Ramblings of a Madman....

An Irregularly Updated Commentary

Wherein I ramble and rant about divers programming lingos....

• Basic The language I lost my programming virginity to, so to speak. On the Apple //e, so I associate this language with ludicrous difficulty in renumbering lines.
• C What can I say? I guess the traditional saying sums it up: C combines all the power of assembly language with all the ease of use of assembly language. When people laugh and quote this at me I usually respond that it has other good features as well.
• Assembly Yup, I could, should I be seized by the passion to do so, write a function in PowerPC assembly language. I've done it before. But if it takes a minute to write the function in C, it will take me 5 hours to implement in assembly. Rarely worth the bother for coding, but priceless when figuring what the C compiler is really generating.
• Pascal I can read it, thanks to all those outdated copies of Inside Macintosh, but have never written it except for porting header files from C. I understand that for it's considered pretty good as imperative languages go.
• C++ I cannot express strongly enough the depth of my hatred for this language. I can read it, but by golly I refuse to write it. In the words of Alan Kay: I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. The other one I like (by the oh-so-prolific Anonymous) is: C++ : an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog.
• Java I am supposed to be learning to use this one, but confess to dragging my feet a wee bit. Larry O'Brien: Claiming Java is easier than C++ is like saying that K2 is shorter than Everest. Actually, it isn't ease or difficulty, it's the fact that it doesn't do what is advertised (run everywhere), its performance and memory management are er, rather troubling, and for UI design it's no good unless you're doing OS X Aqua stuff in which case, why not cut out the molassesey middle man and go directly with Objective-C? One of the things that really bugs me about hard-core OO implementations (and implementors) is that everything becomes an object, even actions. It's like a language that doesn't have verbs, just lots of nouns ending in -er. So you have the EventLoopRunner and then the AbstractEventLoopRunnerFactory and let's not forget the ConcreteEventLoopRunnerFactoryImplementationExtender. Eesh. The C++ geeks are just as guilty of this kind of gobbledygook as the Java geeks. Any language under which you are obliged to "subclass like mad" is way poor design.
• Objective-C Glad you asked. I love Objective-C! OK, so it isn't cross-platform exactly, although I guess GNUStep will let some Obj-C code run under non-X Unices, but I haven't really researched the details. But Cocoa should IMHO be used only for the frontend; the backend should be ANSI C all the way, or Perl. GNUStep/Obj-C support for Windows may or may not exist, and who cares. I refuse to acknowledge Windows as either a viable platform or a real operating system. "Cross-platform" means "it runs under OS X and other Unices." 'Nuff said.
• Perl If C had string-munging capabilities like Perl, I'd never leave the house. Well, it can be sorta cryptic sometimes. (Blame the geeks who strive to pack the RSA algorithm into one line.) Perl is an immensely useful language to know. So far it has been second only to C in usefulness. Yes it's spiky, yes it's ugly sometimes. I still like it swell.
• Ruby I call it Objective-Perl. Make it do more in half the lines of code, and make it 100 times more readable than Perl. This is exactly the kind of language I would expect a Japanese computer scientist to produce. Ruby is cool as hell. And O'Reilly's Ruby In a Nushell has a goat on the front cover. What more could you want? (Well, Unicode support will be nice when it arrives.)
• Lisp Now we're getting into Salvador Dali National Park. Lisp is just plain weird. Very A.I., very retro. Imagine a page of Objective-C with all the brackets changed into parentheses, everything not in square brackets removed, everything jammed into one function, and all the builtins changed to cryptic functions like cdr and lambda. Oh, and just for kicks, let's get rid of type checking and the distinction between code and data. Here's an example that should give you bad dreams:
  
  (defun process (sent sent-number turn-number sent-list &aux match)
(when (> (length sent) 0)
(setf match
(position-if #'(lambda (triple)
(string-equal sent (second triple))) sent-list))
(if (null match)
(push (list sent-number sent (list sent-number)) sent-list)
(push turn-number (third (nth match sent-list)))))
sent-list)

A good samurai will parry the blow.

What an amazing weekend this has been. My good friend, and boss (and, as I announced to about 150 people at the reception, onetime mortal enemy), Floyd Noell Tucker got himself married on Saturday. The preparations for this grand event had progressed for months. We dressed in medieval garb, yet there was nary an SCA member to be seen. (I for one am always glad when that is the case.) As my friend Will said, Floyd has provided us with swords, alcohol, and banjo music. (Good old Tom Marshall was there, with his music band.) It was rather cool that the entire wedding party was armed with swords, staves, flails, and the odd tomahawk. The male participants, I should say, tho we all know that most any bridal gown is sufficiently voluminous to conceal two or three lightweight McCullogh chainsaws. So perhaps Tami was holding out on us, chuckling as we strutted around with non-motorized edged weapons.

My primary responsibility was operating one of the two Sony digital camcorders on the scene. I believe that my battles with Murphy's various laws were successful. Nothing exploded, at least nothing I was close to. No one vomited or provoked a fistfight; there was no nudity I was aware of, and no animals were harmed in the making of this wedding. My ivory satin lace-up shirt managed to avoid both red wine and marinara sauce. (Proof of the existence of divinity?)

I'll sniff around for some stills and scans to get them posted here. I just wish I'd gotten a haircut before the event; I was looking and feeling decidedly shaggy. I have decided I like knickers and knee socks. But I felt naked without my usual array of pens (two black, one red) since I hadn't any pockets.

I knew, of course, that once the banjos went home and were replaced by a DJ I would be hauled bodily onto the dance floor. People just seem to like doing that to introverts, regarding us as fair game. I'm one of those guys who can count on one hand the number of occasions on which I have danced. Slow danced a couple times in the mid 1980's. Hopped up and down for about 15 seconds at my 10th class reunion in 1998, before skulking off into the shadows when no one was looking. (The ninja training comes in handy from time to time.) A long ago girlfriend got me to try dancing to a Pet Shop Boys song in my parents' living room but I was so self conscious I managed about ten bars before saying "enough". That's about it. But it seems in the past couple years I have become quite a different person. When one of Floyd's kids demanded I report to the dance floor, I just sort of shrugged and obeyed like some dim and docile beast. Brittle wood snaps in the wind. My old buddy Sean held my coffee (intermezzo between the wine course and the beer course) as I went and thrashed around a bit. The only dancing strategy I have is to try and make one (or more) of my feet resume contact with the floor on either a downbeat or an upbeat. The task rapidly grows to consume 100% of my processing power. If anyone had told me two or three years ago that I would do enough dancing to actually feel muscle aches the next day, I would have thought them certifiably insane. I reckon if you get me likkered up enough I'll try about anything. (Actually, I should point out I had the encouragement of dancing with one of the most beautiful young women I've ever met.) All in all, I had the time of my life. (And only a very slight resultant hangover, one of the fringe benefits of having the metabolism of a bumblebee.)

Funny thing is, I used to hate weddings.

What beautiful chaos life is.

Home