Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49145729

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

But what can you do? At this point, keeping federated alternatives, protocol-first designs, and multiple interworking implementations is more important than purity; it might well be the last successful initiative of its kind.

No mention of long-term stake of EU in ActivityPub platforms either, as if W would be our savior.

The case mentioned where the CSS min() function is rejected is another place where bulk import of the extremely complex CSS spec is just not helpful. Ebook readers aren't evergreen browsers after all.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41326179

3.14 broke GC

I guess these kinds of priorities are exactly why Python is not my favorite programming language and why you have tens of Python versions installed on any machine. Not to talk about the Python 2 -> 3 drama that was also about fetishising syntax and pureness over pragmatism, installed base, and respect for existing code.

My experience with Python is a really bad one for professional work: it's chaotic and slow, and has by far the worst versioning and packaging story of any mainstream language, yet its proponents keep praising it in denial.

I guess Python is an ok target for agentic coding, but my god do look Claude's commit messages pretentious, with code bases quickly heading into absolute unmaintainability. At least it had found gross JS injection vectors in a Django app that really shouldn't have made it through a code review, architecture level as they were, but oh well. A mature Django app is also not a nice dev experience IMO, with tons of implicit behavior all over the place encoded in a mix of magic filenames, database naming conventions, and URL routing quickly descending into regexp hacks.

I guess what may also have contributed is that there are a number of concurrent logics implemented in Prolog for prototyping Erlang's scheduler such as Concurrent Transaction Logic ([1]).

[1]: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bonner/ctr/Home.html

Prolog also works extremely well as a target language for code generation by LLMs for these domains due to it being "higher up in the food chain" compared to procedural languages so to speak, and because Prolog was originally envisioned for classic NLP and hence has a corpus of one-to-one mappings from natural language to logic (as in the example in [3]). So well in fact that even with last-gen models textual descriptions for suitable problems become the bottleneck and you can in many cases just go straight to Prolog code instead ([2]).

[1]: https://quantumprolog.sgml.net

[2]: https://quantumprolog.sgml.net/llm-demo/part1.html

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48080201

Simple general-purpose opponents can be coded using just recursive backtracking search, while more advanced ones (supporting moves that need to destructively change state) can still be conveniently modelled by reifying facts and thereby enable backtracking over assert/retract-like Prolog DB modifications, as used in discrete combinatorial planners [1].

[1]: https://quantumprolog.sgml.net/container-planning-demo/part1...

    k >> plus 0 _ P         |---->  k << P
    k >> plus (s N) _ (s P) |---->  k; _ >> plus N _ P
    k; _ << P               |---->  k << P

    % "Sum is the sum of S1 and S2"
    plus(S1, S2, Sum) :- Sum is S1 + S2.

    % "What is the sum of 3 and 5?"
    ?- plus(3, 5, S). 
    % Answer: S = 8

    % "Is 10 the sum of 3 and 5"
    ?- plus(3, 5, 10).
    % Answer: fail 

    % "What's the difference between 3 and 10?"
    ?- plus(3, X, 10).
    % throws an error 

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48060495

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47744132

Points: 103

# Comments: 51

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/ms536495...