Lonely Lion

In keeping with the Pragmatic rule of “learn a new programming language once a year,” I’ve spent a fair amount of time learning Ruby over the past two weeks or so. I’m reading Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers\’ Guide and Agile Web Development with Rails. Both are very well written books, and I’m enjoying Ruby thus far.

Ben’s recent post on “the wackiness of Ruby” made me want to add something to what he’s saying: I am really tired of inter-language bickering. It makes it really difficult to learn new things, when the vast majority of bright open source-y people choose such hard-core zealotry as their world outlook. That said, I’m a huge hypocrite for bringing this up, as I start my share of sentences saying “Python does this much better…” However, I’m trying to turn over a new leaf.

I’ve made a conscience decision while reading the Ruby stuff to let it be what it is, and not let my opinions slow me down. It’s tough. It’s taken a fair amount of self-discipline to not stop reading and exclaim something or other about why something is good or bad. After the first few days though, it got easier.

Open source projects and languages need advocates. Potential converts are sometimes best converted through somewhat disdainful appraisals of their current choices. I’m tired of it. Being open to new things is a much more rewarding experience. I’m glad that Ben, a fierce advocate of a particular stack of tools, takes the time to learn something new. I’m glad that he calls out what he sees as inconsistencies, while not necessarily passing judgement on the project. I think it can be a very difficult thing to do, especially in the pretty zealot-y user group community. It’s something that we should all at least try, I think we’ll all find it’s a better way to view your world.

Phew. What a day. I’m back in the office after watching lots of people mill around for the afternoon. Lots of energy out there, people were clearly having a lot of fun. Also, in a particularly mercenary move, I put a handful of “ticker tape” (shredded newspaper) up on ebay. Go Ebay!

The crowds are starting to form outside, they’ve closed Lasalle and Wacker. This shot is from the 11th floor of my building at 180 N. Lasalle.

The crowd is getting warmed up for the Sox ticker tape parade that’s going to be passing in front of my building this morning at 11 am. They’re already lining up outside. A particularly lively group was chanting “call in sick!” to people on their way into work. It’s going to be a fun day, regardless of your baseball affiliation.

Found this link (http://www.afactor.net/kitchen/coffee/kaffeeKantate.html) to a cantata written by JS Bach for performance in a coffee house via this violin.com blog entry. While you’re there, check out this mp3 of Scottish style fiddle.

Ian just posted Little Apps Instead of Little Frameworks. It’s a good write up, and a good idea. The idea of paste being able to facilitate this sort of thing, where you can mix and match little bits, written using different Python frameworks, is attractive.

I recently listened to the Jason Fried Basecamp presentation on I.T. Conversations. One of the ideas there that really resonated with me was “embracing your constraints.” So your team is short on money, don’t necessarily go after more money, use that constraint as a way to push yourself to innovate. That idea also resonates with some improv concepts I’ve pushed a lot in the past, that show structure (constraints) make you hone the art. Absolute freedom sometimes leads to a big mess.

Which leads us to Python web frameworks. It’s a pretty widely acknowledged big mess. So, seeing that as a plus, rather than a minus, ultimately leads to Paste, and what (I think) Ian is getting at. Rather than buying whole hog into any particular framework, or any monolith for that matter, build small and combine. There’s a significant amount of ramp up associated with any given project, and a significant risk associated with trusting any one framework to really be able to solely meet every need of a particular project. Having the ability to mix and match is key.

All that said, I’m also reading
Agile Web Development with Rails. One of the concepts in the Rails philosophy that I like is freedom, with sensible defaults. That makes sense to me. My tools should give me the power to do what I want and not get in the way. At the same time, they should work pretty well out of the box, without much tweaking. There’s a lot of good ideas floating around out there, it’s a very exciting time to be making silly web applications.

The Farm: The Tucows Developers’ Hangout :: [Web Apps] Chicago: Center of the Web 2.0 Universe? from Tucows.com. Pretty neat headline. I was actually just thinking this this morning, Chicago has a lot of open source talent, despite our non-coast status.

Just look at the chipy.org site to get an idea. Midwest!

Paste is on my list of “things that don’t quite make sense to me.” I know it’s important, and I know that it will make life easier. However, up until this morning, I wasn’t exactly sure how. Ben Bangert wrote up a distillation of it’s usefulness, which I just read. The paster command, to me, is exactly what these gajillion Pythonic web frameworks need, a single command that lets you say “I want to create a [insert framework] app, give me some best practices and a quick running instance.” After reading Ben’s write up, I checked out the Paste site, it got pretty sexy while I was away.

New font, new colors, new docs. Things are really coming together nicely. Pile on new support from Myghty, and Paste is starting to really beef up. Good work Ian, and thanks Ben for the reminder to keep checking in on Paste.