Out in the real world, the thing that all programming languages are actually built on top of looks much more like a Turing machine than a collection of composed anonymous functions. But of course if you want to make your programs go really fast, you can’t treat them like Turing machines either. You need to acknowledge that all of this theory goes out the window in the face of how important optimizing around memory access is.

Which isn’t to say one perspective is right and one is wrong. These perspective all exist and have spread because they can all be useful. But acting like one of them is “reality” isn’t all that helpful.

Ps. Not that the parent actually said the formal perspective was reality. I just wanted to articulate this thought I had bouncing around in my head for a while.

Calling it a “gift” somehow manages to add an extra level of ick in my mind.

This pbs aeons video has a great explanation: https://youtu.be/scAp-fncp64?si=hjeWKGBI7riyjE1M

I did like the advice that if you peak under the abstraction a lot, it’s probably a bad one, tho even this I feel could use some nuance. I think if you need to change things in lots of places that’s a sign of a bad abstraction. If there is some tricky bit of complexity with changing requirements, you might find yourself “peeking under the hood” a lot. How could it be otherwise? But if you find yourself only debugging the one piece of code that handles the trickiness, and building up an isolated test for that bit of code, well, that sounds like you built a wonderful abstraction despite it being peaked at quite a bit.

The “has always” is in quotes because it’s a useful lie. You kind of need to really understand the double slit experiment to get quantum fields, superpositions, and how that related to entanglement. Took me years and years of occasional YouTube physics videos before it finally clicked. But if entanglement still doesn’t make sense, I’d start by trying to understand the double slit experiment. It sounds way less awesome than entanglement, but it isn’t really. Double slit is in fact awesome and just as weird. Entanglement is way less cool than it sounds, and no, not actually a way of cheating the speed of light limit for information transmission.

Getting in the habit of automating stuff in your editor and environment can also have a real snowballing effect. Yes, you end up “wasting” some time with yak shaves that don’t work out. But it doesn’t take long before the scope of what you can tackle in a day grows. It’s really profound how much friction you can remove, and how much friction there is in fresh environments.

Also, and ymmv, but a lot of repetitive tasks can be pretty soul crushing. Too much toil and you can come to dread your job. Automating something away almost always feels rewarding to me. Keeping yourself happy and motivated in your work should also count for something.

Glad they aren’t shy about their escape velocity roots. I swear, the ship in their logo looks just like a kestrel.

I’ve always been taught the two rooks are better and who can argue with 5 + 5 > 9? But also, I’ve also lost almost every game where I’ve had the rooks. I always thought that I just needed to be a better player to take advantage of it. Glad to know it wasn’t just me.

Just goes to show that these shortcuts, like the point system, are only heuristics, and pretty shallow ones at that. Knowing that being up a bishop gives you slightly more of an advantage than a knight is better than nothing. But learning in which sorts of positions a knight is actually better than a bishop will give you a much deeper understanding (and correspondingly more wins).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_simulator

[1] I’d, of course be happy to have a discussion about whether the refactor would make the code better or be worth the effort.

[1] Sedgwick’s algorithms class (useful and clear, but dry as hell), Martin Odersky’s scala course (solid, but probably a little dated by now), several others not worth mentioning.

It’s out there, so whether you finish it, someone forks it, or it just serves as inspiration for another project, you’ve contributed.