[Edu-sig] musings on Javascript etc.

[kirby urner]

So still gangbusters for Chicago, though I haven't found a CouchDB to
surf yet (stupid joke).

PPUG was great last night, a really growing community, poor Produce
Row for beers eh?  All those paying customers.

So in what ways am I pro Alan Kay?  A very open minded guy in a lot of
ways, worried about 'idiocracy' (I'll expound), and really a task
master in terms of gym coach, like Richard Simmons on steroids.

On the 'Idiocracy' front, he openly doubted whether 'people today'
were smart enough to invent tcp/ip, like if we had to start all over,
did we really have what it takes?

On the open mindedness front, he was taking another look at JavaScript
and really liking what he found, and that attitude communicated
clearly enough to where I'd say my attending these Admirers of
Javascript @ Cubespace are owing to his opening my eyes awhile back
(Shuttleworth Foundation summit, me with the loud fan Toshiba).

On the gym coach front, he'd openly diss with this "low pass filter"
talk that drove people crazy, really challenging to hear.  You could
tell he admired Python though, a lot (he made no secret about it).

So yeah, Alan the guy is impressive.  I knew Arthur would be curious
about my impressions, as he was very openly *not* an Alan Kay fan
(talking about this very archive -- good reading).

That's about the limit of my interactions.  Here on edu-sig, I tried
to communicate my discovery that he's actually a "slayer" versus
Smalltalk, running a Buffy number against this early Frankenstein
experiment, got OO out of the starting gate, but it's kind of like one
of these horses at this point (from a deep DARPA past, like IDLE
someday?):


Anyway, thanks Alan for the heads up about Javascript.

Probably my main disagreement with Alan's philosophy is I'm less
attracted to neat, clean, recursive environments, prefer the more
losely coupled heterogenous environment of competing paradigms.  It's
somewhat the difference between a great painter with a definite look
and feel to explore, and an art curator, who enjoys artwork from
multiple great painters (as I'm sure we all do).  Like, I'm not that
motivated to "solve" the problem of GNU/Linux being a world of
bewildering complexity.  Maybe Alan isn't either, in which case we're
on the same side on this one.

Note that I didn't say anything about Python, as I admire it too, just
as Alan does.  I cut my programming teeth on APL, found Python to be
in that same groove for me, though not the same paradigm (APL was
pre-OO in many ways, with the J language a more contemporary offering
in the same lineage).

I also thinking namespaces are a honking great idea.  Honk honk!

Back to PPUG, I've got the usual blog write-up.  Basically, Python is
doing well in the parsing, machine learning, and semi-structure data
departments, though it's lagging vis-a-vis Tokyo Tyrant.
Kirby