Who would want to donate to wikipedia when they know that a lot, probably most, goes to pushing woke politics?
2021 the hosting costs were $2.4 million and they spend well over $100 million each year.
If they were to use their funds to actually drive the site they have enough to fund it for years to come. Most of their funding goes to stuff that has nothing to do with Wikipedia. This is yet another example of an org that has been taken over by political extremists that don't care about the core product and ruins everything.
I am a bit upset about it because I used to donate monthly until I learned about how they actually used the donations. I think this is a very important topic and urge that everyone that donates to Wikimedia stop immedietly.
After reading some of the comments in the arbitration process discussed on this page (see: “Administrator desysopped after RfA comment, arb case in progress”) I would find it hard for anyone to argue, with a straight face, that the most active members of the community do not lean towards a common political ideology.
Whether that influences the quality of the articles, particularly new ones, I cannot say; I was banned as an admin and editor years ago and have zero desire to return. (Although I am wondering if I might enjoy working on some of the non-English wikis, having seen that their communities seem far less internally combatative.)
> FWIW, here's the comment that led to Athaenara getting desysopped, and it amounts to a direct personal attack on an admin candidate for the sole reason that they're trans:
If females are underrepresented among admins, and the comment is factually correct in saying that the representation of women consists mostly of trans women, isn't the trans status of the candidate directly relevant to whether you actually are improving representation? I'm not sure how pointing this out qualifies as a personal attack (which isn't to say the comment isn't problematic in other ways).
Suppose black people are underrepresented among admins, and in trying to increase that representation, they nominate a transracial person who was born white but identifies as black, wouldn't their transracial status be a relevant consideration?
Transracialism isn't as widely accepted, despite the fact that both gender and race are "social constructs", and I think this makes it clear that "trans" status can sometimes be relevant in such questions. If they can be considered for a role because of their trans status, then they can also be rejected from a role because of their trans status.
> It's almost impossible that that could be true based on demographics (50% vs around ~0.5% for women vs trans women)
It would be almost impossible if admin membership were drawn completely randomly from the population. It would also be impossible for over 80% of computer science graduates to be male given the same assumption. Computer science is observably dominated by males though, therefore perhaps membership isn't drawn completely randomly from the population in either case.
I'm not privy to the demographics of Wikipedia's admin membership so I don't know if the comment in question is factually accurate, my point is only that it doesn't follow from the comment alone that it's prejudicial against trans people or that it constituted a direct personal attack.
At least, it's not more prejudicial than accounting for race or gender in a positive context, since some people think any consideration of these factors, positive or negative, is unjustly prejudicial.
I can simultaneously think that’s an abhorrent comment while also pointing out that the vast majority of the arguments (on both sides) regarding her ban were based on her beliefs, not her actions, which is counter to how these processes are supposed to unfold.
I think her action here is to represent her beliefs by submitting an oppositional vote based purely on her ideology and not the actions of the candidate. It makes sense that the ideology is also debated?
This comment section has proven you right. HN: We don't tolerate mindless repetitive criticism of programming languages, we do tolerate mindless repetitive criticism of people.
(I'm referring to the manual reduction of the rank of an article mocking go)
I believe the complaint was that the female representative team had a majority of trans people, so less of a personal attack and more of a general comment about the team.
There's no such "space" at all. This whole idea that trans women are somehow monopolizing spaces that "rightfully belong" to cis women is just a transphobic, hateful slur; especially so when the attack is so clearly targeted at a single, vulnerable trans person. The block was absolutely warranted; it was an egregious violation of a "no personal attacks" rule that's been there since the beginning.
Not going to entertain the plenty of your tangents, just going to say this:
you are wrong, obviously these spaces exist and I'm confident this comment refers to such one, because the context makes sense this way (Occam's Razor), so the block was not warranted at all, not even in the slightest.
> I would find it hard for anyone to argue, with a straight face, that the most active members of the community do not lean towards a common political ideology.
I believe it, but then let's not pretend it is otherwise. Let's not have people fund projects under the false pretence of keep servers online.
> Whether that influences the quality of the articles, particularly new ones, I cannot say
With zero intention of doing so, over time, people's political ideologies will bleed into the content. The organization itself will become more and more hostile towards opposing views.
The neutral topics themselves still have merit, but I suspect not for much longer. We no longer can have an article about master-slave buses without bringing up slavery [1], for example.
I mean, in an article about terminology I would expect to see how is that terminology evolving, and it is undeniable that a lot of entities are moving away from it. Doesn't matter whether you and I agree on the move or not, but it's a reality and it's appropriate to discuss it in that article.
Also, Wikipedia has a lot of pride in being factual, avoiding judgements of value, and backing with already established sources. I think that makes it really hard for ideologies to bleed into content.
Honestly, it seems like one of the main [1] motivations for anyone participate on Wikipedia is to push some ideology or another. I know they theoretically have rules against it, but those are invariably enforced inconsistently and/or only against the most blatant cases.
IMHO, some prime Wikipedia skills are finding bureaucratic cover and being deliberately mute about your motives.
For reference, here's the comment that was deemed sufficient grounds to be desysopped.
> # '''Oppose.''' I think the domination of Wikipedia's woman niche, for lack of a better term, by males masquerading as females as opposed to welcoming actual, genuine, real women who were born and have always been female, is highly toxic. Go ahead, "cancel" me, I don't care. – [[User:Athaenara|Athaenara]] [[User talk:Athaenara| ]] 00:44, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
The important context here is that this is a direct reply to a trans person's application to become an admin on Wikipedia. In other words, they're not objecting to trans ideology or something, they're specifically telling a Wikipedian that they can't be an admin because they're trans.
Except the debate on the ban (which is what I was referring to - the reply itself is pretty much indefensible) became a referendum on ideology rather than a legitimate discussion on a ban due to a harmful action.
Indeed, she is one of many women who are completely fed up of being talked over on women's issues by men who identify as women.
It wasn't really the appropriate forum for her outburst, but I think many of us can empathise with the sentiment she was expressing. The subsequent overreaction to her comment kind of proved her point too.
this is pretty fascinating to me, i thought the whole point of wikipedia was if you see something wrong you hit edit, fix it, and then click save. If you want to add something new the process is the same. Do you now have to pass like a virtual interview to qualify to make a change?
There are power users with more privileges like being able to lock controversial articles, revert defaced articles, and stuff. Those people apply for the position.
I think she using "male" and "female" to refer to sex. In which case, this would be a true statement, regardless of one's opinion on the validity of 'gender identity' as a concept.
Kinda. It's different for different people. Many trans women take hormones hoping they'll help them look like a typical gender-conforming cisgender woman.
One other really common reason is that they are deeply upset by and experience dysphoria due to the effects of masculine puberty, and use hormones and surgery to match their body to how they feel it should be. It helps them feel comfortable in their own skin.
I saw a comic from a trans woman once who had recently started hormones, who noticed she had a miserable mood for a few days every couple of weeks for no apparent reason. She marked them on her calendar and found that it was always the couple of days before her HRT shots. She switched from shots every 14 days to every 10 days, and that fixed it up. So it seems that for trans people, HRT isn't just cosmetic, but has a direct effect on mental well-being that's independent of any noticed physical changes.
Unless they're used in a discussion specifically about human biology, "male" and "female" can be assumed to refer to gender. The terminology isn't neatly separated, unfortunately.
It depends on context. A discussion about "female singers" would probably be referring to gender.
It's useful to have an adjective equivalent of "man" and "woman", so people use "male" and "female" to mean that. My main point isn't to establish one meaning as more common, but to point out that there's not one "correct" meaning. Terminology around sex and gender are not neatly divided and it's not always easily determined what meaning people are using.
> Male is the sex of an organism that produces the gamete (sex cell) known as sperm, which fuses with the larger female gamete, or ovum, in the process of fertilization.
> Female is the sex of an organism that produces the large non-motile ova (egg cells), the type of gamete (sex cell) that fuses with the male gamete during sexual reproduction.
The person I was replying to made a bunch of allegations which had to be based on something, right? If you’re going to attack them for something they did there has to be some kind of specific event you could point to.
This is the key - and it's the failure mode of all political/charity begging across decades and decades.
"We want money to do the things we want to do" doesn't get as much reaction as "holy shit the servers will die tomorrow because you fucks don't ever donate and just suck the sweet sweet wikitit of knowledge".
It's obviously manipulative and at some point it crosses a boundary into immoral. You could add a "My donation is necessary to keep the Wikipedia servers online next year" yes/no question to the donation page and I bet you'd get something high like 80%+ picking yes, because of how the appeals are written.
Only 2.4 of the 112.4 million spent was actually on maintaining the servers themselves. The rest were spent on salaries (55.6 million (!!)), grants (22.8 million (!, why?)), & "Professional services" (11.67 million (again, why?)).
> What does "pushing woke politics" mean?
From what I can gather, it's the promotion of leftist talking points that relegates objectivism & personal liberty in favor of any form of rebalancing, be it racial, political, economical, social, gender-based, or sexual.
My problem with this is that its mainly a phenomenon that's isolated to western countries, with Asian & Middle-eastern countries seemingly skirting by with LGBT+ arrests & atrocities without any major recompense.
> Why is the cost of web hosting so important? Do any comparable organisations spend a more appropriate proportion of their revenue on web hosting?
This is mainly because Wikipedia's donation drives make it look like "Donate to us to keep the servers running", when their own reports make it clear that a lot of the donated funds have been sucked up by the foundation's own internal mechanisms.
> Which political extremists have taken over?
Mainly left-oriented extremists, with the organizations listed from here onwards being examples that were funded by the foundation.
Wikipedia was supposed to be a place where consensus could be reached without falling into the trappings of personal or political bias. Instead, the foundation is now seeking to reduce its own transparency by ceasing the publications of its quarterly reviews:
> Only 2.4 of the 112.4 million spent was actually on maintaining the servers themselves. ... why?
You seem to be arguing that anything other than strictly server maintenance is wrong, immoral or unnecessary. I'm not sure why that would be the case.
I think people may be focusing on these high-level figures a bit too much. The Wikimedia website has other information about what it is they are actually doing.
> Wikipedia's donation drives make it look like "Donate to us to keep the servers running"
Fair enough, I can imagine how that could be an issue. As one opposed to such manipulations in general, a critique of the sort of messaging being used is something that I would welcome.
> Side note: Gish-gallop-style questions are note a conducive way of inviting conversations around a topic.
Thanks, I didn't know that term before. I used a string of blunt questions formatted in that way to be as clear as possible, and because it mirrored the form of the OP's comment.
> You seem to be arguing that anything other than strictly server maintenance is wrong, immoral or unnecessary. I'm not sure why that would be the case.
This is answered by
> Wikipedia's donation drives make it look like "Donate to us to keep the servers running"
Meanwhile I've only ever considered the banners to be annoying and beg-y, but not any sort of claim that they are running out of money. Do the people "scammed" by "help us reach our fundraising goal" also get scammed by those emails about "donald trump's defense fund" and similar? Why didn't they just look up whether wikipedia is running out of money?
I don't understand how a disruptive banner that makes no claims can be considered nefarious.
Anything other than server maintenance or tangibly improving Wikipedia and directly supporting technical projects is unnecessary. Frankly nobody cares about the rest aside from the people getting money as a result and maybe their family and friends.
It’s like Mozilla and all of their non-Firefox/Thunderbird bullshit. Bloat for the sake of bloat.
> > Side note: Gish-gallop-style questions are note a conducive way of inviting conversations around a topic.
> Thanks, I didn't know that term before. I used a string of blunt questions formatted in that way to be as clear as possible, and because it mirrored the form of the OP's comment.
It's also a mis-use of the term. It's for live debates when you just dump a series of questions on the opponent without giving them time to respond, trying to make them look stupid to observers. Doesn't really apply to text like here, when you can take as long as you need to type of the reply.
> You seem to be arguing that anything other than strictly server maintenance is wrong, immoral or unnecessary.
I suspect the OP would be perfectly fine with Wikimedia hiring translators to translate more of the 6.5 million English articles into other languages which are often considerably less developed. Or funding more development of their textbooks, dictionaries and other content. They clearly have ample funds that seem to be going to more dubious ends.
> I suspect the OP would be perfectly fine with Wikimedia hiring translators to translate more of the 6.5 million English articles into other languages which are often considerably less developed. Or funding more development of their textbooks, dictionaries and other content. They clearly have ample funds that seem to be going to more dubious ends.
...I would rather that the translation efforts be done by the community & translation services than by the foundation itself. Pushing the effort of translation onto the foundation gives them authority over the translated material, & consequently authority on the original material itself.
In principle, I would like the scope of work for any foundation to be as minimal as possible, & to be directly related to the direct operations & maintenance of the service being provided. Any additional efforts beyond that invites scope creep & will inevitably bloat any organization with non-related work.
> From what I can gather, it's the promotion of leftist talking points that relegates objectivism & personal liberty in favor of any form of rebalancing, be it racial, political, economical, social, gender-based, or sexual.
This does not read like a good-faith interpretation to me. Small-o objectivism and personal liberty are not at all incompatible with a "woke" perspective on race; I daresay relativism -- particularly moral relativism -- is a minority opinion even among leftists. Nor is it necessarily the case that being woke means you're in favor of enforced rebalancing on the basis of race, ethnicity, etc. Wokeness, in my experience, is far more concerned with issues of justice than with rebalancing (which I take to mean something akin to affirmative action or reparations).
> How do you arrive at the claim that "probably most" donations go to "pushing woke politics"?
In their donations campaigns, they make it sound like most of the donations go to fund the site while it's almost less than 2%. If they were to employ cheaper developers not working in the city centre of SF and stuck with the pure operational costs (Wikipedia is driven by people working for free for the most part anyway) it would be significally less than it is today.
Even if they change nothing how the site is developed and the actual engineering costs, the funding pages are still dishonest since most of the funding does not go to Wikipedia itself.
> What does "pushing woke politics" mean?
They give money, a lot of it, more than double than the operational costs to highly controversial funds that are politically driven and does not lean on anything else. Thus, they fund specific (extreme left wing) political agendas and therefore are pushing politics.
> Why is the cost of web hosting so important? Do any comparable organisations spend a more appropriate proportion of their revenue on web hosting?
Because they make it sound like this is the main reason that they need additional funding when they ask for it on their webpage. It is what they claim (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fex9854WIAIHSun?format=jpg&name=...) they need in order to operate the site. If they strictly just used the funding to operate the site they could do so for many years to come.
> What is ruined?
The sense of having an actual free community that governs factual information for free for everyone. A site where everyone can rejoice over and take pride in the common knowledge of humanity and the accessability that it provides for people in countries that can't easily get this information otherwise.
This is slowly being ruined by people, like I assume yourself, that are so blinded by the current political agendas that they cannot see the damage they're inflicting on the community. I understand that people always have had different political agendas but you used to be able to talk to people on the other side of the spectrum and accept basic physical facts about the world.
Now it seems like we've thrown everything out of the window. People can't even get along over well established scientific facts and this is true for extremists on all sides.
It is hard to trust a source of information if you know the people that controls the information are political extremists. I would want to live in a world where I can trust that the articles on Wikipedia is as objective as can be.
The most recent Annual Reports [0][1] list 43% and 42% "Direct support to websites" and has a brief explanation of how "Keeping the Wikimedia websites online is about more than just servers." But I do note that plural 'Wikimedia websites' and not just 'Wikipedia'. But even if your 2% figure is accurate for wikipedia.org, that's 40% on other websites, some of which is used directly by Wikipedia.
They same reports list ~32% of their expenses as "support to communities" which they say includes "grants, programs, events, trainings, partnerships, tools to augment contributor capacity, and support for the legal defense of editors."
The screenshot you linked [2] doesn't show anything about hosting costs. I think most people would expect keeping any organisation/website running to involve costs other than the cost of the internet connection/servers. But I do realise that I'm talking from a privileged position here.
> This is slowly being ruined by people, like I assume yourself, that are so blinded by the current political agendas that they cannot see the damage they're inflicting on the community. I understand that people always have had different political agendas but you used to be able to talk to people on the other side of the spectrum and accept basic physical facts about the world.
I'm not sure where that's coming from. All I am doing is talking, and calmly asking you to explain some of the points you volunteered in this forum.
> I'm not sure where that's coming from. All I am doing is talking, and calmly asking you to explain some of the points you volunteered in this forum.
First off, I am sorry if I came onto you but the questions you were asking while fair and square was incredible naive and a bit wishy washy so I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that you were a firm supporter of the traditional extremist left wing camp.
Everything about the wikimedia scandal can be viewed either by their own documents or most of the important parts is in the twitter thread posted by me and others in comments.
Most of the costs regarding the websites is probably due to the high salary costs of having developers maintain stuff. This is fine IMO but when you run a not for profit org maybe you should respect peoples money and open an office somewhere else than one of the most expensive cities in the world or simply hire remote developers and other employees.
> Thus, they fund specific (extreme left wing) political agendas and therefore are pushing politics.
Please provide some evidence that they fund specifically "extreme left wing" political agendas. By which you mean, what, soviet-style communism? Gulags for cops? Violent revolution?
> Thus, they fund specific (extreme left wing) political agendas
They fund specific agendas. I suspect you are from the USA, have never come across groups with extreme leftwing views, and have confused touchy-feely leftish liberalism with "extreme left wing".
Certainly they are using the funds to discreetly push a political agenda; I think they shouldn't do that. I think they should invest the capital, and run Wikipedia on the investment income. That's what you do with an endowment; you don't launch a search for ways to give all the money away.
Well, not true. They have employed hundreds of people and pays them ridicolous salaries. Less than half is actually used on actually operating/developing the site. Yes that fund is the most controversial part but it's not the only thing about the topic that is controversial.
2021 website hosting cost $2.4 million - which is less than it did in 2012. Most of the money they recieve by donations goes to something else. As you may see, the site hosting costs are less than what the spend on that controversial fund.
The budget and headcount simply keep growing and growing. At the same time, the Foundation has had eight-figure surpluses for nine of the last ten years:
In the July 2020 – June 2021 financial year, the surplus was close to $90 million (over $50 million increase in Foundation assets, almost $40 million increase in Endowment).
Yet when volunteers complain that software tools need updating and bug-fixing, the Foundation claims there is a lack of resources:
One thing they do spend money on is consultants and "community organizers" trying to figure out how to get people in the developing world to write Wikipedia articles in their languages for free – in part so that Big Tech's voice assistants and Knowledge Graph panels can provide answers in Indian and African languages and extend their monopolies to new markets.
Money actually flowing to people in the developing world however has been a really small amount – less than $4 million in 2020:
Nice ninja edit there, your post previously claimed "about 90% goes to pushing woke politics". As you can see below, enumerated in excruciating detail in the annual reports if you'd like to dig in, the biggest component of Wikimedia's expenditure is simply paying the engineers that keep the site running and roll out improvements like the new UI, visual editing, etc. The actual hosting bill (servers, bandwidth, etc) is only a tiny fraction of that cost.
Yeah I get that I exaggerated my first sentence and thus edited it but it's not that far from the truth.
According to their own site, https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goe... about 43% goes to the websites. This is less than half. I imagine that most of these salaries are ridicolously high where they could employ cheaper devs and get an actual good representation they chose a SF office with SF employees and give them huge salaries. And since I have learned about this fund and other controversial topics about their employee count etc I question this figure as well. I am not convinced that they have devs for about $50 million per year.
It's fine if you operate a for-profit company but when it's a not for profit organisation the ridicolous spending seems a bit disrespectful to the people that help shape wikipedia to what it is today.
I've reviewed several grants and I remain deeply worried we are spending money on stuff that is a poorly disguised attempt to raid WMF coffers. A lot of grants are 1) being used for stuff that has ZERO connection with Wikimedia movement, 2) have little to no accountaiblity (people promise to do stuff, if they fail, I see no mechanism for money to be returned to WMF) and 3) seem to have very inflated costs (ex. one project I remember well asked for ~6k$ for open access publishing, whereas I know that the average costs of OA in this very field is usually under $2k, and a lot of similar research is published at no cost yet still using OA model). While I am sure some grants are being spent on worthy causes, the amount of problems I see here is very worrying. I am glad this issue is making more waves. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 11:44, 31 October 2022 (UTC)
So supporting radical left wing people with millions of dollars for output of political propaganda does not? Would you be as apologetic if Wikimedia would donate money to people who spread nazi propaganda as well? If nothing makes them extremists, then no one is extremist.
Of course it's all subjective but this is kind of what I mean that people like this destroys. If we, the other people standing by, cannot even get along to call shit out when it appears then we are royalty effed.
The original claim for which I asked a citation was "This is yet another example of an org that has been taken over by political extremists"
The link you provided makes the claim "Wikipedia pages are biased in their descriptions".
Those claims are not the same, thus your reference does not support the claim. I don't really care either way, but it is dishonest to refer to sources which don't even support the claim.
We can't agree because you appear unable to support the original claim, use dishonest and emotionally manipulative discussion techniques ("Of course it's all subjective but this is kind of what I mean that people like this destroys. If we, the other people standing by, cannot even get along to call shit out when it appears then we are royalty effed.") and Whataboutism ("Would you be as apologetic if Wikimedia would donate money to people who spread nazi propaganda as well?") to attempt to spread your worldview.
May be referring to this part of the thread[1] linked in the article
> Wikimedia gave $250,000 to Borealis's Racial Equity in Journalism Fund. That money was then cascaded down to a dozens of ideologically aligned news outlets across the US.
> Thus, the money you give to keep Wikipedia online is diverted to bankroll the inescapable American culture war.
Here is the message wikipedia has on its donation page:
> We'll get straight to the point: Today we ask you to defend Wikipedia's independence.
> We're a non-profit that depends on donations to stay online and thriving, but 98% of our readers don't give; they simply look the other way. If everyone who reads Wikipedia gave just a little, we could keep Wikipedia thriving for years to come. The price of a cup of coffee is all we ask.
> When we made Wikipedia a non-profit, people told us we’d regret it. But if Wikipedia were to become commercial, it would be a great loss to the world.
> Wikipedia is a place to learn, not a place for advertising. The heart and soul of Wikipedia is a community of people working to bring you unlimited access to reliable, neutral information.
> We know that most people will ignore this message. But if Wikipedia is useful to you, please consider making a donation of €5, €20, €50 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.
Whether or not one likes the causes they give the money to, if they spend $100 million and they only use $2.4 million for hosting, and they also give money for political activism, then this is a misleading message, making it sound like they are on the cusp of not being able to cover the costs that keep the site online unless they start having ads on wikipedia.
Oh I completely agree, misleading is the best way I'd describe this message as well.
But the idea that they're "going woke" or "going political" with their money because they support BIPOC journalists and presenting that as a waste of money ($250k, about a month of hosting), that's where you completely lose me.
Also I'm pretty sure Wikimedia does way more than just hosting.
Well, they apparently did donate to some woke-adjacent pseudoscience, which seems like a waste of money to me. Regardless, I agree with you that the question isn't where some $0.25 million went, but why they are spending $100 million and still asking for donations with that misleading message, while a few years ago they were spending a small fraction of that even though their hosting costs were actually higher back then. It increasingly looks like Wikimedia as an organisation has a parasitical relationship with Wikipedia, doing enough to keep its host alive with a small fraction of its budget, while benefiting from the work of volunteers and not even fixing longstanding issues with the software that the volunteers ask to be fixed. Even beyond fixing bugs, I'd be happy to add to their $100 million budget if they actually did useful things with it. I can easily think of 10 features that would improve Wikipedia. For instance, Wikipedia pages such as "list of countries by GDP per capita" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...) are useful, but the table UI is not that great and the map is a non-interactive PNG image. For $100 million, why can't we hover over the country and see its name and the exact GDP per capita number?
Most of the money from the Knowledge Equity Fund so far has gone to organisations in the U.S. I think that indicates how much genuine thinking about diversity is taking place in the Wikimedia Foundation.
I apologise, I'm sure there's a better, more cool-headed way to discuss giving money to a marginalized population to make a foothold in a marginalized field with someone that views that action as "woke politics".
I'm sure we've could've met in the middle (like only supporting some BIPOC journalists) if only I wasn't so gosh-darn divisive. My bad.
When people accuse someone of being "woke", I believe they do not mean literally that they consider those people to be more awake to social justice issues, that they disagree with fixing injustice, and they want it to continue. Rather, it can be an accusation of performative social virtue, a distaste for sanctimonious platitudes, or a disagreement regarding the source of a particular systemic issue and how to fix it.
Now, you can disagree with this, it is obviously impossible to tell for sure without reading people's minds, and many people will throw out accusations of "wokism" with little to no merit to the point where you lose the will to engage with any of them, but if you do argue against these accusations of "wokism" as endorsements of bigotry, you aren't actually engaging with what people are telling you.
In that sense, the "middle" between "woke" and "bigoted" isn't "slightly bigoted", it's "not woke and not bigoted".
Ah, so the middle is to just do nothing in favour of boosting marginalised groups, otherwise you're "too woke" because those marginalised groups tend to lean left? No, I don't think I can agree on that. Because, as I stated multiple times so far, marginalised people's existence != political.
Being a bigot is a choice (and using the term woke unironically is a pretty good, albeit not perfect tell), being black is not. I couldn't care less about finding a common ground with bigotry. I have zero interest in debating them, and I have zero interest in debating your "centrist position" to do nothing to elevate BIPOC people's position in marginalised fields. Hope that clears up my comment for you!
The is the most bad faith arguing I've seen here in a while. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The people that want to support those valuable causes should find their own supporters instead of hijacking the supporters of an encyclopedia without telling them. It's as simple as that and has nothing to do with being bigoted, it's about feeling cheated when you were asked for money for one thing and then they used it for another. You're intentionally being difficult because you believe you're right and that trumps everything else, but it doesn't.
> Ah, so the middle is to just do nothing in favour of boosting marginalised groups ... I have zero interest in debating your "centrist position" to do nothing to elevate BIPOC people's position in marginalised fields
Doing nothing might be a lot more conducive to minority achievement than some of the stuff that was ultimately funded by these grants. Such as SeRCH's YouTube videos about "intersectional scientific method" and "hyperspace".
A BIPOC receiving a grant is not the issue, the issue, and what might be considered "woke" is to give the grant because they are BIPOC. That's "equity".
Equity means awarding people based on immutable characteristics and makes every interaction in society a racist/sexist struggle.
Anyway, you may be in favor of it, which is fine. Just know that it's an incredibly unpopular movement that is widely rejected internationally, and also in most developed nations across the political spectrum, minus the far-left.
Even the idea to call said people "marginalized" is insulting.
What is this BIPOC voting population (I just learned this term today)? Are we talking of the united states of america or does this somehow apply to other countries? Don't these journalists push american viewpoints anyway, and aren't they much better funded than almost any newspaper outside the USA? Why should most of this money going to one of the richest countries in the world?
I wonder whether you would post a comment similar to this if it turned out that the donation money had been funnelled to right-wing think tanks and had then subsequently been distributed to right-leaning commentators?
So because they're donating to your political leaning, it's fine. Do realise that half the population leans the opposite way to you, and you'll see why encouraging more organisations to get political is a disastrous thing for society.
It's far more than 50%. When specifically considering "woke" politics, centrists and moderate progressives reject it too. I'd say it's in the range of 70-90% rejecting.
Pretty much anybody outside California rejects it.
Cause being BIPOC while in journalism isn't a political ideology and their existence is not "woke" nor "political". On top of that I happen to believe a wider range of voices within journalism is incredibly important and see nothing controversial there.
That seems way better to me than giving money to those hostile towards damn near every marginalized and underrepresented minority. Does it not seem that way to you?
It's not my fault (nor is it Wikimedia's) that this specific historically marginalized and oppressed group of people as a collective leans a certain... less confederate-flag-waving way.
Were they supposed to find a hypothetical centrist group of BIPOC journalists that will therefore then over-represent right-wing BIPOC population?
If you see one side involving millions of people is portrayed as monsters, you should doubt such portrayal (people overall are good, sadists who enjoy human suffering are tiny minority, most evil is from systems/institutions not individuals).
Here's personal account (one data point) of what I mean then I use the word "wokeism:" good intentions are subverted to censor people, to distract from what is important, kindness/openness is weaponized e.g., cancel culture is applied to university professors for voicing scientific truth.
The mere fact that the word has been appropriated to mean something negative to some should be a big ol' red flag for those who are skeptical about its necessity.
It isn't and wasn't ever about divisiveness or negativity, the whole point is to include as many people of diverse backgrounds as possible in as many things as possible, and "woke" politics could be described as ideas and policies that support this concept of inclusivity.
Nothing about "woke" ideology portrays anyone as a "monster", full stop.
Millions of people are monsters. Millions of people are sociopaths.
People who use the term "woke" as a pejorative universally are stupid, terrible people, or they're manipulating stupid, terrible people. This is an absolute truth.
> If you see one side involving millions of people is portrayed as monsters, you should doubt such portrayal
Except that history is chock full of cases where millions of people collectively acted as monsters. People may overall want to be good, but seem to be very easily persuaded that "good" involves genociding all those "others".
> most evil is from systems/institutions not individuals
If those institutions perpetuating evil are made of up millions of people, then who cares? Your claim is that "Wokeism" is obviously wrong because it says 40 to 60 million Americans are acting like assholes, when in fact they're simply all individual die-hard followers of the asshole party? You're just shuffling definitions around to get around the obvious point that the term "woke" is now a get-out-of-racism-free card. (Or sexism, classism, homophobia, you name it)
> cancel culture
Yes, all those woke people, banning and burning books ...
To the first part, knowledge as a collection of facts is subjective, so the statement "the most subjective academic fields" is already false. The humanities long ago realized that the meaning of statements like "line A intersects line B" depend heavily on implicit assumptions about what you mean by 'lines' and 'intersect'. And even when the math used is unambiguous, the communication and interpretation of it is always done by a human with cultural biases that are liable to make "straight Euclidean line" the unspoken default. The only time it's objective is when the expert is communicating to other experts with the same contextual biases.
To the second part, the humanities are fond of condemning a system that perpetuates systemic violence. That rich white men benefit from
and created it is a historical - and in the most abstract discussions, coincidental - fact. It's only human nature to be uncomfortable with criticism of a system that's done you no harm or done you well. But the political humanities are concerned with you to the degree that you refuse to acknowledge or take action against this system. The white male is the byproduct of a historical examination, not the starting point.
Is a Thatcherite political columnist exactly an unbiased source? That self-promotional “law” is conspicuously unsupported by evidence and seems hard to reconcile with the hard right resurgence in various around the world.
Interesting - I'd never heard of that quote, but I've definitely observed the same about online forums. But it's more like - the more moderated online forums become, the more left-wing they become.
"O'Sullivan's First Law" seems like nonsense to me. Here are some counterexamples:
Centrist political parties.
Every small company I have worked for. (Large companies tend to be performatively social-justice-y and economically right-wing.)
My local public library.
Every choir, orchestra, etc., with which anyone in my family has been involved.
The Church of England. (I mention this just because of the presence of the Episcopal Church in the quote. The CoE contains very left-wing bits and very right-wing bits and plenty in between, but as a whole I don't think it can reasonably be described either as left-wing or as right-wing.)
I think the only way you can make the "Law" true is to define either "left-wing" or "right-wing" or both broadly enough that everything is either "left-wing" or "right-wing".
(I wondered who O'Sullivan was, and noted that a web search brought up a Conservapedia page. In case anyone has forgotten how ... distinctive ... the ideas there are, I remark that their examples of O'Sullivan's First Law include Fox News, CPAC, and Pat Robertson. Anyway, it turns out that O'Sullivan is a former editor of the National Review, another thing that's on Conservapedia's list of Things That Are Now Left-Wing, and he named the "law" after himself.)
Even if that were true (it doesn't seem like you're able to substantiate this)...
Good.
"Woke" politics (better known as "anything conservatives don't like") are the only sane politics taking place right now. Perfect? No. Actually trying to help the people who need it most? Yes.
Who would want to donate to wikipedia when they know that a lot, probably most, goes to pushing woke politics?
Hold up a second. The last time I saw an article whining about political bias on Wikipedia the complaint was that Wikipedia were a bunch of incel neckbeards and/or Nazis. Has something changed?
Wikipedia is basically the Wikipedia volunteers. Anyone can volunteer, so unsurprisingly some of the volunteers are "odd".
This article is about WMF, which is run by paid employees, not volunteers. They reflect the political posture of their employer, not the consensus of the Wikipedia volunteers.
Things have changed a LOT in the last 15 years. There are no neckbeards left on Wikipedia. It's all purple-haired, blue check marked ideologues now. Everyone else gets banned.
As far as I can tell from the OP and it's cited links[1], in 2021 they had around $160 in total revenue. $5 million of that went to the Tides foundation, the thing I think you are describing as "pushing woke politics". Another $50 million of that revenue was simply left over as unspent surplus.
Are you talking about other expenditures as "pushing woke politics"? On what basis are you claiming that a "lot, probably most" of donations to go "pushing woke politics"?
(Around 1/3rd of donations (still not "probably most") remain simply unspent, which is kind of weird, but not about "pushing woke politics").
> Who would want to donate to wikipedia when they know that about 90%+ goes to pushing woke politics?
Lots of people! The advancing of fashionable progressive causes is a far more popular thing to do today than hosting free online encyclopaedias. Wikipedia would arguably get more donations if they stuck a Black Lives Matter logo on their banner ads.
> Lots of people! The advancing of fashionable progressive causes is a far more popular thing to do today than hosting free online encyclopaedias. Wikipedia would arguably get more donations if they stuck a Black Lives Matter logo on their banner ads.
I don't think so. Just because the social activists are vocal does not mean that they are numerous.
In fact, looking at raw numbers, they're obviously in the minority: wikipedia donators outnumber actual BLM donators, so there are obviously more people interested in donating to wikipedia than to BLM.
If the wikimedia foundation were honest in their request for donations ("We plan to spend this on political activism"), they'd get fewer donators.
As mentioned previously, I applied and got denied. For obvious reasons I don't really want to go into details, but the experience I have of the swedish police force is that it is completely meaningless to even report things to them.
In the UK the next step would be to approach either the Police and Crime Commissioner (an elected person who oversees the local Police service), or the local Member of Parliament, or to seek a Judicial Review via the courts.
If you’re genuinely at risk then surely this can be established and must become actionable?
My gf bought a dell xps 15" with OLED and an i9 processor. I think it was reasonably priced compared to competitors but it just so happened that her screen broke, or it got loose.
She called Dell and they sent a new one so she could transfer her work over to the new machine and picked up the other one a few days after. All and all it was a good customer experience.
In my view, it seems like it has good build quality (in general, stuff can happen) and good customer support. Although she will never run linux on it. This website reads like a frustrated developer who decided to take matters into his own hands. I am very doubtful that this is the common experience, at least if you order directly from them. Sure it may have driver issues but at least they have an option to ship it with linux and without paying the windows tax, most companies don't even do that.
I personally use a Thinkpad t460p from 2013 that runs Ubuntu and still works great honestly, even the battery life. I will soon upgrade to a desktop instead of a laptop so that I can run more heavy duty stuff like training models.
One thing that Kotlin got going for it is the tooling. I mean, the creator of Kotlin creates some of the best programming tools out there so I'd imagine (without actual experience of Kotlin) that it has great tooling.
Sometimes, the tooling is even more important than language features IMO. It makes developers move quicker, find bugs easier and so on. I like the idea of Kotlin, that it can compile to jvm bytecode, javascript and native.
So in essence, I can use the same language everywhere in the true meaning of the word.
> Sometimes, the tooling is even more important than language features IMO. It makes developers move quicker, find bugs easier and so on. I like the idea of Kotlin, that it can compile to jvm bytecode, javascript and native.
The only thing I'd worry about is Java overtaking it.
Do you remember Coffeescript? There was a point in time where it had impressive adoption, and quite a bit of buzz. But then Javascript added features, and all of a sudden the tooling burden associated with Coffeescript just didn't make sense any more.
With Oracle's 6 month release schedule, that's a distinct possibility. Especially since Java can no longer rest on its laurels as a language (if Oracle doesn't want it to become Cobol 2).
* Android is a massive platform, and Android is basically stuck on JDK8 (or JDK11 with desugaring, wooo).
* iOS compatibility-ish. KMM is not ideal and mostly generates ObjC compatible objects (so generics are mostly screwed for Swift and writing iOS code is not ideal, but even being able to define common and enforced contracts is cool. iOS benefiting from projects like SQLDelight is super cool)
* Jetbrains hedged their bets, and Kotlin/Multiplatform is a solid option. Coupled with Jetbrains Compose for UIs as well as having the entire Java ecosystem available is very solid. Compilation for so many platforms, directly to native executables is cool.
* Java is still very slow to evolve. Kotlin has had data classes for a long time, Java recently added records. Inline classes offer some nice type safety at basically zero costs. Coroutines and structured concurrency are a beautiful way to work, and Project Loom would only build the foundations of that. Context extensions (while terrifying in the potential for spaghetti code they offer) are a useful feature, reified generics have some great potential.
Now, Kotlin has its disadvantages too. Compilation times are not that great (hopefully K2 fixes this partly), but it's relatively safe and is kind of more than just a JVM language by now.)
I agree with everything you said except for "Java is still very slow to evolve."
New Java versions are cut every six months since 2017 and since then has added a significant amount of new features, syntactical sugar, APIs, et cetera. Not only that, but they've also have been pretty aggressive IMO in deprecating and removing legacy. Very very different than the Java I remember working in years ago.
The hesitancy in jumping beyond JRE8 is the large backwards compatibility road bumps in JDK9-11, and now again with 17/JavaEE->Jakarta. I wish Java would continue to add new features but be a lot more considerate of avoiding, completely, migration headaches.
We are migrating Java 8 -> 17 now and it’s been a right royal pain. I’m glad we didn’t jump to 11 LTS, and instead make one big leap. It might be a very long time before we do another LTS upgrade if they keep making poor migration choices.
The only relatively bumby migration was 8->9. After that it is a very smooth ride, and that bumpiness was the price for the accumulated tech debt/slow down from the end of the Sun era.
Well, my understanding is (but I have yet to personally experience) the migration from 17 -> 18+ is rough because of all the javax.* packages being renamed jakarta.*
Which likely means touching a pretty significant portion of your codebase for the upgrade, and then who knows what 3rd party libraries you depend on are expecting...
So it may be as simple as Find/Replace for some folks, for others, it might be a deep dark rabbit hole.
Not breaking things used to be Java's MO. Yes, that means a ton of legacy cruft built up over the years... but we used to be able to depend on Java to "Just Work".
Perhaps some of this is necessary. After all, the C# folks seem to have no problem breaking everything to add new features... but I'd assert the Java community as a whole is much less tolerant of breaking changes and rapid deployment of features.
There are entire segments of the industry that has never touched any javax package - while no doubt widespread, I do believe that it is still a very fair price to pay, and none of these changes were even half as problematic as for example the python 2->3 migration. So I don’t know, I’m fairly sure it is impossible to keep a platform alive with even less/smaller impact breaking changes.
In HN a while back, an Oracle dev pointed out that the evolution is slow for a reason. Which confirmed slow. New releases every 6 months, but not that much in the way of changes.
This isn't criticism of the fact of it or going into why it is or whether it should be that way. It's just a statement of fact.
You're correct of course, but to back up the parents comment, they do have a habit of implementing things other than the low hanging fruit that developers are frustrated not having, leading the drive towards other jvm langs
Functional/SAM interfaces (transforming interfaces with a single method into a simple lambda), pleasant usage of lambdas (last lambda parameter can be put outside of the call like(this) { ... }, leading to a language that lends itself really well to building a DSL, coroutines were not a low hanging fruit but absolutely are infinitely more pleasant to use than RxJava, operator overload including invoke(), ranges that are pleasant to use (0 .. 10).forEach { }, or when (floatVariable) { in 0.0f .. 1.0f -> ... }, pattern-ish matching with when (not quite full on functional language powerful, and I believe that Java is not only catching up to it but making their switch quite a bit better), a standard lib that is packed full of extremely useful and consistently named methods, extension functions, delegation (if you inherited a SDK that has a piss poor interface, you can simply make a SDKWrapper(val internalSdk: SDK): SDK by internalSdk, which means that it will automatically implement it, and you can then have your wrapper do whatever around it (logging, better functions, DI, etc.)))
Kotlin is truly a pleasant language, both when you don't know it (although it can look a bit symbol soup-y at times for juniors), and when you fully know it.
Just browse through the Kotlin standard library. It's basically just a set of mappings to the Java standard library with a whole lot of extension functions to make it easier to use.
I don’t know how well it works, but we have seen these kinds of projects, and they seldom work as is. Not sure how well Scala Native works, even though it predates Kotlin’s try. (Though scala.js is surprisingly good!)
But do you really think that a relatively young language like Kotlin with minuscule adoption (compared to java) will be better at this game then Java?
Java has a very good compiler to Js maintained and used heavily by Google (j2cl, part of their closure compiler toolkit), which can also output obj-c code. These are/were used heavily for porting their shared libs between basically all platforms.
For native, Graal is a very cool way forward benefiting all JVM languages (as well as scripting languages, its polyglot features are insane).
> Java is still very slow to evolve
Is it a problem? The majority of developers don’t like running after the language, even though it may seem so based on online hype circles.
Well enough, provided you stay within the known bounds. Hell, some people at Touchlab even went as far as porting Jetpack Compose to work on iOS (which, uh, I would not recommend in its current state), and it technically works. I probably wouldn't recommend writing all of your app logic in Kotlin, but being able to share the data layer is amazing.
>But do you really think that a relatively young language like Kotlin with minuscule adoption (compared to java) will be better at this game then Java?
It depends on where you're looking. Most modern android development will most likely be done in Kotlin. Backend work, for things started relatively recently, Kotlin is not surprising. But mostly, Java does not make iOS compatibility a goal. Java tell you "get a JVM and run our shit" (or get GraalVM and have basically an embedded JVM). Kotlin has two sides, and Kotlin/Native does not depend on the JVM.
>Java has a very good compiler to Js maintained and used heavily by Google (j2cl, part of their closure compiler toolkit), which can also output obj-c code. These are/were used heavily for porting their shared libs between basically all platforms.
j2cl still brings in a light JVM to the Web. Kotlin does not. It provides interop to the JS APIs as well as its own tech, but it's not meant to take your Kotlin code and immediately run it on the web (which is an awful, awful idea). You're still meant to write your browser specific code, your android specific code, your x86 specific code, etc. In any language you want, even! Write it in Kotlin/JS, or let your typescript consume the Kotlin/JS bindings. However, you can have a common base that'll work everywhere.
> For native, Graal is a very cool way forward benefiting all JVM languages (as well as scripting languages, its polyglot features are insane).
Graal is an extremely cool project, but with different goals. Write once, run everywhere is a lofty goal, but it only works on very similar platforms (Windows/Linux/OSX). Kotlin has taken a Write once, specialize what is needed approach.
> even went as far as porting Jetpack Compose to work on iOS
Well, Gluon promises the same for JavaFX apps and there is a sample app actually downloadable from the AppStore.
> j2cl still brings in a light JVM to the Web
Not at all, it compiles to very optimized Javascript. Oh, and I forgot to mention that there is also teavm, which is not a VM contrary to its name -- this latter transforms java byte code so it works with guest languages as well.
Swagger + OpenAPI generates data classes for you, and maybe a Retrofit/Ktor/Whatever interface. It does not handle repositories, data fetching, caching and combining, it does not handle a SQLite database.
Which dependencies ? If you already have Android devs, on the iOS side it adds a single swift package, and similarly so on Android.
> It does not handle repositories, data fetching, caching and combining, it does not handle a SQLite database.
right, but you can use that to autogenerate all those things (have done it before) with a few additional tools (code templates) and have it all (repositories, fetching, caching etc) automated (there is a limit of course, combining might be a bit hard in that case)
this is really useful though because now you can deploy to more platforms in their native languages using idiomatic code, and switching to newer techniques, e.g async/await can be done instantly just by updating the source template which any team can download and compile themselves
> Which dependencies ? If you already have Android devs, on the iOS side it adds a single swift package, and similarly so on Android.
for ios, its including basically the whole kotlin runtime and additional support (kotlinx-datetime, etc) in that single package (xcframework), then add a lot of data classes and things start to add up... for us its one of the biggest single dependencies on our ios app
The thing is, they're all optional. You're never going to use any of these features if you don't need them. Your code can stay as a nested list of calls. But put them all together, and you can have code that is super explicit about what it needs to do, without having to re-pass things that are already there.
> Do languages really need new features every N months to stay relevant?
I think a fixed N month release schedule is much healthier than what Java did before, which was wait until everyone was on the bus in order to ship, which resulted in multi-year delays.
No, but fortunately Java doesn’t do that. They have long running projects, when one is nearing completion it will be put in preview in the upcoming release. No rush to make it into anything, it’s ready when it’s ready. (Which should be copied by the rest of the industry as well)
Depends. Are the features making things better, or just more complicated?
Even if it makes things better only for, say, 10% of users, but doesn't make it worse for the other 90%... the users will take that every N months for as long as the language authors can do it.
No, if you are targeting a different platform you can't use JVM libraries.
If your target is JavaScript, you can use JavaScript dependencies (sort of: they won't have any type bindings so you will need to code then yourself) but you can't use any JVM libraries on it.
As other said, yep, you do not get the Java ecosystem if your target is native executables (or JS). there are alternatives like kotlinx-datetime, kotlinx-serialization, the kotlin stdlib. However, if you know you're going to stay on a JVMable target, feel free to not use Kotlin/Multiplatform, but regular JVM Kotlin libraries
IIRC the main appeal of CoffeeScript was syntactic sugar like lambda expressions etc that were missing in ECMAScript 5.
I think ECMAScript 6 made most of the appeal of CoffeeScript obsolete
When CoffeeScript came out, I vowed never to write plain Javascript again. I kept to that vow for a couple years, but eventually broke it when ECMA 6 came out. Really the only thing that put real technical justification behind CoffeeScript was the double arrow function, and maybe the neat class syntax. Beyond that CoffeeScript is just prettier. Even though I was in charge of choosing the technologies, you got to skate where the puck is going, and the puck was clearly not staying with CoffeeScript.
ECMA 6 copied all the good parts out of both CoffeeScript and jQuery, effectively obsoleting both. Modern JavaScript is almost unrecognisably different from what it used to be, and that's a very good thing.
"Our codebase is in CoffeeScript" tended to draw grimaces for years before Typescript came around.
And no, they serve totally different purposes. Coffeescript tried to make JS syntax and variable scoping behavior non-shit, while Typescript adds static typing while changing very little about the core language syntax.
It was a thing for a hot minute in the early 2010s, before ES6, TypeScript, and the React/Angular/Vue trifecta came along and solidified what JavaScript would be from ~2015 onwards.
It was the default for a while for Rails apps and Wiki tells me GitHub & Dropbox adopted it before moving to Typescript. I think for Rails shops it was popular and there was a brief time where it looked like it might become the thing to do on the front end. But I don't think it ever got the interop with existing JS right.
Ultimately, improvements to JS came along and took the wind out of CoffeeScript's sails. Then TypeScript came along and killed whatever interest remained.
Don't forget about WASM as another platform; it's coming as well. An experimental version actually ships with 1.7; it's just a bit unstable and under documented and very much a work in progress.
I think Oracle is catching up slower than Kotlin has been evolving in terms of new language features. Most of the stuff they add to Java (including most of the stuff they are talking about adding), Kotlin has been doing for quite some time. Kotlin is pushing out minor releases about every 3-4 months and major ones pretty much every year. Basically, they do 2-3 minor versions in between major ones. The pace is relentless.
If anything, Kotlin could use an LTS release because it's actually getting hard to keep up with the ecosystem.
A slower pace might be helpful with that. The main issue with frequent releases is that many libraries take weeks or even months to update and don't necessarily work well (or at all) with newer Kotlin versions. I've had repeated issues with e.g. code generation plugins requiring specific version of Kotlin breaking because some other library suddenly requiring something newer. So that then starts blocking a lot of library updates. We've actually put some effort in unblocking some of this for some of the dependencies we have by creating pull requests.
But I'm excited about the next 1-2 years. I expect Kotlin native to stabilize and grow beyond just being a thing for IOS. I also expect wasm support will become usable in that time frame. I hope to be able to use it with WASI for edge networking or serverless stuff. And maybe even some command line tools. IMHO Kotlin has potential for data engineering as well. There is actually jupyter support for Kotlin. And some machine learning frameworks. It's becoming a proper full stack language.
Yes that's right. In fact, Kotlin really works well with the IDE. But they didn't spend as much time in creating a language with a good and sound theoretical foundation. This works in the short time but shows its flaws later. Java is a bit better here (but quite slow though).
So yeah, I can see Java potentially overtaking Kotlin.
Do you know of any good backend web frameworks for Kotlin? I would wish for something like FastAPI for python. Kotlin may actually be a great fit for a service I want to build and I hadn't really thought of it as an option until now.
If you want something old and battle-tested, Spring Boot works just fine in Kotlin. I found the extreme OO design kinda off-putting, but once I got over it I had a great time with it.
KTor [0] is the 'native' web framework for Kotlin, and there's also a full-stack framework built around it that just hit version 1.0, KWeb [1].
Well I care more about simplicity and easy to develop in rather than battle-tested. Something like the Javalin or http4k would probably suit me the best.
Of course, I have checked Ktor before, but I don't know if I particularly fancy the way they are structuring stuff.
My main issue with the java ecosystem is that it's way to enterprisy for my taste. Everything is so unnecessary complex and hard to reason about, but I will take a good hard look at Kotlin before making my decision. The thing is that I am really interested in the native compilation that Kotlin offers that would be very beneficial for me and the only reason behind picking Python otherwise would be that it is a nice language and already installed on the linux environments it will run in.
Basically I will have a big api and drop (preferrably) a single binary to some machines that will talk to the api. These machines will generally be outside of my control. I have looked a bit on Rust but it seems a bit too low level and hard to work with. I have looked at Deno because it can compile down to a binary but using javascript for this project seems like a bad choice. So I chose Python at first because it seemed easy to get going with, had great tooling and is already installed in the environments I will be dropping a script in.
Hard to imagine anything less "enterprisy" than http4k. Zero dependencies, totally modular, and can easily produce a single binary that contains your web app and the web server itself. No Spring, no Tomcat, no app servers necessary. Install a reverse proxy in front to handle HTTPS. Same goes for ktor.
A few years ago, I used dropwizard for both a service that ran locally and for the cloud backend at a startup. Kotlin meshed very well and we never encountered any issues with either. Also just worked on a project that used micronaut which was less mature and not very intuitive, but did support Scala and Kotlin (a goal in that project).
That this has 5 different answers in 30 minutes is the problem I have with the Java/Kotlin ecosystem. There's just so much to figure out before you write a line of code.
I filed an issue for Scala in 2009, that was answered like "sorry, this particular Java code cannot be used in Scala". In 2012 it still wasn't fixed.
I cannot find the issue now, but I remember I was trying to use gae-mapreduce-java library (built on top of Hadoop interfaces). It couldn't compile with Scala.
The biggest advantage of a statically typed language over a dynamic one is the tooling. Refactoring statically typed code, after working with JavaScript for a few years, feels like magic because the tools just make it work
No, I don't believe it is. If you stay you won't be more appreciated, get a higher salary or other benefits.
I have rather seen the opposite. Each time I have switched companies I've always gotten big pay rise. If I wouldn't I would still be earning like half of what I make today.
The issue is that companies rewards moving every 2 years and as long as that is the case, that is probably what I will do.
