E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

Book Project

I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

Colophon

This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive.

Pile o'Tags

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Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

A Django site.
(Finally!)

Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

Yegge's crusade

I'm generally a big fan of Steve Yegge's rants. See this earlier post for links and quotes from some of my favorites. His writings were a significant influence in my decision to seriously look for a new language to learn in 2007 -- I even bought Programming Language Pragmatics on his recommendation, piecemeal reading of which has definitely expanded my thinking (as well as dredging up parts of that Compiler Construction course I took back in 1989...).

His latest post, "The Pinocchio Problem", is a meandering rant/reverie about complex systems and the future of programming. For me it falls far short of his great pieces. But I had to post about it because of this single passage:

We will never be able to make real progress in computing and language design in our industry until C syntax is wholly eradicated: a task that could take fifty years. The only way to make progress in the meantime is to separate the model (the AST) and the presentation (the syntax) in programming languages, allow skinnable syntax, and let the C-like-syntax lovers continue to use it until they're all dead.

Ironically for me, he slams Haskell in the post too -- for being statically typed. I almost let that get to me until I remembered... Steve hates all programming languages, he just hates some more than others.

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007
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Some related posts: The Language I Will Kind of Learn in 2008: Smalltalk • Understanding tuples vs. lists in Python • OSCON 2007, Day 3 • Array comprehensions in Javascript • Real-World Haskell: A new book • Neat Python hack: infix operators • Learning Haskell inch by inch • The whitespace brigade • It's Haskell • Johnny can too code

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