Tumblelog: 3 – 6 February — Edward O’Connor

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down — up to a man's age-old dream; the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order — or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

— Ronald Reagan (today's Wikiquote)

The 37signals guys are going to begin marking trollish comments on Signal vs. Noise with a ~~dunce~~ troll cap. I'm all for it; hopefully eston will follow through on his comment to build a WordPress plugin for it.

This Sunday's Dilbert has a nice BSG reference. Via bstar_galactica.

From The Art of Lisp & Writing, Richard Gabriel's introduction to David Lamkins' Successful Lisp:

Lisp is the language of loveliness. With it a great programmer can make a beautiful, operating thing, a thing organically created and formed through the interaction of a programmer/artist and a medium of expression that happens to execute on a computer…

The malleability of the medium while programming is part of the act of discovery that goes into understanding all the requirements and forces—internal or not—that a system must be designed around…

Lisp is a medium for working with a computation until it is in balance with its external and internal requirements. At that point it can be decorated with performance-enhancing declarations and perhaps additionally modularized. In this it is more like an artist's medium than what many think of as a programming language.

Lisp, viewed this way, is a good vehicle for understanding how programming and software development really take place. Because programming Lisp is more like writing than like describing algorithms, it fits with how people work better than the alternatives.

Of course, this is the same point that Paul Graham made in Hackers and Painters:

[This] means that a programming language should, above all, be malleable. A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen. Static typing would be a fine idea if people actually did write programs the way they taught me to in college. But that's not how any of the hackers I know write programs. We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.

<qid> RFC 2119 extension: "OUGHT TO" - a MUST that is ignored because people are lazy

<john-l> Yes!

* john-l laughs

<qid> as in "all XML documents OUGHT TO be well-formed"

…

<^aristotle> and the meaning of SHOULD is always a lot of fun, like in HTTP where it says that GETs SHOULD be idempotent

<^aristotle> and all the web monkeys read the spec and claim "well it doesn't say I have to!"

<^aristotle> guess we need something that it is to SHOULD as OUGHT TO is to MUST

…

<hober> MIGHT AS WELL, perhaps

— from #atom

Hey, look, another unofficial RSS feed got created because old-sk00l webmasters can't be bothered to stay up-to-date. This time, it's Rose-Hulman's 1995-looking news page; the unofficial feed is from stobor. I've added it to rgsb.org.