Groovie

Designing web pages is a pretty annoying task for most web programmers I’ve met, including myself. I’ll be first to admit it, I’m not too hot when it comes to web design. I haven’t even bothered changing the default theme for the blog engine I’m using.

What would be really slick is a sort of Web Design for Programmers book, ala Joel’s User Interface Design for Programmers writings and book. I’ve read quite a few books on web design that try to go over basics, but in the end for some reason it always feels like as a programmer, I’m missing those creative juices that result in an unique and interesting website.

There’s a fairly nice series with this exact title over at PeachPit.com that goes over some of the fundamentals. What I think would be ideal, is a website entirely devoted to this topic, with examples and layouts that are good starting points for your own web projects.

I searched around on Google quite a bit, and only came up with the PeachPit articles I cited above. A List Apart is a rather nice site to learn specific web design techniques, but doesn’t really focus on application of the techniques as related to the website on the whole. This part is left up to the designer, which doesn’t help a programmer much.

Having a beautiful website, or even just an aesthetically pleasing one can make a big difference even to other programmers, whether they want to acknowledge it or not. One of the clearest examples of this I’ve seen is with web frameworks and toolkits. A great looking website can get people into a toolkit/framework that might’ve otherwise moved onto a site that looked more “interesting”.

I’ve read quite a bit of Paul Graham’s articles regarding Lisp, how awesome Lisp is, how much of a dufus one might be for using a language programmed for dufuses.

Now, before I start, I should mention that these posts are quite old, and I don’t really want to start a flame fest over this again. However, I couldn’t help but notice today with a problem I had in my code, how easy Python made the solution (Zach points out the Lisp solution is quite succinct as well).

Without a doubt, Lisp excels at recursion, function/code generation, and closures. This frequently leaves Lisp looking like a god when you see how many lines of code other languages take to replicate the examples Paul chooses to compare (which always revolve around the things Lisp excels at as Paul Prescod points out)

Today, I came across a fairly common case, where I had a function taking keyword arguments and collecting them all. That would look like this in Python:

def somefunc(**kargs):

Now, if I want to take two of those keyword being passed in, and set some defaults so they’re not required but will always have something set in the function body, its rather easy:

def somefunc(keyone='default', keytwo='anotherdefault', **kargs):

So in one line, I have now added two defaults that will be available in my function body for use. How succinct is this in Lisp? What about in Ruby?

I cite two languages that came off very well in the Accumulator Generator shoot-off. They Ruby doesn’t do quite as well in this case, which I’ve actually encountered far more than the code generation cases Graham is apt to cite. (I actually like Ruby and am now using it quite a bit, I’ll be quite happy when it has keyword args)

What’s even worse is where in this thread that I referenced above, Graham at the end says he has no clue how one would create a basic class to handle accumulation in Lisp. I find that rather disturbing that something so easy in Python has Graham saying, “God only knows.” how to do it in Common Lisp Richard points out below that this is because PaulG is rather keen on macros, and not so big on OO. That makes complete sense to me as Lisp did not start out with OO features, those were added later when it was all the rage. When working in an elegant functional language like Lisp I can see why one would never have to consider OO.

That alone should indicate that many technical comparisons between languages can be easily skewed towards a language by using examples that heavily favor built-in abilities of the language one chooses to boast about.

In the end, I’m left with the belief that different languages have different applications. Claiming one language is the be-all, and is always better for any task is about as false as claiming that a language has no problems or issues.

Within certain realms it does make sense to compare languages, scripting vs scripting, functional vs functional, etc. But leaping to a comparison of functional/dynamic-typed vs non-functional/static-typed is typically going to result in some strange claims.

Anyways, if you feel like commenting, try and come up with an example of where Language X (that you use) has a very succinct solution compared to Language Z (all the others). It’d be great to compare some examples and see areas in which different languages fall flat on their face when it comes to succinctness. (Ie, in most dynamic languages, you’d have to add several lines of code to ensure variables are the type you want. A feature/annoyance of static-typed languages)

Update: An anonymous user kindly informs me that there’s no foundation for my claim that some languages are better in certain realms than others, unfortunately the anonymous user fails to say why.

Ruby has no keyword arguments currently (Ruby 2 will have them and keyword collectors ** as Python does). To even approximate my Python example in Ruby, you’d first need to declare the argument as optional which has the side effect of packaging it into an Array. Wheras in Python **kargs packages up the rest of the key/vals under a dictionary. If someone would like to write out the full translation in Ruby, I’d be happy to put it up here, but I doubt its going to be pretty (until Ruby 2).

Zach was helpful and provided an example showing that the specific task I cited is fairly short in Lisp as well, looking like this:

(defun somefunc (&rest kwargs
                 &key (keyone "default") (keytwo "anotherdefault")
                 &allow-other-keys)
                 ; ...
                 )

I would like to make it very clear that my point is not that Python is better, but that technical comparisons can be warped to favor certain languages. This is the same point Paul Prescod makes, and what I’d actually like to see is more technical comparisons that make this point obvious.

Really. I mean it. Where’s Single Sign-On?

Liberty Allienace was started 4 years ago to provide a competing alternative to Microsoft’s Passport. It’s taken Liberty Alliance years to get to any sort of usable starting point, while Microsoft has actually had developer code out there and usable since 2001. I’ve even toyed with some Passport login code in Perl 4 years ago.

Since that time, Passport is used rarely if ever on the web, and the Liberty Alliance has tons of docs to show, implementation specs, and even a Java toolkit for Liberty Alliance. Yet I don’t see many (or any?) websites using the federated login of Liberty Alliance. Where’s my single sign-on??

In the time of Web 2.0 a toolkit for the major scripting languages should exist. Why isn’t there one for PHP? Perl? Python? Rails? Has anyone done any calculations in how “good” a website or web service has to be before a user is ready to take the plunge to setup yet another username/password? This is an obstacle that gets in the way of a website having more members, and anyone in the business of getting members should want as few obstacles as possible.

I know I’m not even signing up or using some services purely because I can’t deal with yet another username/password to remember. I can’t even remember the ones I’m currently signed up for, so I have to use software that does password/site remembering for me, in my case Password Wallet.

So what are the supposed strenghts of web services/applications?

1. You don’t need to install any software
2. You don’t need to worry about upgrades
3. You can use it anywhere

Out of these, #3 is the one that has been lost nowadays thanks to a password/username program. I can’t get to any website I’ve registered on without my personal computer, because I can’t remember that many usernames and passwords. Some will say, “just use the same user/password everywhere”, and many people do. Even this doesn’t always work though, if someone else signed up using that username first.

It’s been FOUR YEARS since the big hub-bub over Microsoft Password and Liberty Alliance, and we still don’t have handy little toolkits in the most commonly used scripting languages to interact with them. I don’t know about you, but I find this pretty sad.

So tonight I took the plunge, and converted the blog to Typo. It’s totally slick, and I’m digging it. Plus when I want to tweak stuff, I don’t have to mess around with Perl.

It’s currently lacking a feature I had grown accustomed to, Technorati auto-pinging. I’m thinking this would be a good thing to contribute, so I’ll start digging into the code and see what needs to be updated.

Migration was also a bit of a hassle, as it appears the MovableType 3 migration script only is happy if you use MySQL for your old and new blog. Getting it migrated to Typo required dumping the MovableType database using pg_dump, and loading it into the Typo database. Then the mt3.rb script needed to be edited to remove all the table prefixes. After this, the script happily imported all my prior posts, comments, and trackbacks.

I was going on a walk the other night with my wife, and I think she noticed my far off expression and silence. She asked me what I was so thoughtful about, and I admitted my brain was a bit stuck on solving a complex algorithm involving recursion. At that point she asked me what recursion was, she’s very smart, just not a programmer. So I figured there must be some way I could explain recursion without referring to code, syntax, functions, etc.

Here’s the little explanation I came up with on a moments notice:

Let’s say we have a guy named Joe. Joe has some problems and special abilities.

Joe has the neat ability to make temporary clones of himself, when they’re done doing what he asks them, they disappear in a puff of smoke. Joe unfortunately has issues with math. If you hand him a basket of apple’s, he couldn’t tell you how many apples are in the basket, just seeing all those apples at once confuses him.

If you tell Joe a number though, he can easily add 1 to it. So you tell Joe, “Hey, if someone gives you a basket of apples, take one out, clone yourself, and hand the basket to your clone. If the basket is empty after taking the apple out, tell the one that created you there’s 1. When you get a number from the clone you made, add 1 to it, and tell that to the clone that created you.”

Since Joe’s clones know what he knows, they all know these directions as soon as Joe clones himself. So you proceed to hand a basket of 3 apples to Joe.

Joe takes one out, and hands the basket of 2 apples to his clone. Clone 1 takes an apple out, and handes the basket of 1 apple to a new Clone (Clone 2). Clone 2 takes out the apple, sees there’s no more left, and tells Clone 1, “Hey, there’s 1”. Clone 1 adds 1 to it, and tells Joe, “Hey, there’s 2”.

Joe adds 1 to this, and tells you, the basket has 3 apples in it.

You can hand Joe a basket of however many doodad’s as you want, and he’ll happily keep cloning himself until sooner or later a clone takes out the last doodad.

After this little story, you should be able to explain that:

• A Terminating Condition is when Joe should stop cloning himself
• Joe is recursive because he clones himself and repeats the task

If anyone else out there has a more elegant or shorter way to explain recursion to a non-programmer, I’d love to hear it. This story could also set you up to explain such fun concepts as tail-end recursion or the difference between truly recursive functions and one that could be easily re-written in a loop. I’ll leave that to someone else to translate to non-computer speak.