It looks more like Desktop GL might move to mobile devices soon. nvidia seems to be pushing really hard in that direction. But it'll remain to be seen where things go.
Eh, a lot of the recent articles on hackernews about GL have been fairly low-quality and were badly researched (like the guy who complained about timer queries blocking, because he blatantly didn't understand how CPU/GPU communication works) No need to buy into the FUD.
- if you use core profile, modern GL, there aren't a lot of quirks. It's a fairly nice API overall.
- if you target reasonably modern drivers, you won't typically find many inconsistencies and issues. If you do something unusual (like the latest idtech with megatexture) you might run into driver issues -- but that's just how things are, it's not the fault of the API. New functionality needs testing, and GPUs are still constantly evolving.
- extensions are not useless. There are a huge amount of absolutely fantastic extensions. This is, IMO, the main strength of GL over D3D (and other APIs), which does not have a mechanism like this. If you know the hardware supports a certain functionality, there will most certainly be a GL extension to exploit that functionality, even if you can't with D3D.
- in particular, KHR_debug is the best thing since sliced bread. It allows you to have the GPU driver diagnose your program for you, and give you hints such as:
- things you do wrong
- things you should do differently to increase performance
- general debug information
- information on memory usage and where your buffers are stored
No, that would make no sense whatsoever. You seem to be somewhat misinformed about GL...
* OpenGL core profile is quite clean and lean. Both apple and intel have already decided not to implement OpenGL compatibility (where all the cruft sits). There are still a few things that can and should be cleaned up, but it's pretty great already.
* Adding an additional API means there will be YET another thing vendors have to support and will be able to screw up, in addition to the already existing plethora of APIs: GL, D3D, DDX/GDI, OpenCL, VDPAU [or something like it], CUDA [or something like it], OpenMAX, Mantle. OpenVG, ... -- nobody is going to drop OpenGL or D3D for something like mantle, because that'd instantly lose you all your customers. Not even AMD.
* AMDs mantle (which is, as far as we know, just a specific thing to their cards and not even portable to any other cards) is not an attempt to make things more stable, but an attempt by AMD to gain more control over the market (something they are in a good position to attempt right now, as they have control of the console market) and to push into the direction of a low-level interface that is strongly tied to their hardware model. Mantle as an API is (as far as we know) even lower-level than GL and D3D, and hence not very suited for most programmers and applications -- there are a lot more things you can do wrong with it.
Don't believe all the FUD you read on hackernews. The main issue with OpenGL right now is that some vendors are doing a shitty job at it, which is mainly due to the heavy influence microsoft had on the gaming industry for a long time. GL is now making a major comeback due to linux, apple and mobile platforms gaining popularity, which will help rectify these issues over time.
Mantle is also not that important on Consoles - there you have thin driver layer, so Mantle would not help that much. Probably it will disappear in some years/months.
I use chromium with a 5760*1080 resolution, and I frequently have > 150 tabs open across 3 browser windows, and I really have no complaints. I also occasionally peruse or develop WebGL/ASM.js/emscripten applications, so I suppose I fit into your description as someone who is "pushing the web browser hard".
All functionality I need to access quickly is accessible through shortcuts, so I don't typically need to access the "hamburger-menu" very often. The only thing I really use it for is to open the settings tab.
It's a matter of perspective -- to someone who has taken a university class on lambda calculus/on logic that had a chapter on lambda calculus (e.g. as part of a M.Sc. in mathematical logic or CS), anything in RWH would probably seem extremely basic and superficial. It doesn't even introduce most of the basic things a first chapter in a book on lambda calculus would probably introduce you to.
My degree was also heavy on FP and LP alongside many other themes.
I think the biggest issue is with those developers that never got a degree or were unfortunate to land in a degree that taught programming languages instead of programming concepts.
AFAIK dynamic languages have gone away from compiling to native code because there is almost no benefit to it, if all you're doing is basically unrolling your interpreter into a unnecessarily huge binary. Methods like tracing JITs are much more effective at delivering good performance in the hotspots of your program.
The exception is when you allow yourself to annotate your code with type information, which allows you to eliminate a lot of the code you'd otherwise emit. Python for instance allows you to do this with Cython/snakeskin/etc., so the technique (that I think) you're talking about is applied there, because it is effective.
Category theory is pretty popular IME, I've seen lots of mathematician talk about it. It seems fairly popular especially with algebraic geometrists and algebraic topologists.
OTOH I've never seen any mathematician use (perhaps with the exception of myself, depending on at what point you start counting a person as "mathematician" and at what point you consider someone to be "using haskell") haskell. I doubt the haskell community actually has any mathematicians, it's mostly just people who'd like to be mathematicians but are too lazy to get a degree.
The overlap of mathematicians who care about category theory (some logicians, algebraic geometrists, algebraic topologists, ...) and mathematicians who program (mostly mathematicians from applied disciplines, numerical methods, computational physics, ...) is pretty much zero.
You probably won't find your algebraic topology professor programming in any language anytimes soon, except LaTeX.
> The overlap of mathematicians who care about category theory [...] and mathematicians who program [...] is pretty much zero. You probably won't find your algebraic topology professor programming
Well, unless perhaps s/he has some involvement in a project like this one http://comptop.stanford.edu/ ("The overall goal of this project is to develop flexible topological methods which will allow the analysis of data which is difficult to analyze using classical linear methods"; first named person in left sidebar is an algebraic topologist).
Or this one http://www.esf.org/index.php?id=8764 ("Applied and Computational Algebraic Topology"; first named person on steering committee is an algebraic topologist).
Or, turning away from algebraic topology as such to mathematics inspired by algebraic topology and involving both category theory and programming: http://homotopytypetheory.org/ ("... new program for a comprehensive, computational foundation for mathematics based on the homotopical interpretation of type theory. [...] currently being implemented with the help of the automated proof assistant Coq"; note that in practice doing nontrivial things in Coq is a matter of functional programming).
For sure there are plenty of mathematicians (in algebraic topology and elsewhere) who don't program, but I think the intersection between people interested in categories and people interesting in programming is bigger than you suggest.
I don't know how many of them are using Haskell, though.
Yeah, I'm aware that some projects that apply computer science to pure mathematics (in various forms like Kenzo/CAT, PLEX (not CPLEX, that's for applied mathematics/finance/etc), agda, coq, GAP, ...) exist, but I don't think the claim that they are very very niche with mathematicians is exaggerated.
If you go to your average mathematics department and ask a few professors there that work in logic, algtop or alggeom, I doubt you'll find any that do any programming for their research. You probably won't find that many logicians that use proof-assistants either, although those are probably the least niche category of the things listed (and they are fairly popular with the CS folks)
A isn't really very low-hanging though, rewriting the build-system for something as complex as the kernel would be quite the undertaking even just from a technical standpoint, let alone that you now have to change thousands of peoples workflow by having them install and use a new build-system (some of those people are probably dedicated to just maintaining the build-system too, so their job would radically change) as well as figure out a suitable build-system in the first place (which one would work well for the kernel? which one works on all the architectures people want to compile linux on? etc)
B from linus' perspective just means "wait a year for things to automatically get better (after throwing some money at it)" which seems like the low-effort solution.
Your anecdote may tell us something about the "typical grandma end-user" situation, but it is totally irrelevant for situations that arise in large "enterprise" IT facilities, where the admins set everything up for you (in some central, network-booted/installed image), and the users don't really have to figure out anything. Configurations are centrally managed with cfengine etc.
Where I work we have around 10k RHEL workstations, and they are all centrally managed. Users neither install nor uninstall software, they don't set up printers, they don't set up their own hardware configurations, ...
Another example is Disney animations/pixar, where all animators use RHEL workstations.
Your colleague may have given up on ubuntu because he couldn't get "desktop dungeons" or "plants vs. zombies" to run without windows, but in a coorporate setting, management does not generally consider that a priority.
You make valid points, but please stop saying that naive users are grandmas. I even specified he was my housemate - how many elderly people do you know share a house? It's even the wrong gender. The world's non-power computer users are not limited to grandmothers (who seem to be all about desktop use) and toddlers (who seem to be all about iOS).
Also, my colleague didn't give up on Ubuntu. He just noted four different ways to fix the given problem in four consecutive six-month releases.
