How so?

Because their traditional extend, embrace, extinguish strategy no longer worked. Windows Phone and Internet Explorer failed and they were losing so much mindshare switching from one failed api to the next. The monopoly was becoming pretty fragile.

Further efforts to bifurcate the browser market. Keep it classy, Google.

Programmers are just self-important.

and that's a helpful description in what way?

Helpful? It's just true.

Well that’s depressing.

Yes. It is a feedback loop, much like we see with the climate... aaaand writing this comment fed into it.

As someone with depression, I thought the same thing!

Perhaps it's nitpicking, but what benefit is it to not make the GraphQL language be valid JSON?

A JSON dsl would be significantly more verbose to support the feature set. GraphQL is super straightforward.

There is a json (technically object) to graphql converter up on npm I use to dynamically create queries. I use it sparingly due to verbosity https://github.com/kadirahq/graphqlify

valid point, but are you talking about the schema or the results. For Schema, it makes sense to have a different DSL as JSON's cons include the inability to describe types on values.

Just with 3 types (string, number, boolean), we can not cover more advanced types.

The standard is excellent, and has been rolled out much more effectively than previous standards (much more smoothly than flexbox, to cite a recent example).

The women involved in this project kicked ass, and continue to do so. What's to feel conflicted about?

It's also releveant that the author feels perfectly justified in making recourse to a hypothesis about history which far from easy to test: “The idea of genius elaborated during the Romantic Age (late 18th and 19th centuries) has done harm to education.”

Compared to what? Clearly he doesn’t know how to make a historical argument — perhaps he considers such arguments beneath him.

That's a rather unreasonable criticism. I'm sure if you could ask the author (before he died a few years ago), he could provide you with more detail.

Requiring an author to expand on every question a piece brings to the readers' mind is just an unreasonably high bar.

There are whole subfields of language documentation, language revitalization, language reclamation, etc. There are conferences (ICLDC, Breath of Life, Language is Life just to mention three), journals (http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/), funding organizations, archives, PhD programs around the world…

So, yes, there are efforts.

Because you want to be nice?

Nice to the dead people?

Or instead be "nasty" to the dead people and nice to all the living people by sharing freely with them. To me it doesn't look like a question of niceness, it's far more nuanced surely?

It's not just dead people you're talking about, it's the families of those people. Keep in mind that in many cases the recordings of their ancestors are the only ones existing. It's not at all clear that a university or library should always be able to make those decisions without the involvement of the families.

There is often very private, very personal information in language documentation: even though it seems like the fact that the speaker should have been aware that making a recording was equivalent in some way to publication.

Plus, it's important to remember that before modern standards of informed consent were created, many linguists didn't have the speakers' best interests at heart, and were unscrupulous about recordings.

The ethics of legacy field recordings is a very messy business, with consequences ranging from legal measures to the unceremonious end of otherwise productive relationships between speech communities and researchers. I've seen cases where individual children of a single speaker have had differing opinions on what should happen to recordings.

Why do my children get claim over my speech, that I freely gave, any more than anyone else?

> I've seen cases where individual children of a single speaker have had differing opinions on what should happen to recordings.//

Which is natural as relatives make an emotional response, rather than a response that looks to the greatest/greater good. Which is exactly the reason why a broader view should be taken.

Legally speaking I imagine the recorder [of the speech, or lead researcher] owns the copyright or its in the public domain -- there really doesn't seem a strong reason to try and add additional restrictions based on racial discrimination and supposed moral outrage.

Do you want to create a right of people to hold censor over all media their ancestors produced or is it only native North Americans you want to pussyfoot around?

There were massive genocides in not too distant past; I fail to see how adding modern racial inequity fixes that in any way.

I don't understand why Python people aren't more intent on getting it into web browsers. Or are they?

What would I want to do with Python in a web browser? I wouldn't be able to use most of the standard library, and I wouldn't be able to use most PyPi packages.

Sure, it might be a better language than JavaScript, but you would have to rip out and replace the entire standard library, and Python without its libraries wouldn't be any fun.

Oh we wish. People tried (brython came close). But any attempt are currently not practical as the runtime is very heavy, not to mention the stdlib.

So we are stuck unless the browser vendors decide to ship a Python VM next to their JS VM. And they won't do that.

ClojureScript does very well despite the parent Clojure having a big runtime and largish stdlib. Good tree shaking (dead code elimination) helps a lot.

Specifically, tree shaking through the venarable (and somewhat confusingly named :) Google Closure Compiler.