“Finally, Bucciarelli is right that systems like telephony are so inherently complex, have been built on top of so many different layers in so many different places, that no one person can ever actually understand how the whole thing works. This is the fundamental nature of complex technologies: our knowledge of these systems will always be partial, at best. Yes, AI will make this situation worse. But it’s a situation that we’ve been in for a long time.”
Readit Newsspenrose commented on Nobody knows how the whole system works surfingcomplexity.blog/20... · Posted by u/azhenley
spenrose commented on Water 'Bankruptcy' Era Has Begun for Billions, Scientists Say bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/ciconia
Governments are not ready to admit the fact of the Earth's overpopulation.
This perspective dates to at least 1940, when the population was a fraction of the current size. The fantastic Charles C. Mann wrote an excellent book, The Wizard and the Prophet, about it.
Regarding water specifically, we now have multiple desalination projects of 1MM m^3/day, enough to support a city of 4MM people. They are expensive, but getting cheaper, and real (rich) polities in the Middle East are relying on them.
Guido van Rossum was not an accomplished mathematician. He has a master's Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science, and got a bronze medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad, but the former is because that's where CS was taught, and the latter because he was a smart high school student.
As he described it:
"But after that first year [of college], it turned out that the real math I wasn’t particularly good at. And I think there were some great teachers at that university and some super cool topics being taught. And I couldn’t keep up. I remember something about a particular form of group theory. And I knew—and a few other students who were like, “Oh, you’ve got to go do graph theory, or group theory.” And I was like—it went way too fast. And I suddenly realized I didn’t have the skills to keep up with those topics. But in the meantime, starting almost from my first month I entered the math department, I had been learning to program because they had I think one of the first-year undergraduate courses was programming in Pascal."
Quoting from 'Oral History of Guido van Rossum', https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10273871...
Thank you for the correction. I should have said “trained”.
Kotlin didn't target LLVM at all when it was designed, that feature came much later. The primary target for Kotlin is and always was the JVM. And Kotlin was designed with usability in mind from day one, that was the justification for it. Weird to say Kotlin define programming as serving the compiler. The compiler bends over backwards to serve the user.
Thank you for the correction
I forgot two, er, three:
9. Python got lucky that its inevitable screwups (Python3) didn’t quite kill it.
10. Swift and Kotlin both define programming as serving the compiler (specifically LLVM) rather than serving the coder’s problem. (I haven’t discussed Rust so far since it isn’t attempting to compete with 98% of Python use cases, but if you squint you can see it as going one step further than Swift and Kotlin and in effect forcing the coder to be a sort of human compiler who thinks in types and memory management. This is not a criticism of Rust, BTW.)
0. And behind all of this is Moore’s Law and the demographic explosion of programmers. Python was an implicit, perhaps unconscious bet that if you served people thoughtfully, the tradeoffs with serving the needs of contemporary silicon wouldn’t matter as much.
I can't stop thinking about this. WRT Perl specifically, it’s fascinating how the two competitors adopted Unix shell patterns. Python is handicapped to this day by not automagically snarfing up environment variables, etc. But Perl leaned hard into TECO-style gibberish and the meta-syntax that is regular expressions, confronting beginners with arbitrary complexity. It feels like Wall embraced the system administrator side of coding — the side that has an enormous capacity for tracking corner cases and managing impedance mismatches. Wall was trained, perhaps not coincidentally, as a linguist, a field where continent facts really matter. Guido, on the other hand, was an accomplished mathematician. (This is the Dwarf / Elf distinction from Cryptonomicon.)
1. Python was designed by testing syntax with novice users to see what they could adopt easily.[1] > 90% of current Python users weren’t born when it was created. They all had to learn, and Python is the easiest language to learn because Guido and his teammates, unlike $LANGUAGE_DESIGN_GOD, approach the problem as experimental scientists rather than auteurs.
2. Python is conceptually compact, dominated by hash tables with string keys. The initial leader in the ecosystem, Perl, is conceptually sprawling and difficult to reason about.
3. Python also took lessons from the Unix shell, a mature environment for accommodating beginners and experts.
4. Python had a formal process for integrating C modules from early on.
5. Python’s management has an elegant shearing layer structure, where ideas can diffuse in from anywhere.
6. $NEXT_GENERAL_PURPOSE_LANG (Ruby, Go) weren’t enough better to displace Python. Both were heavily influenced by Python’s syntax, but ignored the community-centric design process that had created that syntax in favor of We Know Best.
7. Speaking of open source entrepreneurialism, JavaScript has become a real rival thanks to the Web (and node), but it is handicapped by the inverse failure mode: where Go is dominated by a handful of Googlers, JavaScript was effectively unmanaged at the STDLIB level for a crucial decade, and now it can’t recover. (I’d also guess that having to write a module system that works well in the chaos that is Web clients and simultaneously the Unix world is a daunting design problem.)
8. Python got lucky that data science took off.
[1] https://ospo.gwu.edu/python-wasnt-built-day-origin-story-wor...
I forgot two, er, three:
9. Python got lucky that its inevitable screwups (Python3) didn’t quite kill it.
10. Swift and Kotlin both define programming as serving the compiler (specifically LLVM) rather than serving the coder’s problem. (I haven’t discussed Rust so far since it isn’t attempting to compete with 98% of Python use cases, but if you squint you can see it as going one step further than Swift and Kotlin and in effect forcing the coder to be a sort of human compiler who thinks in types and memory management. This is not a criticism of Rust, BTW.)
0. And behind all of this is Moore’s Law and the demographic explosion of programmers. Python was an implicit, perhaps unconscious bet that if you served people thoughtfully, the tradeoffs with serving the needs of contemporary silicon wouldn’t matter as much.
1. Python was designed by testing syntax with novice users to see what they could adopt easily.[1] > 90% of current Python users weren’t born when it was created. They all had to learn, and Python is the easiest language to learn because Guido and his teammates, unlike $LANGUAGE_DESIGN_GOD, approach the problem as experimental scientists rather than auteurs.
2. Python is conceptually compact, dominated by hash tables with string keys. The initial leader in the ecosystem, Perl, is conceptually sprawling and difficult to reason about.
3. Python also took lessons from the Unix shell, a mature environment for accommodating beginners and experts.
4. Python had a formal process for integrating C modules from early on.
5. Python’s management has an elegant shearing layer structure, where ideas can diffuse in from anywhere.
6. $NEXT_GENERAL_PURPOSE_LANG (Ruby, Go) weren’t enough better to displace Python. Both were heavily influenced by Python’s syntax, but ignored the community-centric design process that had created that syntax in favor of We Know Best.
7. Speaking of open source entrepreneurialism, JavaScript has become a real rival thanks to the Web (and node), but it is handicapped by the inverse failure mode: where Go is dominated by a handful of Googlers, JavaScript was effectively unmanaged at the STDLIB level for a crucial decade, and now it can’t recover. (I’d also guess that having to write a module system that works well in the chaos that is Web clients and simultaneously the Unix world is a daunting design problem.)
8. Python got lucky that data science took off.
[1] https://ospo.gwu.edu/python-wasnt-built-day-origin-story-wor...
spenrose commented on Questions for Cloudflare entropicthoughts.com/ques... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
I am disappointed to see this article flagged. I thought it was excellent.
Welcome to the human condition, my friend. The good news is that a plurality of novels, TV shows, country songs, etc. can provide empathy for and insight into your experience.