In a way I found it useful because it showed me right away that they aren't really a serious business and I was able to cancel our account before the free trial was over.

(It also turns out that their base product is more or less a standard VoIP phone that is fairly easy to set up yourself for far cheaper...but I digress)

I got the drill back a little while later entirely repaired, the bent drill bit included in the return package, and I was charged absolutely nothing for any of it because I guess I was still under warranty and I didn't realize it. It was a fantastic customer service interaction and absolutely increased my loyalty to the company.

...and that's leaving aside the quality of their tools. In my experience they are incredibly rugged--among other things, for a week-long landscaping project I used that same drill with a gigantic bit to dig holes in frozen dirt, and it powered through it without issues. Great tools and a solid company.

(And in the context of the previous paper, this one motivates Applicative well I think: https://www.staff.city.ac.uk/~ross/papers/Applicative.pdf)

That said, I've never really understood the enthusiasm the industry has for introducing Monads outside of Haskell. As I understand it, at the time Philip Wadler wrote his paper, Haskell was pretty painful to use due to its adherence to purity. Monads were presented as a way to maintain purity while providing a principled way to support all kinds of effectful computations. But without some of the features Haskell provides (I'm thinking of typeclasses and HKTs in particular), and given that almost any language you'll be introduced to outside of Haskell already has ways to do e.g. IO or whatnot, it almost always ends up feeling like bolting something on with not a lot of benefit.

Don't get me wrong, I think there's value in stuff like https://github.com/fantasyland/fantasy-land --I find organizing how I think about computations around these algebraic concepts helps me a lot, personally. But that's distinct from introducing these concepts into day-to-day work in a non-Haskell language, especially on a team, which is often more trouble than it's worth unless everyone has already bought into it and is willing to deal with the meaningful friction introducing this stuff produces.

I assume the overabundance of Monad tutorials and libraries has to do with the cachet of knowing this relatively obscure, intellectual thing and being able to explain it to your peers, or to be more charitable, perhaps it's a byproduct of getting excited about learning this new, distinct way to approach computation and wanting to share it with everyone. But the end result is that now we have tons of ridiculous tutorials and useless Monad libraries in tons of languages.

"Neil Armstrong on the surface of the fucking moon."

> There are plenty of rooftops and car parks that can be covered in solar to excellent benefit.

It's worth calling this approach out too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics

In many ways atonality was the inevitable direction that late 19th century Romanticism was moving in, with increasingly ambiguous tonality expressed by composers like Wagner and Mahler. In the early 20th century there was an explosion of new approaches and techniques which started from this basis and pushed tonal approaches to the breaking point and beyond. Composers including Ives, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and others were all trying new things within the realm of atonality and while we tend to look back and map history into narrow movements and philosophies to suit our current thinking, I don't think there was necessarily such a "serialism period" so much as there was the Second Viennese school along with a bunch of other composers trying things out at the same time. And even within the Second Viennese school the approaches were distinct; Berg is known for being a bit more "loose" and romantic in his usage of 12-tone technique vs. the rigid formalist Webern.

Leaving aside the dubious assertions of what is or is not listenable, the reality is that art music in the 20th century became more and more fragmented as the entire music scene changed around the world. Minimalism was just one thing that happened after serialism. Even if we exclusively focus on music labeled "European Art Music" the 20th century was a period of incredible experimentation and exploration with many different approaches to tonality (and atonality) introduced.

I can only imagine the same thing happens in newsrooms with text, especially when it is visibly very similar, like "2002" and "2022."

I mean the difference is that Erlang and Elixir have high-quality pattern matching baked in, not to mention stuff like dialyzer and set-theoretic types.

Clojure has multi-methods I guess, and stuff like defrecord that no one uses...and the turd that is spec. In my experience every Clojure codebase turns into map soup at some point without a tremendous amount of manual labor.

...so it's not as black and white as you're saying, I guess is my point. And for example, I'd always take Haskell over Erlang or Elixir even though Haskell's records are widely and justifiably derided, because the language taken as a whole is that much nicer to use, and stuff like lens smooths some of the rough edges over pretty well.

RIP Rob! Will be having a vindaloo, lager, and maybe some fish (Fish! Fish! Fish!) later in your honor

(EDIT: 100% talking about the UK version here, had no idea or forgot there _was_ an American version)

A classic that everyone should read: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad...

I attended a talk of his at Papers We Love at Strange Loop in 2018, I didn't really read the description and I was vaguely expecting something Haskell related, and instead got this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=766obijdpuU

I could barely understand it, but was impressed by what I could grasp. Dan Piponi's range is amazing, dude is brilliant

I think you meant "blamed Americans for social media" but at this point they both kinda fit

(EDIT: Also fwiw I often use a spoon or whatever to scoop things into the bowl, vs. pouring, which means I have more control but can still offload the measuring part to the scale...)

Whatever gets the delicious baked goods in your mouth I guess

Yeah given that this blog is about "new ideas in economics and the social sciences" I was already feeling a bit skeptical, but when I got to this point and saw no mention of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster (I did not bother looking at the 4-year-old video linked to in that paragraph), I had to put this piece down. I subscribe to a number of astronomy youtubers and I have not heard anyone with data to back them up making this assertion.

As a counterpoint example, here's Dr. Becky (https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/our-people/smethurst) from ~4 months ago obviously not coming from the perspective that dark matter is being ruled out, and right out of the gate she refers back to another piece talking about why we are (so far) convinced dark matter is legitimate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyyZzzgoLNE

So, yeah, as jfengel says...this seems like more MOND again from a dilettante. Skip it