osullivj

Totally agree on YAGNI. I call it premature abstraction. My rule of thumb is I need to see 3 repetitions before refactoring cos 2 is not a reliable indication of functional invariance.

Check out TN DuPuy, the US military theoretical who imported the German Auftragstaktik doctrine into US military thinking.

Fascinating piece of work; thanks! Great comments on V8 JIT optimization in the blog comments that I will apply. Gotta pick up one comment...

"It is an intentionally incredibly sparse language, possibly even relative to other assembly languages."

FYI I'm an old hacker who cut his teeth on 6502 and Z80 hand assembly. No assembler to compile the asm codes to hex machine op codes, no auto calc of relative jumps in hex, hand checking all the hex pointer arithmetic. WebAssembly is higher level, and more like Java or .Net VM bytecodes. But with added checks for secure computing eg no way to touch stack memory directly via ptr arithmetic.

You may find Forth interesting. Especially WAForth: Forth->wasm. Forth is very stack centric, and so is wasm, so they should be a natural match.

Suspect not as later Wittgenstein tells us "the meaning is the use"; don't look at the dictionary definition, look at many examples. And that's what LLMs do.

US has more hi wealth families that can support startup kids, like Gates, making learning by failure more practical.

"It is worth recalling today, as Russia and China confront the United States, that the proximate reason for America’s entry into World War II was its determination to save those two countries from extinction."

Nonsense! Great powers act in their own interests. The US entered the war because of Pearl Harbor. Hitler welcomed the opportunity to wage unrestricted submarine warfare on the US shipping supporting UK & USSR in the struggle against Hitler; hence his declaration of war on the US. Above all the US did not want Nazi/Japanese dominance over Europe, Asia and the Pacific.

Do tell, says this Caravaggio, el Greco and Beccafumi obsessive...

Wonderful! Thanks. IMHO Aquinas adoption of, ironically, Ancient Greek rationalism eliminated hesychastic mysticism from Catholicism. Western writers who repurpose Buddhist meditational practice as "mindfullness" overlook hesychasm...

UK too; my first dose was in 88, we called it E or Ecstasy then. Never heard it called Mandy in the UK, but then I'm 50+.

Yes, I've worked on Fujitsu ICL clones running VME.

Also 40 years, 25 in banking. Done several Unix to Z/OS, and Windows to VME integration projects.

You're overlooking the war in the Pacific. Hitler hoped that Japan would keep the US busy, and wanted a free hand to attack lend lease shipping. US Atlantic supply was key to keeping the UK and USSR alive and fighting. The UK shipped Churcill tanks via the Arctic convoy. The US sent Shermans, Jeeps and much infra. All key to the eventual victory at Stalingrad.

My Corsair K63 is much quieter than a Model M. No need for a din to USB converter either.

One of the reasons for the UK productivity gap is our oversize services sector. In services businesses meet demand by adding headcount, and falling demand is met with layoffs. Since UK hire and fire rules are more flexible than eg FR/DE that works for secs biz. We do still have a manufacturing sector, but much of it is invisible as its the arms industry, where Britain is still a big player. That's OK because the arms industry is less price sensitive than consumer manufacturing like cars, white goods etc. In those sectors strict rules on hire and fire has forced FR and DE industry to figure out how to scale by means other than headcount.

Higher income tax

A very big chunk of that 100B benefits budget is the state pension.

Yes, aren't these harbingers just aggressive early adopters chasing the shiny new thing?

Ditto on Ember, React, Vue and Elm. Was a jQuery minimalist, nut now moved on to Haxe-HTML5. Yes, it compiles Haxe to JS. But the JS it generates maps back to the Haxe very simply, and it's straightforward to debug in Chromium dev tools. There a nice declarative XML system for widget layout. It's up to you to choose how much you do declaratively, and how much in .hx code.

Zachary's Show Stopper covers this ground in a very readable manner, and gives a lot of useful detail on Dave Cutler's design ideas, and DEC VAX VMS background.

Remember it well. I wrote a custom graphics card device driver for some mech eng code that would never fit in the 640K limit imposed by DOS.

The Malvern Hills?

The forces arrayed against you are too great, and likely driven by financial and political considerations. Best get another job, or keep your head down. I have worked in large orgs where senior managers have taken back handers from vendors. I've even seen someone dismissed for that reason. My guess is there's shady stuff going on several levels up, and it will only hurt you if you try to fix it.

Even Wittgenstein's Tractatus?

Was that in VME ?

56, coding since 79, first paid gig 83. I've had these dips periodically in my career. First in 1990! When I get bored or frustrated I tend to find it's down to mgmt. IMHO single biggest factor in job satisfaction is relationship with mgr. At various times I have fixed with internal moves, or new employer. Life is too short to suffer like this when you sell half your waking hours to earn a crust.

Because we can't not hack. I've always been interested in writing, and read a bunch of "how to become a writer" stuff. I read a piece with some great writer answering the Q "how do you know you're a writer?" Answer: because you can't not write. I'm perfectly OK with not writing. But not coding? That's another thing...

Perfectly sound line of reasoning. The obvious counter is to point out that many of the world's biggest economies require young productive folk paying taxes to support the elderly. That's a problem for developed economies with falling birth rates and low immigration. And the counter to that counter is to point at the economic model that bakes in the requirement for growth.

Remaining childfree avoids a lot of exhausting and messy complications. Just as remaining celibate avoids emotional entanglements and STDs, at the cost of loneliness. Historically, virtue has attached to celibacy in many religious traditions. Maybe a sufficiently strong and pervasive environmentalist worldview could impute virtue to the childfree. It is possible to change popular ethics in a decade or so: cf LGBTQ rights or attitudes to drink driving.

The shift from child free adult to parent is similar in scale to adolescence. Can you remember being a pre-sexual child, all the confusion of teendom, and then sexual maturity. As a sexually mature adult, would you ever elect to revert to being a pre-sexual person?

That's the best analogy I can give to explain how parenthood changes you. Life is messier and more complex afterwards, just like sex, but immeasurably richer. And you develop parent-dar. It's like gaydar. Parenting changes you in a million tiny ways, and us parents can see that in others.

From Shakespeare's Henry V, circa 1599...

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead. Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George! '

Res ipsa loquitor...

Do you have a Mercury vs Voila comparison?