Comment by jacquesm

When I was working with it (I was there, 4000 years ago) there was some talk about Swift for the server, but neither obj-C nor Swift ever really breached containment of the Apple ecosystem and -tooling. Which is a shame because at the time I enjoyed working in XCode. Who knew using a mouse swipe to go back in your code would be so natural? Not any other IDE developer, ever.

Last time I worked with it it felt very sluggish and buggy though, in theory building UI elements with SwiftUI is great, in practice it was slow and needed to restart very often, and that was with simple components.

GNU Guix has a good blog, but I don't feel like they are very "marketing" focused.

It's hard to describe precisely, but a lot of free software projects do a good job of putting themselves out there in an unfussy way. There really is something refreshing and cozy about that.

Certainly an element of that but there are also cases where the superior product "lost" to the inferior product because the inferior one was better marketed.

So doing some level of promotion becomes necessary if you want users even when you have the better product - the superior product speaks for itself doesn't often apply any more.

> That would be an absolutely awesome project. Usually when you can think of it someone has already done it so a bit of googling

I've done a bit of googling and research, but still haven't found the time to create a prototype. I do agree that it's an awesome idea, and it's been stewing in my head for a couple years now!

There are a lot of moving parts (scheduler design, probably needs its own high level language and bytecode, mapping capabilities onto actor semantics, etc.) that are outside what current OS-research seems to be focused on.

You nerd sniped me a little and I'll admit I'm not 100% sure what a reduction is but I've understood it to be a measurement of work for scheduling purposes.

A bit of googling indicates that actually you can use performance monitoring instur to generate an interrupt every n instructions. https://community.intel.com/t5/Software-Tuning-Performance/H...

Which is part of the solution. Presumably the remainder of the solution is then deciding what to schedule next in a way that matches erlang.

Disclaimer: this is based off some googling that makes it seem like hardware support the desired feature exists, not any actual working code.

I used to think that Clojure was going to be the first FP language that was going to go mainstream but it seems to have fizzled. What went wrong?

I really want to get into ocaml but the syntax is sooo ugly I feel like you need a great IDE set up to be able to be productive with it.

It’s perennially in my list of languages to check out. It felt harder when I looked into it 15 years ago. Now that functional programming is second-nature, it should be much easier.

Thanks for the reminder.

I like OpenBSD, but I like Docker and Steam too much to daily-drive it.

Thank you for this post and I'll add a note for people who are seeing this and are maybe discouraged about learning Erlang/OTP/Elixir.

I generally agree with you that learning Erlang stuff can be daunting.

I will say that many things worth doing are not easy! Erlang and the whole OTP way of thinking is tough to learn in part because it is genuinely different enough from everything else that is out there that one's odds of being familiar with its conceptual underpinnings are low.

If you have trouble learning Erlang (and OTP specifically) it's not because you're dumb, it's because Erlang is different.

Learning Erlang is not like learning any other dynamic language you've learned. Learning Erlang is closer to learning a bespoke operating system designed to build reliable low-latency long-running systems. It's a larger conceptual lift than going from one dynamic OOP language to another dynamic OOP language.

I love saying this but OTP is a really roughneck standard library. They just added shit to it as they needed it without apparently putting too much consideration into the organization, naming, or conventions.

It makes it very powerful but very disorienting and experience gained with one part of it often does not really prepare you for other parts. Usually each specific tool was created by someone who used it immediately, so it's all reliable in its way. But there is a lot of redundancy and odd gaps.

Elixir's almost extreme attention to naming, organization, and consistent convention is almost as far as you can get from this approach too. It's fun to have them in the same ecosystem and see that there are actually pros and cons to each approach.