zogrodea

"Big Sky Dev Con", not "Better Software Conference" for those who were (like me) initially confused. :)

Someone commented in the past few days that the most impressive demo they saw in a conference was LibreOffice running on Fil-C, and I agreed.

However, this took the #1 spot from it (leaving that previous demo in #2) in my opinion. Very impressive, and nostalgic too.

As programmers and as engineers, we often seek objective metrics to judge the value of things, neglecting aesthetic value and value that cannot easily be reduced to objective metrics.

This accessible paper reminds us that reasoning is not dispassionate and that we should attend to aesthetic matters as well.

The paper itself is in the context of education and seeks how to convey to students the importance and value of a subject matter.

That looks pretty great! I would love to use this at work if functional programming idioms were already familiar to the team and I didn't face resistance introducing them. Thank you for sharing and developing the library.

I think you're right. People describe Java as being colourless.

My experience with this is in .NET, which has methods like readFile (which is async) and readFileSync.

.NET doesn't really need to provide two separate utility methods like this though, because you can use Task.wait to block until the async task is done.

Integrating Defender sounds like it would create an antitrust issue? If I remember correctly, MS was in the past taken to court and forced to sell some product or other separately, when they previously provided it for free.

No comment about being able to move Defender to not require kernel hooks (I don't know).

I'm not doubting, but can you give a few examples of Microsoft trouncing others?

I do recall Disney (a main reason copyright laws last so long, and who didn't want Steamboat Willie to enter public domain).

I also think of Amazon (which the creator of the Elm programming language describes as having "the Jeff problem" because they steal smaller people's/team's ideas), although that's a different problem.

I can't say anything comes to mind right now about MS, though, which is most likely a failure of my memory/knowledge. So I'd appreciate some examples.

Great article. Reminds me of this quote from RG Collingwood about how pervasive copying has been throughout history, and how the famous names we know to have copied would be baffled about us being shocked.

"Individualism would have it that the work of a genuine artist is altogether ‘original’, that is to say, purely his own work and not in any way that of other artists. The emotions expressed must be simply and solely his own, and so must his way of expressing them.

It is a shock to persons labouring under this prejudice when they find that Shakespeare’s plays, and notably Hamlet, that happy hunting-ground of self-expressionists, are merely adaptations of plays by other writers, scraps of Holinshed, Lives by Plutarch, or excerpts from the Gesta Romanorum; that Handel copied out into his own works whole movements by Arne; that the Scherzo of Beethoven’s C minor Symphony begins by reproducing the Finale of Mozart’s G minor, differently barred; or that Turner was in the habit of lifting his composition from the works of Claude Lorrain. Shakespeare or Handel or Beethoven or Turner would have thought it odd that anybody should be shocked."

I do understand the desire to protect one's work too and find it hard to take a single side.

I remember you describing Ropey's author as a "lovely human" too, and want to say that "it takes one to know one/real recognises real". :)

This made me think of part of RG Collingwood's Autobiography, when he spoke of growing up while many around him were artists of one kind or another.

"During the same years I was constantly watching the work of my father and mother, and the other professional painters who frequented their house, and constantly trying to imitate them ; so that I learned to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting, so far as the attempt has gone.

I learned what some critics and aestheticians never know to the end of their lives, that no ‘work of art’ is ever finished, so that in that sense of the phrase there is no such thing as a ‘work of art’ at all. Work ceases upon the picture or manuscript, not because it is finished, but because sending-in day is at hand, or because the printer is clamorous for copy, or because ‘I am sick of working at this thing’ or ‘I can’t see what more I can do to it’."