Hear hear. Elixir is a dream for this kind of stuff. But it requires very different decisions "all the way down" to make it work outside of BEAM. And BEAM itself feels heavy to most systems devs.
(IMO it's not for many use cases, and to the extent it is I'm happy to see things like AtomVM start to address it.)
That plus the new React diff viewer in beta. The old one seemed to be a simpler Web Component inside a Rails turbo frame.
I've tested the beta one and like most SPAs it doesn't scale well to large amounts of data (large numbers of files / line counts). You can feel the DOM slowing down even on a high end macbook. It even blanked out the page a couple times, another common issue when browsers are overloaded. So I switched back to the old one.
>The point is that they are prioritizing this over new features.
Good! Shoring up infrastructure vs. delivering the latest hotness is something that is rarely prioritized. I'll take boring and reliable every day of the week.
You would be a fool to think the Copilot Coding Agent is not their most important feature at the moment. It's not particularly great, but it must become so.
The infrastructure behind serving git repos the way they do is pretty fiddly—I'd not be a bit surprised if this move reduces stability and/or performance.
That started with MS and accelerated with Copilot. Word is that GH leadership doesn't care about anything other than Copilot/AI. All other features are receiving far less focus and fewer resources. I've heard this repeatedly from current and former employees.
IMHO: the acceleration curve into point-of-no-return was when Microsoft decided to go hard on AI, and saw GitHub's Copilot as one of the key inflection points they were going to use to do so - even going so far to adopt the Copilot brand across the entire company.
Before that, it still felt like there _some_ degree of autonomy and ability to think about the developer experience on the platform as a whole. Once ChatGPT took off and MSFT decided that they were going to go hard on AI, though, Copilot (and therefore GitHub) became too important to Microsoft to leave alone.
I kinda suspect the slide was inevitable anyway, given how acquisitions tend to go. But IMO, Copilot was the tsunami that washed the octocat out to sea.
What I find pretentious is the legion of commenters who can't find anything better to comment on and instead pretend they're smart by nitpicking some stylistic choice in the most low-effort way possible.
Classic case of "you're pretentious", "no, you're pretentious". It's exhausting how often we reach for the word "pretentious" when we have bitter feelings about one person's opinion of another person or their work.
I just used it because he did. My real feeling was exhaustion. More of those comments than comments about the subject matter of the post. Like going to a swimming meet as a pro and finding it full of kids instead.
While not a yet an ROI-positive takeover, on an incredible valuation growth trajectory from the post-acquisition low. Likely to be positive the minute xAI meaningfully monetizes Grok. [1]
Gains strategic access to global training data, and real-time human sentiment. [2]
Incredible built-in distribution for new AI-powered products. [3]
Literally tipped the scales in an election, a role typically reserved for traditional media companies. [4]
I love this project, and frankly I can't wait until I see Zig code stitched into and interoperating in a lisp via C transpilation, but I really do agree with the top commenter if you can't get Clojure trademark approval.
Anyways, keep up the amazing work, I wish I could have seen your janky talk at Strangeloop on another timeline.
My company had what was at the time one of the largest Slack enterprise contracts. You have no idea what internal corporate battles we had to face to get our higher-ups to take us seriously at every stage of adoption, and ultimately roll it out en masse. Slack succeeded in enterprise in spite of its name, not because of it. The actual product was phenomenal, relative to alternatives.
Yes, when you have the notoriety, distribution, and reputation-for-insults that Linus does, you can get away with things like that, because you're selling into a culture that already understands the "joke".
I worked for a while in a big traditional corporation. My team was a bit like a little enclave inside the larger organisation. They knew us because we had our top shirt buttons undone and wore brown shoes instead of black. When we interacted with the traditional suits the worst we got were chuckles and eye rolls as we said names like "Python", "GIMP" and "Cockroach" instead of the things they knew about like SAS and Oracle. We never met any resistance due to naming or anything like that. But I still ended up leaving before too long because it was too difficult and slow to make real change and progress.
So if you work for somewhere even worse than that, just leave!
I know a little about getting large companies to use unknown and "risky" tech. I've done it a number of times (including one I'm especially proud[0] of, and that is relevant given the Clojure connection), and built more than one billion-dollar product doing so.
Names have incredible power, positive or negative, when something is in its infancy.
At the start, when it's just you, and maybe one other person, and maybe one more than that... and your entire effort is just a wisp of what it could one day be, all it takes is some random fly-by-night architect (or even project manager) walking by, hearing the name, and saying, "No way am I letting something called jank touch this project," and shutting it down. The ol' swoop-and-poop, but for incredibly understandable reasons: corporate drones are superstitious.
Now... if, as a matter of culture building, you're intentionally leaning into the "jank" name, that's different. Because names have incredible power. So if you're cobbling together a cadre of crack hackers, "jank" might be exactly what you need to telegraph exactly the ethos you want to manifest.
But if you're just looking for a memorable name to slap on something you hope will actually get traction in any production capacity, I'd just ask that Jeaye consider if the potential benefits outweigh the risks.
What you're describing is absolutely true, and I've seen it, but I agree with the commenter that it's a good litmus test for shit organizations. I have learned that it doesn't matter if the name is changed to something better, I will still be working for people that think with their ass, and therefore, half my life will be annoying.
Rust also has negative connotations, arguably worse connotations. Seems to do fine, and I wouldn't want it renamed because a PM is on a power trip.
> but for incredibly understandable reasons: corporate drones are superstitious
Understandable in the sense that I get why a child would do this, not an adult who is supposed to know what they're managing. Unfortunately, the business world pretends "Project Manager" can be slotted into any domain. Now my days are spent correcting the AI notetaker of a guy who is paid 6 figures.
I suppose it depends on which battle you’re choosing to fight.
When I enter such orgs, I join to fix the org. And I want every tool at my disposal to do it.
I love turnarounds. But they require careful management of energy. So if I have an opportunity to convince someone to change a name now, it saves me a bunch of energy later.
FWIW, I learned this while getting both React and Clojure approved for internal use at a Fortune 100 co. Took me weeks. Both had problematic licensing issues, both of which could have been avoided if the authors had spent 10 extra minutes clarifying a few small things a few years before.
Two desktops, two AI workstations, two laptops, and a handheld. Even my wife is running Linux.
My personal phone and work laptop are the last holdouts.