Such self-hosted services might help us a lot, as Slack is currently blocked in China already. I think the two main reasons are that the Chinese government is unable to inspect the data at will, and also they fear sensitive data being leaked to the US government easily, which is actually quite legit. No interest in politics nonsense and having full control over your own sensitive data is probably the best possible thing to do.
What's wrong with that? Many great products started at companies which are not "supposed" to do that as their core business. Pivotal Tracker is one thing that immediately sprang to my mind. Why do you want to strictly limit what a company is working on, and potentially kill great ideas anyways. I believe as long as they're still functioning, their game development business is probably totally fine. The same applies to a person: I don't believe if you work on something as a full-time job you're then not allowed to have your hobbies, side projects(some of which are quite huge in scale) and personal interests. That would be horrible.
Might come across as quite unbelievable for modern day western folks but that's basically exactly what also happens in China and in general East Asian countries. Totally archaic in the modern world and can become extreme hinderances for frank discussions, collaboration and productivity. Fortunately young people are gradually getting rid of those s especially among themselves but it's sometimes quite bad that many people of previous generations are still emphasizing those as civilized etiquettes, while in fact it only breeds hypocrisy and miscommunication. This is also an example of misunderstandings and conflicts between generations: some mundane members of older generations simply don't really understand the more modern ideals of young people, and from incomprehension stemmed suspicions and fear, which is unfortunate and laughable. Some of them are also realizing the issue for sure but the number is still small. The sooner it's gone in our culture the better. I guess it takes time though just as it probably did in other places in the world. Culture changes are always a kind of behind the socio-economic changes.
Weird reasoning, that. I hardly see how a selfish, "territorial" and noncooperative approach could benefit anybody. Sure people might cooperate, but that doesn't mean they will take shortcuts and mess things up.
This argument is really rough. Many programmers surely will only want the content, but websites are interacting with the whole world, and they have business models which cater to the general public. If they only exist to serve simple, static contents then the companies running them might add well just shut up shop. Why even bother spending expenses maintaining such stuffs if they don't appeal to the general public and easily call them to actions anyways.
His ideas are mostly hugely idealistic and categorical, ignoring real world scenarios and downplaying the downsides of free softwares. People who believe in complete anarchy can perfectly choose to live in their enclosed community, but if the world were to follow their way of living it would be a total disaster. Though of course debating their ideas would contribute to the development of practical, real world ideas in some ways. Better to have such a voice around than not, of course, but most people, after thinking it through, would just rightly reject taking his ideas verbatim.
This author is quite exaggerating a bit. It seems like he himself is constantly preoccupied with politics. Fine. But this doesn't mean other people who he see with his eyes are necessarily thinking in the same pattern. "Machiavellian" is such a heavy word. Go started out with a purpose, a purpose which makes a lot of sense. It's not all about "make a new language and shove the new rules onto everyone by coupling it with Very Fast Build Times, a kind of veto-proof Defense Spending Bill in the Congress of computer programming." Such a design has a lot of practical value.
All pretty good. However the author didn't answer the question he posed at the beginning of the article. How does he plan to escape the "ephemerality" of computer programs? Seems from the footnote of his website that he plans to do so by "journeying from web ephemera to the timeless world of data." But is that really so fundamental a change? Or, actually, maybe programming isn't that "ephemeral" after all. It's just that people nowadays have the luxury of updating things at a much higher rate than ancient people, while still preserving(and improving upon) the core spirit. Languages, libraries and classical programs have been around for years. They're not really being overhauled/outdated as suggested. They're just being improved.
The general point is quite good. The only thing is that PHP should be considered as a particularly bad outlier and people still should avoid it at all costs. It's just way too old. It's not "boring", it's antiquated. With Rails/Django being around for almost a decade, they're much more sensible choices than PHP. Sure if your whole massive codebase started out in PHP that's one thing, but if you are spinning up a new project I see definitely no reason for using PHP... Even if it means you'll have to spend a little bit more extra time getting up to speed in the beginning, you'll benefit a whole lot in the end. The same goes for MySQL vs. Postgres, to a lesser extent of course.
