zak_mc_kracken

> Instead, we're left with a slow OS

To make that claim, you will have to show another mobile JVM-based OS that's faster than Android.

> They wrote their own runtime -- which, to this day, is at a great performance disadvantage compared to OpenJDK

This is completely incorrect. OpenJDK is absolutely not optimized for mobile and it would have been a disaster on mobile. A lot of the Dalvik runtime and libraries have been rewritten with performance and memory in mind.

> Imagine that swift becomes a super dominant language both for client and server, but that half of the ecosystem still remains locked by Apple

Isn't that exactly the situation with C# and .net?

C# is kinda open source but the runtime is completely Microsoft's. Nobody seems to make a big deal of it, and C# developers seem pretty happy with their platform overall.

The reason why Google went with writing their own version of Java has nothing to do with avoiding the GPL and everything to do with avoiding to have to pay money to Sun.

> I'm often pointing out in my recent talks how complex and treacherous the Open Source and Free Software political climate became in the last decade.

The climate would be a lot more relaxed if the open source community picked spokespersons who are less fanatical and a bit more level headed than the current crop of leaders (among which rms, esr and the author of this strongly biased article).

> At a certain point, your resume should speak for itself. The fact that experienced engineers with impressive resumes are put through these types of interviews is insulting and frustrating to the interviewees.

Only to bad interviewees.

You'd be shocked to hear the number of impressive résumés I have seen who turned out to be absolute no-hires after 20mn on a white board. By "absolute no hire", I mean the kind where some of the interviewers tell me in the debriefing "I will quit if we hire this guy".

Not all excellent engineers have impressive résumés but they all share a common characteristic in my experience: they all really enjoyed working on the problems I asked them to solve on the white board. I even had some of them be disappointed when we ran out of time because we were having interesting conversations about the problem.

> Not in a language with decent abstraction capabilities.

My question has nothing to do with the language. You are adding a relatively advanced construct which requires a lot of prior knowledge to understand: Free monad, monad, applicative functor, functor, monoid. Then you need to understand the laws that monads must obey, which are not enforced by the type system. Before you get there, a passing grasp with Haskell and higher kinded types will help, and some basics in category theory too.

Saying that adding the free monad doesn't have any cost in understanding is very naïve. You forgot how long it took you to reach that understanding.

Adding the Free monad to this approach doesn't add any cost in understandability?

> It's a 30 year old language

20.

There is no opening of control, just opening of source.

You can be sure Apple will remain the exclusive ruler of what goes into Swift.

> I'm saying this because it'll be a huge benefit to Android. reply

How so?

The language has a weaker type system than Java, doesn't support exceptions and requires error checking every other line, has very poor tool support (because the compiler was not designed with IDE's in mind).

Except maybe add a few developers who refused to write code on Android because of Java, I really don't see what Go would bring to Android.

> It's frustrating to work on projects that are cancelled,

I'm going to guess you're fairly junior in the profession?

The more time you spend writing code, the more you realize that most of your projects will never, ever ship. That's just how the gig goes.

And it's okay. As an engineer, you should be looking forward more to the journey and how much you'll learn working on that project than anything else. Once in a while, you'll ship and you'll feel pride knowing that millions of people are using your code, but that's the exception, not the rule.

Enjoy the journey.

> Apple went through that mode and was within a few weeks of dying. Luckily they debugged themselves.

Not really, Bill Gates rescued them.

It's ONE way to go. There are others.

Sum types supported in the language such as in Ceylon is another one.

And yet another one is safe dereferencing operators (?.) such as in Kotlin.

Still looking for them ;)

Have you looked at the new generation languages on the JVM such as Kotlin or Ceylon?

> But by all means, Erlang embodies many OO design principles

That's interesting because Armstrong himself thinks that OO sucks:

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/OO_programming/why_oo_suck...

Nobody follows Kay's definition of OOP.

And I bet you're going to say "But he coined the term!". Yes. He's still making up his own definition twenty years after the industry gave its own, so whatever he says on the topic is moot.

> Erlang is probably the only true object-oriented language.

And it's true because its creator says so right here, in this link!

In my experience, Go is a lot more attractive as an upgrade from Ruby or Python. It's a very steep downgrade from Java on all points imaginable: type system, exceptions, genericity, garbage collector and runtime, tooling, IDE's, etc...

I feel the other way around.

I'd rather die while I'm alive (doing or living through something really exciting) than completing something exciting, then entering the dawn of life realizing that I'll never do something as exciting again, and then dying.

I wanna die in the middle of having fun, not in a retirement home.

You seem to think that "pro-privacy" is equivalent to "don't collect any private information".

It's not. Not at all.

> The idea that all these companies want private info and thus are all going to be evil is cynical.

"cynical: believing that people are motivated by self-interest"

In a free trade, capitalistic society, companies are by definition cynical, because the ones that are not go bankrupt.

> Apple is different because for nearly 40 years they have been honest and forthright and treating people different. Google says "don't be evil" and then goes out and does evil. Apple doesn't say it, they just don't do it.

I was with you until that last part. I would totally be on board with you if you say Google and Apple are both equally evil because they are looking after their own interest. The fact you think that google is doing evil and Apple is not makes me think you're a bit too far gone on the fanboy side.

> Apple has a vested interest in not collecting, analysing

Do you seriously believe that? They are doing this non stop. Not a month goes by without my iPad requesting my iCloud password so it can back up my entire tablet, even though I've repeatedly declined to provide it.

They are collecting and analysing PII data all the time. They need it because it's an arms' race. They will only stop if compelled to do so by governments or by a privacy scandal.

> "We" are not all prepared to hand over private information.

Unless you tell me you never, ever use a search engine (not just Google, could be Bing or Yahoo or whatever), I am pretty sure you are in denial about that compromise. You are giving away private information all the time, you just don't realize it, or you are okay with the fact that "Getting good search results for this query is worth Google logging my IP".

As magicalist points out in his response, you are taking Schmidt's quote completely out of context. Don't feel bad, you're not the only one.

Schmidt (and Google) are extremely pro-privacy and against sharing information with the government. Google must have like ten lawsuits going on at all times on the entire planet trying to fight intrusive data request from governments. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to prevent governments from gaining access to their data.

At least with Android being open source, they have a reasonable track record of transparency (obviously, that doesn't apply to their search logs, which are still proprietary).

But it's still mostly bullshit, though, especially coming from a company using closed source software for most of its products. Nobody can really tell what they are collecting, what they do with it and how much of it they share with third parties (including governments).

If you google a bit, I bet you will find similar speeches from every single big company CEO these past years: "Privacy is our number one priority, blah blah blah".

If you think Apple is different just because Tim Cook has great speech writers, you're being naive.

All these companies are in it to win your private information, and we are all prepared to give them some of our private information if what we get in return is worth it. That's the game, simple.

> And yes there are pages on the internet that are older than 2006, so what? No one goes "Pffft.. this is 300 years old.." when they come across Newton's Principa.

The difference is that programming languages evolve all the time. Having such an old page still up and promoted to the front page of Hacker News tells everyone that OCaml hasn't evolved since 2006.

This is just a list of resources to learn OCaml, there is nothing about convincing skeptical people here.

Also, this page is almost ten years old.

Not sure how this kind of post ever makes it to the front page.

> this social taboo is, to some degree, absurd

This social taboo is pretty much exclusively limited to the US. The rest of the world is a lot less freaked out about genitalia in general.

Allow me to translate:

> Twitter is using your app graph to help build a more tailored experience for you on Twitter.

The more we can prove to advertisers we deliver targetted content, the more they will pay us.

> Improved “who to follow” suggestions that share similar interests

We will continue to suggest you to follow people who paid us but they are more likely to actually be remotely interesting to you (no promise, though).

> Adding Tweets, accounts, or other content to your timeline that we think you'll find especially interesting

See first item.

> Showing you more relevant promoted content.

See first item.