I encourage you to read the whole thing, but the standout quote for me is near the end:
> One thing I learned from discovering The Elm Architecture is that it is really lovely to be able to show up in any codebase and know what is going on. I think custom operators detract from that enough that they are not worth it for the whole ecosystem, even if they are great for specific individuals.
Having talked to people at work who had to remove custom operators when they upgraded from 0.18 to 0.19, they initially didn't love dropping them, but getting rid of the syntax cliff for new hires at the expense of terseness for the old hands was a decent tradeoff. Personally, I find it can be easy in an ML family language to get a bit wrapped around the axle trying to write the most terse, pointfree implementation of something.
I think you are taking the wrong lesson. The lesson is not "things make break." Many languages break things. Haskell has made it a feature, not a bug.
But this change did more than break things. It meant people using Elm in production had to abandon it, nearly immediately, as all future work would first require them to port the whole stack, in one fell swoop, to Elm (and this was before tail recursion modulo cons was implemented, but recursion was forced).
Imagine if, in Rust's infancy, it decided to remove the C FFI with the argument that people should instead, naturally, rewrite that code in Rust. What would have happened? People would have abandoned it in droves, and it would have been essentially relegated to a research language, never again suited for prime time.
You should consider doing the hard work yourself here. I sat down and reasoned through a Perceus-style RC mechanism a few years ago, made difficult by the presence of one-shot delimited continuations, and actually sorting it all out was not hard. Handing the correct semantics to Claude will produce the correct results if you take the time to understand the actual work you are attempting.
I've had it write Scheme with little issue -- it even completely the latter half of a small toy compiler. I think the REPL is the issue, not the coding; forcing it to treat the REPL like another conversation participant is likely the only way for that to work, and this article does not handle it that way. Instead, hand it a compiler and let it use the workflow it is optimized for.
Agreed. The article bemoans the fact that AIs don’t need to work in the inefficient way that most humans prefer, getting micro-level feedback from IDEs and REPLs to reduce our mistake count as we go.
If you take a hard look at that workflow, it implies a high degree of incompetence on the part of humans: the reason we generally don’t write thousands of lines without any automated feedback is because our mistake rate is too high.
I will guess that farm subsidies go to... well, farming. Doesn't sound completely ridiculous at first sight.
> you're mad about space exploration?
Exploration? It's not exploration at all: it's sending 4 humans for a 10 days trip around the Moon. I wish they used the money for actual space exploration, though.
Hooking up to and generating calls across filesystem APIs cost multiple orders of magnitude more than calling `ls`. These tooling ideas are interesting, though. Maybe Kenneth_E._Iverson was right all along?
Talking to another senior dev over drinks tonight, we both worried not about our work but about who might come up never having written a single line of code. Never even opened a terminal. Is looking at the code something you learn in semester 5?
I think computer science education is going to stomp onward, poorly. And we will get that generation. And things like "terminal tooling is going out of style" won't even be said any more. Hacker groups will turn from discussions about new ideas to talking about doing leetcode without AI.
Our art died because we used our art to kill it. We are the last human masters.
>Hooking up to and generating calls across filesystem APIs cost multiple orders of magnitude more than calling `ls`. These tooling ideas are interesting, though. Maybe Kenneth_E._Iverson was right all along?
I don't think you understood what the idea was. Its not about calling `ls` vs not. I don't think UNIX commands are going away (or at least deterministic calls).
Its the interface itself that would go away. We won't work on terminals but some other interface which would use commands internally.
It's definitely _alluded_ to in Player of Games, mostly as a method of emphasising how unpleasant the Azad society is, but I don't think we ever really _see_ any of it?
(I may just be forgetting; it's probably at least a decade since I last read it.)
If I remember correctly, Gurgeh's internal narrative reveals what he observes in one of the secret channels that are restricted to the upper class. Unpleasant is quite the understatement. lol
But yeah, I don't think we actually see it firsthand, it's more disturbing than gory.
