Reading the utopian sentiment she exudes describing this vision (which, to me, seems very dystopian), it makes me wonder if the discrepancy can be explained simply by an age gap.

I'm trying to remember if I was as much a tech-optimist as she is, at her age. I remember fondly imagining a futuristic smart PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) that's everywhere with me and I can use it like in Sci-Fi movies and games.

I'm assuming this is roughly the same vision, for the next generation that already has smartphones?

Yet something about this new "modality" of listening in on your thoughts, hearing your brain, is just so icky and dystopian to me. Guess I'm old?

This is way too funny. Thank you.

Very cool, I love Scala and am quite sad that it isn't getting the interest and popularity it should.

Me too. It's my favorite language by far. So expressive. Although that can be a downside.

Instead of being sad, have you considered evaluating why that is?

Would evaluating the reason(s) (a futile endeavor, if you ask me) replace my sadness? Hardly.

It's a beautiful language I enjoy working with, and I'm saddened it isn't used and adopted by more people.

The goal isn't to replace, it's to understand so you can grow past it.

If you start from the fact that people haven't adopted it, maybe it's not as beautiful or enjoyable to most developers.

My guy, I am bummed that such a powerful and readable language isn't more popular. I don't need to grow past anything. Being bummed about stuff is part of life.

The reasons it isn't more well adopted are many. The conclusion that therefor it's "not beautiful or enjoyable to most developers" is flawed and baseless. It assumes perfect meritocracy where the most beautiful and enjoyable languages for developers are the most popular ones.

I agree, being bummed is part of life, so is growing past it. Only so much time for what could have been.

I don't think it would require a "perfect meritocracy" for languages that are found "beautiful" and "enjoyable" to succeed if they are also "practical" and have accessable tooling.

What makes languages popular is clearly multidimensional, where astehctics are certainty one dimension (even ugly languages get updates over time if there's enough energy behind the project) but so is timing, tooling, investment, community, etc.

I think it's reasonable to conclude that whatever beautiful nature is/was there wasn't enough. In terms of weight of importance, or degree of agreement.

Interesting. This seems similar to (though using different methods/techniques) what q.ai (that was sold to Apple for $2b) is developing.

See this hn thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46816228

Not sure there's anything to be sorry for, he literally wrote about it a few weeks ago:

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/

"hypeless growth"

Yes. He mentions that in passing that saying people will accuse him of hating on it because he didn't profit from it. I think his point of view is that his company's attempt was smaller scale and not part of the $10B+ waste?

In any case I don't fully understand what he's trying to say other than negating the hype (which i generally agree with), but not offering any alternative thoughts of his own other than- we have bad tools and programming language. (why? how are they bad? what needs to change for them to be good?)

Well, he’s currently running a startup aimed at making better tooling for the space. So, he’s putting his time where mouth is.

Working on a side project that I hope to launch in the near future, I can relate. At first I tried sharing with friends/family but noticed how disinterested anybody who isn't working on it themselves are.

I personally thrive on conversation and a back-and-forth to hone my ideas and thoughts so it's definitely been hard.

I ended up settling on creating system prompts for both OpenAI and Anthropic for co-founders with the explicit prompt that they critique and challenge my thoughts.

In ChatGPT web interface you can create a folder for that context and then all my conversations in that folder relate to my project.

It isn't perfect but it does help and it's a soundboard that's available 24/7, and lets me develop my thoughts, do my research, etc.

There's a risk of it being an giant echo chamber. But then again, most startups are until they hit the market and start validating against reality.

So nice to see modern open source being built with rails. it's the ultimate productivity framework

Virtualzing (or windowing, as it is sometimes called) is definitely one way to tackle this problem. However, it's not a silver bullet. The more complex the UI/rendering is, the more optimizations you will need. The demo you link shows a very simple rendering with no complex user interactions, mouseover events, etc.