Development quotes of the week

This is going to be a pointless never ending debate. Git is flexible enough to let you do this in multiple ways, people are going to have their preferences. Just agree to disagree and move on.

I mean, come on. It took years for vim to win the editor wars. We don't have time to waste on another debate like that ;)

We've won on so many fronts, but we've also lost our way. It would have been unthinkable and scandalous even a decade ago for a presenter at a Linux conference to use Powerpoint on Windows, but you only have to count the Macbooks at a modern Linux conferences (even among the presenters!) to see how many in the community have lost the very passion for and principles around Open Source software that drove Linux's success. A vendor who dared to ship their Linux applications as binaries without source code used to get the wrath of the community but these days everyone's pockets are full of proprietary apps that we justify because they sit on top of a bit of Open Source software at the bottom of the stack. We used to rail against proprietary protocols and push for open standards but today while Linux dominates the cloud, everyone interacts with it through layers of closed and proprietary APIs.

Linux has become the vegetable we batter in proprietary software and deep fry--sure more people will eat it that way but it's not nearly as good for you. Over time we've all started eating our vegetables that way and it's made our community unhealthy. In our healthier days we fought and won against proprietary software giants like Microsoft, Sun, and Oracle, but in the meantime our appetites have changed and other giants have taken their place.

Writing Haskell is almost trivial in practice. You just start with the magic fifty line {-# LANGUAGE ... #-} incantation to fast-forward to 2017, then add 150 libraries that you’ve blessed by trial and error to your cabal file, and then just write down a single type signature whose inhabitant is Refl to your program. In fact if your program is longer than your import list you’re clearly doing Haskell all wrong.