kaens

you call it defund the police because they are disproportionately overfunded.

I spent a decade homeless in appalachia and the general midwest for a decade, and another largely below the poverty line. I'm fine with citing my life and the lives of everyone I knew for the amount of political agency that was present in our lives.

I would not describe that period of my life as having more "free time" but I can understand how that may look the case.

I agree with you in spirit in some ways here and I do not believe in absolution of responsibility. Material conditions, however, often skew the will in ways rather extreme, possibility is not probability and it's a fool that eats shit after watching 20 people take a bite of a cake and realize it's shit.

you're off by a little bit.

The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.

In a well functioning representative democracy, voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.

part of what i'm saying is that if these statements are true, then we are not in a functioning representative democracy.

if i lie to you a bunch and you vote me in, i'm not representing you.

This feels like a contradiction to the previous point that

correct. it is an argument against it.

Maybe a lying politician gets to do this once, but after that it's the populace's job to hold them accountable. The people have a responsibility in a democracy as well. I agree it's not easy and opportunists will try to rig the system. Being difficult doesn't absolve us of the responsibility.

regardless of whether or not i agree that in "the way its supposed to work" this is the case, it's been a lot more than once and for a lot longer than a little bit of time. longer than i've been alive.

with what time, resources, or authority are you suggesting the populace hold them accountable with? don't answer that just yet.

I get the impression we fundamentally disagree that there's "zero accountability to the people". I think there is, but people may just not have the fortitude to do it for a variety of reasons.

We don't disagree in the sense you are talking about, technically. Zero accountability that the accountable will accept as valid though.

If i am born into a life with zero political agency and a constant threat of not having food or shelter in a populace that is largely entirely alienated not only from their peers but from also what they produce and consume how is that me getting what i deserve? In what way do you expect the hypothetical me to be organized or able to organize? How successful do you think someone like that could be at doing what you are suggesting when they don't have more than a $400 buffer and no supply chain?

In many ways, I think the adage of "People get the government they deserve" is true.

I don't think the adage you're referring to is true at all; on the contrary I think that the responses you are speaking of simply take a long time to bubble up into enough of the populace to make them inevitable. Once that threshold is crossed you may as well swap the adage around. The structures and superstructures of societal organization are things that exist prior to you, it's natural for them to be baked into assumptions of "just how things are".

If you want to tolerate rigged systems or lying politicians, or don't want to get actively engaged, what kind of system do you think you deserve?

I don't think that inaction in face of miserable conditions that have been part of your experience of reality since day one makes someone "deserve" those conditions. It just makes them someone living in the reality they've been presented with. Engagement however, of all sorts, has been rising

if i write "bees" on a box, does the box contain bees?

food, water, shelter, and healthcare are universal human interests. it's fine for you to believe the government shouldn't have a hand in them, but then in my view you are simply not in favor of what has been defined in this thread as a "healthy representative democracy"

you could argue that it's not your fault if lots of people don't vote so they get what they get, but you would be oversimplifying things for a HUGE section of the populace who don't vote because they have no one to represent their interests, where their interests are not starving or getting thrown on the street or being in debt for years and years because they slipped on the ice. these people not only do not have a meaningful way to vote, they also often do not have the time or energy to engage in local politics or trying to massage the system. they are currently risking their lives at metaphorical gunpoint every day to deliver "essential" services. minus the pandemic, it's been this way for a long time.

This:

The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.

and this

In a well functioning representative democracy, voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.

do not describe this country, even if you assert that only those who vote are represented. There's zero accountability to the people, the gaps are too large for people who do represent our interests to get through the door (and when they come close the rules tend to change suddenly) Something being against the rules has never stopped someone from doing it if they really wanted to when they are the enforcers or writers of the rules.

if i lie to you a bunch and you vote me in, i'm not representing you. i have no intention on acting in your interests. politics is a crooked game, and ours is a particularly easy one to fix.

and what of the rest of the citizens who didn't vote because they risk losing their job or because of a million other reasons? are they not still citizens? most of them didn't choose to be, and regardless of whether that gives them some sort of moral obligation to participate to their best in the politics of their situation it does not remove their need for food, water, shelter, and healthcare which has been an increasingly difficult need to meet with essentially zero assistance from the system that is supposed to represent them.

to me it seems a lot like the conclusion is either that they are simply lesser for whatever reason and too bad for them or that the institution is just insisting on itself the way that institutions tend to do when they've been around long enough, and maybe a lot of people are actually very out of touch with what it is like to live in america for about half of our populace.

it's just one example of many of huge swaths of people in this country not being treated in the way they they would be treated if they were in a well functioning representative democracy.

see if:

In a well functioning representative democracy, voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.

and "half of this country is a very small bill from crisis for their entire lives, people do things like describing the insurance agent as the most traumatizing part of the bear attack they survived" are both true, in what way can it be considered well functioning?

right, that's why i put "if" there :P

ground realities are that, for example, flint michigan barely has clean water after seven years.

if you are claiming the usa is not a well functioning representative democracy, i agree.

The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.

According to who? I understand that this is a kind of framing used here often, but the federal government has been concerned primarily with itself for a long time now at least to my eyes.

these are rules of thumb, not laws

if you were explicitly asked to, why not?

i think so, largely yes. large industry immersion for a long time (still) lead to, in my view,teaching people wage work skills as opposed to, say, trade or craft skills if that makes sense.

i don't think they'd necessarily become OOP programmers if fp was the default, but i do think we would see a similar trend of fp becoming a distasteful term. all approaches have edge cases and pain points, all those edge cases and pain points get amplified very loudly when they're not accounted for. a lot of fp requires at least as much subtlety in this regard as anything else.

within the framings of software development, i think it is the maintaining of rotting systems that ultimately causes distaste. it is not hard to imagine someone only ever running into, eg, oop systems that are a mess because that's basically all there was for many companies building many things under burnout schedules with no one with more than 5 years of experience working on them.

the problems that fp makes go away easily, the big wins, particularly things like mutability, are things that just happen to fit very well in the problem spaces a lot of software in "the discourse" is written for. if and when those spaces change, so will favored approaches, whatever they end up being.

all that said, i do not think that everyone writing software needs to be a mega computing wizard. the industry is very broad in terms of what types of skillsets are wanted or needed where. i don't think we support this idea very well as a whole.

oh i'm with you there

oh yeah i absolutely agree with you there honestly i just got too in the weeds here, sorry

not saying they aren't distinguished, am saying that a huge amount of the discussion around them in the workforce is being done by people who couldn't define them for you, and that a lot of everything in our field is driven by people who don't understand things copying the shape of them and repeating stuff they heard from people who sound like they do. in general, these aren't people who are going to cross-paradigm as a matter of honing their craft and the ones that are tend towards being good programmers in the end.

i'd further say that that mass lack of understanding is closer to the reason for there being such a mess in many oop systems, in combination with economic pressures, despite common OOP practices being not good for lots of things they got used for.

to quote you elsewhere in the thread:

The reason bad OO is so common is some codebases become economically valuable right around when they start falling apart due to poor design, but you can hire more and more people if the software is bringing in more and more money.

this is a good insight, but i assure you this happens in fp codebases written by inexperienced programmers or poorly managed inexperienced businesses who hired someone to burn them out as well, in exactly the same way, for the same reasons, and that those fp codebases are just as bad, especially now that fp is a "attract the 10xers" item for companies. (would you rather figure out where the thing mutating the state under your nose is or where the hidden assumption that this state will mutate is? i'd prefer doing neither)

Milewski is correct with the caveat that people write the ugliness and build and maintain upon it, producing systems that themselves have tons of spooky action at a distance and get mitigated by bugpatch burn marches just the same

While I recognize what you're saying here wrt types of programmers and what they're likely to get into, I am not convinced that this doesn't have more to do with relative popularities of terms + the tendency for people who are "into" a subject to explore the subject / be open to explorations of different ways of thinking about the subject.

neither fp or oop are well defined terms in actual usage, more of smears of approaches really. moods almost. We have an awful lot of this sort of thing and often a term will get smeared out into a kind of emotional suggestion + some things that help you avoid types of bugs or accomplish a specific sort of goal.

I don't like this much but for a lot of situations it just means you have to understand things well enough to talk about them without using their name or take the time to establish contexts of meaning w/whoever you are talking to, both of which are good things to have in programmers in general.

That is to say: I think you are correct they have passed through a filter, particularly if they came from an oop background, but I suspect that filter isn't much related to fp vs oop principles as a matter of comparison

edit: just noticed you're the author of the article. here's a thought: the reason you want to avoid mutability can be framed in terms of it causing the number of things you have to hold in your head to very quickly exceed nine, often in ways you may not be aware of unless you have pretty comprehensive knowledge about the runtime characteristics of your entire system's stack.

i have found larger real world fp codebases to have essentially the same organizational problems as OOP codebases, just expressed in different ways.

most of the problem wrt code organization has to do with communicating meaning to humans, fp codebases written by people with a weak and evolving understanding of their problem domain are prone to the same sort of spaghettish expression of intent as OOP codebases in similar spaces, albeit often less verbosely by LOC.

the assumption that all you have to think about is the implementation of the transformation of the function you are currently looking at's inputs to its outputs is often incorrect, or only true in small or idealized cases.

this isn't a diss on FP styles as a whole, i prefer them, but it is not in my experience a great model for everything nor do i find it to significantly aid clarity of purpose in many cases. it is well suited to a lot of shapes of problems that currently pop up often, particularly stream transformation / aggregation types of things.

edit: for clarity, the thing that happened in this industry where "OOP" became synonymous with "how you write code / how you model problems" was a terrible mistake and the influence of fp mindsets on the whole has been a positive, especially considering that context. anything that disconnects seriously thinking about how what you're writing is being understood by humans and ran by machines and how that intersects with your domain is imo a mistake, however this is a bit idealistic of me.

If you grow up with no experience of not being stepped on, exactly what would you be giving up on? How exactly do you expect people on average to not accept the general state of the world as it has been for their entire existence?

Acceptance is the default. People, by and large, often do not have the experience of holding ideals of which to give up on that do not in one way or another map onto their experiences in a way suggesting they are living in-line with their ideals.

Because it is extremely difficult to control ADHD to your advantage. It is your entire experience of reality.

You’ll end up creating highly biased or illogical laws that cater to the culture of the times

yes this has often happened

and need to be changed again

the thing is, they often don't get changed.

i see them literally all the time.

there's plenty in this thread.

there's plenty on reddit.

there's plenty on twitter.

what are you talking about?

he donated in support of prop 8 in california (banning same sex marriage)

how the heck do you go from being a dev to becoming proficient in reverse engineering?

have to do a lot of multi-system level debugging, and/or low-level debugging and optimization

it's fine for your local development, probably want to rename it or incorporate the changes into it's parent branch that is named more usefully for pushing it somewhere shared

can't do on osx without reformat if i'm recalling correctly

this is like, basically all of non major urban area America

good thing no one is advocating for laying one brick and stopping

I don't think it's misleading, the date a talk was given can be very relevant for context.

When was the last time you heard of a programming language discussed in terms of discoverability, succinctness, relevance, let alone beauty?

I mean, fairly often throughout the years. Particularly in communities for lisps, ruby, perl, python, C. More common 5-10 years back perhaps.

Relevance is a fairly common topic across the board. Discoverability is maybe the least common topic here, and one that's a pretty interesting one for PL design imo.

I haven't seen too many blog posts about these things lately, but they're frequent enough discussions in personal circles and in mailing lists/chats that this question seemed odd to me.

This is often true.

It's also often true that 1-on-1's are people doing something they are required to do, targeted at quota fulfillment, where there's not actually an opportunity for either side to influence a situation at all because it's just a big chain of fulfilling requests from higher up a chain.

I had mandatory 1-on-1s at a call center doing outbound cold calls for things like FoP fundraisers, a job that couldn't actually be done cheaper legally, where the organization didn't have goals other than maximizing profit, where no one I interacted with were anything but cynical about the job and where there wasn't value to be found in getting more invested in it. My managers were explicit about them being bullshit mandatory 1-on-1s mostly geared at pressuring employees to close more.

Guess what: lots of places are like that.

important to know your contexts.