Wow, I never thought a programming language community can help people overcome negative feelings. These storeis are really nice.

It is not that I can't socialize or don't have friends, it's just that I don't like what most people do (like watching sports, and talking about uninteresting things, etc.) And save some specific people, I feel burned out after spending time with other people. I am known to many as an extremely sociable, and friendly person. I just don't like it.

On top of that, being heretically progressive (truly progressive, e.g. criticizing and disliking all religions and all patriarchy- Christian, Islamic, and Hindu- not toeing the modern woke liberal agenda), I cannot freely express myself except in front of my parents, SO, and about two friends.

In such a life, programming brings immense bliss. I profoundly enjoy poetry, and novels, but they are something you are consuming. I love to create things, modify and change things.

Programming, whether in microcontrollers for hobby, or solving business problems with innovative solutions, or solving project Euler problems, I feel immense joy. If programming did not exist, my life would have been significantly worse.

The article has 25 paragraphs. Near the bottom of the article, one line in one paragraph, mentioned racial diversity in passing.

Is that really a problem for you ?

I also don't get it, but where I live, race isn't the principal eigenvector of literally everything.

In what sense did you mean everything has to be about racial diversity?

That said, it wasn't the point of the article. It's fast becoming the point of this comment thread, though, which is unfortunate.

I would very much like for you to explain to me how everything you read is about racial diversity, when so little of what I read seems to be.

Categorically wrong. This is a programming language community that we're talking about. Haskell hasn't dropped out of thin air. It's the output of a mostly-voluntary community effort. To strengthen the community by making it open to people who have different backgrounds is to strengthen the language.

The real question is why do you only see racial diversity as a problem.

My question to you would be why did you interpret that person's comment that way? Rejecting the hyper-focus on racial diversity which is common in some parts of progressive Western culture is not at all the same as seeing racial diversity as a problem. I agree that in a broad sense a community is strengthened by diverse membership, but I don't agree that the White Guilt hinted at in the original article is constructive.

I think you've constructed a straw-man to argue against here, and that's not at a very nice thing to do.

It seems to me that according to present-day American norms, including a remark such as the one that you did is simply considered good form; you show that even if you are not actively working on the great political causes that are being so eloquently argued to be of existential importance by their protagonists every day, you are certainly aware of them, support the good guys and ready to do your part for their cause if it you are in a situation in which you can contribute. Meanwhile, for those who adhere to a framework in which the prescription for making sure historical instances of racism don't repeat is to banish race as a category from human thinking and discourse as far as possible, the very mention of it in a context where there seemed to be no external reason to is gauche in a similar way to if you suddenly started talking about sexual prowess (taking care to insert a parenthetical remark about what you believe about your own). It doesn't seem to me like your explanation of the "why" here is particularly helpful to cross that gap of expectations, either; it only really makes sense if the reader is already primed to assume that describing people as "interesting characters" and unusual people must at least suggest something about race and gender, but from the other side's perspective this is not any less gauche, especially as it might be taken to suggest that what makes those characters "interesting" to you is just a matter of those characteristics.

Even worse, if the culturally remote reader's degree of familiarity with modern US norms is not zero, the one blurb they likely have in mind is something like "the US has a self-admitted racism problem". In that case, a remark such as the one you made might not just register as introducing a topic that is unsuitable for polite conversation, but actually as betraying attitudes that are opposite to what you wished to communicate - imagine if for instance a speaker of the German police, talking about something mundane such as their strategies for fighting pickpockets in Frankfurt, injected a line lamenting the small number of Jews in the force. Indeed, if my read of US society is correct, antisemitism is one context in which the other (older?) version of antiracism norms still survives in it. To get a rough model of how a given post or statement would sound to the cultural outsider, then, you could try to imagine your post with everything mentioning race replaced with analogous remarks along the "Jewish or not Jewish?" axis.

These tiresome and uninteresting remarks about U.S.-centric political causes, no matter how worthwhile these causes may be on their own terms, stand out as an eminently avoidable reminder of uncomfortable social conflict.

That's really the crux of all of this. There are people for whom racism is an unavoidable, daily issue. Yet there's no way to bring that up without making people uncomfortable. After being told, "You can't talk about it here; you can't talk about it there", people will eventually say, "Fine, I'm going to talk about it everywhere, because no place seems to be any worse than any other."

I personally am very conflict-averse, and much prefer it when people remain very polite. But reading HN in particular, I've come to realize that a lot of people are still going to insist that racism isn't a problem in the US and demand that others not talk about it. They assume that if they're not seeing it then it's not a problem for anybody -- or worse, they're deliberately inflicting it and hiding among those who are merely obtuse.

I find that so offensive that it overrides even my conflict aversion.

I'm pretty sure that there's plenty of ways to do that. What turns people off to the real, actual problems is casual and unhelpful claims like "the U.S. is an inherently racist/white supremacist country" or the like. What that looks like to outsiders is folks who want to seem like they're meaningfully talking about real issues that some might face, but all they manage to do is to be divisive and stir up pointless conflict for the heck of it. At that point, tuning out is a sensible response.

We all watched a man be murdered last year, and HN was filled with people making excuses for the murderer. He was convicted only because every single person watched it; others whose murders weren't caught on film escaped punishment. Much less the numerous others that are less than murder.

When people can't even agree that a murder in front of their eyes was a bad thing, I'm going to say out loud that something is deeply wrong. If that seems like a pointless conflict to you, then it's going to keep happening and I'm going to be shocked that I have to say to your face that it's bad.

If your aggravation about their time offends you more than the injustice done to them, then you know why the tone will keep getting more aggravating.

This seems question-begging, because there are structurally equivalent scenarios where I expect that almost everyone would reject raising the issue as inappropriate.

For example, I am a Gentile, a goy if you will, working in financial machine learning. One cannot help but notice that Ashkenazi Jews are over-represented in my company by a factor of 5-10x. If we adopt the principle that differences in outcomes between groups can only be attributable to oppression of the disadvantaged group by the advantaged one, then we would be forced to arrive at some rather 1930's-Germany-tier conclusions.

I don't think there's anything particularly nefarious about Jewish over-representation in tech, or that I haven't been given a fair shake by fundamentally decent people. But if I were primed to look for it, I could scrape together enough incidents over the years where my Jewish colleagues had acted in some kind of socially ambiguous way towards me (as could anyone about any of their colleagues they've known for long enough). When two of my colleagues lapse into Hebrew in the middle of a conversation I'm a part of, I don't think it reflects anything worse than very mild gracelessness. But if I began from the assumption that history was, say, fundamentally a struggle between secretive, scheming Jews and their oppressed goyische marks, I would probably come to a different conclusion.

Yet if I paused in the middle of my software newsletter to reflect upon the question of Jewish advantage in tech and highlighted the under-representation of Gentiles, musing about what is to be done, I expect that pretty much everyone would find that off-putting at the least.

Is there a relevant difference between these two cases?

The US started at step 1. It's moved to step 2. My personal impression is that it was moving to step 3, though I'm sure that at least some people will disagree. But it seems to me that the current progressive approach is dragging us back to step 2, not moving us toward step 4. And I think that the older approach, what you call "a framework in which the prescription for making sure historical instances of racism don't repeat is to banish race as a category from human thinking and discourse as far as possible", would have gotten us at least solidly to step 3, and maybe eventually to step 4.

I don't think dragging everything back to step 2 is progress.

Apple’s supplied deep learning models are useful and easy to use, and compiling on an IPad Pro or M1 Mac is fast, even with the type inferencing. Right now I am slogging through a 50 hour SwiftUI 2 class.

I am disappointed that TensorFlow for Swift has been mothballed, but Julia and Python are probably much better options for deep learning. BTW, Julia is a fairly good general purpose language also. I have played with little bits of Julia code for text manipulation, REST, SPARQL queries, etc.

EDIT: since this is a Haskell thread, pardon the plug: you can grab a free copy of my Haskell book at https://markwatson.com

Not everyone cares about cross platform.

Also, funding projects not people is a relatively recent notion; e.g. most fundamental physics breakthroughs of the 20th century were done by people who didn’t have to write grant applications.

Yes, FOSS projects are projects too? Or use subprojects if you need more funding for the same project?