In the last entry I mentioned that XSLT seemed to lack minimalism in its design, citing as an example the difficulty of creating “for” loops. In retrospect, that’s a bit inaccurate. The reason that it’s difficult to do a for loop in XSLT 1.0 is because they left that facility out of the language, and you have to kind of sneak around the restriction in a roundabout, complicated way. So I guess in one sense, XSLT is more minimalist than other languages that do have explicit for loops. I guess I was confusing minimalism with simplicity. Oops!

(That said, XSLT’s verbosity is intolerable. In a sensible language, you declare a variable with a statement like “int x=1;“, or maybe even just “x=1“. In XSLT it’s “<xsl:variable name="x" select="1" />“¹. I mean, yuck.)

Speaking of the last entry, I have more buyer’s remorse to share. I finally used up my five lb. bag of rice, so I went to the store and bought a ten lb. bag. It was the smallest size they had aside from the nasty Uncle Ben’s boxed stuff. When I got back home, I realized that I had an unopened five lb. bag shoved in the back of the pantry. It took me two years to finish off the last five lb. bag. I’m going to be thirty-four years old by the time I finish off everything. Unless there’s an insect infestation. Let’s all pray for insect infestations. Well, maybe I can return the bag at the next food drive.

Finally, I’d like to share this C|Net article by C|Net editor Charles Cooper, “Why Larry Lessig Gets an “F” in Software“. Professor Lessig has written a couple of books on the intersection of software and the law. The first, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, argues that unless we start caring about our rights in cyberspace soon, bad things are around the corner. The second, The Future of Ideas, is basically Lessig’s “See, I told you so” book. Both are good reads. Anyway, Lessig has been getting a lot of attention in techie circles — buzz on weblogs, enthusiastic cheers at O’Reilly conventions, that sort of thing.

Naturally, here comes the backlash. The American Prospect’s excellent weblog TAPPED calls this phenomenon the “Didn’t Like ‘Dances With Wolves’ Club“:

Here’s how it works. Some new book/movie/TV show, usually pretty good compared to most of the pap that passes for quality mass entertainment, emerges — David Eggers, West Wing, what have you. The newspapers, newsmagazines, and other arbiters of middlebrow culture rave about it. And then, a few months or TV seasons later, some smart, sharp, lacerating young critic — usually at Slate, in the New Republic’s back of the book, or in some other venue prizing critics who hate what everbody else likes — goes to town and explains why the book is awful, the movie is trite, or the TV show sucks. All the cool kids are doing it! Including some of Tapped’s favorite writers. We’re thinking of Chris Lehmann on why he hates West Wing, Franklin Foer explaining why Steven Soderbergh should win an Oscar for the feel-good Erin Brockovich instead of the critically-acclaimed Traffic, and Dale Peck on why Rick Moody is “the worst writer of his generation.” And now Slate’s Emily Nussbaum says Six Feet Under — an acclaimed t.v. show that by any reasonable measure is far better than your average sitcom — is not so good after all.

Looks like the pop-art world is a lot rougher than the pop-law world, because Lessig’s critics are neither smart nor lacerating. Charles Cooper argues that if you lower the length of software patents from seventeen years to ten, what will you get? Albanian communist dystopia. (Eeek!) Either that, or you’ll entrench Microsoft and Oracle (I didn’t quite follow this one), leading to… West Coast hyper-capitalist dystopia, I suppose. Anyway, there will be some kind of dystopia somehow, sez Cooper. Plus the Founding Fathers didn’t have any software², and Cooper will be damned to see how silly old relics like the U.S. Constitution have anything to say on the matter.

And then of course you have the enraged Europeans (double eeek!) who proclaim, “Damn the Constitution: Europe must take back the Web!” Compared to this piece, Cooper’s article seems quite Moussaoui-reasonable:

[I]f they decide to run their part of the Net according to the principles laid down two hundred and fifty years ago by a bunch of renegade merchants and rebellious slave owners they [should] not be able to force the rest of us to follow suit. If they want a First Amendment online, or to let some gun-toting nut argue that writing viruses is the online equivalent of carrying a concealed weapon and so counts as a constitutionally protected right then they can go ahead – the rest of us can do things differently.

Protecting European and Chinese and Iraqi sovereignty online is certainly possible: it simply requires writing code for an entirely different network that has constant identification and authentication built in at every step of the way. This is the future that Lessig warns about, but the article’s author embraces the concept wholeheartedly. I’ve never seen a more perfect encapsulation of the Cartman “Screw you guys! I’m going home” mentality³, but there you have it. What I don’t understand is why Europe isn’t more freaked out about authoritarian control than we are. They’ve suffered its consequences much more keenly than we have. But I guess it’s more fun to pile on “renegade merchants” than to step back and take a look at the big picture.

1. Let’s not even get in to the whole mess about XSL “variables” actually being constants. I’m too tired.

2. Primitive man pages for vi(1) found among Thomas Jefferson’s personal effects notwithstanding.

3. On re-reading this, I realize that the Cartman metaphor is doubly apt. Not only do you have the “Screw you guys, I’m going home!” mentality, but you’ve also got the “Respect mah authoritaaay!!” aspect to go with it. My subconscious works in mysterious ways…

An impulse buy at the supermarket, and I am now the proud possessor of a fourteen-piece knife set. Actually, the box only had thirteen out of the fourteen knives. Maybe that’s why it was discounted half off. I’m still six knives ahead, the way I figure it. Regardless, I can’t complain, because really I only wanted the chef knife. My philosophy of cooking says that if it can’t be done with an 8″ chef’s knife, it’s probably not worth doing. Maybe a serrated bread knife. But that’s it. What am I supposed to do with six steak knives? Do you know the last time I had half-a-dozen friends over for steak dinner? Never, that’s when.

At work I’m doing a fun little project that requires me to learn SQL. Now I hear you asking, “What kind of self-respecting web guy can go this long without learning SQL?” My response: see the key word, “self-respecting”. (Not only that, I don’t know a damn thing about Perl either¹. So there.)

Fortunately, SQL is a lot of fun. The simpler SQL queries almost sound like English sentences… just add a couple articles here and there. “Select all names from the employee database where the title is “Admin” and age is less than 40.” Of course you can make things much more complicated, but the point still stands. It seems pretty natural and simple to me. I guess that’s how they wanted to do things in the 70s back when SQL was invented. Compare that to a more “modern” language like XSL/XSLT, with all those long command names and where trying to do a simple loop requires tail-recursion and ooooh, my head is already starting to hurt. Minimalism, I tell you. It’s a good thing.

1. To qualify my statement of ignorance a bit, I have to admit that this page has a small Perl wrapper. And of course the 404 page for this site uses Perl to select the random message. So put me down for “near-ignorance”. Sorry about any confusion.