The Many-Worlds Interpretation of JavaScript (opens in new tab)

Author here. Sorry, I guess I misunderstood that part of the hypothesis. Do you have a source, so I can edit my post and correct it?

Well; another problem is that saying that branching happens at all is to miss the point of MWI; which is to avoid collapse. There aren't any discrete "branching" events.

right. it's more like copy-on-write than a completely different replica. also, the probability of the outcomes is not the same (ie some worlds may be more equal/present than others).

it's questionable if it's one world or a split happens and we have multiple worlds. I would lean toward one world with phenomena that we don't really understand.

The JS equivalent would be for this to use different babel, and node.js versions? Random compatible dependencies based on semver?

Within one of the Everett worlds you’ll likely have eternal inflation with many pocket universes that effectively have different constants.

There are even some papers that suggest the worlds of eternal inflation and MWI are the same.

I might be conflating this with parallel universes, but what would be an example of this?

If variations of ‘me’ exist in all worlds, am I the universal constant?

Speaking as the center of the universe as far I’m concerned over here :p

Yeah usually the Many Worlds hypothesis has the same constants, certainly as Everett proposed it.

The multiverse theory is usually used for having many universes with different constants and the like. Of course word use may vary.

I was actually delighted to discover that I've matured (ossified?) enough as a programmer that my source code is in fact fairly deterministic: the other day I somehow managed to completely wipe a fairly complex function (100+ LoC) from my repo before I committed it. I did this a week or so after I initially wrote the function. I then rewrote the function from scratch, with very little memory of how I wrote it the first time, just knowledge of what it needed to do. Ironically enough, almost as soon as I finished writing this function, I found a copy of the original one that I'd somehow stashed and forgotten about, and the two functions were literally identical.

Exactly. If I may add: We (as humans) don't get to choose when and where god flips the coin. Any claims to the contrary fall in the realm of esoterics.

For a similar reason the measurement problem and the question of whether the presence of (conscious) observers makes the wave function collapse should not be misinterpreted as "You can influence reality with your thoughts alone" or "If you believe in something strongly enough, it will happen."

You liked flash programming??

Here is my theory: it is a limitation of the medium of the web. In other software fields, one can use the tooling they like. But with the browser, JS is a must (nascent webasm may change that though). The Go people don't really fight the Rust folks, they just go off to their own camps, occasionally comparing and contrasting. But in the web/js world, everyone is forced to commingled, and so preferences collide.

It's a combination of popularity, forced usage, organic growth, and maturity.

If every single developer ever had to write Java we would see the same complaints.

* A ridiculous amount of dependencies and tooling.

* As many competing ways to architect programs as there are Java developers.

* Lots of warts and quirks due to design missteps in hindsight. Ignored by the people who love it but grating to the people who don't.

* As many "the good parts" as there are Java developers.

* Everyone complaining about Spring like they do React.

For most languages if you don't like it you don't use it. But with JS (just like Java in the 90's and 00's) even if you don't vibe with JS it's completely unavoidable.

I don't like a lot of the vitriol, but I do find reading those threads interesting and sometimes really enlightening. Sometimes I disagree, sometimes I agree, sometimes I learn, other times it's just bickering but just the same... it's strange, but interesting.

Pro JS (more TS) camp here.

There are 2 issues with JS. First is simply as a language. Some people hate it's weirdnesses, which I do understand, but the easy way is to deal with it is just be very explicit.

The more interesting one is JS as a web tool. The reason I'm so against it (and I am making a point and do not want to start an argument) is that it exposes a turing complete language directly to the web, said language having very substantial access to the browser, which stores and ultimately can expose an awful lot of personal information to the world. Where else do we allow this to happen?

JS per se isn't an issue, just the dangerously privileged position it's been given. Any other lang doing the same thing would be distrusted by me equally.

Programming languages are just a means to an end. I've used various language over the years and what I remember is what I built, not whether the language had pattern matching or not.

I have fond memories of writing PHP because it helped build a site to share messages with my family before Facebook. I remember VB.net because I tried to write a game in college. I remember C# because I built a laptop battery meter that I still sell 10 years later. I remember learning JS with node.js because I wrote a log aggregator.

Let's stop focusing on the how we get there and celebrate what we build.

Aren't most popular languages like that? Pro-C, anti-C, pro-Lisp, anti-Lisp etc. Pro and anti Perl, Python, Haskell, Bash, Forth, C++, Go etc. Pro and anti OOP, pro and anti FP etc. There are the languages people argue over, and the languages nobody uses. (And a select group nobody uses but are still argued over - Lisp, Smalltalk, Forth, Prolog, APL etc)