One of the links (on Fusion) points out that GHC in particular has a lot of optimizations and rewrite rules for folds and many Prelude functions written as simple recursion also include optimized fold representations to suggest to various stages of GHC's optimizer.
As with so many such topics it seems an interesting spectrum between clarity and/or aesthetics and potential performance optimizations. Especially because it often seems like one of those "learning curve flips the clarity/aesthetics preferences" because at some point of familiarity folds can be faster to read than trying to reason through an explicitly written recursion.
Cryptographic protocols have been moving towards something of a compromise in flexibility. "Everything flexible" is a security risk, especially when "everything" includes "fallback to nothing secure". "No flexibility" is a security risk because you can't upgrade. The middle path is something like "version numbers" with hard breakpoints. "I only support v2 of this cryptographic protocol and will not fallback to v1."
Which is sort of the hash algorithm approach git is taking with incompatible versions and a version break.
I prefer the punny term "Soup opera". (It's full of supes.) It doesn't need to be gendered, women love many of the superhero movies and TV shows, too. There's also plenty of women that are fans of wrestling, as well.
Also, I say it with affection. I love my soup operas. Our culture has come to have negative connotations to the term "soap opera" and also to the term "wrestling", because of the association with lowest common denominator storytelling, but it is harder than it looks and mass appeal isn't something to scoff at.
>but it is harder than it looks and mass appeal isn't something to scoff at.
counterpoint : cinema designed to key in on adult nostalgia for the sake of safe and easy to acquire financial backing has ruined any quality output that Hollywood once had, and destroyed entirely the indie scene and the chance of acquiring money for any project that is outside the scope of the 600 Superman or Batman movies.
It is easier to make something decent with billions of dollars shoveled at you than it is to do so on a shoe-string budget, and if the environment has proven itself to be either mass-market appeal or decent quality cinema -- which has so far been shown to be the case -- then yeah, mass market appeal is a criteria worth criticism.
if "to scoff at" you mean "You must be impressed with the financial money making power of super hero movies." Then yeah, absolutely , I wish I could make that kind of money -- Super hero movies, however, have yet to impress me as cinema.
This happened before, by the way.
Hollywood kept shoveling money into super hero dreck until Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction made financiers realize that weirder indie shit could also make a buck, so we got things like boogie nights and grifters and the big lebowski getting funded after a long run of yearly Tim Burton hero movies.
As much as it pains me to say it, I hope some new neo tarentino pops up and makes a billion with something weird so we can get out of this lock-step
We are in a golden age of indie cinema right now. Low budget stuff is doing better than it has in most of the history of the media. Both Backrooms and Obsession made strong returns on very low budgets. The kinds of movies like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are doing rather well. Normal and Furious were both good as two recent examples. I could give a long list of really cool stuff I've seen just this year. Have you seen Buddy yet? So weird and rather great.
What Hollywood "lost" in recent decades wasn't indie/small budget/experimental/weird cinema, but "the middle budget", the romcoms and "family movies" and expensive ensemble comedy movies and oscar-bait dramas with lots of bankable stars doing silly or dramatic things on less than a blockbuster budget but more than an indie. But the indie world is filling in a lot of those gaps, and the direct to streaming "original" world is filling in more of those, and signs are some of those budgets are coming back (Heart of the Beast is an example of that sort of lost mid-budget film that just released to theaters).
You may not like superhero budgets, but they are not what killed "weirder indie shit". If anything they seem to be supporting it. Superheroes killed the mid-budget because they could play many of the mid-budget genres such as "family movie", comedy, and romance, and sometimes even "serious" drama.
(ETA: The Big Lebowski is a fun example because that was an indie budget film and the closest the Coens came to the mid-budget was The Hudsucker Proxy which needed it for all the period piece work. Budget size doesn't necessarily equal quality, though I remain a fan of The Hudsucker Proxy it did poorly in the box office and is often considered one of the worst films from the Coens. Ethan Coen directed Honey Don't and Drive-Away Dolls in recent years which were both excellent. The Coens haven't disappeared, though they've shifted gears a bit.)
Losing a trademark to a generic word can make marketing a lot harder, though. A company often needs a new brand then, because everyone else can use their old brand in the marketplace.
It would be fascinating for Alphabet to lose Google the brand to being a generic word. (To be fair, it is something that maybe should have happened already.) Kagi or DDG or someone could use a domain like google.new or google.tech to easily retrain old habits of some users. What is Alphabet going to do in that case? If Google is no longer a trademark but a generic word, do they focus on having the "Alphabet Brand Google" or "The Original Google, by Alphabet"? Either way, that's harder to market and maybe easier to build a fresh brand than fight the generic terminology.
Someone tried to make them lose the trademark. They kept it in court because people literally mean search on Google when they say Google. They don't mean search in general. And that's fair, I don't say Google as a verb now that I use Kagi for search.
I know people that have used it that way in a while. Myself included: I certainly say that. I haven't intentionally used Google the search engine in years, but I use it at the generic term for an internet search.
Yeah, the Smalltalk and Self family take this "everything is an object" approach, sometimes to extremes.
Another relatively well known language in this space for its use as an alternative to especially Lua in embedding situations is Io: https://iolanguage.org/
> And you need at least one real customer project to dogfood the platform initially. Because most platforms start out way too generic with pure architecture astronauts [0] at the helm.
The Rule of Three in Refactoring applies to this scale, too. If you are building a "platform" for one customer project, that's a one-off and quite possibly YAGNI. If you are building a "platform" for two customer projects, that's likely coincidence and still possibly doesn't show company-wide need. If you can build for at least three customer projects, that is a pattern, that provides real guidance on exactly how generic things need to be and better ideas how to abstract it.
Yeah, 1 is always better than 0, just that reminder that real "product focus" happens when you have multiple customers, not just doing one-offs for one or two customers.
I've had similar fights over the years, on both sides of the discussion.
"If our internal design system is barely half as well documented than Bootstrap then teams will still use Bootstrap. We should take a page from Bootstrap's documentation and include as much detail as we can, on everything."
"As a platform team, your product is this API my app calls. My beta environment should be pointing to your Production, never your beta environment. If that means you need to support better multi-tenant from the same 'app', then you need better multi-tenant. Your outage impacts my testing, which impacts my velocity, which impacts my deadlines. Your backwards incompatible updates need to be planned and scheduled and rolled out like a Production update, every time."
Product mentality is still very useful in platform development. If you can't sell your platform on its documentation and its stability and you must sell your platform on mandate and top-down control, you probably aren't doing as much to help your engineering culture as you think you are.
Yeah, you get what I was trying to get at. It also helps to think about open source (and even paid) alternatives as competition.
Although my main problem was that they were designing these very generic solutions (that were both super complex and very brittle) that can fit every scenario when my _actual_ scenario was very simple. I couldn't get my point across that I didn't want to buy-into their full platform because of risks and complexity on my side, but that I would be open to buy-into small solutions if I saw the need for them in our product.
In any case this company platform team had this mentality that the company should operate like google, trying to build these massive all-in-one solutions that everyone under the company should use. When in practice it would never work because of the sheer amount of people required on their side to pull that kind of initiative off (on top of other considerations like ROI, downtime-risk, etc).
I've been wondering this some myself, how many services I could drop and just return to a physical media budget.
One of the factors contributing to it not necessarily being cheaper to buy box sets: Target, Best Buy, and other big US chains have given up on physical media for movies. Last I heard Wal-Mart is on the fence about long term support for it. (At the moment the only chain I know that seems still in it for the long haul seems to be Barnes & Noble, but they could have one bad quarter and change their minds quickly. My local store the DVD and Blu-Ray section is somewhat obviously what used to the Music section and still has a bit left of that old focus.)
Even the manufacturing side seems to be disappearing. Sony has flirted with dropping physical media sales of movies. Warner Brothers and Paramount seem likelier to drop physical media sales if they are allowed to merge.
Netflix lets very few originals make it to physical media. Most of the exceptions I'm aware of are Sony projects. Sony Animation being one of Netflix's last exclusive deals from a studio that isn't themselves. A lot of Prime Originals don't make it to physical media. It seems a mixed bag for HBO Originals and Hulu/Disney+ Originals, presumably based on some internal formulas of popularity. A lot of Apple TV Originals seem to get delayed physical output, but that's largely been because Apple TV doesn't have its own studio, but that changed relatively recently with the purchase of Red Hour (Ben Stiller's studio, of Severance and The Dink fame).
It certainly feels like physical media is dying right now. Maybe more reason to switch to investing in it over streaming services, not that an individual's budget decisions in this vein will affect the company's bottom lines enough that they will notice.
"It certainly feels like physical media is dying right now. Maybe more reason to switch to investing in it over streaming services, not that an individual's budget decisions in this vein will affect the company's bottom lines enough that they will notice."
As with so many such topics it seems an interesting spectrum between clarity and/or aesthetics and potential performance optimizations. Especially because it often seems like one of those "learning curve flips the clarity/aesthetics preferences" because at some point of familiarity folds can be faster to read than trying to reason through an explicitly written recursion.
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