Professional software engineer, musician, gamer, amateur historian, stoic, democratic socialist

  • 2 Posts
  • 158 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I just don’t support dogmatic thinking and indoctrination, especially when it creeps into politics, which is inevitable at the scale of the most popular religions.

    In theory I have no problem with other people’s faith, but in practice it degrades the critical thinking capacity of our population and, paradoxically, the moral capacity as well. That’s a net negative in my opinion.

    Charities exist without religion. I think religions often teach good moral frameworks, though very traditional. But those come with a huge caveat that you cut out a big hole in your brain for the belief that God exists and cares about how you behave. That one idea leads to so much trouble, from false prophets to normalized misogyny and hatred of gay people.











  • Gleam is cool. I wrote some services with it to see if I wanted to use it for more projects. It seemed like a good option because it would be easy to teach.

    Things I like:

    • fast build times (I only tested small apps though, under 2000 LOC)
    • strong static types
    • runs on the BEAM
    • easy to learn
    • pattern matching
    • immutable + structural sharing
    • currying (with parameter holes)

    Things I don’t like:

    • no re-exports
    • it’s possible to have name collisions between packages; authors have a gentleman’s agreement to always create a top-level module with the same name as the package
    • some standard library APIs seem missing or immature (it’s still pre-1.0)
    • it can be hard to get good performance out of idiomatic code for specific tasks (see immutability)
    • no format strings; best you can do is "Hello, " <> name. It starts to get cumbersome
    • parsing/serialization is all quite manual boilerplate; there’s nothing quite like serde
    • no field/argument punning
    • no method syntax; you just have to scan the docs to figure out what functions can be used with a given type
    • you can’t define the same variant name twice in the same module; I believe this is a limitation in how the types are translated to Erlang records
    • you can’t call functions in pattern matching if guards
    • you can’t have dependency cycles between modules in the same package
    • hard to write FFI correctly; you lose all the comfort of types