So, what is a system? A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.

When it comes to Slinkies, this idea is easy enough to understand. When it comes to individuals, companies, cities, or economies, it can be heretical. The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! An outside event may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result.

Think for a moment about the implications of that idea:

• Political leaders don’t cause recessions or economic booms. Ups and downs are inherent in the structure of the market economy.

• Competitors rarely cause a company to lose market share. They may be there to scoop up the advantage, but the losing company creates its losses at least in part through its own business policies.

• The oil-exporting nations are not solely responsible for oil- price rises. Their actions alone could not trigger global price rises and economic chaos if the oil consumption, pricing, and investment policies of the oil-importing nations had not built economies that are vulnerable to supply interruptions.

• The flu virus does not attack you; you set up the conditions for it to flourish within you.

• Drug addiction is not the failing of an individual and no one person, no matter how tough, no matter how loving, can cure a drug addict—not even the addict. It is only through understanding addiction as part of a larger set of influences and societal issues that one can begin to address it.

And an initial definition of a system on chapter 1 page 1:

A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.

edit oops, I misinterpreted what you meant by “some of those words”, didn’t take it literally... Will leave this up anyways I suppose, sorry!

[0] - https://racket-lang.org

[1] - http://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/index.html?q=sicp#%2...

Additionally, if SICP proves too slow going or difficult math wise [3] you can always use drracket for HtDP [4] and it’s corresponding misnamed edX course(s) [5] and later on, PLaI [6].

[3] - http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffk-h...

[4] - https://htdp.org/2018-01-06/Book/part_preface.html

[5] - https://www.edx.org/course/how-code-simple-data-ubcx-htc1x

[6] - http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2012/book/

It’s pretty

It’s fast

It’s not stuttery-stoppy

I can swipe back and forth between pages without waiting 4 seconds for everything to display, and then inevitably move around right before I fucking tap

It’s on the app store

I can use it instantly.

I can remove it instantly.

I don’t know what sandboxing is

I don’t care about privacy

There are convenient share buttons

I can use it on the single device I use regularly

I can screenshot it

I can unfortunately change the style by updating

It can use my battery when it’s closed? Wait wha-

ooh notification

...

I’m gonna go use facebook now like a normal person, later nerds

Jokes, full article: https://outline.com/CrmCSK

A great (albeit maybe not as great as OCaml ;) alternative for web usage would be F# with .NET Core, which has become a joy to work with over the past year or so on macos.

I don’t know what world you’re living in, but that is absolutely not the expected baseline for consumer facing software in 2018 (unfortunately).

Also interops with JS (and has superb bindings for React) so immediate results/learning are very easy to get.

[1] - https://reasonml.github.io

I've seen a worrying conflation between the two in online discussions about this topic for the past day or so. Negative takes towards this are met with at least one "without standards we would have a thousand different chargers, remember what it was like in 2000?"?

Am I off base here? This will come across as a concern troll but I'm genuinely curious about other views on this.

https://github.com/facebook/reason