This is an insult to the intelligence.
Link: AlterNet: WireTap: Why We Stood
What you will find at that link is an “explanation” of why a class of Georgetown students stood and turned their backs on Alberto Gonzales when he spoke there recently. I think “rationalization” would be a better word than “explanation”, except that rationality has very little to do with it.
The author repeatedly informs us that Alberto Gonzales’ legal arguments were “unconvincing and wrong” — neglecting to give so much as an example of what those arguments were, why they were unconvincing, and why they were wrong.
This article exemplifies the double-mindedness we see coming from the left; if you say that it’s a good thing that we are monitoring possible terrorist communications, then they will agree, but say it was wrong because it was “not legal”. Then, if any explanation is made as to why it was not illegal, or shouldn’t be, then they’ll return to the argument that it infringes on “freedom.” This is circular, fallacious, and absurd.
I wish, instead, that they had just said, “We are against Bush and his administration no matter what they do, because that is what we have decided to be. No argument will convince us, because this is what we have decided to believe. We simply looked for an opportunity to be rebellious and disrespectful, and we took it.”
I still wouldn’t like the explanation, but at least I would respect the honesty.
I just deleted a spam comment which actually made it past Akismet.
Considering that Akismet has blocked 116 comments (all spam) since January 5th, that’s not too shabby. If you’re blogging with WordPress and have comments enabled, you want Akismet. It works great.
This is very good…
Link: Ned Batchelder: Deleting code
I have this same tendency to comment out code rather than delete it. It seems safer somehow, like putting it in the Recyle Bin, instead of doing rm -f /myCruftyCode.
Delete unused code. Uh, mostly. I think there are a few lines I want to keep around… ;-)
Guido has written Please Teach me Web Frameworks for Python!, a musing on the state of web frameworks, specifically web frameworks which use Python.
O‘Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf has a new feature; “Rough Cuts” are basically “beta” versions of forthcoming O’Reilly books. You can sign up to read the existing electronic version, or pre-order the print edition, or both.
If you sign up to read the pre-release version, you may also be able to provide feedback and help shape the forthcoming book.
The available titles right now:
- Flickr Hacks
- Ajax Hacks
- Ruby Cookbook
- Ruby on Rails: Up and Running
Interesting? I think so.
Sam Logan recently linked to a new-ish webcomic called Pirate and Alien. It’s pretty good!
I liked this one (click to read full comic):
Well, it looks like Chatsum is starting to expand its beta. It’s a pretty cool concept, now that I see it in action.
Chatsum is a Firefox extension that adds a sidebar which acts as a chat client; what’s unique about it is that you are chatting with any Chatsum user who is visiting the same page as you at that time. Also, Chatsum save past conversation, so if someone made a comment 3 hours ago, and no one has said anything on that page since then, it remains there.
I like it; it’s sort of nifty.
If you use Firefox, go ahead and sign up for the beta; talk to you later!
Dennis Forbes has an article posted about Making the Perfect Cup of Coffee. This on the heels of another recent post on the same subject, Tom Moertel’s Coder’s Guide to Coffee.
You would think that coffee is somewhat important to the tech community in general. I guess that depends; is fuel considered important? ;-)
I couldn’t agree more with Patrick Jordan’s conclusions in his article A Very Quick Comparison of Popular Langauges for Teaching Computer Programming.
The fact that Python is not necessarily the most common language in enterprise use (and that Java, arguably, is) is not an good argument against Python, or for Java. We are talking about an introduction to programming, which should be able to introduce the sort of thought processes one needs for translating algorithms to code, without adding a lot of (potentially) confusing overhead which, with Java, is inevitable.
I can empathize with Patrick’s frustration in trying to write a Java program which accepts input from the command line; this is by no means intuitive. I can remember searching through my textbooks for an example of this sort of thing and finding nothing — one textbook actually provided a class (as in an object class, not an educational one) on the companion CD for doing this so that it didn’t actually have to teach the student how it worked.
Everyone has their favorite language; being involved in Scheme right now, I can see why it was chosen as the introductory language by MIT, and I think the choice is a good one. Python is also a good choice, and I’m inclined to think that Ruby or Perl would be good choices also. (I know Perl has a reputation for “write-only” code, but getting started in Perl is very intuitive, and the sort of programs one writes in introductory CompSci could easily be taught with Perl). I think I’ve even heard JavaScript as a suggestion for beginning programming, and while I’m not certain I completely agree, it would be adequate; it does have the advantage of an easy-to-access “interpreter” in the form of any modern web browser installed on your machine.
I would say, (not that anyone’s asking me ;-)) save Java for when you begin teaching Object Oriented Programming, or more advanced software development courses; that would provide the advantage of actually being able to focus on the parts of Java which are “hard”, since you would not need to spend three weeks explaining common control structures and variable types.
I actually really like Java — but I would agree that it isn’t necessarily the best choice for a first language.
