Binary Balance

It seems that social media is everywhere today. Live tweet our show using the hash tag ‘#WhyJustWatchWhenYouCanCriticise’! There’s other websites as well as Facebook? But how do do your friends know about your inane comments on those ones?! One could be forgiven for thinking the read/write web is getting old hat these days. Web 2.0, how unfashionable an epithet for use by today’s modern web hipster. Read more...

I watched the video of David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote address from RubyCon 2010 the other day. It was unapologetically pro-Ruby, and delivered with the flair and showmanship that has made DHH and 37Signals the polarising force that they are. Being quite fond of Ruby, I found myself nodding along to most of what David had to say. But I don’t wish to add even a small amount of new fuel to the programming language wars that seem to go on endlessly around the place. The purpose of this post is not to join in on any Ruby circle-jerking.

One of the things that particularly stood out to me in DHH’s keynote was a quote from Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language:

The very fact that it’s possible to write messy programs in Perl is also what makes it possible to write programs that are cleaner in Perl than they could ever be in a language that attempts to enforce cleanliness. The potential for greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil.

The potential for greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil. This is a great quote and it rings very true for me. Along with some other parts of David’s address, it got me to thinking about how the uniformity that we enforce in other aspects of life in order to minimise the potential for evil may also be minimising the potential for good. Read more...