OliverM

This is easily googled, no? It is not a twitter fight.

I'm not suggesting otherwise. I'm saying that your "toy example" comment is very dismissive of something that was an extraordinary accomplishment of its day. They invented spreadsheets without it. Dependency graphs are excellent and widely useful things we should all be happy to adapt and reach for, far beyond spreadsheets. We should be grateful that they're available to all of us to build into software products so readily. I've used them repeatedly and I'm sure I will many times in the future.

What I'm trying to communicate is this: this product _invented_ spreadsheets, but you dismiss the implementation with a sneer.

The clause "it's absolutely necessary for all but the simplest toy examples" is what I was disagreeing with. But I wouldn't be surprised to hear that visicalc adopted one as soon as it was technically feasible in later versions.

Isn’t the existence & success of visicalc a direct counter to this?

The author is an accomplished software engineer.

It has both of those. I use them from Emacs comfortably.

Not this Irishman…

No, not in this case. The article already assumes the existence of a near perfectly-efficient process. It's just looking at the minimum energy needed to remove the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to long-established physical laws, no matter what mechanism is used.

We could definitely work harder at supporting the existing natural mechanisms for removing CO2 from the atmosphere, but it's far, far easier to reduce the amount we're emitting.

This is impressive, but they just sound so _alien_, especially to this non-U.S. English speaker (to the point of being actively irritating to listen to). I guess picking up on social cues communicating this (rather than express instruction or feedback) is still some time away.

It's still astonishing to consider what this demonstrates!

I don't object to it at all, I think it's a great idea. We need more models of supporting open-source, including financial ones. BTW I also don't see commercial and open-source as intrinsically opposed to each other - projects can be both, and I wish more were.

I thought Ardour was a commercial product? If you want to download a binary from their site it's either a demo version with injected silence every 10 minutes, or a paid-for option (either a small monthly sub or a larger one-off payment). You can build it locally yourself for free of course, but I don't know if many non-devs would do that.

I like the sentiment but this could have been a tweet. If it was it wouldn't be preaching to the choir.

I am being glib above but in the spirit of useful feedback, the article needs editing for length. It's not that it's badly written, I just found that it took too circuitous a route to make its point.

This is genuinely thrilling. I know it’s likely to be a C++ codebase, which I don’t have a huge amount of experience in (yet). But having open source access to a music machine of the Deluge’s calibre is phenomenal.