the tragedy of languages making an accent on functional programming is that CS education simply does not make a big enough focus on learning that paradigm, which takes a lot of effort to learn, and then there are simply not enough people to hire for reasonable money to seriously maintain these codebases

this self filters only the most committed and possibly eccentric programmers to keep using them, which again reinforces the loop. this is a shame because OOP, which has few of the theoretical and practical benefits of FP, is regularly taught

I thought most US universities taught some kind of Lisp? Over here in Europe many schools teach OCaml or Scala.

I don't really buy into the lack of talent/skill argument. Especially given that F# isn't exactly the most hardcore FP language and toolchain out there. I hire and onboard people from many kinds of background to a non-trivial Scala codebase. Even new grads coming from mostly Python notebooks do all right.

This is also supported by all modern OO languages going somewhat hybrid, as they adopt an increasing number of functional features.

If you're looking for an explanation as to why FP isn't more popular, I think it's mostly the fact that modern high-level languages have become good enough. And Go has proven that even an objectively bad language can succeed if the developer experience and productivity improve in other dimensions.

lol. most unis teach java, python or node these days. (i learned on java and C++ back in 2005-2007)

Yeah there was no mention of functional programming during my formal CS degree. I actually had started trying to learn more academic programming by taking a Coursera MOOC that I only realized was entirely based on functional programming after being a self-taught ad-hoc user developer. It was fascinating and intellectually stimulating but also challenging beyond my free time while at the time lacking more of the CS fundamentals. It looks like it was wisely broken up into multiple 3 week sections but I suspect this is what the course evolved into - https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages

Of course when I took in person university courses we learned Java as the fundamental programming language.

I think almost everything useful and practical has made it into oo and modern languages already though or became best practice for writing in other languages.

I don't even really write very stateful or object oriented python anymore, and idk if anyone would really recommend that? That's been my experience though.

there's some evidence that sun exposure reduces risk of hypertension via nitrogen signalling pathways, but if you already keep track of your blood pressure levels and they are healthy, unprotected sun exposure for longer than short periods is unequivocally a bad thing - at the very least, if your objective is to not look like a tanned leather sheet in your 40s onwards

Rick Rubin gets a lot of direct sunlight exposure and his skin looks pretty good for 60.

https://youtu.be/GpgqXCkRO-w?si=b_pJPs1tIMLD5Shx

Rick Rubin is looking good for his age. I postulate that he has very low stress levels and added that he surfs, he's got something good going for combatting age.

and my grandad was a chain smoker yet did not die of lung cancer. the question is do you want to gamble where you will be on that distribution?

Considering the many health benefits of sun exposure, yes I absolutely want to gamble (within reasonable limits). It's disingenuous to compare that to chain smoking.

who is africa

also, this is geoengineering. the same kind the soviets used to do and the chinese do now. it would never be allowed to happen in a western country because someone with deep pockets for a lawsuit would find an endangered species of worm living in a dune or two

There’s room in all forms of society for regulation. Changing part of the economy isn’t automatically fascism. Slow your roll. Then slow your roll again.

You sit in privilege and sneer at the potential for change. Why change the status quo if you already feel comfortable?

Justify how the most powerful companies in the world, with the worst track records for dishonesty, and with mounds of scientific evidence toward the harm of their products should not be targets of regulation.

Or go ahead and start putting lead into your gas tank, like a hero who doesn’t listen to others.

intense how any discussion with self described environmentalists eventually surfaces that they secretly dream of genocide on a global scale

seriously! this happens all the time to me. i never understand how people can say stuff like this casually without sounding horrific

There’s no need for genocide. Chill with the rhetoric.

Just educate people on sexual health and offer contraceptives. It works.

You are not going to “educate people on sexual health” down to a population of 1 billion in a timescale where these concerns even matter.

1. try at all 2. realize that sometimes problems require multiple solutions 3. realize that sometimes multiple problems require empathy

doubtful. It is sure proven to increase land use and therefore leave less space for untouched nature, though!

If we use farming methods such as monocropping, it is doubtful. But there are other farming methods better suited for the small scale.

its pretty difficult to dig up any solid evidence plastic pollution has effects on health beyond banned plasticisers, and even then. whereas plastic mitigation efforts often result in exacerbating actual issues like leading to more carbon emissions

sure, plastic waste should be responsibly handled. but plastics have major benefits to solving many other problems. in this case it's compounded by readers that have nothing to do with farming (or who have a garden and think they could live off of it) thinking farmers are trying to kill them

also, the article railing against landfills is part of the issue to me. plastic that is landfilled is absolutely responsibly managed plastic. we /want/ our waste to become part of geology, not keep circulating, if possible

> its pretty difficult to dig up any solid evidence plastic pollution has effects on health beyond banned plasticisers, and even then.

Indeed. The presumption that plastics are a health risk is created by simply repeating that they are, with a healthy dose of hypothetical thinking and the precautionary principle. Eventually it becomes fixed in the echo chamber as common "knowledge", like the idea that GMOs are bad.

I find this all very illiberal, the notion that people should be prevented from actions because of the mere possibility of negative consequences (as if that possibility could ever be entirely excluded.)

agreed. i think there are certain plastic materials for which the preponderance of evidence tends toward significant health risks, though; specific things that come to mind include bisphenol-a as an endocrine disruptor, polybrominated diethyl ether flame retardants in polyurethane foams as endocrine disruptors, and heavy-metal catalysts used to add photodegradability to some otherwise stable plastics. it seems completely irrational to me to generalize this to plastics in general

even back when this was just known as RNotebooks this was a great system for producing executable reports that did not warrant the complications of a full latex setup. it’s only gotten better since

The latest version has Typst support and allow producing pdf files much faster than any LateX distribution. Even with a complex template it compiles almost instantly and you can see the final pdf changing while you are typing.

I'm increasingly accepting of the opinion that PDFs are an obsolete file format.

(disclosure: I work on Quarto) I 100% agree with you. It's partly why tools from the Quarto lineage (knitr, rmarkdown) work hard to make popular latex features like crossreferences work in HTML and other forward-facing formats. At the same time, if you haven't tried Typst, my opinion is that doing so is an afternoon well spent. It's an impressive system even early in its development stage. I'm hoping it finally displaces LaTeX --- and I'm a former academic having written about a hundred papers in LaTeX!

I have high hopes for Typst, but I'm very disappointed they didn't design for accessibility from the start (and nice HTML would have done the job). It's shocking how inaccessible latex's output is, and yet Typst manages to be even worse!

Quarto's html output on the other hand is generally lovely for accessible output.

As an author, PDFs are indispensable. A good chunk of folks still prefer to read physical books.

When I migrated my own tooling from rst, I was looking at Quarto but ended up rolling my own pandoc/md tooling.

Why not use epub?

Hard to print a good looking physical book from EPUBs. (I generate EPUBs too.)

Quarto is pretty different from Rmarkdown because it doesn't require an R runtime. This opens up a lot of possibilities when you don't want to include the R dependency.

lots of bad articles that won’t stand the test of lowered interest rates the next years