There's a few that don't work, but one works phenomenally well— CosmicToast/jurl is incredible (unless you're on Windows—the library as a whole does work on Windows but the build script doesn't have Windows instructions in it, you have to hack that yourself).
I use both. They're similar for simple use, but above a certain level of complexity Hy has a lot of Python-isms that bleed through. It really doesn't ever let you forget that underneath all the parentheses you're really writing Python. Janet feels like its own stand-alone language in that respect, where Hy is more like a syntax swap.
I have the impression that Hy's user base is larger, though (not that either one is huge).
There's a lot of little things that just added up, but I think the clearest example was the exchange regarding Andrew's pay from the foundation. I don't have an issue with him being paid for the work, or the amount he's taking, I would be surprised if anyone really did, but the way the interview asked the question came off as "Oh you're only making x? You should be paid so much more", and Andrew even commented in it saying "...it sounds like you're implying I deserve more...". I'm of course paraphrasing, but that's the impression I walked away with.
The questions also had a tendency to be somewhat shallow. There were a lot of places where it felt like the interviewer was queuing Andrew to respond to criticism or explain controversial choices made for the language or tool chain, but the interviewer doesn't really follow up on them are point out what the issues might be.
It might have been expectations I guess. I was hoping for an interesting technical interview and instead it seemed like a fluff piece.
Wrong mindset—a seven-day, 10-minute per day course is the lower limit on what procurement officers will consider acceptable and grant a contract to, which hopeful contractors submit to RFPs as a way of out-competing their competition by submitting the lowest bid.
No actual feedback from or impact studies involving actual users or outcomes are ever registered.
It's like mixing sawdust into the cookies to cut costs, except that when a depivered CBT is worth less than the electricity consumed powering the monitors it is (sometimes) displayed on, nobody with enough influence to matter ever gets upset enough about it to mean anything.
> What people realy want: as little OS as possible
I see what you're saying but that isn't how I think about it.
I'm happy to have as "much" OS as is useful and adds value, convenience, or user experience for me.
Example: I quite like Windows Hello. Facial recognition is the smoothest, most pleasant form of biometric authentication available on a laptop, and it's nice to be able to use it anywhere throughout the whole OS that a password would otherwise be required (e.g. before revealing hidden passwords in a password manager, when opening a command prompt with elevated permissions, or before applying passkeys to log into a website). It starts up fast, works in low light thanks to IR emitters, and recognizes me pretty close to 100% of the time. It's a great experience. My use of my laptop would only be reduced by having "less OS" in this case.
What I don't want is anything that compromises my utility, convenience, or user experience in order to make the OS useful and valuable for someone else.
Example: advertisements embedded in the Start menu are plenty valuable to M$, but compromise my user experience in the process.
Example 2: Inserting Copilot into Paint and Notepad seem valuable for pumping M$'s stock price, but both annoy me by cramming unwanted AI into my basic utility programs where I have no interest in it.
From my point of view, the ideal here is something like pre-OS-X Mac OS, where the OS itself was barely even an OS and more just a substrate just complete enough to run the desktop and third party applications on.
The majority of bells and whistles (which Windows Hello falls under) were not baked into the OS, but instead implemented as system extensions that the user could disable and prevent from loading into memory at will.
This meant that even with the last release of Classic Mac OS (9.2.x), if you disabled all extensions you got a desktop reminiscent of the 1985 System 1 except with color and modern resolution support.
I think it should be more of a goal for desktop OSes to try to emulate this. If a Windows user wants a quiet no-frills Win2000 like experience except with choice exceptions like Hello, they should be able to have that without having to resort to messy hacks that impact stability and undo themselves if you update.
On Windows 11, when you reconnect to a monitor or set of monitors that you've connected to before, it will automatically return your open windows to the layout across those monitors that you had when you last disconnected (assuming those windows are still open).
This is extremely nice and saves me time on a literally (not figuratively) daily basis, to the point that I generally forget that it hasn't always worked that way.
I wish this worked! I have to go to the office on my hybrid schedule. When I switch between home and office, Windows is "smart" enough to keep the windows on the correct window in the task bar while generally placing the windows on the opposite window where I want it (and literally opposite where it is on the task bar!) It's so annoying and I dread the days I'm switching between office and home for this reason, as I have to drag each window to the opposing window before things are back to how I want them. It would be less bad the old way, where they were just stupidly thrown on the "primary" monitor and I only had to drag half of them over.
"Well, they turned the entire OS into a tracking, sales and ad/propaganda delivery service, but they managed to make a single feature non-dumb, so guess we're even."
(propaganda - Windows 11 default widgets are "offering" a lot of russian-biased media, because Microsoft is too dumb to recognize that and they take any news source - and russian connected outlets are happy to use this delivery vector that most gullible people leave turned on)
I don't think that any of the news-oriented default Windows application since W8 had an option to provide a custom RSS channel. It was always a default pool of sources they were bringing.
For my dual monitors, they have a conflict with this feature where they do not detect signal and then switch inputs and eventually power down. Then windows sees a different config and switches again causing an endless spiral. I have to turn both monitors on to the correct input while plugging in the laptop to the dock. I wish there was a way to save specific monitor setups and manually toggle them.
Yet when I switch between home and work I have to fully restart my laptop about half the time in order for it to even detect the monitors. I also find this feature has an issue with certain programs (Obsidian in particular) where it opens the window almost off screen.
Even aside from the malevolence, Windows is rotten from the thirty-year old metaphor that it started with: windows themselves. The job of positioning and resizing applications is a confusing mix of responsibility between the user and the system.
Once you've switched to tiled window managers, examples like these sound like Stockholm Syndrome.
I hate tiling window managers. After I start a program, I move and resize its window to the perfect position, and it stays there for weeks. I don't ever want it to be moved or resized automatically, which is what tiling window managers do by default.
I will offer that you can resize/move/float in most tiling managers. Remembering your modifications is usually possible too. It's the default behavior that separates the experience.
I can't see a practical world where the OS doesn't need to take control of window positioning in certain situations. As a core example, there is full screen. Minimize is another, but that doesn't have a clean analogue in the tiled universe.
There's a natural strong reaction folks have to window managers, because it forces you to mentally remap at such a foundational level.
I prefer tiled managers because the user offloads most responsibility. Open something and by default it uses as much space as is available. If you have a special need, you can float or resize, but the vast majority of cases it makes the right call.
At heart, it's offloading cognitive load. They're more predictable and require less faffing around.
Without having run the whole company twice in parallel, once using Haskell and again in some other language, and without having measured both runs exactly the same way, I don't think metrics like you're interested in could possibly have sufficient context to mean anything reliable.
Obviously Mercury is successful, and obviously Haskell is how they did it. So it's essential to their success. Would it be instrumental to anyone else's anywhere else doing anything else? Can't possibly know, I don't think.
You can, but then "The cake is a lie.", because linecount and bug rate, when concieved as proxies for productivity[1] or quality rarely match up with reality in a way that allows you to make predictions or reason about past outcomes.
You can reason about frequency of particular types bugs, such as null pointers or overflow, or whether those bugs can occur at all.
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