brevitic

The other objection that’s been leveled against static type systems is that they constrain you too much in what you want to express. People say, “I want to express myself freely. I don’t want a static type system getting in the way.”

In my experience in Scala this has not been true, I think for two reasons. The first is that the type system in Scala is actually very flexible, so it typically lets you compose things in very flexible patterns, which a language like Java, which has a less expressive type system, would often make more difficult. The second is that with pattern matching, you can recover type information in a very flexible way without even noticing it.

Great business idea. But did you find a zealot to run it?

This, to me, is one of the great mind-blowing SQL queries. It means something like “find the dealer for which there exists no dealer selling the same product at a lesser price”. It is the “double negative” restatement of “most expensive”. In other words, “not the lesser expensive”. It’s this kind of radical restatement of problems that I hope to accomplish with my work. Of course this actually has nothing to do with Arel, although it’s expressible trivially in Arel. But it provides some insight into my thinking about why I write software and why I am concerned so much about how software is written.

In science, being completely and utterly stuck can be a good thing; it often means a revolution is coming.

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

I don’t think about records. I don’t put myself under pressure. I know what to do and I go and execute.

The interpreter was written by someone who shouldn’t have stayed up so late, Edwin Brady, and the language was designed by two people who shouldn’t have had so much to drink, Edwin Brady and Chris Morris. No doubt Andrew Stribblehill isn’t entirely blameless either.

Piracy is essentially the consumer’s wish to have everything on demand. It’s not like people want to necessarily have it for free