27 Mar 2002 raph   » (Master)

Advice wanted

It took me until last week to come to the realization that I spend a nontrivial fraction of my work time on the phone, in conference calls, but that my phones are pretty bad.

Thus, I have decided that I want a really good phone. Sound quality is paramount, but comfort is also significant. One friend told me I should get a phone that supports Plantronics headsets. Anybody have experience with these?

spam

Even though I have spamassassin installed, spam seems to be getting worse. This essay (or here) suggests that I'm not the only one. The essay also makes an important point: the spam itself may ultimately not be as harmful as the steps taken to try to fight it.

There is no question about it; our email infrastructure is rotting. It seems like the bad guys are being creative in how to destroy it, but there is nobody actively working on improving it.

Even if email continues to be useful for some time, it is very much evolving in flavor. I don't much like what it's evolving into.

Lions book, C

I bought the Lions book on impulse some time last week, and it arrived today. So far, I've only skimmed it, but it looks like a serious treat.

One of the fun things about the book is that the version of Unix described is written in a rather old dialect of C - for example, the assignment form of addition is written =+.

A most striking feature of the language is that types are optional. This works largely because of the nature of the machine - there's only one interesting word size other than "char". The result is a rather more concise flavor than the C of today.

The idea of optional types has fallen out of favor. Languages today tend to either prohibit them (eg Python) or require them (eg Java). I'm not at all convinced that this is a good thing.

One of the joys of C is its maturity - it's been around long enough to have its rough edges sanded off, and also to attract some reasonably decent implementations and tools (though I believe that quite a bit of useful work remains to be done). It's also reasonably stable by now. I think this is very important - it's very difficult to achieve quality if you're constantly throwing good things away and writing new things that suck. Unfortunately, most of the trendier languages are unstable to an extreme. If I write a large system in a Python/C mix now, using libraries extensively, it's almost certain that the preferred Python implementation five years hence won't be able to run it without modification, and the libraries will no doubt have been superseded as well (especially if one of the libraries happens to be Tkinter).

That said, C is not yet completely static. I do not its current evolution is in very good hands, though. There appear to be four bodies that are actively working with C: the standards committee, Microsoft, gcc, and Apple. The latter two are actually based on the same code base, but seem to be steered in different directions.

These guys are not working together very well. C99 has yet to actually be implemented. A lot of the stuff in the spec is needless complexity - the "restrict" keyword certainly comes to mind, not to mention both digraphs and trigraphs. Then you have the "extern inline" fiasco, which virtually guarantees that a potentially useful feature is rendered useless for years to come. Then, you have really good ideas like standard sized integer types, that can't easily be used because they are incompatible with pre-C99 versions.

I think that if the C99 committee had been doing a good job, they could have fixed that last problem without much difficulty. Basically, they could have developed and released (under a very unrestrictive free license) a set of header files that reliably add these new types to the most popular C implementations of the day. New C implementations would of course include them "out of the box". That way, everybody would get to use them, and they could catch on quickly.

Then you have the useful features that they missed. One of my favorites is the ability to call a varargs function dynamically (vararg functions have had the ability to be called dynamically since at least the days of the Lions book). A special case (va_list) is already implemented. I don't think the more general case would have been that difficult or complex, and it would make life much easier for people trying to do dynamic language binding.

Ah well.

mod_virgule

After discussing two instances of good things that are being poorly maintained, it is uplifting to see renewed vitality on mod_virgule.

My only question: if we implement CSS, and then it turns out that there are a lot of people who don't like it, will we have to DeCSS the site?

Btw, one idea that might be worth considering is to use a tiny bit of text to indicate cert level. This would not only distinguish certs on CSS-losing browsers, but also help with screen readers, tiny wireless devices, and other less popular web browsing technologies.

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