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It's hard to argue your "fact", especially against such an insufferable amount of smugness and causal reductionism. I find it not amusing that people can assum

by jmagoon 11y ago

It's hard to argue your "fact", especially against such an insufferable amount of smugness and causal reductionism. I find it not amusing that people can assume things they don't participate in are simple, stupid, and trivial. It's the same type of intellectual closemindedness that leads to major problems in human existence. It's a mindset that deliberately ignores complexity in order to justify preexisting belief and prop up belief as truth while protecting the ego. Personally, I enjoy working on hardware and working on distrubted systems. I also like building things that look beautiful. But to each their own, I guess.

olalonde 11y ago
There was an article on HN recently which I believe applies equally well to technical stacks: http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/18/why-big-companies-keep-failing-the-stack-fallacy/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/18/why-big-companies-keep-fail...
- jmagoon 11y ago
  Which sources nobel laureate Philip Anderson in the paper "More Is Different": "The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe...The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles." https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/~wktse/Welcome_files/More_Is_Different_Phil_Anderson.pdf https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/~wktse/Welcome_files/More_Is_Diff...
  - sklogic 11y ago
    Kolmogorov and Chaitin got a different view on this matter. This is actually what science is all about - finding an information in data, or, in other words, measuring the complexity. If you can reduce a complex set of data to a simple algorithm, then this algorithm is all the knowledge that is there, and the rest is just a noise. By definition. What Phil Anderson is talking about is a different kind of complexity, which is sort of irrelevant in this context. Yes, knowing the fundamental laws won't help you to explain, say, a protein folding, not without hundreds of years of a CPU time. But it does not matter. It does not make this science more "complex".
sklogic 11y ago
> people can assume things they don't participate in are simple, stupid, and trivial I do not "assume" that web technologies are stupid. I know they're stupid and I can prove they're stupid. Where shall I start? Javascript? All of the W3C issued mess? All the damage left from the browser wars? This guy said it all much better than I can: http://beauty-of-imagination.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/tcltk-vs-web-we-should-abandon-web.html http://beauty-of-imagination.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/tcltk-vs... When you have something to compare with, something as simple and beautiful as Tk, all the complexity of the modern web looks like a steaming pile of stupidity.
- jmagoon 11y ago
  That was an interesting read. I'm not familiar with Tcl/Tk. To help me understand, are you saying that the "web" should remain as purely a hypertext platform and that any application should be built using something like Tcl/Tk? E.g. a program provided by your bank to interact with your accounts? If these are pure applications, how are they discoverable in the way that search engines make the internet so useful? Do you find anything useful in the compile to js (or even html/css) world like Elm, PureScript, etc.? Do these provide clean wrappers to broken systems? I certainly find the entire front end world (html/css/js and various compilation of those) painful, and I would definitely enjoy a better paradigm.
  - sklogic 11y ago
    It must be possible to keep the current structure (some form of a DOM plus a scripting language with a full access to it), and still have a dead simple Tk-like event model around it. It's all about overengineering. Tk demonstrated that all this stuff is fundamentally easy. But the modern web technologies are overengineered to such an extend that anyone touching them draw back in fear. So, yes, now the only way to put all that complexity under control is exactly this - things that compile to js (+ css + html), that can hide the overengineered parts of the underlying ecosystem and only expose simple, obvious interfaces. PureScript is a right thing.

by jmagoon 11y ago

olalonde 11y ago

There was an article on HN recently which I believe applies equally well to technical stacks: http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/18/why-big-companies-keep-failing-the-stack-fallacy/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/18/why-big-companies-keep-fail...

jmagoon 11y ago
Which sources nobel laureate Philip Anderson in the paper "More Is Different": "The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe...The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles." https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/~wktse/Welcome_files/More_Is_Different_Phil_Anderson.pdf https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/~wktse/Welcome_files/More_Is_Diff...
- sklogic 11y ago
  Kolmogorov and Chaitin got a different view on this matter. This is actually what science is all about - finding an information in data, or, in other words, measuring the complexity. If you can reduce a complex set of data to a simple algorithm, then this algorithm is all the knowledge that is there, and the rest is just a noise. By definition. What Phil Anderson is talking about is a different kind of complexity, which is sort of irrelevant in this context. Yes, knowing the fundamental laws won't help you to explain, say, a protein folding, not without hundreds of years of a CPU time. But it does not matter. It does not make this science more "complex".

sklogic 11y ago

> people can assume things they don't participate in are simple, stupid, and trivial I do not "assume" that web technologies are stupid. I know they're stupid and I can prove they're stupid. Where shall I start? Javascript? All of the W3C issued mess? All the damage left from the browser wars? This guy said it all much better than I can: http://beauty-of-imagination.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/tcltk-vs-web-we-should-abandon-web.html http://beauty-of-imagination.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/tcltk-vs... When you have something to compare with, something as simple and beautiful as Tk, all the complexity of the modern web looks like a steaming pile of stupidity.

jmagoon 11y ago
That was an interesting read. I'm not familiar with Tcl/Tk. To help me understand, are you saying that the "web" should remain as purely a hypertext platform and that any application should be built using something like Tcl/Tk? E.g. a program provided by your bank to interact with your accounts? If these are pure applications, how are they discoverable in the way that search engines make the internet so useful? Do you find anything useful in the compile to js (or even html/css) world like Elm, PureScript, etc.? Do these provide clean wrappers to broken systems? I certainly find the entire front end world (html/css/js and various compilation of those) painful, and I would definitely enjoy a better paradigm.
- sklogic 11y ago
  It must be possible to keep the current structure (some form of a DOM plus a scripting language with a full access to it), and still have a dead simple Tk-like event model around it. It's all about overengineering. Tk demonstrated that all this stuff is fundamentally easy. But the modern web technologies are overengineered to such an extend that anyone touching them draw back in fear. So, yes, now the only way to put all that complexity under control is exactly this - things that compile to js (+ css + html), that can hide the overengineered parts of the underlying ecosystem and only expose simple, obvious interfaces. PureScript is a right thing.