Stop Writing Dead Programs [video]
I made my way through part of the talk on youtube, it was interesting but far too much for me to stomach. It really drove it home when he flashed slides of graphic organizations of complex data. While some parts might be better than a textual description, graphic representation of data needs to be <i>useful</i>, that is, you need to be able to look at a graph and glean information from it. At the section where he flashes an image of a re-imagined periodic table[0], he immediately exclaimed &quot;look how beautiful it is!&quot; and I was immediately instead confused. What does this image show? If it is a periodic table, can I see the periodicity? For example, can I tell two elements have electrons in the same shell by just looking at it? Can I see if two elements have the same filling of the subshell, and thus will covalently bind in similar ways? Can I tell which elements are more electronegative? I can glean all that from the &quot;boring periodic table,&quot; which yes is a graphic representation and cannot easily be written in sequential text, but this new representation doesn&#x27;t give me any of that at least as far as I can tell. The desire to represent an already existing set of data in a <i>new</i> graphic representation that seems to give no value apart from being novel is not helpful.<p>I can extrapolate this down. A lot of things in life are the result of historical evolution; that is just how things are. While that history can lead to problems, it is just the way things are. And yet, it should be beyond obvious that not everything <i>new</i> is good. For example, while sure the examples he gave were clunky, I can say with absolute certainty that there are times where playing games on my NES is more enjoyable sometimes than playing games on my &quot;supercomputer,&quot; because on my NES I can play until I&#x27;m blue in the mouth, whereas on my phone, I have to stop every 2 minutes and watch an ad that makes my phone even hotter than the console. When what I value is &quot;having fun&quot; instead of &quot;newness&quot; or &quot;shiny graphics with anime girls&quot; I can see that an older device is better. Should I conclude that &quot;advancement in technology is bad for enjoyment and for my sanity&quot;?<p>No, because I am not that shallow in my reasoning here. It&#x27;s clear that &quot;old&quot; vs &quot;new&quot; for my NES vs. mobile game comparison is really a complaint about the change in monetization models, and thus a different user experience for the gamer. In fact, the &quot;old&quot; vs. &quot;new&quot; argument obscures the real difference worth consideration, substituting the argument for a fight between nostalgia and novelty.<p>&quot;Old&quot; and &quot;new&quot; should never be what anyone focuses on because more often than not, such labels obscure the true conflict. Really, certain people like the presenter value things other than &quot;familiarity,&quot; things like &quot;introspection&quot; and &quot;graphical representation&quot; and &quot;concurrency,&quot; and he&#x27;s mad people resist what he likes. Thus, he chalks it up to others stuck in their ways, clinging to &quot;history.&quot; The thing is &quot;familiarity&quot; isn&#x27;t the only argument people have for why they don&#x27;t use clojure or reactive graphical displays: &quot;familiarity&quot; is often a stand in for other things that the people he critiques <i>value</i>, things like their time and latitude to learn new things, or the fact that indeed, some things are actually better expressed in text and as a sequential program than visually or concurrently, or that there are cases where those models are still infeasible on a computer even today (none of my electromagnetic simulations other than the most simplest will work in a reactive notebook because while computers are much faster, being much faster means I just do larger simulations that can no longer actually run in a reactive setting well). <i>That</i> to me is the more (pun not intended) valuable discussion, a discussion of the actual &quot;innovations&quot; and the values you have in mind when you evaluate them. Like, sell me on why I even care about introspection in a computational physics simulation code when I think I&#x27;m doing fine without it. That to me is the more interesting discussion, a discussion of values.<p>But that&#x27;s the problem, just making another talk about how modern lispy introspection or something is cool is just another technical talk, and it certainly feels much less cathartic than painting everyone else who hasn&#x27;t adopted your reactive notebooks as being luddites clinging to their VT100 emulating terminal windows. But that to me feels like where the actual meat is, a discussion of boring technical topics because there I can respond with actual concerns or reasons I can&#x27;t use this or that, and such a discussion would actually be more interesting and productive for me and for people who want to sell newer paradigms.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;8Ab3ArE8W3s?t=1359" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;8Ab3ArE8W3s?t=1359</a>