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I’ve wanted to do this for forever! I actually bought one of the Waveshare 7.5” displays with the intention of hooking it up to a TTY. I wanted to get to the point where I could have a small laptop (probably powered by a raspberry pi) that I could use at the park to do programming and emails and such.
The challenge with the 7.5” displays is that you have to build your own interface board; unfortunately, it seems like messing with e-ink displays involves a lot of yak shaving right now.
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Topics are in the intersection of code and ops usually. I go over it every few months and aggressively prune blog posts that I released prematurely and dislike/didn’t have enough content to be worth displaying.
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Thanks - it’s this Hugo theme (with some minor modifications).
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Hi, I’m Ryan. I blog about what I am reading, computer stuff (sometimes), and a whole host of other things. I mostly post poems or other works of art that I enjoy.
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Does the article contain any examples of the advantages mentioned in the title? I didn’t see any.
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As with most of Gary Bernhardt’s writing, I loved this piece. I read it several times over, as I find his writing often deeply interesting. To me, this is a great case study in judgement through attempting to apply Americanized principles to speech between two non-Americans (a Pole and a Finn) communicating in a second language.
There are several facets at play here as I see it:
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There’s a generational difference between older hackers and newer ones. For older hackers, the code is all that matters, niceties be damned. Newer hackers care about politeness and being treated well. Some of this is a product of money coming in since the 90s, and people who never would’ve been hackers in the past are hackers now.
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Linux is Linus’ own project. He’s not going to change. He’s not going to go away. If you don’t like the way he behaves, fork it. Run your own Linux fork the way you want, and you’ll see whether or not the niceties matters. Con Kolivas did this for years.
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There are definitely cultural issues at play. While Linus has a lot of exposure to American culture, he’s Finnish. Finnish people are not like Americans. I find the American obsession with not upsetting people often infuriatingly two-faced, and I’m British. I have various friends in other countries who find the much more minor but still present British obsession with not upsetting people two-faced, and they’re right.
Go to Poland, fuck up and people will tell you. Go to Germany, do something wrong and people will correct you. Go to Finland, do something stupid getting in the way of a person’s job and probably they’ll swear at you in Finnish. I’m not saying this is right, or wrong, it’s just the rest of the world works differently to you, and while you can scream at the sea about perceived injustices, the sea will not change it’s tides for you.
Yes Linus is being a jerk, but it’s not like this is an unknown quantity. Linus doesn’t owe you kindness. You don’t owe Linus respect either. If his behaviour is that important to you, don’t use Linux.
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Finnish people are not like Americans. I find the American obsession with not upsetting people often infuriatingly two-faced […]
- I think this is a false comparison of some sort. Americans worrying doesn’t say anything useful about Finns.
- I emphatically disagree that Linus is representative of the social culture around me in Finland.
- Nonviolent, clear communication is not the same thing as avoiding difficult subjects. It’s the opposite!
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I think this is a false comparison of some sort. Americans worrying doesn’t say anything useful about Finns.
In my experience of dealing with Finns, they don’t sugar coat things. When something is needed to be said, the Finns I’ve interacted with are extremely direct and to the point, compared to some other cultures. Would you say that’s fair?
I emphatically disagree that Linus is representative of the social culture around me in Finland.
I didn’t say that he’s representative of Finnish culture. He’s a product of it. He wasn’t raised American. He didn’t grow up immersed in American culture and values. It would be unrealistic to expect him to hold or conform to American values.
Nonviolent, clear communication is not the same thing as avoiding difficult subjects. It’s the opposite!
Definitely! Out of interest, what are your thoughts on this in terms of applicability to his communication style? I’m fairly certain there’s a general asshole element to his style, but I wonder how much (if any) is influenced by this.
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He didn’t grow up immersed in American culture and values. It would be unrealistic to expect him to hold or conform to American values.
As an Italian, I can say that after the WWII, US did a great job to spread their culture in Europe.
Initially to counter the “Bolsheviks” influx, later as a carrier for their products.They have been largely successful.
Indeed, I love Joplin just like I love Vivaldi, Mozart and Beethoven! :-)
But we have thousands years of variegate history, so we are not going to completely conform anyway. After all, we are proud of our deep differences, as they enrich us.-
At the risk of getting into semantics, Finland was much more neutral post WWII than other European nations due to realpolitik.
Also, there is something to say for Italian insults, by far some of the finest and most perverse, blasphemous poetry I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. It’s the sort of level of filth that takes thousands of years to age well :)
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Actually the Invettiva is a literary gender on its own, that date back to ancient Greek.
In Italian, there are several passages of Dante’s Divina Commedia that belong to the genre and are spectacular examples of the art you describe.
But since we are talking about jerk, I will quote Marziale, from memory: 2000 years later we still memorize his lines at school
Os et labras tibi lingit, Menneia, catellus.
Non miror, merdas si libet esse cani.Nothing Linus can say will ever compete! ;-)
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Os et labras tibi lingit, Menneia, catellus. Non miror, merdas si libet esse cani.
Google translates this as
Your mouth and lip licking, Menneas, catelle. I am not surprised, merda, if you like to be for the dog.
Which I assume is horribly wrong. Is it possible to translate for us non-worldly folks who only know English? :-)
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The translation from Latin is roughly
The little dog licks your mouth and lips.
Not a surprise: dogs like to eat shits.It’s one of Martial’s Epygrams.
Not even one of the worse!It’s worth noticing how nothing else remains of Menneia. And the same can be said of several people targeted by his insults.
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Hah, that’s great. Thank you!
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speech between two non-Americans (a Pole and a Finn) communicating in a second language.
How is that relevant? On my current team, we have developers from Argentina, Bosnia, Brazil, China, India, Korea, and Poland, as well as several Americans (myself included). Yet as far as I can recall from the year that I’ve been on this team so far, all of our written communication has been civil. And even in spoken communication, as far as I can recall, nobody uses profanity to berate one another. To be fair, this is in a US-based corporate environment. Still, I don’t believe English being a second language is a reason to not be civil in written communication.
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You’re comparing Linux, a Finnish-invented, international, volunteer-based non-corporate project to a US-based corporate environment, and judging Linus’ communications against your perception of a US-based corporate environment. You’re doing the same thing as the author, projecting your own values onto something that doesn’t share those values.
Additionally, by putting the words I’ve said, and following that up with a reference to a US-based corporate environment, you’ve judged the words of a non-American who wasn’t speaking to you by your own US-based corporate standards.
I hope that helps you understand my point more clearly. My point isn’t that Linus does or doesn’t act an asshole (he does), but that expecting non-Americans to adhere to American values, standards or norms is unrealistic at best, and cultural colonialism at worst.
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For older hackers, the code is all that matters, niceties be damned. [..]
Some of this is a product of money coming in since the 90s, and people who never would’ve been hackers in the past are hackers now.No, people who would’ve never been hackers in the past, are not hackers now either.
And hackers have always cared about more than code. Hacking has always been a political act.Linus is not a jerk, his behaviour is pretty deliberate. He does not want to conform.
He is not much different from Dijkstra, Stallman or Assange.Today, cool kids who do not understand what hacking is, insult hackers while calling themselves hackers.
Guess what? Hackers do care about your polite corporate image as much as they do care about dress code.
There are definitely cultural issues at play.
Not an issue. It’s a feature! Hackers around the world are different.
And we are proud of the differences, because they help us to break mainstream groupthink.
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Hacking has always been a political act.
This is a really interesting idea! I’m seeing this kind of idea more and more these days and I haven’t been able to work out what it means. I guess you don’t mean something as specific as “Hacking has always been in favour of a particular political ideology” nor something as general as “Hacking has always had an effect on reality”. So could you say something more precise about what you mean by that?
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This is a good question that is worth of a deep answer. I’ll rush a fast one here, but I might write something more in the near future.
All hacks are political, but some are more evidently so. An example is Stallman’s GNU GPL. Actually the whole GNU project is very political. Almost as political as BSDs. Another evidently political hack was done by Cambridge Analytica with Facebook’s user data.
The core value of hackers activity is curiosity: hackers want to learn. We value freedom and sharing as a mean to get more knowledge for the humanity.
As such, hacking is always political: its goal is always to affect (theoretically, to improve) the community in one way or another.
Challenging laws or authorities is something that follows naturally from such value, but it’s not done to get power or profit, just to learn (and show) something new. This shows how misleading is who distinguish hats’ colours: if you are an hacker you won’t have problems to violate stupid laws to learn and/or share some knowledge, be it a secret military cablage, how to break a DRM system or how to modify a game console: it’s not the economical benefit you are looking for, but the knowledge. The very simple fact that some knowledge is restricted, forbidden or simply unexplored, is a strong incentive for an hacker to try to gain it, using her knowledge and creativity.
But even the most apparently innocent hack is political!
See Rust, Go, Haskell or Oberon: each with its own vision of how and who should program and of what one should expect from a software.
See HTTP browsers: very political tools that let strangers from a different state run code (soon assembly-like) on your pc (ironically with your consent!).
See Windows, Debian GNU/Linux or OpenBSD: each powerful operating systems which their own values and strong political vision (yes, even OpenBSD).
See ESR appropriation of the jergon file (not much curiosity here actually, just a pursuit for power)!Curiosity is not the only value of an hacker, but all hackers share such value.
Now, this is also a value each hacker express in a different way: I want everyone to become an hacker, because I think this would benefit the whole humanity. Others don’t want to talk about the political responsibility of hacking because they align with the regime they live in (be it Silicon Valley, Raqqa, Moscow or whatever), and politically aware hackers might subvert it.
But even if you don’t want to acknowledge such responsibility, if you hack, you are politically active, for better or worse.
That’s also the main difference between free software and open source software, for example: free software fully acknowledge such ethical (and thus political) responsibility, open source negate it.
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Politics is to political parties, what economy is to bankers.
If you read “Hacking has always been a political act” as something related to political parties, you should really delve deeper in the history of politics from ancient Athens onwards.
“Hacking has always attempted to change the world”
No.
This is a neutral statement that could be the perfect motto/tagline for a startup or a war.Hacking and politics are not neutral. They are both strongly oriented.
Politics is oriented to benefit the polis.
Indeed, lobbying for particular interests is not politics at all.Hacking is not neutral either.
Hacking is rooted in the international scientific research that was born (at least) in Middle Age.Hackers solve human problems. For all humans. Through our Curiosity.
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IMO, you’re defining “Hacking is political” to the point of uselessness. Basically, nothing is apolitical in your world. Walking down the street is a political statement on the freedom to walk. Maybe that’s useful in a warzone but in the country I live in it’s a basic right to the point of being part of the environment. I don’t see this really being a meaningful or valuable way to talk about things. I think, instead, it’s probably more useful for people to say “I want to be political and the way I will accomplish this is through hacking”.
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Basically, nothing is apolitical in your world.
Read more carefully.
Every human action can serve the polis, but several human actions are not political.Hacking, instead, is political in its very essence. Just like Science. And Math.
Maybe it’s the nature of knowledge: an evolutive advantage for the humanity as a whole.
Or maybe it is just an intuitive optimization that serves hackers’ curiosity: the more I share my discoveries, the more brains can build upon them, the more interesting things I can learn from others, the more problem solved, the more time for more challenging problems…For sure, everyone can negate or refuse the political responsibility that comes from hacking, but such behaviour is political anyway, even if short-sight.
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I just don’t see it. I think you’re claiming real estate on terminology in order to own a perspective. In my opinion, intent is usually the dominating factor, for example murder vs manslaughter (hey, I’m watching crime drama right now). Or a hate crime vs just beating someone up.
You say:
As such, hacking is always political: its goal is always to affect (theoretically, to improve) the community in one way or another.
But I know plenty of people who do what would generally be described as hacking with no such intent. It may be a consequence that the community is affected but often times it’s pretty unlikely and definitely not what they were trying to do.
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Saying that “intent is usually the dominating factor” is a political act. :-)
It’s like talking about FLOSS or FOSS, like if free software and open source were the same thing. It’s not just false, it does not work.
Indeed it creates a whole serie of misunderstanding and contraddictions that are easily dismissed if you simply recognise the difference between the two world.
Now, I agree that Hacking and Engineering overlap.
But they differ more than Murders and Manslaughters.Because hackers use engineering.
And despite the fact that people abuse all technical terms, we still need proper terms and definitions.
So despite the fact that everyone apparently want to leverage terms like “hacking” and “freedom” in their own marketing, we still need to distinguish hackers from engineers and free software from open source.And honestly I think it’s easy to take them apart, in both cases.
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Good question! You caught me completely off-guard!
Which is crazy, given my faculty at University was called “Political Science”!I use the term “Politics” according to the original meaning.
Politics is the human activity that creates, manages and preserves the polis.
Polis was the word ancient Greeks used for the “city”, but by extension we use it for any “community”. In our global, interconnected world, the polis is the whole mankind.
So Politics is the set of activities people do to participate to our collective life.
One of my professors used to define it as “the art of living together”.
Another one, roughly as “the science of managing power for/over a community”.Anyway, the value of a political act depends on how it make the community stronger or weaker. Thus politics is rarely neutral. And so is hacking.
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Thanks a lot. That does make things clearer. However I am still confused why under the definition of “Politics is the human activity that creates, manages and preserves the polis.” I admit that I don’t understand what ‘Saying that “intent is usually the dominating factor” is a political act’ but at least I now have a framework in which to think about it more.
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That’s very good explanation. I might add:
- The author has the luxury of not having to worry about people dying because they didn’t get the message.
- The author has the luxury of only caring about the message being understood by his own cultural sub-group.
Linus has none of these luxuries. He cannot err on the side of being too subtle.
This blog post is just another instance of an American that believes that the rest of the world has to revolve around his cultural norms.
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I think the author did a pretty good job of editing the message in such a way that it was more clear, more direct, and equally forceful, while ensuring that all of that force was directed in a way relevant to the topic at hand.
(Linus has strong & interesting ideas about standardization & particular features. I would love to read an essay about them. The response to a tangentially-related PR is not a convenient place to put those positions: they distract from the topic of the PR, and also make it difficult to find those positions for people who are more interested in them than in the topic of the PR.)
The resulting message contains all of the on-topic information, without extraneous crap. It uses strong language and emphasis, but limits it to Linus’s complaints about the actually-submitted code – in other words, the material that should be emphasized. It removes repetition.
There is nothing subtle about the resulting message. Unlike the original message, it’s very hard to misread as an unrelated tangent about standardization practices that doesn’t address the reasons for rejecting the PR at all.
The core policy being implemented here is not “be nice in order to avoid hurting feelings”, but “remove irrelevant rants in order to focus anger effectively”. This is something I can get behind.
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I find the American obsession with not upsetting people often infuriatingly two-faced, and I’m British.
[…]
Go to Poland, fuck up and people will tell you. Go to Germany, do something wrong and people will correct you. Go to Finland, do something stupid getting in the way of a person’s job and probably they’ll swear at you in Finnish.
Just wanted to point out that America is a huge country and its population is not homogenous. For example, you could have replaced Poland, Germany, and Finland with “Boston” and still have been correct (though, they’d just swear at you in English 🙂).
I think because most American tech comes out of San Francisco/Silicon Valley that it skews what is presented as “Americanized principals” to the international tech community.
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Just wanted to point out that America is a huge country and its population is not homogenous.
Down here in the South, they have an interesting mix of trying to look/sound more civil or being blunt in a way that lets someone know they don’t like them or think they’re stupid. Varies by group, town, and context. There’s plenty of trash talking depending on that. Linus’s style would fit in pretty well with some of them.
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I’m under the impression that opt-out is not allowed under GDPR, only opt-in. The question is, then, which this UI is. I’d argue it’s opt-out.
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IANAL, but I think this pretty clearly violates the GDPR. From the GDPR’s preamble:
If the data subject’s consent is to be given following a request by electronic means, the request must be clear, concise and not unnecessarily disruptive to the use of the service for which it is provided.
It is not clear, because it uses a dark pattern (using color choices) for the user to read: “We care about privacy -> Sounds Good, Thanks”. Also, I would call unticking 338 companies unnecessarily disruptive. Moreover:
Consent should not be regarded as freely given if the data subject has no genuine or free choice or is unable to refuse or withdraw consent without detriment.
Again, I would call manually unticking 338 pretty detrimental.
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GDPR Recital 32 is particularly informative. I’ll reproduce paragraphs 1-3 here (reformatted for clarity):
(1) Consent should be given by a clear affirmative act establishing a freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her, such as by a written statement, including by electronic means, or an oral statement.
(2) This could include ticking a box when visiting an internet website, choosing technical settings for information society services or another statement or conduct which clearly indicates in this context the data subject’s acceptance of the proposed processing of his or her personal data.
(3) Silence, pre-ticked boxes or inactivity should not therefore constitute consent.
While reading (3) alone you might think that this system would be contrary to law, I think in the broader context it’s probably okay? Your attention is being drawn to the fact that you have to give consent to use of your personal data (the modal). You can either look for more information, or say okay. So I don’t see this as a pre-ticked box within the meaning of paragraph 3.
However, it’s definitely shady (and common) practice. I think it’s borderline, and it would be fair for the regulator to raise concerns. I suspect that the “not unnecessarily disruptive to the use of the service” will actually count in InfoWorld’s favor here. The Correct Solution would be to offer a deselect all.
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Playing devil’s advocate here, but they don’t actually need to untick 338 checkboxes, they only need to click “deselect all” as the author did.
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Sorry, somehow I misread that. I stand corrected.
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And if not GDPR violation, Shamar and others can sue them in class action for the damage to their hands from 338 checkboxes. Each violation will pay a fine equal to the sum of their users at risk of arthritis or carpal tunnel. That’s on top of any GDPR fines.
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robey
2 months ago
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link
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Introducing Network.framework: A modern alternative to Sockets - WWDC 2018
Sorry to be a broken record about this, but can you post the link to the transcript too, for those of us who don’t watch videos?
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I couldn’t find the transcript and don’t know what apple typically does as far as posting transcripts but the page does at least include the slides used in the presentation - I’m not the poster, just wanted to make the slides easier to find.
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The transcript is not available yet. Apple has made the transcripts available for previous WWDCs (e.g. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/305/ - see the “Transcript” tab), so it’ll probably pop up in a few weeks. Sorry!
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I can’t use Haskell simply because GHC is too slow on my 12” MacBook. It’s the only compiler that makes development in the respective language impossible on this machine. 😕
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Eliminate the moving parts (e.g. fans, HDDs) and you eliminate the noise — it’s not that complicated.
That’s not true. I can hear one of my mice. I can hear not-the-fan-noise from my discrete GPUs. I can hear at least one of my SSDs. I can hear my monitor. I can hear my amp. I’ve had a noisy PSU too.
I wonder why the author went with discrete parts especially given that they consider efficiency and are planning to move off the grid. There are CPUs in the 10W to 30W range that are significantly more efficient than the desktop chips that push a lot of heat for a modest increase in clock speed.
Getting a passively cooled PC doesn’t need to be an ordeal that costs thousands of dollars and lots of time trying to find parts that fit; I have a Shuttle DS57U7 and a DS437. Similar builds can be had for a few hundred bucks sans RAM or storage. If such slim PCs are not an option, well, full sized passive workstations are available too.
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If such slim PCs are not an option, well, full sized passive workstations are available too.
One can’t fault the aesthetics of this case, though! It’s available as a full build from https://www.quietpc.com/sys-db4.
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For people who aren’t quite as ambitious about heat pipes, there are several nice little fanless kits from companies like Zotac that will give you a machine that’s passively cooled and only needs some RAM and an SSD.
They’re basically the 80% lowers of fanless computing.
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Hi, a Zotac user here. CPU is a bit slower than I expected, but overall I’m very happy with my setup. Zotac CI527 is cheap, well built, and silent!
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Thanks for the link! A few thoughts:
Wow, Zotac is really bad at selling silent computers. They have a ton of models and I don’t see a way to see only passively cooled models.
The silent PC crowd are all about x86 at the moment. I wonder how ARM fares here. Are all end user ARM machines like Raspberry Pi? (Its CPU is too slow and it has bad IO connectivity.)
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There are a fair number of ARM-based silent fanless computers available on the market: https://www.amazon.com/Unlocked-Cell-Phones-Android/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A2407749011%2Cp_n_feature_keywords_four_browse-bin%3A6787346011
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For those interested in silent computing, the website Silent PC Review has a lively forum. Sadly, it has been years since the owner contributed any of his extensive reviews of CPUs, PSUs and cases.
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http://www.fanlesstech.com is another neat blog about silent computing.
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I can’t log in to Zulip. Logging in with GitHub just loads the login page again. I reset my password (I never set one in the first place), which appeared to succeed, but logging in with my email/password just loads the login page again, just like with the GitHub login. 🤷♀️
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FWIW, I had this same problem with Safari 11.1, and tried Chrome (65.0.something) and it worked fine.
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Great post, thank you! I especially enjoyed how the author explicitly accounts for UX in type systems, in this post and previously.
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VISIONARY
edited
10 months ago
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Racket v6.11 released - includes refinement types and dependent function types
[Comment removed by author]
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They’re compile-time. I’m not sure if the documentation is up to date with this release, but you can check https://docs.racket-lang.org/ts-reference/Experimental_Features.html#%28part._.Refinements_and_.Linear_.Integer_.Reasoning%29.
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Racket’s runtime contract system does integrate nicely with Typed Racket, but I don’t think that’s what these more recent changes are about.
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Does anyone know how expensive e.g. atomic increments are, compared to the regular version, in general?
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Now, how do you type this?
Now you need a Perl 6 keyboard like for APL.
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On Windows 10 since version 1703: Windows+Period/Semicolon.
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This may seem like a trivial gripe, but it’s been a real issue for me when writing Perl 6: I can’t find an editor whose syntax highlighting can keep up with Perl6. I’m a Vim guy, and Vim’s Perl6 syntax highlighting is s l o w, causing the editor to lag, making using the language a chore in that editor.
I’ve tried:
- VScode in Vim mode, but it doesn’t (at least, when I used it) have support for Perl6 highlighting and Perl5 highlighting was just SLIGHTLY off.
- Spacemacs; I wasn’t able to find a Perl6 layer for it.
So um, any suggestions? Perl6 is crazy cool, but I just can’t find a means to write it without getting frustrated at laggy/incorrect syntax highlighting.
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Howdy, also a vim user. I moved to neovim a while back and it allows aync syntax highlighting through plugins like chromatica. Since leveraging this along with ale things have become significantly snappier, especially on larger files.
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This is a great overview of dealing with overload in distributed systems. It’s applicable outside Erlang’s context, too.
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For some reason it’s very surprising to me that they use Qemu for their VMs.
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I’ve often wondered about their infrastructure myself, always assuming it was some heavy duty OpenStack environment of one kind or another.
Clearly they’re on the higher end of sophistication with how they are using their tools, and it’s rather brilliant to me to learn that under all of it is simple QEMU / libvirt. Inspiring actually. They’re basically using a very well and robustly engineered implementation of what we all have on our standard Linux machines.
Cool.
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I’m guessing OpenStack probably wasn’t mature enough when Digital Ocean was founded (2011)?
But yes, as you say, it’s a lot of tooling and a good UI around the same things that everyone can use (much like Linode, although their UI was relatively clunky and they didn’t offer a rich API for a while). Some interesting notes from Netcraft on their growth.
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What a curious way to announce this much awaited new Elm release. Does anyone here know more about the ideas behind that? I’d have expected some kind of public beta and a proper release announcement…
Yeah, it’s a bit…different, but it looks like picking and highlighting one feature is what was done for previous releases as well: http://elm-lang.org/blog
Especially given the “is Elm dead?” questions that have been popping up in the past few months. I guess it’s better to be head-down working on the next release, but I think just a little more communication or visibility into the project might have helped alleviate some of the concerns.
This topic was addressed by Evan (creator of Elm) in his recent talk at Elm Europe 2018 titled: “What is success?”
So I watched the video, and this is addressed around the 41 minute mark: “There’s pressure on me to be always be saying everything that’s going on with Elm development, and the trouble is that it’s not always very interesting… it’s like… ‘still working’”.
I think “still working” would have been better, though. I don’t think anyone expected weekly updates. Every 2 months updating the Github readme with “still working” would have been fine. And the fear that saying you’re working on X and then it doesn’t pan out, so better to not say anything at all, seems like the worse option.
I also think the talk is a little dismissive of Javascript, and the community. Sure, the number of packages is by no means the be-all of a good language ecosystem, but it says something about the platform and its viability. If nothing else, it means there are alternatives within the ecosystem. People have limited time, and very limited time to invest in learning brand new things, so they naturally look for some way to compare the opportunities they have. Is looking at numbers the ideal behaviour? Maybe not, but if I want to sell Elm to my boss and she asks me when the last release was and I say “18 months ago” and she asks if I know when the next one will be and I say “no”… that’s how languages don’t get adopted and ecosystems don’t grow.
As a complete outsider, but also as someone who wants Elm to succeed, I think community management is something they need to take really seriously. It seems like Evan really doesn’t want to do it, so fine, have someone else do it. You can dislike that there are persistent questions about the future of your project, but they’re best addressed at the time, not left unanswered.
Personally, I’m not really convinced by those arguments.
I especially don’t understand why 18 months since last release, and no known date of new release, are arguments against adoption of the language. Take C or C++ — they rarely have new releases. Is this an argument against adoption? I don’t think so; actually, more like for adoption in my opinion! Slow pace of releases can mean that the languages are mature and stable. I’d be really surprised and annoyed by a boss who would think otherwise.
It now occurred to me, that maybe Lua is a good example of a language having a similar development mode as Elm. It’s also evolved behind super tightly closed doors. And new versions are usually dumped on the community out of the blue; though usually with public betas & RCs. But those are published only for fleshing out bugs; language design input is mostly not taken into account. AFAIK, the community is generally OK with this. And the language is totally used and relied upon in numerous niches in the industry (including a large one in game development)!
“Elm” includes the language specification and the compiler.
The C language specification rarely has new releases, but the C compiler, gcc, has 4 releases per year. There would be major concern from the community and your boss if gcc activity was perceived as drying up.
Ah; good one, never thought of it this way; big thanks for pointing this out to me!
C and C++ have been mature and in very wide use for decades, where Elm is a very young language - just a few years old. Same with Lua, it’s been in widespread use for, what, 10 years or more? I think that’s the difference. Elm is still much more of an unknown quantity.
Sure - when the language is mature and stable. I don’t think anyone would consider Elm to be that way: this new release, if I understand correctly, breaks every package out there until they’re upgraded by their maintainer.
Personally, after some initial usage, I currently actually have a surprising impression of Elm being in fact mature. It kinda feels to me as an island of sanity and stability in the ocean of JS ecosystem… (Again, strictly personal opinion, please forgive me should you find this offensive.) I didn’t realize this sentiment so strongly until writing these words here, so I’m also sincerely curious if this could be a sign of me not knowing Elm well enough to stumble upon some warts? Hmh, and for a somewhat more colourful angle, you know what they say: old doesn’t necessarily mean mature, and converse ;P
And — by the way — notably, new releases of Lua actually do also infamously tend to break more or less every package out there :P Newbies tend to be aggravated by this, veterans AFAIU tend to accept it as a cost that enables major improvements to the language.
That said, I think I’m starting to grasp what you’re trying to tell me. Especially the phrase about “unknown quantity”. Still, I think it’s rare for a language to become “corporate grade non-risky”. But then, as much as, say C++ is a “known quantity”, to me it’s especially “known” for being… finicky…
Yeah the last release was in Nov 2016.
The devs are active on https://discourse.elm-lang.org/, which might help people see the project activity.
since they recently disallowed using javascript in elm packages, it only makes sense that they’d lead with what that had won them, i.e. function level dead code elimination.