winkelwagen

This quite touched me, I love libraries and when I traveled through the NA I often went in every big city to take some time from all the travel madness. The contrast between the libraries in Toronto and Seattle was quite stark. You could see the diffence between visitors, and there were a ton more homeless people in Seattle.

At the time i didn’t think much of it, but I was reflecting back on it after a awesome episode of 99% invisible (palaces of the people). The guest talked about how libraries changed and have a different function. And the importance of something he called social infrastructure as something that doesn’t get seen as important as let’s say, roads and electricity.

It’s Very related to what the author of the article is saying. We don’t nearly appreciate enough how libraries function in society. When we keep looking at as a buildings where you can get books and use the internet we totally miss the human side of it and if we don’t equip the people with the skills or experience to deal with it. They are going to be burned out.

Hopefully we can recognize the importance libraries have and support them in a way it benefits whole cities.

It's a fun tradition. We like to complain every opportunity we can about the dutch railways. But it could be a lot worse. Traveling on that Sunday by train is always fun, because it feels that with a lot of companion travels you share this love for books, creating a different atmosphere from traveling different days.

"Boekenweek" is one of the most memorable "commercial celebration" weeks for me at least, remember fun activities at libraries when I was a kid.

Just to get my 5 cents in (as an ex-barista), you can get the best (single origin) coffee's in the world for between 8-12 euro's for 250 grams.(there are more expensive Geisha coffee's, but that's really hi-end) Lets assume you use 18 grams of coffee for a cup. That yields you at least 13 cups of coffee (from the 250 grams. Raw resources would cost you between 0.62 to 0.92 euro a cup.

Manual ceramic grinder between 30 - 45 euro's Aeropress about 35 euro.

Both of them last at least 5 years.

That is quite a bit less than the 5 dollars. Yes it takes you about 5 min to brew a cup. But from having worked in a espresso bar for many years, during morning rush hour, you would be happy to get your coffee in less than that.

I think the article is interesting, because it deals with culture. First is the, go buy a cup of coffee at starbucks culture, and pay premium for the coffee. What I've noticed from working it's that people have their rituals when it comes to coffee. It's about getting fuel to get to work. It's about taking a break from the environment they were in 5 min before. It's about comfort.

That is what you get for the 5 dollars in the article. It's not only about the coffee, it's about taking a break, rewarding yourself.

If you can find a way to get the above pleasures from home-brewed coffee, or stop drinking take-out coffee. Great! But I agree that only seeing it "5 dollars not used for your retirement" is really short-sighted. There is a deeper problem if that is the difference between you able to retire when you're 65.

I've really enjoyed

https://www.manning.com/books/get-programming-with-f-sharp

Think it gives a good overview of the language and it's easy to read. Considering that after a day of working I'm not that sharp anymore it was a good read for me.

Also mentioned in the article, but Scott Wlaschin book really show the strengths of the language. Most of his stuff is great actually, but his website (FSharp for fun and profit) is not the most coherent read, I love using it as reference. I also recommend his conference talks, it has quite a bit wide range of topics.

https://pragprog.com/book/swdddf/domain-modeling-made-functi...

There are also few courses on pluralsight, but cannot remember which ones I really enjoyed.

I've been diving into f# in 2018. I came from c# world, and it really made me a better developer. Really recommend the language. Think it has a great balance between functional programming and OO if it is really needed. I really do think it's easier to write better .net programs with f# then c#. Think this article point out some great stuff.

That said, it's quite hard to actually get to use it in production at the places I've worked. My college's are scared of it (that is pretty reasonable, considering c# is a good stable language and my team is confident that what we develop will make the customers happy).

One thing that makes me hesitant to really try to get this adopted in my company is the tooling. My experience hasn't been great. It works, but it has been pretty unreliable. Some documentation was more focused on the "pre dotnet core" era of f#. I know i've been spoiled, but stuff like debugging, tooling and refactor tools can't touch Visual Studio.

There are some decent options, Jetbrains Rider and VS Code are a couple of them.

Small things, like creating a record type while typing is inconvenient.

type Customer = { Id: int; Name: string; Age : int; }

While typing an instance of the record

let c1 : Customer = {Id = 1;

gives you a bunch of compiler warnings, I know I'm not done, Compiler knows there are more properties. But without looking at the record type it's hard to see what order things are.

I'm not sure if this is just OCaml thing, but C kind of languages are better at predicting what you want to create. It's weird that with the very predictable Hindley–Milner type system it can't provide the developer with good information.

I know it's a small thing, but when working with large projects, I don't want to look everything up, I have the compiler have my back.

I'll really think Microsoft should help the Fsharp Foundation more, seeing what an amazing language f# is. But it really could use some more love from MS. Perhaps they should help the community be more confident that they can solve the business problems they run into. I hope Microsoft would say: "Hey this is how you create The Boring Line Of Business App, with all the bells and whistles you normally need". From how to deal with Dependencies in large projects (No, a couple of (amazing) conference video's of Mark Seemann do not give me enough confident that after 6 months of development it still is manageable)

Until the Tooling is done, I just keep enjoying the language and learn how to become a better developer with it.

From what I understood is that not every Starbucks needs to be profitable. Some are insanely profitable, while others are just branding and marketing places that sell coffee. Of course there is a difference between not being profitable and bulking up insane losses each day, I think that is something Starbucks does well.