Author Archives: admin

The other side of the race to the moon

After watching From the Earth to the Moon and In the Shadow of the Moon, I wondered whatever happened to the threat of a “red moon” that so motivated the US to land on the moon before 1970. Turns out the Soviet lunar program was very real. It never achieved real success largely due to interpersonal rivalries and bureaucratic territoriality, and was canceled as the Soviets lost interest in the program after Khrushchev (Хрущев) was ousted in 1964.

Update 2008-01-03: Red Moon Rising by Matthew Brzezinski is about the Soviet space program. Read the first chapter here.

Update 2008-01-18: Air & Space has some more lunar landers that never were.

Revolutionary and wrong

What Larry Wall is doing (or has been doing, for the last seven years) with Perl 6 is revolutionary:

There needs to be a universal root language, and ways of warping that universal root language into whatever dialect you like.

It’s incredibly valuable to examine all the ways in which a (programming or natural) language can vary. I’m sure they’re learning a lot that will be useful to language designers everywhere. Perl 6 will undoubtedly be a great tool for quickly prototyping new languages, too.

It’s also wrong for a production language. The last thing I want in a programming language is diversely variable and configurable syntax and semantics. Sitting down to maintain or debug someone else’s Perl 6 sounds like a nightmare. Not only would you have to figure out what they are trying to say, you’d have to figure out what dialect of Perl 6 they were using, and exactly how that dialect works.

For this reason I’d tend to avoid Perl 6 for new projects, nor would I want to join a Perl 6 project mid-stream. If I had to work in Perl 6, the first thing I’d do would be to convince the entire team to stick to the standard dialect (or maybe some other, popular dialect) and never re-configure it.

I doubt we’ll see much traction for Perl 6 outside of research settings. The benefit of picking PHP and Java over Python or Ruby is that it’s easier to find PHP and Java programmers, than it is to find programmers for even the relatively popular Python or Ruby. Trying to find a programmer who knows not just Perl but Perl 6 and your dialect of Perl 6 is going to be even harder.

Happy Birthday from LiveJournal

I woke up this morning to five identical emails from LiveJournal. Here’s my LiveJournal inbox:

livejournal-broken.png

What’s wrong with this picture?

  1. I don’t ever need to be notified of my own birthday. It’s on my driver’s license if I forget it.
  2. I don’t need to be notified of anyone’s birthday more than once. And five times in two hours? Really excessive.
  3. I never asked LiveJournal to share my birthday with anyone, yet upon further investigation, I found that my birthday was set to be “shared with everyone.” Birthdates are often used to verify identity; they are a common target of identity thieves. No site should ever default to sharing user’s birthdates (or any other private information) with the universe. One nice way to mitigate this threat is to not include the birth year, which is not important when reminding people of each other’s birthdays.
  4. The messages show my birthday as the nonexistent “December 00,” even though I entered my birthday as January 1st. (I never enter my real birthdate on any site; January 1st works because it’s easy to remember, and anybody who actually knows me will know January 1st is not right.)
  5. If I actually wanted this feature, it would be nice to have more than two days to find a gift for someone.

I don’t actually use LiveJournal; I’ve only occasionally used my account to post a comment. I assume this is not indicative of the quality of the rest of their site.