it's incredible that that project has 11,000 commits, a huge amount of effort has gone into it but the code is really unpleasant to read. I feel like I must be missing something about FOAM - who is using it and why?
The success of an endeavor is proportional to the number of shitty hacks that have come before it. Sometimes this it true in a literal sense -- sometimes a project consists of shitty hacks. But the astute reader will notice that a hack is only known to be shitty because someone did it, and had the courage to make their example public.
Do we reward their courage? No. We act like cliquish teenagers and rip them apart.
I don't mean to single you out. But this subthread consists of a developer at Amazon, an unknown, and a founder -- the very types of people I wanted to respect -- yet the content is little more than "Look at how stupid these people are." What kind of example are we setting here?
Be excited about X! Whether X is FOAM, Javascript, COBOL, C++, Python, Erlang, Scheme, NPM, ASDF, Vim, Stallman, or a song. Be happy. Be amused. Be anything but bitter.
In this instance, FOAM shows what's possible. Is it necessarily a good idea? Who cares! We've learned something new! Be excited!
How certain are you that an idea that strikes you as bad is actually bad? For every possible circumstance? What about with a slight tweak? In fact, "An idea that seems bad" is the short definition of "startup."
Most ideas that seem bad are, in fact, bad. But it's important to fully explore the problem space before dismissing them, else you'll dismiss Facebook.
This subthread is about a software technique, not a startup idea. But is it really such a different domain? Would the idea of Python have survived if it had been introduced in the era of Multics? It wasn't a compiled language, so it couldn't hope to survive back then. Yet its time was coming, whether or not it would have been dismissed at the time.
"Under what circumstances could this be a good idea?" That's the valuable question. And if you also have a good answer to "Why now?" then you may be onto something. In fact, you might be one of the first people to notice that an idea has flipped from bad to good. Seems like a pretty powerful position.
It seems like most influential work started as a hack. (TeX is a notable exception.) So if you want to do influential work, be delighted by hacks. It'll make them easier to explore, and you might end up in a position few others realize is valuable.
Most everyone agrees with you in general about the usefulness of "trashing other people's work", but I think your response here is disproportionate to the circumstance.
For what it's worth I was asking a genuine question, most experimental projects don't get 11k commits so I assume that people are actively using it - my question is, given the plethora of alternatives available, what is it about FOAM that leads people to use it?
I shouldn't have said that the code was unpleasant, which is obviously subjective, but I should have said "the code style is quite unusual for JS", which it is. It was certainly not my intention to "trash their work".
I think the article is confusing two different issues, the malleability attacks and the dust attacks. Amaclin seems to be behind the dust attack, which is a cheap way to DoS the blockchain by causing blocks to reach the maximum number of SIGOPS with dust transactions, preventing real transactions from going through.
async/await is powered by promises, it's crazy to say that promises are going away, they're becoming an even more fundamental construct in the language.
Probably because it's theoretically inelegant. A lot of people are quite absolutist when it comes to security, and shun solutions that aren't entirely robust to all possible edge cases.
Yet in practice, tame(2) makes privilege dropping such a trivial activity that it will quite likely influence far more programmers than a more capable but also more grueling and complex mechanism like seccomp-bpf.
>> No matter how good the interface is, it’s almost certain this will never hit Linux in the next 5-10 years. It’s not because the interface is bad, but because the glibc-devs and other people are scared of simple and straight-forward interfaces, rather not doing anything than implementing an interface which handles the general case rather than trying to cover the 0.5% of edge cases, being complex and bloated.
> This is such a tough lesson to learn and to apply. I still fail at it most of the time in my own code, thinking up the weirdest edge cases possible that I need to handle rather than making the 99% case nice and simple.
I'm a CS grad student, I've worked in the industry before, and I am 100% guilty of sometimes dismissing a nice and simple solution because the perfectionist in me is annoyed that an edge case takes O(n^2) or that the algorithm won't give the optimal answer in some pretty rare circumstances.
The cost is not just in the form of development expenses. It's about having to support two systems, creating a confusing message for consumers, having to foster and support two different app ecosystems, marketing two different competing platforms, etc.
GraphQL is almost totally unrelated to graphs, it's a way to compose API requests in a manner that fits modern web / mobile usage patterns better than REST. GraphQL has nothing to do with the actual representation of the data. I think the name has led to a lot of misconceptions.
Hi I'm Nick Schrock and I actually came up with the name. Graph in this context means social graph or more generally the conceptual graph of data in your application, which you can query. It doesn't mean that it is a formalized graph database in any sort of way, nor does it seek to be.
I understand the name causes a bit of confusion but the ship has kind of sailed on this one :-) I think people will get used to it if/when it becomes a widely known name.
Ironically, the "query language" part also misses the mark, and I think that part confuses people more (as in that RethinkDB discussion).
GraphQL is closer to what we call a protocol; it has minimal syntax, a kind of data model, and it can only be used for declaring requests. You can't implement anything in GraphQL: absolutely all of its expressions are implementation-provided — contrast with, say, SQL, which, being an actual query language, defines operators, arithmetic expressions, mutations, etc. A defining quality of a protocol is that it's a medium through which clients can talk to multiple black-box implementations, which is exactly what GraphQL is.
I like GraphQL, but I wish you'd thought through the name before you started to publish about it. If you'd called it something like Extensible API Protocol, nobody would have batted an eyelid.
I'm sure you're right because you have the power of facebook behind you but yeah the name is problematic. I agree with lobster_johnson in that it's not a "query language" either, it's more like an analogue of JSON.
Virtually every graph database vendor now gets requests that they implement GraphQL, because from the name it sounds like it fits but in reality it's totally unrelated.
It's a query language. Every database supports at least one query language. It's certainly reasonable to argue that natively implementing multiple query languages is "bloat" or "feature creep" (as some in the comment thread point out and suggest alternate approaches to avoid), but I don't think it's silly.
I highly recommend reading the forum post linked above. Engagingly written, and with some exciting plot twists for people who have been following Darknet Market drama; and perhaps it's even true.
Care to summarise any of the interesting parts, or is it worth holding on and checking this at home? I'm at work and I suspect clicking on "myplanetganja.com" will not go down well with our infra team. Also what does "Variety Jones == Plural of Mongoose" mean?
simon aka Varity Jones aka Plural of Mongoose writes a very long, well written tale with many dubious elements about his life after Silk Road collapses. It supposedly involves high level corruption, $75M of stolen Bitcoin that needs a password, and a beach holiday. It's worth reading, he definitely has a nice style regardless of how much truth there is in the story.
This url leads to forum posts that is written by guy named "Plural of Mongoose". I skimmed it over and it reads like memoirs of main (bad?) character from Noir book. Definitely worth a read if you're into that.
