matthewtoast

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31.
by matthewtoast 10y ago
Nice work! I've been looking for something like this. I hope to see more tools in this vein emerge from the JavaScript ecosystem - tools that aren't afraid to make some well-reasoned assumptions for the sake of a more minimal inte
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by matthewtoast 10y ago
Imagine you invited me over to your home for dinner, and you offered me a glass of tap water. And I said, "No thank you, I don't drink tap water." Would you have any questions for me? Would you feel strange about drinking the
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by matthewtoast 10y ago
The "other kind of fatigue" mentioned is that we have an overabundance of tools/interest in making ourselves more prolific, but a scarcity of tools/interest in improving our code's quality. We chase immediate produc
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by matthewtoast 11y ago
I would at least be careful using Redux to push realtime animation state changes. Returning a fresh application state every 16.6 milliseconds means a lot of object allocations, which means garbage collection, which means UI freezes turning
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by matthewtoast 11y ago
I agree that big, deep stuff like architecture and abstractions can be daunting, but I wouldn't be quick to dismiss style and formatting as mere nitpicks. Code clutter can have an outsize effect downwind of those who create it. A codeb
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by matthewtoast 11y ago
Code clutter is much more consequential than it gets credit for. Poor formatting, inconsistent whitespace, snips of unused code, and misleading filenames are speedbumps (or worse, spike strips!) that a developer is going to hit every time t
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by matthewtoast 11y ago
Nice work! I'm really happy to see this kind of restrained approach to introducing React. I wish it had been the first tutorial I encountered. I hope it inspires other teachers. Tutorials should be about teaching others. But many tutor
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by matthewtoast 11y ago
Maybe part of the "JavaScript fatigue" is that, as each shiny new toy rolls in, the ensuing commentary immediately elevates it to The One Solution We've All Been Waiting For --- followed just as quickly by No This Is The Most
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by matthewtoast 11y ago
Are you aware of any existing, serious effort to build such a thing? I love the idea - and it strongly appeals to me as a developer - but what would make the average user switch to it?
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by matthewtoast 11y ago
That title I would call sensationalist. Our tooling choices don't have to take this king-of-the-molehill, all or nothing, "did X just kill Y?" extreme stance. (I thought the article made some reasonable points, though.) With
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by matthewtoast 11y ago
The God Delusion gives a handful of arguments both for and against the existence of God. Your summary comes across as a straw-man, a misrepresentation that's supposed to convince us that the real argument is poor. Where did he make thi
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by matthewtoast 11y ago
Via Wikipedia, science is defined as: > a systematic enterprise that creates, builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. The key word being "testable". The fallibilit
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by matthewtoast 11y ago
Very cool. It's amazing to me that the developer got it under 1KB. This is the first I've heard of that project, but based on a quick skim, I can point out a few differences between it and Runiq - although the two are certainly si
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by matthewtoast 11y ago
Runiq is my attempt to tie together a few ideas from Lisp with some features of JavaScript inside an interpreted language. Syntax, flexibility, data-as-code DNA would come from Lisp, while a JS backing could give reach and a big module ecos
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Show HN: Runiq, a little Lisp-inspired language that runs on JavaScript(github.com)
24 points by matthewtoast 11y ago|3 comments
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by matthewtoast 11y ago
I agree and that's what I like to do too when these issues come up (time permitting). Still, I hope my basic point came through: the small modules approach isn't a panacea; it can add its own set of problems; "monoliths"
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by matthewtoast 11y ago
Correct and I shouldn't have mentioned XHR -- it was just a fake example for the sake of my point. I just went back and ninja-edited my original comment above to call it "ABCXYZ" so that it's clear I didn't intend t
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by matthewtoast 11y ago
I'll share a thought or two while I wait for $ npm install to finish. I agree that other ecosystems could learn a lot from the Node philosophy. And in general I enjoy working with the technology. But it's not all roses. In an ecos
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by matthewtoast 11y ago
The article's main point is solid: Learning to code is hard mostly because coding is hard -- not just because there aren't enough learning opportunities and not just because we aren't welcoming enough. And learn-to-code merch
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by matthewtoast 11y ago
I've been looking for something like this. This cleanly solves the basic (majority) case and doesn't try to boil the ocean. It looks like it would be easy to build a higher-level API with more features on top of this, which is gre
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by matthewtoast 11y ago
I'm not the parent commenter but here are a few that come to my mind: - Functions - Abstraction - Modularity - Design patterns - Programming paradigms - DSLs - Conventions for naming/formatting/a
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by matthewtoast 13y ago
Author. Looking back at this project now, I think the real takeaway is that the act of programming can teach. (Even when you program like I do.) I built this to learn concepts that had always frustrated me in school: fundamental math that I
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by matthewtoast 13y ago
Mentioned in this article is "The Third Culture" by John Brockman of Edge.org. That book is worth a read, even nearing 20 years in publication. It introduces the ideas of several fascinating scientists (among them Dan Dennett and
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by matthewtoast 15y ago
Hi, Matthew Trost (author) here. I'm actually a bit mortified that this found its way onto Hacker News, as now my admittedly bush-league JavaScript code is getting the brickbats. :-) In truth, I made it mainly as a practice exercise: code,