gjulianm

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211.
by gjulianm 4y ago
Point still stands if you call it a "simpler technology project". It's not about the tech, it's about the community, and communities are far harder to predict and manage than a rocket or a car.
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by gjulianm 4y ago
Well, I think the issue is precisely considering Twitter a "simple technology project", and it's the same mistake that Musk does. Twitter isn't a "software and servers business" as he said. Twitter is a social
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by gjulianm 4y ago
> What Twitter is doing is to scale down first This is not a trivial task. With such a heavy reduction and how entire teams have been completely decimated, there will be a lot of lost knowledge. I'm sure there will even be cases whe
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by gjulianm 4y ago
> Some people decide to learn it anyway, and quickly (within under a day) realise it is actually simple, readable, and easy to use! Do you think all people who decide to learn it anyway end up with the same conclusions? > That is why
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by gjulianm 4y ago
> Realistically most problems that show up by themselves (ie not caused by bad code) Well that goes the first assumption. > or scaling events that reach a tipping point Such as having applications running without restarts for a long t
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by gjulianm 4y ago
For one, the distribution patterns of Whatsapp are far more simple than Twitter. Whatsapp is mostly one-to-one and then one-to-some with groups (with those groups being limited to as little as 100 users at some point, the current 1024 user
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by gjulianm 4y ago
> It's a micro blogging platform with a fairly simplistic feature set. Yeah, you can do Twitter on a weekend… if you only use it yourself and a few friends. But we are talking about a platform with millions of users, all of which wa
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by gjulianm 4y ago
That’s very naive. We’re talking about a distributed system with thousands of servers, with code from people who might not even work there anymore. Yeah, maybe if a server gets a high disk usage alert because of runaway logs you might fix i
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by gjulianm 4y ago
I have listened and to me it always seems to come down to “you make reasonable points but it’s not a problem for me so it’s not a problem”. And I think there’s a lot of implicit bias when people who like APL say it’s perfectly readable. Giv
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by gjulianm 4y ago
No, I don’t think APL is a good mathematical notation. For starters, symbols having different meanings depending on whether they are dyadic or monadic is fairly confusing. That’s made worse by the lack of clear delimitations of arguments of
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by gjulianm 4y ago
> It's really unlikely (imo impossible) you'll forget what a symbol means in APL or K etc if you program in it reasonably often. Well, of course, if you’re always practicing the same thing you’re unlikely to forget it. That’s n
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by gjulianm 4y ago
But there is a difference between “verbose code” and “adding comments”, isn’t it? There’s always the issue with comment-code disagreement. But mainly the point is about the language itself and the prioritization of terseness over unambiguit
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by gjulianm 4y ago
Usually hard to learn and hard to use are very correlated concepts. If something is hard to learn, it usually requires more mental energy to read. For an example closer to APL, mathematical notation is harder to read than the verbose equiva
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by gjulianm 4y ago
If APL actually followed mathematical notation it would be extremely verbose. Most math books, articles and explanations use quite a lot of words, far more than symbols, precisely to allow them to be “read by humans”. Those are mostly used
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by gjulianm 4y ago
Oh, that’s… not confusing at all.
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by gjulianm 4y ago
Indeed, this podcast seems to do a decent job. It was more an off topic remark about how inaccesible podcasts usually are for actually finding information.
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by gjulianm 4y ago
I don’t have the studies at hand but I don’t think it’s such a difficult notion to accept. For starters, there are more symbols than letters, which means you have more things to learn. But the important thing is how symbols/words are p
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by gjulianm 4y ago
I mean, by the same measure, spaghetti code is not spaghetti code if it makes sense in your head. But we all understand that there are certain qualities of code that make it “spaghetti” or not independently of your understanding of it. Simi
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by gjulianm 4y ago
Unless you have perfect memory and perfect recall, it’s very possible you’ll forget what a certain symbol meant. Specially if you read the code at a time you’re not being specially bright (say, Friday noon after an stressful week). Much har
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by gjulianm 4y ago
> (Or at least, the idea is, do you know what dialect it uses? Where's the code from?) From Wikipedia page of K programming language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_(programming_language) > filter(lambda x:
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by gjulianm 4y ago
> I've talked to plenty of people whose eyes light up when you tell them 5 + 1 2 3 just works in the language. This is literally "people who like it say they like it". It's like saying that the value proposition of Py
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by gjulianm 4y ago
> Just as much so as սուրճ or コーヒー or קפה. But far less than the equivalent code in, say, Python, or C, or any other language. That's the point. > What do you think makes podcasts inaccessible? Lack of visible, searchable structu
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by gjulianm 4y ago
> Yet millions of Japanese people are fairly adept at reading it. Yes, because it's their native language. Doesn't say anything about the difficulty of it. My mothertongue is Spanish and I'm fairly adept at using it, and s
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by gjulianm 4y ago
> It's pretty obvious you've bounced off due to a surface-level dislike for the syntax and are guessing about any other features it may have. I'm not saying APL doesn't have those features. I'm making examples of
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by gjulianm 4y ago
> I think the difficulty of this is overstated. I have my degree in mathematics and I've used my fair share of symbols. It's been a consistent finding in articles, books, classes and peer conversations that symbols are not that
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by gjulianm 4y ago
> But readability is in the eyes of the beholder, Unfortunately, given that the program is going to be read by people, what we care is about what the beholders say. > just because I can't read Japanese does not make Japanese unre
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by gjulianm 4y ago
> Also, once you understand the rules of these languages when parsing expressions (which is always right-to-left unless the case of a parenthesis) and all the symbols, readability become less of a problem. This is a very limited view abo
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by gjulianm 4y ago
Because the occupation of Crimea gave Russia the idea that an invasion and war in Ukraine would fail to cause a significant reaction, and the war in Ukraine has been highly disruptive. Note that "react appropriately" doesn't
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by gjulianm 4y ago
Without going into the core of whether FP is better or not, if OOP/imperative is what 99.9% of people start with, you'll expect to have both FP advocates and skeptics coming from that background. It's just that FP skeptics ha
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by gjulianm 4y ago
What are the changes that Mercurial has? I've read many times that Mercurial is easier but I've never seen the reasons. The times I've used mercurial (mostly to download a repo) it doesn't look that different, and other

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