How GitHub Scales Its Culture

Good explanation of the GitHub culture, built, as you'd expect, around asynchronous pulling.

Shhhh ...

I have a confession ...

I re-installed the Google App. Engine dev, environment on my machine. I popped open the Mind Traffic Control codebase and looked into it. I was a bit overwhelmed at the clunkiness of some of the code (I've become a more concise Python programmer since then) but I realised I could still make sense of it.

I tweaked a couple of minor appearance bugs and refreshed the server.

It worked!

It's been a long time since I actually had a working MTC development environment.

I wonder what this means ...

Google's "Future of Javascript"

So Google blame Javascript's weaknesses for Apple's success with iOS and its app ecosystem, and want to replace JS with their own alternative.

Obviously I think this is the most wrong-headed thing I've heard in a while, and a worrying sign of idiocy within Google.

I'm not particularly concerned about the future of Javascript which I'm sure will be around  long after Google's alternative is abandoned.

Trello

Trello looks very interesting.

Lunascript looks very interesting.

Going completely against the spirit of what I said yesterday, Web2py looks interesting.

Been browsing some interesting discussion over at Quora on how they built their site.

It's basically Python and Pylons. But this is cool. They don't use a templating language.

Here's developer Charlie Cheever :

What "templating" means to most people is a way of having the developer write out HTML basically the way that you would send it to the browser and then having a way to include a few things -- typically variable substitution by using special tags lik <% ... %> or similar.

In our case, no one writes any code that looks like HTML/XML literals, so there's nothing in our codebase that really matches what most people think of as templates. We do have view code but that interleaves calls into the model and application logic along with a Python code description of what the HTML for that component should be, which is different from templates which are usually based around the ideas of separating logic and data fetching from this.

This sounds like an approach I've been favouring for a while. I did it in Mind Traffic Control, some other unreleased SdiDesk in Python experiments, and I do it in some Javascript I've written. People think that you should separate HTML from code because HTML is the domain of designers and code is for programmers. But I think HTML is the realm of data-structure (designers should stick to CSS) and part of the programmers' remit.

The way a programmer (or at least, this programmer) wants to express complex data structures is with function composition. So here's an example of my html.py file.

# HTML library
# basic level 

def tag(name,x,*argv) :
 if x is None :
  return u"<"+name+u"/>"
 if argv != (None,) : 
  inside = u''.join(argv)
 else :
  inside = u''
 if isinstance(x,dict) :
  # we're passing a dictionary of attributes for the tag
  s = u"<%s " % name 
  s = s + ' '.join(['%s="%s"'%(k,v) for (k,v) in x.iteritems()])
  s = s + u">"+inside+u"</"+name+u">"
  return s

 # or there are no attributes, just inner
 return u"<"+name+u">"+x+inside+u"</"+name+u">"


# Now we'll actually make some tags
tags = ['html','head','body','script','p','div','table',
        'tr','th','td','ul','ol','li','dt','dd','h1','h2',
        'h3','h4','h5','h6', 'style','pre']

loc = locals()
def setit(loc,t) :
 loc[t] = lambda x=None,*argv : tag(t,x,*argv)

for t in tags :
 setit(loc,t)


# Use like this 
html(
    head(),
    body(
        h2("Header"),
        p('para1'),
        p('para2')
    )
)

But I did start to wonder, given the prevalence of templating languages and some of my recent experiences as a Django developer, whether this wasn't just me being wilfully perverse / crazy. I admit I'm kind of relieved to read that Quora are doing something similar. Maybe I wasn't so mad after all.

Bonus link : Decomposition by language is probably a modularity mistake. (Written back when I was more confident.)

Why Programming Languages?

Back writing more Prolog and getting into Definite Clause Grammars. Having a parser generator built into the language is sweet. :-)

How could I have missed this guy commenting on Oli's Semantic Programming?

Dunno ... but I did.

Funny : Analogue literals in C++.

See post on Composing about Kill Math, dynamical systems visualisation.

Compare spreadsheets.

Designing a software "atelier".

Google's Cloud Robotics

Someone else with the disease. :-)

Nice Quora question about code at early Google.

What I take away from these stories is that pushing out ugly prototypes of your products will not prevent you from building a world-class engineering organization in the future.

Bloody hell, Prolog can be frustrating sometimes!!!!

Doh! I may have been a bit previous in saying that I'd got the hang of Prolog syntax.

Awesome response from SWI-Prolog when you just query an unbound variable. :-)

?- X.
% ... 1,000,000 ............ 10,000,000 years later
% 
%       >> 42 << (last release gives the question)

Wow! Playing with Prolog at the moment. It's awesome.

I seem to have finally achieved some kind of fluency instead of fumbling around without knowing how to drive the thing. It probably helps that Erlang has accustomed me to the syntax and other conventions.