reading

> [...] the fact that manually specifying version numbers to > avoid running *newer* code is commonplace, expected, and > a "best practice" horrifies me.

> Let's kill this meme that software priced lower than a large > pizza is somehow "expensive".

Paul Graham sci-fi

Breaking Good

"Years later, in a misguided and sexist retaliation against Adm. Hopper's COBOL work, Ruby conferences frequently feature misogynistic material."

+1 for Portuguese gov (pun intended)

"[...] a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."

And hey, they coded it in Lisp!

"I now have a dozen little scripts that do nifty things with mail. [...] And every time I write one, I feel like a genius. The whole system just delights me. I want everything in my life to work like this program."

About CLI: > The power of this representation, though, goes much further. > More difficult things can build upon the general pattern that > evolves from the syntax: > > create playlist "country plus katy" from last 11 > > Harder, but are we really ramping up the difficulty considerably > over what we can achieve with a GUI? The GUI version of that > last command isn't hard, but it's... fussier. It no longer > "just works."

"Always consider the implicit capabilities of the unimpaired user, and take steps to even the playing field. That's what accessibility means. Not special treatment, but tailored access to the same treatment."

"I anticipated a weird and slightly arduous journey, especially when it came to using the keyboard. To my great surprise, I picked it up immediately. Within 30 seconds, I checked the weather. Next, I read some stock prices. Amazingly, it even renders stock charts, something the blind have never had access to."

"[...] people don't really talk much about code base size; it's not widely recognized as a problem. In fact it's widely recognized as a non-problem. [...] People in the industry are very excited about various ideas that nominally help you deal with large code bases, such as IDEs that can manipulate code as "algebraic structures", and search indexes, and so on. These people tend to view code bases much the way construction workers view dirt: they want great big machines that can move the dirt this way and that. [...] Industry programmers are excited about solutions to a big non-problem. It's just a mountain of dirt, and you just need big tools to move it around. The tools are exciting but the dirt is not."

> "Why are manhole covers round" is one of the eternal > questions in job interviews.

"[...] eavesdropper can see the size of the request and reply messages, and [...] these sizes sometimes leak information about which page you're viewing [...]"

"Dispatches from the Programmer Liberation Front"

"Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards -- all areas where Flash falls short."

"The moral point being that if you're pirating copyrighted material or clicking through idiotic EULAs without reading them, why on earth are you still slapping a copyright notice on software you yourself write and release?"

"Programming isn't typically a job done under pressure, so seeing how people perform when nervous is pretty useless."

"Let's be clear: It's fine to say that Flash is flawed; it is. (You know who'd agree? The Flash team.) It's fine to hope for alternatives to take root. (Competition makes everyone better.) But let's also be honest and say that Flash is the reason we all have fast, reliable, ubiquitous online video today."

"If I have to write one more polyglot bash / awk / python script to gather data from log files on a bunch of different machines, demux that into a time-ordered event stream, pipe it through something to munge it into some slightly different format, ship that off via post to some web address and get some JSON back, parse that into some other shit, do some computation over it like aggregation or date math over time stamps with unlike representations, wrap the results up in an HTML table and send that table in a MIME-enabled e-mail to myself I think I am going to *explode.*"

> This is not a new or revolutionary idea. In fact, you probably do > something close to this already. The problem is that "close" isn't > good enough.

"Programming is an exercise in overcoming how wrong you've been in the past. At first you'll overcome the syntax errors, then you'll overcome the structural errors, and then you'll come to align your code with the standards of a greater community and you'll feel safe and like you've made it. You haven't -- you're still wrong because you're *always* wrong. You are playing a game you cannot win. And let's face it -- if it was a game you *could* win you'd not be playing at all."

> For example, I want the next C grammar to define that a space comes > between any keyword and an opening parenthesis. "if (foo)" would be > legal, but "if(foo)" would not. Not a warning, not optionally > checked, but actually forbidden by the language parser. Flat out > illegal. Can't compile.

"Current optical tags, such as barcodes, must be read within a short range and the codes occupy valuable physical space on products. We present a new low-cost optical design so that the tags can be shrunk to 3mm visible diameter, and unmodified ordinary cameras several meters away can be set up to decode the identity plus the relative distance and angle."

"Where is the iPod logo? On the back! The interface makes the brand."