waffle

Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Pirate Party, says that Anonymous is to the Pirate parties as Greenpeace was to the Green parties. Rick reiterates that “Pirate”, where it means every freedom that is threatened and every evil that is introduced by the violent overreaction to “piracy”, is a new concern in the same way that “Green”, “Labor Rights” and “Civil Rights” have been new concerns before.

The Pirate Party hasn’t succeeded when it’s the majority party (which is useful, because that’s not going to happen) but when everyone else understands their concerns and defends them without prodding, because it’s the right thing to do.

Name the five things you don’t like about Islam. Chances are none of them are in the Koran, that they’ve been imposed by cultural layers inherited in now-muslim communities and that they aren’t even unique to muslims in those places: so says Mustafa Akyol.

(I choose to not believe in a fellow in the sky, but I think you should be free to do so for purposes of personal reflection.)

Microsoft opens the keynote archive from PDC (Professional Developers Conference). Among the hits are Bill Gates introducing Win32 in 1992 and two unexpected sessions from 1996: Douglas Adams and why not Steve Jobs, then from NeXT, talking about WebObjects.

Isn’t it time to stop using the phrase “scripting language”?

The original example was for scripting to be used for scripts; to cobble together a working pipeline of lesser parts into an automation or to massage data. Every traditional scripting language is by now usable for deeper programming, and many of them are good at it. The performance argument was always a long-term fallacy because it conflates language with implementation and indeed something like Node is as fast as anything because it uses the tireless improvements in V8.

Every programming language I know is used for both scripting and application development. Half of them are called scripting languages for historical reasons. I don’t know when the next wave of interesting languages will come, but I bet no one will use the term “scripting” beyond to say that it’s usable to write scripts in.

There is maybe a place to retain a distinction; shell languages like sh, bash and Powershell, and maybe also real, actual in-system scripting languages where you can’t escape the box and have access to very few tools, are truly intended to be used for scripting in their original meaning. They actually provide little facility for good programming practices because they’re not focused on them but on the task at hand. (C++ is the converse of this coin; making it hard to use it for anything but big system programming because intricacy is encouraged.)

The long and short of it is that we all know half of Google runs on Python. If you program today, you will write scripts, you will write applications and you will write systems, and you will do it in a few different languages, but the two axes are now truly disjointed. There’s no reason for me to not write scripts in C# and a network server in JavaScript any longer, and to burden either language with labels of their heritage is a mistake.