mrh

hard to rule out!

Where is that from? It is extremely pessimistic and obviously false.

someone should tell Iceland

wait until you try emacs

nice name

Structuralists seem to forget that words are signfiers and signs of meaning, not the source of meaning

Wouldn't that only apply to ontic structuralists? They say the structures themselves are the real things. But epistemic structuralists merely say that the kind of knowledge we can have about reality is structural knowledge (but the world itself might be full of non-structural objects).

"The Tao is Silent" by Raymond Smullyan is a great introduction.

The problem isn’t so much the side effect as it is the ability to introduce side effects arbitrarily with no warning to someone using your functions

Yes, I try to allude to this in the "caution" and "tldr2" sections, but I think I could have been more clear. You are right that for many people it's not so much about avoiding side effects as it is about coming up with ways to use them carefully. Stateful monads and clojure's atoms/refs were in fact what I had in mind. And debating the pros/cons of these techniques is indeed a good conversation on its own! What I mostly wanted to get across is that fp is not about programming without side effects. All the good debate is about the extent to which we should try to avoid side effects, and what techniques we should use when doing so.

I think it’s also really important to call out the concept of total functions

Yeah I think this is totally (heh) worth talking about, and a much better topic than pure functions. I only didn't mention it because I don't see it brought up too often.

why

That sounds roughly correct, though I don't see the connection with the article? Unless you're saying that "products" (like Signal) will always exist, which is probably true but is orthogonal to whether or not other models will succeed.

As for email, I think posteo does a pretty good job, but you're right options are few and far between. But self hosting email is just as viable as ever? Perhaps less so since e.g. gmail will instantly flag your incoming mail as spam if you're sending it from randomsite.tld, but honestly that issue hasn't gotten that bad (yet). Yes, whenever there's a protocol like email or xmpp, companies will create gmails and signals and turn them into walled gardens, but that doesn't spoil the protocol for everyone else. It just causes frustration that companies build closed products on top of open technologies, but not much to be done about that.

Nice! I was wondering what that short downtime was. Still loving it here, keep up the great work 👍