With his first sentence, "I’m gearing up, like some kind of power washer, to spray new productized services into our operations group so they can SOP those services at scale." the author reveals his arrogance and poor communications ability.
First, a power washer is a violent device that strips the surface from its target. It's not something that you aim at people or animals. He needs a very different simile, maybe spreading seeds.
Second, must he speak only in non-English jargon? When did the acronym SOP become a verb? Does he want his Operations group to just "SOP" everything? Does he not want the group to do what we once called "kaizen", continuously improving upon the standard procedures?
His notions of how to delegate may be fine, but in my organization I'd want somebody other than him to be in charge of it.
I don't see how the static typing of the bound languages enters into it. Python has type hints which can be enforced by some compilers, if you are so committed to type safety in your config scripts. If you have Pkl output YAML or XML then where is your type safety?
Since "popular" does mean that very many people are using it, I think it would be wise to try to serve the Python community.
So true. One of the major config mgt utilities which shall remain nameless, (cough, Ansible, cough), is written in python but created an excrable POS config language build on YAML. At least Ant had the excuse that Java was not suitable for a config language. Will people never learn that building scripting languages on markup languages will inevitably end in tears?
I thought it odd that the language bindings didn't include the most popular langage, Python. In fact, Python seems not to be mentioned at all in the linked page. So I'm wondering, is it
1) Because the developers of Pkl are Python haters
2) Because the developers of Pkl are so overawed by Python that they can't imagine Pkl contributing anything useful to the Python ecosystem
In either case, having suffered so much using Ansible and its excrable YAML scripting, I may use Pkl together with Python.
Importing Miller beer into Germany raises questions anyway, but it's a good thing that the guy didn't try to import Coors. Germany would have had real problems with their slogan, put in place by Joseph Coors, of "Arbeit macht frei".
As another MIT alum I'd heartily second your statement "Most MIT students interact with one another in class as fellow masochists struggling together against a common foe". IHTFP anyone? One difference I have with you is in identifying the foe. I'd say it was the faculty, not the material. A second difference would be in assessing it as an advantage. I've encountered people who went to other schools that are, IMHO, at least as good as MIT (U. Chicago, Caltech). The experience they describe was less focussed on inflicting pain on the students and more on the cool stuff to be learned.
The first lesson from Prof. Rota is about making the painful and unhealthy practice of spending seven hours at a desk a routine thing. The course he cites is 18.03. Its subject, ordinary differential equations, is about as well understood as anything in mathematics. The ODEs that are solvable have generally been solved. I'd question the value of putting students through a meat grinder of lectures and problem sets to drill them in the mechanics of solving those problems. AFAIK computers can do the job now for both those with closed-form solutions, which students can be made to solve, and for those that require numerical methods. Would the students not be better served by a course that focussed more on understanding the nature of the equations and their relationship to physical phenomena than on how to grind through solving them using specific known methods?
The most significant thing that came out of MIT anywhere near my time there was the RSA cryptosystem on which most network security still relies. The most significant aspect of RSA is not the math of the factoring problem that it's based on, but the clever application of that math to create an asymetric cryptosystem. Grinding ODEs does not teach that kind of creativity. I'd argue that making learning into a painful grind actually hinders it.
First, a power washer is a violent device that strips the surface from its target. It's not something that you aim at people or animals. He needs a very different simile, maybe spreading seeds.
Second, must he speak only in non-English jargon? When did the acronym SOP become a verb? Does he want his Operations group to just "SOP" everything? Does he not want the group to do what we once called "kaizen", continuously improving upon the standard procedures?
His notions of how to delegate may be fine, but in my organization I'd want somebody other than him to be in charge of it.