The secret tantra.

In the world of socially constructed (and propagated) abstract bullshit secret tantric teachings hold the local optimum spot for reaching extremes in both abstract “thinking” and absurdity of making secrets out of utter bullshit.

In our world the tantra is that a huge pile of imperative crap written in OO C++ and called JVM is the best thing available to humans and is intended to save the world.

Some true seers and sages of the past has been able to see through the veil of bullshit and proclaimed that imperative code with destructive updates and sharing of a mutable state, especially in a multi-threading setting cannot be done right in principle - there number of possible states in which the whole system can be (given possible interleaving of execution contexts) is a lot bigger that our limited minds could comprehend.

To put it simply, a context switching could potentially occur between any two imperative statements with any shared mutable state could be altered in between (literally “inside that semicolon”), so any assumptions of the code (invariants) would not hold.

Mathematically speaking the referential transparency property would be invalidated at any moment, and what is worse, such events will be uncommon and unpredictable.

These observations are well-known results of Joe Armstrong and others. No one seem to pay attention. The tantra says that the JVM is the best thing this world has been granted by Gods and we should still re-implement everything inside JVM using a fucking verbose imperative OO languages (with fundamental inconsistencies, aliasing issues, unsound type system and what not) “designed” by brain-dead people who never studied anything but Algol.

Scala was an attempt for “reformation” but, precisely like other religion reformation movements, it gained little to no followers. Notice that Scala, being the beautiful work of Art as it is, does not solve the fundamental problem of an imperative OO implementation and everything breaks with every major gcc/libstdc++ and/or openjdk release.

The Akka framework simply does not work on modern (8+) JREs. This is an actual fact.

The seer’s and sage’s languages, on the other hand, took design of the runtime seriously, being systematic and principle-guided, so there is no memory or other resource sharing at an implementation level, which rules out the very possibility of messing everything up. No surprise Erlang is shining in the down-to-earth telecoms, and heavy industries.

A bunch of narcissistic assholes have tried to put together a mostly-functional, LISP-like language with immutable data structures and emphasis on stateless data values (instead of stateful objects, which is in principle a delusional idea), but, again, it does not solve how fundamentally fucked the JVM itself is.

As scholars we absolutely must know (and apply) the principles upon which Erlang, Scala and Clojure has been built upon, especially the story of Erlang, how a principle-guided effort by a trained (and disillusioned) physicist lead to almost perfect “concrete” system to solve vastly complex real-world problems.

Your Watsapp is possible because Joe Armstrong was a systematic and principle-guided designer, a true sage.