To me the logical conclusion is that in a weak and vulnerable society: it pays to be a jerk. In other words, the fact that a jerk can be a good leader just speaks poorly of those following such leader. That said, I think that the article is rooted on a stereotyped false dichotomy: I have met nice people that can sometimes act as assholes, and assholes that can be empathic.
Its all about abstraction layers and inmediate feedback, factors that have been already succesful providing motivation, easing the learning curve for newcomers and even enhancing productivity and pushing further the possibilities of technology.
Scripting languages, mouse-operated visual operating systems; we have been there before and taking away the micromanagement of the development process has been a good thing. And while the challenge back then was to abstract away the processor, now the goal is abstract away web technology stacks, having to learn at least 3 different languages to build the most simple web app, and so on.
An even more interesting question which is implied in this proposal is whether non-imperative languages can be made easier to learn by being closer to the way the brain works.
Complexity is not a problem if something is achieved with it. That said, a complex problem will often require a complex solution and sometimes the simplest solution is the most appreciated, efficient or elegant.
Poor maintainability /extensibility / modularity /scalability, bad encapsulation, abundance of side effects, spaguetti and raviolli code - among others - are perhaps the real problem you're seeing behind your coworker's complex design.
It is not a war that can be easily won though, you can see how in the java ecosystem unnecessary complexity is the norm. And outside java too we see unnecessarily complex frameworks or libraries gaining heavy traction.
Less pancakes, bacon, fries, pizza, hamburguers (and more vegetables and grains). Such greasy food might have sense on a hostile cold weather but that doesn't mean its good on the long term.
You will be punished if you criticize communism and angular.js among other subjects where political correctness and idiotical consensus have more weight than reason. The kool kidz rule with an iron fist, and they know no mercy.
Statistically, downvotes correlate to comments that the community deems low quality. Throwing out buzzwords in lieu of clearly articulated views supported by rationales, reasons, and examples often falls in that category. So do comments that assume that people with contrary views lack reason.
Statistically, the way to avoid downvotes and earn upvotes is with thoughtful well-written comments that contribute to improving or maintaining the quality of HN.
The thing is, despite what many people here seem to think, HN doesn't really have a consensus. If it did, it wouldn't be as paranoid about the Eternal September effect as it is, as one of the symptoms of Eternal September is users not agreeing with and following the consensus set by older members.
What HN does have is a number of mutually opposed consensuses each believing the others are destroying the site by astroturfing and posting irrelevant nonsense. So yes, if you criticize angular.js and communism, you might be punished. But if you criticize capitalism and praise front-end frameworks, someone else will have their knives out for that as well.
Believing in reptilian illuminati or the AH1N1 pandemia, both are delusions... one invented by internet freakos and the other invented by big pharma and mass media.
Anything that questions mainstream media version of the truth is automatically labeled as conspiracy theory delusion and hence put in the same category as believing in reptilian illuminati . How is this different to cult brainwash mechanics? (to ridicule a view other than the cult-accepted view).
The sirya crisis is a perfect example: a few years ago the shariah law al'qaeda guys were the movie villains: religious fanatics that stone women to death and bomb our free countries, the media now portrays them as rebel democratic heroes because they oppose the siryan government, we almost send them an aircraft carrier as military support. If you don't see the contradiction and obvious attempt to manipulate your opinion to support an agenda, then (downvote me to zero karma if you want) you are a well educated fool.
The deciding factor as to whether not something is a conspiracy theory delusion is not whether or not the mainstream media agrees. It's whether the conspiracy theory has any facts to support it. Deadly influenza viruses = lots of evidence = not a conspiracy. Reptilian illuminati = no -evidence = conspiracy. You may notice that this schema does not even reference the existence of MSM...
I am experimenting with something similar for a java web framework https://github.com/constructo/chemflow . Its kind of sketchy right now but achieves the spreadsheet-like programming nicely.
To ellaborate a bit further, I don't know haskell but I can agree that the authors code doesn't look like spreadsheet programming.
My approach is inspired by join calculus which is centered on the concept of waiting on a set of signals/cells to trigger a reaction (I ignore the concurrency capabilities of join calculus which make it a bit more complex). It seems to me that FRP takes the long route to achieve this since its focused on event handling.
Anyhow, this can be easily achieved with a simplified cactus stack where each stack "frame" holds a reference to its parent so that it notifies its parent when its value is set, then when all of the stack frames are ready the procedure associated to it is triggered.
This type of stack has some interesting capabilities including memory friendly infinite recursion and compound-key data structures. I believe that it has potential for artificial intelligence and the development of modern dataflow languages.
My guess is that Arc - the lisp language running HN created by Paul Graham - was new, and coding and maintaining a database driver was out of question.
Today, perhaps the way to go would be to use some sort of json webservice interface to a database written in another language rather than writing a driver.
That would be my guess as well. It's one thing to decide you want a simple forum and have it coded within a couple of days. It's entirely another to spend months creating a stable database library and keep it upto date with all the latest changes.
Because dystopic ideas are the new cool, with self driving cars and astronaut food... seems that the future is designed by startrek fans that did never read 1984.
As much as I like to shake my cane at those confounded kids and their self-driving automobiles, at least they can claim their revolutionary world-saving product would actually be revolutionary.
I just don't think that saying Soylent lacks soul is constructive enough when Rhinehart says that it elevates the status of real food to leisure. If the future involves making life more "functional" then bring it on... its only dystopic once the soul gets eradicated.
