Webshit Weekly - September 2016

Functional programmers, realizing that their entire discipline is rendered inconsistent and useless the instant it is faced with herculean tasks such as "I/O" and "users", finally admit for the record that it's better to do literally anything else when these tasks arise. Satisfying termninology like 'free monad' and 'applicative functors' are bandied about as Hackernews tries to decide if you want imperative nougat with functional candy shell, or functional fruit filling with a flaky imperative pastry surrounding it. Nobody stops to wonder if the functional wizardry compiles to imperative code, or whether the processor gives a shit if your source code looks good in LaTeX. One Hackernews admits he doesn't know what these people are jabbering about; all Hackernews in agreement are ritually downvoted. In accordance with federal law, someone asks how this compares with Rust.

The LaTeX Fetish

So this is – officially – why LaTeX is good for writing in. Word processors make you ‘worry too much about the appearance of [your] documents’, which is ‘a distraction’, but writing in LaTeX enables you to ‘focus on the content of what [you] are writing without attending simultaneously to its visual appearance’, usefully ‘forget[ting] about what the text is going to look like and concentrat[ing] instead on its conceptual structure’. Everybody says so. Even me. (My co-author’s innocent, btw: I wrote that paragraph.)

So convinced was I that this was why scientists wrote in LaTeX that I even had a go at writing a LaTeX paper of my own (it never got finished; there was a lesson there). What I eventually realised was that while the argument is (as noted above) widely repeated, it is also wrong. Let’s have a look at that example again. Seriously, anyone who believes that making people type this…

\documentclass{article}
\title{Cartesian closed categories and the price of eggs}
\author{Jane Doe}
\date{September 1994}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
Hello world!
\end{document}

…instead of this…

Cartesian closed categories and the price of eggs
Jane Doe
September 1994

Hello world!

…amounts to ‘let[ting] authors get on with writing documents’ has (at best) a slightly unconventional understanding of the words ‘let’, or ‘writing’, or possibly ‘get on with’.

The Web Obesity Crisis

To repeat a suggestion I made on Twitter, I contend that text-based websites should not exceed in size the major works of Russian literature.

This is a generous yardstick. I could have picked French literature, full of slim little books, but I intentionally went with Russian novels and their reputation for ponderousness.

In Goncharov's Oblomov, for example, the title character spends the first hundred pages just getting out of bed.

The tech lead for Google's AMP project was nice enough to engage us on Twitter. He acknowledged the bloat, but explained that Google was "resource constrained" and had had to outsource this project.

This admission moved me deeply, because I had no idea Google was in a tight spot. So I spent a couple of hours of my own time making a static version of the AMP website.

I began by replacing the image carousels with pictures of William Howard Taft, America's greatest president by volume.

I think this made a marked improvement from the gratuitous animations on the original page.

Motherfucking Website

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