I Don't Like Tags

They force you to make up a categorization system as you go — it’s stressful and it doesn’t work that well. On Delicious I’ve tagged a gazillion things “js” and another gazillion things “javascript”, and it’s hard to rename them… What a mess. I’m going to start using Twine more — the only reason I haven’t already is because Delicious is so much more mature — it’s older, more stuff has been built for it, etc.

But I think Twine is on the right track: automatic organization is going to be big. We don’t have to think about organizing things in our brains, and until we don’t in computers either, computers are going to be a pain to use. What’s even more exciting is that computers don’t have the brain’s disadvantage: they don’t forget anything.

I’m loving the philosophy of Humanized. Reminds me a lot of Quicksilver: the name of Humanized’s main product, “Enso”, comes from a Japanese tradition, and Quicksilver’s “About” dialog contains a haiku. I’m so intrigued by Asian philosophy — it seems like they’re on to something. Heck, Einstein liked Buddhism.

Pro-Choice vs. Pro-Life: The Difference is Where the Line is Drawn

The pro-life philosophy is not to draw a line when it comes to life: if a woman is pregnant she has to have the baby, even if she was raped. Stopping life, no matter how early, they say, is murder.

But they do draw a line: impregnation. After the woman is pregnant, she has to have the baby. But that’s not where the process starts, obviously — the woman and the man decide to have sex beforehand. So, if they don’t draw a line when it comes to stopping life, is it murder every time people decide not to have sex? Are Catholic priests killing babies when they preach against premarital sex that might have resulted in babies?

No, that’s ridiculous, anyone can agree — this debate is about once the woman’s pregnant. But there’s the line again. All pro-choicers do is move the line to birth. Women choose to have abortions for the same reasons they (and men) choose not to have sex, or not to get married: they’re not ready for a kid, they didn’t want to have a kid with this person, whatever.

Both pro-lifers and pro-choicers draw a line, the difference is where.

Ruby vs. Python

So this weekend I played with Ruby after a long hiatus. It’s a neat language, and for a while I got thinking about porting Braindump to Ruby, since I’m already ditching about 60% of the code I wrote for it (after ditching 100% of the code when I ported from PHP). In addition to being an elegant and innovative language, Ruby has a strong web developer user base and thus lots of great libs for web development (Camping would be fun to work with). Also, the language has a whole culture and zen thing to it that’s intriguing. But, despite all that, I decided to stick with Python, for a lot of the reasons I decided to go with it in the first place:

• Syntax — Ruby can do a lot of things with less code than Python, but Python code is cleaner, simpler and more semantic, more readable.
• Culture and Zen Thing — I don’t really get Ruby’s yet, but I like Python’s. Python people seem to have bigger horizons — they seem to on average have bigger visions, and build things for the sake of the things and not for the sake of using the tools. It’s the language of choice for the likes of the W3C guys (I see a lot of sample code for working with RDF written in Python), the Nodebox guys (designers, people thinking about “artificial creativity”), the OLPC guys (entire GUI in Python), linguistics people — the list goes on.
• CherryPy — It’s just what I need in a web framework and nothing more. Simple, elegant, flexible enough.
• RDFlib — A really solid and comprehensive RDF parsing, serializing, and persistence lib — I couldn’t find anything comparable for Ruby, save the Ruby bindings for Redland which have to be compiled and stuff (ick)
• Other Libraries — While Ruby has tons libs and assorted hacks for web development, Python has libs for everything, and good, mature ones, too.

So, yeah, stickin’ with Python, although I’ll probably continue to play with Ruby from time to time. Armin Ronacher (author of Jinja, my favorite Python templating language) puts it nicely:

• Python — Ass-kicking programming language
• Ruby — nice hackish programming language for scripts and other stuff :D