• 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle
  • S-expressions are a hack because the Lisp devs didn’t know how to make an actual compiler, and instead had the users write the syntax tree for them. (For legal reasons I am being facetious).

    Just for anyone thinking you are serious; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression I love how S-expression existed.

    McCarthy had planned to develop an automatic Lisp compiler (LISP 2) using M-expressions as the language syntax and S-expressions to describe the compiler’s internal processes. Stephen B. Russell read the paper and suggested to him that S-expressions were a more convenient syntax. Although McCarthy disapproved of the idea, Russell and colleague Daniel J. Edwards hand-coded an interpreter program that could execute S-expressions.[2] This program was adopted by McCarthy’s research group, establishing S-expressions as the dominant form of Lisp.





  • I think the message that want to be passed by this article is probably pro-oil industry. It gives a false impression that we could tackle ecology not by changing our habits but just be mad at a few billionaires. And this is factually false.

    Unlike wealth pollution is more equitably shared among people. Here in order to demultiply the calculated pollution of billionaires they introduced thier industry and the pollution of their employees somehow.

    And while it is expected these people pollute more. Getting rid of them will not reduce the pollution as one could expect.

    unfortunately everyone, even not the wealthiest will need to change how they live to have a visible impact on pollution. broadly speeking, not just CO2, as we have a lot more ecological problems than global warming. Note the focus on global warming alone is also a strategy to hide the real changes that need to ne made in order to prevent humanity to hurt itself too much by destroying its own ecosystem.

    Edit: As I am being downvoted it looks people probably misunderstood my message. I would gladly get rid of super rich people. But while this would help, we would all still need to make efforts. Until we accept that we should change our way of life, we will not solve our balance with our ecosystem.







  • I don’t see how this could be positive for any Software developer in the long run. I totally see how this could be positive for CEO/CTO, Project Managers, in the long run, and I see a few short term advantages for Software developers.

    Let’s be clear, I saw that coming since Microsoft bought Github, and I am scared by the direction this is taking. The end goal is to move more and more control and power to non-software people about Software development.

    By forcing every developer to not use their own tools this will have a lot of advantage for CEO/CTOs but this is terrible for software developers:

    1. telemetry: they will try to find a formula to assess who are the best performer in a team. And as with SEO, any formula could be gamed, the best at this game, will not be the best software developers, but the one that will learn how to cheat.
    2. global team tooling enforcement: vim vs emacs etc… ? Forget about it, the only way to work on a project will be via this unique allowed editor.
    3. assets protection: impossible to download the code on your local computer to use external tools on it. The only way to have analysis tools will be via these “allowed” analysis tools. This will make code analysis and experimentation a lot more difficult.
    4. Locked by promoting vendor-specific applications. As you will focus to make your code/app/product work only for Google Cloud for example, you will naturally use Google-Cloud-only features that will make your code difficult (or impossible) to move to another Cloud provider, or god-forbid, host your product on a non-cloud or private made cloud.

    And I can think of other possible drawbacks but my comment is already long enough.



  • I don’t see how this could be prevented.

    There are already many “small web” movements. With different proposals. Like gemini, sub-set of currently supported web standards (typically no-js, no-css, no POST, etc…)

    But the monetized web is doomed to reach a point were it will be controlled in such a way that you will not be able to block ads, not be able to hide your pseudonymous identity.

    I remember reading an article many years ago about the cat and mouse game between ads publishers and ad-blockers. The conclusion were that in the end, ads blocker will lose the final war. And with these kind of system we are closer and closer to reach it.

    I think we need to collectively find a way to have sub-nets. For example declare that our website conform to certain sub-net properties.

    • no-ads
    • privacy (no cookie/no js/no user-agent header/no canvas, no css)
    • etc…

    The small webs are different for everyone. It would be very nice if we could put an HTML header that would list which small webs pattern this page is compatible with. And have a browser that would adapt to your preferences and also a way to filter your small-web preferences in search engine.

    The closest to this we have today is probably gemini. But this a very small but friendly web. I am sure we could find other solutions to create an alternative “respecting his users” web.


  • As you only mention git and not any git hosting. I would say you could easily use git hooks. Fir you and probably ask everyone in your team to install the same git hooks to have a chance to review changes before they are commited.

    For my team there is an init-git-repo.sh shell script in our repository. When you execute it, it will install all the git-hooks fir your local repository.

    You can use them to add checks during commit, merge, etc…

    Edit: I read a bit too fast. As you are using bitbucket there id probably the equivalent of github’s CODEOWNER file as already proposed in another comment.



  • nix does not need nixOS to run but is a complex package manager. At least for me, it doesn’t seem more complex than docker ecosystem.

    I personally use nix to take care of downloading compatible dependencies in isolation for me. And the rest of the code is really, just basic script shell or Makefile too.

    I also could add a fancy mergeShells function I have written in nix to support a docker-compose-like composition of nix-shell files. But you could go a very long way with nix before you even want to do something like this.



  • This was a very great article to read whose title does not make justice to the content.

    I think I kind of dislike the generalization on generation. To me recently there are simply a lot more people that see programming as a job and not as much as a passion.

    I learnt programming as a scientific activity and not as a productive one. So this was driven by creativity. And many in my promotion shared these values. But even in my time, many were just interested in the job. And of course, these people were not as effective. They were mediocre in comparison to people programming in their free time.

    And yes, there is probably a lot more people like this today, in particular in younger generation. But there are still a lot of people programming for fun in their free time in the latest generation. This is just, they are now hidden by the majority of more “normal” people. Because let’s face it. Attitude of people programming during the week-end for super long hours while still programming for work during the week is not sane and abnormal.

    Edit: a big missing part is that passionate dev are not necessarily what company prefer. Because yes, they can do incredible work. But quite often I see company prefer to have few of them and a bunch of more mediocre but reliable developers.