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lordgroff

908 karma · joined July 6, 2020

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lordgroff··on Show HN: Play Othello in your web browser (made with Mithril)
I agree. Mithril hits the sweet spot.
lordgroff··on .NET 8's Best Blazor is not Blazor as we know it
One of these (react) does not belong. React brought a new, better, API and kept the old one in. Migrating between react versions is actually a very simple affair, nobody was forcing React hooks.
lordgroff··on The new Bing will happily give you citations for a pile of nonsense
This may or may not hold true (this DS is nowhere near as convinced as you are) but your parallel with Model T is odd, seeing as how that was immediately useful and absolutely revolutionary.
lordgroff··on <3 Deno
I've recently been playing with Deno. It's early days yet but for all the general scripting tasks I might use Python for, I find Deno a better fit. First class typescript is a killer feature, as is the fact that there is a semblance of stdlib which node simply doesn't have.

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.

lordgroff··on Type hinting sucks
Java or Typescript.
lordgroff··on Type hinting sucks
I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that if you need typing for Python, you might as well go full throttle and use Java (maybe TS/Deno?), unless you're in a specialized ecosystem like data science and you have no choice.
lordgroff··on The rise of universities’ diversity bureaucrats (2018)
Those appratchicks are no better than Soviet appratchicks who had their own litmus tests of what was and was not acceptable. I'm not from Russia or the ex Soviet sphere but I did spend a large portion of childhood in a communist system in Eastern Europe and am still horrified that people don't seem to understand that this is exactly the kind of bullshit you had to deal with in that system.

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.

lordgroff··on I use C when I believe in memory safety
I 100% agree with your conclusion, except without the pain. I like Java and I think in every way that counts, it makes sensible choices.
lordgroff··on Python's “disappointing” superpowers
It's a net benefit. I just think that we've stretched Python into all kinds of directions which should be served by actually statically typed languages.
lordgroff··on AI Generated Seinfeld runs 24/7 on Twitch
It IS the experience. Without the chat I would have checked out of the nonsense in a minute but the audience reacting to the endless non sequiturs truly made this an art.
lordgroff··on Python's “disappointing” superpowers
I maintain Python code bases for a living, and feel that the language has simply been pushed too far. Static typing in Python doesn't give you the advantage of actually static typing and even IDE support is -- well it's not terrible, just not great.

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.

lordgroff··on Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018)
100%

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.

lordgroff··on Reducing technical debt by valuing comments as much as code
So train people to write better comments, because although code doesn't lie (questionable as that is since the intent behind the code and what it does doesn't always align) it can be literally the worst implantation of an algorithm imaginable, and so we teach people how to code.

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.

lordgroff··on Make a Resume in LaTeX
Yeah I hate to agree with this because while I love the idea of LaTeX--yep, it doesn't separate content and style. You get markup all over the place and it's often cryptic as hell. My resume is in LaTeX and I hate editing it because I'm always afraid the styling is going to break in some subtle way and then I have to figure out exactly what went wrong.
lordgroff··on Pipe Operator (|>) For JavaScript
Because there's not that much wrong with modern JS, with the "created in a weekend" mantra being wholly irrelevant.. Back when JS was trash there was was Coffeescript and other lesser used alternatives, and Google tried to push Dart but nobody cared. Today is pretty much only JS and its superset TS and that's not an accident. They're perfectly productive. My annoyance with JS is almost entirely to do with Node, otherwise I prefer JS to Python, for example.
lordgroff··on Nuclear explosion impact on humans indoors (2022)
It's... Not even comparable. That bomb is a quaint toy compared to modern nuclear arsenal, and of course nobody would be launching one or two nukes today because it isn't 1945. Mass starvation, disease, loss of key infrastructure and any sort of industrial capacity would await those "lucky" to survive initial blasts.

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.

lordgroff··on PHP in 2023
PHP is far from my primary language, but in no universe is the language that powers so so much of the internet "small".
lordgroff··on PHP in 2023
I hope you realize that "fixing" these types of early mistakes is almost impossible for PHP, a language which tries hard not to break things, especially something that's going to be used everywhere. But if this is such a deal-breaker and your IDE is dumb as a stump and can't remind you nothing prevents you from wrapping the stdlib or using something like psl to do it for you.
lordgroff··on PHP in 2023
Small PHP community, now I've heard everything.
lordgroff··on Alpine.js
And for Alpine it's sort of fine. People have taken Alpine a lot further than the original intent, which is to add sprinkles of JS to what is otherwise a server rendered page.

For anything even slightly more complicated we have things like Mithril or Preact, and yeah they avoid this sort of thing for a reason.

lordgroff··on HTML with Superpowers: An Introduction to Web Components
Ooooh I see. So the idea is to add all the extra (standardized) components to the browser itself! Yes, that is a worthy goal indeed.
lordgroff··on HTML with Superpowers: An Introduction to Web Components
Can you explain how open-ui solves the problem? I went on the website, and to be fair I didn't really get it, but say for <breadcrumb /> component they give a proposal of what the HTML would look like in their proposed solution with nav, ok, li elements. How does this replace the idea of having a breadcrumb web component which is a higher level abstraction?
lordgroff··on HTML with Superpowers: An Introduction to Web Components
Still the same issue though. What about Svelte? What about solid? What about mithril?

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.

lordgroff··on HTML with Superpowers: An Introduction to Web Components
I don't get this comment. I don't care if a usable web component is built with stencil, lit or not, what I care about is that I can use that same library WHETHER I'm using React, Vue, Svelte, Solid or whatever.
lordgroff··on HTML with Superpowers: An Introduction to Web Components
Anywhere you actually need React (and also React lite solutions like Preact or Alpine), which is essentially where your page isn't just a static page, web components by themselves don't do anything to handle the complexity of state. But what they allow you to do is to use the same component in whatever framework you pick.
lordgroff··on HTML with Superpowers: An Introduction to Web Components
It obviously hasn't happened, but I hope that web components eventually make serious inroads. A UI library for React, Vue, Svelte, Solid, whatever... Imagine being able to have a component library that works with any of them (or none of them).

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.

lordgroff··on Learn Lisp the Hard Way
There are macros in other languages but nowhere will they merge with the language as effortlessly as in the case of Lisp's syntax.

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.

lordgroff··on On the Gnome project and “my way or the highway”
This never made sense to me. Why is it bad there's several, especially at the current level of maturity, where both GNOME and KDE are perfectly viable options.
lordgroff··on Why I'm still using Python
It's a far cry from an actually typed language. I like Python and deal with its code bases for a living, but frankly it has gotten too big for its britches.
lordgroff··on O Holy Crap
https://eightouncecoffee.ca/collections/hand-grinders/produc...

And yeah for products like these you really need to search prosumer forums for the specific area in question, Consumer Reports would be useless.

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