@loke I'd actually never heard of array subscripts before! Not in the past 10 years, anyway. It's always been indexing to me.

In similar vein, it was a big day when I noticed where for loops came from.

@loke @samebchase Yeah it comes from set-builder notation, which itself has I'm sure crossed over back and forth between English, German and other languages as mathematicians read papers in multiple languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-builder_notation

Turning full circle, `for` loops eventually gave rise to Python's notion of list/set/dict comprehensions.

@ndpi @michiel @njoseph @amirouche @neauoire @clarity I _really_ appreciate all of you engaging with my self-doubt :pilin: Obviously I mostly agree with you all. Here, questioning assumptions has shed a lot of light. I'll summarize what I've learned in a few hours.

Is "situated software"[1, 2] just another rationalization for tweaking our text editors, ricing our desktops, etc.?

[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situatedsoftware.html

[2] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app

I also can't just ignore all the considerations of industrial software.

I can't just do it from scratch because I don't have all the skills. Deciding what to depend on is also thorny. Pulling in irrelevancies vs excluding people.

5% of software lasts a long time. (Analogy with food breaks down there.) Hard to tell which 5% it is. (Analogy with building roads/bridges breaks down there.)

If I were to ever have any success, I'll be dealing with awkward requests, the risk of burnout.

It's not just a matter of deleting features. Any time I innovate a feature even slightly, I find myself doing something I don't have the skills for. I lost the first version of this comment thread, writing it on my Teliva-based editor (which provides character counts for chunks). Fucking stupid bug, and it was all me.

Software benefits from testing. If you use software with few users, it's almost certain to be under-tested.

One thing is clear: the dream/temptation to "scale up" is poison. But it's unclear what's left. We end up with a few people scattered in a humongous state space mostly building stuff for ourselves, nibbling at the margins of the software industrial complex, while unable to actually extricate ourselves from it.

You can have both kinds of software, the kind that's unreliable because the authors are indifferent/malicious or the kind that's unreliable because the authors don't have enough support.

@csepp I have my own NIH problems. The lesson I took away from suckless was to try to be more precise about the goal. "Suck less" is so generic that everybody reads something subtly different into it. As an example, my true north is, "minimize dependencies to get something working, even if the experience is klunky."

Then again, they've managed to have more people collaborate than I've done. The generic message may be why. What do I know.

@csepp That does seem like a difference in philosophy large enough that you shouldn't use their stuff.

Lately I consider philosophy the #1 factor in adoption choice. e.g. no more Slack for me.

I actually subscribe to "worse is better" myself. But with the following interpretation:

“It is far better to have an under-featured product that is rock solid, fast, and small than one that covers what an expert would consider the complete requirements.” (https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf; pg 219)

@hkgumbs I certainly learned a lot that I didn't know when I vaguely asked how SSB could be a blockchain. Thanks for the thread!

@clacke @makeworld

@hkgumbs I'd say SSB isn't using a blockchain?

@aw Oh that's a good point. So maybe the movie was taking some liberties. I kept seeing evidence of IoT behind the scenes. Like the lamp that follows Paul in the early scenes.

@neauoire

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

— Frank Herbert, Dune

🤯 And I was just saying a month ago how the computers in Dune seemed very healthy. I should reread the book.

Via @aw (https://alex.flounder.online)

@neauoire

@neauoire Yeah! I found it visually more interesting than the Matrix when I first watched it. I also found myself talking eloquently of the role of computation in this universe. Taken for granted, fades into the background just like it's supposed to. Lots of issues in this universe, but convivial computation wasn't one of them. At least for the high-status members of this extremely sparsely populated society that we get to see :)

@neauoire There's also Planet of the Apes, which banned tech beyond the 1800s.

@aw