Also perhaps worth mentioning Baserock (http://wiki.baserock.org) which can reproducibly build an OS from sources in git and deploy the resulting artifact to various popular targets, kvm, virtualbox, openstack etc.
This seems to be associated with GENIVI, Yocto and OpenEmbedded for automotive. If this can reproducibly build any Yocto-based OS, are there plans to upstream this capability to Yocto?
I personally felt that the "What killed the Linux Desktop" article was completely irrelevant.
It seems there's always going to be some people who complain that GNU/Linux isn't 'good enough' or whatever, and as a community we should simply ignore these people.
Going into my final year at Edinburgh uni, studying Comp Sci.
I've always felt that I'm not nearly as talented as the folks around me, however I've loved computers since I was 10, I'm still in love and I'm always writing programs.
Ever since I realized I'm not the most talented at comp sci (mainly the mathematics) I've had problems with my self-esteem. As such, I find this article incredibly comforting. Thank you!
I really wouldn't worry. The worst developers are the ones who simply have no interest in software and/or computing. The "smarter" developers can sometimes be a royal pita to work with.
I worked at the University of Edinburgh for a while and I was definitely far from the smartest (it was full of physicists that had been to oxbridge), however I would still like to think I was thought of as a capable developer who got things done.
I would say that it is important to make sure you are good at the process of development - document and test your code, try to be methodical about things. If you can do this, you should be an asset to any software project.
Just stop it. I mean - stop worrying about mathematics, this instant. If you want to develop software your hard work and passion will trump everything, be it natural talent, better memory or plain intelligence.
Life is awesome, the sky, the sea, ice cream - all of it.
I'm only sorry that I don't get to stay here longer.
Sure we suffer sometimes, and some people suffer more than others. But to insist that we stop reproducing in an attempt to end human life just to avoid pain...
I think you need to read the post that lays out the argument -- the lack of purpose is not considered a negative. Also, I think your assertion that life is awesome would carry more weight if the things you listed were things you experience daily rather than once in a blue moon.
If you are interested in having a discussion about this, comment on the blog post that presents the argument. I'm sure the author will engage (gently).
Yeah, because ice cream the sky and the sea are things I experience once in a blue moon... pretty sure I see the sky everyday, eat ice cream most hot days and I live by the coast, so...
In any case, those were obviously examples, like I need to argue why life is awesome...
If you don't want to discuss it on HN, then don't post to HN...
On the other hand when I criticized Chris Granger's "LightTable" I was told that I was a "hater" followed by several statements suggesting that Chris should ignore folks like myself: the "haters".
So I'm not sure, perhaps it is more about who you are than what you say. In any case, I have noted the general fall in quality of articles here, but, there's still some interesting stuff now and again... c'est la vie!
Also even if the code were indeed based on just basic numerical or string primitives, how would the 'instant feedback' work if the code were in a long, tight loop or did heavy cpu intensive stuff?
I think this is a critical point, has the author of LightTable considered what would happen with instant feedback for less trivial pieces of code?
Besides that, I think this critique is fair, because honestly when I saw LightTable, it seemed like smoke and mirrors. I have a friend quietly writing an innovative new text editor, I expect it will be more 'ground-breaking' than LightTable, but I don't see him trying to take everybody's money.
I think this is a critical point, has the author of LightTable considered what would happen with instant feedback for less trivial pieces of code?
Some of the code in his demo talked to the web framework he wrote (that I use in production code) and IIRC to the SQL abstraction layer he wrote (that I also use in production code). Something makes me think that he has given some thought to how these things might interact with the real world.
I think it's fair to ask for money. Chris Granger has a track record of building useful, production-worthy libraries and tools both professionally and as a hobby. If he's going to not work for a while, possibly hire other people and build an open source IDE, it's reasonable to ask for outside funding.
I'm not sure about others, but I wouldn't give my money to any software project that didn't describe in detail how it might overcome such glaring design challenges.
You seem to be focused on the instant feedback and stack display issues.
Instant feedback is not meaningfully different from a REPL in this respect. It is unlikely you would type imperative things like "delete this directory" in to a source file. You might define a cleanup function that deletes files, but it would be pretty unusual to call it at the toplevel unless you were intentionally using the code buffer as a REPL. I'll grant that immediate evaluation of such things might be a little dangerous, but Clojure, though the JVM does have mechanisms to dangerous things like file IO.
Stack display seems like an easier problem to solve: only display a certain depth, or just put a scroll bar on it. It doesn't matter how much stuff there is as long as you're looking at the part you're likely to want by default.
I think the one downfall of this project as currently envisioned might be that this is a great concept for Clojure and perhaps some other functional languages. It could be good for JS if written in a mostly functional style. Python is a little less functional and is commonly used for scripts, which wouldn't play as nicely with instant feedback.
Scripts are distinct from applications or daemons in that they normally contain a sequence of imperative actions that they evaluate and then quit. They might not define any functions at all. Applications and daemons typically run code from an entry point like a main() function. LightTable seems to be designed with Clojure in mind, and Clojure was not designed with scripts in mind.
As a student taking a CS degree for fun, I think the 'Happy Hacking' article is fairly insightful. Not of the best quality, perhaps, but insightful none the less.
A good article would have taken the actual source material "The Happiness Hypothesis" and not filtered it through antisec/anticorp propaganda. It's nice that they pointed out the general idea that doing what you love as your job doesn't always work out, but jesus fucking christ, there's so many jobs out there I can guarantee you there's a way to do what you love and make money off it and not grow to hate it. Nothing is set in stone.
