clay_shirky

Perl hacker who tried to switch to Ruby before adopting Python here:

Of _course_ boring is better. How could it not be? If you are trying to solve a problem, the last thing you want to be thinking about is the language itself.

The language you adopt to code up a solution should force you to think clearly, but no more than that. Executable pseudocode is as close to an ideal state as you can get for a high-level language.

Perl, meanwhile, was filled with multiple ways to do things -- famously and absurdly thought of as a virtue -- reveled in side effects, and did so much implicit work with variables and flow that perl was often unreadable by anybody else, including the you of three months from now.

"Python did everything other scripting languages did, but in a cleaner and more comprehensible way" tells you most of what you need to know about Python's victory, but the death blow was delivered by the perl community's love of complexity, which led to the disaster that was Raku.

By the turn of the century, it was clear that python 3 was a better plan for the future than perl 6.

You cannot possibly know how much this delights me!

Most of my writing was about social media, back when the web was young, but "Ontology is Overrated" is actually my favorite thing I ever wrote, and it makes me happy beyond measure to know that it helped someone manage an actual argument over whether to buy into the semantic web!

I have never been talented enough to write production code, but I often thought of myself as trying to provide ammunition to people like you who are, when talking to bosses who didn't understand that the phrase "Now it's just a simple matter of programming!" was a bitter, sardonic joke, not an upbeat assessment of possibility.

Thank you for telling this story! This whole thread has been like hearing my own eulogy, but this in particular is just :chefs_kiss:

Yep, it became a spot for all your erectile dysfunction needs. And the constant pattern of "I fix it, spammers break it' wore me out, so, despite media savvy, I just stopped caring (though this thread convinces me that was the wrong answer...)

This whole thread is giving me feels, but to the basics, I'll tell you how it happened.

I'd been writing about what we came to call social media since the early 90s (alt.culture.usenet and alt.folklore.urban ftw), but by the middle of last decade, all anyone wanted to talk to me about was marketing on Facebook, which was the boringest possible topic.

At the same time, my wordpress host had lousy security, and my site was getting frequently disabled because of some malicious javascript uploaded through some hole they hand't patched. I wasn't writing there anymore, so it was pure cost at that point, and cost of my time, not just dollars.

Then I moved to Shanghai for several years, working on other stuff, and fixed the site a couple of times again, and one time, my host was like "We disabled your site!" because of their own security flaws had let it get hacked again, which, the whole thing had entered 'ugh field'territory.

I never decided to let the site lapse, I was just tired of dealing with it, and the political circumstances in both China and the U.S. seemed much more urgent than rescuing some historical essays, so one day at a time of not dealing with it became years.

And here we are, me reading my own eulogy. Which is incredibly flattering and touching, I have to say.

I'm not even sure what of it can be resuscitated -- maybe if I want it back, I'll have to copy it from Wayback (and will say "Thank you Brewster", not for the first time), but if anyone here has advice about competent and secure hosting for an old Wordpress blog, hmu at [email protected], because reading this, it makes me embarassed not to have just fucking fixed this a year or two ago.

And thanks, all, for this thread. -clay