Archive: December 15, 2003
Via sweetcode, Myer looks like an interesting source code analyzer. I had to check out the Google cache of some of the examples though, since Savannah is down because of a security breach.
Via Ian, I could have sworn I'd come across Edge Side Includes before, but I couldn't find it in my blog, so I'm blogging it now.
Via Josh Claybourn, this is very important. I agree with his comments completely.
I haven't gotten to write anything about this -- partly because I've been "resigned to defeat" like he says -- but I keep wanting to say to our traitorous Supreme Court: "What part of 'Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech' don't you understand!?"
And lest we get too down on the Supreme Court that upheld this dreck, or the Congress that passed it, keep in mind that our president signed it into law, despite expressing his belief that it was unconstiutional, thus violating his oath of office.
And, in addition to the huge medicare socialist crap that Bush signed, this is the main reason I don't like Bush domestically anymore. And for me, that's saying a whole lot. Overall he's still ok... I still like him as a person, and foreign policy-wise he's excellent -- though he's equivocated in cases like Israel and Taiwan -- and I'm going to vote for him again, but I'm not happy.
Tax cuts, while great, don't really mean much in the long run if you create huge upward pressure on taxes through things like this prescription drug bill. We need to pass a balanced budget amendment, like they just did in California (well, they voted to put it before voters, and I expect it'll pass).
Via Martin, Lua now has a book. Awesome. If I had money I'd buy it.
The Farm links to an interview at Artima.com with Anders Hejlsberg about Innapropriate [sic] Abstractions. Hejlsberg makes such an important point in this article that I'd like to highlight. I was reading this series of articles at MSDN about COM, and they kept saying things like:
You write code that uses COM components without worrying (or even knowing) what type of COM object you'll end up using, so you use the exact same code to hook up to an in-process, local, or remote object. ... COM does the rest, including starting processes and communicating over the network.
Throughout the article at MSDN, I kept thinking "No, you really should be worrying if something's going out over the network". You have to program something completely differently if that's the case. Hejlsberg highlights this:
The prevailing wisdom five or ten years ago about how distributed systems would be built in the future was CORBA, IIOP, object request brokers. The rave at the time was to make the world look like objects, in particular, to have a bunch of infrastructure that shrouds the fact that objects are distributed. The nirvana ideal was that you could just say Object obj = CreateMeAnObject(), and then call obj.ThisMethod(), obj.ThatMethod(), and you wouldn't know if that object was over in Thailand, right next door, or in the same process. The problem with that type of programming is: it works great in a single process; it works quite well across processes; it works fairly well in a small intranet; but then it completely sucks thereafter.
If you hide the fact that messages go across a network, and don't know when they go across, you end up with chatty conversations. And all of a sudden, the speed of light can become a big problem for you. You can't engage in a conversation with an object out in New York that goes, obj.LetMeGetX(), obj.LetMeGetY(), obj.LetMeGetZ(). No, you need to say, obj.LetMeGetXYAndZ(), and have everything come back in one chunk. But you can't really do that unless you actually make people understand that they are building a distributed application. In other words, you shouldn't try to pretend that a remote object is just a local object, because there is a difference.
I really wish I could remember where, but I remember reading years ago about a bug that exhibited behavior limited by the speed of light.
Dan schools us on how to write useful libraries: Bloody stupid things to do when writing C libraries, #78:
...having callback function arguments that do not take a corresponding invocation-specific data pointer.
Joel Spolsky writes about the different cultures of Unix and Windows, and gives a positive review of Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming.
What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.
This is, of course, a major simplification, but really, that's the big difference: are we programming for programmers or end users? Everything else is commentary.
How did we get different core values? This is another reason Raymond's book is so good: he goes deeply into the history and evolution of Unix and brings new programmers up to speed with all the accumulated history of the culture back to 1969.
Indeed I would recommend this book to developers of any culture in any platform with any goals, because so many of the values which it trumpets are universal.
While talking on the phone with my friend Sean just now he reminded me of one of the important ways in which the Trinity is necessary for our concept of God to be coherent.
In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, the world was created by God. At some point the world didn't exist, and God was "alone". Almost everyone in the JCI tradition would affirm God's self-sufficience (process theologians notwithstanding) -- in other words, that God is in no way dependent on his creation, but is complete in and of himself.
Importantly, that implies that God didn't acquire any of his attributes only after he created contingent beings, but had them from eternity. So, that means that God was always loving, always just, etc. Without the concept of the Trinity, I don't think you can sensibly consider God a loving being. For, the only love He could have had as an absolute singular being would simply be a self-love, and not a mutual love between persons, which is the way we normally understand the word "love".
In fact, God's very personality (note, I don't mean His "disposition", but rather his personal-ness -- the fact that He is a person and not some abstract "force") seems to me to be dependent on there being multiple persons within the Trinity. For how could God relate to external beings if he was not already able to relate within himself?
I consider this to be one of the great failings of Judaism and Islam's conceptions of God.
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Monday, December 15, 2003
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