shijie

Not an inaccurate title, but very hard to parse!

Irrationally, I always think that posts like this are about me in my own role at work. Thankfully, I’m not this out of my depth. My impostor syndrome has decreased by 6% today.

I recently went down the rabbit hole to find a dumb TV. It was surprisingly difficult. I ended up with a Sceptre 65 inch TV, to which I’ve plugged in a rooted, jailbroken Chromecast.

It’s been awesome. The TV is fast to boot up, responsive, doesn’t spy on me, and doesn’t need useless software updates.

Something I’ve learned as someone with high proficiency in another language that I learned in adulthood (I would never say fluent, maybe “functionally” fluent):

Poor pronunciation (I.e. thick accent) but good grammar is usually more forgiven by a native than great pronunciation but poor grammar. Because then you sound more native, but you sound a bit… mentally slow.

I am in the latter camp. My Mandarin Chinese accent is really quite good. But I sound like a child.

So my suggestion to all learning a new language: keep a bit of your accent and heavily index on correct grammar and vocab and listening skills.

In this context I meant “all but” == “everything except” i.e it is almost impossible. Are you saying it means the opposite of how I used it? I’m not certain what you mean.

This is untrue.

https://thinkingelixir.com/elixir-in-the-type-system-quadran....

The language is still strongly typed, and with the language being purely functional, I found myself not missing static typing nearly as much as I thought I would. Things just work, and they break during compilation if they don’t.

I will say that editor support for static languages is categorically better due to the language server being able to more completely reason about the state of your code. That’s the one drawback.

We’re experiencing this at my place of work. Our backend stack is Python, and coming from an Elixir/Phoenix background, adding a durable queue to our infrastructure should be trivial but because of the nature of Python, it is all but impossible to run the queue in the same codebase and application server.

Elixir and the BEAM make it so easy and pleasant to run extremely complicated infrastructure in the same codebase and in the same application context. Hard problems made easy.

I miss it.

It tripped my “trying to hard to write eloquent, witty prose” senses. I proofread a lot of papers in college and wrote a lot of columns in the school newspaper. This is a common style. Thesaurus-driven word choice.

It seems that every ShowHN that features an Elixir project is well-polished, has a sensical API, and has friendly, solid documentation. Is this a function of the nature of the language, the community, or a mix of both?

As someone going through a horrible divorce, replete with custody fights and the whole nine yards, I’d still say that you’re thinking about this wrong.

I am the father of a three-year-old girl. I would go through my marriage a thousand times, complete with abuse and emotional trauma, if it meant I could get my daughter in the end.

I’ve found that happiness has never been found by endeavoring to avoid any and all potential suffering. I cannot control how my wife behaves. I can only control my reaction.

Find a partner that is emotionally resilient, calm under pressure, and has a desire to continually better themselves, then go for it. It may still end in divorce, but I promise you it will be worth it.

Why does everyone leave out the important details??

Most people are more interested in a narrative than they are the truth.

Not every critical or mean-spirited comment is bigotry. You got your fee-fees hurt because there’s probably some truth to the comment, even if it’s mean. Buck up, quit complaining, prove the parent comment wrong in your day-to-day work. Right now you’re just deepening a few MBA stereotypes at the moment.

I’m not aware how prevalent this technique is in Japan, but here in the US it is totally unheard of. I watched the whole video. What an exquisite result. So impressive. It makes me realize the level to which some people dedicate toward their craft. I am not at the Katetsugi level of craftsmanship in my own profession, but this documentary inspires me to get there!

So for parents of phone-using-age kids, what is your tactic for healthily limiting screen time? Behavioral, technological, etc… As the father of a 2 1/2 year-old, I’d love to hear suggestions, even though this scenario for me is a few years down the road.

Yes, basically. Fun fact: Blazor and LiveView were developed independently, around the same time as each other! Just two similar implementations in disparate communities.

I’m going through this right now. I’ve done everything I could to try and save the marriage. My spouse is on the warpath. We have a 2 year-old daughter. I would be willing to work on myself and expect nothing in return for the rest of my life if it meant my daughter could go to the park with her mommy and daddy together. I cannot say the smallest part of how I feel. Unyielding personal torment and failure. Breaking up a family is truly lose-lose.

I was also struck with commenter’s swift label of her apology a “non-apology.” I’ve seen this on Twitter and elsewhere. It’s basically a proxy for “I don’t think you’ve suffered enough to be forgiven.” And that strikes me as honestly a little bit terrifying.

This just seems like a rather clever permutation of ad hominem.

“The reason I won’t refute your argument is that it is so incorrect that it would take me forever to explain why.”

I have had a completely opposite experience during the last 5+ years as full-time Elixir dev, but I can empathize with running into a few scenarios where some library wasn't implemented in Elixir, or the library you want to use is no longer supported.

If you're looking for an "every feature I will ever need to implement has a library for it" experience a la Rails or JS, you might not be happy with Elixir (although we shall see what 5 more years does to the ecosystem).

I don't have problems wrapping a service's API and creating my own library every once in a while, if it means I don't have to trade off slapping together a 5+ service behemoth just to get a good concurrent queue working. This is where Elixir/OTP shines: the hard stuff is easy.

Lowdefy looks great. I'm currently looking for something like Django Admin that isn't necessarily a part of Django (I'm an Elixir dev myself). Have you used Lowdefy extensively? Pros and cons? Limitations? Are you involved with the project itself?

This is a great list of suggestions. Also, Halo CE is one of the greatest multiplayer games of all time. My friends and I still play Halo CE (NHE) on LAN all the time.

I would say that with SO, amortized consensus is fine due to there being a "right" answer to a technical problem or question (more or less). Twitter deals mainly in the market of human opinion, which is necessarily far more nuanced with n sides to a story. This makes Twitter the arbiter of truth for their platform. Perfectly legal, as it's their platform, but I wouldn't expect a free exchange of ideas on such a platform.

As a daily user of Elixir since 2016, having come from a Python/Django background, I can assure you that you can know very little about OTP/Beam and still be immensely productive. But once you learn the underlying concepts that gird Elixir, so many solutions that normally require queues/caching/back pressure/state machines/distributive architectures are all possible with Elixir itself. I can say this honestly that Elixir is the most powerful I’ve ever felt as an engineer in any language.

Do you eat nose-to-tail? I hear a lot about people’s carnivore diets and they sound mostly like an “animal flesh diet,” which is lacking in myriad key micronutrients. It seems one would absolutely need to supplement animal flesh with kidney, liver, heart, etc... I’m curious to hear your experience.

My thoughts exactly! As the Elixir code at my company continues to grow at a rapid rate, writing OTP services for everything has allowed me to never have to think about entire classes of bugs and edge cases simply by virtue of the patterns inherent in OTP and Elixir/Erlang.

Right tool for the right job.

I’m surprised to hear that you believe this to be a myth. The only sources claiming this to be a myth seem to be popular news sites referencing each other in a circular fashion. Here’s a detailed study on the matter: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3312275/

Citing RationalWiki as your source doesn’t lend a great amount of credence to your argument. That section on Quillette sounds like it was written by an angry teenager. Maybe you could cite Wikipedia instead: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quillette which disagrees with your argument rather completely.

I would imagine Quillette, being a conservative-leaning publication, routinely disagrees with this person’s socio-political beliefs, so ad hominem must necessarily be used.

Thank you for posting this! Thanks to you I'm digging in to this book right now and having a blast. The author is an engaging writer and it's been tremendous fun thus far.