Doc Avid Mornington @ docAvid @midwest.social

Not actually a doctor.

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2 yr. ago

No, my question does not imply a pure functional language at all. Pure functions exist in languages which are not purely functional. Most of the functions I write are pure functions. I could have a workflow where I work with another programmer who handles the minimal stateful pieces, and I would only write stateless functions - would that make me not a programmer?

(There are also purely functional languages, by the way. I just didn't remotely imply there were, or make any claims about them, at any point in this thread, prior to this parenthetical.)

The part about declarative languages has nothing to do with state, or functional languages. Declarative languages are a whole different thing. Of course declarative languages handle state. The comment I was replying to said "Programming is the art of juggling of state and control flow". Declarative languages don't involve juggling control flow.

I didn't say there is...

No, it's really not.

So, writing stateless functions, or working in declarative languages doesn't count?

A primary challenge strengthens the successful candidate in the general. Our democracy is deeply flawed, but it always has been. It's not worse than in the past when only a tiny fraction of the population was allowed to vote. This is the first time in history that we're seeing serious national discussion of ranked voting, and some states and localities have implemented it.

Approval voting is actually worse than first past the post, in my opinion. We need ranked choice, IRV or STV as appropriate.

Where's your degree from, Hillsdale? I can't imagine it would be any serious school.

• If you had a legitimate degree, you probably would be able to make a coherent argument, instead of announcing that you have a degree, like it's a magic talisman, to always make you right.
• If you had a legitimate degree, you would probably know that there are people with more education than yourself who are socialists, and not believe that having a degree in economics necessarily makes one pro-capitalist.
• If you had a legitimate degree, you would almost certainly have had at least one or two socialist professors on your way to that degree.
• If you had a legitimate degree, you probably would have learned more intellectual discipline than to call anybody who doesn't agree with private capital a "tankie".
• If you had a legitimate degree, you probably wouldn't be so unwise as to assume you were the only one. This thinking shows a really sheltered life, like somebody who has never even been to a university, or encountered new ideas. It connects back to the "magic talisman" view I mentioned above.

Sure, language is complex, and it isn't broadly wrong to refer to the US as a "capitalist country", as capitalism is certainly the dominant economic power, here, but that's intentionally dodging the point. You were the one speaking in absolutes, saying "But socialism is a stupid inefficient system, so it's a non starter." That statement alone indicates a complete lack of understanding of what socialism is, an understanding rooted in absolute systems, which in turn heavily implies a lack of understanding of what capitalism is. What do you think these words actually mean? Come on, show me what that Hillsdale degree was worth.

It's not that simple, though. Yeah, those reactions will be there, large portions of MAGAts are already indoctrinated for that, but with the right messaging in the right places, some people will get mad and at least stay home. No group is homogenous, and I think this has potential to eat into a significant portion of his ravenous base. The messaging has to look like it's coming from their own, a kind of "Trump betrayed us to get in with the liberal elites" narrative. Throw in some pics of men kissing and Trump rubbing elbows with the Clintons. It's all about hitting the emotional weak spots and diverting some people here, some people there, into a new narrative. Whether a good long shower afterward will wash away the dirty feeling is another matter.

Did you know that the US does not have a capitalist system? In fact, it's silly to think of "capitalism" and "socialism" as systems at all. They aren't. They are broad systemic feature sets. You've probably heard the phrase "mixed economy". That's actually what nearly every nation has, a mixed economy, meaning that we have socialist, as well as capitalist, elements. In fact, without socialist elements, the capitalist elements of our economy would have self-destructed a long time ago. You clearly have no idea what capitalism or socialism even are. That's fine, most people don't, it's pretty much the norm, but now that it's been pointed out to you, you have a choice: learn, and grow, or be a stubborn fool. Hopefully you choose well.

Capitalists depend on the threat of hunger and homelessness. UBI undermines that.

It's also just a ridiculous proposition. So much media tells us this is possible, but no, it's not, not even if you find a virgin jungle. Professional survivalists who train and study for it still wouldn't be able to actually live a full life - at some point you're vulture food without society. We're cooperative, tribal animals. That's our strength, and we've built economic systems designed to take that strength from us.

Theirs was better, but I salute (and upvote) your effort, it's good to try and improve our messaging.

This other commenter did pretty good though:

https://midwest.social/comment/7716126

Lol I came so close to downvoting. You really need a /s in there.

Capitalism depends on the threat of homelessness to function. UBI can definitely ameliorate the problems of capitalism, but capitalists will constantly fight it. UBI is also a great idea within socialist economies, where there would be no force against it. We should be doing both - eliminate capitalism and provide UBI.

Oh yeah, and anybody else who had fetched in those commits may still have them as well. It's hard for something to be gone-gone, but it may be annoyingly-hard-to-recover-gone.

Orphaned commits can get garbage collected at some point, though.

No, we have to actually fight that in material ways. Voting third party or abstaining is accepting it. That's exactly what the party leadership wants angry voters to do. If you don't want to accept genocide, organize and take over the Democratic party. We need to win congressional seats, committee seats, control of local clubs, everything from the bottom up.

You only named one upside, I can't think of any other, and C-like syntax is pretty common, so it's not much of an upside. It's at least debatable whether the JVM is a good thing at all - the majority of languages get along perfectly well without it, and there's no reason to believe the ones that do target it wouldn't be doing just fine if it didn't exist. It's weird to say Java gave a job to anybody - the demand to have software written resulted in programmers being hired; if Java hadn't been pushed on the market by Sun, it would have just been another language. Java didn't establish any fundamentals at all, it just borrowed from other places. While all three of the other languages you mention are interesting, for sure, I'm not sure why somebody who doesn't like Java should limit themselves to JVM languages.

I get the feeling you feel like I was somehow calling you out. I want to clarify the the intent of my message was more in the spirit of "wow must be nice" than "you're making that up". But also I'm just interested in how different your experience is from mine.

Who said anything about only requiring 1 reviewer?

I must have misunderstood. You said "If no one has reviewed your change within 24 hours you are allowed to approve it yourself." To me, that sounds like, after 24 hours of no review, one self-approval is considered sufficient. That, in turn, seems to imply that before 24 hours, one non-self-approval is probably sufficient, no?

You should try working for a healthy team where everyone takes collective responsibility and where the teams progress is more important than any one person's progress.

I've had team members in the past who are very self-focused, they tend to close a lot of tickets and look good, then get promoted out, leaving an unmaintainable mess behind. Allowing that is generally a failure of leadership. But right now, that's not our problem, and what you describe is pretty much how we operate.

I'd love to work on a team where everybody took code review a lot more seriously, believe me, it'd be nice, but my team does generally get everything approved, with at least two non-self approvals, in under 24 hours. If something is getting ignored because people are busy and it's a large change because we aren't perfect, and there is some reason to get it in soon, it just takes a quick request on Slack to get the needed attention.

What I found surprising about your description was more that the potential of a self-approval coming up would, in itself, get people's attention, rather than somebody reaching out personally and asking for a review.

Our big weakness is review quality, not quantity. It's crazy the number of times I look at something and see the two or three approvals already, start going through it, and find issue after issue. I see that on other teams as well, where there's usually only one or two devs who ever really make any comments on a review, it seems to be very common.

Yeah, people are so angry, so ready to screw themselves and go down a dark path to prove a point, so do you think that telling them they can't even make that point in the primary is going to get them on board for the general? It's absurdist, antidemocratic, nonsense.