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The internet has made defensive writers of us all
I was struck by this passage in Steven Pinker’s article about why academics’ writing stinks :
Paul Chiusano
Part 1 of this series discussed the difficulties faced by gradient-based approaches to learning:
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Visit pchiusano.github.io → On Hacker News Jul 2014 – Jan 2017
Society, Policy & Culture 2Software Engineering 2Web & Frontend 1Open Source 1Life, Learning & Writing 1Programming Languages 1
2
CSS is unnecessary given a layout language
CSS, a language for specifying visual appearance on the web, is … so complex that it has never been implemented correctly; yet, successive versions specify even more complexity. At the same time, it is so underpowered that many elementary graphic designs are impossible or prohibitively difficult, and…
3
The failed economics of our software commons and what to do about it
Progress in the software industry has been crushed under the weight of technical debt accumulated over the last 40 years. The tools, languages, libraries, and platforms we all rely on suffer from massive incidental complexities responsible for billions of dollars in wasted productivity. Anyone who spends any amount of…
4
Why hasn't Haskell taken over the world? And the curious case of Go
Programming is all about managing complexity. Without good tools to manage it, the complexity of programs becomes mentally intractable for our limited brains and we’d lose control and understanding of our programs (imagine writing a big software system entirely in assembly language).
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The problematic culture of “Worse is Better”
Our industry has been infected by a dangerous meme, and it’s one that hasn’t been given its proper scrutiny. Like many memes that explode in popularity, “Worse is Better” gave a name to an underlying fragment of culture or philosophy that had been incubating for some time. I point to C++ as one of the first instances…