The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

artima.com has two parts of an interview with Bruce “Thinking in C++/Thinking in Java” Eckel in which he talks about why his new favourite programming language is Python. Here’s an excerpt, which pretty sums up my feelings as well:

It seems the compromise in Java is marketing. They had to rush Java out to market. If they had taken a little more time and implemented design by contract, or even just assertions, or any number of other features, it would have been better for the programmer. If they had done design and code reviews, they would have found all sorts of silliness. And I suppose the way Java is marketed is probably what rubs me the wrong way about it. We can say, “Oh, but we don’t like this feature,” and the answer is, “Yes, but, marketing dictates that it be this way.”

Maybe the compromises in C++ were for marketing reasons too. Although choosing to be efficient and backwards compatible with C was done to sell C++ to techies, it was still to sell it to somebody.

I feel Python was designed for the person who is actually doing the programming, to maximize their productivity. And that just makes me feel warm and fuzzy all over. I feel nobody is going to be telling me, “Oh yeah, you have to jump through all these hoops for one reason or another.” When you have the experience of really being able to be as productive as possible, then you start to get pissed off at other languages. You think, “Gee, I’ve been wasting my time with these other languages.”

The interview is in two parts:

• Python and the Programmer
• The Zen of Python

My friend and housemate Paul Baranowski has posted a writeup on the lessons learned from working on Peekabooty (the distributed proxy app for allowing people in countries where they censor the Web to surf it freely). It’s divided into two sections:

• Lessons learned about managing an open source project
• Lessons learned about programming

This “lessons learned” article will be the basis for a roadmap that will outline the future development of Peekabooty.

An additional lesson

In addition to the lessons that Paul outlined, I learned something else: sometimes a racy name will backfire on you.

Earlier this year, I was being interviewed at a high-tech placement firm somewhere in uptown Toronto. The recruiter told me that she’d looked over my resume earlier and wanted to voice some concerns.

“Peekabooty,” she said. I could almost hear the ice crystals forming as she spoke. “This might be a problem.”

My initial guess was that she was concerned that a project that once was associated with members of the Cult of the Dead Cow might pose a problem. I was prepared to offer the party line: “Yes, the original team behind the application was gathered by a prominent Cult of the Dead Cow member, but the project has long since been run solely by an individual, Paul Baranowski, who is not a member of the notorious hacker group.”

However, she blindsided me: “Why would you ever put a pornographic site on your resume? Don’t you know that it’s incredibly unprofessional?”

“I beg your pardon?” I asked, trying not to laugh. “Pornography?”

“I know it seems puritannical to you young computer guys, but many businesses are very conservative. They would frown on such…distasteful work, no matter how technically skilled you are. You really should remove it from your resume. Honestly, what were you thinking?”

“It’s not a pornographic Web site,” I said as a pulled a copy of the International Herald-Tribune with a Peekabooty article out of my portfolio, “It’s a piece of software that allows people to bypass the Web censorship mechanisms in more repressive regimes around the world.”

“It’s not pornography?”

“Not in the least.”

“But the name!”

“I know. It wasn’t my idea.”

If you think she had trouble grasping the idea that Peekabooty was not a porn Web site, you should’ve seen me try to explain that it wasn’t for a company or client, but something that Paul and I put together in our spare time.

Once, I walked into a room and found a couple in the middle of a doozy of an argument — he was throwing his hands up in the air and walking away in frustration while she sat hunched over in a chair crying buckets of tears. Another time, it was two friends, one of whom had a telephone cord wrapped around the other’s neck, ready to bludgeon him with the mouthpiece. Your experiences may not be the same as mine, but I’m sure you know the feeling.

In preparing for the new job, I decided that I should read up on XML and protocols derived from it, particularly RSS. Looking at the arguing going on, I’m experiencing deja vu.