On the second link, as another commenter mentions, the "Try it in your browser" is one click away, near the top. On the first link, it's two clicks away, but the first of those clicks is a perhaps surprising backwards-lick to get back to the homepage...
Unfortunately, many of the diehard language enthusiasts here seem to be getting quite worked up over how inaccessible the code examples are. Instead of being able to immediately see the syntax so they can rush back here to make insightful and educated comments on how that syntax compares to $their_fave_lang, they are forced to spend up to 4 or even 5 minutes reading documents clearly describing the design of the language, and being obliged to click on their mouses up to 10 times even in some cases.
If a member of the Pony team sees this: even though it's more than a tad ridiculous and you have in fact made a lovely website with loads of clear information, maybe consider adding the "Try it in your browser" link as another option in the burger menu thing on the left. That way it follows everyone around, and you never have to suffer a HN discussion getting needlessly derailed by the resident PL fanatics.
> Instead of being able to immediately see the syntax so they can rush back here to make insightful and educated comments on how that syntax compares to $their_fave_lang, they are forced to spend up to 4 or even 5 minutes reading documents clearly describing the design of the language, and being obliged to click on their mouses up to 10 times even in some cases.
Welcome to interface design! Your way of thinking could not be more wrong if you tried :)
How buying stuff on say Amazon works:
1. Click on picture of a car
2. Click "Buy Now"
How it would look like if we apply yours/the Pony website designers' approach:
1. Read a 10 page description of what the car is
2. Click on a link buried on page 12 that lets you buy the thing
> 1. Read a 10 page description of what the car is
> 2. Click on a link buried on page 12 that lets you buy the thing
But the link to the playground is on page 1, the home page, and not page 12? So your whole argument is moot, since it seems the Pony people obeyed at least this part of your interface design dogma.
Or, in other words, "you could not be more wrong if you tried :)".
The issue here was that page 2 was linked in the title, so everyone was getting to page 2, and not clicking back to page 1, where the playground was, and instead clicking forward and getting lost.
And all that aside, as another commenter said, even if the playground was hidden behind the most fiendish of mazes -- perhaps not every programming language is interested in attracting the kind of people who think every corner of the universe must mirror Amazon's approach to "sales".
Personally, I would say that if one is a real PL fanatic, one is more interested in the semantics than the syntax. :)
The problem with the linked docs on the Pony website is not that it doesn't explain the semantics (it does!) but that it seems to be written at a pace appropriate for someone who has no clue what static types even are. [1] Give a concise demonstration of the syntax and the semantics, even if that means that the latter will use terminology that not everyone will understand. Then the full tutorial is there for the details.
As for why people outside these companies use their products, it usually comes down to two reasons: a) Their employer has purchased licenses and wants employees to use them, either for compliance or to get value from the investment; or b) They genuinely like the product—whether it’s because of its features, price, performance, support, or overall experience.
Hmm. Are you aware that I was responding to this comment?
> Why do people use obvious spyware when free software exists?
So, even though the poster was referring to ByteDance when they said "obvious spyware", I was feigning incomprehension in order to ask the question, how do we differentiate ByteDance from what Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon (and the rest) do.
It's a real question - why do technical people, who arguably should know better, and can do something about it - continue to use these data-harvesting and user-selling platforms? The answer is obvious when it's the case of an employee of those companies, I grant you that.
My apologies if you feel your response did address that, and I missed it. If so, please help me see what I missed.
And the Snowden revelations happened, which programmers and sysadmins and etc saw, and then... continued as before, in the large majority of cases. It'd be baffling, if it wasn't so easily explained by the usual mixture of self-interest and moral cowardice.
I'd be a very interested admirer, if not user, of such a project. I'm playing with J this past week, and otherwise have a couple of CL books under my belt. No other real experience programming, but I certainly think that sounds like a cool idea.
I wonder where April would fit in, with your idea? Joining forces with the fellow who made April might be a possibility. Strength in numbers, and all that.
I suspect you might be observing two correlates and picking one as the cause of the other in a way that is ahistorical.
Specifically, it seems to me that colleges becoming more vocational and colleges becoming more expensive are both natural outcomes of the neoliberalisation of all things. I am aware that some students now rationalise their educational investments with the logic you describe above, but I think it's a post-hoc rationalisation.
You can get a good job without going to college, and you can get a good education without paying a gazillion bucks.
A side point, but calling it "vocational" seems a bit euphemistic too. Learning carpentry is a vocation. Getting a business degree is not equivalent to learning carpentry. I might say colleges have become commercialised, rather.
Reading Barrett Brown's "My Glorious Defeats" at the moment, being reminded of that time Anonymous went after Visa, Mastercard, and others, in retaliation for them blocking payments to Wikileaks.
An action the payment companies took extrajudicially at the behest of the US government because the US gov was't happy with Wikileaks. Wikileaks' crime was that they'd been very successful at getting true information to the public about what governments were doing.
This was quite shocking to me (and at least some others, presumably) at the time, in 2011. I guess if we were taking it seriously, we would have been obliged to say: oh, how fundamentally authoritarian and anti-democratic.
When progressives/democrat/left types shout "fascism!" now on account of something Trump did or said, the cynical part of me says that a lot of them probably just want Obama/Clinton/Biden-flavoured authoritarianism rather than "ugly" lower-middle-class Trumpian authoritarianism.
Very many of us are quite critical of all authoritarianism, and don't feel like we've been represented by any presidential administration for our entire lives. Centrist liberalism isn't flashy or popular, though, and it doesn't spawn many angry rallying cries or outrage that goes viral, so you'd think that we don't exist.
The current flavor of authoritarianism is quite bad, though, and does distastefully wear its hypocrisy on its sleeves.
If "centrist liberal" means being critical of all authoritarianism, from Obama to Trump, where would the democrats lie in this political balance?
I ask sincerely here. That would be a centre which would be ten miles left of where the centre seems to be, from where I'm sitting. Curious to know how you view the political spectrum to arrive at this framework.
For example, Macron might be a good example. How would you classify his politics, based on the above framing?
I agree, the deporting of citizens is much worse in real terms.
They're both fundamentally anti-democratic, is what I meant. In both cases, the political / business class controlling the state is utilising private and public institutions to further their aims, with little to no care for law, morality, or even common decency.
What packages and workflow specifically do you use? I haven’t come across many gentle introductions so looking for clues on what’s a reasonable first step that’s well maintained with good docs.
I am not a scientist, and was primarily having a laugh with my comment.
That said, I do know that the type of person who likes configuring things very in-depth can set up intricate and powerful workflows in Emacs. I don't know what kind of data science IDE specifically you're interested in putting together, but here's a general article:
There's also this MOOC on reproducible research in French and English from Inria, where you're encouraged to follow the course in one of three ways: Jupyter, RStudio, or in Emacs' Org-Mode. I'd love to do it, but can't really justify spending the time at the minute.
Creator of org-mode is Carsten Dominik, who is an astronomer by trade, so, it's a scientist's tool. A few of his talks are listed on this page, if you're interested in going straight to the source:
https://www.ponylang.io/discover/
to
https://www.ponylang.io/
On the second link, as another commenter mentions, the "Try it in your browser" is one click away, near the top. On the first link, it's two clicks away, but the first of those clicks is a perhaps surprising backwards-lick to get back to the homepage...
Unfortunately, many of the diehard language enthusiasts here seem to be getting quite worked up over how inaccessible the code examples are. Instead of being able to immediately see the syntax so they can rush back here to make insightful and educated comments on how that syntax compares to $their_fave_lang, they are forced to spend up to 4 or even 5 minutes reading documents clearly describing the design of the language, and being obliged to click on their mouses up to 10 times even in some cases.
If a member of the Pony team sees this: even though it's more than a tad ridiculous and you have in fact made a lovely website with loads of clear information, maybe consider adding the "Try it in your browser" link as another option in the burger menu thing on the left. That way it follows everyone around, and you never have to suffer a HN discussion getting needlessly derailed by the resident PL fanatics.