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chucke

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chucke
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
lol, the trans-pacific route was pointless. Portugal monopolized the Indian ocean and spice trade for more than 100 years. It established the atlantic triangle trade of Africa (supplying slaves) to Brasil (supplying sugar) to Europe. All of them comercially viable for centuries. Meanwhile, Spain could barely cross the Pacific ocean and make it the viable trade route to the spice islands that it longed for to be.

Many forget that the circumnavigation of Magellan was both a mistake and a failure. The discovered pass to the Pacific, the southernmost point in the planet not counting Antarctica, was considered unnavigable most of the year (the magellan fleet had to wait 6 months at Puerto San Julian before daring to continue the search, surviving its first mutiny attempt), before treading the slow currents of the Pacific, which took down the majority of the fleet to scurvy (while most likely contributing to the madness of Magellan, which made him the delirious zealot which jumped foolishly to his death at the hands of Lapu Lapu). In fact, part of the fleet tried to make it back through the Pacific, only to give up again, come back to the spice islands and be captured by the portuguese, while the remainder barely made it back, commanded by Elcano, one of the mutineers of Puerto San Julian; a route that btw, they feared taking, as it was in direct violation of the Tordesillas treaty and would certainly condemn them to death would they be discovered. 1 ship out of 5 made it back. 18 out of 270 men. By the time they arrived, the new world colonization was still mostly considered a failure, Columbus still an outcast, not even worthy of naming the continent he discovered (this was roughly 18 years before the Aztecs, Incas, and all the gold and silver that got plundered).

Meanwhile, the portuguese routes remained largely uncontested, that is, until a certain young portuguese king died in a battle in the north of Africa leaving no children, thereby opening the door for the two crowns being ruled by the same king, and with it, making Portugal a target for the many enemies Spain had been collecting along the way. And that was the beginning of the end for the portuguese century.

The Manila galeon is certainly an historic milestone, but it connected America with Asia. Payload needed to be carried by land all the way to the Gulf of Mexico before departing to Europe. Barely global, if that's what's implied. It started quite late in the history of the spanish in Americas, some 100 years after the conquest of Mexico, because until then, extracting and transporting all the gold and silver to Europe was considered more profitable, until there was so much silver in circulation in Europe that it devalued it, thereby making Asia a more enticing market for its silver, as it was still considered valuable by then. The route also lasted a bit more than 50 years. Consider that the portuguese route to India was still being navigated way into the end of the 1800s, and only being truly disrupted by the opening of the Suez canal.

I'm not here to downplay the several achievements, or exacerbate the atrocities of the spanish empire. Every empire had them, no less the portuguese (while they did not come up with the idea of slavery, the atlantic triangle is responsible for the biggest intercontinental forced transfer of human beings in history, and the massive economic dependence it created in African kingdoms caused its brutal collapse after the abolition). But not calling it the first global empire of the discovery age, specially taking into consideration that they literally started a century before anyone else, is factually incorrect.
chucke
·قبل 7 أشهر·discuss
Both are true. Different camps meant that any significant change to the language was scrutinised loudly. If my memory doesn't fail me, the last significant changes from the time Guido was still in charge, and he mostly abandoned the BDFL because of backlash. Since then python has been on a constant "analysis paralysis" state, with only efforts about performance pushing through (no one complains about a faster horse).
chucke
·قبل 7 أشهر·discuss
Maybe I wasn't clear, but until now there were 2 types of type notations being debated, RBS and sorbet/RBI. Sorbet adopting RBS means that's the lowest common denominator. Typing is definitely not a standard, not yet. rbs-inline is definitely not a pet project, it's the RBS creator response to the main complaint about RbS , its the reason sorbet finally adopted it, and will be part of mainline rbs gem.
chucke
·قبل 7 أشهر·discuss
Happy bday ruby!

For the usual doomsdaysayers saying "ruby can't X so I left it for Y", when X is typing, RBS is becoming the accepted standard (now that sorbet supports it),and RBS inline notation next to signature/code too (for peeps complaining about separate files); when X is LSP, ruby-lsp is the standard and already supports "go to definition" (its major hole for a long time), and its plugin architecture allows other other features to reuse the same code AST/index (So that each linter/formatter/type checker doesn't have to parse their own); when X is parallelism, ractors are have actually become performant in a lot of common cases, and it's only missing some GC improvements to be truly non-experimental.

There are new shiny things like ZJIT or Box, but even the core team recommends against using them in production for now. But they'll get better, as its been happening with the things listed above.

No wildly new syntax changes is also a good thing. Should help alternative implementations catch up.
chucke
·قبل 8 أشهر·discuss
Static typing has come, there's RBS, which has (finally) coalesced (after adding support for inlining in code) as the blessed type notation, supported by both steep and sorbet. Considering that big companies have adopted it, I'd say that the community agrees and has done something about it. But as you can imagine, many ruby apps have been stuck in legacy for years.

About performance, not sure how you think static typing could solve it, but considering the significant investment recently in JITs, in particular YJIT and ZJIT, again, the big apps seem to agree with you and have done something about it?

Even if you ditch CRuby for the JVM, you can still use JRuby, and still leverage the language while not being pulled down by the runtime.

It's not like you're without options.
chucke
·قبل 8 أشهر·discuss
Lmk when the app launches, will beta test if for free.
chucke
·قبل سنتين·discuss
> Nobody says you need http, sqs, grpc, and queue

I give it to you that, we're it not for microservices, I wouldn't need as much of http, sqs, etc, as well requiring making sense out of all of it via tracing/metrics/logging...

I've worked enough with microservices and heard enough managers preaching the same "cattle not pets", "small focused services", and similar, enough to know that high turnover or several rounds of layoffs, unreasonably high cloud bills and clients frustrated with high latency, often caused by several services, is the inevitable outcome.
chucke
·قبل سنتين·discuss
Debugging IS more difficult. Observability is much harder, sometimes needlessly. When you're 4 languages deep and have to enable distributed tracing across a variety of brokers/protocols (http, sqs, grpc, queue in a database) you know the lord intended you to spend your time in a more useful way.
chucke
·قبل سنتين·discuss
The equivalent to passport in ruby is called omniauth. Having used both, don't really find a huge upside in the former compared to the latter, just different APIs.
chucke
·قبل سنتين·discuss
For payments, not for billing, right? I'd be very surprised otherwise, considering how Stripe's offer for billing is quite inflexible and (at least 6 months ago) offering experimental features.