Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
Up at Cornell, Tom Bruce has a post about the problem of funding open access to legal materials. This brings to mind a conversation I had with a doctor friend recently about AltLaw. My friend, accustomed to the open-access requirements of NIH grants, was frankly shocked that there are no comparable rules for legal decisions.…
It’s interesting to see the first signs of rebellion against RSpec. I jumped on the RSpec bandwagon when it first appeared, mostly so I wouldn’t have to write “assert_equals” all the time. But while I liked and used RSpec, I don’t think it made my tests any better. If anything, they were a little bit…
A small post for the new year (in which I have resolved to write more). The standard introduction to object-oriented programming teaches you to create a class for each type of thing you want to deal with in your program. So if you’re writing a payroll program, you would have an Employee class, a Department…
When storing any large collection of data, one of the most critical decisions one has to make is when to normalize and when to denormalize. Normalized data is good for flexibility — you can write queries to recombine things in any combination. Denormalized data is more efficient when you know, in advance, what the queries…
What makes an on-line community? In the past two weeks I have received announcements of three new “communities” all interested in using open-source software to retrieve, share, and analyze data from or about governments. Most of these announcements say the same thing: “A lot people seem to be working on this, but they aren’t talking…
RDF is seductive. I can’t get away from it. Something about the ability to represent anything and everything in one consistent model just tugs at my engineer’s heartstrings. The problem with RDF, as I’ve discovered through painful experience, is that the ability to represent everything sacrifices the ability to represent anything efficiently. Certainly that is…
I dropped in to hear Rich Hickey talk about Clojure at the New York Semantic Web meetup group. Some highlights: “ยข Some programs, like compilers or theorem provers, are themselves functions. They take input and produce output. Purely functional languages like Haskell are good for these kinds of programs. But other programs, like GUIs or…
Update September 22, 2008: I have abandoned this model. I’m still using Hadoop, but with a much simpler data model. I’ll post about it at some point. … Gosh darn, it’s hard to get this right. In my most recent work on AltLaw, I’ve been building an infrastructure for doing all my back-end data processing…
Google recently released its Protocol Buffers as open source. About a year ago, Facebook released a similar product called Thrift. I’ve been comparing them; here’s what I’ve found: Thrift Protocol Buffers Backers Facebook, Apache (accepted for incubation) Google Bindings C++, Java, Python, PHP, XSD, Ruby, C#, Perl, Objective C, Erlang, Smalltalk, OCaml, and Haskell C++,…
I’m sure I’m not the first to suggest this, but here goes. Ever since somebody first thought of applying the Model-View-Controller paradigm to the web, we’ve had this: The View is a conflation of HTML and JavaScript. JavaScript is an afterthought, a gimmick to make pages “dynamic.” All the real action is in the Controller,…