it’s not confusing in this case. the analogy works perfectly.

That’s strange but submission has many links. Mostly a positive. The only negative I had, which is dependent on my goal of industrial adoption, is that Z notation proved too hard to understand in a lot of projects for a lot of programmers. Alternatives, many coming later, also had a better story in automatic verification of code against the specs, generation of code from specs, prover integration, and so on. It’s still interesting for people studying various kinds of logic or historical use of formal methods. I keep Z papers in my collection just in case their work ever has ideas for solving a new problem.

At some point it becomes a fairly straight forward cost/benefit analysis. There are situations where a country wide ban mean the difference between your service being up or down. My organization blacklisted all of China for a while a few years ago because our choices were between our customers in China not being able to access our site and no one in any country being able to access our site.

In our case we had the resources to reverse that ban pretty quickly, but if your service is being DDoS’d from a fairly small geographic region where you have few, if any, legitimate users I can at least sympathize with the decision to forgo traffic from that region entirely rather than make what might be a substantial investment for little return.

If you can’t provide an alternative then I can’t take this seriously, and - until then - I hope that nobody else can either.

What you’ve described is right - it’s not uncommon for companies to snoop on HTTPS traffic by installing their own CA on employees machines. I don’t think it’s a good practice, but it does work in cases where companies insist on doing so, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t work for a caching server.

Rewind 10 or 15 or 20 years and Flash was killing the web, or Javascript, or CSS, or the img tag, or table based layouts, or whatever

Flash and table based layouts really were and, to the extent that you still see them, are either hostile or opaque to people who require something like a screen reader to use a website. Abuse of javascript or images excludes people with low end hardware. Sure you can disable these things but it’s all too common that there is no functional fallback (apparently I can’t even vote or reply here without javascript being on).

Are these things “killing the web” in the sense that the web is going to stop existing as a result? Of course not, but the fact that they don’t render the web totally unusable is not a valid defense of abuses of these practices.

On top of that, nobody’s twisting anybody’s arm to visit “heavy” sites like CNN. If CNN loads too much crap, visit a lighter site.

Or just use http://lite.cnn.io

nobody’s twisting anybody’s arm to visit “heavy” sites like CNN

Exactly. It’s not a “web developers are making the web bloated” problem, it’s a “news organizations are desperate to make money and are convinced that personalized advertising and tons of statistics (Big Data!!) will help them” problem.

Lobsters is light, HN, MetaFilter, Reddit, GitHub, GitLab, personal sites/blogs, various wikis, forums, issue trackers, control panels… Most of the stuff I use is really not bloated.

If you’re reading general world news all day… stop :)

what has failed is individuals resisting in isolation. what we haven’t tried is a unified movement.

Your second paragraph nails it. I bet most people here agree with these rants; but most of the people paying their salaries don’t care.

I suspect that by “working” they mean “being paid to work …”, not “attempting to get paid to work …”, and that is certainly not a right.

I think it’s ironic that participation in the field is described as a privilege rather than a right but later we get

We must make room for people who are not like us to enter our field and succeed there

How on earth can everyone be obligated to be inclusive if no one has a right to be included?

Counterpoint: many people in the industry are “have been programming since elementary school” types. Having the resources for that (usually your own computer to play with, + sometimes access to classes and stuff) wasn’t a given.

Even those who go out of their way to do stuff like coding camps get shunned by the “truly passionate”.

It’s not exactly the original point but accepting people from different backgrounds is important I think.

(As an aside: this is also present in the “show us your GitHub profile” talk. Maybe you have kids and simply don’t have that sort of bandwidth. Or don’t care about making your own web framework?)

Comparing programming to, say, woodworking (another interest of mine, although I do very little woodworking). Comparing the “state of the art” wood working tools from 50 years ago to today, there’s not much that is new. About the only thing I can think of that a woodworker from the late 60s wouldn’t believe are the CNC machines readily available. Even a woodworker from the 1700s would find the motorized tools familiar (if not outright wonderous, but there are hand versions of nearly everything one can find in a modernized wood working shop).

Meanwhile, the “state of the art” computers from the late 60s and today are incomparable. We went from single digit MHz clock rates to single digit GHz clock rates (a thousand fold increase), from memory counted in single digit kilobytes to double digit gigabytes (nearly a hundred thousand increase) and disk storage from possibly triple digit kilobytes to single digit terabytes (about a million-fold I think). The approach you take to a program when you have a 4MHz CPU, 64K RAM and 160K disk is vastly different from a 4GHz CPU, 64G of RAM and a terabyte of diskspace (and in come cases, there are programs you can do that would have been impossible back in the day).

I’m looking over the books that are nearby, and let’s see … I see a few CP/M books (good for historical context but little else these days), The Programmer’s Sourcebook for the PC which was maybe even relevant 15 years ago (and today about as useful as the CP/M books). Oh, there are a few books on the Amiga (brings back fond memories of 25 years ago), OS/2 1.0 (again, historically interesting for a potential rival to Unix back in the day) and a book on the VAX architecture (nice but no longer mainstream as it once was).

To some degree, yes, there is very little that is actually new in the computer industry. Over the past 34 years I’ve seen fads come and go and in one way, it’s the same thing all over again but in another way, it is (annoyingly) different. There are things we can do now that we couldn’t do then and in some ways, things have finally slowed down over the past decade (at least hardware wise—computers haven’t gotten significantly faster or even more capable really) but not everything. The only language I learned in college that I still use is C and even that is becoming more and more unpopular as time goes on (the other languages I learned in college were Fortran, Pascal, Lisp, Prolog and Ada; I can count on one finger the number of times I used those languages and still have a finger left over, but I’m not upset at learning them).

This is exactly the sentiment behind schlub. :)

Anyways, I think you nail it on the head: if I’m reading somebody’s code, I’m probably trying to fix something.

Leaving all of the guts out semi-neatly arranged and with obvious toolmarks (say, copy and pasted blocks, little comments saying what is up if nonobvious, straightforward language constructs instead of clever library usage) makes life a lot easier.

It’s kind of like working on old cars or industrial equipment: things are larger and messier, but they’re also built with humans in mind. A lot of code nowadays (looking at you, Haskell, Rust, and most of the trendy JS frontend stuff that’s in vogue) basically assumes you have a lot of tooling handy, and that you’d never deign to do something as simple as adding a quick patch–this is similar to how new cars are all built with heavy expectation that either robots assemble them or that parts will be thrown out as a unit instead of being repaired in situ.

I think it’s a case of OO in theory and OO as dogma. I’ve worked in fairly object oriented codebases where the class structure really was useful in understanding the code, classes had the responsibilities their names implied and those responsibilities pertained to the problem the total system was trying to solve (i.e. no abstract bean factories, no business or OSS effort has ever had a fundamental need for bean factories).

But of course the opposite scenario has been far more common in my experience, endless hierarchies of helpers, factories, delegates, and strategies, pretty much anything and everything to sweep the actual business logic of the program into some remote corner of the code base, wholly detached from its actual application in the system.

Sometimes we break things apart to make them interchangeable, which can make the parts easier to reason about, but can make their role in the whole harder to grok, depending on what methods are used to wire them back together. The more magic in the re-assembly, the harder it will be to understand by looking at application source alone. Tooling can help make up for disconnects foisted on us in the name of flexibility or unit testing.

Sometimes we break things apart simply to name / document individual chunks of code, either because of their position in a longer ordered sequence of steps, or because they deal with a specific sub-set of domain or platform concerns. These breaks are really in response to the limitations of storing source in 1-dimensional strings with (at best) a single hierarchy of files as the organising principle. Ideally we would be able to view units of code in a collection either by their area-of-interest in the business domain (say, customer orders) or platform domain (database serialisation). But with a single hierarchy, and no first-class implementation of tagging or the like, we’re forced to choose one.

That’s literally true! I am work with some of the old code and things are really easy. There are lots of files but all are divided into such an easy way.

On the other hand, new project that is divided into lots of tier with strick guidelines, it become hard form me to just find a line from where bug occur

I don’t think tree vs string is the difference. For all languages, it is a string of bytes on disk and a tree once parsed in memory. Lisp just has a closer correspondence between tree and string, which makes it cognitively easier. I don’t know where somebody would draw the line that they are considered “homo”, equal.

This. I would gladly pay a one time fee to license software. If my organization can stand up a server for our product we should be able to put up another one for logging/analytics/whatever else gets shoehorned into being a third party service. It shouldn’t be rocket science to sell a piece of software with an install script, or heroku procfile, or whatever config looks like for AWS.

Indeed. I also found the OP’s take on “Americans not wanting to talk politics” to be quite a bit off, at least for me. It’s not really that I don’t want to talk politics. I used to do it a lot. But I got sick of the consequences of voicing my opinions. My own particular views tend to disagree with just about everyone else’s, so it just winds up creating a ton of friction and I end up losing a ton of time to it. One day, I realized that I didn’t want to spend my life that way (I’m certainly not going to change anyone’s mind) so I just mostly shut up about it. Things have been much better.

If I had read the OP’s book, I don’t think I would have been so distracted as to be incapable of learning from them. But I certainly would be skeptical of any future work put out by the OP. The views themselves wouldn’t really bother me, even though I probably disagree with many of them in various ways. (If they did, I’d have a really hard time living in Massachusetts and working in Cambridge.) What would bother me is the fact that the author was so confident in their own opinions, that they would use them in a descriptive context as if they were facts.

N.B. I use the word “politics” here to loosely mean “the discussion of current events in the context of government behavior” or “a controversial topic that divides political party lines” or something like that. I don’t use in the sense of “literally any action, including inaction.” (The latter interpretation exposes a trivial contradiction in the claim that I “mostly shut up about politics.”)

I don’t like unions and I do like guns and I’m very uninterested in being preached to about these things by tech people via a medium that doesn’t allow discussion. I don’t think I’d literally be unable to learn from reading the examples, I just think I would get a different book after a few of them or avoid this book if I knew about them going into things.

I’m inclined to upvote things like this that I think are likely to provoke interesting conversations though for the record.

My politics, too, align with those of the author.

imagine Feuerstein had picked a different set of targets, say he derided victims of police brutality as criminals deserving what they got […] Would you still support his choice of examples under the same principle?

Same as with when encountering any political speech: support everyone’s freedom to choose their political viewpoints and promote them [1], but only actually support politics that make the world better. Argue and rebut where you think it’s important to and/or effective. A.k.a. don’t ban the book, but that doesn’t mean you have to buy it or like it.

AFAICT that’s what most people who disagreed with the actual book did, too.

[1] With the usual dishonourable exception for politics intolerant of other viewpoints, or even entire peoples’ rights. I don’t advocate repressing their speech at every turn, simply because that is not the most effective way to suppress the school of thought, but a tolerant society must reserve that right to prevent the intolerant from abusing it and taking over. See the Paradox of tolerance.

I’m sorry but the only shame is that it took so long. Supporting obsolete versions is expensive, and the decision to move off Python 2 has been made, what, 10 years ago? I don’t know why people insisting on supporting Python 2 expect the entire community to pay the price. Still.

I think there is something they have other things in common as well. They are functional, rather than fancy. Facebook got its hype without ever looking modern. Some forums had the same happening to them. Facebook alternatives largely focused on other areas than being practical.

Similar things could be said about Gmail, Google, eBay, Craigslist and Amazon as well as many chat platforms.

I don’t think you are wrong at all, in fact I agree, I have my doubts about the reason for Facebook being successful is real names. However I do agree, that the lack of some form of centralization or the lack of really simple federation is a reason.

Another thing is that BBSs and Facebook are rather different from Facebook, when it comes to the intent and structure of users sending content. Facebooks only structure is Comments and Time. There is nothing like “off topic”, really. There is also no moderator watching over things outside of their Groups feature. Also forums and BBSs while in general allowing for such things, don’t really make it a normal action to decide on what you read (follow) or plan events. Facebook and many other social networking sites focus on human interaction/communication over everything, while BBSs and forums focus on topics in strong hierarchy. You have a forum/BBS about the BSDs, then you have subsections about the individual BSDs, each having something about the base system, applications, hardware, programming, news, you have an Off Topic general talk section, something about meeting, something about jobs, in each of those you have threads on more specific topics/problems. You have a search functionality to use this kind of hierarchy and so on.

I think Facebook benefits from it basically being a completely open way to distract yourself. People write about random happenings, and people expect to read rather random parts.

It will always show you more, if you want, because that’s what those networks aim for (keeping users busy on their website). This is not what your average forum aims for. You usually arrive looking for information and write to ask or inform.

Of course that’s not true for every forum out there, but even though it might not really be big technical difference it certainly is a difference in use case. It probably is also why many alternatives didn’t get there. They often were topic heavy, sometimes even on accident. For example alternative that came up for privacy reasons had privacy as a very dominant topic. There was a big fraction of Linux/BSD/… users or at least very tech savvy people. So random strolling there never was really random.

the standard line is that there’s no particularly good reason to

Without being rude, this is false. The problems with the GIL are well-known, and they’re not like you say. In fact there’s yet another attempt to get rid of the GIL by python-dev@ as of the last PyCon (GILectomy).

It’s not possible to get rid of the GIL, while

1. Not breaking existing C extensions. The GIL is exposed as part of the Python-C API; C extensions may rely on global state protected by the GIL, etc.
2. Not hurting single-threaded performance
3. Improving multithreaded performance

If you relax one of those assumptions, you can get rid of the GIL, but then there would be no point.

The original post is correct in the sense that an architectural decision that was made at the beginning of Python’s life that is hard to change. There have been multiple, serious attempts to get rid of the GIL over the last 25 years.