Had a great weekend in Bristol with Caroline, which is where we both went to college (and hence where we met, many moons ago!).
As well as wandering around our old haunts, we went to the very chilled out Ashton Court Festival - which is highly recommended, especially as it’s only £6!
My personal highlights included Figment, Ivory Springer, Steve Harley, and a great band whose name I’ve forgotten, but they reminded me a bit of the Shoogleniftys - I think they might have been called Sheelanagig.
This one is for Jean-Marie, who didn’t believe me…
The relevant paragraph in the Telegraph article is:
One of the first jobs undertaken by a young Margaret Thatcher was to discover ways to "inflate" ice cream with air and boost its value - to some, a neat analogy for her later activities.
The latest version of iChat has added support for Jabber, and it already supports rendezvous (now called bonjour, which is the worst name I’ve heard for a very long time) and AIM.
iChat also supports non-standard, proprietary audio and video chat with other iChat users.
I like iChat, its got a clean and simple interface, and generally seems to work very well. But I live in the real world, which means that not all of my friends own a mac, and not all of the Windoze users use AIM.
There are already plenty of open source multi-protocol clients out there (Fire is the best Mac one I’ve found so far), but I don’t want to give up the iChat interface, or the audio and video conferencing (I’ve got an iSight and I’m damn well going to use it).
It seems to me that if the developers of iChat have half a brain-cell between them, then they will have implemented some sort of plug in mechanism for supporting different chat protocols, just for their own sanity.
I’d really like to see this mechanism being made public, so that third parties can implement plugins to support some of the other popular protocols. And if it doesn’t exist yet, then it really ought to… so get cracking please Apple.
Tom Smith has been looking at Ruby, and having some hassle.
I spent one very superficial session of a few hours looking at it, and I mean to go back. I must admit though that Tom’s post chimed with my impressions, particularly the stuff about syntax:
As syntaxes go, it's not C... but I don't like having to add "end", I really don't like the pipe chars in "friends.each do |friend|", nor the "@" character in object variables, as much as adding ";" in other languages, they all become noise and just another niggly thing to forget or make reading and writing the code more effort. Oh and I've never liked "==" rather than "=". I think that I really want my own pidgeon Ruby that borrows from Python and HyperTalk.
Why is it that there’s always something nasty in a language that otherwise looks quite clean? I don’t agree with all of Tom’s specific gripes, but I can’t stand naming conventions that involve putting graphical characters at the beginning or end of words to distinguish their type. I don’t find it necessary, and to me it just adds visual noise and makes everything look messy. Even Dylan (which as most people know is as near as I’ve got to my perfect language) has a hideous and totally arbitrary naming convention which goes a long way towards spoiling a beautiful language.
My superficial impression of Ruby was: oh bloody hell, it’s a more object oriented Perl. That’s probably grossly unfair, but there was something about the tutorial that I was reading that reminded me of that kind of syntactic “look, aren’t we clever, we can do all this in just five characters” which really puts me off. Yes it may be powerful, but I don’t find terseness particularly attractive in computer languages. It’s surely not that much effort to type a few more characters is it?
My take with Perl was always: “it’s fun at the time, but I always end up feeling slightly dirty in the morning”. I am going to give Ruby another chance, but I’m a bit worried that it might be similar.
By the way Tom, don’t worry about the syntax barrier. Not being able to remember which language you’re in is the sign of a true programmer… so stop denying it and get on with your coding!
Looking at my logs, I noticed that I was getting quite a lot of people looking for old links, particularly for Last Exit to Hypercard.
As a result, I’ve put up most of my old site at http://old.elegantchaos.com.