I was messing around with regular expressions on some default interpreters on my Debian machine, wondering about what the default encoding behaviour for string literals might be. As you do. So, given a string with a "pesky foreign accent" in it, how many characters do various languages think it has?
Unfortunately, this creaky old blog software I hand-cranked cannot render this amount of markdown source blocks (ROFL), and I so I collated a GitHub gist of my findings. Despite all it's many faults, GitHub excels at markdown-serving.
The languages I tested are Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Bash, Common Lisp, and JavaScript.
The test ? Does the string café (an English loan word with an accent character ) match the regular expression denoting 'a four character string'
On my computer, with a UTF-8 locale, this string, while clearly four characters long, occupies five bytes . So does the string match four characters or five characters? This is computers, so obviously the answer is it depends.
There's been a flurry of discussion on Hacker News and other tech forums about what killed Perl. I wrote a lot of Perl in the mid 90s and subsequently worked on some of the most trafficked sites on the web in mod_perl in the early 2000s, so I have some thoughts. My take: it was mostly baked into the culture. Perl grew amongst a reactionary community with conservative values, which prevented it from evolving into a mature general purpose language ecosystem. Everything else filled the gap.
I remember Perl
Something to keep in mind, is that although this is my personal take, and therefore entirely an opinion piece, I was there at the time. I stopped doing Perl properly when I left Amazon, I think this would have been around 2005. It's based on the first hand impressions of somebody who was very deeply involved in Perl in its heyday, and moved on. I have a lot of experience, from both inside and outside the tent.
Perl's roots are sysadmin
What culture? Perl always had a significant amount of what you might call "BOFH" culture, which came from its old UNIX sysadmin roots. All of those passive aggressive idioms and in jokes like "RTFM", "lusers", "wizards", "asking for help the wrong way" etc. None of this is literally serious, but it does encode and inform social norms that are essentially tribal and introverted. There implicitly is a privileged population, with a cost of entry to join. Dues must be paid. Cultural conservatism as a first principle.
This stems from the old locked-down data centre command culture. When computer resource was expensive, centralised, fragile, and manually operated, it was rigidly maintained by gatekeepers, defending against inappropriate use. I started my career as an apprentice programmer at the very end of this era, (late 80s) pre-web, and before microcomputers had made much inroads, and this really was the prevailing view from inside the fort. (This is a drawback about fort-building. Once you live in a fort, it's slightly too easy to develop a siege mentality). Computers are special, users are inconvenient, disruption is the main enemy.
An unfortunate feedback loop in this kind of "perilous" environment is that it easily turns prideful. It's difficult to thrive here, if you survive and do well you are skilled; you've performed feats; you should mark your rites of passage. This can become a dangerous culture trap. If you're not careful about it, you may start to think of the hazards and difficulties, the "foot guns", as necessary features - they teach you those essential survival skills that mark you out. More unkindly, they keep the stupid folk out, and help preserve the high status of those who survived long enough to be assimilated. Uh-oh, now you've invented class politics.
The problem with this thinking is that it's self-reinforcing. Working hard to master system complexities was genuinely rewarding - you really were doing difficult things and doing them well. This is actually the same mechanism behind what eventually became known as 'meritocracy'1, but the core point is simpler - if difficulty itself becomes a badge of honour, you've created a trap: anything that makes the system more approachable starts to feel like it's cheapening what you achieved. You become invested in preserving the barriers you overcame.
(This is the same mentality that built leetcode interview pipelines BTW, but let's leave that sidebar alone for now)
So the UNIX operator culture tended to operate as a tribal meritocracy (as opposed to the UNIX implementer culture, which fell out of a different set of cultural norms, quite an interesting side bar itself2), a cultural priesthood, somewhat self-regarding, rewarding of cleverness and knowledge hoarding, prone to feats of bravado, full of lore, with a defensive mentality of keeping the flame aloft, keeping the plebs happy and fed, and warding off the barbarians. As we entered the 90s it was already gently in decline, because centralised computing was giving way to the rise of the microcomputer, but the sudden explosive growth of the WWW pulled internet / Unix culture suddenly back into the mainstream with an enormous and public opportunity vacuum. Everyone suddenly has an urgent need to write programs that push text off UNIX file-systems (and databases) and into web pages, and Perl is uniquely positioned to have a strong first-mover advantage in this suddenly vital, novel ecosystem. But it's culture and values are very much pulled across from this previous era.
(Springing out of this, Perl had an, at best grudging, tolerance for 'difficult genius' types, alongside this baseline culture. Unfortunately, this kind of toxic personality tends to thrive in the type of culture I've described, and they do set to help the tone. I'm not here to call out people specifically, because I'm trying to make a point rather than feed a culture war, or dig up gossip, but there were several significant examples, you can probably find lore if you like. I think the kindest way I can describe the compounding effect of this is that there was a strong cultural norm along the lines of "It's OK to be rude, as long as it's for a good cause".)
A fort within a fort
I remember this tension as always being tangibly there. Perl IRC and mailing lists were quite cliquey and full of venerated experts and in-jokes, rough on naivety, keen on robust, verbose debate, and a little suspicious of newcomers. And very cult-like. The "TIMTOWTDI" rule, although ostensibly liberal, literally means 'there is more than one way to do it in Perl' - and you can perhaps infer from that that there's little to no reason to do it using anything else. Elevating extreme flexibility like this is paradoxically also an engine of conservatism. If Perl can already do anything, flexibly, in multiple ways, then the language itself doesn't need to change - 'we already have one of those here, we don't need new things'. This attitude determined how Perl intended to handle evolution: the core language would remain stable (a fort inside a fort, only accessible to high level wizards), while innovation was pushed outward to CPAN. You could add features outside of core by writing and consuming third party libraries, you could bend language behaviour with pragmas without modifying Perl itself. The very best CPAN modules could theoretically be promoted into core, allowing the language to evolve conservatively from proven, widely-used features.
On paper, this sounds reasonable. In practice, I think it encoded a fundamental conflict of interest into the community early on, and set the stage for many of the later growth problems. I'm not going to pretend that Perl invented dependency hell, but I think it turned out to be another one of those profound misfeatures that their cultural philosophy lead them to mistake for virtue, and embrace.
An interesting thing I think has been missed discussing the context of the original blog piece, about whether Perl 6 significantly impacted Perl growth, is the fact that Perl 6 itself manifested out of ongoing arguments. Perl 6 is a schism. Here's a oft-cited note from Larry Wall himself about the incident that sparked Perl 6, at YAPCOSCON 2000
We spent the first hour gabbing about all sorts of political and organizational issues of a fairly boring and mundane nature. Partway through, Jon Orwant comes in, and stands there for a few minutes listening, and then he very calmly walks over to the coffee service table in the corner, and there were about 20 of us in the room, and he picks up a coffee mug and throws it against the other wall and he keeps throwing coffee mugs against the other wall, and he says "we are f-ed unless we can come up with something that will excite the community, because everyone's getting bored and going off and doing other things".
(Pause a second and ask yourself about the sort of social culture that both allows this kind of behaviour at public events, and then chooses to embrace it as a key piece of cultural lore)
The impact of Perl 6
Perl 6 was really a schism. Perl was already under a great amount of strain trying to accommodate the modernising influx of post dot-com mainstream web application building, alongside the entrenched conservatism of the core maintainers, and the maintenance burden of a few years exponential growth of third-party libraries, starting to build a fractal mess of slightly differentiating, incompatible approaches of those multiple ways to do things that were effectively now table-stakes language features, as the deployment landscape started to tiptoe towards a more modern, ubiquitous WWW3.
So, while I agree that it's wrong to generalise that 'Perl 6 killed Perl', I would say that Perl 6 was a symptom of the irreconcilable internal forces that killed Perl. Although, I also intend to go on to point out that Perl isn't dead, nothing has actually killed Perl. Killed Perl is a very stupid way to frame the discussion, but here we are.
So... Perl 6 is created as a valve to offset that pressure, and it kind of works. Up to a point. Unfortunately I think the side effect really is that the two branches of the culture, in the process of forking, double down on their encoded norms. Perl 5.x beds down as the practical, already solved way to do all the same things, with little need to change. Any requirements for more modern application patterns that are emerging in the broader web development environment, like idk, Unicode, REST clients, strict data structures, asynchronous I/O, whatever? That can either wait for Perl6 or you can pull things together using the CPAN if you want to move right now. Perl 6 leans the other way - they don't need to ship immediately, we have Perl 5 already here for doing things, Perl 6 is going to innovate on everything, and spend it's time getting there, designing up-front.4 They spend at least two years writing high level requirement specs. They even spin out a side-project trying to build a universal virtual machine to run all dynamic programming languages that never delivers5
This is the landscape where Perl's central dominance of 'back end' web programming continues to slip. Unfortunately, alongside the now principled bias toward cultural conservatism, Perl 5 has an explicit excuse for it. The future is over there, and exciting, and meanwhile we're working usefully, and getting paid, and getting stuff done. Kind of OK from inside the fort. Some day we'll move to the newer fort, but right now this is fine. Not very attractive to newcomers though, really. And this is also sort of OK, because Perl doesn't really want those sort of newcomers, does it? The kind that turns up on IRC or forums and asks basic questions about Perl 6 and sadly often gets treated with open contempt.
Meanwhile, over there
Ruby has sprouted "Ruby on Rails", and it's taken the dynamic web building world by storm. Rails is a second generation web framework, that's proudly an 'opinionated web framework'. Given that the web application architecture is starting to stabilise into a kind of three-tier system , with a client as a web browser, a middle tier as a monolithic application server, and a persistence layer as a relational database , and a split server architecture serving static and dynamic content from different routes, here is just one way to do that, with hugely developer friendly tooling turning this into a cookie-cutter solution for the 80% core, and a plugin and client-side decoration approach that allows for the necessary per-site customisation.
Ruby is interesting as well. Ruby is kind of a Perl6 really. More accurately it's a parallel universe Perl5 Ruby comes from Japan, and has developed as an attempt to build something similar to Perl, but it's developed much later, by programming language enthusiasts, and for the first ten years or so, it's mostly only used in Japan. To my line of thinking this is probably important. Ruby does not spring from decades of sysadmin or sysop culture. Ruby is a language for programmers, and is at this point an sensible candidate for building something like Rails with - a relatively blank canvas for dynamic programming, with many of the same qualities as Perl, with less legacy cruft, and more modern niceties, like an integrated object system, exceptions, straightforward data structures. Ruby also has adopted 'friendliness' as a core value, and the culture over there adopts a principled approach to aggressively welcoming newcomers, promoting easiness, and programmer happiness and convenience as strong first class principles.
Rails is a huge hit. At this point, which is around about the time I stopped significantly using Perl (2004-2005) (because I quit my job, not out of any core animosity toward it, in fact, in my day, I was really quite a Perl fan), Rails is the most appealing place to start as a new web programmer. Adoption rate is high, community is great, velocity of development is well-paced, and there's a lovely , well-lit, onboarding pipeline for how to start. You don't even really need to know ruby. It has a one-shot install tool, and generates working websites from templates, almost out of the box. It's an obvious starting point.
Perl being Perl, develops several analogue frameworks to Rails, all of them interdependently compatible and incompatible with each other and each other's dependencies, all of them designed to be as customisable and as user configurable as they possibly can be6
PHP
There are also the other obvious contenders. PHP has been there all along, and it's almost coming up from entirely the opposite cultural background of Perl. PHP is a users language. It's built to be deployed by copying script files to your home directory, with minimal server side impact or privileges. It's barely designed at all, but it encounters explosive growth all the way through the first (and through into the second) web era, almost entirely because it makes the barrier to onboarding so low as to be non-existent. PHP gets a couple of extra free shots in the arm
Because it's architecture is so amenable to shared-server hosting, it is adopted as the primary implementation language of the blogging boom. An entire generation of web developers is born of installing and customising WordPress and text-pattern et. al by installing it directly into your home directory on a rented CPanel host account. It's the go-to answer for 'I'm not a programmer really but how do I get a personal web site'7 This zero gate-keeping approach keeps the PHP stack firmly on the table of 'basic' web programmers all through the history of the web up to the current day.
Because of these initially lightweight deployment targets, PHP scales like little else, mostly because it's execution model leans strongly towards idempotent execution, with each web request tearing up and tearing down the whole environment. In a sense, this is slower than keeping hot state around, but it does lend itself extremely well to shared-nothing horizontal scaling, which as the web user base increases gigantically throughout the 2000s era, is the simplest route to scaling out. Facebook famously, is built in PHP at this point in time.
Python
There is of course one other big horse in the race in this era, and it's a particularly interesting one in many ways, certainly when contrasted with Perl. This is of course, Python. Python is a close contemporary of Perl's but once again, it's roots are somewhere very different. Python doesn't come from UNIX culture either. Python comes from academia, and programming language culture. It's kind of a forgotten footnote, but Python was originally built for the Amoeba operating system, and it's intention was to be a straightforward programming language for scripting this8. The idea was to build a language that could be the 'second programming language' for programmers. Given that this is the 1980s, early 1990s, the programmers would be expected to be mostly using C / C++ ,perhaps Pascal. Python was intended to allow faster development for lighter weight programs or scripting tasks. I suppose the idea was to take something that you might want to build in a shell script, but provide enough high level structured support that you could cleanly build the kind of things that quickly become a problem in shell scripts. So, it emphasises data structures, and scoped variables, and modules, and prioritises making it possible to extend the language with modules. Typical things that experienced programmers would want to use. The language was also designed to be portable between the different platforms programmers would use, running on the desktops of the day, but also on the server. As a consequence, it had a broad standard library of common portable abstractions around standard system features - file-systems, concurrency, time, FFI. For quite a long time, one of python's standard mottoes was 'batteries included'.
Python never set the world on fire at any particular moment, but it remained committed to a clear evolutionary incremental development, and clean engineering principles. Again, I think the key element here is cultural tone. Python is kind of boring, not trying to be anyone's best language, or even a universal language. Python was always a little fussy, maybe snobby, slightly abstracted away from the real world. It's almost as old as Perl and it just kept incrementally evolving, picking up users, picking up features, slowly broadening the standard library. The first time I saw Python pick up an undeniable mainstream advantage would also have been around the early 2000s, when Google publicly adopted it as one of their house standard languages. Never radical, just calmly evolving in it's environs.
Nature abhors a vacuum
When I sketch out this landscape, I remain firmly convinced that most of Perl's impedance to continued growth were cultural. Perl's huge moment of relevance in the 90s was because it cross-pollinated two diverging user cultures. Traditional UNIX / database / data-centre maintenance and admin users, and enthusiastic early web builders and scalers. It had a cultural shock phase from extremely rapid growth, the centre couldn't hold, and things slowly fell apart.
Circling back though, it's time to address the real elephant in the room. Perl manifestly did not die. It's here right now. It's installed I think by default, on almost every single computer I own and operate, without me doing a single thing to make that happen. It's still used every day by millions of people on millions of systems (even if that isn't deliberate). It's still used by many people entirely deliberately for building software, whether that's because they know it and like it and it works, or because they're interfacing with or working on legacy Perl systems (of which there are still many), or maybe they're using it still in it's original intentional role - A capable POSIX-native scripting language, with much better performance and a broader feature-set than any shell or awk. I still occasionally break it out myself, for small scripts I would like to use more than once, or as parts of CLI pipelines.
What I don't do any more is reach for Perl first to make anything new. In my case, it's just because I typically am spoilt for options that are a better fit for most tasks, depending on whatever it is I'm trying to achieve. By the time I came to Perl, (1998-ish), I was already on my third career phase, I had a strong UNIX background, and had already built real things in lisp, java, pascal, visual basic and C++. My attitude to languages was already informed by picking a tool to fit the task at hand. Boy did I love Perl for a few years. The product/market-fit for those early web days was just beautiful. The culture did have too much of the negative tropes I've been pointing at, but that wasn't really a problem personally for me, I'd grown up amongst the BOFHs inside the data centres already, it wasn't too hard for me to assimilate, nor pick up the core principles. I did occasionally bounce off a couple of abrasive characters in the community, but mostly this just kept me loosely coupled, I enjoyed how the language solved the problems I needed solving quickly, I enjoyed the flexibility, and I also enjoyed the way that it made me feel smart, and en-route to my wizard's robes and hat, when i used it to solve harder problems in creative ways, or designed ways around bugs and gremlins. For a good 3-4 years I would have immediately picked it as my favourite language.
So as I say, I didn't fall out of it with any sense of pique, I just naturally moved to different domains, and picked up tools that best fit. After Amazon, I spent t a lot of time concentrating on OS X and audio programming, and that involved a lot of objective C, C++. The scripting tools in that domain were often in ruby, sometimes python. For personal hacking, I picked up lisp again9 (which I'd always enjoyed in school). I dipped in and out of Perl here and there for occasional contract work, but I tended to gravitate more towards larger database stuff, where I typically found C, java and python. The next time I was building web things, it was all Rails and ruby, and then moving towards the web services / REST / cloud era, the natural fits were go, and of course node and JavaScript or Typescript. I've always been a polyglot, and I've always been pretty comfortable moving between programming languages. The truth of the matter is, that the majority of programming work is broadly similar, and the specific implementation details of the language you use don't matter all that much, if it's a good fit for the circumstances.
I can't imagine Perl disappearing entirely in my lifetime. I can remember entire programming environments and languages that are much, much deader than I can ever see Perl becoming.
Pascal used to be huge for teaching and also for desktop development in the 8/16 bit era
Objective C - only really useful inside the Apple ecosystem, and they're hell bent on phasing it out.
Before I got into the Internet, I used to build application software for 16 bit Windows (3.11) which was a vast market, in a mixture of database 4GLs (like PowerBuilder, Gupta/Centura SQLWindows) and Win16 C APIs. This entire universe basically no longer exists, and is fully obsolete. There must be many similar cases.
I mean who the hell realistically uses common lisp any more outside of legacy or enthusiast markets? Less people than Perl I'm sure.
Perl also got to be if not first, then certainly early to dominate a new market paradigm. Plenty of things never manage that. It's hard to see Perl as anything other than an enormous success on these terms. Perl innovated and influenced languages that came after in some truly significant ways.
Tightly embedding regular expressions and extending regular expressions (the most commonly used regular expression dialect in other tools is Perl)
CPAN, for package/library distribution via the internet, with dependency resolution - and including important concepts like supply chain verification with strong package signatures
A huge emphasis on testing, automated test harnesses, and CI. Perl test format (TAP) is also widely found in other CI/harness systems
Blending the gap between shell / scripting / and system programming in a single tool. I suppose this is debatable, but the way Perl basically integrated all the fundamental POSIX/libc as native built-ins with broadly the same semantics, but with managed memory and shell conventions was really revolutionary. Before this, most languages I had ever seen broadly tended to sit in one box, afterwards, most languages tended to span across several.
Amazing integrated documentation, online, in-tool and also man pages. POD is maybe the most successful ever implementation of literate programming ideas (although most of the real docs don't intertwingle the documentation very much iirc)
Just these points, and I'm sure there are many others that could be made, are enough of a legacy to be proud of.
Counterfactuals are stupid (but also fun). If I squint, I can imagine that a Perl with a less reactionary culture, and a healthier acceptance of other ideas and environmental change might have been able to evolve alongside the other tools in the web paradigm shift, and still occupy a more central position in today's development landscape. That's not the Perl we have though, and that didn't happen. And I'm very confident that without the Perl we did have, the whole of modern software practice would be differently shaped. I do think Perl now lives in a legacy role, with a declining influence, but that's really nothing to feel shame or regret for. Nobody is going to forcibly take Perl away as long as POSIX exists, and so far as I can see, that means forever. In 2025 too, I can see the invisible hand creeping up on some of these other systems I've mentioned. Rust is slowly absorbing C and C++. Ruby (and of course Rails) is clearly in decline, in a way that probably consigns it to become a similar legacy state. From a certain angle, it looks a lot like Typescript is slowly supplanting Python. I won't be entirely surprised if that happens, although at my age I kind of doubt I'll live to see the day.
Footnotes
1 : Meritocracy is a fun word. It was originally coined as a pejorative term to describe a dystopian mechanism by which modern i.e. Western / British society entrenches and justifies an unfair and unequal distribution of privilege
2 : The UNIX implementer culture, is scientific/academic and fell out of Bell Labs. I guess you could extend this school of thought as a cultural sweep towards building abstracted cloud operations, toward plan 9/ Inferno / go
3 : Web 2.0 was first defined in 1999 by Darcy DiNucci in a print article , the term didn't become mainstream until it was picked up and promoted by Tim O'Reilly (then owner/operator of perl.com, trivia fans), an astute inside observer of the forces driving web development
4: Another unfortunate bit of luck here. Right at the point of time that 'agile' starts getting some traction as a more natural way to embrace software development - i.e. iterating in small increments against a changing environment and requirements, Perl 6 decides to do perhaps the most waterfall open source development process ever attempted. . It is fifteen years before Perl 6 ships something resembling a usable programming language.
5 : The Parrot VM, a lovely quixotic idea, which sadly fizzled out, after even Perl 6 stopped trying to target it. Interestingly enough, both python and ruby both made relatively high profile ports to the JVM that were useful enough to be used for production deploys in certain niches.
6 : A side effect of this degree of abstraction, is that as well as being very hard to get started, it's easy to fall foul of performance overhead.
7 : This ubituitious ecosystem of small footprint wordpress custom installs gives birth to the web agency model of commercial website building / small ecommerce sites, which thrives and is suprisingly healthy today. Recent, and slighly optimistic surveys have pitched WordPress as powering over 40% of all websites today. Now this is certainly inflated, but even if the realistic number is half of that, that's still pretty damn healthy.
8 : It's often repeated that Python was designed as a teaching language, but as far as I know, that's not actually the case. The designer of Python, Guido Van Rossum was previously working on a project that was a intended as training language, called ABC, and many of ABC's syntax and structural features influenced or made their way into Python.
9 : Common lisp is a better answer to an infinitely flexible 'everything' chainsaw language than perl, IMHO
Calm down, not gigs I'm playing, gigs I'm going to.
Festival season is upon us, I realised, as I found myself watching the Amazon Prime streaming footage of this years Primavera Sound. Primavera seems huge now, and I'm surprised/pleased to notice I'm not really getting any pangs of FOMO. It's fun to dip in and out of the streams though, and the Amazon presenting team / live mixing are endearingly sloppy and untogether. I guess PS has outgrown me, or I've aged out? I think it's them not me, it's only just about recognisable as the buzzy hip live music mash-up I first started going to almost twenty years ago. Maybe I'll go for 2027 (which by my count will be the 25th anniversary year) - or maybe I'll find something a bit smaller and leaner and odder. I've been eyeing OFF in Poland for a while...
Live music has changed so much recently. I was gently flabbergasted when the Beta Band, a band I used to gently follow around the country, announced a reunion cash-in tour, and sold out the early access, and the general access tickets in about five minutes flat, while I sat there bewildered trying to figure out which Ticketmaster entry-point seemed the least likely to meltdown while I was using it. This being a band I regularly used to pay a fiver on the door to see play in a half-empty student union bar, back when they were hot stuff 🤣.
That appears to be the way things are nowadays. You have to pre-register for the pre-register, and get a code from pre-ordering some merch, and know how to game the electronic queues. And then you have to remember which one of sixteen different apps (all owned by Ticketmaster) your electronic tickets are squirrelled away in them, when you finally arrive at the show dates, up to a year later. That's if you remembered to put in your diary, and didn't just forget about it entirely. Anyway, I'm not too sad about missing the Betas, might as well let some other people have a chance - although I expect I'd have had all the nostalgia, I'm quite sure they'll do the festivals in another year or two after this level of interest. While I was in Ticketmaster, failing to get Beta-d, I saw some St. Vincent tickets for Somerset house in July, on sale before any announcement, so I picked up a couple of those instead.
I have had a bit more success with some of my other pre sales. Upcoming I have
I think that's it so far. I might have forgotten some, as I said. At my age I need to write things down. Like this.
Two things all of these have in common - I had to buy all of them months and months in advance using a 'pre-sale code', and, somehow they're all female artists. I don't think those two facts are related. It's fairly noticeable that women artists really dominate popular music these days. I cynically suspect this might be related to the fact that all the money fell out of it a couple of decades back. The boys have all moved on to being startup founders.
I'm not going to see Oasis, but I will be tracking the integrity of their reunion over at my hand made personal oasis bust-up tracker https://haveoasissplitupyet.lol
My children are going to Glastonbury without me 😬. Most likely, I will watch some of it on the TV.
Oh, I am going to Latitude again, although I'm so spectacularly uninterested in almost all of the musical acts playing, I hardly count it as a gig. I expect I'll be down the front for Alison Moyet though.
I Asked AI to Rebase My Git Branch and Accidentally Discovered the Future (and Uncovered the Past)
One of the things I initially missed most, when shifting from emacs to zed was magit, which has been my main git interface for IDK, let's say about 20 years 🤷.
I'm a bit of a sloppy worker, but a meticulous git user, lots of atomic annotated commits, many linear branches, I'm cherry picking and rebasing, and stashing, and magit integrates all of this naturally into the normal flow.
Zed has git integration, obviously, but it's entirely basic - pull, push, commit, branch, diff, that's about it. It does let you stage incrementally, which is most of the problem solved, and of course, there is a terminal integration, so you can pop a shell and use git CLI (like a farmer 🤪).
It's OK, but clunky, obviously. A little bit of friction and dissonance in this slick world of modern native editors that were actually made this century. I think the kids are a lot looser with git than I am, and perhaps they have a point, but I like the discipline.
Here comes the machine mind
You probably figured out what's coming next, if you bothered to read this far.
I've been using the zed LLM integration to write commit messages for a while - it's pretty well suited to that, given a bit of context, you can generate a draft commit message that summarises the changes, and it's you tweak and approve them before you apply. It's a pretty good example of the kind of low-hanging, small improvement, you can achieve with even simple model, precisely applied to a narrow context that involves generating prose. Smoothing out busywork.
Obviously, zed is pretty agentic 🤢, because that stupid word is all the rage these days. I guess you can open a chat box and ask your editor to vibe code your whole application. (Good luck with that, if you do, I think that's liable to create more work in integration than it saves in writing, maybe that's just me)
I use the agents for a bit of boilerplate here and there - refactor this, replace these magic numbers with proper constants, redo this part to use an iterator, what is the type checker complaining about here, how do I configure the language server to disable a misfeature, again, it's not too bad at doing think kind of drone effort, and there is a small but appreciable productivity gain to be had.
I cross the streams, and surprise myself
This last week, I was suddenly inspired to cross the streams, and something interesting happened, surprising me enough to bother drafting a post on the topic. I don't really like to thought-leader, but occasionally something will delight me enough to want to share.
I wanted to tidy up a messy WIP branch that collected a couple of different ideas in progress, (and had also coincided with me correctly figuring out how to enable auto-linting in zed, so I suddenly had a lot of aesthetic formatting corrections dropped suddenly into an already untidy sandbox)
A minute or two fiddling with rebase in magit, but in zed...? Time to roll up my sleeves, and flex, and take out the ol' git pitchfork, or hitch up the rebase propagator to the reflog tractor (I do not really know what farmers do). But, wait. I wonder if...
So I pull up the agent and ask it "can you run an interactive rebase on this branch please, and group all the white-space only changes into one commit, the other formatting changes into another, and then separate the removal of the obsolete class from the other feature work?"
And, it kind of worked! It got stuck a couple of times, and I had to pop in and edit a couple of things, and I restarted it over with the order of the commits I wanted a little more explicitly instructed once I recognised where the conflicts were going to land, but I got the result I intended, certainly with no more fiddling about than I would have had to do if I'd been performing the task manually, maybe less? It's hard to measure, but I enjoyed the experience.
One thing I definitely realised. It was less irritating. I was able to complete a disruptive, yet necessary chore, while in the middle of doing something more interesting, with much less context switching than performing it manually. And that got me thinking about interfaces a bit more. Chat bots are unquestionably a very ergonomic interface.
Increasingly, I am starting to think that a key part of unlocking the value of LLMs, may be through thinking about them more as solutions for interface design problems.
Considering git interfaces
Git is a classic case. Git's interface sucks space balls, everyone knows it. I mean I know a few people who like it, and I'm happy for them (but I think they are weirdos). It does allow for a bunch of studly machismo and nerd flexing, for anyone who has invested enough time in learning its arcana to impress people with stunt-git trick shots, and that can be fun. I have definitely enjoyed being the knuckle-cracking "stand back everyone and stop panicking, I know how to fix this" guy on a number of occasions, but that is a sideshow. You can do circus tricks with power tools, and some people do, but it's not the reason the tools were made.
Git has a compelling storage model, and a commit graph workflow that solves a bunch of annoying challenges with incremental and concurrent code editing and integration, efficiently and better than previous source code version systems. That's why it became a huge success.
Git's horrible ergonomics and implicit barriers to entry, but compelling powers of sharing and integration, allowed GitHub to spring into existence, as a multi trillion zillion company from out of nowhere, just by slapping a nicer set of user abstractions on top of git's ugly robotic core. (in the process accidentally inventing some other significant ergonomic problems, like pull request based workflows, and IDK, tag driven releases, but I guess that's a different blog post)
Git's foul ergonomics are what pulled me into learning magit, which has a reasonably steep learning curve of its own, but also follows the emacs way of having a lovely manual. It's a better thought out UI. It also leverages many common emacs behaviours, so when you're working in emacs already, which I typically was, again, you get this reduction of context switching.
The mythical 'Flow State'
Why is this so important? At this point, it's tempting to dive off into a side bar about "programmer flow state", a long held shibboleth of the developer community about which I don't have much truck, but many thousands of words can be found about it on the web already. - I don't like anything that reinforces programmer identity as a higher state of being, and I dislike how easily this concept is weaponised towards shunning collaboration and social work (e.g. "coders must not be interrupted during holy flow state") , again this is clearly a different adjacent blog post - but the notion is not fundamentally baseless.
Programming tasks often require holding a lot of accrued context about a chain of thought, and carefully expressing those in a narrow, precise domain, incrementally progressing towards a well defined future state. It's not easy for a human mind to do that, it takes a bit of effort. Effortlessly breaking out of one domain into another mode of expression isn't really possible. To do that even passably well, perhaps you would need a different kind of "mind", even?
I think version control is interesting here, precisely because it's liminal stuff. It's programming-adjacent work in a certain sense, it's a chore - any time you have to break thread to address some version control nonsense or busy work, you are in essence interrupting yourself. It makes a lot of sense to try and find a low friction simplified user interface to mediate these kind of tasks. Like GitHub, or magit. The ideal is to minimise the amount of disruption you face while working on these background or side channel threads of work. You can mitigate against this in two main ways I think. You can look for ways to simplify the UI to better suit a particular working context, as we have been discussing; alternatively you can divide the work and make the secondary context a first class task that's managed separately.
One way to do this is to structure the way you work so you can plan your version control stories a little ahead of time, and use discipline in your task management to make it better fit onto the VC, with strategies like formal branching and ticketing protocols, rigorous task mapping that accounts for tech debt, probably integrated into a project management system.
Another way you can do it is to make it literally someone's job and push the load out sideways - examples of this might be code review protocols, gatekeepers for merges (in the olden times, with less sophisticated version control software, I've often worked on teams where there was a nominated 'merge master', whose entire job, or a large portion of it would be to basically do the integration and harder version control work on behalf of the feature developers), also other adjacent roles like scrum masters, or DBAs.
How about SQL ?
That train of thought got me thinking about SQL. I think SQL is another interesting example of 'programming-adjacent work', although it might be a bit more subtle of an example than it first appears. Let's have another digression then. I really like SQL, although it's obviously covered in warts and sharp edges, I've always appreciated it's utility, and to a certain extent it's ergonomics. It does share some of the properties I've discussed with git - it's very often a boundary, and context shift away from the main thread of programming, and programmers tend to hate it, and like to avoid it, and make up nasty memes about it for slack, and that kind of thing - just like version control (or meetings 😘), it's essential and necessary work in a lot of software development, but it's another liminal place, where you have to get pulled out of the context of thinking about your feature work, and software architecture, and land in another place for a while with an annoying external syntax, and a lot of aggravating round trips into different tooling.
Indeed, over the years, a very common programming pattern is to try and slap a more program-ergonomic abstraction layer in front of the SQL, once again to try and minimise the friction and narrow the interface - I'm thinking of things like various ORMs, 'noSQL' database engines that bring the data modelling and querying closer to the application layer, all of them moderately successful, and yet SQL still hangs around everywhere, slightly annoying everyone, like a remote senior cousin inevitably invited to every wide social gathering, tolerated, rather than enthusiastically invited.
That's because SQL is already an ergonomic abstraction. It's kind of the ur-DSL. SQL is there because databases have a lot of inertia associated with them. All the data is often where the money is. Data is the raw stockpile of materials, the raw ingredients of the information that's necessary to run large information technology applications. Data tends to accrue value cumulatively, and you want to keep it all in a big lump in one place (this is why we have terms like 'data-mining' and 'data-warehousing'), so you can correlate it, and leverage sexy network effects from having it all integrated into one humongous data domain. Once you pass a certain critical data mass, you need to access it multi-modally , i.e. there will be many different use cases for the same information sets, different users and different applications will emerge from, or require access to, various intersectional pieces of that data blob. Now, reading and updating that data blob by hand, in your preferred programming stack would really sting. You'd still have to leave your application software context, but you'd now need to delve into a world of low level file systems, and data packing, and indexed data access, and write locking, and concurrent editing, and wire protocols, and cache invalidation, and the whole nine yards of that side of computer science.
I pause a little here, because I realise I'm probably making it sound kind of fun to a particular audience segment (amongst which I include myself, periodically), but let's not lose track of the core point. If your intended task is to make a cool dating app that helps your users get laid, low level storage systems coding is a horrible, high effort context switch away from the feature track you're working on. And of course, all this data access code you're having to do while you go will also need tracking in your version control system, more context switches. Instead, we SQL.
LLMs suck at SQL though
As an aside, I have found LLM coding assistants to be generally pretty bad at SQL writing. I have two hand-wavy personal theories about why this is the case
Programmers, on average, in my experience are really pretty bad at SQL, probably because of the reasons we delved into above. So the training set of the models is full of low quality material. (cheap shot, maybe? 😅 Cut me some slack, I've spent many hours of my life fixing other people's bad SQL)
Effective SQL generation requires a lot of external context the model doesn't have - not only the entire database schema, but also ideas about the data contents, and distributions that a pre-trained model doesn't necessarily have any access to. I think getting good SQL results from LLMs would need a lot of context prompting, or specific training. Still doesn't entirely explain why they're so bad at basic join syntax.
I'm tempted to infer something from those two sub-points about SQL requiring fundamentally different kinds of reasoning to other forms of writing, but I'm probably just seeing the face of Poseidon appearing in the patterns of my mental sea foam... I'll leave it there for now. (a third parallel blog post? This stuff is getting fractal). BTW - The name for that fascinating phenomenon is *pareidolia* , and it's something worth keeping in mind when discussing "AI" concepts...
The surprising invention and nature of SQL
Ahem... Another really interesting aside is to have a look back at the history of SQL. SQL is rather old. It's basically my age, and I've already pointed out I've been using emacs professionally for at least a few decades. SQL emerges from IBM in the 1970s, as a research project, greatly influenced by E.F. Codd's classic article 'A relational model of data for large shared data banks'
The primary designers of SQL were Don Chamberlin and Ray Boyce, part of IBM's system R research project, who were tasked with looking into ways to apply Codd's relational / mathematical principles of database modelling to IBM's database businesses. IBM's database business at this point was most of IBM's business, and IBM's database business was pretty huge. Prior to relational databases, the existing big iron database management systems were awkward weird transactional / hierarchical databases, like IMS/360 where you pretty much had to write a specific computer program to be batch executed from a queued transaction management system. Each 'query' was more akin to an independent program. In order to change the report, you'd develop a new program, and you would need appropriate programmer time and skill to do it, and your best turnaround for results would be several hours, probably more like days.
So the system R researchers wanted to make this more flexible, but their ambitions didn't end there. Chamberlin and Boyce wanted to make information retrieval accessible to non-programmers. Here's Chamberlin
"Ray and I hoped to design a relational language based on concepts that would be familiar to a wider population of users. We also hoped to extend the language to encompass database updates and administrative tasks such as the creation of new tables and views, which had traditionally been outside the scope of a query language.[...] What we thought we were doing was making it possible for non-programmers to interact with databases. We thought that this was going to open up access to data to a whole new class of people who could do things that were never possible before because they didn’t know how to program."
Can you see where I'm heading? SQL is a frantically successful example of what we used to call '4GLs', (fourth generation languages), when I was a school kid, (although by that point, the text books - and what we didn't yet call the hype cycle - were already breathlessly excited by the imminent arrival of the Fifth Generation Languages, and systems...). The terminology is dated, and stretchy, and marketing-fed, but the central gist is - 4GLs are languages that were operating at a higher abstraction level. Your inputs and controls would describe a program at an abstraction level much higher than the operation of the system, and the 4GL would write a program for you that ran at the lower level. All a bit hand-wavy, but SQL querying has some really interesting properties related to this delegation.
it's declarative. Your query describes the data structures you want to retrieve, and the actual details of how the data is retrieved from disk is decided for you by a query planner.
it's live and interactive - you can interrogate the system interactively at a REPL
it's got a weird-as-hell syntax full of special cases that tries valiantly to use ENGLISH LIKE words, all IN UPPER CASE SHOUTING that deal in terms of database structures and relational operators, not computer terms like bytes and loops and sorts.
The query planner is worth a little thought - The query plan uses a bit of maths, and some heuristics and a bunch of information and sampled data about your system, and works out a series of reads and sorts and filters that produce the data structures your query is requesting. Crucially you don't tell it HOW to do it, just WHAT you want it to do. (sorry, the upper case is a bit addicting, I'll stop). Most of the time you don't think about it too much more than that. However, most SQL database systems will show you their plans if you ask them, typically by using the EXPLAIN keyword, which will show you what the planner thinks it should do to build the result set you wanted. If you don't like what it's decided you can't tell it to do things differently, but you may teach it to do things differently, typically by updating the available indexes and constraints, or maybe by re-balancing the statistics it uses to decide about cardinality and seek times, and that kind of thing.
Here again we have a division of labour - the idea is that the structural and statistical and optimising and runtime bits of maintaining the SQL system can be delegated to the programmer and technician classes, who can be more concerned with the implementation and operational parts, and the query writer (a non programmer, if you remember) can just get on with expressing their tasks in a lower friction, narrowed domain, where they don't have to context switch out as hard from their task at hand, writing lovely business reports for the sales and finance teams to make slide decks from.
Now I'm not saying that SQL writing is 1970s prompt engineering, but I'm also not not saying that, right?
Here's Don again, after the fact
"Ray and I were wrong about the predominant usage of SQL. Typically, SQL is embedded in a host programming language and used by professional programmers"
Is SQL any good though?
SQL was, as I have said, a spectacular success. It's still bloody everywhere, fifty years on. It was also an abject failure. The syntax is a mess of unaligned clauses with special cases everywhere (INSERT and UPDATE have such radically different approaches to clauses but sort of do the same thing. So does DELETE really). You need to understand maths to do it properly. You also need to understand the precise details of the database schema. The database schema is maintained in a separate dialect that's somehow intertwined with the querying DSL and uses the same interfaces, but again obeys a different syntax and semantics. Record locking is both implicit and explicit. The concurrency model is insane and nobody actually understands it properly. NULL breaks everything including query logic. And most damningly, it's never used as an interactive REPL by non-programmers. It's folded into programs mostly. In fact these days, an eye-wateringly huge number of applications bundle an entire SQLite embedded RDBMS inside their application deployment.
Repeated interface patterns, and why I care
There's a pattern emerging here I think - querying and reporting wasn't quite entirely programming adjacent busywork, but it was business-adjacent drone work, and SQL was an attempt to narrow the interface with an ergonomic DSL that got out of the user's way and reduced the scope of the context switch needed to engage with the reporting system. It kind of failed at the interface, if you ask me (and most folks who have to use it), but it did succeed amazingly at reducing the complexity of the context switch. Using SQL to mediate data persistence inside your application is kind of like using magit to fold your git operations right inside your emacs workflow, they both serve to shrink down the cost of flipping out of your primary task domain, into some other essential, dependent domain.
Either reduce it to a tight DSL, or extract the work and organise it so it can be delegated to another worker. Sometimes, you put a DSL on top of a DSL, to tune it down even further. Sometimes you build a team to own the work in this domain. What if you build a DSL over a DSL but the DSL could sort of work like a team you can delegate tasks to? That's a compelling interface, that is.
When I look at it like this, using an agent REPL in zed to run git operations strongly reminds me of that (failed) SQL/4GL promise. I tell the thing the result I want from it, and it builds a plan of execution, and I can iterate on that, interactively. Only this time, I'm using literal English sentences to describe the narrow domain the system has trained itself on, not some bastard awful pidgin version of it, that somehow ends up with the worst features of both natural languages, and programming languages. Sorry SQL, it has to be said. And you know what, I kind of love you anyway.
I think this pattern can be found in several places of software development, if you squint right. Programming-adjacent work gets reduced with DSLs or narrow abstractions, which bring the benefits of reducing that tedious, expensive context switch. I guess we have lots of it in CI automation, pipeline building, that kind of thing. DevOps is built out of this stuff, infrastructure as code, deployment charts, meta deployment charts, run-books, playbooks. These domains are also places I've found LLM-based assistants super helpful - help me grind out some yaml please so I can add a pull request pipeline that does this thing I just thought of, without me having to spend quite so much time reading up the stupid YAML syntax for this weeks CI system, and spending hours sitting in a push/fail/edit/push loop on some git forge. GraphQL over REST apis - maybe? Unit test generation and test harness design is mostly busywork in a DSL following some declarable constraints. I think I already mentioned figuring out the precise type annotations for things. It makes me think that coding-assistants are perhaps more of a user interface paradigm than they are a coding one. More like a 4GL than a semantic IDE.
In conclusion
What's my point? I'm not completely sure (he says after several thousand words)
I like zed, I'm finding it more useful than I thought I would, and I've stuck using it on and off for a few months now.
I keep finding small useful things for LLMs to do, and I enjoy that process.
The most value might be in 'programming-adjacent' things - e.g. as I mentioned, I'm now personally only writing a small proportion of my commit messages by hand, and I think my commit messages are considerably better off for it.
Tools that reduce the context switches for 'programming-adjacent' work will win
Conversational interfaces are very low friction for human minds.
LLMs are much better than humans at context switching to a different domain, while keeping track of and applying accrued context across different tasks
Is there something you need to do that applies a tight but boring DSL across a defined data set? A model might actually be quite good at that. Another weird thing I've found them almost spectacularly good at is networking and debugging - describe a topology, give it a tcpdump, and watch it spit out a bunch of diagnostic suggestions and potential remedies for you to use.
These tools are one of the biggest tech shifts I've seen in my rather long, slightly storied, career that spans a whole bunch of tech paradigm shifts.
Summary footnotes
This is just some opinions, inspired by how astonished I was to successfully use an "agentic" tool to run some gnarly git stuff I would have had to pull out the manual to do. There's all sorts of important discourse about LLMs and the out of control tech hype cycle around them that I don't go near, and I'm not writing a manifesto
I'm not a historian, or a first hand witness of the pre-RDBMS data scene, although I did work alongside people who came from that background, so I do have a lot of secondary source exposure. I haven't done much research other than light web searching, so please take my historical characterisations with the appropriate amount of salt. I know pretty much zilch about how IMS/360 actually worked, I just remember the name, I'm generalising.
I wrote this blog post by hand, it's not the sort of thing I think LLMs are much use at. I'm trying to express my own opinions here, in my own voice, because I was excited about a couple of ideas and wanted to try sharing them
I wrote this blog post in emacs though.
I probably won't write any of those other parallel blog posts, who has time to write blog posts?
I did use Claude to fact check the post. Don't laugh, they can actually do that sort of thing now. This stuff moves fast.
Finally, I feel I ought to note that Ray Boyce died tragically young at 27 in 1974, shortly after the presentation of the SEQUEL design paper. He left an astonishingly outsize impact after such a short career. Put a dent in the world, as they say. Don Chamberlin, happily, is still with us so far as I know.
You wait two and a bit years for a blog to show up and then all of a sudden there's two of them!? I seem to have accidentally started a new blog. OMG.LOL, a rather whimsical web service I've belonged to for a while, is dropping new features on it's members for the holiday season, in the form of a charming animated advent calendar. The theme of the season is 'blogging', and right there on day one, they gave us a weblog service, weblog.lol.
So I'm over there at cms.weblog.lol. And I appear to be attempting to post a review of a different christmas pie every day, in a fit of seasonal over-enthusiasm. It will never last. So far I'm three for three though, and having fun.
Do check out omg.lol btw. It's my favourite kind of internet thing really, user-focused, a paid service (no grotty ad trafficking), (it's cheap too, right now it costs $5 per year, although the price is rising in January, get in soon if you want to, you can buy several years in advance) For your money you get a cute namespace of your choosing. Obviously I am cms, and a bunch of other neat stuff. Weblogs! (we already mentioned these). A customisable home page. A DNS subdomain, to do what you like with. A nice short email address, with forwarding. A mastodon instance, an irc server for members, a pastebin, probably some other things I've forgotten. Keybase proofs!
It's cool! Loads of 'small web' vibes, a built in community, and a bunch of fun tools. Definitely gives me nice warm fuzzy 'early internet' feels. I've managed to convince two other people I know to sign up so far. You should too! But in the meantime. I'll be over there blogging. And also maybe over here blogging? I'm such a blogger these days.
Back again! Literally years since my last post. Is blogging back? It feels a bit like people are slightly more excited about self-hosting content again than they have been in a couple of years, it's true. The big incumbent social networks are feeling a bit less solid than they used to. Facebook has been laying people off and visibly throwing money away chasing a dorky-looking, implausible VR business that almost nobody (save for the investors) seems interested in. Twitter has gone private, rather publicly, and at the time of writing seems to be in the process of reinventing itself as Twitter 2.0, whatever that turns out to mean. Right now, it seems to mean far fewer people posting, looking at my logged in timeline. Mastodon is having a moment. Maybe blogging is back!
While I am mildly excited by these winds of change, none of this is really anything to do with my sudden return to posting. My motive is something considerably less idealistic. I've moved web-hosts again, putting this post clearly into the least exciting, yet most solipsistic form of personal blogging, namely, updates on infrastructure and apologies for lack of content, addressed to an almost entirely imaginary audience!
My motive for moving hosts is worth a minor note, and also feels very 2022. My hosting costs have shot up so much, primarily due to the dramatic surges in energy costs of the past six months, that it no longer seems economically viable to use even cheap commercial hosting to prop up a vanity website I barely make any use of. So I've taken the very retro step of bringing it all back in house. Literally in-house, this page is now running off a tiny low-power media PC repurposed as a basic Linux server, connected up to my home DSL connection, and sitting in the cupboard behind the television in my front room. I had fun doing it, but it was an extremely manual process, and as a result of that I'm quite sure there's a few bugs and glitches hanging around, and some stuff will be weird until the all of the DNS edits are fully propagated.
They are still annoyingly hard to track down, but I finally sourced a breadmaker. And I have made some bread. And eaten some of it, and it was good. Astonishingly simple to use, just tip in some slop, select a program and then wait. Although the timer only goes up to 13, meaning I had to get up at 6:30 to release it. On the positive, this is exactly how real bakers do it and so I feel I am close to becoming a master baker.
It is a Panasonic 2511-KXC I can't really offer an objective review. I have never used a bread maker before, and I chose it mainly because it was the only one available in SE England. It has a nut dispenser, although I have not yet put my nuts in it .
I have been rather enjoying wearing a mask outside ever since the bad times began. All the way back in Feb or maybe March, I forget which, time seems more broken than usual, I was improvising by looping a scarf several times around my lower face. I own, and enjoy a lot of scarves, and the weather back then was fairly amenable to swaddling one's entire head in designer fabrics.
Subsequently, as we set in for the long haul, my much cleverer partner ordered the whole family some reusable ones, from Deakin and Blue. Easier to fit, and more effective, and I switched over to this. It's swimwear fabric, basically a speedo for your lower face, and I've been lining it with one sheet of kitchen roll, square folded, which is comfortable enough, and gives a few layers of filtering. The mask is reversible, patterned on one side and black on the other, but I always wear the black side out. I think they other side is floral, but I'm not even sure of that.
I realised I find it fun to wear. It feels like wearing a disguise. Another layer of private bubble on the roam, an extra shield to accompany the earbuds. Thinking about it, so many of my childhood heroes were masked. I think I'm quite into masks. We had the lone ranger and Zorro on the telly, alongside Batman and Robin. Robin Hood had a hood, of course. I remember trying to figure out how Spider-Man could even see through his striking mask design, and how I might some day figure out how to make one. Masks are just cool. Under normal circumstances I'd feel a bit weird wearing one everywhere, and I think it would provoke suspicion, but currently I can prowl around looking like a plank, but imagining I'm a badass. It's nice to have found some minor positive thing emerging out of all the drama of pandemic season. I should probably invest in more masks, get some more interesting colour going on.
Something I'm enjoying far less is any tone of dedicated anti-mask rhetoric, examples of which do seem to be floating around my internet. I find it very hard to understand. Not quite as hard to understand as the mobile phone mast burning, but still. Even if you don't find obscuring your face as childishly gleeful as I do, I don't know why you'd want to make a stand about not wearing one. Even if I assume the conversations on social media are distorted, and amplifying extreme minority views, as they usually do, even when I'm out and about I think I'm probably seeing less than 1% of people wearing them, (although I've not counted properly). This seems a shame. Especially given that I'm living in the eighth ranked hotspot on that leaked sheet of areas for concern(!).
It seems pretty obvious to me that even a very imperfect mask will still impart some reduction of transmission, and it's a numbers game we're currently in. The cumulative benefit of lots of small reductions everywhere are still a useful contribution. Most of the rhetoric I've seen in both directions seems more focused on the individual, arguing that they don't filter much out, or it's some kind of curious affront to personal freedom, or urging people to think of campaigning for it like a seat-belt or an airbag for a car. This perspective is almost entirely wrong. A mask is not something to wear for personal protection, it's something small you can do to help everyone else, that is most effective when everyone else is also doing it.
I realise we live firmly in the age of the self, but I do remain confused how a country that passionately adopted the weekly ritual doorstep clap nation-wide, in a matter of weeks, is less keen to rush into this, arguably more useful, performance piece. I wonder what the missing mechanism is, if it's messaging, or psychology, or something more profound and deeply entrenched.
Still, I have my fun, and don't really plan to stop any time soon. I have been wondering about getting some sequins in, or if I could get some custom patterns ordered. I guess if this all goes on long enough we'll see redbubble and stickermule and the others adding masks to their standard merch templates.
You wait six months for a blog post and then I suddenly update all the things at once. Here we are. Site redesign. New Server. New software release. Lets tackle those in order
Redesign
I launched this version of my blog originally as 'in-progress' software before it was quite ready, after spending a few years faffing around with experiments intended to replace WordPress. One day I had something I wanted to publish, and WordPress was broken, and the thing was nearly working so I hit go. It wasn't feature complete, and there was completely minimal styling, but I thought it looked OK enough, until a friend pointed out it looked completely insane on a mobile. I felt pretty embarrassed, so I quickly cobbled together a mobile-first grid-oriented thing using zurb foundation 5 as a framework, because that was what we were using at work at the time, and it seemed like an excuse to learn a bit about how it worked. I subsequently reworked it to use foundation 6 with a slightly styled theme based on my old WordPress colours and there we are. Of late, the amount of gubbins needed to support the foundation classes has been a bit of an encumbrance, and so I decided to do away with it. This time I just hand-wrote the styles again, I think CSS has moved on a bit and hope browsers are generally a bit better behaved. Seeing as we were doing this, I did a new theme, it's based on my emacs colours. I don't care that you hate it, no.
New Server
I'm sure you all heard, ARM hardware is the new hotness now. As a natural contrarian, I was already hosting my site on an ARM server and so it's clearly time for me to move to AMD64. Not quite. For years I've been having fun hosting this place on one of scaleway's ARM C1 instances, which appealed to my quirky taste in alternative computers, as well as being super-cheap, and in many ways, offering far better raw performance than a VPS or a cheap cloud instance. Seriously. I was running about twelve services per instance, and my own hand-written site software, and performance was more than acceptable. I even hit the front page of the reddits and the orangenews a couple of times with my tech dithering, and soaked up big blog traffic spikes, no sweat. However, scaleway haven't offered any useful updates to their core platform since they experimented with, and withdrew a 64 bit ARM beta, and now seem to be moving more towards a VPS/Intel vision, and it was really becoming a bit limiting to be stuck on Debian 9 and 32 bit. So I moved house, installed some containers on an existing server I had sitting around and now we're live, in Belgium .
New software release
This is a little bit tied in with the last item there. The site engine here is written in common lisp, and for the longest time I just had it running out of an interactive repl attached to an emacs. Yes, including the #1 NackerYews story days. I moved it to a systemd service, for process supervision, and proper logging and things like that, and I wanted to get some kind of release management regime in place. So I had a fun time figuring out good ways to build standalone lisp apps, and how to package them up for Debian, and now I kind of have tagged release builds. I'm also running in my own cowboy cloud, sticker-ed together out of LXC, so the blog now can be deployed as a clean, ephemeral contained service any time I want to do a release. Particularly this part of things was becoming quite the aggravation, cross-building for ARM32 isn't really trivially feasible with common lisp, and although I had a lot of fun for a bit building debs on a raspberry Pi tucked under my desk, I eventually ran out of patience trying to keep ABI back-compatibility with older Debians.
Devops
My process probably seems a little bit archaic and convoluted to anyone used to thinking about this kind of thing in a modern context. It is true that there are lots of simpler abstractions and services for doing this kind of thing these days. Perhaps less intuitively, doing things the bale-of-twine and pencil sketch cowboy manner I've pitched for is also crazy easy compared to what I remember hand wrangling sites of old used to be. LXC is fairly straightforward to install on Debian stable OOTB. (unprivileged mode is still a bit of twerking, but if you follow the recipe exactly, straightforward enough). Debhelper vastly simplifies deb building (although I'll concede you do still have to do way too much) and gpb is simpler yet in some ways. Quicklisp, buildapp and quickproject make lisp dependencies and builds almost pleasurable. Cloudflare and certbot wildcards make swapping hosts around with full TLS almost disconcertingly straightforward compared to what I've been accustomed to in the past.
Of course this is still a rolling set of dependencies which may appear complex or unfamiliar, but in a lot of ways there's also a whole lot of faff and bookeeping overhead removed, no accounts or APIs, third-party apps and frameworks to keep up-to-date. Most of this task list was concerned with a full bootstrap from a naked host. For ongoing support I just have to compile debs using standard make, launch empty containers with standard templates, and write posts and maintain code with a straightforward text editor. And there's complete autonomy of hosting and running, I'm not really locked into anything, which is exactly where I prefer to keep things. The modern-day indieweb refuses to die!
I can remember fairly clearly the first time I seriously tried to calculate the future . I was maybe ten years old, lying in bed and re-reading an issue of 2000 AD, and for the first time, I was puzzling over the idea that that title, intentionally and inherently futuristic, represented a real calendar date that would one day arrive, and somehow, calamitously render the name obsolete. I tried to figure out how old I would have to be by the time we reached this epoch, but as I recall, it was beyond my reckoning. It didn’t seem that likely I would live long enough for vengeful androids and routine interstellar travel, and yet even from 1977, the year 2000 seemed countable. And here I am, now, in 2020, A number that looks so impossibly, so implausibly of, from, and for the future my brain isnt really comfortable holding on to it. But first we must put away 2019. Here's my 2019 roundup, in something like 20 paragraphs.
I rejoined social media:
2018 I had a year off Twitter, feeling a bit exhausted by it all. It didn't really seem to make much difference. Now the Internet seemed to have invaded, occupied and consumed everything. Surveillance capitalism now so entrenched it was to be a regular part of mainstream think piece commentary. Network effects being what they are, It’s deluded and futile to make even token efforts to keep beyond these tracking networks, the reach is now such that secondary and tertiary associations will just link around you and pull you in anyway. So I bounced back onto Twitter, signed up for Instagram, and even rejoined Facebook-and rectivated Foursquare. I’m not particularly excited by any of them. At best, they represent a low friction way of posting light life updates, and it's nice to get reciprocal insights back about people I know, but don't see regularly. (And now I don't really see anyone regularly, so that’s a thing) It's fine, but we can do better. Ironically 2019 feels like the year everyone started to gently pull back from all this online sharing stuff. Ho hum.
Gene Wolfe died
Boo. Probably my favourite author, genre or otherwise. Age 87, which is by any account a splendid innings. A couple of personal resonances last year. I finally finished reading the “solar cycle”, which contains some of my most loved books. I started when I was fifteen, and I was just starting into the final volume when he died. And then the Folio Society issued a fairly exquisite luxury edition of his masterpiece, "The Book of the New Sun", signed, numbered and limited to 750 pieces, and which I somehow managed to discover and purchase before they sold out. I felt pretty decadent, and guilty about spending hundreds of pounds on a fancy copy of a book I already owned, but within weeks people were listing them on eBay for thousands, so maybe it was a wise investment? Anyway, Wolfe is amazing, and-if you havent read him, why not try? Start with the Fifth Head of Cerberus, I would.
A Haircut:
by the end of the year, I was bored of the hair, so it's all off again. I suspect the next time it grows back in may well be all white.
An ASD diagnosis:
No not me. We've basically known about it for a long time ourselves, and painfully been pursuing a diagnosis through the systems for literally years, but late in the year we obtained a professional diagnosis of ASD for number one child. Shock, relief, and lots to process for everybody, but a powerful sense of progress in a way that feels constructive and enabling, not reductive and labelling.
Weddings x2:
Here's a surprise ageing effect. Having got past "peer group wedding” season, and assuming weddings were all done I seem to have hit "generation below hits wedding season" season, and now weddings are a thing again. That's cool, I like weddings. This summer was two, both fancy AF. One in a cathedral, one in Cyprus. The latter was an Orthodox church service, which was quite unlike anything else I have previously experienced. Weddings are a pretty big deal in Cyprus.
Castles:
Throughout 2019 we held a family membership to English Heritage, and as a result spent a few weekends wading around ancient English castles. There are quite a few spectacular examples In this part of the county, closest to the mainland (we can see France very with the naked eye most days). Dover is particularly astonishing. Pretty middle-aged, I guess. National Trust next?
Photography:
I've been getting gently back into using actual cameras for photography. Maybe inspired by instagram? Possibly just because my predilection for "alternative" smartphone operating systems lumbers me with dreadful quality camera software? Regardless, I have been having fun shooting things with real glass - on my much loved power shot GX9-2, which sadly caught some water damage on a recent trip to Malta and is still drying out four months later - but this gave me an excuse to upgrade it to a slightly larger slightly more posh Canon M100, which is more cumbersome and not quite as fun to use, but easily compensates for that in image quality and lower light performance. I don't even muck about with much manual selection, mostly plain automatic shooting, but I really enjoy something about the deliberation, and the ceremony, and having to actively curate, triage and extract the images off the camera in order to use them for anything. Mindfulness? Contrarianism? Whatever, Fun.
Still in Folkestone:
Yup. After quitting London to work remotely, we sold the big house, and shifted even further south to Folkestone, where I remain, the most mundane kind of digital nomad imaginable. I like it a lot. I was born by the sea, I grew up by, in and on the sea, and now, once again, I walk, with god, alongside the actual sea, most days. I've even gone in it to swim. Folkestone is my kind of town really - collapsing Victorian splendour, a harbour, vague touches of bohemia, light gentrification, that isn't trying too hard, and you can clearly see France most days, without effort, and that is something I will never not find mind-bendingly magical.. It does rain a bit too much, mind you.
Dental surgery:
2019 Was the year I finally gave up pretending I could largely ignore the pitifully untended state of my teeth. Actually, it was the teeth that made the decision for themselves. I have a pretty strong dental phobia (Maltese dentistry in the 1970's was not great), but by the middle of the year something was painfully not right in an area that had been slightly bothersome for years, and pain was escalating alarmingly. I still couldn't manage the appointment making myself, so thanks to my lovely wife, I ended up enrolled with a local private practice, and with a fairly gruesome diagnosis : -an impacted wisdom tooth had grown down into my jaw and accessed, destroying two molars, and threatening jaw damage. Surgical intervention was required, and due to my panic-stricken inability to co-operate, it was to be done under a still fairly Terrifyingly named process of "conscious sedation". That meant a referral, three months of waiting for a slot at a specialist clinic, and an almost constant diet of pain-killers in the interim (as well as two very uncomfortable, and strictly speaking forbidden, international flights) but eventually I got through it. The conscious sedative was one of the most surprising experiences I have ever had. Strapped into a chair in a small theatre, and attached to a drip, I remember a brief chat about consent, and then the next thing I remember I was in the passenger seat of the car on the way home, a mouth full of wadding, having entirely lost a couple of hours and a couple of teeth! I am left wondering if I was out for the operation, or if I have simply retained no memory of it, and what precisely is the dittoed between those two anyway? I find the very existence of this kind of instant blackout drugs and astonishing and implausible marvel. If It were a plot device in a fiction, I'd have scoffed at how completely unrealistic it was. So now I have a dentist, a treatment plan, no headaches, and two Fewer teeth. Lots more work needed, but it feels achievable. And I’ve experienced time-travel.
Common Lisp@work:
Love this one. My day job is still working at platform.sh, where we have a home grown container runtime that powers our "cloud" project. Cloud engineering is my team, and literally my first act in the job was to port one of my existing lisp web apps to the runtime as an experiment. Well, it turns out our VP of engineering is also a lisper, and we have ended up extending these experiments to building a couple of internal tools in SBCL, which are of course hosted on the platform. These proved useful enough to keep, and at that point, it started to make sense to productionize the lisp containers, so we can have a first class and maintainable build, rather than shoehorn a lisp install into a capable enough container. At which point there was no reason to not make this publicly available for customer projects, which we announced with a blog post, which was well recieved on the social platforms. I only had a tiny part in all of the above processes, but it is still one of the coolest things I have ever been involved with at work and remains a woeful reminder that I have a pretty cool job and work with a great team.
A-Rank in Splatoon!:
I adore Splatoon, Nintendo’s gloriously styled paint-em-up, online FPS. I’ve been playing it quite regularly since launch on the Wii U, and through into it's subsequent re-packaging as Splatoon 2 on the Switch. I love everything about the game, from the mechanics, which are well-considered and balanced, all the way through to the world-building and the whole skate-tween-punk cartoon fish aesthetic. I mostly play ranked, and although I wouldn't claim to be particularly good, 2019 was the year I finally sneaked A rank after years of trying. And not just once, but in a couple of categories (zones, tower, and rainmaker) Yes I realize this is because fewer people are still playing. What of it. I have a badge.
TV:
I watch a lot of TV. and I'm not ashamed of it. I know we're living through peak TV, but for me 2019 was a less than stellar year. Plenty of things, I probably should like, I just didn't. I dont have much appetite for "The Apprentice" anymore, although it can still deliver hilariously awful situations from its contrived casting. “Fleabag” annoyed me almost as much as it charmed. Star Trek regularly sent me to sleep (love the art direction still). The concluding series or Mr Robot was great, I've thoroughly enjoyed that whole run, but it was time to sign off. "Homecoming" wasn't quite so great, but it worked. I think my favorite show from last year would have to be discovering “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” on Netflix (awful title. do try to get past the title) - Super-smart, subversive , unpredictable, bingeable, engaging, and great music. I was already a huge Adam Schlesinger fan, and now I guess I'm a Rachel Bloom fan too. So many earworms. Bring back old Greg!
Books:
I suck at reading, these days I know it's a common modern Iffliction. I have been trying to make an effort. I finished the Gene Wolfe Solar books, as I mentioned earlier, but otherwise 2019 was not so great. According to my Goodreads account (doesn't capture everything but it's fairly accurate) , I only managed nineteen books, some of which I can't even remember reading. Aside from Wolfe, I think my high points would have to be "The Peripheral" and "Ingenious Pain" . 2020 we have a sequel to "The Peripheral" due, as well as the final installment of Hilary Mantel's Cromwell books and I'm going to do better. Im trying to do ten minutes entirely focused reading a day this year. Going well so far (2 books finished already)
Movies:
I'm still struggling here as well, although we do a weekly family movie night, I still rarely get to the cinema. I did make it to see “Rise of Skywalker" and this I did manage to see every Star Wars movie on initial cinema release. I'm afraid the most enthusiasm I can find about that is that I’m glad it's done. Similarly, on the other franchise I finally got up to date with Marvel by reaching “Avengers: Endgame" on streaming, and I'm mostly happy to be able to say “OK, this can stop”. The kids got into Harry Potter, having reached that sort of age, and so I also belatedly got to the end of those, and my goodness they're bad. Things, I actively liked- “Lady Bird”, Netflix's "Annihilation" was superb, and my favourite was probably "Sword of Trust". And on Xmas Eve I decided to watch an ancient favourite, "Lair of the White Worm" which I enjoyed revisiting so much, I may make it into a Xmas tradition from now on. Ken Russell(I) is my man.
A New kitchen:
Our kitchen seemed to be in relatively good shape when we bought the house, but it had a conservatory attached to where the back door ought to be, which although it made for a lovely sense of light and space was punishingly cold in the winter. So we decided to get a glazed back door fitted between. And then we found rotting wallpaper trapped behind the kitchen units over damp plaster, and decided to get a nicer fitted kitchen while addressing that. And then we discovered a water leak running down the back wall. And then a cascade of horrors, including a lintel-free window, a removed chimney being held up by what looked like a nail through an old chair leg, three layers of wall cladding, and perhaps most excitingly, several rotten joists not doing the greatest job of keeping the upstairs upstairs. Cue months of no kitchen, stripping everything back to brick, jacking up the roof, replacing beams, dry lining everything. and then potting in a kitchen back on top. And now we have a back door. And quite a nice kitchen. And far less money.
Malta & Cyprus:
Two Foreign holidays? I already mentioned my friend's magical destination wedding earlier, but by way of attending we got to spend almost a Week, without children, (thanks, Grandma!) in a pretty swanky hotel in Limassol. Cyprus is hot in the summer, and I say that as someone quite used to heat. So I ended up doing something I have never done before, and just hung out poolside, reading, and swimming and being waited on. And that was just great. And Despo came by to visit, which was a lovely coincidence. Then, a couple of months later we all went to hang out in another resort hotel, but this time in Qawra , in a Family oriented holiday complex. That's the first time we've done significant overseas travel as a family, also the first time I've been back in Malta in almost a decade. I enjoyed the opportunity to show the girls a little of the sense of what Malta is like, and I stole away for a poignant solo visit back to my old home town, my last opportunity to do it as a full EU citizen.
Softwares:
I am feeling quite out of love with computers and software, and especially the flipping internet and the incessant noise bubble of the tech industry. At the moment, I'm afraid to say, outside of work (work is cool, as mentioned already) I’m not really indulging in very much computering. A brief spurt of activity on a secret, not yet abandoned, but not yet revisited project, at the start of the year, and then nothing really - a few isolated sessions of hacking on the software for this site which only really focused on infra things and build chains - I guess I have a useable flow for generating 32 bit ARM debs from Common Lisp applications, but that's more bureaucracy and housekeeping than hacking, and even I don’t find it that enthralling. And most of my infrastructure is still a mess after moving. Maybe 2020 I'll find a way to relight the spark. Maybe I'm done ? Seems unlikely, but I’m not inspired.
I love my new shaver:
On a more positive technology note, I did fall severely in love with a piece of consumer electronics. I finally lost patience with my Philips rotary head shaver, after years of dissatisfaction and overspending on replacement foils and cutting heads that never really helped much. Not really knowing where to turn to for advice, I tried the wire cutter, something I’m a little wary of trusting and I picked up a Braun series 7 during Black Friday month at amazon.co.uk, and no exaggeration, It has COMPLETELY CHANGED MY LIFE. I am competely astonished at the ease of use, enthralled by the consistency of the result, and enraptured by the sense of considered Germanic engineering that exudes from every aspect. I love this thing and it makes me happy while I am using it.
No music:
I am barely listening to anything. Some of it is because I've barely strung my music library infrastructure back together after relocating. Some of it’s because I'm too old and boring and middle aged. Some of it's because I still don't have a subscription to a streaming service, and some of it's just because I think I have just lost the habit of it. I have been playing guitar much more in the past 12 months than in previous years, and l am flirting with writing and recording a little bit more again. 2019 though, is a solid musical wash-out.
iOS WTF:
I know! I'm back on (an) iPhone after YEARS away. Actually, I jumped via an iPad first. I’ve been enjoying this fanciful idea of multiple, task-specific devices, and I wondered about splitting the non-coding, computer things away from my laptop and I thought I'd give an iPad mini a try-out as a general-purpose 'personal' computing device; Apps, email, browsing, etc. It was a mixed success- I use it for some things way more than I expected I would, it is basically the only way I do email now, I have used it to write the entirety of this blog post. (by hand, with a pencil!), and a bit less for others (I had a quixotic notion that I'd finally get everything organised into digital calendaring but I still remain a barely calendared human) Overall though, I likes it. It’s very reliable, I’d say it’s a slightly more useful thing than it appears to be on the surface, and a slightly less capable thing than it appears in the advertisements. I'm quite happily onboarded now though, to the point that I feel comfortable treating it as the primary device / silo for certain categories of things. So much so that when I hit a patch of phone trouble with my Sony Xperia 2 running /e/ (This year I have bounced between Lineage, /e/ and SailfishOS in my continuing adventures in alternative phone systems) I decided to dust off an almost dead iPhone 6S and give it a try. And, it's fine. Fine enough that I refurbished the battery myself, which cost fifteen pounds, and was surprisingly straightforward and kept going. Several months on, I'm still using it. Although not all that much. I think one of the side effects of moving more of my "app stuff" over to the iPad is that I'm not really using my phone for anything much these days beyond light social networking, messaging and podcasts. Oh yeah , and Apple Pay everywhere! I love Apple Pay almost as much as I love my electric Shaver. It is quite peaceful not having to care about whether my phone is working or not when I need to take a call.
I am typing this onto a phone, on a station platform, squinting at the early morning light. It is damp on the ground. Many birds, still excited enough by the recent dawn, and cheered on by the imminent Spring, are loudly singing in their particular competitions.I have been awake since stupid o' clock. I am a commuter, I have a headache, and I have a back-ache, and I am tired.
I have been doing this routine, or a near variation of it for the last seven or eight years. It's been very useful. I have been privileged enough to afford to maintain a whacking great family home, in a comfortable part of Kent, and shuttle back and forth to the big smoke, and taken my parts, minor and significant, in various start-up and scale-up companies, some doomed, some successful, almost all of them great fun, inside London's burgeoning 'tech scene'.
As of today, I am done. Today is my last commute.
Now on the train, speeding toward Cannon Street. By some miracle of kindness, this train, frequently delayed, often truncated, usually rammed to the gunwales with the pissed-off, the late, the drooling snorers, the dextrous make-up applicators, the slightly terrifying morning Stella drinkers, arrived on time, and half-empty, and I have a seat, with a half-table. Airline seating, but nobody is pinning me in with an arse much larger than the mean spirited seating budget. Somebody up there likes me.
"When a man is tired of London, he's tired of life", as the hoary old paraphrased proverb would have it. I'm not tired of life. I don't even think I'm tired of London. I haven't finished exploring it yet. I would like to do a bit more life, and a bit less dull routine. Recently, it's all been feeling a bit repetitive, and formulaic, and stale, and not really me. It feels like the right time to make some changes.
I suppose 2018 seems to be my year for quitting things, from the outside. Over here I'm less sure of that. Change can be healthy, and constructive. A chaos wizard binds disorder and fluid energies into tools of power, after all. I don't believe in mid-life crises. I do believe in making the most you can from out of what you have. That's how the magic works.
We're bang in the middle of selling the house. Planning to move further out, to the coast. I shall miss London, but only in the way I missed it when I left before, twenty-five years ago, perhaps more. That was opening a chapter onto great and marvellous things. This time will also. I'm sure I will be back. Meanwhile, I'm saying goodbye, at least for now.
Now just pulling in to London Bridge. I like the Shard. It wasn't even a thing when we first moved here. Scenes change, always. Exciting.
Cannon Street. One last day in the office. That's the end of my first, and probably last, ever live-blogged commute. A great run. That could not have gone better. I call that a perfect ending.
I stumbled across a reference to the RMS Mülheim, and ended up in a wiki-hole. This German cargo ship was wrecked at Land's End in 2003, in apparently bizarre circumstances.
On investigation, it was discovered that the chief officer—who had been on watch at the time—had caught his trousers in the lever of his chair when trying to get up, causing him to fall and rendering him unconscious."
This brings to mind those periodic surveys about accidents in the home, wherein you learn that something inauspicious, like the toothbrush, is a significant factor in a majority of domestic fatalities. When I looked into it a little more, I did notice that trousers are involved in a surprising number of domestic incidents. In this article from 2001, they get the blame for 6000 accidents a year.
Project 'get off the main web and back onto the indieweb' has been a little bit derailed by 'life events', some of which I should probably blog more about, in the truest spirit of that community. I am still plugging away at it over here in the corner, quietly.
/me waves
In addition to refocusing on self-hosting, some of my other goals were to play better with the "fediverse", experiment with a couple of p2p alternative Internets, and do a few more real-life networking. So tonight there's an opportunity to combine a couple of those, as tonight I am attending the London Mastodon Meetup, in the guise of one of my many secret identities, '[email protected]'.
I'm not sure that disappointed is quite the right word to use, but part of me thinks it's a shame that it isn't
A few months ago, I hacked together a kano system to give the children an introduction to computers and what everyone seems to want to call 'coding'. I like the idea, and the style of the kano kit , but I was a little bit dubious about dropping a couple of hundred quid on a 'edutainment' project that might prove to be of little lasting interest. I'm not particularly hung up on the kids achieving productivity with the thing, but if I'm going to increase my pile of computery devices, I'd prefer to invest in things that are going to be useful.
I hacked together my own Kano
Like so many recent consumer 'DIY' hardware kits, the kano systems are built over the super-popular Raspberry Pi single board computer system. The nice kano people provide downloads for their base system (which is built over linux), as well as all their educational software. So, you can fairly cheaply assemble a scratch-build system from parts, especially if you have most of the parts already lying around in your gigantic pile of computery devices, which of course, I mostly do. You just need a screen, a Pi, some input devices, and a suitably-sized SD card to flash an OS image to. (Use this app!)
It all works fairly well. They bundle a collection of educational free software, including the usual suspects (Sonic Pi, Scratch), some slightly more suprising and fun inclusions (Minecraft Pi Edition), and their own 'Kano Blocks' programming system, a kind of scratch-like skin over maybe Python and JavaScript (I haven't really looked into it too much). Most of the value add comes with the user interface kano have used to tie all this together - it's got a nice colourful simplified desktop, and an onboarding script that uses a charming story-telling metaphor with an unfolding narrative (that starts out in a UNIX shell!) to nudge you into a 'learn to program' RPG style adventure. This takes the form of a Zelda style game that walks you through various scripted programming assignments, with a kind of quest structure. The backstory is sort of an updated spin on 'little computer people'. Overall it's quirky, charming, and seems to be quite engaging. Certainly, more appealing and welcoming to younger children than something like a bare Raspbian desktop with the various apps installed.
I think designing user interfaces is really hard. I've done a bit of it myself. To my mind, it is at least as hard, perhaps harder, than writing computer software. On this front, despite a few rough edges, I've been really impressed with how well the Kano design caters to it's audience. By and large, it's pretty suitable for reading-age children to work with mostly unsupervised. (Pleasingly, there's no requirement for a network connection). That's quite a feat. It's not iPad-easy, but it's offering a significantly more freestyle, open-ended computer experience. I had a tiny bit of troubleshooting with WiFi drivers, and sound initially (hey, it's linux on the desktop after all). I expect these wouldn't present if you were using the official hardware kit. I would give a gentle recommendation of kano to anyone that was thinking of introducing a 6-8 year old child to 'computing' in a useful sense. Most of our interface struggles came from a less expected direction...
Intuition
Kano uses a tradtional desktop metaphor, which expects you to have a keyboard and a mouse/trackpad. It's straightforward adding these to a Pi. You can use any standard keyboard or mouse. Your options are USB type A, or Bluetooth. As you might expect, I have piles of these lying around. As it turns out, mostly these are Apple devices, because of historical reasons. These seem ideal. Apple! The fêted industrial design company. Really well built, attractive equipment. Attractive. Robust. World-beating, reliable Bluetooth stack. I had a small parts bin to choose from. Wireless and wired. Mice and trackpads. Aluminium and polycarbonate.
They kind of worked as well as you'd expect. Except the children found them too confusing to use. It turns out, they're riddled with implied behaviour. Multitouch click behaviour for left and right clicks. Or completely invisible mouse 'buttons'. Weird icons for SHIFT, and TAB, and ENTER, and CAPS that are mostly subtle variations on the same symbol. Granted, I'm using the devices outside their expected context, but I was struck by the irony of how unintuitive all of this was, and also how unneccessary. I can appreciate that there's an aesthetic at play here. From a decorative perspective, there's a tasteful and consistent minimalism that ties it all together. I don't think it exhibits good design. I think it's just pseudy, pretentious, and fake.
I like things to be pretty, and I value design. Both concepts are linked, but they ain't the same thing. Minimal interface design is a laudable goal. If you remove complexity from the interface medium, you remove boundaries, lower overheads, and make a system that's quicker, effective, and less taxing to use. If you do this, and you succeed in doing it well enough, there's an inherent beauty to any well considered tool, that sits somewhere beyond visual proportionality and materials. All these Apple peripherals fail to deliver much of this, sometimes quite badly. I was a bit surpised that I never noticed this so directly in the ten years or so I worked with these tools. But I was already an expert user, these flaws were a couple of layers lower than I was used to looking. Admittedly, some of the mice were pretty terrible, but I have famously always been more of a keyboard man.
After a couple of months of rotating the devices, and patiently explaining that you press over here for this kind of click with this finger, and over there for the other purpose, with a different finger, and this kind of arrow is SHIFT, but that kind of arrow is CAPS LOCK, and scrolling happens this way, I caved and bought a Logitech K-400. It is battleship grey, and not particularly pretty. It uses a dongle for wireless, not bluetooth. The integrated touchpad works fine, and has two differentiated physical buttons. The SHIFT key is labelled with the word 'Shift'. It has been immediately popular, and I have not yet had to field a single question about how the keyboard or pointer works.
I am a fairly sanguine UK rail commuter. I do not understand why they schedule the annual price hike for exactly the same week the holiday maintenance work is likely to have overrun, affecting all the services. Surely it would make more sense to raise the price at the start of the financial year, in April?
Old Street station has a popup "Black Mirror" shop. I am not sure how I feel about this. I am fairly sure I know how Dan Ashcroft would feel about this.
I think she is smitten.