Day: August 27, 2016

Germans have long thought that the Schlegel & Tieck translations of Shakespeare are better than the original. The conceit of Shakespeare being a translation from the original Klingon is an echo of that.

Not necessarily better, but certainly smoother is the best known translation of Cavafy, by Keeley & Sherrard. A lot of Cavafy is about his precarious linguistic eclecticism. It’s very hard to render in a non-diglossic language without sounding silly. Keeley & Sherrard, after others’ failed previous attempts, decided not to bother.

It’s not a faithful translation in that regard, no. But it is very readable.

No references were harmed or even looked at in the authoring of this answer.

It’s hard for us now to understand the awe and fear of ancient Greek religion. So when reading this answer, try not to think of Pericles and Demosthenes. Think instead of J. Random Tribesperson from, I dunno, Vanuatu or some place.

Booze was a scary thing to those who invented it, and no less scary to those who got hold of it. It made you act like you were possessed by a god. A scary god, who was also tried up somehow with sex and fertility. A god who was somehow acting out through you, and you had no control of yourself.

In fact, that’s the original meaning of the word enthusiasm. Being entheos, in-god: having a god inside you.

There were religious festivals to propitiate this strange, scary god called Dionysus. The festivals involved people getting drunk, which was a scary thing. And having the god speak through them in rant and song.

2500 years on outside your neighborhood bar at 3 am, I would argue not much has changed.

Because this was a religious ceremony, full of awe and solemnity, the drunken songs had names. Dionysus was somehow tied up with fertility, and given the stereotypes of the animal kingdom, some songs were called goat songs. I forget why other songs were called the kōmos, because I’m refusing to look up any references.

Because this was a religious ceremony and not a frat party or soccer match booze up, the songs had a religious bent. Being possessed by the god was scary, and the songs were about scary religious stories that invited awe and fear. You know. Myths.

Because the god was in them (they were drunk), they would tell the stories from the perspective of the god. In the first person.

At some stage, someone in the crowd listening to the holy drunken recitation of myths decided to join in.

And take turns telling the myth with them, in the first person.

Which turned into them acting out the myth story.

Drama was presented in Athens during the Dionysia, the religious festival of Dionysus. They involved song and dance, and a chorus of actors singing solemn songs, and having individuals talk back to them.

The Greek for goat song is tragōidia.

The Greek for kōmos song is kōmōidia.

Like you build a microservice in any other programming language, but with the advantage that concurrency is baked into the language.

You’ll need a messaging system as your backend for services, that can talk to Golang. Kafka will, and so will NATS.

You will need a HTTP server front end in Golang, that receives RESTful service calls and passes messages from the HTTP on to an incoming messaging queue, or reads messages from an outgoing messaging queue to HTTP. labstack/echo is an example of that.

You will need a message handler and distributor in Golang, that grabs messages from a messaging queue, invokes one or more microservices on them, and puts the output of those microservices on another messaging queue.

You will need a series of microservices, coded in Golang and all running at the same time, that read in a message and output a different message.

I did not build the base framework of nsip/nias2, the Golang Microservice set I’m contributing to; my CTO Matt Farmer did, and his code is very legible. Unlike mine.

And of course, consult How is Go (programming language) used in microservice architecture?

I can confirm this. I have just deleted my all-time most popular answer ever, and turned it into an answer wiki instead for What is the difference between realize and realise? Can it be used interchangeably?

The 20k views of that question are gone from both my stats graphs, and from my profile “About” sidebar. It took maybe an hour for the latter to refresh; the graphs lost the deleted answer immediately.

I can’t confirm the same for upvotes, because said answer never got any upvotes. As befits something that should have been an answer wiki to begin with. (It was just a link of related questions. And I hadn’t made it an answer wiki at the time, because No Onboarding On Quora.)