I love the idea, but the repository search is actually pretty hard to use. It should be able to find quickly `org/repo` or `user/repo`. Moreover, the layout kinda breaks on mobile. Is this website open-source? Some people could (possibly) contribute.
However, I think tweets and blog posts are two serious competitors. How does thankyouopensource.com differentiate from those?
But why do Ethereum people maintain a custom programming language? This could easily add a huge amount of complexity (and security issues) with very few benefits.
Moreover, maintaining a large and critical project without automated tests seems impossible to me.
The problem here is that you are handling a ton of money and it is irresponsible to manage a project in this way. More thinking that many people, including developers, in the community are millionaires, so it is not a resource problem. When you send a rocket to the space you also test it against ETs.
At least Vitalik & Gavin Woods in combination with Joe Lubin (Consensys & Ethereum Foundation) keep pushing it without any talks about reality, but just sell unproven future ideas while they train people and manufacture ICOs (less so after the SEC) and sell Ethereum to dumb enterprise that drunk the cool-aid.
I don't know if anything similar exists in other coutries, but in France there is a growing "workshop" trend - which are basically short web curriculums (a few weeks learning Rails, jQuery, Symfony or others) - to turn anyone into a "developer". I've heard many salesmen or others saying "I will learn it". They don't realize how hard it is. You can't simply write any program with pyramids of jQuery callbacks. You need automated testing, fuzzy string matching, automata theory, murky x86_64 assembler and much more.
The OP was "baffled" why anyone would ever use this API. Clearly, the API's success shows that sometimes this tax you highlight is well worth it. (That was my point as well.) Nobody is claiming the tax doesn't exist, just that it shouldn't be baffling that a rational actor would choose to pay the tax in exchange for the corresponding benefits.
(Not to mention with very minimal effort you can usually avoid the majority of the specific tax of latency you mention, by doing things like parallelizing the request with other work or doing it asynchronously to the user's interface.)
I think "software developer" describes quite well what I do on a daily basis. Better than the "principal software engineer" that adorns my business card...
(which is still better than the "principal consultant" I had on my card in the early '90s when I was a mere kid - it made a grey haired banker in the city smirk a bit and remark "well, maybe when you have some grey hairs". At least I now have plenty of that!)
Reading automated tests and doing extensive searches in the codebase (with recursive `grep`s) is often helpful. If you use an IDE with a go-to-definition function, it can replace grep.
I have the overall feeling that most people don’t realize that parser combinators are nothing more that disguized recursive descent parsers. Personally I love both.
They're not, though. They're a formal language for talking about all kinds of parsers. You can implement them as recursive descent if you want. You can also compile them into formal FSAs if you want.
Parser combinators are a quite general technique which has been applied to PEG parsing, Earley parsing, and many other specific algorithms. Recursive descent is common because it is easy to implement and allows the resulting combinators to form a Monad.
However, I think tweets and blog posts are two serious competitors. How does thankyouopensource.com differentiate from those?