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you know i think it may be significant that when i talk about why the work in the cancer lab motivated me i say "these VERY SMART grad students were held back by their coding environment" because it should be very clear why that matters but it occurs to me that robert pike sees people as essential scaffolding for him to be very smart. which. maybe i do too? but my success metric includes whether i succeed
just exited the shower......they're saying that shit was QC approved ✅✅✅
? did you know we had a QC?
! yeah but it's been disabled ever since that guy went on vacation four years ago
! shit just popped up
! a new green box for once
? pandora ?
! you know that wasn't her box right
? do you think hope lives in a containerized development environment
? do you think we put it there
there's this incredible bit to start chapter 2 of the holes book by louis sachar where you know as context spoiler alert for chapter 1 he gets framed for this cartoonishly evil and also clearly improbable crime and is sent to a desert where they dig holes and the desert is clearly full of holes and it emphasizes not only how remote it is but how part of its remoteness is how it's covered in this moat of essentially their own graves. i don't know if the book ever says that part.
but chapter 2 starts and he just previously had one kid talk to him and tell him oh you think this is bad? the second hole is the worst. because the injuries beget their own pain now and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and then.......
second sentence. the third hole's the worst. the fourth. but stanley knew that wasn't true. he was getting stronger.
idk maybe that's the most improbable part of the text. but the slings and arrows can't rely on outrageous fortune forever. fortune can mean luck, wealth, fate. some of these end up reducing to the others but the transformation is one-way. information is lost.
one thing i never get tired of is reading documentation i wrote. like damn you are so right and you know what? this is new information to me. this also happens for like other text i write. i promise you the ocd makes it take hours to figure things out but usually once it's out i don't find my own reasons to fix it beyond nitpicks. no clue why i was granted this gift but it happened immediately the first day i took an SSRI
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i'm having a normal amount of emotions reading my own documentation for the first time in years so i think it's safe to continue. i did have a powerful and positive burst of emotion on the home page where we use the term "pants empowers you" and it's actually talking shit very specifically about starlark here and holy shit that is bona fide trash talk. maybe this is a safe space
this documentation is so goddamn empathetic and i did not write what i'm reading now but someone got the message. they're getting a thank you card if this c++ backend becomes more than vaporware
god damn we have macros now and they're Good for reasons that you would agree with. erdős would say they're in the book
my entire fucking thing for years after working on this was "you do not make a fucking programming if you are not serious about making a fucking programming language". what does that mean? it means if you decide upon the inherent Correctness and Goodness of you making a language in the affirmative, and you have the means like google to force people to use your shit like bazel and starlark, and you do not take it very seriously that your not-language needs to be a fucking programming language, and instead fund a decade of conference talks about how programmers are simpletons and are better restrained, i will have to restrain myself, and then i will destroy you regardless
many things to say about python but ✅ it has a package manager (you know it's good bc i did a whole conference talk on how much i love the maintainers). ✅ it has for loops. ✅ it has string interpolation ✅ you will not have to wait for google to prioritize for loop support
making a DSL out of a language that does the language parts for you is indescribably easier and less user hostile. but then you don't get to fund a decade of conference talks on how the engineers you hire are like cattle, not pets
did you know all of pants's built-in functionality uses the same API we expose to users. do you know that this left me speechless. do you know that's literally the only thing any other editor needs to do to match emacs but they won't fucking do it
the ordering of the good shit we worked very hard on that anyone should care about is presented in exactly the correct order of importance:
(1) fine-grained caching. that shit will slip through your fingers. it will fall to the floor. we'll clean it up for you. that's the pants promise ✅
(2) concurrent execution. actually much more difficult when you are driven by things people give a shit about and don't let the caching slip because the concurrent stuff is easier (it's literally easier. caching under concurrency is the hard part. but caching at all.....well, no. parallelism is hard. but caching is hard and nobody has been told it's hard so they keep fucking it up and parallelism does not have this problem)
(3) is remote execution which is useful in some cases but it's a fun game you can always win so far (except the entire twitter monorepo using our outline scala compilation) by running locally. if someone paid me to work more on it i could find more ways that are faster remotely. but it's.....anyway i like our impl of it
the important thing to note here is that outline compilation is a fancy term we made up referring to the ability to retrieve the interface to compile against without blocking on the whole big compile process.
this sounds complex. it's not, because it's the literal one single thing the c preprocessor provides you with: a meta-language to specify dependencies independent of the compiler input. this is TERRIBLY unfortunate for all c/++ programmers since the 70s. but it will be very convenient for us
it will be somewhat less convenient for robert pike https://circumstances.run/@hipsterelectron/114999225150191752 it has precompiled header files if you literally want a precompiled interface to compile against. but we don't actually need that. the c/++ model of header file inclusion cleanly describes dependencies without compilation. this gets us the same caching and parallelism we needed a whole new scala compiler by eugene burmako (who is AWESOME to work with) happened to already be writing. convenient!
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