Irenes (many)

You are all dreams and we are happy to know you, as you are nice dreams. We are an asexual autistic trans-feminine plural system with a label collection.

We compromise with legibility only so far as to say the following: Technology Director at Internet Safety Labs; ex-Google information privacy expert. 🏳️‍⚧️🍁

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Last Notes

2024-05-02 02:29:35

some things ARE coincidences. life is not a Hollywood movie, things can happen without there being story logic behind them.

2024-04-28 04:02:29

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honestly we had more punishment than reward as kids, but yeah, it can go either way
having been a teacher ourselves, a long time ago... notionally the kids who are ahead of the class can lift the whole class up, which would really be ideal, but it does take effort on the teacher's part to make sure it plays out that way. it's hard to blame teachers for any of this when funding is so short...

2024-04-28 03:58:29

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same

2024-04-26 23:02:18

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like, fuck white nationalism, fuck fascism, etc, give them no voice. but dissent is a thing to cherish.

2024-04-26 23:01:53

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you know, we need to chew on this. resharing for discussion and all that; it sounds good but we feel like it might be overly broad...

2024-04-25 21:41:00

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when we have more spoons - it's been an intense week, we're not able to formulate long explanations right at the moment
mostly we raise it in case you have something totally different in mind :)

2024-04-25 18:33:19

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how would you feel about features where the command prompt is a structure editor driven by type definitions and help text embedded into the executable? it could be made to look just like a plaintext editor for the stuff you've memorized, while actually knowing what it's doing so things can have proper names and stuff

2024-04-22 04:54:55

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*sigh* reflecting back on our past we don't think we ever seriously believed that there would be a single final programming language, but we sure did buy into the purity narrative anyway

2024-04-22 04:41:49

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oh for sure!
we share your frustration, that's why we wrote the thread. when we DO learn from history, we are NOT NECESSARILY condemned to repeat it :)

2024-04-22 04:38:01

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btw if you hadn't guessed, it was you who reminded us of our thread, thanks :)

2024-04-20 00:25:44

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it's a nice thought, just, who wants to type that every time?

2024-04-15 19:46:46

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no, yeah, the sheer supply chain in modern shoes...

2024-04-14 18:40:35

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have we told you our HyperCard story already?

2024-04-14 18:40:23

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it's been a consistent trend in that direction for a long time
fundamentally, polished, packaged experiences are easier to market than organic and confusing ones

2024-04-14 18:39:12

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as on-ramps to learning go, the experience when we were kids was TERRIBLE - which is why only the small fraction of people who vibed with it wound up going into the field
but the thing is, the on-ramps today are in many respects even worse.

2024-04-14 18:38:21

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not everyone wants to use a computer as a tool for creating computer stuff - even the people whose goal is creative in nature
so it's, like... entirely defensible that microcomputers no longer boot into a programming language REPL from ROM when turned on, and all that
but something is lost, and it takes active effort to construct it in the new context

2024-04-14 18:36:54

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it worries us, as well, which is why we have spent so much time lately thinking and talking about documentation and discoverability
(it's not as if anyone ever formally taught us, either. quite the opposite. however, we benefited from the excellent Unix reference material that has grown disused and harder to navigate, and that no longer covers everything people might care about.)

2024-04-14 18:33:39

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oh, certainly. that's why we really like the "blank page" way to put it. it isn't a value judgement, just a description.

2024-04-14 16:11:31

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the challenge that command-line interfaces have always had that is mostly solved with GUIs is that it's the tyranny of the blank page: you could do anything, so you are the one responsible for figuring out what you want
voice assistants are like command lines in this respect... but it's even worse because there's not any sort of manual or anything to learn about it from

2024-04-14 16:10:12

it's really quite a condemnation of voice-assistant UI that we have to memorize the names of all the lights and stuff
there's no way to even ask it "what things can you turn on" or anything like that. you have to get that information from somewhere outside the UI.

2024-04-11 23:33:33

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for anyone who hasn't figured out why it matters whether the platforms we congregate on are corporate ones
please remember that corporations tend to have zero-tolerance policies for criticism of the status quo

2024-04-11 19:23:44

oh
that's quite saddening :(
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5587

2023-08-21 20:25:54

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the "what if all code everywhere were written in this specific language" thing is just another way of saying "what if all code everywhere were written by my friends? or, at least, by people I can trust?"

2023-08-21 20:25:15

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and so uh....
we think it's important - at least, in our pursuit of personal growth, we found it to be - for programming language communities to examine the extent to which they might be focusing on technical mitigations as a way to avoid thinking about social problems
because long-term, if you're trying to build to last, you need to be able to solve BOTH technical and social problems

2023-08-21 20:23:03

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strong engineering ideals are good! they're really important!
strong community ideals are ALSO good

2023-08-21 20:22:43

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in our experience, most people who subscribe to idealistic views of how to improve software based on fancier technologies are, at least in part, going that route because it lets them avoid thinking about the community stuff

2023-08-21 20:21:47

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that's really important and also as far as we know it's our own coinage, so we'll say it again, louder
EVERY TECHNOLOGY IS ALSO A COMMUNITY

2023-08-21 20:21:11

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every technology is also a community

2023-08-21 20:20:39

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other problems come back because they're problems that just... only exist when humans gather in large groups. oops, your compiler's "benevolent dictator for life" turns out to be racist and that has created a huge bias in who is and isn't part of the community you didn't realize you were building? .... oh, and that lack of feedback from other groups has meant that a lot of the technology has reductive assumptions baked into it that it's too late to change? surely nobody could have predicted this

2023-08-21 20:18:15

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some of the problems come back because you had inadvertently assumed them away. what if we just don't worry about GUIs for now? what if nobody actually uses anybody else's libraries but instead writes all their own stuff from scratch? those assumptions don't hold up when the community grows

2023-08-21 20:16:57

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but like
the reality is that as soon as you get thousands of people using a language, and using it for production kinds of tasks, an awful lot of the problems you thought you left behind come back

2023-08-21 20:16:16

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people have believed this about a lot of the more idealistic languages
and those ideals are good! they're important! Rust lifetimes, for example, are a really great innovation that does meaningfully improve security (as do various other ideas in Rust but those aren't new, per se, other languages have tried it before)

2023-08-21 20:15:12

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so to get more concrete, this manifests when people say (as we did, when young!) - if we can just make sure that all software is written in Lisp, all these hard problems will go away.
it's an easy conclusion to arrive at. we looked around the Lisp ecosystem at the time (this was twenty years ago), there were a lot of people who cared about language-level features for this stuff, we didn't see a ton of legacy code problems

2023-08-21 20:14:04

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we want to say, we are huge believers in language-level security features. we see that as the only way that the strategic balance of hacking could ever tip towards the defender.
we are not writing this thread to say that people shouldn't seek better programming languages - we're writing it to dispel the illusion that there is ever a FINAL programming language

2023-08-21 20:12:58

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... or such as maintainability, or adaptability to different environments, or any of a ton of other things.
different programming languages make different promises in this regard and it's not that any of those promises are FALSE, it's that it doesn't solve everything

2023-08-21 20:11:49

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the trap is this: if everything is written in (some specific language / framework), it'll be good and we can stop worrying about all those confusing externalities such as security!

2023-08-21 20:11:14

there's this kind of thinking trap that programmers sometimes fall into, which we'll explain
honestly? in our youth we fell pretty hard into it and were huge Lisp fans. then later we were huge Haskell fans for similar reasons. it took a while to really process everything and come to terms with the impossibility of the desire