Some context I think might not have made it to the Hacker News readers. We use Kotlin at Pinterest, we were one of the two teams talking about the value of Kotlin when google announced support at IO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPzxfeDJDzY.
We don't expect to be able to hire Android engineers that are familiar with Kotlin to the level of expertise we expect with Java. We do expect everyone to be able to work with any part of the Android code base and not be guessing at how of the concepts many android devs aren't familiar with work. If you don't consider the time for engineers to learn this, you are not considering some of the cost of adopting. If you think it's not that big of a deal, then go for it, we did.
On there link list they have belong.io listed described as:
"Hey, I made a new thing: It’s a Twitter-fueled link aggregator that favors new projects/sites over n…"
So I'm guessing they are grabbing sites from twitter, but no clue if there is any method to the madness. I wouldn't be surprised if it was manual or if it was just pulling from one persons twitter.
I don't think breadth first search would have been the right approach. The search space is actually quite huge for this. Also, the algorithm wasn't built to create a build that wins the fitness was simply how fast they could produce the army the user inputs.
What stands out is if you had asked anyone even a professional player to build this exact army composition (7 roaches) they would almost certainly not have pulled it off as fast as the method this algorithm discovered. The algorithm was able to do it by doing a few tricks that normally aren't intuitive but, work out so your resources match up perfectly to make the build happen.
Also, I can confirm as a mediocre Starcraft player the build was quite powerful.
Some context I think might not have made it to the Hacker News readers. We use Kotlin at Pinterest, we were one of the two teams talking about the value of Kotlin when google announced support at IO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPzxfeDJDzY.
The article is meant to show the reasons we considered not to use it. The language is very similar to Java and we've written some about how even "the grumpy java developer" can learn it https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/kotlin-for-grumpy-....
We don't expect to be able to hire Android engineers that are familiar with Kotlin to the level of expertise we expect with Java. We do expect everyone to be able to work with any part of the Android code base and not be guessing at how of the concepts many android devs aren't familiar with work. If you don't consider the time for engineers to learn this, you are not considering some of the cost of adopting. If you think it's not that big of a deal, then go for it, we did.