bblaylock

Is clay like code?

Clay comes from the earth, has great plastic deformation properties, and when heated sufficiently it turns to ceramic--whereafter it can never be turned back to clay. We humans have been doing ceramics for over 30,000 years. Yet, there is no undo in the process of pottery, and much of the process requires experience to know, in the most inexact sense of knowing, what the result will actually look like. Clay exists as a physical medium, and while knowledge of chemistry and physics can certainly inform your usage of clay, in actuality the chemical interactions that occur during a firing are still complicated enough that we in the industry still refer to them as "kiln magic".

Programming, conversely, is primarily a logical thought experiment. Most of the programs I have written have almost no physical representation. There is no material to coding, even assembly programmers work at the top of a heap of mental and physical abstractions. The process itself is rife with tooling between the user and the medium, correcting our mistakes and suggesting alternative ideas. There is always very quick feedback as to the result of a program. And the field, although still full of open questions, is largely well specified, in spite of it being an incredibly young field of study!

As far as mediums for expression go it would, in my opinion, be rare to find two that are more different. I can't help but think of the old phrase, "the map is not the territory."

I haven't had any issue moving projects between node, bun, and deno for years. I don't agree that the risk of bun failing as a company affects anthropic at all. Bun has a permissible license that anthropic could fork from, anthropic likely knew that oven had a long runway and isn't in immediate danger, and switching to a new js cli tool is not the huge lift most people think it is in 2025. Why pay for something you are already getting for free and can expect to keep getting for free for at least four years, and buy for less if it fails later?

This reads more like Anthropic wanted to hire Jarred and Jarred wants to work with AI rather than build a Saas product around bun. I doubt it has anything to do with what is best for bun the project. Considering bun always seemed to value performance more than all else, the only real way for them to continue pursuing that value would be to move into the actual js engine design. This seems like a good pivot for Jarred personally and likely a loss for bun.

I think there are several reasons. First, the abstraction of a stream of data is useful when a program does more than process a single realtime loop. For example, adding a timeout to a stream of data, switching from one stream processor to another, splitting a stream into two streams or joining two streams into one, and generally all of the patterns that one finds in the Observable pattern, in unix pipes, and more generally event based systems, are modelled better in push and pull based streams than they are in a real time tight loop. Second, for the same reason that looping through an array using map or forEach methods is often favored over a for loop and for loops are often favored over while loops and while loops are favored over goto statements. Which is that it reduces the amount of human managed control flow bookkeeping, which is precisely where humans tend to introduce logic errors. And lastly, because it almost always takes less human effort to write and maintain stream processing code than it does to write and maintain a real time loop against a buffer.

Hopefully this helps! :D