jstratr

I can reach http://status.aws.amazon.com/ from my home Comcast connection in SF. The status page is showing green for all services.

So what's the lesson here? Check the WN site directly instead of depending on search sites.

Kayak and TripAdvisor will give you unpriced WN flights in their search results. You still have to check WN directly for prices, but it's useful for seeing what's available.

Flight metasearch sites have contracts with airlines and OTAs for specific markets, so you're likely to see different inventory if you visit a Canadian site instead of a US site, for example. Seeing different prices on the same inventory is much less likely (disregarding taxes and exchange rates.)

Like others have said, Southwest inventory doesn't often appear on sites like Kayak because they want customers to book directly. That cuts out the commission to Kayak and conditions people to look for flights on southwest.com in the future.

Are we seriously so pathetic as an industry that learning 3 new technical terms is a problem?

For most people, yeah, I think monads are a big hurdle. They look intimidating to outsiders.

I still have to admit that I like the approach Haskell has taken. Sure, it's harder to grasp the concepts if you don't have a background in math, but it's not like monads, monoids, arrows, and functors were thrown in there just to be pretentious. There's a whole lot of useful theory surrounding those concepts that can be used to the programmer's advantage.

Interesting talk! Bracha has some good arguments against features that I generally enjoy in programming languages, like Damas–Hindley–Milner type inference and pattern matching.

Regarding Haskell: The points he makes against obtuse names based in category theory are valid, but then again, Haskell has its roots in research programming languages. Math-based terminology makes more sense for an academic audience.