Totally agree. Since when did a work queue/thread pool thing become anything beyond intro to systems work?
Furthermore, I don't know where everyone gets off saying erlang is so fast either: I'm not sure where things are now, but last time I checked, their scheduling algorithms were leaving quite a lot on the table, standing to benefit quite substantially from even the most basic operations and logistics knowledge.
good point. on the other hand, however, perceived cost has always been more important than actual cost, and that's when it comes to absolutely anything, including UI.
"Lets take anything to do with behavioural conditioning and fundamental incentive structures and call them game mechanics, just so we have an excuse to make up something new and forget that everything we're doing has been going under constant research and development since the dawn of the industrial revolution..."
I've actually been thinking a lot about this kind of stuff lately. In fact, I think when you start to think about a person's email address as more than just "an address where you send them email", and rather, as a globally unique, completely ubiquitous address to connect with them in general, there are a lot of really interesting applications you can build around it that completely supplant existing protocols.
Given that they're explicitly about people in particular, personal web pages, social networks and distributed code reviews are kind of the tip of the ice berg. How nice would it be to have a structured project management protocol that operates over email, but allows people to hook up whatever client they want to interpret it, allowing them to work in a way that best suits them?
Assuming "romantic comedy" was just an arbitrary dichotomy to serve as linkbait, I think you can find other genres that penetrate just as deeply as sci-fi that might make the point more clear.
If you look at jane austin, I think you'll find her influence on the generic female psyche is at least on par, but probably far stronger than the impact of lucas on the generic geek psyche.
The difference is the geeks make it visible so that they can share in the "mythology of exploration" together, whereas the femmes just make it implicit as a more natural "understanding of how the world should be". (I acknowledge i'm making some grand assumptions here, this is a sunday morning thought experiment)
Now, obviously its far easier to believe that "you'll find a perfect man who'll do everything for you" than it is to believe that "you'll run around in spaceships blowing up deathstars", simply as a consequence of the latter being a very explicit detachment from reality (and while the former is much more implicit, at the same time, I might add, it may quite possibly be just as detached and with its own set of moral consequences, but I digress). But I think that's where the real difference is: science-fiction is an explicitly unrealistic escape from the way things are, whereas most other genres are intended to blend in with out existing perceptions of the world around us to convince us of the realistic possibilities of an achievable fantasy.
Space in particular is coded very deeply in our cultural sense of the unknown and journey, and its often frightening to make journeys alone. So we bring companions: we build subcultures.
i really liked the redis codebase. not sure if its changed much since it became a much bigger project, but back when it was mainly @antirez, it was some of the cleanest code i've ever read.