Q: Hey! Should I read this?
A: Perhaps not. Perhaps. I use this page as a low-filter, low-threshold way to get ideas out. Capture ideas, incomplete as they are. Growth and nurturing is a separate process. Filtering, curating, organizing — that’s for later. The reading experience might feel like a stream-of-consciousness endeavor — with less flow, less feelings, less poetic content. In other words, messy, without the good sides of messy. Still, I choose to make this public, because I believe public should be the norm, not the exception.
🐉
I feel shackled by pressure for specificity. Always be specific. Specific is better. Don’t be vague.
Specificity expels indirection. Indirection is core to design.
If we lazer-focus on the specific, we’ll ignore problems with a longer feedback cycle time than some arbitrary limit.
Statement: “don’t build something for yourself – you’ll ignore users”
Response: “no – DO build product for yourself – but design in the flexibility as indirection. Don’t force your users into your workflow. Doing it for yourself is not workflow design - it’s capability design.”
By building in flexibility — indirection — at the right layer, we decouple the product, and give ourselves leverage.
I’m better when I have fun.
I have fun when I build stuff for myself and others.
∴ I should build stuff for myself.
Commonly discussed feedback loops:
Uncommonly discussed feedback loops:
(moved from separate page)
We explore how Pandoc supports embedded code.
We can write Clojure:
(defn act [& commands]
;; code
)Or Python:
def act(*commands):
# code
passOr even javascript:
function act(commands...) {
// code
}Another morning.
Possible solutions:
Outcome - less messy front page.
Right now we’ve got this:
Intent: bring ideas to life. Discuss, sharpen, play.
Status: very much work in progress. Please advance at your own peril.
Pages:
- aphorisms
- emacs
- feedback-loops-api-design-how-it-works
- hourglass-architecture
- journal
- knowledge-worker
- opt-in-hierarchy
- options-to-the-max
- orthogonality-enables-optionality
- product-for-developers
- truth-descriptive-prescriptive
- unix-signals-crash-course
- website-so-what
Possible next steps:
- Write real content
Possible improvements:
play.edn file?Backwards compatible path - existing behavior prevails, title is “settable” from play.edn.
The root HTML file will now depend on all the play.edn files. Perhaps use SQLite for caching?
Not now. I want good performance under scale. Performance is important.
I can just opt for manual indexing if the need arises.
Outcome - better titles. Order. First create a play.edn file manually. Then create the proper
title for that file. Run index.clj by
hand.
Dump:
So …
I’d like a teod/apply-on-save-mode.
Perhaps I made it work?
Or?
Nope. Back to manual teod/apply it is.
Morning / afternoon / whatever.
🤠
How are we coming along?
play.clj script with a CLI.Next steps?
page command automatically
categorize stuff as “don’t mind me”| Page | Category | aka |
|---|---|---|
| https://play.teod.eu/emacs/ | Rambling | |
| https://play.teod.eu/aphorisms/ | Page | |
| https://play.teod.eu/feedback-loops-api-design-how-it-works/ | Article draft | |
| https://play.teod.eu/hourglass-architecture/ | Ideas & capture | Narrow waist |
| https://play.teod.eu/opt-in-hierarchies/ | Ideas & capture | |
| https://play.teod.eu/orthogonality-enables-optionality/ | Article draft | |
| https://play.teod.eu/product-for-developers/ | Article draft | |
| https://play.teod.eu/journal/ | Rambling | |
| https://play.teod.eu/unix-signals-crash-course/ | Article draft | |
| https://play.teod.eu/knowledge-worker/ | Article draft |
How do we tag?
By form:
| :form :rambling |
| :form :article |
| :form :explore |
| :form :unknown |
By readiness:
| :readiness :in-progress |
| :readiness :published |
By language:
| :lang :no |
| :lang :en |
Dump -
distributed ${ARTICLE}/play.edn files
are “near” to the article (nice), but tedious to batch edit
batch editing is nice in a table
A normalized model is EAV.
EAV example:
:id "emacs" :title "(Doom) Emacs learning journal"
:id "emacs" :form :rambling
:id "emacs" :readiness :in-progress
What are nice ways of batch editing?
One big text file Excel table SQLite?
How should lines be deleted?
In Dired, simply d the line, then x to apply with confirmation In Magit, c c to commit, C-c C-c to apply
I could simply try dumping all the data into SQLite and see how that works out.
I have:
Metadata per page some pages
So - simple, flat model.
I could build
Files -> SQLite SQLite -> files
Do I want “apply everything” or “apply partial”?
I could implement “apply everything” in terms of “apply partial”
First delete all the play.edn files
Then apply partial And confirm changes in Git.
play.edn to ensure link integrity./play API
draft$ ./play2.clj relations :from :files :to :lines
:id "emacs" :title "(Doom) Emacs learning journal" :form :rambling :readiness :in-progress
:id "feedback-design-impl" :title "Feedback loops, API design and how stuff works"
...
Created the lines mode - and more.
| Mode | Read? | Write? | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| :files | y | y | play.edn files is the main storage |
| :lines | y | y | lines give a concise overview |
| :table | y | y | table is great for batch editing |
| :pretty | n | y | :to :pretty is great when devleoping a reader |
This almost looks like an hourglass architecture :)
relations interface in the middle.
I’m happy with the design.
idea - dynaimc programming isn’t lack of types. Dynamic programming is options to do flexible stuff.
Option - work on data structures rather than types. XML - static types for everything, or a dynamic tree? JSON - types for everything? Alternative formulation - serialization for free
Option - dynamic runtime. Dynamic languages often support interpretation / dynamic recompilation
Option - extend language when required. Embedded DSLs are just data (Or macros, but macros can be complex)
Option - use schemas directly for validation rather than types
Examples? Hmm Python? Clojure? Javascript?
I want to give Ole Jacob a big JSON file he can build UIs on top of
play.teod.eu/iterate-knowledge-archipelago.json
rich entity semantics - “url” “title”
& filter on tags
I want to get more info when I generate pages. This should be possible:
./play.clj page compuational-engineering :title “Computational Engineering”
And it should also write :author-url and :created-at.
Are they even required any more?
I haven’t used any of them in a long time
Makefile works well
Action: delete em.
☀️
For me:
| Written for myself | 10 |
| Shared with others | 1 |
Why?
Working on my own ideas / perception / intent is something I’d like to do with an internal feedback loop.
Why?
Hmm, good question.
Well, easy answer. Because I don’t get anywhere as fast ahead through conversation with others.
Why?
No, actually, that’s not it.
And amount of written text is the wrong metric
Effort is the right metric
For effort, it’s perhaps 50/50
50 % internal
50 % external.
I prefer writing to thinking when iterating internally.
I prefer speaking to writing in conversation
I think? I’m not quite sure.
That basically means they are missing Org-mode.
So perhaps “I dislike anything that doesn’t have Org-mode” is better.
😆
I feel shackled by pressure for specificity. Always be specific. Specific is better. Don’t be vague.
This feels like a statement that sometimes a bad abstraction is required to get to a good abstraction. Also, I hate being forced to do stuff.
https://irreal.org/blog/?p=10050
and https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscatal.5b00538
and https://www.technology.matthey.com/article/66/2/122-129/
And “which is the first subset of Org-mode that should be supported?” https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/tree/master
Should be worthy of a page on its own.
Also paves the way for what I can do with play.teod.eu.
Also perhaps worthy of publishing to the Clojurians Slack? Hmm.
Driving in Troms, with Tjerand and Torstein.
npx seems to look for new versions on each invocation. I can’t use the following offline:
$ cat preview.sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash
npx live-server --no-browser --port=3000
So … what do I want? Just having the dependencies available offline would be nice, really.
Options:
node_modules, package.json and package-lock.json.ag is using Org-Roam quite heavily. He
separates between:
And says that there’s no semantic difference between those three categories and:
Hmm, I think I’ve actually landed on that same structure myself in Roam. Fleeting notes go on the Daily Notes page. Permanent notes are entities. Project notes are one big hierarchy.
How does that map to play.teod.eu?
Fleeting notes go into the journal. No new entities. Permanent notes get their own page. It should be possible to link to permanent notes! Project notes get a page per project. That page is deleteable or “removable from index”.
Question: “in what context do I want to re-discover this piece later”. Then – establish links to all those contexts.
I really don’t like UPS.
I could create some simple Emacs lisp commands for that which shell out to babashka.
Hmm.
How do others do it? I tried looking at the Doom Emacs creator
dotfiles, but I didn’t find any Emacs config. https://github.com/hlissner/dotfiles/tree/0df9027010b424410a4622eba54b979c256f0efb/./
I guess his Emacs config is just Doom. What about https://github.com/tecosaur/? He
just has a big org-mode file. What about https://github.com/org-roam/?
Good. Toplevel org-roam.el. Then (require 'org-id') and
others.
Why?
It’s the next step, I think. I know how to do basic stuff, I don’t know how to do interactive stuff. I love how magit works. How dired works. Dired’s view over the file system, the ease of moving around.
So … I probably want a major mode too. Haha.
:)
Git knows this.
I would like: input folder path, output last changed timestamp.
Purpose: sort, enrich :relations.
Treat :changed the same way as I’m treating :id now. It’s a special
tag, and should not be written down. When writing lines back to files,
dissoc the :changed property.
named ideas have a deeper meaning. They have an URL, and can be linked to.
project journal is temporally indexed. Date up top, topic below. Project-scope rambling.
project problems is a mutable approach to attention design. It does not function as a ledger. Rather, it is meant to be changed. Problem-scope attention design.
journal is the temporally indexed global catch-all thing. Put things here when in doubt. Global-scope rambling.
problems is a global list of things that want attention. Global scope attention design.
teodorlu@teod-t490s ~/tmp/temp-2022-07-15/prompt % prompt off
% PROMPT="$ "
$ echo hello there
hello there
I don’t want to end up stuck. In a context where there’s no novelty. Where there’s nothing I can learn.
What does such a context look like?
Is it closer to a research lab than a product company? Can there be both?
ec Nextcloud/store/elementsofclojure.pdf“Indirection is abstraction”
Indirection, also sometimes called abstraction, is the foundation of the software we write. Layers of indirection can be peeled away incrementally, allowing us to work withint a codebase without understanding its entrirety. Without indrection, we’d be unable to write software longer than a few hundred lines.
Huh, this names something I’ve seen. Python scripts written by civil engineers. One big for loop, with some clauses.
Advantage: straightforward. Disadvantage: Inflexible. Lesson: use indirection / abstraction to make code flexible.
Grateful.
?
I wrote something I thought was of value:
- Make sure your note taking system supports your goals. My goals: (A) assist my learning, (B) easily share content and get feedback from others.
When you produce content, consider (A) what you want to achieve by producing the content, and (B) how you want to find the content later.
Use one global namespace for named concepts. Category / taxonomy / tags belongs in metadata.
Why the goals? If your system supports your goals, you will continue to use it and get value from it. If your system doesn’t support your goals, it becomes tedious to use, and you’ll abandon your notes.
I encourage you to put your notes publicly on the web. Public notes have URLs, and there’s no easier way to read content. You’re going to remember notes.yourname.com/THING, or just go via notes.yourname.com to list / search.
My information architecture consists of named concepts, journals and metadata.
Named concepts is the top level. Wikipedia uses this structure. There’s one global namespace with sufficiently qualified names. You are going to remember your note by this name. Disambiguate in your global names.
Journals are organized by date. The advantage of journals is that you don’t have to name anything. In general, it’s nice to start with a journal, and collect named concepts on demand. Journals don’t have to be discoverable.
Metadata helps you discover and index your notes. Categories and tags go here. But don’t go nuts on categorization, think about what those categories should achieve. Remember the fact boxes on Wikipedia? Those are driven by concept metadata. Sometimes it’s better to embed a table or a nested list on a concept page than introduce metadata. “Is this helpful to understand the concept?” - put it on the page. “Is this helpful to find/index your content?” - it’s metadata.
Let’s say you want to learn FUSE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace). Create a journal page for learning FUSE, and tag it as “open problem”. Make sure you can list open problems. Each time you’ve got some time, open your FUSE journal, and work to understand something. Read the man page. Read wikipedia. Read the source. But annotate! Take notes in your journal as you go. When you revisit your FUSE journal, you can easily rediscover where you were last time, and decide where you want to go next.
Didn’t get any comments.
Am I dissatisfied? Doesn’t feel that way. Am I surprised? Yes, perhaps. That’s imprecise. Yes, I’m surprised. This is something I believe strongly in.
Am I disappointed? No.
xx
bimodal strategies
deep work, tactical initiatives, strategic initiatives
Applying bimodal strategies to the design of the daily effort.
Squirreltime – topic of stuff :)
Burnout, meaning and deep work. Reflecting on the last half year.
How is a perfect day structured?
Principles to prevent burnout, mess and loss of the strategic picture.
Hello.
Live.js: https://livejs.com/
I’m hosting with Cloudflare.
Problem: there’s no live-reload.
Diagnosis: Cloudlfare sends the same headers on each request. That’s meant to disallow caching. But in my case, it causes cache invalidation to never happen – opposite of the intended effect. I could fork live.js if I want, it’s small.
To get Live.js working with Cloudflare, I need Cloudflare to produce
correct etag headers. That means I need to
disable some Cloudflare stuff.
General Cloudflare Etag docs: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/218505467-Using-ETag-Headers-with-Cloudflare
Cloudflare pages dog, mentions etags: https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/serving-pages/
Pretty pleeeease
Still no etag header on the responses.
is it automatic or not?????
Woah!
:)
Also, “how to help”.
From Aphorisms:
10 - When in doubt, do that which builds trust.
11 - When still in doubt, do that which reifies and distributes intent.
12 - When still in doubt, reduce WIP.
13 - When STILL in doubt, improve your specific & general feedback loops.
xx
Target audience: xxx
Because taking notes is 90 % for the process, and only 10 % for the resulting artifact.
Because simply copying does not help you reify your taste. It does not help you to cultivate your taste.
options
choice
se Terminalen: Hvordan løpe med motorsag. Jeg har lyst til å bruke dingsen til Magnus. Det hadde vært fint. Men … hvor var det vi gjorde det? Vi flyttet det til et Iterate-repo, vi.
“Cultivate your aesthetic”, visa said. I wanted answers. I wanted a preference. So I figured, Okay, let’s try that. Let’s dig in.
I had no idea what that little germ of an idea would do to me.
Now, it has changed how I think. I find more joy, meaning, purpose and connection in each day. I enjoy doing my work. I’m not doing it for somebody else, I’m doing it for me.
Yet — at times, the devil in me shows his face. His strikes are more powerful. His tongue sharper, his arguments bear more conviction than before.
I realize that I cannot be only kind.
As I started to write today, I expected to want to explore bitterness. Bitterness at lack of quality. Bitterness when those around me don’t care.
I had a lang walk+talk with Sindre today. We talked about things I’m frustrated with. (and we bumped into Ida, which was fun)
I have this model of human relationships. Your relationship with someone has three attributes:
I find that trust and shared intent can be built. And building those are sort of … easy. Well, it’s not exactly easy. But it’s soluable, in the words of David Deutsch. It’s work. It’s something you can do. Improve trust and shared intent every day, and you’ll succeed. (or figure out that this is someone you don’t want to work with)
I digress.
I don’t think shared sense of quality can be built. I think shared sense of quality is discovered. You figure out what someone likes, explore their kneejerk reactions. What do they deliver, when given freedom? Is it any good?
Making an explicit effort to cultivate my own aesthetic has sharpened my inner critic. I see clearly what I like and what I despise. And my reaction to content without substance is bitterness and disgust.
Is this my new normal? Is disgust the price to pay for joy? Does a tree with branches reaching to heaven necessarily need roots anchored to hell?
We’ll see.
Oh, we’re not quite done. The eagles have come, saved the day, and we wake up in Rivendell.
I actually feel good now. Being dead serious, actually honest about that sense of quality. I felt like an ass when I was in the heat of the moment. Now I feel … relief. I feel good. I didn’t expect that.
I bet there’s a lesson in here somewhere.
Until next time,
Teodor
we wake up again, this time in the Shire. Yet Another End That’s Not An End.
I read this:
feeling proud of your work is critical for any ambitious/high-achieving person. for this type, it’s not about the hours put in, it’s about the *feeling they get out* of doing the work. and if they’re not interested in the work, it’s hard to make it phenomenal and be proud of it.
— Isabel⚡️ (@isabelunraveled) November 7, 2022
The War of Art introduces “territorial orientation”. Here’s a quote from the chapter The Definition of a Hack:
In other words, the hack writes hierarchically. He writes what he imagines will play well in the eyes of others. He does not ask himself, “What do I want to write? What do I think is important?” Instead, he asks “What’s hot, what can I make a deal for?”
The hack is like a politician who consults the polls before he takes a position. He’s a demagogue. He panders.
“so what?”
Yeah, that’s the feeling of quality and lack thereof. The joy of doing something worthwhile, and the disgust of wading through swamps.
“so what, you feel like complaining?”
No. I like where I am. I like where I’m going.
And I like that I don’t like everything I see.
bitter can be good. Ginger. A good beer. Grapefruit.
We had some snow! Now we have some gray stuff.
cond->
confusionI expect the following to evaluate without crashing.
(cond-> (list 1 2 3)
number? inc)Do you know what? It crashes! Who would have thought.
1. Unhandled java.lang.ClassCastException
class clojure.lang.PersistentList cannot be cast to class java.lang.Number
(clojure.lang.PersistentList is in unnamed module of loader 'app';
java.lang.Number is in module java.base of loader 'bootstrap')
I thought
(cond-> form condition transform)was equivalent to
(if (condition form)
(transform form)
form), but it appears I was wrong. Not sure why.
:)
Proposed principle: don’t ask people for stuff in public.
Why? I was in an E-mail chain with five other people. I don’t like those E-mail chains.
Proposed principle:
Why? It decouples “is this disrespectful” from other questions as “what is good?” and “what is practical?”.
Why bother with all this collective knowledge management stuff?
Watching a video where Werner Hetzog discusses Mike Tyson’s interest in old dead french rulers, I get the urge to write, to model, to map out.
but why?
Because it means something. I’m not interested in making Wikipedia 2. I’m interested in a curated, subset of the knowledge, values and culture of the world. And I want that subset do do something.
Not just describe some facts. The knowledge should have a function. A purpose. The knowledge should be a source of good questions.
I don’t just want to put all of history on play.teod.eu. I want interesting things. Documents can be interesting. Art can be interesting. Programs can be interesting.
If you will, we get stuck in a tautology. Interesting things are interesting. No shit!
But perhaps the systems thinking and quality aspects are less common. A way to surface interest is to provide a thread of interest. Therefore, I want threaded interest on this site. 🤔
Electric: https://github.com/hyperfiddle/electric
With Electric, I can write a backend and stream updates to a frontend. I could use that to serve & stream updates.
How? I could use a babashka file watcher to trigger signals for reloading a specific page. Then Electric just makes the rest work.
| Competence | Quality | Aesthetics | Taste |
|---|---|---|---|
| Skills | Outcome effectiveness | what’s the right outcome? | why are we even here - where do we want to be? |
Left: Objective, specific. Right: general, vague.
codename filebbrowser
(:evil +everywhere)tap> to good use, perhaps
persistHow
Consider having a “process stack” – start filebbrowser from the terminal, and put terminals “on top”, then start filebbrowser on top of that (again)
Support FZF UIs natively
Idea 2.1: JVM server, bb clients. 🤔
Yup
But building on Clojure (bb/jvm) gives a different set of tradeoffs.
🤔🤔🤔
Then I don’t have to reinvent Emacs. Aaaand I can “move around” more quickly.
| date | project / option | theme |
This way of dividing is sufficient for lots of stuff.
| organization | project | initiative |
Truth slices up what’s wrong. Virtue keeps you in check, lets you avoid harming yourself and others.
That’s right!
Do you dare be the judge of quality?
Har du egentlig gjort noe fornuftig i dag? Jobber vi egentlig på det som betyr noe? Når du uttrykker skepsis til struktur du ikke ønsker, er det fordi strukturen er dårlig, eller fordi du ikke gidder?
if you look at the lives of individual creators, it’s so rich!
– Mark, Metamuse (podcast), episode 40
So … wealth is texture? Wealth is rich in texture? Variability, details, individuation?
Rather than boxed, bland, plain, smooth?
🤔
we either construct language or apply language to gain value in context.
See Software architecture as langauge construction or Capability, feature and assembly.
There’s one word: “bra”. And its meaning depends on who you’re asking.
But there’s a difference between “bra” and “bra”. We rarely emphasize the word in relation to the other words in the sentence.
Every week, Alex Miller brings together content from the Clojure community in Clojure Deref – the Clojure newsletter. This is an interesting corpus of free resources. Perhaps something can be done for discovery.
List of things I find good. List of things I find bad. List of things I want to stay the same. List of things I want to change.
Perhaps.
For myself. For my self respect. For my team. For my organization. For my customer.
at least let me know easily whether the change was “fix bug” “add stuff” or “move things around”
| f | fix: | fix stuff | things were broken, now we’re good |
| a | add: | add stuff | TOOL handles some PROBLEM better now. |
| r | refactor: | move stuff around | internals, no observable changes. |
| d | doc: | doc | doc changes only |
If everything is moving all the time, you cannot move yourself. If nothing around you can ever move, you’re stuck.
In other words, it’s bad for you if everything moves, and if nothing moves!
your personal workflow. You have a finite amount of attention you can spend each day. You can use that attention to follow movement, or to cause movement.
| follow movement | consume |
| cause movement | create |
How do you want to spend your day?
Fragmented movement is when everybody is waving their arms faster and faster and faster, but the things that matter stay the same.
In cohesive movement, internal structure enables the desired outwards movement. For example, car frames or aircraft bodies are stiff, but move fast.
| move yourself | Support, challenge, carry carry |
| help others move | Support, challenge, carry support |
making that … thing … explorable would be good.
Can I provide HTTP redirects with javascript? I’d like to.
Hmmm.
Isn’t that how the DOI thing works? Or perhaps I should have a small redirect service that does the right thing on the HTTP level?
.. and I might want to just generate the HTML and CSS myself.
But I’m not able to!
😔
At least not right now, within my current skill ceiling and available time. And I’m also hesitant to fork away from Pandoc.
what about … forking pandoc? starting from pandoc and building?
hmmmm
disadvantages:
but .. I could I extract the current pandoc html writer and work only with that? Use the rest of pandoc as a binary, and write only the json->html piece?
Perhaps “transpile” from haskell to clojure?
🤔
I’ve sometimes felt annoyed working on code bases, seeing stuff that can be improved everywhere. Then, later I’ve realized that I was focusing too intently on stuff that doesn’t matter.
The right layer to focus on was 2 or 3, I was stuck on 1.
The last words of Learning to play support. I feel like they carry meaning. Or carry something that I don’t quite know yet.
charity. Take the first step. Reach out your hand.
grace. Accept error. We are not perfect.
joy. Live, let live. Love. (“I want to know what love is” or “All you need is love”?)
hva: skal vi fokusere på innsatsen vi legger ned, eller effekten den innsatsen har?
produkt: outcome over output. Hvis vi ikke fokuserer på produktet, blir alt bare tull.
team: innsats OG outcome. Jobben vår er å lage bra ting, da må vi vite om tingen er bra. Men fra dag til dag er jobben vår å legge ned en innsats som gjør tingene bedre. Vi kommer på jobb, skal legge ned en dags innsats, så skal vi gå hjem.
teamprosess: innsatsen er alt. Hvordan vi jobber er ufattelig viktig!
Done!
Q: what’s the right interface for making microtheories?
Q: what’s the right interface for making knowledge playlists?
Microtheories need to be good explanations. Examples of good explanations:
a “little memex” is your own corner of knowledge. you curate the index. you create and link your nodes. you can refer to and build on other memexes, but the act building the memex is the reward in itself.
microtheories deserve its own URL. others should be able to leverage your little memex.
a microtheory is a bite-sided deinfition, and motivation for why it matters.
a knowledge playlist is an ordered list of microtheories.
Go!
yes!
Flyttet: https://serve.olorm.app.iterate.no/o/olorm-7/
Source: https://twitter.com/jackrusher/status/1623367128635084802
Jeg leser Homesteading av Jack Rusher.
I dette asnittet blir jeg sittende å tenke:
I managed to sidestep the worst of those concerns by practicing something I think of as “attention hygiene”:
Jeg har tenkt mye på oppmerksomhet mens jeg har laget denne siden. Se feks attention design.
Jeg tror det er grunnen til at jeg liker å holde på med disse greiene. Jeg tar kontroll over min egen oppmerksomhet.
datomic was open sourced
curious
Electric Clojure, Datomic and Quil. And nextjournal/clojure-mode. Done right, this could work for kids!
But local setup & installation is too complex. So I’m kind of curiuos about trying this myself.
This would essentially be a cheap maria.cloud clone. So … why?
Deliverables?
dynamic runtime, high performance, instant startup, pick two?
| thing | dynamic runtime | high performance | instant startup |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clojure | 1 | 0.8 | 0.2 |
| Go (programming language) | 0.4 | 0.8 | 1 |
| Rust (programming language) | 0.1 | 0.95 | 1 |
| Javascript | 0.8 | 0.5 | 0.8 |
| Babashka | 1 | 0.4 | 0.9 |
Idea: of “dynamic runtime”, “high performance” and “instant startup”, you can only pick two. I rated (very subjectively, hand-waving) some runtimes from 0 (bad) to 1 (good).
Would you agree? Are there counter-examples? Does this have to be the case?
How would you score runtimes you use on the three axes?
My speculation:
I know borkdude has experimented with starting up Sci and JVM Clojure simultaneously, using Sci for instant startup, and moving over to JVM Clojure for JVM optimizations / compilation, but I don’t think that effort got further than experimentation. Another challenge is that sci isn’t exactly the same as JVM Clojure, so I suspect one could get nasty bugs if the two runtimes “diverge in execution”.
I also wonder if Common Lisp might score high on all three. But I haven’t used CL in anger, so won’t blindly guess a score. Common Lisp hacker opinions welcome! I’m also curious if Clojure is better than Common Lisp on any of these axes. Which further begs the question about why some of us prefer Clojure over Common Lisp, and if that merits a fourth axis.
10:31 teodorlu:
I also wonder if Common Lisp might score high on all three.
Perhaps this is more a matter of effort than anything else. If we had infinite resources, perhaps we could “just” invent a JVM that worked like this. Start out with a simple statically compiled interpreter, then move to compile & JIT optimize stuff. But I’m speculation, I’ve never written anything like the JVM or Sci.
Related, perhaps “jvm bytecode” is a better target for this than “Clojure”. So that there are different JVM bytecode interpretation strategies with different performance characteristics.
I had to shorten the column names to make it fit:
| column name | short column name |
|---|---|
| dynamic runtime | dynamic |
| high performance | performance |
| instant startup | startup |
| instant build | build |
| ecosystem | ecosystem |
| thing | runtime | performance | startup | build | ecosystem |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clojure | 1 | 0.8 | 0.2 | 1 | Maven |
| Go | 0.4 | 0.8 | 1 | 0.7 | ? |
| Rust | 0.1 | 0.95 | 1 | 0.1 | ? |
| Javascript | 0.8 | 0.5 | 0.8 | 1 | NPM |
| Babashka | 1 | 0.4 | 0.9 | 1 | Graal |
| Cherry | “no” | “as JS” | “yes” | 0.9 | NPM |
| Nbb | “good” | 0.9 | 1 | NPM | |
| Fennel | “good” | “as luaJIT” | “good” | “good” | Lua+C FFI |
| Zig | Zig+C ABI |
moved to own page: execution for developers.
are the overall priorities right? are we doing the right things to hit the overall priorities?
what things should I be making progress on today? have I made progress on the things I should today?
if you don’t know a process’s job to be done, you
As a leader, you need to know why things are being done.
This is a burden, but also a fine way to judge everything. If you know why initiatives are worked on, you can judge whether the initiative works as it should
Easy mode (awareness):
Hard mode (awareness + actionable):
Process:
Goal:
13:06: moved this into prompts for learning.
I want to write something about product management and good theory. Tie David Deutsch and Marty Cagan together.
Core: the skills of a good product manager is theory building in practice.