jdtig

I don't think the point of the article is that everything was intentional.

He leads with the differentiators from WordPress because WordPress alternatives are a big conversation at the moment. This is a chance to inform people about how Ghost chose to be different: Non-profit, no plugins, etc.

But the final section ("Governance & the road ahead") seems like a subtle admission that the current Ghost structure wouldn't prevent a BDFL from going off of the rails. Maybe it's too subtle, since he doesn't explicitly connect statements like these:

Neither myself nor Hannah own any shares, assets, domains, trademarks, or other companies related to Ghost. Everything is owned by the Foundation.

From the beginning, Ghost's governance structure has had a board of trustees made up of its two founders, myself and Hannah.

I think Matt showed that some of the open-source-foundation shell game isn't real: There's a WordPress Foundation, and WordPress.org, but it really all belongs to Matt.

So, if Ghost can follow through on changing it's governance structure, it gains another differentiator from WordPress.

Well, WordPress made it 20+ years without a huge fuss over the fact that everything was controlled by Matt. And it only happened now because Matt himself blew things up!

Ghost has been lucky that their own conflict of interest hasn't been an issue: The cofounders don't own anything, but they still have complete control on the nonprofit. It sounds like John O'Nolan is trying to take pre-emptive steps to prevent WordPress drama in Ghost.

Thanks. I wonder what the experience is like working on a very large codebase with or without a framework. E.g. Stripe vs Shopify.

Or if the framework is barely noticeable at that scale and doesn't really matter anymore. That's the impression I get for Instagram (which was built with Django).

Does Stripe use RoR?

The author mentions the codebase was Ruby, but I didn't see if they talked about Rails.

Many writing systems of Southeast Asia borrowed this idea and work quite similarly as a result. Here's Burmese, which also writes vowels on all four sides of the consonant they follow:

ကာ - ka ကီ - ki ကူ - ku ကေ - ke ကို - ko ကော - kaw

The bird on the vessel in Burmese is called a "hintha" (ဟင်္သာ), a common symbolic element in Burmese and other Southeast Asian cultures.

Fun fact: Many European languages have a word derived from the same root. It's χήν in Greek, Gans in German, ganso in Spanish, and goose in English.

I can agree that the Paiboon romanization (g/k, b/bp/b, d/dt/t) is probably the most intuitive for English-speakers.

But it's silly to say that it's the best system just because it is easiest for people like yourself.

I do think something IPA-inspired (k/kh, b/p/ph, d/t/th) is consistent and still usable. It will also encourage better pronunciation (at least for somewhat serious students) if they are trying to say the correct sound (unaspirated /k/) instead of approximating it with an English phoneme that isn't used in Thai (voiced /g/).

You think that /k/ sounds like /g/, because you speak a language (English) that doesn't distinguish them. However, I imagine that writing "k" for /k/ makes perfect sense to speakers of languages that have /g/, /k/, and /kh/.

And your solution works for /k/ and /kh/, but runs into problems when you have a three-way contrast (/b/p/ph/ and /d/t/th). You can't write "buu" for "crab" just because you think it sounds like an English "b"; you need "b" for the actual /b/ sound.