jmoiron plays the blues

@jmoiron Academics will sometimes lament that good ideas die on the vine, while crude implementations by practitioners gain traction despite their flaws. This is especially true, in my experience, in PLT.

@jmoiron I've always thought that there were selection filters not unlike natural selection. "Good" systems can leave no intellectual heirs, and "bad" systems can become so successful they demand study. To bring it back to Gabriel, this is the subject of one of his most famous essays.

@jmoiron The implications of systems as the natural world has more overlap with my areas of interest: if studying real world systems is important for computer science, what mechanisms determine which systems become successful?

@jmoiron In my experience as an engineer, I find these behaviours often _are_ forseen in the literature, but their predictions are too obscure. This may be due to the "incommensurability" Gabriel discusses in in his talk: academics publish in a language engineers do not understand.

@jmoiron As real computer systems become more complex, they often display new, unforseen emergent behaviours that become areas of scientific inquiry. I think we understand this: OSes, filesystems, and languages have been vibrant areas of study for a while.

@jmoiron I've always considered the natural world of CS to be the abstract one of computation, using models like the turing machine. The idea that it is computer systems built by engineers is interesting, and I have noticed that as a pattern in eg. papers surfaced in PWL.

@jmoiron The central case study is Mixins, which were first designed by engineers in the late 60s, had several implementations ranging from the late 70s to late 80s, but were only first described in scientific literature in 1990.

@jmoiron One of the definitions of engineering is "the application of scientific knowledge to create new things", but Gabriel argues that the new things being created did not exist in nature and therefore can (often?) preceed scientific understanding.

@jmoiron I watched this talk by Richard P Gabriel yesterday: https://t.co/uECixsyYPs The talk covers a lot of ground, but a philosophical question I found interesting was: "If Science is the empirical study of the natural world, what is the natural world of computer science?"

@jmoiron Horrific scenes in Turkey. A 7.8 in the middle of the night is terrifying. https://t.co/Cj13mRh3Rv

@jmoiron @jordanorelli must love dconf then

@jmoiron @nycsouthpaw shokupan, often called "milk bread" most convenient place to get it is probably Paris baguette.

@jmoiron is knowledge of mdadm a blessing or a curse

@jmoiron Or, maybe if they treated work transactionally and kept it at arms length, they'd be fine. Sacrifice years of engaging with your job and making this 8 hour daily commitment part of your life, so when it ends, there's less pain and disappointment!

@jmoiron Seeing loads of "don't make your job your identity" takes. Do we say this to Teachers? Artists? Athletes? Or do we think "remember, companies can fire you" is insightful advice after a huge round of layoffs?

@jmoiron Is the insinuation that people upset at losing their income, daily routine, and a bunch of acquaintances (not to mention immigration status) must have overly defined their identity on their job? If they had just focused on rock climbing or something, they'd be ok?

@jmoiron Big Initech energy. https://t.co/aFTKlumTcB

@jmoiron Using trains Korea, Japan, & HK and thinking about the MTA: https://t.co/bFQWZrZnGv

@jmoiron People talk a lot about tech bros reinventing really basic shit like buses because of an utter lack of diversity and that's absolutely a fair play, but if you're naming your calendar and scheduling app "cron" maybe you needed a nerd or two on the team.

@jmoiron @RottenInDenmark "well kid, I guess there aint no rule sayin your dog can't play basketball"

@jmoiron @phenlix @inowland It was v1/v2 message incompatibilities between gogo and the main line proto implementation, both Go implementations. The way it manifested was non-obvious and took a while to trace to what is a known issue (and gogo has very recently been officially deprecated...

@jmoiron @LastonSlappy 🤦 hopefully what i meant to communicate (that people with agency did this actively, it didn't just happen) is clear

@jmoiron @inowland Yeah, I think we agree on that. My rant is that they've been successfully marketed and sold as starter tech choices (you'll need it eventually!), and people who helped make that happen are now saying "woo boy things sure got complicated!"

@jmoiron @inowland Great example, because we recently spent >3 weeks debugging a nuanced incompatibility between gRPC implementations. At 1000 ppl, I'd agree that the benefits of the ecosystem outweigh the complexity costs, but do you want to go on this side quest at 10 people? 50?

@jmoiron @inowland It's easy to say, but is it true? I'd say that the population & influence of x-faang vastly outweighs "gods of pre-IPO", especially at large. What industry wide trends do you attribute to that population?