musou

musou wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by hollyhoppet in Happy 15th anniversary to "They're Taking the Hobbits to Isengard" by hollyhoppet

no occasion i know of, just got the urge to do it. my partner and i both grew up heavy in the evangelical brainwashing machine so it was fun to revisit a piece of media as projected-onto by the right wing theocrats as that one, with fresh eyes. hadn't seen them since they first came out on video. without a bunch of authoritarian adults telling you how to interpret it, it's fun to focus on sam and frodo's gay longings, instead of on the weird patriarchal aragorn/arwen thing they shoehorned into the movies that wasn't really accounted for in the books. it was edifying to see the messages JRRT put in there about trying to hold on to hope in the midst of hopeless times (when you just lived through WW1 and watched all your childhood friends walk into machine gun fire), instead of just the glorification of a bunch of white noble-blooded dudes (and eowyn) in gleaming armor slaying ravenous hordes of mindless brown skinned orcs.

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musou wrote (edited )

Reply to github is changing the title of "master" branches by twovests

this is a good change, and if there's any pigheaded reactionary programmer types complaining about it you can also point out that it's shorter and every Real Developer™ hates typing.

also SVN used "trunk" by default if i remember correctly, and that was also a better, older name that dates back to the orignal Concurrent Versions System that predates bitkeeper by quite a while.

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musou wrote

Reply to Shouldn't we be concerned about the economy? by twovests

it absolutely sucks and is incredibly scary. unfortunately i think it's also the case that the only way to decouple everyone's ability to put breakfast on the table from the mechanisms of capital flows is to go through some crisis like this in which the failings of tying the two together are made abundantly clear. which, i think they are now. we just have to demonstrate this to enough people to change it. and unfortunately the consumerist mindset and culture here in the US at least renders this dependency invisible to most people, or if they do see it, they feel like it's a "natural" phenomenon rather than something invented by people that we could decide to change.

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musou wrote

Reply to Why is JavaScript only used on websites and webapps? by twovests

javascript is an OK language to use for some things, but it has a lot of annoying aspects that make it difficult or just unsuitable for many kinds of programming. for example, there is still no real integer type in JS, which means arithmetic is potentially subject to floating point rounding errors, so it's very easy to shoot yourself in the foot if you're having to operate on, e.g. amounts of money, or other applications where precision is absolutely critical.

it's also the case that most (but not all) js libraries and frameworks are written without much regard for mutable state - which makes sense given that the original context for the language is inside the browser, where the Document Object Model basically treats the entire content of a web page as a giant global variable that can be accessed and mutated from anywhere in your program. this can make large js applications, even those not running in a browser, very difficult to debug when something goes wrong.

it also lacks good language-level primitives for concurrency compared to some other languages, which is something that is becoming increasingly important as CPU clock speeds aren't really going to be getting much faster anymore, and program authors need to spend more time making sure they're making good use of all the CPU cores available. i spend most of my programming time writing code that targets the erlang VM, and the lack of a first-class primitive datatype to represent processes/threads is the feature i miss most of all when working in JS.

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musou wrote (edited )

Reply to Hey WebDev people, what tools should I use for a simple full stack web app? by twovests

if you're already comfortable with javascript, i would suggest express, but if you're totally new to the web dev game, i would suggest something like django or rails as they tend to be more "batteries included" and both python and ruby have less "gotchas" in terms of weird edge-case behavior than js does.

my all-time favorite web framework is actually phoenix, which is written in a newer language called elixir that runs on the erlang VM. this is a slightly more esoteric choice, but it's far from unproven technology (it is used at many companies you have probably heard of), and phoenix has a lot of nice features that i now miss any time i go back to the other choices i've listed here.

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