> Workers don't want to hear about their alienation. They want a raise, dignity, childcare and a stake in the game. They don't want to be surveilled, or fired by an email generated by an NN.
All of those things are encompassed by a single word—alienation. They are all a consequence of a loss of control over your working life.
Alienation isn't a historical event. It's a term that describes how a human being, in the present, relates to the things he creates.
The concept is simple:
Most people today are put in the unusual position (anthropologically speaking) of creating things they do not themselves sell. From this flows a lot of consequences for social conflict, politics, mental health, etc, something we should try to understand.
Yeah, perhaps this does make neovim more a monolith, as there are already great plugins like coc.nvim that can be used. However, I believe the expectations of a modern text editor have been raised sufficiently in the last few years that we now expect to have code intelligence baked in, just like we came to expect baked-in syntax highlighting decades ago over editors that lacked it back then.
> This feels like a move away from plugins and into monolith territory, which feels like a big step.
I don't consider LSP to be a monolith. You still have the decentralization of language server development. Rather, LSP is just a standardization of what we have come to expect from editors interacting with plugins. And because the standard is modular in its features, the barrier to entry for new language servers and editors remains low.
As a standard, I don't think LSP encourages monopolization the way that the web does for browsers.
> gravitational dynamics are time-reversible, so if gravity could capture you like this you could also start in orbit around a planet and spontaneously be ejected.
I don't have a strong background in physics, and perhaps this is splitting hairs, but is this true if we consider gravitational radiation? Over a very long time a body's orbital energy will be lost to gravitational waves.
It's not sunken cost. Vala is performant, plays well with a multitude of languages, doesn't require a VM, and makes it easy to write Gtk applications. Unlike Rust it's very simple to learn and the elementaryOS project likes it for that reason since it lowers the barrier to entry for app developers. Based on this I'd say it's still got a lot of things going for it.
Now is there more to improve? Absolutely. Despite its use by users, development of the language itself suffers from chronic underinvestment. But I think that's changing a bit recently. (Full disclosure: I'm involved in developing the language and tooling. We could always use more contributors.)
> gnome project felt that they had to n.i.h. an entire programming language.
This isn't what happened. When Vala came out (2006), it was at the time the only programming language advertising such high-level concepts as found in C# (like async/await) while guaranteeing you native performance without a VM. At the time it was billed as a better C++ and a faster C#. When the elementary project adopted Vala (2007), Swift and Rust weren't things, and they would remain unstable for at least the next decade.
Today the world has changed, and while I'd argue that Rust is one of the best languages invented, Vala still has some things over it: easier to learn, binds well with C and a million other languages, faster compilation and a simpler toolchain, has built-in type annotations for Gtk and DBus, all while guaranteeing you native performance.
> I'd love to use Elementary OS, but their use of Vala is just such a turn off. That language is dead except for a tiny gnome niche.
I'll go out on a limb and say that while this might have been closer to the truth 3 years ago, there has been an uptick in activity on the language recently, especially with improvements in tooling. If you look here (https://github.com/topics/vala), while you'll see it used in smaller projects, you'll also see there's a fair amount of high-quality software written in Vala. Clearly the language is capable for serious use.
As far as the language itself is concerned, I think it has a number of good points that aren't very common (outside of Swift or Rust): that is high-level abstractions with little to no runtime cost, easy to learn, C compatible and binds easily to practically every language under the sun thanks to gobject-introspection.
So this is a study about political diversity where it's specifically relevant to the organization's work. In this case, Wikipedia. I'll admit that political diversity is necessary when the "product" is unbiased articles written on politically controversial topics. But how would this affect how a software company develops products, how a car manufacturer develops cars, etc, where political diversity is not relevant?
The author conflates "viewpoint diversity" as it pertains to a workplace setting with political diversity. There are many benefits in a workplace to a diversity of views on how to approach the work and this kind of diversity improves the quality of the product the organization produces. But is this true for political diversity? Maybe, but the author doesn't explain why, and it's not clear what studies exist that support his view.
I don't think this is an intellectually honest article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Western_North_America_hea...