Nick Page
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2015–2024
3:36 · 163K views · Jun 18, 2013
An animated clip from the second radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in which Arthur Dent argues with the Nutrimatic drinks dispenser, which produces something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
Posted as a joke when threads discuss unhelpful gadgets and smart devices.
3 comments from Hacker News
I totally agree that JavaScript sucks, but that's not a good enough reason to boycott it, because it's absolutely ubiquitous and so well and widely supported. And no matter how bad it is as a language, it still beats compiled languages as a dynamic extension and scripting language. Another non-technical advantage: Apple allows iOS apps on their app store to dynamically download and execute JavaScript code, as long as you run it in Apple's Safari browser component (which UnityJS does). But even though it's technically possible, you aren't allowed to do that with Lua, Python, TCL, Visual Basic, Pascal, C++, C#, or any other interpreted or compiled language. So JavaScript occupies a special spot in the universe, the web ecosystem, and also the iOS ecosystem, that makes it not matter if it sucks. Plus a lot of smart people and big projects are working hard to mitigate its suckyness, make it run faster, and integrate it with all kinds of different platforms and APIs, like TypeScript, WebAssembly, AssemblyScript, React Native, Chrome Embedding Framework, Electron, and all the apps like PhotoShop you can script in JavaScript. Even Adobe finally figured out they should use the real thing instead of jerking you around with ActionScript or some other weird language like AppleScript. UnityScript sucks much much more than JavaScript, and has none of its advantages of tooling, libraries, running in every browser, etc. It's a terrible idea to make or use yet another language that's almost
There's one bit of Douglas Adams tech that fits closely with this: The Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser[1], which dispenses something almost, but not quite entirely, unlike tea[2]. Reminds me of some of the code I've got from ChatGPT that almost, but not quite entirely, doesn't work. :P 1. [LINK] 2. this video
If you've got a robot that can fetch water, pretty much all other problems are solved. Particularly if it can understand a limited set of spoken commands like "make me a cup of tea". Of course it could go horribly wrong: this video