> "The owner/CEO of a small to medium company won't hire you because, given your experience, they will be afraid you will learn their industry and become a competitor. The manager at a medium to large company won't hire you because they will be afraid you'll take their job."
I'm mid 40s & in the same boat. Entrepreneurship probably is the only option. It is what it is.
If you look at recent layoff numbers, their coastal brethren will be joining them soon. It's America! One man copes with food, another with money, another with sex. You are all degenerate!
Not just readability; trade-offs in every conceivable dimension: time efficiency, memory efficiency, developer efficiency, readability, maintainability, correctness, etc, etc...
Adopting the features he values is not free. A toll would be paid along a different axis.
The combinatorics of full-text search are astronomical. A dashed-off comparison like this is pure noise. There are so many knobs to twiddle, and a nudge to any one of them can yield remarkably different results.
HN is written in Arc, which is a lisp derivative that runs on top of Racket, which has the same runtime inspectability as almost every other lisp, and for PG's public relations board, it was a good choice.
Rusher is full of s** though. It isn't really a case of, "this one was ahead of it's time, this one's behind". It is a case of trade-offs. I can dash off all kinds of cool stuff in Racket or Clojure, in record time w/ minimal lines of code. Good luck getting someone else to understand it though, and good luck getting me to understand it after a year away from it. With a larger code base, built-in compile-time type enforcements are huge--and as an afterthought, with macros, on an opt-in basis does not count. Aaron Swartz had Reddit re-written from lisp to python for similar reasons--not strict types, obviously, but having more syntax than parentheses is a big win when new hires are trying to understand the system.
Same story with APL: brilliant as a desk calculator on steroids, clumsy for nearly everything else. Or C, the indispensable bit-twiddling language; only a sadist would want to write an application in it, but it's still pretty darn indispensable for the tight spots where performance matters (drivers, AAA video games, AI maths, crypto, etc). I'd say that all the way up until the late 80s, all of the spots were "tight spots."
It's like the Bret Victor cult--a demo of a game-maker program that used javascript as its intermediate representation. It had been done hundreds of times before with different IRs, and the model is entirely appropriate for making 2D video games. Raise the dimensionality, or change the problem, and the model breaks down, but he conveniently ignored that, because it is more fun to get up on the podium and play programming prophet than to do the work of making a language that actually has legs.
Since RAM (slow) and/or cache access is involved in nearly every step--which becomes increasingly complicated when trying to preserve cache coherency across multiple cores--improvements in the next two are a big deal:
Executive summary: Work smarter, not harder, & the ultimate measure of performance, is performance (which may sound stupid, but it's in the textbook, because it's true!).
I would also add that more cores aren't necessarily better. The utility depends upon the nature of the task & how memory-hungry it is. If the task is inescapably sequential, it doesn't really matter how many cores are on the die. Same story with parallelizable tasks that pound RAM: at any given time, one core is hogging the memory bus, and the rest are waiting their turn. They may take turns, but at any point in time, it's essentially single-core performance.
The place where multi-core really shines is when you have a highly parallelizable task, where each thread grinds really hard over a smallish data set that fits comfortably in the core's cache. In that case, you can definitely max out all cores. Though from what I see in the wild, that is a rare case.
A lot of the industry is really just gaming benchmarks at this point, which are, for the most part, bullshit. I think Apple will remain in very good shape on this front, if only because of their customers (i.e. normies instead of gamers; people who haven't fallen completely into the quantity cult). They will complain when it stops feeling fast (the only measure...), instead of taking it as a challenge & wasting their lives on overclocked water-cooling bullshit.
I'm mid 40s & in the same boat. Entrepreneurship probably is the only option. It is what it is.