Saturday, February 01, 2003

Languages. Language of the year. The Pragmatic Programmer suggests learning a new programming language (at least) once per year. Specifically, you should learn a language that changes the way you think about things - learning C# if you know Java doesn't count. Last year I decided to learn Ruby - a lot of people told me how great it is. At first I thought it was pointless, but I eventually dived in. Man, I'm glad I did! I've since fallen in love with language. [Joe's Jelly] After my last post, I gotta calm down/switch gears.  Hmm.  Learning Ruby, I gotta say that I don't think you're pushing your boundaries.  Want to learn something new and truly mind-expanding?  Go find Ernest Friedman-Hill's Jess system.  Read the manual, think hard, and you'll find out where computer science is going in the long run.  Yes, he's created a CLIPS system for Java, and perhaps that on its own is not worthy of what I've just said.  But when you start thinking about what you can accomplish with it, and what happens when you attempt to create aspect-based systems and couple them with rule programming, you get to a very interesting place. I've been in this game a long time (17 years) and that combination represents the first truly new thing I've been exposed to in some time. 4:16:19 PM

What are we doing? Now, it's happened again. America took far too long to get back into space after Challenger, and I fear that Columbia will yield the same result. I exhort and urge us all, from President Bush to the assembly-line workers in the huge shuttle preparation buildings in Orlando (where we visited just one month ago) to continue to explore space. Not because we don't value the lives of those who have perished, but because we honor what they believed in. Let the flights continue unabated--it's the only way for us to master a collective national fear. Build another pair of shuttles to replace Challenger and Columbia, taking advantage of all the new advances we've undertaken in the years since their first construction. Mankind's destiny lies in space--we must leave the crib and venture out into the real world. [The Mountain of Worthless Information] Ted's right -- we need to get back out there.  I've often asked myself over the past few years a question: What is this country trying to do?  If you don't live in the US, feel free to ask yourself the same question about your own country. Are we trying to create peace and prosperity?  Are we trying to make our citizens happy?  Those are such internal goals.  Should not the desire of a great society be to build something of beauty, expand the knowledge of the world, or discover a new truth?  So enthralled are we with the twin notions of obedience and prosperity that we have forgotten the essential core of the human spirit, that which I believe justifies our existence -- our ability to surprise God and expand the boundaries of what we know and achieve.  There is an 8 year old boy without a mother, in Racine, Washington, because our politicians felt that saving a few dollars was more important than safety protocols that would have kept his mother alive.  Seventeen years ago, a teacher's family lost their mother because a subcontractor falsified test documents to avoid cost overruns. Seven remarkable human beings are dead because we don't have our priorities straight.  That's you and me, and the people who represent us.  We're about to spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 billion crushing the leadership (and hopefully only the leadership) of a small country in the middle east.  Is there not another way?  Billions of dollars go, in farm subsidies, not to support our nation's farmers, but to prop up the massive agricultural companies that rob them of their lives' work.  Here in DC, the leaders of the local teacher's union gleefully robbed their membership of their dues money, using it to buy themselves whatever they felt like.  They, in particular, had no concept of consequence. What has happened to ethics?  What has happened to responsibility?  We so often declare a "moral person" to be someone who takes certain stands on certain issues -- the unsolvable issues, the ones that don't actually matter. I think the ethics of our interactions with other people, and with society as a whole, are the next frontier of human awareness.  Without finding the right way to live together, to work out our differences, to be good to each other, we will not survive.  It is time that we declare that lack of regard for known consequence is a prime failing, and try to better ourselves.  Have we dug too deep of a hole?  You -- the politicians who axed NASA's budget.  Did you care how the money was spent?  Were you concerned at all with what was being accomplished?  Were you just trying to eliminate an annoyance, an easy target?  Were you being political when you voted to slash the budget? You now reap the deadly and tragic consequences of your decision. 4:08:23 PM