Notices by Don Romano (alt) (thor@noagendasocial.com)

When consuming news media, always keep in mind that a journalist's job is to take events and frame them in the most sensational light possible. This may involve the portrayal of conflict where none exists, neglecting any exonerating circumstances, asking leading questions, deciding what the story is and fitting the facts to it later, and a number of other dubious or outright unethical practices that result from the constant pressure to generate news and attract eyeballs.

Fun fact: You can convert JavaScript arrow functions to strings and extract the AST (abstract syntax tree) using JSEP.

Suppose you made an ORM that worked like this:

const s = entity
.filter(r => r.id == 9)
.map(r => r.id + 1)
let res = await s.execute()

The execute() function would pick apart the chain, convert filter() to an SQL WHERE clause and map() to a SELECT statement and combine them into:

SELECT id + 1 FROM entity WHERE entity.id = 9

Example screenshot from Node REPL:

Fun fact: You can convert JavaScript arrow functions to strings and extract the AST (abstract syntax tree) using JSEP.

Suppose you made an ORM that worked like this:

const s = entity
.filter(r => r.id == 9)
.map(r => r.id + 1)
let res = await s.execute()

The execute() function would pick apart the chain, convert filter() to an SQL WHERE clause and map() to a SELECT statement and combine them into:

SELECT id + 1 FROM entity WHERE entity.id = 9

Universal hazard sign.

I approve of this message.

We went from primitive airplanes to Apollo 11 in just 57 years. That's not a very long time, frankly.

Time to shoot everything in diagonal mode.

@monerica That's possible, but if so, how would I get there?

@monerica I look around those "find a job that fits your personality" pages you find, and nothing really stands out as very interesting.

I'm not the typical inventor type. I build things from time to time, but most of my activity happens in my head, in notes and drawings that I make, in ideas I share with other people.

@monerica There's a lack of boldness and vision and everything has to be "realistic" and "reasonable", and people mostly say "that's how we do it around here".

@monerica That's a damned good question...

All I know is that I like to think and to hatch plans. I like to devise things or processes that improve the world. I like to ponder the workings of the mind and of the world.

Programming is *kind* of like that, except you rarely actually get to design things from scratch, and are mostly cleaning up other people's messes. Also, if you're employed, you rarely have a say in what problems you get to solve.

Whenever I try to do something about my situation, the result is inevitably:

- More debt
- No improvement over status quo
- Even worse resume

The thing is that if I do nothing, that doesn't help either, because I just end up having a nervous breakdown and losing my job anyway.

1. Need money and human interaction.

2. Find programming job.

3. Remember that I don't actually like being a programmer.

4. Quit or lose job.

5. Go to 1.

I've been through this cycle too many times. I don't know how to get out of it. Most other jobs out there require a degree of some sort, and also, a resume that doesn't look like someone fired a machine gun at it.

@zingbretsen @alexcleac Yes. Pretty much. And at that point, you're back to just having code that manipulates data, instead of having a proxy language in the middle.

You could retain SQL as a means of improvising queries, for exploration, debugging and not the least providing data access to systems that do speak SQL.

@zingbretsen @alexcleac Having an intermediary language there seems unnecessary.

@zingbretsen @alexcleac Executing server-side is a proposed solution to the problem I have stated. Functional list processing constructs could be converted to query execution plans.

@zingbretsen @alexcleac What I don't want is having to stick WHERE clauses inside of a string that's passed to the ORM, for example. Or chaining clumsy constructs like and(), or() or eq(). Those are all workarounds.

@zingbretsen @alexcleac Also, there are expressions you couldn't translate to SQL, especially if you give your functions a body with multiple statements (this is occasionally necessary). Simply being able to use the native expression syntax of your language at all would be a major improvement, though.