Chipping the web – 0x0A
November 27th, 2006 7:04:02 pm pst by Sterling Camden
Moishe Lettvin, former Microsoftie who worked on Vista’s controversial Shutdown Menu, explains just how tightly screwed Vista development became.
Looks to me like C# 3.0 takes the language farther from its Java roots and closer to more modern scripting languages. The examples shown have problems with omitted white space, but if you already know the language you should be able to overlook them.
Vaspers the Grate left a comment here that intrigued me to the point of subscribing. Now he has expanded that idea into a post on the Mouth as Weapon: 9 Signs of Psycho Blabbers, dedicated to yours truly (not, I hope, as an example). Numbers 6 and 9 seem the most penetrating, IMHO.
Kathy Sierra on the merits of jargon. When not gratuitous, specialized vocabulary can improve conversation, although it may leave everyone else in the dark. But I wonder how “Web 2.0″ really fits in this discussion. So does Shelley, who quotes Dare (who is more harsh). I wonder what Dave Greten would say. Regarding professional jargon, I’m reminded of conversations back in the 1990′s between Ken Lidster and myself about enhancements to Synergy/DE. As our intense dialog continued into the elevator that was shared with unrelated businesses, the looks on the faces of the other passengers often indicated that we were speaking a completely different language. After they exited, shaking their heads, Ken and I would turn to each other and suddenly laugh. Good times.
The Top 20 replies by Programmers to Testers when their programs don’t work (thanks, GMSV). Next time you’re confronted by QA, just try to avoid using one of these. Betcha can’t. Number 1 is most definitely my number 1 response.
ImageChef, a handy online utility for generating images with embedded text. Lots of images to choose from. Too bad you can’t provide your own.
Supreme Court to examine ‘obviousness’ of patents. You mean combining text with images isn’t patentable? What about how to make a sandwich (thanks, Armchair Anarchist)?
Black-out Friday at Walmart.com. Not so smiley when along with the prices, down came the servers.
I’m all over this new holiday. In fact, I’ll start celebrating today. Never mind, I’ve been celebrating for months. Thanks, Shelley.
And BTW, Shelley, bravo. Regardless of what terms are used, we need a distinction between those who assert that there is no divinity and those of us who do not pretend to certainty. All human language evolves with usage, and regardless of scientific definitions, in common usage atheist refers to the former, and agnostic to the latter. The browbeating Shelley received in these comments because she refused to be labeled and neatly categorized only confirms why I shun the designation of atheist myself.
Pietro Paschino uses my tag cloud widget for WordPress. Grazie, Pietro!
Last but definitely not least, The Sayings of Phil Factor. Hilarious. I guess I just disproved the penultimate one, though, at least in Phil’s case.
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Celebrating for months…hee!
Just remember to not blog while drinking…
Part of the value of Repeal Day would be the analogies that can be drawn between prohibition and the current state of affairs with regard to such issues as the “war on drugs” and the government’s ongoing effort to prevent US citizens from using encryption.
I like holidays that have the possibility of getting someone’s attention.
Pietro Paschino uses my tag cloud widget for WordPress. Grazie, Pietro!
Thank you for made it!
it’s really useful! 
Shelley, thanks for the advice, though it comes too late.
Yes, Joseph, Repeal Day is not only a celebration of alcohol, but also of liberty.
Pietro: glad you like the widget. How would you improve it if you could?
the counter sometimes get an error, i think it’s due by my database, but if i reset the theme without the widget and then i insert it again (also without refreshing page) it goes as usual. anyway, i think your work is really good!
sorry, not counter (i’m not english i thought it was the correct word)… i mean the option to set the font dimension, sometimes it gets an error and tags are all similar or just few of the correct dimension… hope have ben clear…
apotheon: sorry for not recognizing your comment earlier, it was caught in moderation for some reason (maybe the word “drugs”). I agree, it’s a statement about individual liberties.
pietro: that’s odd. I wonder if something in your style sheet is overriding the font size. Next time it happens, put a comment here and I’ll take a look at it.
No, you’re not a chatterbox, as far as I can tell so far. You inspired me to think more about this topic of Mouth as Weapon. Now I’ve stirred up another controversy and I haven’t slept in days.
Vaspers, you sound a bit manic, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Channel the energy, dude.
It’s a common attribute of computer users: the screen makes us surge with energy, and we slurp our toxic coffee, play our special music, and read between the lights.
“read between the lights” – nice.
Sometimes I feel like I’m “riding the light”.
That’s way better, so I’m proud of you my friend, than “riding the lightning” an old prison guard term for the electric chair, or was it the vibrating onion massager? I knew I should have gone to bed last Thriceday. Aunt Bananas is coming toward me now, gotta go hide the COBOL book.
And just what would Aunt Bananas do if she discovered the COBOL book? God, I haven’t programmed in COBOL for 24 years.
If you’ve ever played the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, you should know exactly what happens when you discover a COBOL book: you lose sanity points. That’s what happened to me when I first cracked open the COBOL book I currently have on a shelf behind me right now. I keep it as a reminder of the vile, blasphemous things that lie slitheringly in the darkness beyond the realm that we can see, questing with their foul and heinous grasp into the depths of our very souls with each indrawn breath, ancient untrammeled Powers whose unfathomable and inexorable purpose is not comprehensible to the apprehensions of mere mortal men. Or something.
Ah, no I have not played that game. But I can attest to the sanity-sapping qualities of COBOL. For about two years (1980-1982) I wrote millions of lines of COBOL code. Not that volume is particularly difficult in that tongue. The amount of near repetition required becomes mantric after about 3000 lines.
Java is the new COBOL, I think. Compare it with languages like OCaml (for a statically typed example) and Ruby (for a more scripting-oriented example). Repetition is greatly reduced from Java’s standard in both.
I’d have to agree. For a language that supposedly achieves reuse through OOP, you sure do have to type a lot in Java. I’ll have to check out OCaml sometime. Ruby is amazingly concise and elegant.
“specialized vocabulary can improve conversation, although it may leave everyone else in the dark. But I wonder how “Web 2.0? really fits in this discussion.”
Your elevator story is exactly how it fits… but the real problem (I think) is that in your example, the people in the elevator *knew* they had no clue what you were saying, while with “Web 2.0″, too many people think they have the same idea about what it means. My point (apparently very, very badly made) was simply this: there are people out there who have a shared understanding of what that phrase means, and the fact that a gazillion other people don’t–but think they do–doesn’t change that fact. So, it’s not necessarily a word I’d ever recommend using–I never use it (unless I’m making fun of it)–but I don’t believe it’s accurate to say it means “nothing.” At O’Reilly, and a lot of other places, it is domain-specific, useful, meaningful jargon. I doubt the label will survive, though, because way too many other people use it to mean entirely different things (including as an empty buzzword).
Wow — I can’t believe I’ve been running around the web defending a word I don’t actually *like* or *use*… but I know with certainty that it works for some people and communicates a tremendous amount. I’ve sat in a room of 100 people meeting on patterns of Web 2.0, and I’m pretty certain that there was heavy overlap on the venn diagrams of what each participant thought it meant.
I’ve learned my lesson on this one, though. I don’t want to have to talk Dare down from the window ledge… ; )
Ha!
Language is a tricky phenomenon, as I’ve been unsuccessfully arguing to the “yes you are an atheist” crowd lately. In their case, a small group wants to use a technical definition for the term (essentially, “not a theist”) and they want everyone else to use the term the same way. But the population at large doesn’t think that way. They attach an affective meaning to the term “atheist” that means essentially “against theism”. That’s why I insist on being called an agnostic, because it communicates better what I don’t know to the world at large.
I think something similar has happened to “Web 2.0″, though as you pointed out, the variety of popular definitions is even greater. If anyone wants to use the term with a specialized meaning, they’ll either have to define it at the front of every conversation or only converse with those who have a similar understanding. They aren’t likely to find an elevator in which the term will simply go over the other heads. I think a new, unsullied term might be in order.
Thanks for stopping by and commenting, Kathy.
Actually, Java succeeds quite well at what it claims to do in terms of the supposed benefits of the linguistic syntax and semantics themselves. Specifically, it provides a strong object oriented structure that allows for excellent code reuse, and for good-enough protection and encapsulation. Modularity of code can be really good in Java. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where the benefits end, and those benefits alone mean almost nothing in real-world use. The remainder of any benefits you hope to achieve must be accomplished through a lot of hard work.
Ruby is also excellent at all the same aforementioned things as Java, but it provides a great many other benefits as well, such as succinctness — quite possibly Ruby’s only major coup over Java (except for some of the characteristics of the inheritance model), depending on how broadly you apply the term “succinctness”. If you don’t apply it very broadly, the rest of the benefits in Ruby (the language itself) over Java (the language itself) must be described under some other headings, such as excellent regular expressions, an excellent library management system, and a more verb-oriented object model.
Because of Java’s contrasting characteristics, as well as other language design decisions, succinctness is definitely lacking, and the internal DRY-compliance of a given program is matched by rampant violation of the DRY principle from one program to the next, because of the heaps and piles and truckloads of scaffolding that must be written or generated every single time you start designing a class hierarchy for a new program. In addition, the noun-oriented object model requires tremendous cascades.of.dotted.strings.of.nouns.glued.together.with.verbs(lots) which, of course, creates verboseness problems of another sort. And it goes on.
Erm. My point, I think, was that Java is pretty darned good at helping you avoid repeating yourself by using a class hierarchy when writing a program. It just doesn’t help any in terms of trying to avoid reinventing the wheel every time you write a Java program from scratch. Y’know, the major reason there are so many great development environments for Java is simply that you wouldn’t get much work done in the language without them because you’d be spending all your time erecting scaffolding.
re: OCaml and Ruby
I don’t know as much about OCaml yet as I did about Ruby when I first started telling you (and others at TR) about Ruby, but what I do know excites me at least as much as what I knew about Ruby at the time. The major problems I’m finding with OCaml so far are adjusting to the strong and static type system and the poor documentation for the language. I’ve dealt with statically typed languages (C/C++, Pascal) before, and I’ve dealt with strongly typed languages (most of the rest), but never a strongly and statically typed language (and certainly not one that used type inference). As such, it’s a bit of a major adjustment.
As for documentation, I’m kinda trying to solve some of the problems for those who follow after me by documenting some things as I go. I have something readable about named functions already, for instance, which covers recursion as well, though it probably needs more editing before it’ll be really up to snuff. The use of quotation marks and the line of quoted strings at the top are artifacts of a tentative plan for how I intend to automate an online help system using short tutorial files, though at present all I’ve really got is a couple tutorial files in progress. It’s going to take me a bit to get around to developing the help system because I’m planning to write it in OCaml, which requires learning rather a bit more of it than I currently know.
I’ve babbled a lot. Time to go.
DATE-COMPILED paragraphs, Editing in Animator, field record file, INSPECT STRING UNSTRING, DO ENDDO
I’a! I’a! Cobolhu fhtagn!
COBOL waits? or dreams? or both?
Thanks for your summary, apotheon. I’ll have a look at your tutorials.
That language is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with agonizing syntax even programming may die.
Please let me know if you find anything worth commenting in the tutorials, of course. I’d like to ensure they’re as good as possible.
I will have to recite that verse, apotheon, the next time I encounter one of the Old Ones.
The Old Ones? You mean like Ken Thompson?
Heh. It’s never been my pleasure to work with the B programming language (was it ever used for anything production?).
I was thinking of old languages like COBOL, Fortran, BASIC, early macroassemblers, etc.
I think all they ever used B for that led to anything we’ve seen is bootstrapping UNIX development.
[...] Okay, that title has got to throw somebody for a loop. If you’ve been following along, you’ve seen me get progressively more obscure/cute/stupid in my choice of numeric references. Why? I wanted each “Chipping the web” post to have a unique title, but I didn’t just want to append a number. So I used different languages’ names for numbers, different numeric representations, and various things that refer to a number. In yesterday’s title, “sulfur” is the element with the atomic number 16. I’m counting, in my own weird way. Can anyone make out how the title of today’s post is “17″? [...]
I’ve programmed “pictures” and “songs” in BASIC, I got a C in that class, too. hehe.
“pictures” and “songs”?
I’m guessing he’s talking about pixels and system speaker beeps.
Ah…thanks apotheon. Sorry, ran out of fish oil three days ago. Brain starving.
No problem. It took me a moment to remember that I did something similar in about ’82 or so on an Atari 1200 — writing a simple “game” program that involved hitting a key on the keyboard when a dot appeared on the screen in a random location. Whoever hit his key first got a point.
I played it with my father for about three or four minutes, then went back to Frogger.
Heh. I used to write games for fun in BASIC. Blackjack, craps, and the infamous ratrace. Later went to C for a knockoff on breakout and others. Nowadays games are so complex that you can’t really write them recreationally any more.
Yeah, that’s pretty much what I meant. It was interesting though to see how many lines of code was needed to get some sort of “perspective” into an otherwise flat rendition of pixels.
[...] Today WebZappR picked up this post in its aggregated coverage of the “Why Web 2.0 is more than a buzzword” meme. Never heard of WebZappR? Neither had I. Google it and all you get are links to the site itself, or trackbacks from their blog. I tried searching on MakeYouGoHmm, KBCafe and even TechCrunch and got no results. [...]