Oh man, Felicia Day is going to be on Friends on February 5th.
Tim Bray wrote a short and sweet message to the W3C-Tag mailing list a few months ago that pretty much echoes my thoughts on the issue exactly.
The Web is distinguished from many other information systems in that
its important interfaces are defined, not in terms of APIs or data
structures or object models, but in terms of syntax, by specifying the
content and sequence of the messages interchanged. It commonly occurs
that programmers working with the Web write code directly to generate
and parse these messages. Even more unusually, it is not uncommon for
end-users to have direct exposure to these messages. This leads to the
well-known "view source" effect, whereby users gain expertise in the
workings of the systems by direct exposure to the underlying protocols.
The general success of Web software is evidence that interoperability
in networked information systems is best achieved by specifying
interfaces at the level of concrete syntax rather than abstract data
models or APIs.
My addition to this is that the syntax should therefore be as simple as possible to express everything you need to. Then, you can build everything you need to on top of that simple syntax.
(Via Mark's b-links)
Note to all... if you don't offer permalinks, I'm much less likely to credit you for links I blog. On the other hand, if you do offer permalinks, I'll try extra hard to credit you... even if your permalinks many clicks away.
I'm literally in shock by what I've just read. I've long held that something bad happened to America as a result of the civil war, and that our entire view of government subsequently changed from that of a federation of sovereign states to a far more strongly centralized nation.
The Litmus Test for American Conservatism, by Donald W. Livingston, has some strong words to say about Lincoln and his role in that change:
These actions are justified by nationalist historians as the energetic and extraordinary efforts of a great helmsman rising to the painful duty of preserving an indivisible Union. But Lincoln had inherited no such Union from the Framers. Rather, like Bismarck, he created one with a policy of blood and iron. What we call the “Civil War” was in fact America’s French Revolution, and Lincoln was the first Jacobin president. He claimed legitimacy for his actions with a “conservative” rhetoric, rooted in an historically false theory of the Constitution which held that the states had never been sovereign. The Union created the states, he said, not the states the Union. In time, this corrupt and corrupting doctrine would suck nearly every reserved power of the states into the central government. Lincoln seared into the American mind an ideological style of politics which, through a sort of alchemy, transmuted a federative “union” of states into a French revolutionary “nation” launched on an unending global mission of achieving equality. Lincoln’s corrupt constitutionalism and his ideological style of politics have, over time, led to the hollowing out of traditional American society and the obscene concentration of power in the central government that the Constitution was explicitly designed to prevent.
And the article argues exactly what I've been thinking. In fact, this is what I wanted to write a long weblog post about:
A genuinely American conservatism, then, must adopt the project of preserving and restoring the decentralized federative polity of the Framers rooted in state and local sovereignty. The central government has no constitutional authority to do most of what it does today. The first question posed by an authentic American conservative politics is not whether a policy is good or bad, but what agency (the states or the central government—if either) has the authority to enact it. This is the principle of subsidiarity: that as much as possible should be done by the smallest political unit.
Emphasis mine. And like I've posted about before, there's no longer any party in America which truly cares about limited government. Livingston makes this point, and places the schism squarely back in the 1860's.
The Democratic and Republican parties are Lincolnian parties. Neither honestly questions the limits of federal authority to do this or that. In 1861, the central government broke free from what Jefferson called “the chains of the Constitution,” and we have, consequently, inherited a fractured historical memory. There are now two Americanisms: pre-Lincolnian and post-Lincolnian. The latter is Jacobinism by other means. Only the former can lay claim to being the primordial American conservatism.
I want to check Livingston's facts about Lincoln that he presented earlier in this essay. If all true, and I don't have much reason to doubt that they are, well... I don't know what. It'll certainly change my opinion about Lincoln, and alter my perspective on America in general. And I'll certainly be able to understand how the Civil War was understood in the South to be "The War of Northern Aggression". I just wish I had a better mind for history.
Thanks to Dane Carlson for the link. I'm going to have to go exploring around the Chronicles Magazine web site.
Bush set to visit Libya in first half of 2004. Permalink not permanent, so copying text:
LONDON – Libya is preparing for defense cooperation talks with the United States, leading to a visit by President Bush early next year.
Libyan officials said the United States has agreed to review Tripoli's defense requirements in wake of an agreement by Col. Moammar Khaddafy to eliminate his nation's medium-range missile and weapons of mass destruction arsenal. The officials said the two countries plan to begin formal talks on Libya's defense and security requirements over the next few months.
The officials said Britain and the United States will lift sanctions from Libya by April 2004. They said this would pave the way for a visit by U.S. President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Tripoli during the first half of next year.
"The United States has promised to protect us from any attack," Khaddafy's son, Seif Al Islam, said in an interview with the London-based A-Sharq Al Awsat daily on Dec. 24.
It's a strange new world.
I can never find one of these when I need them. Clarence collected links to a whole bunch of them, including a list at Clagnut and another list. Here are a bunch for future reference:
Anyone have any more?
Update (Jan 5): Ultimately I'll be collecting everything here
Modelled after Perl's WWW::Mechanize, John J. Lee, also the author of Python spidermonkey, wrote mechanize for Python.
I can't wait for the day I have a use for one of these things.
The merging of Python and Lisp continues. Via LtU, via Lemonodor, check out Lython.
Lython is a new lisp front-end for the Python programming language. It resembles common lisp and compiles directly to Python bytecodes and transparently integrates with existing Python code and libraries.
It currently provides a very limited macro system. It is hoped that it will one day support full-blown lisp procedural macros.
Limitations: This is a very early proof of concept release and is in no way ready for real production use.
Update: Adam comments.
John Hawkins rightly blasts the Bush administration for its lack of a strong immigration policy, and outlines things they would do about it if they were serious. Great ideas.
Unfortunately it seems we'll need to suffer another attack before we get serious.
Tuesday, December 30, 2003
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