908 karma · joined July 6, 2020
My two main quibbles about Deno are:
1. The rather pointless security model that seems about as relevant as it did for PowerShell.
2. It's quite young, there's still some pointy edges.
No, you didn't get shot for dissent. No you didn't disappear. It was all much more bland and insidious than that, you were accused of a thought crime and that might kill your career. Conformity was the name of the game and I see increasing evidence that we're very much following this trajectory in North America. And it has that insidious quality too that you can't speak out against it because if you do you're clearly a racist/misogynist/homophobe/insert-bad-thing-hereist.
The thing is, once we go through all this static typing exercise in Python, we get no performance advantages, and the whole thing seems bolted on, with worse semantics than most modern typed languages. And yes, it can stifle undeniable advantages a dynamic language like Python can provide.
Python remains a fantastic prototyping and scripting language, but my feeling is that it now handles more than it should.
There's a vanishingly small number of applications where it's really going to make a difference. Use what your work uses, or if personal project what you like. The more I use React and co. the more I feel like it's all the same thing.
Teaching people how to comment is a skill that's just as important and nothing turns me off a project faster than the "code is its own documentation" mantra.
I'm not as convinced nuclear winter is a scare theory either, I think it's hard to say, but it frankly doesn't even have to factor in the slightest.
For anything even slightly more complicated we have things like Mithril or Preact, and yeah they avoid this sort of thing for a reason.
I know this might seem like a "who cares" sort of thing since the industry has standardized on the three listed, but I find all three overkill for a lot of things and, for example, keep my small projects in Mithril. But then I'm hit with either using Construct UI (which is honestly ok, this is all internal stuff), or having to make all the components myself.
What makes it such an impossibility for production? Even if, as in the case of Ionic, they provide web components but also wrap them up for React, Vue and Angular.
Since I really like mithril and there's one UI library, I've been playing with Shoelace and Crayons and they're pretty nice to work with, but I remain a bit puzzled why there's so few players in the space.
The way Lisp is structured means that almost certainly if you're missing language feature X you can bolt it on, stacking the new features on top of each other to make whatever abstraction you see fit.
It's the kind of thing that makes a Lisp head amused when someone talks about the genius of C# and LINQ (as an example). If you need an abstraction in Lisp, you can almost certainly build it in an ergonomic fashion that just doesn't have a parallel in other languages.
It's one of those powers you don't fully appreciate until you have it and then every other language seems hilariously inadequate in comparison. With great power cones great responsibility and it can all crumble with a lack of discipline (hence why I'm also a fan of ridiculously restrictive languages like Go), but honestly the sort of meta programming possible in Lisp has no equal I know of.
And yeah for products like these you really need to search prosumer forums for the specific area in question, Consumer Reports would be useless.