If your .ts code differs massively from your .js code you have no one to blame but yourself.

Blame? Not only is this how I want it, I think it's the obvious and natural progression of Typescript code.

Typescript is not just 'typing' for JS, it encourages much cleaner abstraction, modularization etc. than JS.

My first Typescript exposure was a re-write of several thousand lines of JS code. After a little bit of 'adding typing' I realized there were much better ways to organize information. The result was powerful - what was once a near hairball of code, was now magnificently cleaner, easier to read, easier to re-factor, easier to maintain.

That experience not only validates the existence of TS but strongly highlights the limitations of JS which has always been a deeply problematic language, full of pot holes and weirdness, and though it's fully understandable why the language evolved how it did - that's no justification for it's ugly failings which cause existential inefficiency in many situations.

Though 'adding typing to JS' might be a good start for using Typescript in any given scenario - anyone only doing that is missing a bigger opportunity.

The reason your posts in this thread are so irritating is because TS has all the same junk people hate about JS. You say things like JS is "deeply problematic" and "full of pot holes and weirdness" but you don't address how TS has fixed any of these problems. (Hint: it hasn't. Fixing the language is totally beyond the scope of TS).

Typescript provides concrete benefits. Maybe it also provide some benefits that aren't so concrete, like encouraging developers to think about how they're representing data earlier rather than later. But it doesn't "fix the language".

Not quite.

I agree TS definitely does not 'fix' JS, but in practice, it helps avoid many issues.

Example: prototype inheritance.

Now you can argue that's a 'good feature' of JS, but I'd argue it's just convoluted and difficult.

Since programming in TS ... I've basically never run into a prototype inheritance concern, and maybe a little bit daring (or lazy) to say that I've forgotten many of the details. You really don't have to know anything about prototype inheritance when you're in TS land.

Modules. Technically, that's going to be 'fixed' in a near future version of JS, but really, it's not. Modularization is cludge in JS with various versions. In TS it's fairly clear. No issues there either.

Also, annotations.

Anyhow, yes, you're right technically, but TS does obfuscate a lot of the ridiculousness to the point wherein I would say TS is borderline another layer of abstraction, not just 'types'.

It's the only thing in tech I actually talk up when I get the chance.

I think that's because TS lets you see patterns in your data and code that were "invisible" in JS. You could still write clean code in JS, you just have to be able to see all that implicit structure. Spaghetti code is spaghetti code with or without types, it's just easier without types.

That's totally true, but it's pretty much the point of a programming language - to enable and facilitate intelligent organization of logic.

I agree with your comment.

> Why would hunter gatherers not wear clothes, when they can offer useful protection against the elements?

I was curious about this and looked it up. Apparently there was some period of time during which humanity did not wear clothes. This has been determined by looking at the DNA of hair lice versus clothes lice and seeing where they diverged: http://news.ufl.edu/archive/2011/01/uf-study-of-lice-dna-sho...

That went in a direction I didn't expect! Very interesting, thanks :)

React is not "batteries included". Angular is.

This isn't a weakness in React. I prefer react's approach. But it does mean the developer needs to make more decisions.

Angular comes with stuff like RxJS and a wrapper around XmlHttpRequest. React doesn't. Again, this isn't "correct," it's just a different approach. No one is being combative here (except you), just descriptive.

Neither of those are things that are needed for a javascript project. Fetch is a perfectly fine replacement for XmlHttpRequest and is a standard part of JS. RxJS is nice to have, but is not necessary.

I don't like the "batteries included" metaphor because it implies getting batteries is hard. Yes, Angular ships with routing but thanks to the node ecosystem adding react-router is a one-line command. The hard part is learning the routing API which you have to do either way.

"batteries included" means that the software itself has everything you need to get going. It's not that it's hard to get an individual component, but now you're relying on a third party component and potential issues with random configurations etc. It takes some research and effort to figure out that react-router is the best module among the options for routing.

> Dogs got closer to humans thousands of years ago. Their role was to protect. In the process, they became less intelligent than their ancestors: The wolf.

I don't think it's fair to say wolves are smarter than dogs. They specialize at different things, that's for sure.

In general I disagree with your post.

If you imagine a dog living in a stone age village versus a dog living in a town today, it doesn't seem to follow that the latter is going to be smarter because human technology is more advanced. A stone age dog might recognize a knock on the hut of a door and the modern dog might recognize an alarm going off. Seems like the same thing to me.

If you want smart dogs the answer is eugenics. Breed the smartest ones. This is tried and true and it's how breeds like border collies or german shepherds got so smart: they were bred for obedience, intelligence, and ability to perform their jobs. More pets and fewer working dogs (which is definitely the trend) is going to result in friendlier, cuter, but less intelligent dogs (compared to working breeds anyway).

Whether a show, book, movie, song, etc is "worth the time" is entirely subjective. There are million dollar franchises based on material that I don't consider worth my time. But you better believe that stuff is worth Netflix's time.

A perfect example of this is "Bright," a netflix movie that was critically panned. But people watched it. And now they're making "Bright 2". Are you really suggesting that Netflix should stop making movies that people want to see because critics (professional or otherwise) dislike them?

Two things people need to keep mind:

a). There's no objective way to judge this stuff.

b). The existence of movies like "Bright" does not prevent "high quality films" from being made.

Werner Herzog, Kelly Reichardt, Wong Kar Wai, Michael Haneke, Mia Hanson-Love, etc can keep making movies whether or not "Bright" keeps getting made over and over again. Both kinds of movies have their audience, and that's fine.

None of this is relevant though. You're comparing critical acclaim with the opinion of the masses, while what's being discussed is the reaction of the masses based on pre-viewing marketing (views) vs the reaction of the masses _after_ having seen the movie (reviews).

You conjured the objection to professional critics out of whole cloth to bolster the weak argument that the opinion of the masses who've watched the movie in question is not _precisely_ what they should be optimizing for.

Views that a user is dissatisfied with is obviously not good for the user. While just as directly profitable for Netflix, it's also something they should seek to minimize in favor of satisfied views (ie views that would lead to good reviews), as it can be a leading indicator for "I don't like much of what I watch on Netflix" --> "I'm going to watch less Netflix". The latter is obviously not something Netflix wants, both in terms of ability to acquire content and potential loss of subscriptions on the margins.

Netflix funnels people towards their own properties in the hope of raising the value of their new IP and network. Some are hits. Some are misses.

People watching Bright doesn't mean people, on the whole, liked Bright. Making a Bright 2 might just mean that making another was the easiest and cheapest way they had to honour Will Smith's contract, which may have primarily been inked to keep Will Smith out of putting together exclusive content for other streaming services he was in talks with.

The idea that the quality of the content itself is the end-all of the business decision to fund a series or movie is misguided.

Regardless, this misses the point. Consumers are right to push back against lowered content standards, and opaque business choices don't trump that. If Bright was actually good, it would have been fans that were clamouring for Bright 2. They weren't. The fact that good money is following bad doesn't mean the series is suddenly a success.

Recent Adam Sandler movies are a great example - he makes huge money off of small budgets and people watch them.

You’re on the right track, but there is an objective way to measure this stuff: views and retention. Netflix is a retention machine, not a quality content machine. According to their models, the content they are making keeps people around.

I don't think anyone in this comment chain is saying "we don't want women building stuff". Rather, some commenters are uncomfortable with the assumption that moving from 15 males to 11 males + 5 females is necessarily an improvement.

Maybe 5 of the original 15 males were gay. Does that change your perspective? I find this whole way of thinking unsettling. Doesn't it simply depend on who these people are as individuals?

I'd also be careful with the argument you've (implicitly) made. It doesn't seem to follow that the distribution of gender of programmers should match the distribution of gender of users. Besides, there must be software projects where 95%+ of users are male or female.

In general, I think most of us here agree that gender discrimination is bad, people being discouraged from making career choices due to gender is bad, and sexual harassment is bad. We may disagree on the frequency with which these things occur or how to fix them, but I think we're a lot closer than it appears from these contentious comments.

I said nothing about matching engineering's gender distribution to the user base's. Please don't put words in my mouth.

The thread-parent's comment made it clear that, in his situation, it made things better. Is it going to in every case? No. But using edge cases to argue against the median is even more specious than the argument you assert I was trying to sneak in.

> I said nothing about matching engineering's gender distribution to the user base's.

Then why say this?

> women are on the order of half of their users.

Because if you're ignoring (by simply not hearing) the perspective of a meaningful representation of that ~half of your user-base, you do not, and probably can not understand them.

You don't need to have parity between those ratios, but you might want to do better than the "token diversity hire" — assuming you do at all.

The thread-parent didn't make that clear. Rather, he defined success as replacing men with women and then said he'd done that, therefore, it was a success.

His post tells us nothing at all about what impact that had on the quality of the resulting software.

I really enjoyed the interview as well. Borges' manner of speaking is wonderful.

> Borges says he's not a thinker in the interview. But I dunno, even if his influences are clear, his ability to understand, and then convey these ideas in such a way as to make them self-evident is in some ways the greater act of philosophy than the raw conception of the ideas.

I disagree here. Borges is a storyteller: he's interested in provoking a response from his readers. He's not arguing for or against a philosophy, but rather he finds inspiration in the philosophical writings of people who are arguing one way or another (ie philosophers).

What he's doing is no more or less impressive than what they're doing, but the two things very different. I think he's absolutely right to point that out to the interviewers.

I agree. I've done the same thing in works of art - used art as a vehicle for communicating philosophical concepts. Which is fine, but there's no rigor there, no defense of the concept, no detailing the implications. There's no need, because I'm not creating or defending philosophical concepts, only sharing them.

I recently wrote a song called "Everything Is Made of Love", which lifted pretty heavily from Spinoza. The song works well, but it no way makes me Spinoza's peer. More recently, I've been reading some of the Frankfurt School thinkers, and their idea of art as a means of expressing revolutionary (in a political sense) ideas. I looked back on a play I wrote/produced last year in that context, and was very pleased to see how well I expressed the ideas of Marcuse et al, manipulating pop culture in order to criticize society on other levels, even though I wasn't really cognizant of the Frankfurt School at the time.

It's written for a general American audience so it makes sense to use those units.

> Zuckerberg and FBI director Comey do as well. Seems common sense these days. Which is really, really sad.

Both of these people are public figures. You can argue that it's common sense if you're a public figure. If not, "common sense" seems like an exaggeration.

I have had threats and stalker like situations in my life, and concerns for my children. It's common sense for many people.

Edit: This isn't about the government per se, but anyone can get hacked for any reason. Working on security issues for almost 20 years has made me paranoid.

In the 90s when I first setup a firewall on a dialup modem, I found I was getting attacked at random every minute of every day. (this is nothing compared to the servers I deal with today) Only the ignorant masses think their current device isn't compromised.

I assume all my devices are compromised, or able to be.

This is really sad that the response is so often: you must be just paranoid, when stalking is so common and surveillance software is cheap and so easy to use. Actually stalking/surveying a potential target is a very prolific tactic used by most modern criminals, it's crazy and stupid not to care about it.