Wed, 08 Oct 2008
The story of the blog: part 1
or: how I stopped worrying and learned to love unfocussed rambling that touches on but never actually informs one of something, or other, or something.
There are many good questions about why I'm starting a blog, but the real answer is that I think I have some value to provide to the world.
But this post isn't about that. It's about how I came to my current limited understanding about blosxom (which I can't help but mentally mispronounce as 'block-sum' for some reason which is as mysterious as it is typo-inducing).
The first thing to know about Blosxom is that you should IMMEDIATELY remove 'blosxom.com' from your personal internet. It's great and all, but it is clearly not updated. My understanding is that the original author has better things to do than update a web page he made in 2003. So forget about that web site. Instead go directly to blosxom.sourceforge.net. The page looks almost identical, but is actually up-to-date. And they've moved a bunch of plugins into source control so that you don't need a crazy naming convention to figure out with of a dozen versions of file that you can only find through googling it is that you actually want to download.
The second thing about blosxom that you should know is that it is a straight cgi program. No resident process. Not even a database process. This is great for me, since my host http://nearlyfreespeech.net doesn't allow the former and charges a whole 2 cents a day for a mysql process. Madness I tell you. It's hard to get anything done when you're this cheap, and oh boy am I this cheap. Look, I haven't even registered a domain yet! (Yeah, yeah, I'll get to it.)
I'm still not convinced that I shouldn't throw it all away and instead us mzscheme cgi-programming. If I'm going to do some programming, do I want to do it in scheme, or perl? I know it sounds crazy, but I like scheme. It's kind a pretty, and I know that I only sorta know it, but I'm hoping to get to spend some more time with it at some point in the future.
But then I think about how I'd really like to use markdown in my entries, and ther's a blosxom plugin for that (zero config. Just drop in the plugins directory and 'Your uncle is Bob'). And if I want trackbacks or comments, there's aplugin for reCAPTCHA, etc. The list really does go on. I mean, there isn't even a scheme module for recaptcha, let alone a plugin for left-paren that does what I need automagically.
There's a great little quote about perl that I saw on reddit recently: "Perl has no problems additional syntax won't solve. Including too much syntax." You should read the whole comments section (well, some of it) cause mr_chromatic tears some pretty amusing holes in some internet blowhards who think that reading a blog posting on Perl 6 makes them an expert.
Why do I mention that? Because it seems to me that perl programmers, if you'll pardon my French, get shit done. While Scheme is beautifuly, it's fast (don't smirk, it really is fast), and it's so higher order that it hurts, there's not a lot getting done. Like Haskell, there's this core of hyper-smarties who are getting just rediculous amounts done on the corners of the world they care about (and occasionally blogging about how if everyone used Haskell just think of how much would get done), but there aren't enough of them. Contrast with perl, where you can't walk ten feet without tripping over a module on CPAN that someone wrote to do some totally rediculous thing (--insert link here-- God knows I've seen some doozies on CPAN). So maybe there's something to this 'messy-syntax that makes common tasks easy once you memorize thirty sigils and operators'
Amusing inside-out: The current reference implementation of Perl 6 is written in Haskell. Audrey Tang is totally a hero. Remember what I said about Haskell super-smarties? Yeah, well, this is what happens.
posted at: 05:16 | path: /Meta | comments/permalink