Farewell, National Blog Posting Month

I wasn't officially part of National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo), but I have been trying to post everyday this month. I skipped one Saturday, then I completely fell off the wagon just before Thanksgiving. I posted a few times after Thanksgiving, but it was never really the same. Still, it was a good experience, and I hope to keep blogging here more regularly, although probably not daily. I found that I would post stuff just to get my posting quota in. The postings weren't always as informative or helpful as I would like. I wasn't happy about that, and I probably won't be posting as often, but I should be happier with the quality of my posts. So now I say, Farewell, National Blog Posting Month! And thank goodness you're over.

Writing and Coding, Part 3: Artistic Expression

All right, I'll admit it. I've been putting this part of the series off. This is a huge topic, and the more I've thought about it, the less I feel I can do it justice in the time I have to prepare and the space I have to expound on it here. So instead of doing an in-depth exploration, I'm going to provide a very high-level overview. Put on your running shoes. Artistic Expression Programming seems to be a creative, artistic endeavor in two ways. First, you have phenomena like perl poetry, where code is explicitly, consciously used as poetry. This is related to the school of thought that looks at programming's primary purpose being communicating algorithms to a person. Executing the code on a computer is secondary, a means of making sure you are correctly expressing the algorithm. Aesthetics: De Gustibus Non Disputandum Personally, I tend to having simple, regular syntax, even at the expense of having simple, regular semantics (although I like that to be simple also). This bias is evident in a couple of ways: First, I prefer Python to Ruby. Ruby's semantics are probably more regular (everything's an object vs everything's an object, but it may be a classic object and some things are sealed), but the few times I've attempted to learn Ruby, the syntax just seems a little irregular. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but enough that it's squelched what little motivation I've had so far to learn what is probably a fine language. But that's beside the point. What I'm trying to illustrate is that people judge programming languages partially according to criteria that is strictly non-utilitarian. Having simple syntax doesn't make any difference in how capable Python is at building, say, web apps. (As I type this, I'm mentally constructing an argument that it does, but in general, I stand by this statement.) Of course, the academic in me is wanting to step back and define terms now. What does aesthetics mean? Maybe it's time to step back, pull out some literary theory books, and see where this leads us. Is there anything more dull than someone who is both a literature- and computing-geek?

The Kindle and Big Brother

Mark Pilgrim has an great post that draws correlations between the Kindle's DRM and Orwell's 1984. The point here really isn't the Kindle. Amazon's e-book reader is just the latest example of such policies. (It may be breaking new ground, so to speak, in that it is an inherently connected device, and its DRM reflects that.) Right now I'm reading (paper book) Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. In that future world, privacy is virtually non-existent. DHS has monitoring devices in everything. Vinge explicitly says at one point that people had to adjust their quaint notions of privacy. (I don't have the book in front of me, so I don't know that he put it like that — quaint, and so on — but that was the impression that I got. Britain and other countries are moving quickly toward a surveillance society. I remember several years ago, I was helping to chaperon a study-abroad program in England, and we warned the students that they should be careful about such things. In a previous term, a student was caught trying to buy drugs when a video camera installed in an alley recorded him. I would imagine that the United States is moving in that direction. Certainly the current administration would like that. We already have cameras surveilling intersections for traffic violations. The sheer size of the US means that we probably won't be able to monitor everything. We'll have to find some scaled-down version of universal surveillance that only monitors high-risk areas. Until the computers can watch us for ourselves. Then we can monitor everything.

Programming Fun

I just ran across a great post on Ruby being designed to be fun. I don't program in Ruby myself, yet. I've attempted to learn it several times. I get started working through Programming Ruby, but I never get very far. I never have much motivation to pick it up. It seems to occupy a niche that is happily occupied by Python in my programming ecosystem. If another language is going to displace Python, it will probably be some form of lisp. In the end, what finally makes me set aside Ruby are aesthetic reasons I'll talk about more later (when I finish the Writing and Coding series I'm working on). Of course, I also looked at Python once or twice before it clicked for me, so maybe there is some Ruby in my future. Still, I think that it is great that Ruby is designed for fun. When I did finally "get" Python, I had just come out of bad experiences with two other programming languages: I had hit Perl's 1000-line limit; then I switched to Java. Java's great, but it's not fun. Python made programming fun again. That sounds like I had just gotten out of two bad relationships when I met her. And maybe that's what it was.

Playing Catch-Up

Things have settled down after the holiday, but I'm still trying to go through all the electronica that has accumulated in 120 hours of not touching a computer. In the meantime, entertain yourselves by browsing the Most Unusual Books of the World (via Geoffrey Rockwell).

Happy Thanksgiving

Yesterday I said that I would return the to the writing and coding series today. I lied. Later this week, is Thanksgiving Day in the US. Originally, I was going to struggle through all the relatives and food and attempt to post anyway. I've decided not to. While I'm gone, I'll leave you with this link: Kindling Openness and Impact. This touches on some of the issues I see with the Kindle. If you are in the US, happy Thanksgiving. And to everyone, I hope the rest of your week is great.

Paradigm Shift

Amazon's getting ready to release an e-book reader, Kindle. This sounds pretty cool. Too bad $400 is more than I want to sink into an reader. Robert Scoble points out that a lot of people aren't loving this device. Whether it succeeds or fails, however, I think this device is fascinating, for the same reason I find the the current writer's strike interesting. We have a traditional, risk adverse industry (publishing, music, TV, movies). A new, disruptive technology comes along (the Internet). Now, those industries have to figure out a new way to make money at what they do. Everything changes. This is an old story. The same thing happened at the invention of the printing press. Initially, the printers were the main ones making money. A publisher would buy a book from an author, and that was the end of the author's rights. The printer could publish the book. He could change the book. He could put his name on it. Somehow, we went from there to today's situation: authors are paid a more or less fair percentage of the sales of the book, they are credited, they have some say in what changes get made to the book before publishing. Today, we (publishers, studio executives, writers, and consumers) are trying to figure out how to make money at this. The old media probably aren't going away soon, but they are becoming less important. The new-fangled Internets are messing everything up. Will the solutions that we reach now be the final ones? (Final here means until the next disruptive technology comes along tomorrow.) Maybe not. That's what's interesting.

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(Tomorrow, back to the writing and coding series.)