Gábor's blog

Today i have found an article about Arc on programming.reddit.com. While reading the article, i remembered the thing that i do not like about Arc. People often talk about problems like fragmenting the lisp-users even more, or about using lisp1 or lisp2, or hygienic macros etc. My issue is different:

Arc does not behave like an open-source project

that’s it. for example:

• what (open-source or free-software) license does the code use?
• where is the version-controlled repository for the project?
• where is the bug-tracker?

The answer to all this is probably that the project is too young, and all this is still in flux, and it will be clarified when the language becomes more ‘final’. I think it should be the opposite way. Paul Graham should have specified the license from the start. They should also open up the version-control-system they use to develop Arc, and if they don’t use one, they should.

If i got something wrong, please tell me. I’d love to be corrected on these.

p.s: if you’d like to try out a lisp that’s usable currently, there are a lot of them. here are some to start with: mzScheme from the scheme family and SBCL from the common-lisp family. Or, if you would prefer to try out something different, something new, try Clojure. It runs on the JVM, so you also have access to all java libraries.

Ruby on Rails recently started to use Lighthouse for ticket-tracking and GitHub for source-code-management. Both of these products/services are closed-source. i personally wonder if this is a good move (to base your infrastructure on closed-source). Well, for GitHub, the underlying technology is Git, so if they later decide to migrate somewhere else, it should be ok. Let’s hope that Lighhouse has some nice export-all-content functionality :)

while both of these services (GitHub, LightHouse) are closed-source, i somehow assumed that they at least ‘understand’ how open-source/free-software works. but then, yesterday i found out that GitHub Terms of Service forbids free-account-users to block ads. hmmm…maybe they should also forbid free-account-users to open Mercurial’s web page in their browser, while GitHub is open in any other window/tab.

As many other people, i also got my google app account (even crateated a stupid test application. it’s fun to try out such a radically different hosting-environment.

but there is an issue with it seems many do not realize:

the “database” backend of google-app-engine (i will call it BigTable in the following text) is not a relational (read “SQL”) store, and it will never be. for example, it does not support SQL JOINs. but it’s worse than that. because of it’s architecture, JOINS will never be fast there. BigTable is essentially a collection of spreadsheet-tables, where you can do some basic searches, that’s all. oh, and transactions.

for this reason, there probably never will be a BigTable django-ORM wrapper. of course technically it’s possible to implement in python all the missing features, but it’s performance characteristics will not be the same as of a relational-database.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation/3554-Zero-Punctuation-No-More-Heroes

it’s a review of the No More Heroes video game in an unique, unforgettable way. it’s full of ideas/opinions/experiences… full of content.

for the best review-ending of my life watch the ending starting from 3:20. awesome.

also be sure to watch all the reviews, and subscribe to the RSS feed

I’ve played a lot of RPGs… the last one i played for a longer time was Rogue Galaxy… i’m currently at roughly 40% of the game, and currently i have to go and collect 3 items in 3 separate dungeons.

and that was the point where i stopped playing the game (ok, not exactly, i went into one of the three dungeons and then stopped there).

i just cannot help it. for me it seems incredibly boring, that now the story will not move on until i do all 3 dungeons, which will probably involve nothing except going-through-the-dungeon, and fighting-the-boss. three times. i have the feeling that authors usually do this when they are simply out of ideas. now, it might be that actually in Rogue Galaxy, those 3 places (dungeons, whatever) are filled with fantastic story, but i don’t think so :)

the same happened in Neverwinter Nights, except that there you had to collect 4 items (4 stones if i remember correctly). and i hated it there too.

somehow this reminds me of Clichequest

Today ISO approved the Open Office XML format as an ISO standard.

It’s always sad when i have to cut out an entry from my ‘respected authorities’ list, and this time i have to do it with ISO. Now that i think about it, i never really followed whether ISO is a respectable authority or not, but somehow, by default assumed it is. Maybe it never was.

There are several reasons why i don’t like Open Office XML, i will describe here some of them. please note, that i was unable to download the final version, that was accepted by ISO. all i could get was the one accepted by ECMA, and i assume they are similar. if not, please correct me in the comments.

• the spec contains attributes like autoSpaceLikeWord95 (section 2.15.3.6), which basically means that you have to do some formatting the same way as Word 95 does it.it is not specified how it should be done. so if someone wants to implement it, he should try it in Word 95?

I always used PostgreSQL, never MySQL. The reason was simply that at work first i had to work with PostgreSQL, and later i simply saw no reason to switch to MySQL. For me they both seem to offer pretty much the same functionality/performance these days.

But what i’d like to talk about here, is their home pages: MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Most of time i work with open-source/free software, and i got used to the way their home pages are created/behave. and let me tell you this: if i would have to choose today between MySQL and PostgreSQL purely based on their home pages, i would never ever choose MySQL. Their web page is just similar to the usual full-of-bullshit commercial-product web pages, which i learned to hate. The only missing thing is the photo of some happy-guy-in-a-suit holding a copy of MySQL.

Or, let’s try a simple test: How fast can you find the download-link for the latest version of MySQL?

• with Postgresql, it’s right there on the home page, on the right side of the page.
• with MySQL, the first download-like-thing you find is some 30-day-trial… (WHAT? A TRIAL? ISN’T THIS GPL???) . below i can either DISCOVER it, or TEST DRIVE it or LEARN it or read the WHAT’S NEW section… but no DOWNLOAD. well, but if you check more, you can find the small ‘download’ link in the TEST DRIVE section. now you get to a new page, where they try very much to persuade me to buy a commercial version. but, if i prefer to do everything by myself, and accept that there will be no binary builds after every update/bugfix, i can download the free version

i understand the reason for the piece-of-shit web page. MySQL is dual-licensed, there is a commercial version, and there is a company behind it that is trying to sell it. but the problem is that because of this, the “free” version is basically shown as a worse version. and that’s not the best way to look good to programmers using free/open-source software.

Probably many of you have heard already about Seaside. It’s a smalltalk web framework, where you can write a web-app in a linear style:

let’s say you want to create a web-app which:

• shows a form to the user, where he can enter a number and submit it
• then you show him a second form, where the user can enter a second number and submit it
• then you show the user a page which displays the sum of those 2 submitted numbers

i did a quick check about what source-code-management systems are used by the programming languages that i find important/interesting, and here is what i found:

ok, i fixed the issue (had to download the newest version of the php markdown plugin)