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Code and words about code from Reg "raganwald" Braithwaite

A Brief History of Dangerous IdeasJuly 22 2008

(This will be super-brief because (a) I really don’t know that much History, and (b) there’s really only one idea here with a few examples, and once you get the point, we’re done and can move to the outro.)

Astronomy and Celestial Mechanics were dangerous ideas because they undermined the most powerful organization of their day, The Church. That’s why people have been banned, tortured, and burned at the stake for talking about these ideas.

Crossbows were a dangerous idea because they allowed an untrained peasant to kill a knight. Longbows were not a dangerous idea, because only trained archers can kill a knight with a longbow, and the nobility were the only people who could compel peasants to practise yeomanry.

Cryptography is not a dangerous idea, because we really don’t know if any of our algorithms and protocols are resistant to the NSA. This was hi-lighted when researchers “discovered” differential cryptanalysis. When they looked at the DES algorithm IBM has been promoting since the 1976, they found that it had been specifically tuned to resist differential cryptanalysis. IBM ‘fessed up: the US government had told them to tune things that way without explaining why, leading us to conclude they had known about this attack for decades before it became p

"L" is not a code smellJuly 21 2008

During my presentation at RubyFringe, I shared a conjecture that has been swirling around in my brain for a while: Are IDE features really language smells?

I don’t think it’s an original thought. If nothing else, it’s a corollary to what I believe to be true about many of the GoF design patterns: Many of them are workarounds, ways to Greenspun missing language features. Now, this is probably not the case for all IDE features, and in truth it may be that there are some features which could be implemented in either the language or the IDE, but the IDE may be the best place to put them.

But there is a fairly large class of IDE features that strike me as language workarounds. One of them is definitely the ability to spit out a lot of boilerplate. If you need a lot of code written, you ought to be able to get your programming language to do it for you, not your IDE.

There is room for people to disagree about this. There are some who feel (Strawman alert!) that programs consisting of large numbers of simple elements are easier to understand than programs consisting of a small number of highly abstract elements. Those folks feel an IDE gives you the ease of writing a program wuickly plus the ease of reading that same program quickly. They feel that abstractions make the program easier to write but harder to read.

I happen to disagree with this, and if y

Ruby.rewrite(Ruby) in Ten... Nine... Eight... Seven Days...July 14 2008

Checking the RubyFringe schedule, I see I must somehow keep the audience from yawning for thirty minutes between 2:10 and 2:40 on Sunday afternoon. I have the unenviable task of appearing between two incredibly smart and hardworking people, Damien Katz and Chris Wanstrath.

Upon reflection, I think I’d better open my talk with this quote from Horse Feathers:

I’ve got to stay here, but there’s no reason why you folks shouldn’t go out into the lobby until this thing to blows over.

—Groucho Marx

See you at RubyFringe!

My analyst warned me, but metaprogramming was so beautiful I got another analystJuly 13 2008

Try to imagine a world where every programmer you know is a wannabe language designer, bent on molding the language to their whims. When I close my eyes and imagine it, I have a vision of the apocalypse, a perfect, pitch-black storm of utterly incomprehensible, pathologically difficult to debug code.

—Jeff Atwood

Whereas I have a vision of a world not too much different than the one we live in today. A few people invent ridiculous things, incomprehensible things. Most people carry on doing what they’ve always done. And a few people invent new, worthwhile things that move us forward.

In my world, a few people inventing great things more than makes up for a different few people inventing ridiculous things. If we get Rails out of the deal, isn’t it worth giving Ick a bemused smile, tousling the creator’s hair and encouraging him to “keep trying?”

Jeff goes on to put some smart people on a pedestal, prostrating before their greatness. I admire them as well, but I don’t confer a priesthood upon them. Once upon a time, reading and writing was not something plebeians did. Even the bible was a closed book, you only heard what was recited in Church.

Does anyone doubt that democratizing the written word—through education and especially Gutenberg’s invention—has been a force for good?

Off topic: AntagonymsJuly 8 2008

An antagonym (also called a contranym) is a single word that has meanings that contradict each other.

For example, “Reg Braithwaite buckled his belt and lifted, hoping he wouldn’t buckle under the strain.” The word “buckle” has two entirely opposite meanings.

Antagonyms aren’t nearly as important to the world as finding a way to make our avocation our vocation, but all the same the very idea brings a pleasant smile to my face, and I hope you’re amused as well.

(via Hacker News)