In your flying car, no less.

The drawcard for me is that I can do in a few bytes of declarative CSS things that take many lines of imperative JS to get right, with fewer weird misbehaviours, fewer framework compatibility issues, and a lower time-to-interactive. Working under noscript conditions is just a cherry on the cake.

Deep down inside, however, I miss DSSSL.

Self-driving cars beat humans on safety already. This holds for Waymos and Teslas both.

They get into less accidents, mile for mile and road type for road type, and the ones they get into trend towards less severe. Why?

Because self-driving cars don't drink and drive.

This is the critical safety edge a machine holds over a human. A top tier human driver in the top shape outperforms this generation of car AIs. But a car AI outperforms the bottom of the barrel human driver - the driver who might be tired, distracted and under influence.

I didn't become a software developer so I could write the same SQL queries, the same plumbing code, the same boilerplate beginnings of programs, the same repetitive error handling, the same string formatting, the same report generation, the same HTML templating, and the same thread cancellation logic. I also didn't become a programmer so I could gratify myself by yak-shaving elegant helpers for those SQL queries, plumbing, boilerplates, error handlers, formatting, reports, templates, and cancellations.

Bloggers have been kidding themselves for decades about how invigorating programming is, how intellectually demanding it is, how high the IQ demands are, like they're Max von Sydow playing chess with Death on the beach every time they write another fucking unit test. Guess what: a lot of the work programmers do, maybe even most of it, is rote. It should be automated. Doing it all by hand is part of why software is so unreliable.

You have a limited amount of electrical charge in your brain for doing interesting work every day. If you spend it on the rote stuff, you're not going to have it to do actually interesting algorithmic work.

The world Lisp was born in is more like your iPhone example than the intervening years were. Lisp is older than POSIX by 20 years.

It is also worth noting that Gabriel wrote this in 2003. At that time, programming was a much more solitary activity than it is today. Git would not exist for another two years.

nothing. it's just from someone with no experience with nix like me, it feel weird that someone is already deep into Nix but isn't tempted to use it daily.

I tried this but they just come back with retorts like "OK boomer" which tends to make the situation even worse.

How do you respond to that?