"A quick look through history" is what I'd expect from someone who skims over a book and completely misses the point because they think they know it all.
Indeed I gave you three constraints but you're only looking at one independently.
When else in history were markets global? Why am I arguing with someone who can't even read?
> I can bet you nourish some well-developed fantasies about what you would do if you were given enough power over any "less centralized society", and they are a lot more about imposing your view over everyone than ensuring your small community can prosper and be happy.
Damn, you sound very angry for someone who is having a calm discussion on the internet. More importantly, you seem to be assuming a lot of stuff about me but we've never met. And you have no clue about how much of it is right.
So please just, kindly, shut up. You look like an ass.
My issue with capitalism is fundamentally split in three parts: that profit is the driving force behind action; that short term effects are prioritized over long term ones; and that global markets operate at a scale that does not allow individuals to have any real agency in their environment due to the points outlined in the previous comment.
It just fosters the kind of behavior that goes against my idealized version of what society should be according to my understanding of the conditions in which we thrive.
i.e. it turns people into selfish venal assholes and it destroys our chances at a better future with each passing day
Perhaps I'm also using a wrong definition of anarchy then. But it's honestly the closest label I know for this concept. A less centralized society.
The fact that Open Source is about sharing, and they don't share. They only take. It doesn't have to be written in legalese somewhere, it's the spirit of what makes Open Source what it is.
And I'd argue that doing something for profit is also against the spirit of open source, but that's a different argument. The thing is that open source is for the most part an effort from hackers, hobbyists and professionals who want to foster a positive ecosystem for people like themselves. To make their passion better and simpler and more fun and more accessible and more interesting and safer and more efficient and more general... So that more people might fall in love with it.
It's not to push a product or to convince people that they need it.
And that sentiment comes from the fact that open source is the reason many people got into programming in the first place! Thanks to all the free resources out there. So they want to give back to the community. That's how I feel about it at least.
But then again, when huge corpos contribute to open source it's great because they have a lot of inertia. So I think that's a good thing, it's a positive feedback loop. My previous point is not black and white, even though I am obviously bitter about a lot of things.
Evolution intends in the sense that it follows an abstract fitness function. I didn't think I'd have to explain that here. I know how to implement evolution algorithmically.
And no matter what you think about tribal societies, we still live in tribes every day. You and your close friends are a tribe. Your family is a tribe. Forums and now social media communities are tribes. HackerNews is a tribe. Open source projects are tribes, indeed they fork over ideological differences all the time. Political parties are tribes, indeed they split and antagonize each other all the time. Nationalities are tribes. Companies are tribes. Social classes are tribes. Subcultures and "identities" are tribes.
We are not built to handle global contexts, so we collapse them into tribal ones. We do that for everything. There's always an in-group and an out-group and a hierarchy if we're talking about a cluster of people.
It's not that FOSS fails, it's that unethical corporations worth billions of dollars go unpunished for abusing it (because the law exists to protect them).
FOSS is fundamentally anarchy (the good kind that shows that human beings are not all pieces of shit). Anarchy can't exist in a capitalist society because it shows people that they don't HAVE to live like slaves. They can live as members of tribes, as evolution intended for us.
So as always the organism is originally healthy and successful until the parasite that is capitalism spreads and suffocates it for its own reproduction.
> Like having dictionaries that are able to hold whatever you want is so incredible when you compare to trying to do the equivalent in Java for example.
Can't you just make a dictionary of objects, same as in C#? Except that in C#, if you really want to, you can also use `dynamic` to get python-like behavior.
Otherwise, generally speaking, in a strongly typed language you want to figure out what those objects have in common and put that inside an interface. If you can't modify those objects just slap an adapter pattern on top.
The result is a dictionary of objects that adhere to a specific interface, which defines all the properties and procedures that are relevant to the domain and the problem.
This makes thinking about the problem much easier from a type theoretical perspective because it lets you abstract away the concrete details of each object while preserving the fundamental aspects that you care about.
I guess that it takes two different mindsets to in order to appreciate the pros and cons of dynamic vs static programming. There are certainly many pros for dynamic programming, but I'm more comfortable thinking about problems in generic terms where every relation and constraint is laid bare in front of me, one level removed from the actual implementation.