I've been doing systems work for 20 years. Here's why most of those things are actually good:
- Strings are subtly complex, but strings are not variables. You can assign a string, and later handle it as a variable, and not deal with any of the specifics of string-iness. Likewise, you can take a variable, and later treat it as a string (for loosely or not-typed variables).
- Magic switches are not magic, they are options. Virtually every program takes options. Sometimes they impact a lot of things, sometimes a little. Only the context determines how much is "too much".
- Terse/cryptic variables allow you to write complex expressions in a compact form. This allows you to read more in a small space, making it easier to reason about or form complex expressions. Human languages are flush with these, as is mathematics. But you have to balance the terse, cryptic and magical with guilelessness, or it becomes a mess.
- Terse and magical syntax is, again, a feature, not a bug. Using magical syntax I can do in a few characters what would take me many lines with a traditional language, and as we all know, increased number of lines correlates to bugs, in addition to simply making it harder to grok.
- Types aren't ignored, but they may be very loosely enforced. If you want to write a quick program to get something done, typing is a curse. If you want to write a very thorough program, typing is a blessing. In many cases, loosely or untyped programs actually work better than their typed cousins, because they allow for more unexpected behaviors without failing. Failing early and often may be a modern trend, but... it literally means things fail more, and this is often not desirable.
Caveats:
- Programs that are hard to read do indeed suck, and it takes lots of experience to make some kinds of programs easier to read. But that's not an indictment of the program, it's an indictment of the person who wrote it. We don't indict English when somebody writes a document that's impossible to comprehend.
- Interestingly, some of the more popular languages are the worst to debug. Perl is probably one of the easiest languages to debug, not inconsequently because of how good the interpreter is at suggesting to the user what the actual problem was and almost exactly how to fix it.
If you do some research and then want to publish it in a journal, there is a large scope of work on the publishing side which includes hosting. Scihub just redistributes what journals have already spent the money to vet, edit, proof and publish. The "cost of access" is paying for all of the aforementioned work. So there is a lot more to do, and pay for, that is not being captured by people looking from the sidelines going "why is nobody giving me free cake?"
If all you want to do is say "we have pre-pubs on a free FTP server", sure, that's cheap as hell. But it doesn't replace the journals, it doesn't address research funding models, it doesn't move scientific progress forward.
> of course scientists could run a reputable journal for free or on donations
We can't even get critical infrastructure open source projects funded by donations. What makes you think people will start donating to free research journals?
> You can run a better journal for free than what you can get from Elsevier.
If you staff and pay for it.
You're also forgetting that the entire point of Journals is so that research institutions don't have to think about how to dole out the grant money. In addition to actually creating an entire new journal, you also have to make sure its "reputation" is better than the existing journals, or nobody will use it.
> The scandal in my opinion is that a professor or phd candidate is paid by the state to do research and then the state has to pay again to license the contributions their employees made. Meanwhile the taxpayer who already paid for the research cannot access that research for free.
Ignoring the fact that you can indeed get the research for free if you e-mail the researchers... Who is going to pay for unlimited online access?
Somebody has to pay for it. It is not free to publish journals, or keep tens of thousands of them, with millions of articles, around indefinitely, for instant access by anyone on the web.
The only thing you can change is who is paying whom. Either you pay a publisher so that they maintain access. Or the people actually publishing an article pays the publisher (Open Access), in which case it's taxpayer money from the researchers' budget paying for it. Or you have lawmakers create some government subsidy for them to maintain access, or you have lawmakers create some government agency to maintain access. Other ways to pay include big private donors, universities, libraries, museums, endowments, foundations, societies, etc.
In all of those cases, someone will be paying. The question is, who, and how much? So far, nobody has offered to cough up all the dough. Maybe you can get Bezos, Bill and Buffet to chip in.
Does the "social media industry" provide a service where you, an individual, can sign up to one single site, and access every social media post that exists?
No. Because they're different social media sites. They do not work together. They compete.
- Strings are subtly complex, but strings are not variables. You can assign a string, and later handle it as a variable, and not deal with any of the specifics of string-iness. Likewise, you can take a variable, and later treat it as a string (for loosely or not-typed variables).
- Magic switches are not magic, they are options. Virtually every program takes options. Sometimes they impact a lot of things, sometimes a little. Only the context determines how much is "too much".
- Terse/cryptic variables allow you to write complex expressions in a compact form. This allows you to read more in a small space, making it easier to reason about or form complex expressions. Human languages are flush with these, as is mathematics. But you have to balance the terse, cryptic and magical with guilelessness, or it becomes a mess.
- Terse and magical syntax is, again, a feature, not a bug. Using magical syntax I can do in a few characters what would take me many lines with a traditional language, and as we all know, increased number of lines correlates to bugs, in addition to simply making it harder to grok.
- Types aren't ignored, but they may be very loosely enforced. If you want to write a quick program to get something done, typing is a curse. If you want to write a very thorough program, typing is a blessing. In many cases, loosely or untyped programs actually work better than their typed cousins, because they allow for more unexpected behaviors without failing. Failing early and often may be a modern trend, but... it literally means things fail more, and this is often not desirable.
Caveats:
- Programs that are hard to read do indeed suck, and it takes lots of experience to make some kinds of programs easier to read. But that's not an indictment of the program, it's an indictment of the person who wrote it. We don't indict English when somebody writes a document that's impossible to comprehend.
- Interestingly, some of the more popular languages are the worst to debug. Perl is probably one of the easiest languages to debug, not inconsequently because of how good the interpreter is at suggesting to the user what the actual problem was and almost exactly how to fix it.