BrianTheMan
8 HN mentions · mentioned in 8 months, 2011–2016
1:23 · 1.5M views · Nov 29, 2007
The classic 'What have the Romans ever done for us?' scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian, in which revolutionaries grudgingly list the benefits of Roman rule. It is a short comedy clip.
HN commenters mostly drop it as a joke when someone downplays the upsides of something, such as a platform, a company or industrialization.
8 comments from Hacker News
You know when I hear a people speaking like this, I can't help but think about that scene from "The Life of Brian" where the rhetorical question of "What have the Romans ever done for us?!" ( this video ) It's terribly simplistic to look only at industrialization problems and completely neglect to acknowledge the upsides. Is there pollution and would I like there to be less, sure. Having said that would I want to give up the safety, food security, medical advances, conveniences, etc. that make life worthwhile so that I could live in pristine, untouched nature? Not a chance. I've life is substantially better because I live in an industrialized society and I'll take the pollution so long as it comes with all the good in my life.
Because some people might not know the movie and/or get the reference, it is from The Life of Brian, a hilarious comedy from Monty Python. The scene: this video
> So what's new? What do you really win with Clojure other than better libraries and community? Not much. Community and libraries are of outmost importance in picking a language. So, your "what do you really win other than those", reminds me of "what the Romans ever did for us" Monty Python skitch ( this video ). > Oh and the uh...concurrency primitives? They're a canard. They're neat, they're designed excellently (being that it's Rich Hickey), but they're just not as impactful as other things are these days. If single-node/instance performance was important, you wouldn't be able to do it on the JVM. If scalability is important, shared memory on a single node is irrelevant and it becomes a matter of implementing a partition tolerant database. The concurrency primitives would've been more important in an alternate universe where we didn't use databases/data stores/filesystems for state management and synchronization and instead did Smalltalk stateful servers. A really bizarre way to look at things. You've basically taken too extremes and arbitrarily declared that there is nothing of importance in between. No, single-node/instance performance can BOTH be important AND achieved on the JVM. It's all a matter of degree and other tradeoffs. In the world we live in, concurrency in a single instance is important. Not everybody has huge multi-instance problems, and even those that do would like to be able to use less instances for their loads. > You want to win the Lisp-community-at-larg
Parasitic HFT that doesn't actually provide liquidity is a consequence of rules that are designed to provide liquidity. Think of what you would "expect" if things were working right. Am I going to try to sell something at the exact moment a human needs to buy? No, I'm going to sell to a dealer who will hold it for a bit and then sell to a human who wants to buy. The dealer is purely algorithmic, so he may as well be replaced by a computer. From the article "On the positive side of electronic trading, the panel said, liquidity has improved, transaction costs are lower, and market efficiency is generally better." Relevant Monty Python: this video
You mean apart from discriminated unions, pattern matching, computation expressions, units of measure, partial function application, immutability by default and general lack of null reference exceptions? See also: this video