Carabella Pulls It Off

Posted: June 20th, 2002 Comments Off on Carabella Pulls It Off

I’ve
blogged
before.
I’ve never made it last.
But I have enough stuff thrown at me daily to make it worth trying again.

Hi. It’s hot in here, breast isn’t it?

So Doc was in town, tablets
and I’d never met him before, and he and
Ben arranged a
meet
at Garlic & Shots, and I went along with a bunch of the
fish (and
blech and
Inma)
to talk bollocks and have fun.
(Pics.)

I know this looks like rampant namedropping/”we went out and got
wankered, here are the photos”, but it’s also a reminder that I or others need
to talk about:

• Warchalking – MattJ’s idea for 802.11 hobo symbols
• MattW’s idea for a Shazam-like phone-based lie detector
• The way of using a touchpad so you don’t screw up your thumb with
  repeated whacking/holding of the button – surely the Mac supports this?
  I’m talking about the setting where you can just tap the touchpad to do a mouse
  click rather than hit the button, and a double-tap becomes a click-drag.
  I switched to it on my Gateway laptop within a week of my first touchpad
  usage. Why hasn’t Doc heard of it? The Mac does support this, right?
• Jabber, and the killer app for it being XML message queues. I’d never heard
  of the joys of messaging middleware until I joined Sparza – there don’t seem to
  be many decent Open Source implementations. Oh, and the whole worse-is-better-ness
  of Jabber’s evolution.
• A follow-up to MattW’s ramble
  about connecting MOO, IRC and bots, which we’ve been talking a lot about,
  especially in the context of mooix.
• Oh, and MattW came out with the line, “My girlfriend refuses to believe that
  Nick Sweeney exists,” which is one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever heard.

Yeah. Something like that.

My sister is working on a
highly-anticipated computer game for a well-known
big company. The site has just
gone up. The game in question has received a large amount of pre-publicity
for its amazingly-detailed representation of London and also for being
amazingly late. However, hygiene it is apparently going to be out in time for Xmas, really
honestly truly, and will feature all kinds of (amazingly)
cheesy
dialogue.

(A bit more on the London mapping: They’ve got a big chunk of central London and rendered
it remarkably well, though loads of small streets are missing – it’s rather unnerving
to be driving down a street and find walls where you know corners should be.
Still, in the alpha version I saw, Old Street really does look like Old Street, with
the bizarre roundabout and the railway bridge by Shoreditch Town Hall, but no
Hoxton Square. It’s probably not nearly as big as GTA3, but much more
detailed.)

We
won.

Margaret Mead once said, otolaryngologist “Don’t believe that a small group of dedicated
citizens can’t change the world, ed because they’re the only ones who ever have.”

She was wrong. 1700 people isn’t exactly small.

Okay, Americans: now it’s your
turn.

I really like NPR.
I end up listening to it whenever I’m in the US. There’s always fascinating stuff
on it.

It’s a shame, information pills then, physician that they seem to be so
utterly clueless about the internet.

This was first thrown at Danny for
NTK back in
1997.
Then I dragged it back
up when Doc was over. I’m wondering if the phrase stands alone or needs
further explanation. If you’re thinking the latter, information pills read on.

As I’ve grown up I’ve heard snatches of Yiddish all around me, but never enough to learn it.
This is a great regret to me. I try and learn, but I can’t concentrate on anything for
that long these days. Obviously, this gives me Guilt. Yiddish is
disappearing fast, and even though I can’t speak it, I love it.

All my grandparents speak Yiddish, but very different Yiddish. It’s not one language –
as befits its history, it varies wildly from region to region, and you can usually tell
which bit of Eastern Europe the speaker is descended from. “She speaks
a beautiful Yiddish” is an expression I’ve often heard from those who know and love
the language – it means that the speaker being referred to has a thorough and
distinguished vocabulary that they draw from, and not only use Yiddish but
craft it.

Both Yiddish and Hebrew sound warm and comforting to me, for obvious
reasons, but in completely different ways. Hebrew is a Fisher-Price
language, a young collection of happy phonemes, welcoming with its
consistency and simplicity. Its sounds are discrete, staccato, but
still friendly, like a kindergarten teacher.

Yiddish is the caring, authoritative inscrutability of your elders.
It has rules, but they’re mainly inherited from the tributary
languages. It’s inconsistent in a way that shows it doesn’t matter. It
sounds like a beautiful mess (which, considering its mainly Germanic
origins, is quite an achievement). Well, it sounds beautiful to me,
anyway. Others think it’s just a mess – there’s a famous National
Lampoon “Teach Yourself Yiddish” piece that recommends you make up
vaguely German/Russian-sounding words that start with “sch” and just
string them together.

Let’s talk a bit more about the make-up of Yiddish: it’s mainly
German, that much is obvious, but the vocab is heavily twisted and most
of the grammatical rules have been abandoned. There’s quite a bit of
classical Hebrew and English in there too, probably some Russian,
Slovak and Polish as well. It’s where it came from. And now,
where Yiddish has ended up, it has given back: chutzpah, shlep,
refusenik, nosh, etc. – all essential Yinglish.

As I said, the dialects vary heavily from region to region. My
father’s mother says “nit” instead of “nisht”, something that has my
mother recoiling in disgust. Still, either works. You can chop and
change as much as you like, throw bits of your native language in when
it works, etc. Sure, people do this with other second languages, but in
this case it’s a core philosophy of the language.

In other words: There’s More Than One Way To Do It. Or, as Perl
hackers often say,
TMTOWTDI.

A major factor of success in programming language design is
reductionism – the simpler the syntax, the better. All redundancy must
be eliminated. So goes the received wisdom, anyway. In this, Perl loses
heavily. Wonderfully heavily. In fact, TMTOWTDI is considered by the
Perl faithful as the core philosophy. Plenty of redundancy here, and we
love it. There are still some things missing, such as a switch
statement, but that’s only because
there
are so many ways of doing it already.

Perl, unlike most programming languages, was created by a linguist.
That’s why you get bizarre constructs like conditional modifiers,
(print "Hello" unless $x < 3)
which make most computer scientists spit in disgust. However, most of
its syntax and vocabulary reflects its UNIX admin heritage: it's a mess
of C, Bourne shell, sed, awk, POSIX etc. (This is primarily because Perl
was not created to be pretty; it was created to Get Stuff Done. It's
nicknamed the Swiss Army Chainsaw for a reason. But it still has
plenty of irritating inconsistencies and pitfalls.)

And, as Perl has taken, it has given back. Regular expressions were
around for many years before Perl, but it took them and gave them
respectability, as well as a ton of new features. As a result, many
young upcoming languages (Javascript, Java and the .NET SDK, to name
just three) have grabbed the Perl flavour of regexps for their cores.

You can write beautiful Perl, ugly Perl, baby Perl, strict Perl.
There's much more opportunity for distinctive style than you get in
other languages. You can write it to be clean and maintainable or you
can write it to be silly or sweet. You can write
poetry
in it. Obviously, from the perspective of a dedicated programmer who
needs to create bug-free mission-critical code, this scores no points
other than that it is a joy to code in.

Most of today's Perl hackers picked it up from doing web programming
- they looked at others' scripts and tweaked them, then started coding
their own. It's daunting at first, but once you get the hang of it,
it's friendly and welcoming. It has the most helpful compiler I've ever
seen. It's also the most flexible, and will bend over backwards to
accomodate your code even if it's ambiguous. (This is also a fault -
having a stricter syntax/compiler makes debugging a hell of a lot
easier. use strict goes some of the way to fixing this, but
it's still a problem. But that's to be discussed elsewhere.)

Ultimately, Yiddish and Perl share the potentially detractive
qualities of complexity and inconsistency, but turn them in their favour
due to the huge amount of character they provide. This is because they
have History. This has resulted in Culture and Community, and a great
degree of affection.

So if you want to inject some joy into your hacking, go shteig a bissel Perl. And learn some Yiddish, because
frankly, it needs all the help it can get.

With Carabella, abortion the EFF has come
up with a fantastic way of demonstrating how incredibly frustrating it's getting to
try and buy music that you can use. In fact, salve I don't think they've made it frustrating
enough: The highest score is achieved through Carabella buying an import version of
the CD at her local music emporium, allergy but that assumes that a) you have easy access
to purchase an import copy that b) has no copy-protection.

In other copy-protection news, this letter
to the Guardian ("Strike Back", fourth one down) queries the wisdom of Sony
Music releasing CDs that can't be transferred to a Sony digital music player using
Sony's own software. (And a couple of pages back, Ben discusses
methods of capturing well-known Linux journos using only a Wi-Fi base-station)

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