My frustration with the flow, is that you’re forcing me to make a decision at a point where I don’t really know if a thought/idea/comment I want to share will rise to the level of warranting the organizational overhead of making it a “topic” vs just a little toe in the main stream.
I haven’t used Zulip in a while, but can’t you reorganize messages/topics after posting? I remember that as being one of the biggest advantages over Slack for exactly this reason (the Slack equivalent is “I wish I’d known to reply in a thread, because oops, this topic took over the channel”).
Maybe a being/creature that looked like a person when you concentrated on it and then was easily mistaken as something else when you weren't concentrating on it.
I’m certainly no Pratchett, so I can’t speak to that. I would say there’s an enormous round coin upon which sits an enormous giant holding a magnifying glass, looking through it down at her hand. When you get closer, you see the giant is made of smaller people gazing back up at the giant through telescopes. Get even closer and you see it’s people all the way down. The question of what supports the coin, I’ll leave to others.
We as humans, believing we know ourselves, inevitably compare everything around us to us. We draw a line and say that everything left of the line isn’t human and everything to the right is. We are natural categorizers, putting everything in buckets labeled left or right, no or yes, never realizing our lines are relative and arbitrary, and so are our categories. One person’s “it’s human-like,” is another’s “half-baked imitation,” and a third’s “stochastic parrot.” It’s like trying to see the eighth color. The visible spectrum could as easily be four colors or forty two.
We anthropomorphize because we’re people, and it’s people all the way down.
A C Compiler seems like one of the more straightforward things to have done. Reading this gives me the same vibe as when a magician does a frequently done trick (saw someone in half, etc).
I'd be more interested in letting it have a go at some some of the other "less trodden" paths of computing. Some of the things that would "wow me more":
- Build a BEAM alternative, perhaps in an embedded space
- Build a Smalltalk VM, perhaps in an embedded space, or in WASM
These things are documented at some level, but still require a bit of original thinking to execute and pull off. That would wow me more.
Your assumption is somewhat correct, for both Erlang and Elixir, however the phrase under discussion doesn’t mean the same thing for immutable languages. Both are ‘pass-by-value’ but that term is being overloaded in a particular way. As I said in another comment, ‘value’ in the language from TFA means any object that IS NOT a reference. The qualifier that every semantic object is a ‘value’ and that therefore, all arguments to a function call, threads spawn, etc are independent values which are (logically, at least) copied to new values that are then passed to the new context.
However, for Erlang and Elixir ‘pass-by-value’ is otherwise called ‘call-by-value’. In this case, it is a statement that arguments to functions are evaluated before they are passed into the function (often at the call site). This is in opposition to ‘call-by-name/need’ (yes, I know they aren’t the same) which is, for instance, how Haskell does it for sure, and I think Python is actually ‘by-name’ as well.
So, Herd’s usage here is a statement of semantic defaults (and the benefits/drawbacks that follow from those defaults) for arguments to functions, and Elixir’s usage is about the evaluation order of arguments to functions, they really aren’t talking about the same thing.
Interestingly, this is also a pair of separate things, which are both separate from what another commenter was pedantically pointing out elsewhere in the thread. Programming language discussion really does seem to have a mess of terminology to deal with.
> I imagine just about any computer science major would have learned the rules of memory layout according to some kind of C-like compiler.
I have worked with a number of fresh grads over the last ten years. I can think of one who may have had a good handle on this. At best the rest range from “vague memory recall about this” to a blank stare.
On the flip hand, it’s something someone can pick up pretty quickly if motivated.
About 7 years ago, we deployed a “gateway/orchestration” role device in ag tech. Power draw is a big concern for us (not a lot of free power out in the middle of fields). We used an SBC from Emtrion. I remember asking my EE counterpart at the time “why not a Pi? Surely someone makes hardened versions of those?” He was skeptical and I think the aura of “toy/hobby/maker” scared him off.
Fast forward. We’re getting ready to role out our next generation. It’s based on the Pi Compute Module 4 (the CMs are basically just the basic Pi and you put your own carrier board for peripherals under it). It is amazing. It has easily 20x the power, 20x the RAM, better temp specs and such, a great eco system, uses about 30% less power, and about 1/5 of the price. The only thing we’re not sure about yet, is the robustness of the BLE with the onboard radio chip.
It’s amazing how far these things have come. For low volume product builds, it’s hard to find a reason not to use one of the CMs.
Even funnier is the history. IIRC, the very first Raspberry Pi was an idea based on a bunch of stock of shitty SoCs for set-top boxes that Broadcom couldn't get sold, so Eben Upton got these for cheap for the foundation he and a few others had started to promote computer literacy.
Honestly, in all my life I've never seen the Pi being sold in EU for €35. The min. price I've found has always been around 45/50, with Pi5 never under 75, because of scalpers
I'm waiting for the "Can it do Management?" experiment.
I do not have a positive impression/experience of most middle/low level management in corporate world. Over 30 years in the workforce, I've watched it evolve to a "secretary/clerk, usually male, who agrees to be responsible for something they know little about or not very good at doing, pretend at orchestrating".
Like growing corn, lots of literature has been written about it. So models have lots to work with and synthesize. Why not automate the meetings and metric gatherings and mindless hallucinations and short sighted decisions that drone-ish be-like-the-other-manager people do?
Huh. I tried docker. Didn’t like the odor of enshittification, and so switched to podman (desktop). I use it on macOS, and deploy on Ubuntu. It’s been smooth sailing.
I found the signal to noise ratio better in Podland. As a newb to docker space, I was overwhelmed with should I swarm, should I compose, what’s this register my thing? And people are freaking about root stuff. I’m sure I still only use and understand about 10% of the pod(man) space, buts way better than how I felt in the docker space.
I miss when software engineering put a high value on simplicity.
Yeah I was pretty hard on podman in that comment but the truth is I use it over docker wherever I can. I have a mixed environment at home but settled on RedHat for the home server and everything seems totally ok. I really like quadlets, and the ability to go rootless is a big load off my mind to be honest. I do wish they'd package it for other distros though. It would save some headaches.
Podman is in Debian and has been for a while (and so will eventually propagate to all its derivatives). I would presume Arch and SUSE have it, not sure about Gentoo, what other host distros are missing?
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