code rythm

I won’t give any example, I don’t have the time.

I hate when people don’t put a whitespace after a comma in their code (or in whichever of their prose), it breaks a typographic rule, it makes their work difficult to read.

Similarly I don’t like when people don’t add extra blank lines to their code. Prose that isn’t split in paragraphs is hard to read, it’s the same for code.
Bits of silence are important in music pieces, there are bits of silence around notes, around musical phrases. Rythm.

A majority of the smart guys I came across until now were equally good/excellent at maths and music. I’m not among them.

It’s a pain to read code slapped together without a single breath / blank line. It’s usually perpetrated with an IDE, encouraged by auto-completion and an opening on some hyphothetical refactoring. Auto-deception.

I prefer to work with my plain text editor, line by line, like a poet, verse by verse. But I’m no poet nor am I a musician.
Beautiful muses are demanding.

insert name here…

Well, there :

I’m convinced that one of the reasons Google has been so successful is because it was not founded by a bunch of ex-Microsofties or [Insert name of successful company].

Documentum !

InformationArchitects.jp

I was in YouTubeYa yesterday evening for the monthly Ninjava meeting. YouTubeYa ?

Oliver Reichenstein, a Swiss migrated to Japan, turned the classical Tokyo Metro map into a Web Trend Map.

On that map, Shibuya, the center for youth and crazy culture in Tokyo is where YouTube got placed. By the way, there is no website assimilated to Akihabara (“too crazy” Oliver said).

I first knew about Oliver’s company InformationArchitects.jp via this Labnotes’ blog post highlighting The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard, and then Peter from the Ninjava group announced that Oliver was going to talk about web site design at the Ninjava meeting, great !
Programmers listen to Designer.

Oliver’s presentation focused on the Easy-2-Read standard, go read it if you have to present information via the web.

Lots of questions were fired at Oliver, he had presented with passion, he replied with passion, exposing his experience and beliefs. Lots of questions revolved around the differences between western and eastern presentation of information.

Oliver studied philosophy in Paris and then was attracted to information architecture and design. He made the move from Zurich to Tokyo a few years ago. He and the team he built here are quite successful (and it won’t stop, 80K hits on the Web Trend Map the day before the presentation).

There are two things I learnt yesterday : we may free ourselves from the screen constraints we inherited from the 80s and still honour, and we have to step back when considering what we are writing and how we are presenting it.
And “web design is 95% typography” too.

Thanks to Peter and Zev for inviting Oliver to talk at Ninjava !

and other small coders

IBM announces an interesting initiative today that will make it easier for open source programmers and other small coders to put together a range of software, including Web Services.

From Andy Oram at OnJava. No link to the actual IBM announce.

“other small coders” is quite insulting, I guess it comes from IBM. “patent protection” as always, sounds very ‘cosa nostra’.

business intelligence ?= ignorance

I just stumbled over that page :

An Open Source BI Platform, as conceived by Leonardo da Vinci over 30,000 years ago.

I didn’t know that Renaissance occurred 300 centuries ago. That makes for a really old Leonardo.

sudoku

(warning : half baked text, posted anyway)

Mixed threads of thought :

I was a bit verbose, I told my brother that ruby quizzes were the sudoku of Ruby developers.

Ruby and sudoku, then, via reddit, I came across this post by Eli about sudoku as SAT problems :

When sudoku became popular, I solved a few and quickly reached a conclusion that I don’t find these puzzles interesting. The solution process just felt too mechanic

He went on solving sudoku in a very interesting way…
The computer has to do the repetitive work. We all write programs to solve sudoku, but what about generating them ?

Is this number a prime ?
or
Please generate me the list of primes between 1 and 1000

Bad parallel, a is used by b.

Catalog of openings.

And I can’t find a link to an article detailing the usage of the first computers for generating logarithm tables…

your product

They are everywhere, their way was paved, they’re spoilt, they’ve all the documentation, videos and slideshows, it’s an invasion… They were given a box, a very convenient box…

The Rails developers…

Rails is grand, but don’t forget to think out of the box… How can you call yourself a developer when you’re just a baby bird stuck in its railway nest screaming : “hey, feed me with the documentation on how to integrate your project into Rails !”… If only you had the decency to initiate a reflection on how to achieve it instead of playing the “consubie”, taking open source and free software for granted.

P.S.

Don’t call my project a “product”, did I ask for any of your money ? The price is playing the open source way : reporting bugs, providing patches, communicating in an open way via the mailing lists and not via private emails.

April 1st

Java = Soviet Union
Ruby = …

entreprise ruby

Check this thread started by Alexey Verkhovsky about “Enterprise Ruby”.

Extremely interesting.

dsl

Why discussing DSL ?

“building a domain specific language on top of a more general language” is “programming”; else “programming” is …