Language of Choice

Reading Steve Yegge’s blog and Paul Graham’s essays has made me want to try programming in a Lisp dialect for a major project. The only problem has been I don’t really like Common Lisp. I like the Lisp part of Common Lisp. But I don’t like the libraries, in particular there isn’t a good standard way to do serve side programming (if you find one, point it out to me). Also Common Lisp makes it hard to interact with the operating system. In contrast Python, Perl, etc. make operating system interaction extremely easy (in perl system(“command”)).

The other major Lisp dialect is Scheme, which I like for its simplicity but most Scheme implementations don’t have a strong community. There is one Scheme, PLT-Scheme, that does have a very active community of users and good support for server side and GUI programming. Even though the web page emphasizes teaching there is good support for practical programming.

The problem with PLT Scheme is speed, it’s just as slow as Python whereas some Common Lisp compilers has performance comparable to C, see language shootout.

There is another Scheme implementation, Gambit Scheme, that is speedy (as speedy as C) but once again Gambit Scheme doesn’t have all the libraries I want. So for now I’m going to try using PLT Scheme for my personal projects and see how it works out. In particular I’m going to be porting my computational geometry code over to PLT Scheme.

Hopefully most of the code I write for PLT Scheme will also run using Gambit Scheme.

Ad Saturation

Have we reached a local temporal maximum for ads? As you well know, ours is an ad driven world. Everywhere you look there are ads. This phenomenon has gradually come to pass in the last century. Especially now in the online world there are ads everywhere.

But I’ve noticed that in the last couple years there are a couple places where the prevalence of ads has decreased.

1. TV, the number of ads on TV hasn’t decreased but we now have DVR’s which accomplish the same purpose. I almost never watch live TV because you have to wait through the ads. It will be interesting if the number of ad free channels increases in the future because everyone has DVR’s (so TV ads would be pointless because everyone would fast forward through them).

2. Certain websites. In particular I’m thinking of Wikipedia and Google two of the most used website today. Wikipedia has absolutely no ads and Google has intelligent ads. By intelligent ads I mean that when searching for “Earth’s diameter” on Google you don’t see any ads (versus searching for “exercise equipment” which brings up lots of ads). But on Yahoo they always have ads for any search. Also the Google home page is simple and devoid of ads versus the Yahoo page which is overly complicated and not ad free.

So there is my evidence that all is not hopeless, there have been at least a couple bright spots in keeping the world from being overrun with ads

Why Reading Sucks

I am a big fan of textual information over plain video. But the current reading experience is sub-optimal. Why?

Because reading text on a LCD is not fun. You can’t easily read on your bed, couch, outside in the park, etc. It is possible to use a laptop but laptops are still too heavy compared to a paperback book. There is also the issue that people don’t like reading novel length material on the computer. I think we can safely agree that reading novel length information on the computer currently sucks.

This is why many of us still buy books. But reading dead-tree books also sucks, just in a different way. Many times I end up having a love hate relationship with dead-tree books because while reading is good, searching is terrible. Many times I want to search for specific information in a dead-tree book and it’s virtually impossible to find because I don’t remember where it is or I might not even remember what book the information is in. Thus the advantage of digital information in search capabilities.

So the best reading experience available right now is to buy a copy of the dead-tree book and a digital copy thus you have the search capabilities of a digital book and the superior reading experience of a dead-tree book.