That is what Delta Chat and Monocles do on different protocols, with WebXDC. https://webxdc.org/

Anything from djb can be expected to be good 👍

The simplest tool I had come across was memoize.py (and others like it). Given a build script, it uses strace on a from-scratch build to figure out dependencies. On future builds, it rebuilds only what has changed. It naturally captures edge cases like, rebuilding everything if the compiler changes! But also the typical case, of include files etc.

On a lighter note. There are Git experts? ;-)

Oh, and. Now I don’t need a separate bookmarks app, a separate notes app, a separate todo list app, syncing mechanisms for them, or a mechanism to search through all of them.

I never liked the fact there is a contacts app which other apps can tap into.

I have started using an org-mode file with entries that have tel: or callto: properties. I lose vCard exportability, but I can use the file as-is instead.

* Open-source

Yes

* Android, Web, and (if necessary) Linux and Windows clients

Emacs on larger devices, Orgzly on Android

* Stores contact info locally (i.e. self-hosted)

Yes

* Stores contact info securely (encrypted)

Unencrypted, but if you don’t allow apps other than syncing apps the permission to access all files, it may not matter as much

* Can store in a cloud location (e.g. Sync, Dropbox)

I just have Syncthing set up to sync those files too

I remember glancing at NodeBB (in my ignorance, I am averse to node.js). Activitypub seems to be an integration in it rather than its basis.

I get that it is an evolution, but building on top of SBCL seems like it would have made more sense.

That is great. But isn’t this more than the scientific method? It is rigor, and the capacity to look at all the factors in reality instead of cherry-picking one for a laboratory experiment.

I do agree we all could do with more rigor and also avoid cherry-picking factors to study, in any discipline.

there’s already mountains of evidence of static typing making code significantly less buggy on average

What is this mountain of evidence? The only evidence I remember about bugginess of code across languages is that bug count correlates closely to lines of code no matter the language.

That sounds like a laundry list of tech thrown together for effect. It is not even relevant. You are talking empirically-proven tech as a counterpoint to laboratory-only experiments, aren’t you?

I don’t know about the Wright brothers, but the human-powered flight bounty was apparently won using the strategy of fast iteration to empirically identify the solution. GPS too would have been built on real-world feedback iterations.

Computing hardware is a special case, where they replicate the laboratory into a billion-dollar structure and call it … ‘fab’ ;-)

The scientific method shorn of contact with reality, like with most research nowadays and especially in medicine, is just for show.

I submit that laboratory-experiment-based understanding being valid in real-world use, in any domain, is itself a belief rather than knowledge. And in such an unstructured domain as software development, it is even less likely.

Thanks for posting this! That blogsite is always very productive reading.

I don’t get the obsession with the scientific method. Movie quote: “we don’t live in the courtroom, your Honor; do we?”. You can eliminate outliers like experts and students, hobby projects and lives-at-stake projects; everything you are left with is a good reflection of the industry. Example: any study with Java versus Python has to count.

I have no real experience with dynamic languages, so I can understand where the blog responses about dynamic languages having extra bugs come from. But they miss the important point about dynamic languages allowing for non-trivial solutions in fewer lines of code - matching that would basically need <AnyType> to be implemented in the static language, with the accompanying code bloat, under-implementation, bugginess, etc.

I think the reference to 0install’s porting is real experience of the difference between Python and OCaml. Caveat: author Thomas Leonard is a seriously expert practitioner.

Would the Delta Chat e-mail client or the Monocles Chat XMPP client help? They both support webapps-in-chat (WebXDC), and a calendar is one of the many simple apps already created. https://webxdc.org/

I suspect writing cross-platform desktop/mobile apps in HTML/CSS/JS was another big pull in this direction.

Many popular languages are bad, yet JS is the one with a widely-deployed OS interface written in it (WebOS).

If free-software/open-source devs hadn’t got caught up chasing all this, there was a chance of replacing JS with other languages in the stack. HTML/CSS/your_language probably for apps initially, even making browsers support plugging in languages later. The docs say anything other than JS is not supported, so no <script type=“text/your_language”>. If only!