Spooky action at a distance

Einstein famously characterized the strangeness of quantum mechanics as “spooky action at a distance”, which, if I had to pick one phrase about physics to be my favorite, would be a strong contender. I like to relate this to programming language design: there are some language features which are similarly spooky. Perhaps the most infamous of these is operator overloading. Consider the following:

x + y

If this were written in C, without knowing anything other than the fact that this code compiles correctly, I can tell you that x and y are numeric types, and the result is their sum. I can even make an educated guess...

Elasticsearch does not belong to Elastic

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/-zRN7XLCRhc?start=2483

Elasticsearch belongs to its 1,573 contributors, who retain their copyright, and granted Elastic a license to distribute their work without restriction. This is the loophole which Elastic exploited when they decided that Elasticsearch would no longer be open source, a loophole that they introduced with this very intention from the start. When you read their announcement, don’t be gaslit by their deceptive language: Elastic is no longer open source, and this is a move against open source. It is not “doubling down on open”. Elastic has spit in the face of every single one of 1,573 contributors, and everyone who gave Elastic their trust, loyalty, and patronage. This is...

2021-01-19

scroll 0.1 released: download

Status update, January 2021

Hello from the future! My previous status update was last year, but it feels like it was only a month ago. I hope you didn't miss my crappy jokes too much during the long wait.

One of the advancements that I would like to mention this month is the general availability of godocs.io, which is a replacement for the soon-to-be-obsolete godoc.org, based on a fork of their original codebase. Our fork has already attracted interest from many contributors who wanted to work on godoc.org, but found the Google CLA distasteful. We've been hard at work excising lots of Google crap, rewriting the indexer to use PostgreSQL instead of GCP,...

The confusing world of USB

History will not remember us fondly

Today, we recall the Middle Ages as an unenlightened time (quite literally, in fact). We view the Middle Ages with a critical eye towards its brutality, lack of individual freedoms, and societal and technological regression. But we rarely turn that same critical lens on ourselves to consider how we’ll be perceived by future generations. I expect the answer, upsetting as it may be, is this: the future will think poorly of us.

We possess the resources and production necessary to provide every human being on Earth with a comfortable living: adequate food, housing, health, and happiness. We have decided not to do so. We have achieved what one...

Fostering a culture that values stability and reliability

There’s an idea which encounters a bizarre level of resistance from the broader software community: that software can be completed. This resistance manifests in several forms, perhaps the most common being the notion that a git repository which doesn’t receive many commits is abandoned or less worthwhile. For my part, I consider software that aims to be completed to be more worthwhile most of the time.

There are two sources of change which projects are affected by: external and internal. An internal source of change is, for example, a planned feature, or a discovered bug. External sources of change are, say, when a dependency makes a breaking change and...

A megacorp is not your dream job

Megacorporations1 do not care about you. You’re worth nothing to them. Google made $66 billion in 2014 — even if you made an exorbitant $500K salary, you only cost them .00075% of that revenue. They are not invested in you. Why should you invest in them? Why should you give a company that isn’t invested in you 40+ hours of your week, half your waking life, the only life you get?

You will have little to no meaningful autonomy, impact, or influence. Your manager’s manager’s manager’s manager (1) will exist, and (2) will not know your name, and probably not your manager’s name either. The company will be...

How to design a new programming language from scratch

There is a long, difficult road from vague, pie-in-the-sky ideas about what would be cool to have in a new programming language, to a robust, self-consistent, practical implementation of those ideas. Designing and implementing a new programming language from scratch is one of the most challenging tasks a programmer can undertake.

Note: this post is targeted at motivated programmers who want to make a serious attempt at designing a useful programming language. If you just want to make a language as a fun side project, then you can totally just wing it. Taking on an unserious project of that nature is also a good way to develop some expertise...

The beautiful silent thunderbolt-3 PC