The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 14 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Granger: Excel is the world's most popular programming language
“The most popular programming language in the world is Excel. It is programming just like everything else is. And Excel is used by eight hundred million people every single day, right?”
Granger: Programming languages model computer hardware rather than human processes
“We have this weird case right now where our languages, Python, pick any language, right? Is actually designed to model computer interaction, right? It's designed to model how computers work. Like, I'm gonna send TCP messages, and so on and so forth. But if you…”
Granger: C and the actor model cannot solve modern computing challenges
“You know, C is not going to save us. You can't just stick the actor model on top of it and hope it's going to work.”
Granger: Turning everyone into software programmers is neither realistic nor desirable
“I don't know that it's realistic, though, that, or even desirable, right, that we end up with, you know, far more programmers than we end up with anything else.”
Granger: Managing software complexity by stacking abstractions creates fragile systems
“Pure engineering makes this very pragmatic trade-off, right, which is that you tame complexity by adding a layer of abstraction. And this is like stacking teacups on top of teacups, right? You can do this for a little while, but eventually those teacups, that …”
Granger: Software bugs provide feedback on flawed thinking rather than signaling failure
“So you think about, like, when you get a wrong answer in, in a math class, right? You got it wrong, so you redo the problem. You just did it wrong, right? I mean, you do it right, or you do it as many times as you need to until you get it right. Whereas in sof…”
Granger: Software literacy means automating work, not building apps
“It's not about everyone building apps, right? The new writing is not building an app. The new thing is about getting the computer to do work for you, whatever that may mean, right?”
Granger: Democratizing coding will shift software development away from consumer clones
“We're not gonna end up with just Airbnb clones and Pinterest clones, right, eventually we'll start to get very interesting applications that are designed, you know, I'm a biologist, I'm working on cancer, this is purely for solving, for helping me solve cancer…”
Granger: Legacy computational models fail to handle modern networked systems
“And the truth is, our models for computation never really included those eventualities, right? We sort of assumed that, hey, that 19 seventies computer with just a single CPU would be fine for us.”
Granger: Software industry and academic research are reuniting after decades apart
“Industry and research are starting to come back together again, right? You go back to the seventies, there kind of was no distinction between the two. They were basically the same.”
Granger: Software engineering must gain power through simplicity, not complexity
“What we're really trying to get back to is simplicity, right? Instead of adding more teacups on top of this thing, wipe all the teacups away and find the foundational principles that we need in order to embrace this new machine, right? Gain power through simpl…”
Granger: Shared mutable state in distributed systems is a disaster
“We learned very quickly that, ah, you know, shared mutable state is a disaster in that world, and then we have to do something else. And there's nothing simpler than just keeping a log of every single thing that ever came into the system, right?”
Granger: CRDTs and theoretical trends will reshape software computation
“We're gonna see these start to eek more and more and more into the system as we try and find ways to work against that new machine. And it's those trends that are ultimately going to, you know, reshape the way we think about computation as a whole, and then ho…”