Purple Cow

"It's people who have projects that are never criticized who ultimately fail"

Getting real for marketing people.

(shortest review ever)

Python Brasil 2009

I'll be speaking in the Python Brasil [5] - the fifth conference of the brazilian Python community. It will take place in Caxias do Sul, RS, 10th to 12th of September 2009.

I'll be speaking about "Python at Yahoo! Brasil" - mainly about our (almost famous) Python powered project, called Yahoo! Meme.

See you guys there! :-)

The Seasoned Schemer

"- Does your hat still fit?"

"- Of course it does. After you have worked through the definition of the Y combinator, nothing will ever affect your hat size again, not even an attempt to understand the difference between Y and Y!"

Well, the quote pretty much nails it: The Seasoned Schemer, also by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen, is a very good complement for the first book, and as recommended as "The Little Schemer".

Except that... I don't agree with their "nothing will ever affect your hat size again": I think there are lots of "head expanders" out there waiting to be read.

But I'm taking a break before the third one: it's healthy to keep the same hat size sometimes :-)

Thrift: a software framework for scalable cross-language services development

I'll be speaking in the upcoming International Free Software Forum (fisl.org.br) about Thrift - a "software framework for scalable cross-language services development".

My deck is (already) available at http://github.com/bzanchet/presentation-thrift-fisl10/ - yeap; git over slideshare :-)

See you there!

The Little Schemer

Do you know what "recursion" means? No, I mean, have you looked recursion in the face? Do you KNOW how the magic happens? It's not that simple.

"- Does your hat still fit?
- Perhaps not after such a mind stretcher."

Have you heard of "The Little Schemer", by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen? I wish I had... Some 5 years ago. Well, I already have the other two here, just waiting for this one to be properly digested.

As part of the digestive process, I just implemented the y combinator function in python - the language I'm currently fluent at thanks to that 5-times-a-week-8-hours-a-day thing.

It's not exaggerated: "it's one of the most strange and wonderful artifacts of Computer Science" (aside from these words, there's also a javascript version here thanks to Douglas Crockford).

Go grab your copy. Now.

Pragmatic Thinking & Learning / Predictably Irrational

Next, two "light psychology" books. First one: Predictably/Irrational, by Dan Ariely.

"[...] everything changed irreversibly in a matter of a few seconds. An explosion of a large magnesium flare, the kind used to illuminate battlefields at night, left 70 percent of my body covered with third-degree burns.

The next three years found me wrapped in bandages in a hospital and then emerging into public only occasionally, dressed in a tight synthetic suit and mask that made me look like a crooked version of Spider-Man. Without the ability to participate in the same daily activities as my friends and family, I felt partially separated form society and as a consequence started to observe the very activities that were once my daily routine as if I were an outsider."

Very entertaining, it has some cool insights about human cognition, psychology and behavior. Lots of stories and scientific studies, resembles Malcom Gladwell's style. Not bad.

Then Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, by Andy Hunt, one of the original "Pragmatic Programmers".

"You can set up more rules to explain, and then more rules to explain those, but there’s a practical limit to how much you can effectively specify without running into a Clinton-esque “It depends upon what the meaning of the word is is.” This phenomenon is known as infinite regression. At some point, you have to stop defining explicitly.

Rules can get you started, but they won’t carry you further."

As the first one, not bad. It contains some cool chapters, some nice ideas and insights about cognition, concentration, productivity. But not a world changer, either. Personally... A little too much self-help, and not much that wasn't said before.

So, from these two, I'd highly recommend Dan Ariely's Predictably/Irrational. It's a light, quick-to-read book, full of short and curious stories - kind of thing that also matters. But concerning psychology, cognition and neuroscience, I would stick to some more focused, deep books on the subject: for now, two of my favorites are The 21st-Century Brain and, of course, Godel, Escher, Bach. What are yours?

Javasript: the good parts

"It is rarely possible for standards committees to remove imperfections from a language because doing so would cause the breakage of all of the bad programs thtat depend on those bad parts. They are usually powerless to do anything except heap more features on top of existing pile of imperfections. And the new features do not always interact harmoniously, thus producing more bad parts.
But you have the power to define you own subset. You can write better programs by relying exclusively on the good parts."

That's Douglas Crockford talking about the "most misunderstood programming language"; and his arguments are very strong: javascript is not only a small, toy language. It's a very powerful tool, with astonishing features. And given that with great power comes great resposability: JavaScript is hard.

Building modular, reusable, readable code with this language is not a trivial task - this is not actually a disadvantage, though; it's a challenge (who doesn't like them?). In this book, Douglas Crockford points out a lot of interesting ways to avoid most of the problems of the language in order to write robust, concise code.

So, closing the review: JavaScript has its issues, but most of its problems are not inherent to the language and can be safely avoided. It certainly doesn't deserve all the critics out there (although some implementations obviously do). Really recommended book; it sheds light on a lot of myths and shows the bright side of this powerful language.