luciole (he/him)

No. February 12, 2015 actually was an extremely polluted day for Paris. The fine particles count was through the roof and you can find articles about it. Please don’t pull stuff out of your ass.

Hopefully they said “adieu” (very respectfully fuck off forever), not “au revoir” (see you again friend).

having to wait for javascript to load, decompress, parse, JIT, transmogrify, rejimble and perform two rinse cycles

This is whole sentence is facetious nonsense. Just-in-time compilation is not in websites, it’s in browsers, and it was a massive performance gain for the web. Sending files gzipped over the wire has been going on forever and the decompressing on receival is nothing compared to the gains on load time. I’m going to ignore the made up words. If you don’t know you don’t know. Please don’t confidently make shit up.

EDIT: I’m with about the nags though. Fuck them nags.

Oh I love it when the language has advanced type inference! I have fond memories of tinkering with Haxe.

I know far too little about compilers & interpreters to have anything to say about performance so I’ll leave that subject to wiser programmers.

What I can say about the usage itself of dynamically vs statically typed languages is that I struggle with assessments that attempt to quantify the differences between the two paradigms. I’ve come to consider programming has a craft, and as such the qualitative properties of the tools, and especially the languages, matter significantly.

I’ve been switching back and forth between dynamic and static languages lately. Although dynamic languages do feel more straight to the point, static languages are easier to navigate through. All that typing information can be harnessed by intellisense and empower the non-linear reading needed to understand a program. That’s valuable for the whole life cycle of the software, not just the time to reach initial release. It’s kind of a rigid vs fluid dichotomy.

Python’s Twine issue 153. Be warned that since this meme has first trended the comment section has been irreversibly tainted by that other place’s crowd.

It’s the thing you insert inside your butt to feel better.

relevant xkcd

I haven’t played Minecraft for a while, but I was under the impression that Microsoft was progressively turning the Bedrock version into a microtransaction hellscape. If I’d have to reluctantly commend Microsoft for anything, I’d rather go for Visual Studio Code.

$ walk north

Come on y’all, would you lay off the gatekeeping. Some of us still think the free web’s a good thing, lest we all end up in a walled garden hellscape. JavaScript is therefore needed if we’re being pragmatic. Just transpile it from TypeScript if you’re too stuck up for dynamic languages building something big.

Lisp dialects attract me but HN’s culture repulses me more.

I think it’s established genAI can spit straightforward toy examples of a few hundred lines. Bungalows aren’t simply big birdhouses though.

Whether it is being offered to the end users as free (as in freedom) software or as paid closed source has the usual implications. Ease of use, accessibility measures and support impacts inclusivity. Supported languages (natural and programming) will influence further who uses them or not. What constitutes the user base will determine what’s it’s used for and in turn will apply pressure to the editor to take a certain direction.

Political impact is not always obvious and not every single grain of software will be infused with a powerful one. The point is that our choice is either to ignore it or to acknowledge it. We can’t opt out of the world; blind neutrality is as political as any other position.

I would like to offer as a counterpoint that everything is political. Tech is no exception. Tech is a tool, a tool comes with a specific affordance and an affordance suggests to the wielder a certain worldview. To wilfully ignore the social and political impact of one’s work does not protect it from the world’s turmoil.