rajandatta

Some History and Tech topics

Fall of Civilizations - multi-hour documentaries on historical events and, well, the fall of civilizations. The one on early Sumer is brilliant.

Kings and Generals - brilliant episodes on Military History around the world and big time span. E.g. one in Caesar's Gallic campaigns is brilliant.

Code-report - Programming, APL introduction, book workshops on books like SICP.

The biggest reason is lack of knowledge and awareness amongst Developers. Increasingly, Management and Senior Management do not have the breadth of knowledge and understanding of these areas to be able to overrule inertia against their adoption.

The problems are not technical but cultural. I experimented with Picat and have looked at Prolog and Mercury. Picat is a superb language. It allowed me to rewrite a constraint satisfaction problem in 150 lines of code that had been an ungodly problem area for months. The original was in Java but the design was the issue. But I had ab exchange with Picat's authors to try and make it more attractive for Corporate Developers but it's not their priority.

Based on my experience - 3 things stand out for me:

The idea of a separate language is too tough. It must be embeddable in a larger, mainstream language. Minikanren is a good example. Embeddable Prolog is hit and miss today. The idea needs to be developed and polished. I work primarily in Banking. A large Bank will have hundreds of apps. Adding a new language, technology, nailing down Management and then having to maintain knowledgeable staff is not an easy proposition. So much easier to adopt if we can integrate ideas into mainstream platforms (Java, .NET). By all means build the stand alone platforms but also offer it as an embeddable component. Clojure with Datalog, Racket with Datalog, Minikanren are good examples.

We need more, better success stories and wins to be publicized. Erlang has had a huge win with Whatsapp. For all its life since the mid-70s - I'm not sure I can point to huge, visible truly large wins. I'm sure there are successful projects for Prolog and Mercury et al but it needs wins.

Teach, teach, teach - evangelize and get the idea out - not as much re tech but applying logic based programming. Business rules definition, BRM, BPM are natural areas but you don't see logic programming formalized in them. Try and change that.

I think there are 2 primary reasons:

First, if they were Minoan that would have been recorded in the annals of civilizations like Egypt and others which kept good records. The Egyptians and others of the Eastern Mediterranean had long links with Crete and the Minoans. It doesn't stand to reason that the Minoan could launch such a large movement (in the sense impact so many areas of the Eastern Mediterranean) and no one notices.

Secondly - the nature of the sea peoples attacks, assaults suggests a group of people moving, migrating - not looting and returning. If the Minoan were doing this - why would they not return with their gathered spoils to their homeland. If they did return - where is the physical and archeological evidence?

Those are the pressing ones that come to mind first. There's also the question why would the Minoan embarknon something so foolish as invading Egypt. Egypt was what a hundred times bigger? If you failed - first you'd expose yourself to retribution and secondly - you'd weaken yourself severely leaving you exposed to others.

Wonderful article! I work in the Banking space in North America and this was a very informative read on the Payments Industry in Japan.

Excellent article. Worth reading for anyone interested in the Lisp family of languages. Author's other project, Pollen, is also very interesting.

'Object Oriented Software Construction' - Bertrand Meyer.

Did not agree with everything but it was excellent.

Commenter here ... meant to say 'The conceptual basis for languages is very similar'.

The best way to think about this is that all of these variants exist:

APL uses custom glyphs

J uses symbols from an ASCII keyboard - its a big set of primitives

Q from Kx systems uses words.

The conceptual basis for the languages is very simple. As others have said - your experiences will guide where you feel most comfortable.

This is a crime against humanity - our culture and history. It's profoundly disturbing that Rio Tinto gets to do this repeatedly with no consequences. To all Australians - what the hell??

Just want to come to give props to Sumatra PDF. Lovely product - lightweight, fast, portable. Mau not have every feature (not saying it does or doesn't - does what I need) but does a lot really well. Highly recommended.

Anyone known if CudaText has features to edit Lisp or Scheme family of languages? Will be checking out the project.

Really well done article. In-xeptjh treatment of a problem that few will actually tackle - a migration at Facebook's MySQL scale.

Would be really good to see how long the project took and the migration speed they achieved.

Second this. Other products have it as well but Notepad++ has worked very reliably for me.

I'm not sure how much more mystery one neds than 'Only orbiting telescope in human history has a fault our best engineers haven't diagnosed as yet!' :-)

Anyone else look at the headline and feel this is one of the dumbest headlines ever. It makes it sound like NASA's incompetent. 'Why haven't you fixed Hubble yet?'.

There doesn't seem to be any nuance or respect that they're trying to repair an orbiting telescope that was launched 30 years ago and designed 40 years ago - and that people are patiently trying to sort through a fully autonomous system 400 miles above the surface of the Earth with a very large set of failure options.

For me - huge props to NASA and other organizations that do this kind of work and keep these systems running for decades. I need to reboot Windows every 2-3 days

What is the technical foundation - language, libraries etc?

Does anyone have real life experiences and thoughts on how EventBus compares to Guava?

I believe the key difference with using a tool like Skribilo is that you have the full computational power of Scheme and can generate dynamic content. Other tools may be equal to just the writing aspect but this is Scheme turned inside out. Instead of a language creating content; this is content blocks interwoven with language output.

Great comment. Thanks for sharing your lived experience. Technology does evolve. But it's always helpful to have in-depth perspectives.

Congratulations to the Zig team. Zig's a very interesting project for language mavens. A question - what does the Zig ecosystem look like?

Are there strong products and parsers, services, actor models, interfacing with Middleware written in Zig? Or is the theme - drop to C based interfaces to those products? What's the zen of Zig say?

What are some notable wide use applications, solutions written in Zig?

An intriguing idea. Very nice. Will study further.

Same here! Made the journey from QEdit to Vim to UltraEdit to Notepad++. These days I'm dabbling in Emacs and Notepad++.

Emacs for Org-mode - arguably the most revelatory single piece of software I've seen in 40 years of working with Software. Notepad++ is a safety crutch that I haven't let go.

Visual Code is OK. Not exciting though lots of respect for it.

UtlraEdit's smoothness, speed and polish are highly commendable. Just don't have the need to spend on the annual licensing for it.

I'd say that you idea of Domaim is unduly restrictive. Yes, in an e-commerce or a merchandise based business, Products and Orders are domain objects. But services and ports and interfaces are every bit as real from a complementary domain - the domain Of software design and Technology Operations.

We are at historically bad levels of Interoperability because we don't really engineer software for management. We just call it an implementation detail.

Domains overlap. An e-commerce system will have a domain perspective to Infrastructure and the Infrastructure provider will have domain perspective on a Tennant like a specific e-commerce system. Bother are valid. There's real value in reducing the impedance between those views

The vision and model here seem excellent. Jolie as a language seems to have strong roots in academia and Europe. The one alarm is the lack of information on real world use, case studies and non-trivial adopters or users.

Anyone know of any large scale use of Jolie?

This is a silly.comment unless you know the application and the domain. Excellent answer on all the things the go into an Internet facing app. Plus Education is a tricky area because the outcomes are complex - what are the paths to a certificate, diploma, certificate. Khan Academy probably wound up writing the original Python code themselves instead of a COTS product.

I'm not a big fan of LOC as a metric. You certainly can't compare languages. But the point that this is a large app and the builders are happy with their product and choice says a lot.

YMMV

Huh - if you work in this domain - how is Visio very expensive? It's a few hundred dollars for things that save you tens and hundreds of work. It also has an unbelievably rich extensibility model - almost too complex.

The bigger issue is a) it doesn't do many of the things that we as architecture and design work requires - declarative rules (Component A --> connects to --> Component B) - enforce this rule without my having to worry about arrow drawing b) Version management c) Visio's default of a printed page as Canvas is incredibly cumbersome - we want big canvases in which we can zoom in / out liberally for large diagrams (hundreds of components).

It's more a question that it's not really an architecture tool for large systems. It's a general purpose tool that we've attempted to manipulate. So it doesn't work well for in-depth uses.

The Icepanel.io seems like an excellent start to an interesting project. But seems very early/alpha.

Key features - be able to distinguish between connections flowing into a hub (Outlines); have bi-directional flows to illustrate different data exchanges; colours; lack of due to huge Pro sign up ad in Diagrams view are all hinderances.

YES - absolutely. I think the personal and societal benefits to health and well being stand out. Less so perhaps if you're younger with lesser responsibilities to families and elder care.

I've tried other arrangements - longer hrs/day in return for 1 day off every 2 weeks. Worked well and the benefits are such that at this stage 80% of salary for fewer hours would be a good arrangement.

The real danger is the unstated but practical assumption that you're on the book for fewer hours and lower pay but in real life expected to continue to do 50, 60, more hours week because of culture and events.

Thanks for sharing. Very interesting. I wasn't aware of Cranelift. Will read.

What are people's thoughts on the current state of the art in using Cofe generation for higher level and lower level development?

Yes - it would seem so. The support for custom run times is interesting and seems like an improvement. Not sure Jupyter notebooks do that - certainly not for all supported kernels.