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This feels like DropBox really sticking it to the Python community, PyPy in particular. They have a lot of lofty goals but there is zero indication they know how to achieve any of them or that any of what they want to do is necessary. Not sure why they just didn’t become major contributors to PyPy for awhile until it became clear PyPy couldn’t accomplish what they wanted.
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Interesting. I didn’t support the guy’s views on gay marriage, but I was excited to see how someone with his technical expertise could lead the company. If it were up to me, I think he should have stayed if he was truly the best person for the job as long as his views didn’t affect the way he did his job.
EDIT: Especially given the statement in his personal blog post a few days ago, I think he should’ve been given a better chance.
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That post said he would not “ask for trust free of context” and should be allowed to “show, not tell” but then his next actions were to refuse to discuss his position except in a 1:1 setting, and to essentially double-down on his intolerance with a weird justification about Indonesia.
The showing was all too telling. It was really that which disqualified him from the job.
CEO, even of a technical company, is not simply a technical position, it’s a position as a leader, a figurehead, a frontman, an ambassador. Mozilla faces multiple challenges in the coming months and years that will require someone skilled at these sorts of social politics and navigating passionately held views (cf DRM, mp4 etc).
That their CEO couldn’t even manage to navigate this with his own position - that he in effect put his head in the sand and refused to discuss it or even attempt to justify it - boded poorly for his ability to do it for the entire organisation.
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My question: Does this new age of moral purity scale, or will we have to know all the politics of everyone we associate with?
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A very nice, succinct introduction to Elixir, but in some ways more importantly, OTP. I’m not sure Erlang (or Elixir) would be viable w/o the strong generic patterns and best practices provided by OTP.
I think Elixir compliments Erlang well: Erlang is rock-solid, and has a lot if Important code in production, and must make very conservative choices, insofar as feature additions (see how long it took to get maps). Elixir, while benefiting from the power and maturity of BEAM, can be considerably more liberal; for ex, meta programming is sorely missed in Erlang (you’ll see LFE filling the gap). Hygienic macros alone make Elixir look very appealing
Steve’s posts are always a good read. I implemented a design described in one here: https://github.com/wcummings/hostess
I spoke with a basho engineer who claimed “I once saw Steve Vinoski implement an MPEG decoder while someone read the spec aloud to him”, when trumpeting the merits of Erlang’s binary pattern matching. I want to believe