Major tsunamis in Japan aren't rare at all, they've occured multiple times in the past century. They also don't happen to follow a fixed time schedule.
If a built you a house, following all the protocols for safety, right next to an active volcano, would you consider it safe?
The common case of "bundling" is just concatenating files, which works fine if people add their damned semicolons.
To quote the author:
"not using any semicolons at all is a very popular trend in JS these days, so it is very possible this problem might happen in the real world"
This is the crux of the problem. Javascript programmers often follow trends, not sane practice. Looking at the code, for some reason there's a semi-colon before "require" invocations as well.
I don't even know what to say, at this point. Everyone is fired.
His style is much closer to late 90s geocities websites. Even if that became fashionable again (in an ironic hipster way), there still would no intention behind it on his part.
Maybe he's actually a master troll though, who wants to see typographers beg on their knees for mercy, when he lays out text vertically with horizontal letters.
Design aesthetics matter, always. People care about aesthetics. Do you believe Apple is the highest valued company right now because of superior functionality?
If Alan Kay didn't have his credentials, people would dismiss his UI work outright simply based on aesthetics. He's not making "beginner mistakes", he's been at it for a long long time. He either doesn't care enough or he has an impairment to see these issues. Maybe you have that impairment too and therefore refuse my point.
> The rest of your comment can be compressed to name-calling ('horrible', 'unacceptable'), and thence to nothing.
I didn't "name call", I gave an account of the quality of the work. It is remarkable bad. Of course, design is subjective, so that's just an opinion.
> Please don't post like this to HN.
Given your characterization of my post, I will deny you this request.
I will continue to post as I do and you will (or will not) find to waste your time moderating my posts (or banning me). I don't mind either, the choice is up to you.
I'm always baffled by Alan Kay's complete disregard (or possibly blindness) towards aesthetics. His slides are horrible, without exception.
You may say: "But that doesn't matter, it's the idea that counts!"
First of all, that's completely wrong, especially when it comes to startups. Secondly, look at the actual user interface stuff that comes out of his later work and everything in the "Modern Smalltalk" community. It is completely unacceptable.
I was interested to hear the argument up until "Ruby on Rails" showed up. If "Ruby on Rails" does what you need, that's great, but then I'd say you're barely programming anymore, just like writing HTML/CSS barely is programming.
If we just go down another level (where you would implement something like Ruby on Rails), the same question appears. Do we favor explicit logic over implicit relations? At that level, I'd say the rule of thumb that "explicit is better than implicit" pays off, because it's often not that much more code, and a lot of code builds on top.
If you read the article, you'll see that what Corral is right now (i.e. the supposed "next generation") is in fact being abandoned. It's a dead-end, at the very least.
Many languages in use today don't even have a (first class) concept of unions or structures, at least not in the sense that you are talking about. If you're talking about about "bloat" those contexts, you might want to start somewhere else...
>> The downside is then if you just get a message without knowing what it is about it's difficult to figure out.
You're saying that as if there was a clerk reading the message at the other end. If a computer program gets a message it doesn't "understand", it's not going to "figure it out" either way.
Worse, if you're a programmer that doesn't know the actual schema and you're trying to figure out what the schema might be just by looking at the data, you'll probably run into trouble.
Nothing is competing with HTML on being what HTML is. Nothing is even close.
All text encodings in common use build on top of ANSI. The de-facto standard (now) is UTF-8 and there's no reason to change that.
IP really does move all the data around the entire internet (that's kind of in the name right there!).
Yes, there are variations, extensions and incompatibilities, but these things are not being re-invented all the time, exactly because these things are ubiquitous standards.
The manpower behind Linux is superior. Not sure if it's the "vast majority", but for many business cases following the GPL(v2) rules simply is not a problem.
Both the PS4 and the Nintendo Switch run on FreeBSD, by the way.