I at first thought it was nice to save the wrapping, but you save yourself sooo much pain, ugliness and mistakes pattern matching trying to distinguish the types once you just use tagged unions.
I think you’re both pointing at the same tradeoff: “untagged” unions feel lighter, but you often pay it back in ad-hoc narrowing (shape checks/heuristics) and ambiguity once variants overlap.
Tagged unions/ADTs make the discriminant explicit, which is exactly why they tend to be reliability-friendly: exhaustive matches + explicit constructors reduce “guessing” and refactor breakage.
That said, I agree the ergonomics matter, TS-style discriminated unions are basically “tagged” too once you add a kind field, for example.
I worked through https://htdp.org (which uses untyped Racket), and funny enough, that's what really for me thinking about type driven development. The book gets you to think about and manually annotate the types coming in and out of functions. FP just makes it so natural to think about putting functions together and thinking about the "type" of data that comes in and out, even if you're using a dynamically typed language.
> Chomsky has focused on the generative side of language
The answers to "why" that Chomsky pushes so hard for are very valuable to adult language learners. There are basic syntactic rules to generating broadly correct language. Having these rules discovered and explained in the simplest possible form is irreplaceable by statistical models. Neural networks, much like native speakers can say "well this just sounds right," but adult learners need a mathematical theory of how and why they can generate sentences. Yes, this changes with time and circumstances, but the simple rules and theories are there if we put the effort in to look for them.
There are many languages with a very small corpus of training data. The LLMs fail miserably at communicating with them or explaining things about their grammar, but if we look hard for the underlying theories Chomsky was looking for, we can make huge leaps and bounds in understanding how to use them.
I'm a big Chomsky nerd, Chomsky fan, and card-carrying ex Chomskyan linguist. I hate to break it to you, but not even Chomsky thought that the Chomsky hierarchy had any very interesting application to natural languages. Amongst linguists who (unlike Chomsky) are still interested in formal language classes, the general consensus these days is that the relevant class is one of the so-called 'mildly context sensitive' ones (see e.g. https://www.kornai.com/MatLing/mcsfin.pdf for an overview).
(I suppose I have to state for the record that Chomsky's ties to Epstein are indefensible and that I'm not a fan of his on a personal level.)
I'm so happy I made the jump to NeoVim 6 months ago.
I finally got good RTL support with iTerm, language server stuff works great, and best of all, navigating and selecting things SYNTACTICALLY with nvim-treesitter-textobjects is life-changing.
Nice move and nice write-up! There has been so much propaganda around serverless, so we need to hear more of these voices.
I moved away from FreeBSD to Debian for hosting my things because the process/daemon management was too tricky. You seem to have figured out a good solution, but I wanted something simpler like PM2 for automatic process management/restarting/logs. Unfortunately PM2 has an issue [1] that makes it unworkable with FreeBSD. It would be so nice if FreeBSD had a smooth, more declarative way of managing processes.
> I moved away from FreeBSD to Debian for hosting my things because the process/daemon management was too tricky.
It indeed is tricky. To be honest, I wasn't "put off" by it because I've been using BSDs and old-style Linux startup systems for almost 30 years now... but the lack of abstraction shows, and I don't think it's great.
The daemon(8) wrapper is neat to integrate pre-existing servers into rc.d, but I do not fancy having to deal with that "by hand" nor to create a shell script to manage my own service (related from a few years ago: https://jmmv.dev/2020/08/rcd-libexec-etc.html) nor to have something entirely separate to manage log rotation.
As much hate as systemd gets, I do think being declarative (and doing so in a DSL that's not a programming language) and having a true process "supervisor" is a better model. BUT, as I mentioned in this article, I also like the "no churn" of the BSDs because what I learned and refined over ~30 years is still similar to this day and that I won't be bitten by surprises.
Not GP, but I do prefer the very direct control you get with rcctl (OpenBSD), openrc (Alpine),... Systemd often feels like autoconf. It's needed when you really want the capabilities, otherwise the opaqueness and complexity feels very much cumbersome when you're dealing with a simple service.
I do like the Unix way of having different components handling different tasks instead of having different things which are entangled with each other. It encourages transparency.
Even with daemon(8), PID files and the lack of process supervision might be my least favorite aspect of FreeBSD, an OS I like overall. Not long ago, I wanted to avoid running a custom service that way on a fresh FreeBSD server. After researching my options, I found an adequate solution in the daemontools family. I'd heard of daemontools but hadn't paid much attention to it.
My service has been managed by runit and, most recently, nitro (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/nitro). Both have run as the service's user. They supervise the process and handle logging. I have found the design of daemontools and its derivatives runit and nitro elegant; it lives up to the reputation.
I have been using daemontools for managing my services on FreeBSD servers that have run 24/7 for almost a quarter of century, with down times of an hour or so only at intervals of a few years of continuous running, whenever I made a hardware upgrade or a complete OS replacement (by passing to another major version of FreeBSD).
Now there are several daemontools derivatives that bring it more up-to-date, but even the ancient original version did most of one would need for reliable service management.
> As much hate as systemd gets, I do think being declarative (and doing so in a DSL that's not a programming language) and having a true process "supervisor" is a better model.
I've been playing with dinit for a bit now; it combines a lot of the nice advantages of systemd with a finite scope and being portable across OSs.
I remember having same problem with Linux, tried to compensate with Monit but it never just worked quite right.
Systemd might add a bunch of unnecessary complexity in places, but for a sysadmin it's a fucking blessing. Just write one simple file, set binary, user, done, add some limitations and dependencies if you want to be fancy, set auto restart to true and It Just Works.
Can even set some memory limits if you want to be fancy so any memory leak won't get you into too much trouble but just gets the service restarted
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