Memes and Principles, Intent

This is a prelude to an upcoming post where I intend to speak about Atom Entries as some kind of "simplest thing that could possibly work" (for the specific purpose of representing manifests of resources ("resource" as the R in URI (and in RDF, of course) — i.e. the resources of the web, and the mind (perhaps even "the world", but I doubt it))).

The prelude is just some thoughts about a couple of principles.

First: the simplest thing that could possibly work. A phrase often quoted and often misapplied. This is common knowledge, and many clarify things by interpreting what "possibly work" means. I won't. I'd just like to rephrase it as "the simpler thing that actually works". It's useful since it both hints that there can be more complex/complicated things (see #3 and #4 in The Zen of Python) that don't actually work (for some arbitrary meaning of "work", admittedly), and (obviously) that there are simpler things that don't work at all (less or more simple than the one that works — this is the heart of the problem). I feel this phrasing avoids the confusion the original one often causes (it just seemed to be a simpler way of saying it that still works..). So, to repeat: just say "the simpler thing that actually works". It works.

Second: just a recap of an old joke of mine regarding the principle of DRY. I very much do prefer if programming practise adheres to that one. There's too much code that suffers from MOIST. Still, I advice you to avoid to DRY until SHRIVELLED. (Those sure are acronyms. Please do hover.) This is related to the first principle above, and I mainly mean that some practises, such as heavy use of metaprogramming, simply performs too much reduction to make the intent clear even to the appropriately trained eye. Mileage will vary, but as many others have already advised: don't be too clever. It will bite others, and you as well. (Ok; honestly, my main intent was probably just to make a pun out of a perfectly sane advice.)

I will probably repeat this.

[Side note: It's funny. Just this last week I've noticed I habitually misspell "intent" as "indent". I had to correct myself about three times while writing this. Obviously my prolonged use of Python has caused these two distinct words to conflate in my mind. I never indented that.]

Logix

I get a fuzzy feeling (with a dash of vertigo) when I look at Logix. For something managing to utterly violate many of the finer points of restriction that make Python programming resistant to cases of obfuscated cleverness, Logix is one of the coolest things I've seen lately (I guess I'm a year late to the party though). I've been doing some Ruby inquiries recently, to capture the finer things and evaluating my potential Python bias (while interesting, I see no reason to abandon my current favorite; still: YAR (Yet Another Rant)). I've also taken some time to look closer at Haskell, with some fun effects on my sleep cycle.

Although I might sometimes ponder if the Python syntax could be tweaked some to great effect, I often realise that I'm picking daisies instead of harvesting for the winter. Python is brutally straight-forward and effective as it is. Still, Logix is what I obviously overlooked when I saw Pluvo earlier this year and felt the lure of language experiments. Logix may be in a state of flux, but I really wish that it would prosper as somewhat of a hyper-intelligent, mind-boggling but brutally powerful layer on top of Python. If nothing else, it would give me and everyone else believing that this or that could be a better syntax for the job an easy way to test it. And possibly discover that it was a better syntax for a job, but perhaps not the right job. Still, Logix can definitely make declarative programming and design of DSLs a breeze. Or perhaps a tornado.

For a concise example, see this excellent article.