointing, because I'm always applying my brain power instead toward more mundane tasks.
When I see stuff like this and the author's previous artile, it reminds me of the overwhelming potential of scriptable systems and customizable open source software. But at the same time, trying to pursue these things has always been a net negative for me in terms of productivity, for several reasons: there is often such a high learning curve, there are so many different choices of programs that people use (with the resulting community fragmentation), and there is so little investment in UX. So I get all caught up in learning the systems themselves instead of dealing with the limitations of the systems I know and getting to the actual work. So on one hand I know I'm stuck in local maxima, but on the other hand it remains such a long and risky investment to try to seek other more optimal solutions.
There are ripple effects with everything, and yes technology always provides disruption, but it would be absurd to say that technology accomplished these things.
We’re getting nowhere with this. This entire thread was about STEM vs other majors, and you were singling out philosophy. You can’t just decouple yourself and your arguments from the context of the conversation and claim i’m straw-manning you. And again, you have a severe misconception that none of these “bullshit majors” are useful, and that somehow a lack of consensus on everything invalidates competing ideas. And come on, “torture people” is bringing your argument to absurity. You’re basically arguing that individuality is a bad thing now. I can’t change your perspective, but suffice to say it’s short sighted.
Oh, and STEM is different? Let me try: math and physics aren't about understanding quantity and the universe; they are about memorizing equations and pretending you know them just in time for the test. Computer science is about more about copying and pasting code and getting away with it. What you're describing - where gaming the system is the norm - is entirely valid, and a problem with education institutions as a whole, but it's completely independent of the subject matter.
I don't understand your last paragraph at all. Not everybody agrees, so therefore liberal arts education is invalid? Or not everybody agrees, so let's give up? These are defeatist attitudes to take in either case. Implicit in your argument, as a response to this whole thread, is that not "somebody has to do the work", which I have never argued against; you're saying "nobody should do anything but the work". Meaning STEM, or whatever BigCo is hiring for right now. We continue to have huge problems globally that either have nothing to do with technology or are directly caused by technology, that need to be solved with entirely different skillsets. People perform better when they are motivated, and money is a poor motivator after a certain point. You make a very poor assumption that someone studies one of these subjects and their skills and experiences just go into this void, and/or that I'm advocating that people major in something and strictly do that for the rest of their lives. If you want to do the hands-on work and major in Hands-On Working, then do it. But don't discourage others from doing what they want and are good at during the narrow window of their lives when society supports them to do it.
Glad to hear that - I can share my perspective too. Even given my graduate computer science degree, I only apply what I learned in a very shallow way to my work, which has generally been apps of some sort or another, web mobile etc. For example I studied a lot about operating systems that don't even come up in my projects, other than a process vs thread vs coroutine, blocking or nonblocking io. Similarly with algorithms and architecture. Of course, it's easy to shrug off what you already know as supposedly obvious, but I sure as hell never had to implement a complex algorithm and perform asymptotic analysis on it for my CRUD app, and all the concurrency and object-oriented programming stuff I learned has become more obsolete now that we have horizontal/vertical scaling, databases and cache servers handling concurrent state, and a tendency toward trivially parallelized code and event loops. What has really stuck? Discrete mathematics and deductive systems, theory of computation - abstract stuff I could not appreciate at the time and now wish I really tried at. So altogether, I feel that my CS degree helped in the short term, but on the long term, has left me only marginally advantaged over either not having a degree or having an unrelated degree, and still leaves me unsatisfied with my understanding of honestly more fulfilling subjects. And while I can pick up plenty of books and information on the engineering side, I face a much more uphill battle trying to understand concepts in economics, math, and physics, and my comprehension of creative writing, art, and philosophy is still really lackluster.
There is absolutely pressure to go to college, but there is hardly pressure to follow passions. If there was, then the two would be in conflict. The pressure is: don't follow your passions, go to college, major in STEM or "something useful". What has that resulted in? An inflation of watered-down STEM-lite degrees not just from the standard degree factories but accredited state research universities, that provide none of the benefits of a liberal arts education and still leaving one poorly trained to produce.
I am willing to bet that given a population of philosophy majors and a population of engineering majors, if you gave them an equivalent year of quality mentorship in programming, the philosophy majors would perform better. Because philosophy heavily emphasizes critical and abstract thinking. Better yet they might be able to really think about the consequences of the systems they build, whereas the tech industry mostly seems to have no problem and no concerns about building a global surveillance apparatus. Engineers learn how to do now the stuff that is relevant now. As a software engineer I am constantly battling with abstraction, and I constantly feel held back by my limited understanding of math, science, and philosophy.
The cost of college is an issue of its own and it's irrelevant to choice of major. School is the one place where we have an institutionalized system to study and progress the liberal arts as a whole, which teach us how we got here, what we value, and how we ought to live. One episode of The Wire should be sufficient demonstration of the need for our understanding of sociology to improve, among other things. Discouraging any of the liberal arts due to the overwhelming cost of college exacerbates our problems and risks turning universities into trade schools, directionless and with all the volatility of economic cycle.
This is either a low effort bait post or exactly the kind of bullshit tech-worship I've come to despise. There's more to life and learning than STEM and whatever rides the current economic wave.
Counterpoint: technology advances are devaluing co-location. The need for dense metropolises may decline noticeably in the next century. There's a lot of 21st century promises around this that have failed to deliver as quickly as expected, but the long-term trajectory is probably still there.
It's more complicated than "FP or not". Languages like Haskell isolate state and IO. But the mechanisms are there, and Haskell was intended to do it; it's just formalized and very strict. There are FP languages that don't have this pure separation (I believe OCaml and Scala mix IO freely), and that's more at the core of where the friction might be of interacting with a database rather than FP itself. I would often not use Haskell for database-related stuff, I agree, but it's more because I often do no require the level of strictness that the type system enforces in all my database interactions such that it would be worth the investment. But if you're doing mission-critical stuff, it may be worth getting the safety guarantees.
I checked out this and the some of the author's other posts. A lot of complaints here in the thread are valid and pretty consistent through their articles. However even though the ideas are scattered and loose and they're trying to market their product, there was a lot of interesting food for thought - it helped that I've spent some time studying FP. I also feel that operating systems have been stagnant for a long time. Yes, the OS should manage hardware and resources, but also the OS is a platform on which other things are built. The platform part is mainly what has felt quite stagnant and perhaps more layers of systems on top (JVM, containers, etc.) might not be the best answer. Adding a layer on top has the benefit of compatibility and reliability that the layer below provides, but layers also compound constraints, possibly sticking us with local maxima.
True, I can see how in this case, at that time, it could be effective. But ironically, there seems to be a similar dogma surrounding FP these days - speaking even as a fan of the paradigm, with a perspective tempered by experience. I can’t help but think that polarized viewpoints like this contribute to replacing the subject of the idealization rather than the underlying problem of idealizing itself, if only indirectly due to the combination of the arguments themselves and the sense of authority behind them, rather than the merit of the arguments alone.
You're desscribing a very loosely defined and optimistic view of how things can and will play out. This is like the equivalent of seeing the early stages of bitcoin and deciding we should all ditch all current forms of money for cryptocurrency. I could list out a bunch of ways in which the system "can" work if I felt so optimistic about the idea of the technology just like this, but any points I would make based on my intuition and desires would be put in serious doubt in light of how cryptocurrencies have played out in reality thus far.
But they don’t answer the question of the role schools play in social development. There is also the question of how to effectively test students outside a supervised exam - online makes cheating plenty easier. And last is how to replace classroom labs which require special equipment. These are not impossible tasks for MOOCs to account for but all that I think these courses have only shown compelling methods of providing instruction and information on-demand and the ability to replay this instruction. School is a lot more than that.
I'm not familiar with Cloud Haskell, but I can attest that documentation and information availability in general have become a huge priority for me recently after getting burned by lack of it in recent years. This is actually very tricky to nail a sweet spot in, because it almost requires that a technology be currently popular, yet stable. There are long-lived Haskell libraries that have poor documentation and Haskell is rare enough that there aren't often answers to common pitfalls on StackOverflow etc. Ruby on Rails still has ongoing releases, but its popularity has declined and apparently so has its sources of community information beyond the official docs, which only cover so much. And then you have the immature, fast-moving JS ecosystem. Ironically for these reasons I could easily see myself choosing Java for projects in the near future; I don't like the language, but I've learned that the problems I have with Java are not my biggest problems as a professional engineer anymore.
Agreed - it certainly is rewarding in itself to get to the next level, but that's precisely it: the means become ends in themselves. I stopped using stuff like Arch Linux a while back for similar reasons.
“I mainly wanted to provoke people...” I hate this. I see it way too often. It’s either a cop-out to avoid having to own up to your arguments or its just poisonous rhetoric in the first place that contributes to partisan opinions, especially when the speaker has an air of authority that causes people to accept what they say at face value. It is directly antithetical to critical thinking.
Expect a long journey if you’re trying to get to the state where you can make a web app. I am making a conjecture here but from my limited but nontrivial experience it seems libraries in the applications ecosystem of haskell apply the most advanced features they know of to solve their problems. That would normally be fine, but they do not abstract away this complexity; due to the type system’s rigor, these choices are propagated to you as the consumer of the library because you have to consume the library in a way that satisfies whatever advanced type features they have. So the end result is that to get anything done like make a basic Yesod web app you have to be at an advanced level. I feel i benefitted from learning the structural and type theoretic aspects (monads etc) of Haskell but I also am glad i ditched it after some time because the investment just did not seem worth it anymore after a certain point. Anyway just my perspective, hope its helpful if you find similar difficulties. Right now I’m checking out Scala as an alternative, but i’ve just started so I can’t offer any comparison other than I know it is less rigorous.
It is still now distant enough that I can't recall specific examples, but what I had found is that the solutions in blog posts etc. on Grails 2 (large majority of search results) did not apply to or did not work with Grails 3 when we tried them, unsurprising given a major version change, but frustrating nonetheless. I suspect that since you were following Grails's progression from such an early stage, any incompleteness or lack of clarity in the documentation may have not been so obvious to you because you would have been able to implicitly fill in the gaps, but we as newcomers found it totally inadequate. It was often reduced to black-box trial and error.
You may gave gotten into Grails at a better time. I more recently attempted a project in Grails and it was a disaster. In fact it was my worst framework experience ever. Mainly because completely inadequate sources of information. Grails 3 had been released but the documentation was terribly incomplete so we had to spend a lot of time searching and about every bit of info we tried to look up returned results strictly for version 2. So some really basic things we just never figured out how to do. I’ll never touch it again.
What do you value? You can also make this argument to advocate ignoring web accessibility because its not a cost benefit tradeoff that is worth a single entity’s bottom line for the sake of the small percentage of people that are disabled. Private actors in the capitalist economy regularly make very shortsighted decisions. It’s up to us to establish the boundaries in which those decisions get made, and to some extent, our laws are a reflection of our values. What kind of world do you want your possibly disabled children to grow up in? (Edit: and what kind of sentiment do you want to be established in society and the industry when you are 50+ years old and looking for a job?)