I’d like full stack developers to try something. Next time you have an itch for a personal project, see if you can make it with no frontend JavaScript. Just some CSS and HTML forms. All templating handled on the backend. Just try it and see how far you get. Don’t worry if it looks like a GeoCities page.

Then try finding places where JavaScript would make it more responsive or better UX in some way. Does the back button still work? Is it actually faster? Does it provide any benefit at all?

Maybe it does, but just try.

What’s the difference between a “scripting” language and a “real” one?

This is (theoretically) a programmer forum. I use the programmer definition. By that definition, not having an algorithm is nonsense.

I also hate the way “algorithm” has taken over the public consciousness. You can find people unironically saying “I don’t want any algorithm in my social media feed”, which is a nonsensical statement.

Networking has little to do with it.

Microarchitecture needs to be broken up into components. Those components need to send messages to each other. Components sending messages to each other is arguably the core of what object oriented design was trying to do all along. If your devs were bad at classifying components in an object oriented design, then they’ll probably be bad at it in a microarchitecture, too. Worse, the actual system is now likely spread amongst many different version control repositories, and teams stake out ownership of their repositories. Now you get more blockers spread amongst several teams.

Where the network layer comes into play is to replace something that used to be running in a single CPU core, or sometimes different cores on the same motherboard. Unless you can exploit parallelization for your use case, the kind where you have more threads than the number of CPU threads a single motherboard can handle (which can be several hundred on current systems), this will always be slower.

Here’s Orwell in “Homage to Catalonia”:

“There were perhaps a thousand men at the barracks, and a score or so of women, apart from the militiamen’s wives who did the cooking. There were still women serving in the militias, though not very many. In the early battles they had fought side by side with the men as a matter of course. It is a thing that seems natural in time of revolution. Ideas were changing ready, however. The militiamen had to be kept out of the riding-school while the women were drilling there because they laughed at the women and put them off. A few months earlier no one would have seen anything comic in a woman handling a gun.”

This was in an overwhelmingly leftist camp. Orwell sees glimpses of an anarchist collective based on mutual aid popping up. Yet, sexisim clearly persisted after a period where it had been pushed aside.

These issues don’t go away just because people become class conscious.

By the end of the post chain, I could no longer tell if this was a joke or not.

I’m a little surprised the police didn’t already know about that method. Seems like they’d encounter enough CCTV footage that’d it’d be standard training.

I once again overestimate the training levels of the police.