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by mumblemumble
977 days ago
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The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said "Master, I have heard that objects are a very good thing - is this true?" Qc Na looked pityingly at his student and replied, "Foolish pupil - objects are merely a poor man's closures." Chastised, Anton took his leave from his master and returned to his cell, intent on studying closures. He carefully read the entire "Lambda: The Ultimate..." series of papers and its cousins, and implemented a small Scheme interpreter with a closure-based object system. He learned much, and looked forward to informing his master of his progress. On his next walk with Qc Na, Anton attempted to impress his master by saying "Master, I have diligently studied the matter, and now understand that objects are truly a poor man's closures." Qc Na responded by hitting Anton with his stick, saying "When will you learn? Closures are a poor man's object." At that moment, Anton became enlightened. https://wiki.c2.com/?ClosuresAndObjectsAreEquivalent |
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But I was there. I was there in 2008. I was there at the first Expo show in IRC. I'm losing my edge to the kids whose fingertips I hear when they get on the decks. I'm losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every JS design committee from 2008 to 2018.
I'm losing my edge. To all the kids in typescript and wasm. I'm losing my edge to the bootcamp Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered nineties.
I was there. But I was there. I can hear the fingers every night on the decks. I was there in 2008 at the first search engine collapse. I was working on MVC frameworks with much patience. I was there when Ruby started up test-driven development. I told them, "Don't do it that way. You'll never make a dime."
I was there. I was the first guy playing dynamic dispatch to the php kids. I played it at phpclasses. Everybody thought I was crazy. We all know. I was there.
I've never been wrong. I used to work in the dev store. I had everything before anyone. I was there in the C# linq booth with Anders. I was there in Glasgow during the FP clashes. I woke up typing on the beach in frontpage in 1998.
But I'm losing my edge to t-shit clad people with proprietary ideas and more investment. And they're actually really, really nice.
I'm losing my edge. I heard you have a compilation of every good quine ever written by anybody. Every great patch by Linus Torvalds. All the flamewar hits. All the sourceforge tracks. I heard you have a floppy of every 90s asm rpg on German import. I heard that you have a white label of every seminal Gang-of-Four techno hit - 1995, '96, '97. I heard that you have a CD compilation of every good '60s fortran book and another box set from the '70s.
I hear you're learning vim and lifetimes and are throwing your c compiler out the window because you want to make something safe. You want to make a web app.
I hear that you and your team have deleted your .NET repos and installed npm packages. I hear that you and your band have deleted your npm packages and installed F#.
I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know. But have you seen my records? Wirth, Peyton-Jones, Dijkstra, Fortran, C, C++, D, R, Haskell, PHP, Python, Scala, Java, C, ... malloc, gcc, #include, while(*s++), ...
You don't know what you really want