I had several history of science and technology courses at university that caused me to reach the same conclusion.
Basically the same story repeated over and over. Somebody invents a thing (usually through some sort of crackpottery or insane devotion to some personal belief or theory) and then the crackpots all get to work messing with the invented thing. Eventually the crackpots die or get bored and real science is hopefully the last man standing (but that can sometimes take a long time).
There's an indepth analysis into the switch from geocentricism to helieocentricism that basically gives the same impression.
Im pretty sure I watched a numberphile video on this. I'm having trouble googling it. Anyone know the video I'm talking about?
This is the sort of thing that belongs on HN, but not WSJ. WSJ should be talking about the privacy issues they vaguely touch on before going back to talking about doomsday by statistical argument.
Actually, this is much more interesting than the doomsday math. Like does somebody have the mental model of a bunch of software engineers shoveling equations into a furnace and it powering a data center?
What exactly did they have in mind when they decided on that phrasing?
I can second ocaml. Im using it more lately and really enjoying it. Of course the compiler error message leaves a lot of room for improvement. And it does take a lot of time to get used to all of the peculiar syntax.
But you get ADTs, the best modules on earth (even if the syntax is a bit old ...), GADT if you want them, object row polymorphism, polymorphic variants, streams, etc.
That's not particularly charitable. The accidental AMA that happened on HN a few weeks back gave me the impression that V lang isn't as polished as a concept as some of the other offerings out there. BUT the author seemed tp have something brewing. And regardless we'll have some more evidence in the coming months.
Regardless, V lang is another data point that something besides C is a possibility with the modern tools that we have available to us. Whether or not it pans out is almost immaterial. Just the fact that so many people are finding some sort of success or making some sort of progress in this space is enough for me to continue to watch for any new progress in the C competitors.
I imagine the types of things you do with the respective languages as well as the number of people in the communities have a pretty big impact.
For example if you're using c++ to implement an interface for some hardware then maybe you can just quickly follow a spec. But with lisp you're more likely to try and implement some sort of ai thing that requires a lot of stopping and thinking.
With respect to community size, if you have a bunch of people then you're going to get more accurate numbers but if you have a small community then you might end up with a lot of outliers.
Finally people are probably more likely to have a significant amount of practice with c++ vs lisp and that probably has an impact.
This is pretty cool. Ive seen a surprising number of things hidden in c# that can affect performance. For example stack allocation. Anyway im looking forward to the tools, frameworks, and abstractions that come from these features.
I dont know. Ive seen systems before where anyone could make catastrophic 'modifications' like what you describe. I tend towards blaming the system construction over the junior developer.
Basically the same story repeated over and over. Somebody invents a thing (usually through some sort of crackpottery or insane devotion to some personal belief or theory) and then the crackpots all get to work messing with the invented thing. Eventually the crackpots die or get bored and real science is hopefully the last man standing (but that can sometimes take a long time).
There's an indepth analysis into the switch from geocentricism to helieocentricism that basically gives the same impression.
http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...
Our advances are spearheaded by crazy or unhealthily opinionated people who just want to try and do things they think are neat.