spyrosg

The UK doesn't have much to export in terms of natural resources (excepting Ireland), or hard-to-move industry. That leaves services, which can go away easily. So the situation was already bad in terms of overt influence, compared to, say, Germany.

Behind the scenes however, the British seem to stay important. The safekeeping of the Gladio operatives' names, Steele's involvement against Trump, the UK national who started the White Helmets, ... I have the vague feeling that les rosbifs seem to pop up a lot where the action is, just not too obviously.

Indeed. Or more people than you realise implicitly support the idea of censure with only vague restraint, and are just nerding out on the details.

In the end it will likely not matter how expertly the eurocrats contain the symptoms of deeper, social problems, it might very well blow up in their faces.

People who like thinking seem to overestimate the power of ideas in shaping the world. My interpretation is that it's probably the typical arrogance of the intellectual letting itself through.

For example, there are arguments that the renaissance was a result of the social and economic conditions created by the black death, not the intention of any human actor. The post-WW2 social wellness a result precisely of the war, and so on.

Not everybody agrees on what "improve mankind and society" should mean, so you're back to either submitting to a common concept of objective truth, where the "bad" but realistic model wins, or political arm wrestling for your ideas to win against the other's (on the basis of faith if you're in the middle ages, or whim if you're a postmodernist).

You may simply not be a good dev. What then?

I live in a market where finding a job quickly makes it another shitty job, and only after amply signaling your submissiveness (ah, Europe). You get no unemployment money, because it's you who quit, of course.

There's also the fact that you're the good guy and yet you're the one getting shafted, while the arses above keep doing what they do. Anyone with a brain will sense something's wrong, and will rethink their ethics.

And yet, the programmer may have a responsibility to bring a salary back to his family. People will call him a criminal for obeying his boss, but they usually will not come and help him if he does the right thing and takes flak for it.

What about Ahrefs? Also, some people must be using Ocaml's cousin F#, or Jon Harrop would not have a job.

Edit: oh, finance. Right.

I do not see Python as the natural choice for a first language. I've even had adult colleagues squint when I tried to explain decorators, or objects and all the self/static/class/method binding nonsense.

OOP in Python is something I really cannot like. I teach the language to children and as soon as I get to objects (which is not avoidable in Python, as many libraries and the language itself use objects) the number of concepts I have to explain is too much and I get the dreaded blank stare. I haven't so far found a short explanation that gives them a good enough grasp on objects that they can start making their own.

Ideally I would like to have to explain few orthogonal concepts, as learning a new concept in the abstract is hard and their mind has little patience for it, and let them experiment as soon as possible. But experimentation needs the minimum mastery required to combine the concepts and get some result. Pyhton's objects tend to expose their functions+struct guts, which does not help.

And don't get me started on warts like the "global" keyword, which makes simple scripts with global state and a few functions (a step into learning functions and structured programming) a frustrating and buggy process. I still cannot understand async/await enough to be comfortable with it, and if Armin Ronacher doesn't either... Meanwhile, languages like Oz do concurrency, with actual parallelism, beautifully.

I'm starting to think Scheme and Smalltalk would be excellent beginner languages. "Here's how to make an s-expr; these s-expr are applications, these are definitions. Now go."

I would very much like to know that too. I think Alan Kay said something about the middle management at Xerox being excellent people, too, so I would be tempted to think this is the one important factor to get the kind of tech oasis that were PARC and Bell Labs.

Some of us end up in the few dream-team environments that already exist today, but most will have to build those ourselves; any hint would be very welcome.

Your view would be fair if it was openly stated to the smart kids in their young age. Knowing that they're on their own, whatever they end up doing would be an informed choice and their responsibility entirely.

This isn't what happens in reality though. Schools and teachers demand submission to their authority on the implied promise that they are going to take care of you. When children believe that, and then are let down, is it the children's fault?

Gifted kids have high IQ, but probably not high EQ. They're defenceless against bullshit and blind to multi-level messages at that age, like most other kids.

Personally I don't blame the school system. What it does is not fair, but fairness is a fairy tale. It is a tool of society, with a useful purpose, and some unfortunate side-effects. The parents of a kid that's let down by the system should however take charge and start telling him how things really work, and make the kid realise that it's just him now.

Given the low cost of long-term storage, if you have any auditing requirement, it's worth it to store lots of logs.

It sounded fine the first time I heard it, but I don't buy the "it wasn't free and Linux was available" argument any more. If more Linux users had read the papers like you, and done so early enough, they might have had an aggregate influence on Linux's design when it was still malleable. A Plan9-like Linux would have been just as good as Plan9 eventually.

Your stated reasons aren't valid. I think they ported Mozilla until 2002 (Russ Cox, maybe?). There was also a compat layer: APE.

As a counter to your argument: a system that has little capability compared to the well-established alternatives, starts from nothing, yet takes over the world: Linux.

I really believe there was no greater reason for Plan 9's failure to catch on (or at least it's ideas) than my peers not being interested in their own education.

Didn't Plan 9 eventually get some mechanisms to facilitate interactions between such local-only networks around the world? 9grid and such.

In any case, Plan 9 is still ahead on quite a few fronts, with federated authentication that is simple(-ish) and works, a versioned filesystem by default, a unified namespace (the new interpretation of "filesystem") to access any resource you might want to use (instead of, today: DNS + TCP ports + HTTP URL's), and security by only exposing the necessary resources to processes, instead of exposing everything and then making up contrived access restriction schemes on top. (Smells of capabilities by Pike's own admission, I believe). That last part was mostly thanks to namespaces which Linux has picked up and popularised in a simple form with Docker... after 20+ years.

The important bits of the new architecture were also about the parts that were left out. No disk usage utility, based on the rapidly decreasing price of a giga bytes. Go and try to make contemporary sysadmins, who still partition their drives to this day, accept this highly distruptive simplification. Gotta create ourselves our busywork!

In the end, Plan 9 was made by /educated/ people with /resources/, and much of today's software isn't. No surprise it's better made.

(edit: some structure added to my rambling.)