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Conaw's profile
Conor White-Sullivan🧢
Conor White-Sullivan🧢
Conor White-Sullivan 🧢
@Conaw

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Conor White-Sullivan 🧢

@Conaw

Co-founder of @RoamResearch. Believer in tools for thought. Friendly partisan for #yang2020

San Francisco, CA
roamresearch.com
Joined November 2008

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    1. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 14 Dec 2019
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      28. Getting beyond abstract symbols does not mean getting beyond abstract ideas. The power of programming languages (and why you may want to learn them, even if not intent on building software) is that they let you get you hands dirty with building and using ur own abstractions.

      1 reply 0 retweets 14 likes
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    2. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 14 Dec 2019
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      Conor White-Sullivan 🧢 Retweeted Conor White-Sullivan 🧢

      29. Cheating and linking an old threadhttps://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1134173307878629376 …

      Conor White-Sullivan 🧢 added,

      Conor White-Sullivan 🧢 @Conaw
      Reduce. Filter. Map. I first learned to code for the same reason I learned foreign languages. I was promised it would change the way I think. Those three functions for transforming lists delivered so thoroughly it's hard to think without them. Algorithms of thought.
      Show this thread
      1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
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    3. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 14 Dec 2019
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      30. Datalog is a much better query language than SQL, and will be more widely used than SQL in 2050 But might be only if you count people using natural language datalog, which will go mainstream in next 10 years https://web.archive.org/web/20181102114644/http://alexwarth.com/projects/nl-datalog/ …

      1 reply 1 retweet 13 likes
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    4. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 14 Dec 2019
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      31. Urbit is an interesting project, but won't actually take off unless/until someone writes an X -> Hoon or X -> Arvo or X -> "whatever" compiler because no one actually wants to think in Yarvis' pig latin.

      1 reply 4 retweets 24 likes
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    5. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 14 Dec 2019
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      32. Hosted languages that provide nicer abstractions over the libraries from their host language have a huge huge advantage over new languages starting from scratch. The ability to work with libraries from an existing/broader ecosystem is damn near table stakes for a new lang

      1 reply 1 retweet 16 likes
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    6. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 14 Dec 2019
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      33. The world is a worse place because MIT switched from teaching LISP in the intro CS courses to teaching Python.

      3 replies 5 retweets 44 likes
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    7. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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      34. If you haven't learned a programming language for a reason other than A) It was a assigned to you in school B) You thought it would make you money Then I doubt your a) curiosity b) open-mindedness and as a result c) competency as a engineer

      2 replies 8 retweets 61 likes
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    8. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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      35. There are two problems for programming languages to solve 1) Performance on machines 2) Usefulness as a tool for thought Right now those are complected -- Intentional Software was doing something interesting toward separating those two out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_Software …

      1 reply 2 retweets 23 likes
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    9. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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      36. **Technical people** are just people who "try to understand" Killing conversations with "I'm not technical" is a dangerous practice that will hurt you (and those around you) in the long run.https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/uP3mR1Xef …

      1 reply 9 retweets 53 likes
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    10. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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      37. Your type system won't save you

      2 replies 0 retweets 25 likes
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      Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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      38. Provably correct doesn't mean it works

      1:02 AM - 15 Dec 2019
      • 1 Retweet
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      • Martin Nyx Brain (wannabe) breaker of (the bad) loops Gordon Brander marls Jonas digital Henk Poley Maxim Leyzerovich QC
      2 replies 1 retweet 43 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          39. Contracts and gradual typing > strong types https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTl7Jn_kmio …

          1 reply 1 retweet 12 likes
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        3. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          40. Many people with 10 years of experience in software engineering haven't actually grown or learned much in that time. They've done the same first year 10 times on repeat. Polyglots generally avoid falling into this pattern.

          2 replies 2 retweets 39 likes
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        4. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          41. Reagent (A Clojurescript wrapper around React) is way easier to read, write, and maintain than vanilla react.

          2 replies 0 retweets 11 likes
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        5. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          42. Dan Abramov has said that Redux is not a javascript clone of Re-frame (the CLJS framework for writing SPAs in react), it is just that both were inspired by elm and arrived at similar pattern... But even so... Re-frame was first and still much better in almost every way

          1 reply 1 retweet 3 likes
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        6. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          43. The Re-frame documentation is most informative/entertaining read-me on githubhttps://github.com/day8/re-frame/blob/master/README.md …

          2 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
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        7. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          44. Clojurescript is an EXCELLENT choice for consumer or SaaS internet startups. If you are starting a new company and can afford it, you should spend invest a few months in learning it first and building in it vs your normal stack, will pay huge dividends over time.

          3 replies 1 retweet 15 likes
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        8. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          45. A great engineer can learn Clojure well enough to be productive in under a month.

          2 replies 0 retweets 14 likes
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        9. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          46. Setup for react development (Webpack/Babel/100 other tooling things) was a dumpster fire in 2015. It's probably still bad.

          3 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
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        10. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          47. Create-React-App and Gatsbyjs probably have made setup for Javascript projects much better. Still probably not as easy to use or as powerful as shadow-cljs.

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        11. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          48. Typescript is mostly hype.

          2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
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        12. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          49. VScode is a typescript IDE, is probably pretty magical, and I am likely missing some cool sources of tools for thought inspiration by not playing in that ecosystem.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        13. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          50. Airtable is on track to be the Wordpress of relational databases.

          2 replies 0 retweets 15 likes
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        14. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          51. Graph databases are far better than relational databases for most things.

          3 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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        15. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          Conor White-Sullivan 🧢 Retweeted Wes

          52. Amendment to 4. No one who is loud about OO is doing real OO. Agree Erlang is OOhttps://twitter.com/weskerfoot/status/1206058780703776769?s=19 …

          Conor White-Sullivan 🧢 added,

          Wes @weskerfoot
          Replying to @Conaw @vgr
          Erlang, Pony, Monte, and E are all pretty OO in that sense
          2 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
          Show this thread
        16. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          Conor White-Sullivan 🧢 Retweeted Grady Booch

          53. In general, folks thinking about programming languages and computing more broadly, don't know enough history. Folks interested in the topic should read "The Dream Machine" to start and not blindly trust shitposters like me. VN def over-hyped thohttps://twitter.com/Grady_Booch/status/1206311525851357184?s=19 …

          Conor White-Sullivan 🧢 added,

          Grady BoochVerified account @Grady_Booch
          Replying to @Conaw @vgr
          Conor, respectfully, you know very little about von Neumann or the history of computing in which he lived. and as such I have a difficult time excepting anything else you said in this thread.
          2 replies 0 retweets 18 likes
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        17. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          54. One reason to know history is so you can see what elements of your language were put in place to deal with constraints in your environment that no longer exist We don't use punch-cards, we don't need a distinction between expressions and statements http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html pic.twitter.com/ZrFTndLQfy

          2 replies 1 retweet 16 likes
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        18. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          55. Questions are not a sign of ignorance, they are a sign you are paying attention. It's more than OK to ask people to define terms or give a concrete example, and ok to stay in conversations you can barely understand. Applies to conversations in and about all languages.

          2 replies 9 retweets 25 likes
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        19. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          Conor White-Sullivan 🧢 Retweeted Conor White-Sullivan 🧢

          55. Meta opinion about my opinions on programming languageshttps://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1206324267513597952?s=19 …

          Conor White-Sullivan 🧢 added,

          Conor White-Sullivan 🧢 @Conaw
          Replying to @StrongReduction @vgr
          Seek the source! I'm just a deformed ignorant offspring of Bret Victor and Rich Hickey Here first https://changelog.com/posts/rich-hickeys-greatest-hits … Then here http://worrydream.com/Links2013/  And here http://worrydream.com/#!/Links 
          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        20. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          56. Datomic is far and away the best graph database available today. Has Java and Clojure APIs, non jvm languages can use rest apis. If you're a startup, worth being in Clojure though.

          3 replies 1 retweet 11 likes
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        21. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          Conor White-Sullivan 🧢 Retweeted zhaphod beeblebrox

          57. Listen, I'm not saying he didn't have massive contributions, esp on the math side. Just know too many AI bros (who I still love) who've said things like "We just need 50 Von Neumanns to build an AGI god and we're set" No. And he's not all that.https://twitter.com/zhaphod/status/1206327029601165312?s=19 …

          Conor White-Sullivan 🧢 added,

          zhaphod beeblebrox @zhaphod
          Replying to @Conaw @vgr
          Yes von Neumann is not the genius everyone made him out to be. Righto. Those other laureates who were in awe of him were also perpetuating a marketing myth.
          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
          Show this thread
        22. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          58. The most important idea in Datomic is that there is no reason to overwrite data just because it changes. It is more than a graph database, it is a graph database with a notion of time and history built in. What was Joe's address as of Dec 2017?

          1 reply 1 retweet 24 likes
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        23. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          59. The main limitation of the EAV tuples (popular in Semantic Web land) is that you can't easily describe the relationships. You get the FACTS, but it is a bit tricky to add information to those facts like "where did this info come from", or make statements like If A then B

          2 replies 1 retweet 5 likes
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        24. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          60. To model human thought in a computable way you need to solve the problem in 59, you move closer to this goal if you give each "fact" or "edge" in the graph a unique identifier. Long history of this in Associative Databases Example in @RoamResearch https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/WhSDOjZ0d …pic.twitter.com/cBYtMW0npe

          1 reply 1 retweet 8 likes
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        25. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          Conor White-Sullivan 🧢 Retweeted Chris Granger

          My shit posting on Eve has evoked the ire of @ibdknox, whose work I do greatly respect. So will offer my more nuanced opinions on Eve and programming languages related to tools for thought, esp related to @RoamResearch and see if that gets me the last 40https://twitter.com/ibdknox/status/1206244381252034560?s=19 …

          Conor White-Sullivan 🧢 added,

          Chris Granger @ibdknox
          Replying to @Conaw @vgr
          It didn’t go off the rails because we showed an example of building a game. Games are how the vast majority of programmers came to be. There’s a lot of absolutism in this thread that’s backed by neither reality nor experience.
          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        26. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          61. Designing a programming language - a medium for people to express their thought in a machine computable way is insanely hard. Perhaps even harder to get the time and funding to do that level of deep work. Exponentially harder to do on VC timescales.

          1 reply 0 retweets 12 likes
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        27. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          62. The fact that Chris and team were able to get venture funding AT ALL is an insane testament to the them, and quality of prior work /vision. The fact that they got funding from some of the top investors in silicon valley put the project in historic category. Lot 2 liveup 2

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        28. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          63. Light-table (from Eve team) promised a smalltalk like IDE for devs using clojure or js Easy access to docs, organize workspace by function not file, see values pass through Huge potential for intelligence augmentation! Easy switch for a userbase https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H58-n7uldoU …pic.twitter.com/Lvta7NqJYD

          2 replies 3 retweets 8 likes
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        29. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          64. Alpha sheets (later project, diff team) let you use R & Python code in a collaborative excel like spreadsheet. Was like Light Table but from another direction. Adds programming to Excel, versus adding better reactive env to programming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hddcNvU9UVI …pic.twitter.com/fM5gw4H6ws

          1 reply 1 retweet 7 likes
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        30. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          65. Light table had a very Bret Victor type feel make it easier to explore what you could do make it easier to get a handle on what is going on in the program in real time give yourself a bunch of contextual information and focus your attention only on what matters

          2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
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        31. Conor White-Sullivan 🧢‏ @Conaw 15 Dec 2019
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          66. That project (Light Table) thus offered huge potential for "intelligence augmentation" Allow people to solve problems that they otherwise wouldn't be capable of solving Invent things they otherwise wouldn't have been capable of inventing For beginners or experts alike!

          1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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        32. 37 more replies

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