Are we in the worst of all possible worlds?

Good people are constantly being supplanted in favour of the greedy and sociopathic, over and over and over again.

Imagine if Gary Kildall had made the deal with IBM as was supposed to happen, instead of Gates.

http://www.tomrolander.com/GaryKildall/In%20memory%20of%20Gary%20Kildall.htm

Gary Kildall tried to push elegance in software. Imagine sane computing. Imagine if this person had influence over computing that Gates ended up having.

Actually, I can't imagine it, because some other monster would have come along. The demons are everywhere.

The human race is comprised of mostly nasty, selfish monsters. Our being conscious is a mistake and we shouldn't even be here, but that is a topic for another day.

People who try to do good seem to get stopped before they go too far, while the greedy monsters are completely free to run amok.

It's best to an hero.

Gary should has sticked to math and family, because business is not for weak. He lost the deal with IBM because stupid female pussy!

should has sticked

Go to sleep, Nikita.

These Chinese girls seem to be in the best of all possible worlds.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/22/chinas-rich-kids-head-west

>>1
It's not to do with good people or bad people, or even good engineering/design or bad. It's the fact that they're not actually related - how well things do in the market is only tangentially related to how actually good it is. Technical people, the people who actually care deeply about the elegance of their designs and quality of their engineering, are generally loath to admit this for a number of reasons, chief among them being that they often prefer to solve (relatively) more simple problems that are more in their domain relating to the actual design of things rather than the substantially more complicated and fuzzier problem of succeeding in the marketplace. And who can blame them? It not only involves a completely different set of skills, which are deeply married to a specific time and place (knowing what people want in one time and place won't necessarily help you sell things in another), it also reveals uncomfortable and profoundly depressing truths about the world we live in - success in the ``real world'' isn't much related to any of the things they care about. Any piece of absolute garbage can succeed just as well as their best effort, if the people marketing it can get better deals with OEMs and proprietary software producers.

It reflects a fundamental unfairness about the system we live in and further by going to work every day and spending money - it's not a democracy, people get locked into buying things (``voting with your wallet'' as they say) that they don't even really want for any number of reasons - using Windows as an example, they range from that the choice is already made for you (you go buy a new brand name computer, it comes with Windows on it) to disincentives for switching (your hardware manufacturer doesn't release specs, so you can't use it with other systems, but they release drivers for Windows, because everyone else uses it, partially because it supports pretty much all hardware, because everyone uses it, ... - this is less of a problem than it used to be, but only because a herculean effort on the part of FOSS developers), to downright malicious behavior (intentional incompatibilities with Word and other systems, intentionally breaking Java's cross-platform portability for the sole purpose of marrying programs to Windows, lots of things involving browsers, etc).

I can only imagine that this is not what people who just want to solve interesting problems want to think about, that they are close to useless without someone to make shady backroom deals and impress idiots for them.

>>6

how well things do in the market is only tangentially related to how actually good it is. [...] it also reveals uncomfortable and profoundly depressing truths about the world we live in - success in the ``real world'' isn't much related to any of the things they care about.

Actually it reveals a much more depressing truth: your definition of "good" as having an "elegant design" or any other such property has no relation whatsoever to any conventional aspect of good, such as being pleasant to use, empowering, and so on.

"Worse is Better" consistently wins over "the Right Thing" from every imaginable underdog position not because of some inscrutable marketplace magic, but because the Right Thing is invariably a piece of useless shit. Very consistent, elegant, and absolutely pointless.

Software is meant to be used by people. Since you don't have anything resembling a mathematical model of a programmer, you can't design a programming language, operating system, or the tiniest library that would be useful to a programmer from the first principles, with nothing but logic and reason.

For example, the C++ iterator hierarchy rings true in the sense of mathematical beauty. It feels discovered, not invented, it comes from the Erdős's Book. It's also one of the worst things about C++, has been making people's lives miserable since '98 and still continues to do so because of a simple fact: 99.9% of the time you need an input iterator so all trade-offs we have to live with are pointlessly painful. "99.9% of the time you need an input iterator" is not a fact that you can discover by thinking about the beautiful and elegant structure of your programming language.

Of course, this truth is so profound and depressing that every single smug lisp weenie and their ilk can't bear to face it, and prefers comfortable lies about the world being an evil place with no respect for beauty or goodness.

WELCOME TO CAPITALISM

>>5
These kids deserve to be rich, because of the superior genetics of their parents. They are genetically superior to you, because your parents were too lazy to make billions of USD, exploiting stupid commie slaves. Same way Stalin was genetic superhuman, because he earned a ton of money using GULAG slave labour and exporting gold to the west. Now Stalin's descendants are pretty wealthy. Same for Khrushchev's grandchildren and Putin's daughters.

>>8
You'll never be as rich as Kim Jong-un.

>>9
Russian detected. Fuck off, white nigger.

>>7

Software is meant to be used by people.

``People'' isn't a homogenous demographic, there are different sorts of them and some of them are fucking idiots. The fact that some important and meaningful things are lost on them doesn't necessarily reflect badly on the things themselves.

using sepples as an example of mathematical beauty

I don't think that's a very good example.

every single smug lisp weenie and their ilk can't bear to face it, and prefers comfortable lies about the world being an evil place with no respect for beauty or goodness.

I think it's more that they are upset that most people either have different values than them (their goal is to write beautiful and concise code, my goal is to get my team of indians to get my company's product out the door before the deadline) or are simply idiots (most programmers have exactly as much interest in computing as bricklayers have in engineering and math).

>>11
enjoy being poor, having no slaves and oil.

>>13
Russians calling others poor? Lol, go fuck a pig. I make more money per hour than you make in a week.

>>14
Say that to Kim Jong-Un, poorfag
http://myfirstclasslife.com/kim-jong-un-net-worth-luxurious-lifestyle-notorious-dictator-earth/?singlepage=1

Slavs are slaves.

>>16
The English word slave comes from Old French sclave, from the Medieval Latin sclavus, from the Byzantine Greek σκλάβος, which, in turn, comes from the ethnonym Slav, because in some early Medieval wars many Slavs were captured and enslaved.[

>>16
Chinese are made of china.
Germans are germs.
Californians are caliphs.
Hungarians are hungry.
Czechs are always checking dubs.

Chinese are niggers
Germans are niggers
Californians are niggers
Hungarians are niggers
Czechs are niggers
Africans are slavs

Ho could one insult a nigger? Call him dumb slav!

>>17
Friendly reminder that Byzantium is a lie. It was always the Roman Empire.

Computers were only ever supposed to be for programming. Programming for the sake of programming. In the 70s up to the mid 80s, that is why they were made. They were made by programmers, for programmers. The problem started when computers started getting made for people who didn't want to program them.

Mathematicians and programmers desperately craved for a computer so they could have an instrument that let them create and explore worlds through programming. When I was a kid in the 80s, I had that same craving. Computers are universe engines. When you program a computer, you conjure the spirits of the computer with your spells.

Using the computer for anything else misses the point entirely and is an incredible waste.

>>22

The Personal Computer was supposed to free the individual. Suddenly, the individual was able to freely explore mathematics, explore truth, to conjure any world they could describe. Any abstraction. If you know the demon's name, you can write a program to conjure it. Computers were sold with manuals that explained how to create your own worlds with them, because it was assumed that is why you wanted a computer.

Those manuals sadly overestimated people's desire for truth. Not everyone cares about mathematical beauty and abstraction. Hardly any do in fact. A tool that can give everyone complete intellectual freedom is instead being wasted on distractions. The internet is the worst thing that happened to computers because it turned these magnificent reality engines into just another passive consumption widget like a TV or radio. Instead of programming it and using it to discover new worlds, its easier to use it to summon the latest distraction from anywhere on the planet straight to your eyeballs. Nothing can compete with that. The reward pathways in all of our brains are completely fried, like a drug addict. The internet has fucked computers and it has fucked us.

>>12

using sepples as an example of mathematical beauty

Have anything to say about the contents of the example? I mean, from where I can stand that particular part of sepples was designed following the principles of mathematical beauty, and it's not a coincidence that it's one of the worst parts of sepples.

I think it's more that they are upset that most people either have different values than them (their goal is to write beautiful and concise code, my goal is to get my team of indians to get my company's product out the door before the deadline)

I don't see how you can derive those values of "beautiful and concise code" without having them ultimately grounded in getting useful code out the door. Qualities of good code stem from the hatred of the process of writing code.

If you don't hate writing code but actually enjoy the process, you end up being the what >>22,33 is making fun of, a brainless monkey enjoying abstract art of endless boilerplate.

And if you agree that beautiful and concise code is actually the sort of code that's directly linked to supposed crazy productivity increases, then you have to explain why on Earth Lisp or HASCAL or Forth or whatever's your favorite poison is not a total superweapon, allowing the privileged class of Übermensch run circles around poor Java monkeys, in terms of acquired money and bitches as well.

Don't give me bullshit about network effects (new languages and technologies appear and dethrone incumbents all the time, only they all still follow the Worse Is Better model somehow) or "average programmers" dragging you down (you are supposed to be Übermensch, remember?). Nah, in my humble opinion the horrible truth is that your opinions on what helps with beautiful and concise code are total bullshit because they actively reject empiricism and are ashamed of being grounded in practical usefulness.

>>22,23 you know what's your problem to an extent you aren't trolling about it? It's not that you like intellectual masturbation, "writing code for the sake of writing code", it's that you lie to yourself and others about your real motivation which is to have other people admire your jerking off skills. That's the only explanation for why you're upset about them having other values despite the fact that that still leaves you perfectly capable of petting the one-eyed Python for the sake of pure art.

>>24

Have anything to say about the contents of the example?

It's not related to any of the ``mathematical beauty'' I've ever come across, that's why I didn't comment on it.

it's not a coincidence that it's one of the worst parts of sepples.

A couple of counterexamples off the top of my head: Haskell is basically just lazy System F, and ML is an even simpler strict version - these systems do not suffer for their simple and ``theoretical'' (for lack of a better word) foundations, they are indeed the entire point of them, and are (relatively) successful for precisely that.

or "average programmers" dragging you down (you are supposed to be Übermensch, remember?).

You want to write the project in Haskell because you know that you can encode all sorts of useful correctness information in its type system, letting you spend less time debugging and have less of a chance of it breaking in production (thus saving everyone time and money), your boss can't spell ``Haskell'' and is much more interested in having it written it in PHP because it's the ``industry standard''.

Real world programming is not about the best way to lay bricks, it's about the best way to get the most bricks laid when the people doing it are drooling retards who can barely spell ``PHP''. We absolutely get dragged down by the average, the entire system hinges on the fact that you are replaceable and if most of the people available to replace you are retards, then you're not going to be allowed to do anything they can't - this includes using better tools beyond the grasp (or motivation to master) of the lowest common denominator.

You're saying that ``elegance'' isn't related at all to what gets things out the door, but neither is what you think of as ``pragamatism'', at least on the level of individual ability. What matters is what is pragmatic to your boss, and a huge factor in that is how stupid everyone else is, because that's going to be your replacement some day.

>>24

you know what's your problem to an extent you aren't trolling about it?

I'm serious. If you think that makes me mad or stupid, then so be it.

>>24

If for no other reason, Lisp and Forth are beautiful because the entire environment you work within can be comprehended by a single person. You can enjoy actual freedom when you learn to use them.

The fact that using these languages allows you to avoid people is arguably the whole point.

My tastes are simple. Bach. Just Bach. And programming.

Lock me in a room with a piano and a computer.

Or just shoot me. Or just let me wander around pretending to be normal for the indeterminate period between now and my death.

>>25

Real world programming is not about the best way to lay bricks, it's about the best way to get the most bricks laid when the people doing it are drooling retards who can barely spell ``PHP''. We absolutely get dragged down by the average, the entire system hinges on the fact that you are replaceable and if most of the people available to replace you are retards, then you're not going to be allowed to do anything they can't - this includes using better tools beyond the grasp (or motivation to master) of the lowest common denominator.

There's no "entire system" in a sense of shared goal, there's a shitton of independent fiercely competing entities, and if hiring programming Übermensch who are 100x more productive in HASCAL than your average drooling retard were actually possible, then someone would do just that and get a shitton of money.

This actually happens with a surprising regularity, Axe-drenched RoR dudes come to mind as maybe the most prominent example, but actually look at any fad, like node.js or MongoDB, in your imaginary world all of that shit would've been dead on arrival simply because PHP coders don't already know it.

Want to shift the goalposts from that to them being unable to grok your favorite language? That's a venerable tradition, Paul Graham did that with his "Lisp is unpopular because average programmers can't understand lambdas", too bad a couple of years later Visual Basic got lambdas and nobody batted an eye. Do you really want to double down on the idea that Ruby's Smalltalk style OOP or CPS as used in various trendy js libraries are a walk in the park compared to, I don't know, literal symbol substitution in Lisp macros?

But also, you see, there's also this little thing called "open source". Like just for one example, one morning Linus Torvalds woke up and decided that he had it enough with bitkeeper and wrote git. Like, single-handedly, until it was actually useful, without any pointy-haired boss worrying about being able to replace him with an Indian. He could've used fucking Coq as the implementation language, and everyone who wanted to contribute would be, OK, guess we have to learn Coq now. Because Linus Torvalds is actually pretty close to being a programming Übermensch who doesn't need no help from drooling code monkeys to get his stuff out the door and went on record saying that he likes C because it's relatively hard and keeps idiots away.

Where's the awesome open source software written by the 200 IQ geniuses who can fully appreciate the elegance, conciseness, and beauty that HASCAL allows them to express? Why nobody uses it?

DROP TABLE bbs;

>>29
node.js is actually an example of the effect. It's shoehorning javascript, a commons web monkey language, into another place where it never belonged, for the convenience of web monkeys.

>>31
Point is, it's nowhere near simple. If a web monkey can learn how to write working code in continuation passing style, then I just don't see on what grounds you can realistically assume that Lisp presents some sort of insurmountable conceptual difference for her, and that's why it's unpopular.

>>32
I've been saying this for years. People put up with extreme bullshit from the popular languages, and learn all sorts of convoluted fuckery in order to get anything real done. They're simultaneously too stupid to understand anything in any other language than they're own, no matter how beneficial it might be. If it shows up in their own language, all of a sudden they magically gain the ability to understand it.

The only solution is mass euthanization. These ass-backwards parasitic shitfuckers are an offense to humanity and sensible reality itself. Kill every last one of them.

>>33
I remember when you Lispers were saying JavaScript and Ruby were Lisps. Now that people are running into problems with these languages, you're disowning them.

Kill every last one of them.

Why is this? Because they have experience using Lisps for real world applications and might tell the world what Lisp is actually like?

>>34

I remember when you Lispers were saying JavaScript and Ruby were Lisps.

Weird, the only people I've ever heard that say were JAVASCRIPT NINJAS and RUBY ROCKSTARS.

I cringe whenever someone says to "use a lambda" when they mean an anonymous function. There's not even any Greek in sight!

>>34
Kill them all because they're a roadblock to progress. All else besides that which is blessed by Microsoft or Oracle or whoever their god is, is automatically anathema. At some point the gods will bless more, but these worthless idiots are the dead weight of why languages are shit, projects are shit, and computing is shit. There is no other option besides a final solution. If you're not inventing anything new, if you're not rediscovering interesting applications of computing, then die the fuck off and get out of our way.

>>36
I cringe too.

"Lambda calculus" originally had the more down-to-earth name "hat calculus" so the Greek letter is a total red herring, mostly intended to give an air of formalism and complexity to a simple idea.

Most anonymous functions are not "just" lambdas in the sense of lambda calculus. They have other information, like type tags, mutable bindings, or side effects, which have different semantics. There is a pure lambda calculus interpretation there, but it is not the same as what the programmer wrote down in the language.

"Anonymous function" is not the important part: the important part is "function" (or "procedure"). It's like saying "use an integer literal" when they really mean "pass an integer (whether it comes from a literal, variable, function result, or other expression) as a parameter."

>>37
The only roadblock to progress I've seen is Lisp. Lispers swindle ideas from other people and hide them behind nonsense to make them seem complicated. Closures, for example.

>>38
Apparently the λ was a transliteration error: the notation was initially 'x (prime-x, as distinguished from (or a play on) x') but the two characters were misread as one; out came the lambda, and it stuck.

Anonymous functions is only a small part of lambda calculi.

>>41
Most languages don't have lambda calculus, they have anonymous functions, even though they usually call them lambdas.

>>41
Which is a reason to cringe. It's like imagining the number 36 and then claiming you're working with imaginary numbers.

>>40
[citation needed]

>>39
0/10 troll.

>>44
https://duckduckgo.com/?q="Church+originally+intended+to+use+the+notation"
Fuzzy memory, it wasn't prime-x.

>>33

I've been saying this for years. People put up with extreme bullshit from the popular languages, and learn all sorts of convoluted fuckery in order to get anything real done. They're simultaneously too stupid to understand anything in any other language than they're own, no matter how beneficial it might be. If it shows up in their own language, all of a sudden they magically gain the ability to understand it.

This is getting circular.

Me: if Lisp's problem is that it's too complicated for code monkeys because it has lambdas, how come those code monkeys code in CPS as demanded by the latest JS framework (which also involves using lambdas)?

Anon: Oh, that's because those code monkeys only code in what they know.

Me: if Lisp's problem is that it's unknown to the code monkeys, how come those code monkeys routinely swarm over totally unknown to them JS frameworks and learn to code in CPS to use them?

Anon: Oh, that's because those code monkeys can't understand lambdas.

What the shit. How about not repeating that ad infinitum and agree that maybe Lisp SUCKS for reasons entirely unrelated to the laundry list of supported features?

That maybe there's more to designing a language than making a Self-Contained Beautiful Right Thing and leaving the boring implementation details like making it actually useful to the fans of your Right Thing who recursively try to solve that problem with the Right Thing approach?

The only solution is mass euthanization. These ass-backwards parasitic shitfuckers are an offense to humanity and sensible reality itself. Kill every last one of them.

Yeah, the final solution is to kill all people who produce barely useful software, that would re-qualify the unuseable software produced by the Lisp Übermensch as being the best ever, mission accomplished!

Check out "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut. It's satire by the way, normal people don't cheer for that sort of an approach.

>>47
Death of the mediocre programmer would be the opposite of Harrison Bergeron, you illiterate fuck.

>>47

It's satire by the way

Satire is the lowest form of comedy and the lowest form of wit.

>>47
Lisp doesn't have lambdas*
JS doesn't have lambdas.
JS code monkeys do not routinely swarm over totally unknown to them JS frameworks, they stay at nodejs.

_{* However it is closer to lambda calculi than Javascript}

God actualized the best possible world

God actualised the best possible world

>>47

Me: if Lisp's problem is that it's unknown to the code monkeys, how come those code monkeys routinely swarm over totally unknown to them JS frameworks and learn to code in CPS to use them?

Because they only code in what they know. ``Knowledge'' in this context truly is as superficial as simply recognising the syntax. The monkeys know Javascript, follow the hype trains of JS frameworks, and learn CPS from the moderately more intelligent folk writing JS libraries (who themselves most likely got it from a Lisp but don't recignise the fact in their tutorials so they don't scare off the masses).

(is-alien-to 'Lisp (code-monkey :can-read 'JS) :because '(parentheses)) and there is literally no deeper reason. Source: Stack Overflow, the bottom half of all Hacker News discussions with 'Lisp' in the title, /r/javascript, et cetera.

>>51
But then the God-Eater ate God and turned the world into the worst possible world.

>>54
I love that game!

>>52
You know what you need to do with your orthography.

``Knowledge'' in this context truly is as superficial as simply recognising the syntax.

Bullshit. What about the people who swarmed all over Python?

"Oh that was different syntax but it was promoted by Google, so..." -- yeah, go fuck yourself with your predictions that can explain anything.

Or maybe the parentheses are important. Maybe having a community that's focused on making shit is important, comparing to a community that's all about proving it on the internet that their way of making shit is totally superior, and it would become totally obvious if only someone got to actually make shit using their language.

>>57

What about the people who swarmed all over Python?

Different context, ``faggot''. NEXT!

Van Rossum stated that "Python acquired lambda, reduce(), filter() and map(), courtesy of a Lisp hacker who missed them and submitted working patches".

Funny world we live in!

>>59
Syntactic sugar and 3 functions that were already one-liners in Python.

>>57
"the parens" is hiding the ugly truth that lisp is forcing programmers to get to AST level(essentially abstract assembler) and they prefer writing interfaces and high-level constructs instead of combining AST primitives like some lego blocks.

>>60
Was anything a one-liner in Python 1.0?

>>61
AST is about as far away from assembler as you can get. -0/10 troll.

>>61,63
* assembly
^_Cretins.

>>63
/polcat kegabs/

>>63
AST is actually a half-way between a real language and assembler.
C++ -> AST -> Asm

>>65
What the fuck do you think you know? An AST node can be anything from exception scopes, to special binding behavior, to weird method specifications, to declarative config. It's literally program structure, containing any possible expressivity a programming language can express, except in a regular format that's easily transformable and generated. Shit like C++ syntax exists because of trash like Fortran and Algol catering to shit programmers, instead of expressing the power of meta-computation directly to them.

trash like Fortran and Algol
shit programmers

So basically the entire software industry solutions and most open-source projects are written in trash algol-based sublanguages by shit programmers who barely able to code a for sloop. Only elite few Lispers hiding somewhere in their basement with handmade Lisp machines actually write real QUALITY code(actually they make LISP machines write the code, since they're above code monkeys) and communicate through LISPnet using LISProuters.

I think there is a world market for maybe five personal LISPuters. Half of them would be for /prog/ regulars.

>>67
To clarify, because you can't read, the language design precedent is based on catering to shit programmers. New languages carry on the assumptions of the previous languages instead of actually rethinking what's going on, what can be expressed, and how a programmer can manipulate the code itself. It's inertia of failure.

>>69

To clarify, because you can't read, the language design precedent is based on catering to shit programmers. New languages carry on the assumptions of the previous languages instead of actually rethinking what's going on, what can be expressed, and how a programmer can manipulate the code itself. It's inertia of failure.

Lisp is the second oldest high level language in existence. It got really popular in the seventies. It was taught in pretty much every university, so every single formally educated programmer was reasonably proficient in it. Lisp was used as the scripting language in the erstwhile most popular text editor. Lisp was peddled like nobody's business through the first decade of this century by Paul Graham, so pretty much every programmer who ever looked for a programming discussion on the internet was exposed to it. And yet, and yet.

Speaking of inertia of failure, Lisp seem to be a physical wonder, a non-inertial object: no matter how hard you push it, the moment you stop pushing it gets to a complete standstill.

>>70

Lisp is the second oldest high level language in existence.

It's the second oldest high level language still in use.

There'a a big difference between the second oldest car and the second oldest model of car that is still being made today.

Gary was driven to create, not to control. Gary was one of the good humans.

>>66

trash like Fortran and Algol catering to shit programmers

Modern languages are definitely incorporating Algol concepts across the board, look no further than both Haskell and OCaml ubiquitously using higher-order functions and algebraic datatypes.

Fortran is the oldest HLL still in use, and its shit legacy prevails.

>>14
Without Fortran, there would be no car and cdr.

There were cars and cdrs before fortan.
Source: I was alive back then, the road was filled with old cars and cdrs.

>>73
They're pretty fundamental features, though, that happened to exist in Algol first as a coincidence of time.