When
· Naughties
· · 2006
· · · July
· · · · 15 (2 entries)
Magnificent Silliness · In the wake of the passing of Syd Barrett, Roberto Chinnici pointed out that you can see a compendium of Barrett video at YouTube, and I spent the best part of an hour watching some. Ah, YouTube, feels like the Napster glory days; beyond any doubt a life-enhancer. Colby Cosh has innocent fun searching it by date. And, like Napster, it feels doomed. Pumping video around the Net isn’t cheap for anyone, and I just don’t see how it gets paid for. For more Internet video negativity, see Mark Cuban. And speaking of magnificent silliness.... Syd. Bye, Syd. He never made it out of the Sixties and I had a few friends not make it out of the Seventies, you can burn the candle at both ends and in the middle too, but not for that long. I looked into the record collection and didn’t find anything with Barrett on it, so last night I listened to Atom Heart Mother, which is not far off. It’s hard to know what to think of PF these days. Their later work is far too much on the radio; suddenly about the time of the execrable The Wall, the world flipped and they were a symptom of everything wrong with Rock; Johnny Rotten was picked out of his London gutter wearing an “I Hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt. Still, I’m quite sure that the music will remain loved by many long after we’re all dead; but I bet most of them will never have heard of Syd.
Rubies and Pearls · I’m still feeling my way into this comments system, but my first days with Ruby are making me think back a dozen years or more, to when I was learning Perl. It was a big data-filtering job and Michael Leventhal had pulled together a very typical Perl bundle-of-regexps and suddenly one day I was pitching in on handling more types of input data and pulling out more structure. Larry Wall, the author of Perl, is a linguist by training, and is proud of the fact that with Perl, as with a natural language, you don’t have to be an expert to be effective Just as a child derives value from using English even if inexpertly, a novice Perl programmer starts being rewarded quickly. Other languages have this characteristic to a greater or lesser degree; and I’m beginning to think Ruby is right up there. (For me, Java had it too, as it would I think for any expert C programmer comfy with O-O thinking.) At the moment, there are lots of Ruby idioms that are still gibberish to me; but I find two crucial things: my pidgin Ruby is already pretty useful for getting things done, and I’m learning new tricks.
