The Well-Bred Grapefruit

What foreign language should kids learn in school?

If you ask a group of people that question, you’re likely to get several different answers, most of which would fit nicely into the following groups:

So, Google Wave was announced today. I don’t even know what it is yet, and I’m seeing people left and right either announce that it’s going to be ‘the next big thing,’ or decrying how it’s going to be an utter failure.

One of the other aspects of my jumbled Greenville.rb talk related to how well programming languages relate to spoken languages.

The best example I could think of true immersion in a spoken language is using that language for your internal monologue (others have suggested that dreaming in a language is another sign - I think those are fairly similar, and should be considered equivalent). When you spend a lot of time studying Spanish in college, for example, you eventually (if you’re doing it right) hit a threshold where you start thinking in Spanish instead of in English; you no longer have to translate your thoughts from English to Spanish in order to communicate them, and you no longer have to translate Spanish to English in order to understand it. In other words, Spanish has at that point become a proper notation for your thoughts; you can think in it as well as you can speak it. As with my previous post, I’m not the first to consider that this could be applicable to coding (and some insist that it already is, in a sense).

Last night at the Greenville.rb meeting, I gave a talk (which I would link to, but it was rather ill-prepared and rambly) relating the concept of writing code to writing… well, in English; a process that I summarized poorly as ‘literature.’

I realized as I was talking to @Gumbercules on IRC tonight that my struggle with Twitter came down to a simple dichotomy: my principles vs. my friends.

Well? Am I?

The response to that post seems to have fallen into 3 distinct camps:

a) People who don’t want me to leave Twitter, but aren’t willing to leave themselves;

The Unix philosophy - “Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface” - is an interesting one to me, as a programmer. Mostly, I think, because it enables me to hack at my own system with a greater degree of control and expedience than I would have otherwise. There are some sacrifices that you make in adopting this philosophy, to be sure… but the flexibility it provides is unparalleled.

Without much ado, here’s a list of Twitter alternatives and their pros/cons as I see them. Please respond with a comment here if you’re interested in potentially joining/migrating to one of these along with me. Your feedback is appreciated.

I’m not going to rant and rave about how Twitter really screwed the pooch this time, and how they should immediately replace their lost features, or anything of the sort. I’m not really in a demanding mood at the moment. Really, I just don’t care any more.

I just got another email announcing Furman University’s "Do Not Call Me At Dinner" ‘plan.’

The premise is simple: give them money now, and they promise not to call and interrupt your dinner to ask you for money later.