600 karma · joined November 27, 2008
The biggest missing feature for me though is the lack of a receive syntax. Sending and receiving messages should be a first class citizen on the BEAM. There is a very limited workaround in the standard library, but I guess the requirement for type safety means we'll have to wait forever for anything that can actually do things like listen to PIDs or the inbox without Erlang or if the box.
I'm still hopeful this will be tackled, as I really can't stand the concurrency primitives of most other statically typed languages and Gleam has the most promise to fill that niche.
> The primary motivator for Firefly's development was the ability to compile Elixir applications that could target WebAssembly, enabling use of Elixir as a language for frontend development. It is also possible to use Firefly to target other platforms as well, by producing self-contained executables on platforms such as x86.
I hope this becomes more prevalent at least for paid services.
For dedicated hosting there is https://robot.your-server.de/doc/webservice/en.html
I just wish they had NixOS images so I'd save a few minutes of initial deploy time.
It's quite frustrating to me, because after I've been using Nix & NixOS for about 3 years now, there's no way I'd go back to the insanity out there. I never had the amount of stability, control, and predictability on any other platform, from configuring my OS, editors, WM, shell, random ricing, or building VMs, Servers, Docker containers, production deploys, development environments, there's really not much Nix can't handle. But getting familiar with Nix took some serious effort I'm sure not many people can afford. I begin to understand how frustrated people in the Lisp and Smalltalk communities must feel while people slowly reinvent everything they've enjoyed for decades (and Nix is still in its teens).
Teaching people about the value of having just a single package manager, no matter what OS or language they're using, is mostly futile because there's so much value attributed to being "mainstream" that now we have hundreds of mainstream package managers with varying degrees of sophistication, security, predictability, and ability to _not_ try and take over your system.
I use it to build and develop Go, Ruby, JS, Crystal, Elm, Mint, Haskell, Perl, Bash, VimL, Elisp, Guile, and whatever else comes my way. All I have to do to get a working and isolated dev env is go into that directory and let nix-shell do the rest. On NixOS you also get nixos-container with all its benefits, so I can test whole networks or just spin up some DBs, all behaving exactly the same they'll be once deployed by simply reusing that configuration.
Of course it also manages Systemd, so I guess we'll just write yet another function to slap a checksum on those containers and control them as well, it's just a shame that humanity loses so much time reinventing the wheel every few months.
On the other hand, there's still a lot of opportunities for start-ups in that space, like https://nixcloud.io, https://www.tweag.io (they just hired Eelco Dolstra so he can work full-time on the Nix core), https://www.packet.net (they sponsor almost all our new CI infrastructure), or https://vpsfree.org/ (first one to offer their own NixOS based distro specifically made for VPSs), which are all doing well.
But if you want to make pure boro-silicate glass, you cannot tolerate much contamination of oxides, lime, lead, dolomite, salt, etc. or your glass will be tinted, full of bubbles, and possibly even cracks while cooling.
Even with the recycling system in Germany where you separate glass by color, people will not distinguish a soda-lime, boro-silicate, or lead glass. And I don't know a process that could extract the pure SiO2 from old glass (though I'd love for someone to jump in and tell me about a cheap method)
That's the very first sentence...
> Almost any electrical appliance can be adapted to work off of alternate power, such as compressed air. Some Amish women have been using compressed air to power blenders in the kitchen for years. In one house, compressed air powers a water pump, sewing and washing machines, and drills and saws in the shop. Some Amish businesses have as their specialty adapting such appliances so they can be powered by compressed air.