Rickasaurus 🔥 @Rickasaurus@mastodon.social

Been doing some research into the state of the JavaScript/Node.js world for an upcoming project and I’m so freakin’ impressed with:

• FeathersJS (amazing, lightweight REST/realtime back-end framework)
• VueJS
• Nuxt

Some beautiful work being done by the community.

<3

A Cruel Angels Thesis (Cat Piano Cover) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EijpUzjKeM8

20 year old advice on helping people with computer problems is not only timeless, but also imho much more generally help-oriented useful.
http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/how-to-help.html

"Beginners face a language problem: they can't ask questions because they don't know what the words mean, they can't know what the words mean until they can successfully use the system, and they can't successfully use the system because they can't ask questions."

> The Ur/Web compiler also produces very efficient object code that does not use garbage collection.

http://www.impredicative.com/ur/

The gossip on #lobsters says it's a fully functional language and the way it does not-gc is it guesses how much memory you'll need, allocates some pages once, runs, then dies. If it runs out of memory it tries again from the start with twice the memory.

Reminds me of those people who turned of gc in Python and just periodically died instead, making sure not to run gc on death.

And that makes me think of https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/notes.html .

https://shitposter.club/attachment/771736

(By 'pure functions' here I really mean 'immutable data structures' which might not quite mean the same thing, but the two generally go together).

Conjecture:

Mutatability of data is just an optimisation, and in many use cases - and all use cases of sufficient complexity - an extremely premature optimisation that you have to spend lots of time and effort to reverse.

So let's try not baking it into our core systems, perhaps?

Cons cells are quite a nice fit for immutable data structures, as they allow the maximum amount of structure sharing. This seems useful.

However cons cells also allow *too much* structure sharing, since we get an address inside a giant chunk of storage. This doesn't map too well either to mountable filesystems or to the Internet.

Can we perhaps have a network-friendly compromise, where a remote cell address is a *sequence* of numbers indicating location inside a hierarchy of serverlike spaces?

Massive cryptocurrency botnet used leaked NSA exploits weeks before WCry: https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/05/massive-cryptocurrency-botnet-used-leaked-nsa-exploits-weeks-before-wcry/