Groovie

Designing web pages is a pretty annoying task for most web programmers I’ve met, including myself. I’ll be first to admit it, I’m not too hot when it comes to web design. I haven’t even bothered changing the default theme for the blog engine I’m using.

What would be really slick is a sort of Web Design for Programmers book, ala Joel’s User Interface Design for Programmers writings and book. I’ve read quite a few books on web design that try to go over basics, but in the end for some reason it always feels like as a programmer, I’m missing those creative juices that result in an unique and interesting website.

There’s a fairly nice series with this exact title over at PeachPit.com that goes over some of the fundamentals. What I think would be ideal, is a website entirely devoted to this topic, with examples and layouts that are good starting points for your own web projects.

I searched around on Google quite a bit, and only came up with the PeachPit articles I cited above. A List Apart is a rather nice site to learn specific web design techniques, but doesn’t really focus on application of the techniques as related to the website on the whole. This part is left up to the designer, which doesn’t help a programmer much.

Having a beautiful website, or even just an aesthetically pleasing one can make a big difference even to other programmers, whether they want to acknowledge it or not. One of the clearest examples of this I’ve seen is with web frameworks and toolkits. A great looking website can get people into a toolkit/framework that might’ve otherwise moved onto a site that looked more “interesting”.

I’ve read quite a bit of Paul Graham’s articles regarding Lisp, how awesome Lisp is, how much of a dufus one might be for using a language programmed for dufuses.

Now, before I start, I should mention that these posts are quite old, and I don’t really want to start a flame fest over this again. However, I couldn’t help but notice today with a problem I had in my code, how easy Python made the solution (Zach points out the Lisp solution is quite succinct as well).

Without a doubt, Lisp excels at recursion, function/code generation, and closures. This frequently leaves Lisp looking like a god when you see how many lines of code other languages take to replicate the examples Paul chooses to compare (which always revolve around the things Lisp excels at as Paul Prescod points out)

Today, I came across a fairly common case, where I had a function taking keyword arguments and collecting them all. That would look like this in Python:

def somefunc(**kargs):

Now, if I want to take two of those keyword being passed in, and set some defaults so they’re not required but will always have something set in the function body, its rather easy:

def somefunc(keyone='default', keytwo='anotherdefault', **kargs):

So in one line, I have now added two defaults that will be available in my function body for use. How succinct is this in Lisp? What about in Ruby?

I cite two languages that came off very well in the Accumulator Generator shoot-off. They Ruby doesn’t do quite as well in this case, which I’ve actually encountered far more than the code generation cases Graham is apt to cite. (I actually like Ruby and am now using it quite a bit, I’ll be quite happy when it has keyword args)

What’s even worse is where in this thread that I referenced above, Graham at the end says he has no clue how one would create a basic class to handle accumulation in Lisp. I find that rather disturbing that something so easy in Python has Graham saying, “God only knows.” how to do it in Common Lisp Richard points out below that this is because PaulG is rather keen on macros, and not so big on OO. That makes complete sense to me as Lisp did not start out with OO features, those were added later when it was all the rage. When working in an elegant functional language like Lisp I can see why one would never have to consider OO.

That alone should indicate that many technical comparisons between languages can be easily skewed towards a language by using examples that heavily favor built-in abilities of the language one chooses to boast about.

In the end, I’m left with the belief that different languages have different applications. Claiming one language is the be-all, and is always better for any task is about as false as claiming that a language has no problems or issues.

Within certain realms it does make sense to compare languages, scripting vs scripting, functional vs functional, etc. But leaping to a comparison of functional/dynamic-typed vs non-functional/static-typed is typically going to result in some strange claims.

Anyways, if you feel like commenting, try and come up with an example of where Language X (that you use) has a very succinct solution compared to Language Z (all the others). It’d be great to compare some examples and see areas in which different languages fall flat on their face when it comes to succinctness. (Ie, in most dynamic languages, you’d have to add several lines of code to ensure variables are the type you want. A feature/annoyance of static-typed languages)

Update: An anonymous user kindly informs me that there’s no foundation for my claim that some languages are better in certain realms than others, unfortunately the anonymous user fails to say why.

Ruby has no keyword arguments currently (Ruby 2 will have them and keyword collectors ** as Python does). To even approximate my Python example in Ruby, you’d first need to declare the argument as optional which has the side effect of packaging it into an Array. Wheras in Python **kargs packages up the rest of the key/vals under a dictionary. If someone would like to write out the full translation in Ruby, I’d be happy to put it up here, but I doubt its going to be pretty (until Ruby 2).

Zach was helpful and provided an example showing that the specific task I cited is fairly short in Lisp as well, looking like this:

(defun somefunc (&rest kwargs
                 &key (keyone "default") (keytwo "anotherdefault")
                 &allow-other-keys)
                 ; ...
                 )

I would like to make it very clear that my point is not that Python is better, but that technical comparisons can be warped to favor certain languages. This is the same point Paul Prescod makes, and what I’d actually like to see is more technical comparisons that make this point obvious.

Really. I mean it. Where’s Single Sign-On?

Liberty Allienace was started 4 years ago to provide a competing alternative to Microsoft’s Passport. It’s taken Liberty Alliance years to get to any sort of usable starting point, while Microsoft has actually had developer code out there and usable since 2001. I’ve even toyed with some Passport login code in Perl 4 years ago.

Since that time, Passport is used rarely if ever on the web, and the Liberty Alliance has tons of docs to show, implementation specs, and even a Java toolkit for Liberty Alliance. Yet I don’t see many (or any?) websites using the federated login of Liberty Alliance. Where’s my single sign-on??

In the time of Web 2.0 a toolkit for the major scripting languages should exist. Why isn’t there one for PHP? Perl? Python? Rails? Has anyone done any calculations in how “good” a website or web service has to be before a user is ready to take the plunge to setup yet another username/password? This is an obstacle that gets in the way of a website having more members, and anyone in the business of getting members should want as few obstacles as possible.

I know I’m not even signing up or using some services purely because I can’t deal with yet another username/password to remember. I can’t even remember the ones I’m currently signed up for, so I have to use software that does password/site remembering for me, in my case Password Wallet.

So what are the supposed strenghts of web services/applications?

1. You don’t need to install any software
2. You don’t need to worry about upgrades
3. You can use it anywhere

Out of these, #3 is the one that has been lost nowadays thanks to a password/username program. I can’t get to any website I’ve registered on without my personal computer, because I can’t remember that many usernames and passwords. Some will say, “just use the same user/password everywhere”, and many people do. Even this doesn’t always work though, if someone else signed up using that username first.

It’s been FOUR YEARS since the big hub-bub over Microsoft Password and Liberty Alliance, and we still don’t have handy little toolkits in the most commonly used scripting languages to interact with them. I don’t know about you, but I find this pretty sad.

Update: Technorati informs me that they’re working on fixing this problem.

So I figured I’d log into Technorati, update my profile tonight. Problem is, I apparently forgot my username. So I go to the login screen and don’t see anything about what to do if you forget your username. That’s ok, there’s a Lost Password link, that might help. Clicking the Lost Password brings you to a screen that lets you enter your username OR your email address to receive instructions to reset your password. (Still nothing about if you forget your username)

The email looks like this:

Greetings, !

We received a request to reset your Technorati password.

To create a new password, please visit this URL:

http://technorati.com/signup/lostpassword.html?r=<!Characters removed!>

If the above link is not clickable, please copy and paste the link into your web browser.

Thank you for using Technorati.

How useful, clicking this link brings up a very clean, simplistic interface that lets you enter a new password and confirming that. Once you enter these two words and hit enter…. you get the same exact screen, only with the two fields empty .

Did it work? Did you change your password? No feedback whatsoever is given, except that if you try and do it again, you get an error….. which is even worse, because does this mean you did changed it or not?

Of course, at this point, lets remember the real issue is that I don’t remember my username. So I go back to the helpful screen asking me to enter my username OR email for password reset, and start guessing possible usernames I might’ve used (and for me, that could be quite a bit). Technorati helpfully returns an error screen until I finally enter a username that exists, at which point it tells me it sent the email.

Technorati, if you’re listening (they are), please fix this…

A friend recently brought to my attention that I seem to have a knack for insulting a language based on a quick overview without actually getting into it. After thinking about this awhile I’ve noticed it definitely seems to be more of a trend than I’d like.

The latest example of this was Ruby, but before that Python (Lisp before that). With each language, I’d find new things to nitpick on before really diving in (Which I always seemed to do anyways). As a result of this, I think its time for me to really grow up and stop picking on new languages till I’ve at least had the time to write a few apps in them and truly understand where they’re lacking.

As a quick side-note, here are the things I found to nitpick on before actually learning these languages:

• Objective-C: God, wtf is up with these [] all over the place?
• Lisp: God, wtf is up with these () all over the place?
• Python: God, wtf is up with these _ all over the place, and who in their right mind uses white-space to designate blocks?
• Ruby: God, wtf is up with these {|| } things all over the place?

Obviously I had issues with syntax, I hope to have purged myself of these issues as of this writing. Remember, sometimes a language has a damn good reason to have crazy characters all over the place.