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Paul Graham discusses this in his essay The Submarine: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

As you say, Apple would not be a trillion dollar company without a great product, but you can build something great and also aggressively market it. Nobody is saying they got where they are just with marketing.


I just now learned of DHH’s views by reading the Github discussion. I think the quote should be removed. But I do not think that, without further information, we should condemn someone for using the quote in the first place. And that is because it’s a big world, and you can’t know everything. And I at least do not investigate someone’s political positions before I quote them. If I read that DHH said "Tests are money in the bank" I might have quoted him here or on some other site. And that’s because I didn’t stop to investigate his positions before quoting him, not because I endorse his positions.

I also am not going to dismiss the work of all the other Neovim contributors and stop using it.


Yes. In this interview Michael Stonebreaker, one of the original developers of PostgreSQL, discusses (among other topics) replacing the file system with a database :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPObBOwIrHk


This is one of those perennial ideas; let's get rid of hierarchical file systems and just keep all the files in a database. Speaking as a user who knows how to keep things organized, I like hierarchical file systems. Store the data in a database if you like, but don't break my metaphor.


I like a hierarchy, too. Presumably the underlying engine could be a database but it would at least appear to the user as a tree. But with the option to find files with SQL or a SQL-like language. I would love to be able to find files based on all kinds of metadata that was available for searching with the OS’s file system, and not using any special tools. I’m thinking things like EXIF data, audio file metadata, text file line count, and so on.


The tree-view is practical for users but seems impractical for relational database performance.

SELECT * FROM files p LEFT JOIN files c ON p.id = c.parent_id LEFT JOIN files gc ON c.id = gc.parent_id LEFT JOIN files ggc ON gc.id = ggc.parent_id .... where p.id = 123


Datalog could handle it, though.


When you have a hammer, everything starts to seem like a nail. /s :)


Why the /s? There is a reason why we don't use hammers for all tasks even though we could find ways to accomplish many of them with one.


J. B. S. Haldane discussed this in his essay On Being the Right Size:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Being_the_Right_Size


The site doesn't give you printouts you can fold into a globe, but it is very informative. You highlight countries, drag them around, and their size adjusts to whatever degree of distortion you'd get for any land mass at the given longitude. So you can, say, highlight Greenland and drag it on top of Brazil and see how they compare. You can highlight and drag countries, US states, Canadian provinces, and Australian states. Hovering over an entity shows you area and population.


I think Bash won as Bityard says above, in the sense that COBOL won, which was because it was everywhere (approximately) and then when another system was being built to do something in COBOL’s niche COBOL was the obvious choice. Once it was sufficiently established it won by inertia and absolutely not because it was the better language. Or maybe it was the better language in its time, but it certainly is not now. And note I’m only talking about COBOL’s niche, of mainframe-based processing in the banking, insurance, state and federal payroll and similar areas.


In a similar way that Python won, despite having some pretty delulu characteristics.

Whitespace sensitivity is horrendous (can’t autoformat, no multi-line lambdas, bonkers inline list comprehensions) but here we are.


Quoting from an earlier comment in this discussion:

There's always some nincompoop who brings that up. Al Gore deserves credit for what he did as a senator and vice president. He helped to pass legislation that enabled the NSFNET backbone to grow and to permit commercial traffic to flow on the government-sponsored backbones in the US. Had he not done that, it's pretty likely that the commercial sector would not have seen an opportunity to create a commercial internet that all of us can enjoy, so he does deserve some credit for what he's done.

— Vint Cerf, Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf0rjtnwC9A>


To me they look oppressive and bleak. They are interesting, to be sure. But I don’t find them beautiful. And aesthetics are subjective, of course. I can well believe others find them beautiful.


The linked article does not say what happened to him, but if you Google his name there are lots of hits. This one says he was fired:

https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/monroe-county-deputy-arr...


I think it's that they need humidity or else they dry out. So hot and humid is fine. Hot and arid is what they have a problem with.


Ottawa summers are hot and very humid but the ticks disappear during that season.


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