HiddenBek

Nothing here is untrue, but from my perspective it's overstated. I don't use discord, but I visit the forum daily, follow most of the RFCs, and spend a lot of time coding in Nim (https://github.com/dsrw/enu). I really like Nim, mostly like its community, and think many more people should be using it.

I'm sure fusion could have been handled better, and for 2021 the roadmap was a bit hazy, but I can't think of any other big missteps. Araq, dom, PMunch, and other senior folks are in the forms helping people and answering questions every day, and my interactions with all of them has been very positive. The big post 1.0 feature was arc/orc, and that was very well communicated. Bugs are being fixed, useful new features are being added, and future plans are being discussed in the open.

And Nim itself is great. The "if it compiles, it works" factor is high, yet I almost never feel like the compiler is fighting me. Simple things are simple (I'm teaching it to a group of 12 year olds), it's incredibly flexible, it's fast, and it's suitable for almost any sort of problem. There's nothing else like it, and I expect I'd continue using it for at least a decade even if it switched into maintenance mode tomorrow. I think it will take at least that long for something better to come along.

Viaweb was a cash strapped startup in a competitive market, who succeeded against odds because of their speed and agility. They were running on fumes when they were acquired. A longer development period would have certainly meant the death of the company.

So, no, they could not have written it in C.

Stevey had a series of articles where he implemented Sokoban in a bunch of JVM languages, and Groovy did very poorly. I can't find a live version of the article, but here's archive.org's copy:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060720091555/www.cabochon.com/~...

Groovy just seems pointless to me. It's taken too long to get anywhere, and I can't think any reason to use it over JRuby, Rhino or Scala. JRuby and Rhino have the benefit of being implementations of popular languages, basically getting years of experience, tooling, docs and code for free. Scala adds novel ideas not found in other JVM languages, and makes certain types of problems much easier than they would otherwise be. Groovy is a less powerful version of Ruby with a Java like syntax. It's awfully hard to get excited about that.

Google, EBay and Amazon, to name three.

Rails has filters that can run before, after, or around some or all of your controller actions. This can be done on a per controller basis, or it can be application wide. In this case you'd probably define a "load_widgets" before_filter in your application controller, then set your view to display whichever widgets it had data for.

The Rails magic is well defined though, and it's all documented. It doesn't simply 'stop working'. It's really nothing more than a set of conventions that happen to make certain things really convenient.

This app had something like 200 different tables, with 20 to 50 columns in most tables. Update and insert statements were 5 - 10 lines long, and there were hundreds of the things. There was some JDBC cruft too, but the vast majority was SQL.

This was an extreme case of course, and was mostly the result of bad design, but I haven't come across a database backed application that couldn't be trimmed down with some sort of SQL generator. SQL is fine for simple queries, but, for me at least, has always gotten unmanageable in the long term. Need to select, insert and update the same columns? Duplication. Conditionally group by or order by different fields? Duplication. Decide after the fact that you need to support multiple databases, or eager and lazy loading? There goes the weekend, and probably most of next week.

You could manage all of the above with some sort of home grown solution, but a good ORM just makes everything so painless. I was strongly anti-database for years, yet I now often find myself using ActiveRecord when a flat file would do, simply because ActiveRecord is easier.

Of course, that's just me. SQL and I were never a good fit, and I'm glad to be mostly rid of it, but I'm sure others have had different experiences.

SQL is extremely verbose. During my previous life as a Java programmer I moved a project from raw SQL to the hibernate ORM, and removed 10,000 lines of code in the process. Using straight SQL, the data access code was more than 50% of the entire code base. Switching to an ORM got it below 10%.

It really depends on what you're doing, but I can't imagine why anyone would want to write SQL by hand. If you really want simplicity, don't use a database at all.

A relevant quote:

"We're past the days of using machines as amplifiers of our physical efforts. It's not enough to jam more features into code just so we can eliminate one more position on the assembly line. We're at a point where the machines can help amplify our imaginations."

The idea of software as art is hardly new, but it's nice to see a cool app get some formal recognition.

I did that earlier today, shortly after the post went up. Thank you though. I'll contact YC about it.

I haven't received anything yet. Should I be happy, sad, or just confused?