computation it's the most important cost the e right how much does it cost to execute this thing on the end user's computer

even a slight bit of being bad meant you couldn't get the thing to work at all

based on whether the software was any good

the idea of a thoughts page was originated by maren, who made a script for generating thoughts pages. thoughts.page is a way of lowering the barrier of entry to putting thoughts on the internet for people who don't want to or don't know how to set up a script to do it.

Primary program modules

A story: when I wanted to meet with a really busy friend of mine in SF, I first sent him 2 twitter DMs, then 2 emails, and then 3 text messages, letting him know that I will keep sending one text a day, until an email from him finally landed in my inbox letting me know that he would love to get lunch.

There’s not much implementations can do, and it’s up to the debugger to be smarter about it.

having to go through all the trouble of compiling and building a custom extension

It’s certainly possible that you become so framework-driven going down this path that your wider problem-solving skills suffer.

other people’s toolchains are absolutely inscrutable from the outside. Even getting started is touchy. Last month, I had to install a package manager to install a package manager.

This is a great, ancient browser feature, but as developers we often engineer it away.

What they didn’t consider is that Google had a crack team of experts monitoring every possible problem with SPAs, right down to esoteric topics like memory leaks.

the MPA sites gave immediate feedback to the user when clicking – showing a loading indicator in the browser chrome

web dev culture war

Want to animate navigations between pages? You can’t (yet). Want to avoid the flash of white? You can’t, until Chrome fixes it (and it’s not perfect yet). Want to avoid re-rendering the whole page, when there’s only a small subset that actually needs to change? You can’t; it’s a “full page refresh.”

First thing I noticed is that I spent a bunch of time writing tests that I later deleted. I would have been better off writing the whole thing up-front and just doing end-to-end tests.

the expected lifespan of even very successful SaaS companies is typically much shorter than the lifespan of personal data

I suspect because most software is optimized for industrial use, not personal use. For industrial uses the operations overhead is not a big deal compared to the development and operational efficiency gained by breaking things up into communicating services. But for personal uses the overwhelming priority is reducing complexity so that nothing fails.

preventing the build from bitrotting would probably require a full-time maintainer in the long run

data can be exported from airtable, but the logic and UI can't

when doing independent research I've typically fallen into the habit of creating unbounded projects with no internal structure. I don't think this has been good for my sanity.

Yesterday evening (London, UK time) something amazing happened which can best be described in a single picture:

you get so used to the way things are you don't think of the obvious next step and you know that can be so frustrating

this can't possibly work because if it worked somebody in the last 40 years would have done it

as long as the compiler doesn't use a bunch of global variables to store the compiler state, you can use it to run another instance of itself

Signal, which is damn good crypto work, announced MobileCoin support, and I stopped donating, bummed.

enablingly vague

Many a

I've come to much the same conclusion, I think: to wit, most people secretly enjoy their problems and suffering.

enormous an ounce of energy;

Rephrasing Brian Smith: Some thing is on the Web such that if the Web itself was destroyed, that thing would also be destroyed. If not, it's not fully on the Web. If someone destroyed the Web, this would not damage me if I were being denoted by a URI, but my homepage at that URI would be up in smoke if that what's people were using to refer to me by. I am not on the Web in a strong sense, but my homepage sure is.

In theory, through content negotiation a news website could communicate with your browser and determine where you live and then serve your local news. This rather simple example shows that the relationship between resource and representation can not be one-to-one.

> If I understand your critique, it's this: "How dare you critique their use of Ra? You have no standing! You have no right!" Which is basically an ad hominem attack that doesn't address any of the substance of my complaint.Sorry, no, making up your own caricature of what I said isn't an effective way of responding to it.

How can you let people know that you’re “in the market”? How can you assemble a portfolio or set of case studies?

If I’m curious about how something works, I can usually be reading the code within a few seconds.

maitenance

,"

intemediary

Twitter API

are using

There are plenty of troublesome assumptions and unanswered pragmatic issues in that sketch.

committment

seperate

recieved

the physical shape and color of each command limits makes clear where you can and can't put it

a set of design rules that loosely define how a system should work, rather than a strict specification

amphibians

Paypert

Seymour Paypert

There's a data layer. There's a security layer. There's a visual design layer. There's a hypertext layer that links to other locations. There's an authentication layer. There's an algorithmic layer.

login

seperately

We're looking forward to next week

Out of all of these metaphors, the second most dominant after paper is physical space.

it's

heirarchical

pape

We still imagine the web as a series of paper documents with text and images presented on them.

it seems amateurish

One thing working in complexity’s favor, though, is that engineers like complexity

Good documentation includes background and decision information that cannot be derived from the code.

I was speaking to the CEO of a developer tools company earlier this year. He told me that the biggest obstacle to contribution is his local development environment.

the cloud is reducing the dev machine to a poorly debugged set of environment mocks

Your personal dev environment travels with you no matter which device you use

JavaScript is the universal scripting language

The fundamental mistake of Node.js was diverging from the browser

In 2010, we didn’t have ES modules, but once it was standardized it should have been brought into Node.

If you have some computational heavy lifting, like image resizing, it probably makes sense to use Wasm rather than writing it in JS. Just like you wouldn’t write image resizing code in bash, you’d spawn imagemagick.

Emacs has aspects of the right thing

I almost feel like I should get to draw the interface that I want for myself. like how Acme lets you grow your own palette of commands as you work.

the web is not HyperCard; you can't really make a home-cooked meal

It's the ethos of html-energy, combining the minimalism of htmldom.dev programming

I have one Gatsby site left that I haven't touched in years, I doubt it will get past npm install.

Built using Go, Hugo is incredibly fast at building large sites, has an active community, and is easily installable on a variety of operating systems. In our early discovery work, we found that Hugo would build our docs content in mere seconds.

Developer documentation is incredibly important to the success of any product. At Cloudflare, we believe that technical docs are a product – one that we can continue to iterate on, improve, and make more useful for our customers.One of the most effective ways to improve documentation is to make it easier for our writers to contribute to them.

The interconnectivity features need a server though, and that involves either using a third-party service, or spinning up your own VPS, which means added cost, and you’ll probably have to do that at some point anyway if you choose the third-party option at first.

it's gone into what's called the browser section

Until sometime last year I'd been coding socii in the open

I think adding automated deployments would be a nice quality-of-life feature and would definitely encourage me to write more. Currently, I have to upload a new text file to my server and refresh the pm2 job.

addressable (i.e. you can find and link to them easily in the future)

In this example, we pull the admin/index.html file from a public CDN.

Our build bots do it by parsing your HTML files directly at deploy time, so there’s no need for you to make an API call or include extra JavaScript on your site. # HTML forms Code an HTML form into any page on your site, add data-netlify="true" or a netlify attribute to the <form> tag

Programming is supposed to be needlessly hard

JS is plenty fast and can be used for "large, complicated programs"[1] just fine. The problem with most JS written today is in programmer practices—the way that the community associated with NodeJS pushes one other to write code (which is, ironically, not even a good fit for the JavaScript language). It turns out that how you write code actually matters

I develop in Node and Sveltekit regularly and the chances that on any given day my flow might be crushed by random madness is unacceptably high.

I have seen experienced developers pull their hair out for a day or more trying to get a basic build system working, or to import a simple module.

every time i run npm install i am prepared to embark on a bunch of side missions.

figging

I feel like the point of the article isn't so much "how do I solve this specific issue" as "this is the general state of JS packaging", and the solution you present doesn't work in the general case of larger, less trivial dependencies

Anyway: I think the underlying problem is that it has been hidden that Node is NOT JavaScript. It uses (some) of the JavaScript syntax, but it doesn't use its standard library, and its not guaranteed that a Node package will also run on the browser.

Node severely complicates and confuses things, but node alone is not javascript.

This is a problem with all kinds of programming for new learners - actually writing some code is easy. But getting a development environment configured to actually allow you to start writing that code requires a ton of tacit knowledge.

just include jQuery from a CDN

I can write JS and TypeScript easily enough but when I start a new project I'm always fighting the tooling for at least half an hour before I can get going.

Not only this. Try to change the app two years later. Dependencies gone, wrong NPM version, Webpack config depricated and what not.That's why I like to use vanilla JS as much as possible. It will be maintainable years later.

Javascript is severely restricted in file:// today.

Oh, you’re in file://! Dude, what are you doing these days without a localhost?

I’m gonna use Node!

Today I tried to help a friend who is a great computer scientist, but not a JS person use a JS module he found on Github. Since for the past 6 years my day job is doing usability research & teaching at MIT, I couldn’t help but cringe at the slog that this was. Lo and behold, a pile of unnecessary error conditions, cryptic errors, and lack of proper feedback.

Yes, you could write Python utilities that are easy to install and run, but people don't. And the last bit of that sentence is the one that actually counts. "Could have" doesn't actually count in an engineering context.

I just want to try this C++, download, unzip, oh it's windows so .project file. Fine, redo on windows , oh it's 3 versions of vstuido old and says it wants to upgrade , okay. Hmm errors. Try to fix. Now it's getting linking error.

okay how about ruby? oh I have old ruby , hmmm , try to install new ruby, seems to run, but it can't find certain gems or something. oh and this other ruby thing I was using is now broken ? why do I have to install this stuff globally? You don't but there are several magic spells you must execute and runes you must set in the rigtt places.

I've watched a bunch of very smart, highly-competent people bounce off JS; that's not a fault with them but with the ever-changing and overly-complicated ecosystem.

It feels like every example I run into is an easy to follow "20-steps + 10 packages + 64GB cloud server instance" process when all I want to do is to download some historical temperature data to CSV.

if you think it's hard for someone who is already a programmer - think about how needlessly complicated the entire ecosystem and everything surrounding it is for the average person

You may think that this person is silly - but that is tainted by your past experience of already knowing it warping what you think the baseline average knowledge level is at.

> Movim is easy to deploy> Movim is lightweight (only a few megabytes) and can be deployed on any server. We are providing a Docker image, a Debian package or a simple installation tutorial if you want to deploy it yourself.I imagine a typical Tumblr user landing on this page and not getting a single word of the "easy to deploy" section.

I woke up realizing one of the computers I use isn't set up to build and I wished I could use it to build and release the new version

it’s looking like anything that requires a server is going in the bin

The thrill of getting "hello world" on the screen in Symbian/S60 is not something I'll ever forget. Took ages of battling CodeWarrior and I think even a simple app was something like 6 files

Knuth recommended getting familiar with the program by picking up one particular part and "navigating" the program to study just that part. (See https://youtu.be/D1jhVMx5lLo?t=4103 at 1:08:25, transcribed a bit at https://shreevatsa.net/tex/program/videos/s04/) He seems to find using the index (at the back of the book, and on each two-page spread in the book) to be a really convenient way of "navigate" the program (and indeed randomly jumping through code, as you said), and he thinks that one of the convenient things about the "web" format is that you can explore it the way you want. This is really strange (to us) as the affordances we're used to from IDEs / code browsers etc are really not there

every time I mentor a new learner this is the number one sticking point

local development environments (at least for the languages I work with, Python and JavaScript) break ALL THE TIME

domain ending

I still stick by the fact that web software used to be like: point, click, boom. Now it is like: let's build a circuit board from scratch, make everyone learn a new language, require VPS type hosting, and get the RedBull ready because it's going to take a long time to figure out.

Unlike conventional blogs which are read-only this blog contains active code, so you can click on any of the links in this tiddler and see the code and see how the system behaves.

I have no doubt that the four children, now in their 70s and 80s, who spent their early years in the basement house would never tolerate such activity in their own neighborhoods today.

I always joke that I'm fluent in jQuery, but no absolutely no javascript[...] There are still banks and airlines that run COBOL

i noted first that the headline performance gain was 10% & 11% this for a team given far more time and resources to optimize for their goal than most

I’d just like to point out that the problem with jQuery today is it was a library built to smooth over and fix differences between browser JavaScript engines

jQuery is, last I checked, over 200k unminified.

jQuery-style syntax for manipulating the DOM

The problem is that a lot of old school website devs can write jQuery and very very little actual JavaScript.

I'm not going to write document.querySelector every time I have to select some nodes, which happens quite often.

now something breaks elsewhere that was unsuspected and subtle. Maybe it’s an off-by-one problem, or the polarity of a sign seems reversed. Maybe it’s a slight race condition that’s hard to tease out. Nevermind, I can patch over this by changing a <= to a <, or fixing the sign, or adding a lock: I’m still fleshing out the system and getting an idea of the entire structure. Eventually, these little hacks tend to metastasize into a cancer that reaches into every dependent module because the whole reason things even worked was because of the “cheat”; when I go back to excise the hack, I eventually conclude it’s not worth the effort and so the next best option is to burn the whole thing down and rewrite it…but unfortunately, we’re already behind schedule and over budget so the re-write never happens, and the hack lives on.

Furthermore, its release philosophy is supposed to avoid what I call “the problem with Python”: your code stops working if you don’t actively keep up with the latest version of the language.

the skills to tweak an app or website into what they need

The biggest barriers to coding are technical complexity around processes like collaboration and deployment, and social obstacles like gatekeeping and exclusion — so that's what we've got to fix

Building and sharing an app should be as easy as creating and sharing a video.

as if the only option we had to eat was factory-farmed fast food, and we didn’t have any way to make home-cooked meals

If you’re a coder, when’s the last time you just quickly built something to solve a problem for yourself or simply because it was a fun idea?

I’ve been using heroku for years and while some might complain that it has stagnated and mostly stayed the same since the salesforce acquistion, I think that’s been an asset.

Cold starts depend a lot on what people actually deploy. They're really fast for an optimized Go binary, really slow for most Node apps.

Rust-powered

Before deploying, we need to do one more thing. goStatic listens on port 8043 by default, but the default fly.toml assumes port 8080.

This column will continue only if I hear from people who use literate-programming systems that they have not designed themselves. and it did not continue.

To keep tiny mistakes from crashing our software or trashing our data, we write more software to do error checking and correction.

The atomic unit of developer productivity ought then to be one iteration of the inner loop. The appropriate unit is not code quantity, but iteration frequency. We might call this unit of quantity developer hertz.

Because we didn’t have real marketing people, we updated the product to became more and more interesting to us, the developers, and less interesting to potential buyers.

suppose when you needed to make a permanent edit to the style sheet on your homepage, you opened up the CSS viewer, made the edit, and the result persists—not just in your browser, but by changing the very style sheet itself

because of the "LP will never be mainstream" belief, I'm still thinking of targeting mainstream languages, with "code" and "comments"

an acknowledgement of network effects: LP is unlikely to ever catch on enough to be the majority, so there needs to be a way for a random programmer using their preferred IDE/editor to edit a "literate" program

in other words, there would be no "weave" step

in an ideal LP system, the (or at least a) source format would just simply be valid files in the target language, with any LP-related markup or whatever in the comments. The reason is so that LP programs can get contributions from "mainstream" programmers. (It's ok if the LP users have an alternative format they can write in, as long as edits to the source file can be incorporated back.)

Welcome to the Gerald M. Weinberg Fan Site!

Code can't explain why the program is being written, and the rationale for choosing this or that method. Code cannot discuss the reasons certain alternative approaches were taken.

memory usage and (lack of) parallelism are concerns