It’s kind of like in treesitter style editing, where you can “swap these two arguments,” “select this function,” “wrap this in a try block” with a single keyboard command… but way more standardized and granular. Plus with the ability to execute anything you highlight

All that and then you realize you can store code as data (since it’s just a data structure) and run data as code.

I think most programmers don’t realize how arbitrary the difference is between code and data until they get used to using LISP.

The concepts would be easier to grok up front if they just used normal function calls instead of "And now for this special syntax that only exists for this particular feature" which just adds more things to remember, instead of just the concepts themselves.

So often people coming from one linguistic syntactical style express themselves in that style which makes their code in the new language less understandable or maintainable.

For me, certainly. But it's not a matter of adding parens, it's more removing extra syntax.

My point was, replacing n syntactic constructs by n functions or macros doesn’t reduce the cognitive load of having to know how each construct works. To the contrary, one can argue that everything having the same syntactic form makes it more difficult to distinguish different classes of features.

It was just an example, most languages have quirks like this. I don’t know about Java, but in Rust you have the turbofish operator, whose necessity stems from using the less-than sign as both an operator and a delimiter.

> My point was, replacing n syntactic constructs by n functions or macros doesn’t reduce the cognitive load of having to know each of them.

The difference is that if you don’t know a function/macro, you can just read its documentation. If you don’t know a syntactic construct, where do you look?

Another advantage is that if you want to create new functionality similar to existing language features, it won’t stick out like a sore thumb. For example, you could create an until loop:

  (until (window-should-close)
    (draw-screen))
  # is equivalent to
  (while (not (window-should-close))
    (draw-screen))

  until!(window_should_close(),
    draw_screen());
  // is equivalent to
  while window_should_close() {
    draw_screen();
  }

I just made a library with [query syntax](https://codeberg.org/veqq/declarative-dsls) over various data structures a la sql:

    (import declarative-dsls/dataframes :as df)
    (def people (df/dataframe :name :age :job))
    (df/dataframe? people)

    (df/insert! {:name "Bob" :age 30 :job "Developer"} :into people)
    (df/insert! {:name "Alice" :age 27 :job "Sales"} :into people)
    (df/update! :set {:job "Engineer"}
             :where |(= ($ :job) "Developer")
             :from people)
    
    (df/save-csv people "people.csv" :sep "\\t")
    (def people2 (df/load-csv "people.csv" :sep "\\t"))
    
    (-> people2
       df/dataframe->rows
       df/rows->dataframe
       df/print-as-table)

    job       age  name
    --------  ---  -----
    Engineer  30   Bob
    Sales     27   Alice

    (df/v + [1 2 3] 1 [1 2 3] 1) # returns: [4 6 8]
    (df/v + 1 {:column [1 2 3] :key [1 2 3]}) # returns: {:column @[2 3 4] :key @[2 3 4]}

    (df/v * [1 2 3] [[1 1 1]
                     [1 2 2]
                     [1 2 3]]) # returns: @[@[1 1 1] @[2 4 4] @[3 6 9]]

    (jnj/j "3 4 $ i. 10") # returns: ((0 1 2 3) (4 5 6 7) (8 9 0 1))
    (jnj/j "$" [3 4] (range 10)) # returns: ((0 1 2 3) (4 5 6 7) (8 9 0 1))

From my response, bigger than the article: https://lobste.rs/s/y0euno/why_janet_2023#c_lspe6n

Because industry lied to you, promising "simplicity and riches". The industry didn't just overcomplicate programming. It institutionalized the complication. Why? Because complexity is a moat.

Complex frameworks need certified experts. Certified experts charge more. Companies built around expertise need the complexity to persist. So the complexity gets marketed as sophistication.

They've promised: "Java/C# will get you hired anywhere", but you're hired to write xml (these days yaml). "OOP models the real world", they said. The real world doesn't have abstract factory visitors. "Design patterns make you senior", but you only learned workarounds for language deficiencies. "Learn the framework, get the job". Framework dies, you start over. "Specialization is valuable". you're now hostage to one ecosystem.

A programmer who understands fundamentals is dangerous to this system. The fundamentals:

- a function transforms input to output.

- composition builds complexity from simplicity.

- types describe what's possible.

- effects should be explicit.

And then you realize that Lisp is the skeleton key. All that above is Lisp, or came from Lisp. Every language is either: Lisp with different syntax, or C with different syntax, or arguing between the two.

If you learn Lisp, you don't learn a language. You learn what languages are. You're no longer a consumer of a programming language or two, or a few. You are native speaker in all of them.

Of course easier to explain the "strategy pattern" to a florist, instead of saying "imagine a function that takes a function". Who the hell understands functions? Such a mind-bending concept, literally nobody really knows how they work. Einstein famously complained about it. Too bad he didn't know OOP - would've been so much easier. I couldn't grok general and special relativity for so long, thank god I've found Java - it made it so much easier. I don't know what Persian mathematicians been smoking in 12th century to come up with this utterly fucked up idea of a function. And fuck Leibniz as well.

At that point the main problem for a service is to figure out when they are dealing with someone who could solve the problem through the website, and when they are dealing with someone whose problem is too complicated to be solved that way. Although it also seems like many people don't want to spend the money on doing that analysis and serving their customers, as you have pointed out.

Maybe there is a new frontier where humans can start to become more productive again. Some say that is AI, but that remains to be seen. For now, we've hit our known limit. There is no longer anything outside of human control, like waiting for a crop to grow, that limits our human productivity. The only limiting us is ourselves, and it may be a fundamental limit.

I don't know what that means. When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow? The only thing that changed for the production side was requiring less humans as machines could do the work of many laborers.

> When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow?

part of modern agricultural automation includes year round seasons, which means essentially you are no longer waiting for crops to grow in the way that was first discussed.

This of course is what allows us to have fresh tomatoes year round, and many other fruits and vegetables. Obviously these are not perfect, tomatoes as the example already given, quality of the automated output is significantly less in comparison to the natural - nonetheless we do not wait for many crops to grow in the same way that people did before the 1990s (when computerized climate management, hydroponics and advanced greenhouse tech took off, as some later advances on the already mentioned PLC, and enabled automation in that field of human endeavor)

When we started producing more than basic things like food that are heavily dependent on the environment. In the knowledge-based economy, the only thing that meaningfully stops you from producing continually is you collapsing from exhaustion. However, even if you never got tired, you can still only produce so much per second, if you will, which caps your total productivity. That is the human limit; probably a fundamental one.

Only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population have to wait on crops growing now in order to offer that line of productivity. And of them, like myself, we can now do other productive things while we're waiting. I, for one, work in the tech industry when I'm not farming. Today, 96% of farmers in the USA are productive off of the farm in at least some capacity. Whereas, historically, farmers were busy trying to survive when they weren't being productive on the farm. Many a day were spent in the bush chopping wood so that they didn't freeze in the winter, for example. Interestingly, idle farmers staring to produce salable things during that cold winter downtime is when we first started seeing early signs of human productivity gains over the stagnant agricultural baseline.

Productivity can keep increasing beyond the human limit, but we have achieved that by introducing more and more non-human workers. Humans are already at the very top of their game, at least as we know it. 17th century farmers probably thought they were also as productive as humanly possible, so who knows what the future holds, but for now we have no idea how to make humans even more productive than they already are. We don't have any more obvious "winter downtimes" to expand into. Hence why the measure of human productivity is no longer increasing.

This was recognized a long time ago. It was the basis of the "go to college to make more money" script you may be familiar with if you are old enough to remember. It was well understood way back then that relying on human productivity gains had reached a dead end. The thinking was that colleges would enable people to move away from labor and into leveraging automation, where productivity is effectively unbounded, with college research labs having played and still playing a pivotal role in that, but somehow along the way that got twisted into "go to college to get a job", so here we are... Now people spend god knows how much money to go to college to get the same job, at the same pay, that they would have gotten anyway. Which is pretty hilarious, but also sad.

>his liberal father

Might be a stretch to imply that the Wilhelm II was a mediocre illiberal. HIM was (for a time) interested in protecting workers' rights. However great he was, Bismarck couldn't overpower a "mediocre" populist

https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/forging-an-empire-bismarcki...

Assume every side has great individuals in positions of power (great being here evidently in relation to ability), greatness is thus evenly balanced and not so important to the final outcome.

Some generations ago females in this society were regularly without jobs but were "homemakers", in that time if one were not a homemaker and a female how was the person's feeling of well-being?

Reports conflict about that, but in that time of course females were often kept from employment by being homemakers and thus relegated to secondary status.

Perhaps the studies you look for would be related to feelings of social well-being among hunter-gatherer societies, however maybe those studies are not actually needed? Because probably now that the possibility has come up you will realize hunter-gather societies do not have traditional jobs or employment and that people were evidently able to feel happy in those societies.

Now you may respond with examples of how maintaining hunter-gatherer societies would mean death of much of population etc. because the best kind of goalpost moving is the kind that is true. Nonetheless the point should be clear that people can be happy without typical modern jobs and employment.

Whether or not a modern lifestyle and world can be constructed that does not need jobs and still keep people happy is a different question. And there we are back with something for which there are no relevant studies.

That's the one we live in though, so I guess that seems fair

This was in reply to a statement that argued one did not absolutely need jobs to be happy and that this seeming need in our society was in fact an argument for a problem in the society.

In such a case it seems the use of the studies set in the society is less fair than considering if there may be easily considered conditions in other societies that show the need for a job is not a universal need but actually only a local, currently defined need in our society.

My comment merely showed that if one were to try to think of any examples showing happiness requires employment some should easily spring to mind and counter studies were not needed to prove it was not a universal requirement.

Thus it can change industry in a good way or a bad way, because the black swan is unprecedented and unpredicted, its consequences and their nature is unsettled.

The only thing that is unsettled here still is how many more people will lose their jobs and how much cumulative loss prisoner's dilemma will generate.

I saw random people on Internet suggesting to piggyback this disaster and dip into the crazy money that it is "generating", but in a zero-sum game somebody has to lose.

All that said however, probably the greatest black swan in terms of unpredictability in human history was that there were two freaking big continents in between Europe and Asia when you try to circumnavigate the globe.

on edit: probably should be "the greater the unpredictability and the more things the unpredictable event connects to the greater the negativeness seems to be", because obviously the platypus while completely unexpected affected basically nothing at all.

Technically black swan might not be negative, but for all practical reasons, "black swan event" is what people call impactful unpredictable negative events and they expect those events to be negative. In other words, it is a synonym for "a disaster" of sorts, only "economical".

This is how an economist would call a disaster.

https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-a-rare-bird-how-eur...

An observation consistent with past observations would be a "white swan".

But maybe that’s not the intended meaning either? It’s an interesting expression.