Things programmers believe. It's interesting how some knowledge fundamentally assumed by default. For whatever reasons, the notion is widespread. You're a programmer? Therefore you must know JS, SQL, Bash and Python. In practice, what I've found after decades working with various teams - most programmers have pretty inadequate knowledge of any of these things.
Cljs setup for this case probably would require a bit of scaffolding. While using https://github.com/squint-cljs/squint perhaps would be pretty straightforward. Albeit you're gonna lose the type-safety guarantees - Clojure is strongly typed, and Clojurescript sometimes emits safer code than Typescript does (TS removes all the type-related data from the compiled .js code, while Cljs keeps the runtime checks in place). Squint afaik is much closer to Javascript in that respect.
So, the trivia behind the name is interesting. It all starts with a project called "Mjolnir" (Thor's Hammer). The original idea was for a lightweight automation engine with pluggable architecture. Someone wished to have "batteries included" version, the author said they're not interested in that direction, so the fork was born. What's meant to be a hard-fork, so really not a fork, but rather a "spoon", hence the name.
I can't even work on Mac without it. It let's you do stuff like "alt+spc a b" (apps -> browser) or "alt+spc m j/k" (media -> vol up/down), or edit just about any text of any app in your editor (Emacs atm) - with all the tools you have there - spellchecking, thesaurus, translation, LLMs, etc.
You can plug it to your favorite WM (I'm currently using Yabai) and do tons of other interesting things. Because it's all written in Fennel, one can develop things in a tight feedback loop with a connected REPL - e.g., I can ask Claude to inspect things in the running Slack app or Firefox and make interesting automations - all without ever leaving my editor.
if only keyboards came with built in buttons for adjusting the volume… oh wait. Unless of course you are suffering on a touch bar mac, then I completely understand.
It's not about "having" or "not having" keys for specific actions, it's all about freedom and feeling of control. When you take and apply the idea of modality, you quickly realize that you are no longer constrained with the number of combinations you can have or the type of keyboard you're using. Everything can be controlled by (mostly) using home-row keys - h/j/k/l - without having to memorize weird combinations of modifiers and keys - "was it Ctrl+Alt+Cmd F, or just Ctrl+Cmd F?"
alt+cmd (was a typo, I meant to say alt+space), which is configurable - I myself prefer using cmd+space. That opens the "main" modal, from where you can configure "conditional branching" - e.g. "m" - for "media", or "a" - for "apps", so with "alt+space m j/k" you can do volume up/down, while pressing h/l could be "previous/next song". Then, "alt+spc a b" activates the browser, and "alt+spc a t" - could be bind to activate "terminal", etc.
It only looks like you have to press more keys to achieve anything, in practice - you quickly develop muscle memory. Then switching between the apps, moving windows around and resizing them, controlling playback, etc. - it all gains incredible productivity without affecting the focus point. You don't need to keep moving your hand for the mouse, you don't need to memorize and deal with myriad of modifier-driven key combinations - you control precisely what you need, without ever having to contort your fingers to hold modifiers, without ever thinking "what should I bind this action to, all memoizable keys are already taken, I suppose I'll just bind it to this impossible combo with a key that has no semantic meaning for the thing..." With Spacehammer you can create mnemonically-handy actions e.g., "o f" for "Open in Finder", while in another context that may work as "Open in Firefox".
Renaissance? Yup, checks out. I've been waiting for Web Components to become a thing for a loooong time. The (European) Renaissance took two-three centuries - from Petrarch and Giotto to Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. I suppose we have to wait for another hundred years or so, and in couple of generations we could finally say: "web components is a thing". My grandchildren will laugh at my React-based code, that will happen someday. Right now, there's shit to ship.
hon, this has been "happening" at the time when I grew out of my jquery pants, and still was happening when I was going to my backbone.js induced ptsd therapy sessions; Angular has shipped 20 major versions and React made six rewrites, Next.js switched to rust-based compiler and added the app router, making 15 major revisions - and "web components" still yet "happening". It feels when I finally have grandchildren, it is still be only "happening"... Where's the darn promise? Where the heck is the fame and riches? I've been hearing about this shit for almost two decades now. And have not witnessed it. I hope, it is truly around the corner, but I just fail to see it coming.
Apple has been always 'transactional' when it comes to OSS - they open source things only when it serves a strategic purpose. They open-sourced Swift only because they needed the community to build an ecosystem around their platform.
Yeah, well, sure they've done some work around LLVM/Clang, WebKit, CUPS, but it's really not proportional to the size and the influence they still have.
Compare them to Google, with - TensorFlow, k8s, Android (nominally), Golang, Chrome, and a long tail of other shit. Or Meta - PyTorch and the Llama model series. Or even Microsoft, which has dramatically reversed course from its "open source is a cancer" era (yeah, they were openly saying that, can you believe it?) to becoming one of the largest contributors on GitHub.
Apple I've heard even have harshest restrictions about it - some teams are just not permitted to contribute to OSS in any way. Obsessively secretive and for what price? No wonder that Apple's software products are just horrendously bad, if not all the time - well, too often. And on their own hardware too.
I wouldn't mind if Swift dies, I'm glad Objective-C is no longer relevant. In fact, I can't wait for Swift to die sooner.
Sort of an exception that proves the rule. Yes, it's great and was released for free. But at least partially that's not a strategic decision from Apple but just a requirement of the LGPLv2 license[1] under which they received it (as KHTML) originally.
And even then, it was Blink and not WebKit that ended up providing better value to the community.
[1] It does bear pointing out that lots of the new work is dual-licensed as 2-clause BSD also. Though no one is really trying to test a BSD-only WebKit derivative, as the resulting "Here's why this is not a derived work of the software's obvious ancestor" argument would be awfully dicey to try to defend. The Ship of Theseus is not a recognized legal principle, and clean rooms have historically been clean for a reason.
>> some teams are just not permitted to contribute to OSS in any way
My understanding is that by default you are not allowed to contribute to open-source even if its your own project. Exceptions are made for teams whose function is to work on those open-source project e.g. Swift/LLVM/etc...
I talked to an apple engineer at a bar years ago and he said they aren’t allowed to work on _anything_ including side projects without getting approval first. Seemed like a total wtf moment to me.
I have never had a non wtf moment talking to an apple software engineer at a bar.
I can recall one explaining to me in the mid 20 teens that the next iPhone would be literally impossible to jailbreak in any capacity with 100% confidence.
I could not understand how someone that capable(he was truly bright) could be that certain. That is pure 90s security arrogance. The only secure computer is one powered off in a vault, and even then I am not convinced.
Multiple exploits were eventually found anyway.
We never exchanged names. That’s the only way to interact with engineers like that and talk in real terms.
Every programming job I've ever had, I've been required at certain points to make open source contributions. Granted, that was always "we have an issue with this OSS library/software we use, your task this sprint is to get that fixed".
I won't say never, but it would take an exceedingly large comp plan for me to sign paperwork forbidding me from working on hobby projects. That's pretty orwellian. I'm not allowed to work on hobby projects on company time, but that seems fair, since I also can't spend work hours doing non-programming hobbies either.
No, as far as I know, at Apple, this is strict - you cannot contribute to OSS, period. Not from your own equipment nor your friend's, not even during a vacation. It may cost you your job. Of course, it's not universal for every team, but on teams I know a few people - that's what I heard. Some companies just don't give a single fuck of what you want or need, or where your ideals lie.
I suspect it's not just Apple, I have "lost" so many good GitHub friends - incredible artisans and contributors, they've gotten well-payed jobs and then suddenly... not a single green dot on the wall since. That's sad. I hope they're getting paid more than enough.
It's not even the fact that digital evidence is being used in courts these days, the disturbing thought is, all in all, that it's not that implausible for malicious actors to fake anyone's activity. How would you prove that you weren't at the crime scene when there's a digital footprint of your phone's GPS data, corroborated by (albeit not crystal clear) images and video?
Things programmers believe. It's interesting how some knowledge fundamentally assumed by default. For whatever reasons, the notion is widespread. You're a programmer? Therefore you must know JS, SQL, Bash and Python. In practice, what I've found after decades working with various teams - most programmers have pretty inadequate knowledge of any of these things.
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