If you think someone is asking a rhetorical question, it is usually most interesting to treat it as though it is a legitimate question. Especially if we’re talking about something hard — driving down to underlying assumptions through this questioning process is interesting.
Applying this to Bret Victor’s talk …
A programming quandry (related to some thoughts I’ve had on locality):
The prevailing wisdom says that you should keep your functions small and concise, refactoring and extracting functions as necessary. But this hurts the locality of expectations that I have been thinking about. Consider:
function updateUserStatus(user) {
if (user …Since I want to start blogging again, of course I have to also change my software. That’s just out these things work.
And to start a new blog I need at least one post, otherwise things are breaky. So of course the first post must be the announcement I …
I’ve been trying, not too successfully I’m afraid, to get more people to use doctest.js. There’s probably a few reasons people don’t. They are all wrong! Doctest.js is the best!
One issue in particular is that people (especially people in my Python-biased circles) are …
I’ve been thinking some more about deployment of Python web applications, and deployment in general (in part leading up to the Web Summit). And I’ve got an idea.
I wrote about this about a year ago and recently revised some notes on a proposal but I’ve been …
I don’t like systems that use git push for deployment (Heroku et al). Why? I do a lot of this:
$ git push deploy ... realize I forgot a domain name ... $ git commit -m "fix domain name" -a ; git push deploy ... realize I didn't do something right with the database setup …
I think the most interesting work in programming languages right now is about the runtime, not syntax or even the languages themselves. Which places PyPy in an interesting position, as they have put a great deal of effort into abstracting out the concept of runtime from the language they are …
At PyCon there was an open space about deployment, and the idea of drop-in applications (Java-WAR-style).
I generally get pessimistic about 80% solutions, and dropping in a WAR file feels like an 80% solution to me. I’ve used the Hudson/Jenkins installer (which I think is specifically …
All the cool kids love Node.js. I’ve used it a little, and it’s fine; I was able to do what I wanted to do, and it wasn’t particularly painful. It’s fun to use something new, and it’s relatively straight-forward to get started so it …
Many years ago I wrote a fairly straight-forward port of Python’s doctest to Javascript. I thought it was cool, but I didn’t really talk about it that much. Especially because I knew it had one fatal flaw: it was very unfriendly towards programming with callbacks, and Javascript uses …