Who do you think the PHB making the decisions is going to listen to - Linux, or FatherBusa?
Linus, undoubtedly. I'm not questioning the import of Linus making a statement on this. I'm suggesting that given that his statement retraces more or less precisely (though with less detail) what we've been talking about for the last two -- wait, make that three -- threads on this issue, that we might all do well to let it pass until there's some further development. No one doubted that Linus would make a statement, but the statement itself isn't all that worthy of discussion (because again, it doesn't actually propose anything new). As you said yourself, the PHB isn't reading SlashDot. I suppose they're reading Information Week. Perhaps we should too. But really, is there anything new to discuss here?
You are right. Linus couldn't possibly be a little bit more informed than the rest of us about the fundamentals of Linux.
Surely. Unfortunately, none of that insight is brought to bear on the issue at hand. Read the article. He says what everyone else has been saying for the last two days.
. . . the company has employed black hat hackers for what is called a penetration, or pen, test team.
Black Hat: "Sir, we've tried everything, and the system seems to be 100% pen proof."
Gates: "Even the disk drives?"
Black Hat: "Yes, sir, we tried putting a pen into one of those, but it won't fit. One of our guys almost knocked a pci card out with a pen, but we don't think he was using a Microsoft Pen (tm)."
I will never understand why it's so important that Linux court these kinds of users. I understand that there are certain technical challenges to making it so your grandmother can use a highly-configurable, high performance OS, and I can see why certain developers would be interested in a problem like that. I can also readily see why the folks at Red Hat would care. But there seems to be an enormous number of people (the majority of posters to this thread, for example), who take it for granted that people like the author of this article should be a major target audience for Linux.
Newsflash: Linux (and UNIX generally) is not for dummies. And thank God. It's for super ninja hackers who like to change their drive geometry, dot clock their X servers, hack window managers in Lisp, screw around with the framebuffer, add optimization switches to their compilers, program in assembly, and generally get down and dirty with things in the service of serious, expert-level computing.
Could Linux be easier to use? Sure. And there's some stuff that remains hard to use even if you're in the ninja set, but we're just not the kind of folks who use computers primarily for word processing and spreadsheets.
I'm happy (using Linux for ten years as my only OS). You're happy, I guess (using whatever). What's the problem? Why does Linux need "market share" among anyone beyond really good hackers who can make it even better for other hackers?
John pointed out the way the Fed actually works and this prof told him that John couldn't be right because he was the one with the degree in finances.
I'm certainly familiar with this phenomenon, and I'm deeply saddened by it every time I encounter it. Such obstreperousness is both elitist and unprofessional. For someone who teaches others, it borders on the unethical.
But I think ossification is something every scholar (and student) has to struggle against. It's impossible to be a supple thinker if you're so committed to your own viewpoint that you won't admit of any possible counterarguments. When education is successful, that struggle is similarly succesful. Sadly, education is not always successful in this way.
But I still think that the general method of higher education remains the best chance we have of heading off this kind of tunnel vision (which is so dangerous in so many contexts far outside the academy).
I remember having a conversation with my father years ago about CS grads. He was a software engineer/programmer at a tech company in Cambridge, MA, and had gotten to the point in his career where he was responsible for lots of hiring decisions. Being in Cambridge, they basically had their pick of the Ph.Ds coming out of the CS program at MIT. Once I asked him what they did with newly-minted Ph.D.s in CS. He said, "Retrain them."
I was surprised by this, and so I asked him if he thought all those years of CS education were essentially useless. "Oh, no," he said. "They're worth their weight in gold. They'd spent years working through extremely abstruse problems, and they'd learned how to absorb massive amounts of information quickly. Basically, they knew how to learn anything. Those guys would know nothing about building actual, production-level software for delivery to a customer. But they'd learn that quickly, because the foundation was strong."
Now that I am a professor (of English, not CS), I find myself taking a similar view of university education. It's not the content, per se (though certainly, the content is important), but the habit of mind one acquires by being confronted with difficult problems and issues over and over. If you want to learn VB or SQL, buy a book. If you want to think differently--more deeply and with fewer jerks of the knee--about the world, about engineering, about literature, about art, go to a university and let it change you.
Of course, I am one of those who did pursue an interdisciplinary degree of sorts (I use computers to study literature, and I teach software design in an English department). But that is another story . . .
Yes. Obviously. Your counterattack is well informed and your reasoning is perfectly sound. Ken Brown is an idiot. He has not slightest idea what he's talking about. Amen, amen.
Now, could we please ignore this nonsense and start talking about something else? All we're doing is feeding the FUD by calling attention to it. If this blowhard wants to claim that Linux was written by a covert gang of CIA operatives with money from Al Queda, let him go ahead. There is absolutely, positively no way that any CTO faced with a decision about Linux migration is going to take advice from AdTI. There is also no way that SCO is going to enter this garbage into evidence and win their case with it. And certainly, there is not the slightest possibility of shock troops from the USPTO breaking down our doors and taking our laptops, because of Ken Brown's expert research.
It is really time to stop turning this guy's deluded ramblings into/. headlines.
You know, I never hear anyone disagree with the type of thing you're saying here. It's unsafe, there's no garbage collection, the pointer abstraction is confusing, the macro system is terrible, it's just high level assembler, etc., etc.
But there are lots and lots and lots of people who code Linux programs in C -- the vast majority of the programs I come across, at any rate. These people surely aren't being coerced into it by some manager. I assume that most of the people writing sophisticated software are multilingual (hard to get to get really good without learning at least half a dozen languages, in my opinion). They surely all know about OO, templates, assertions, abstract classes, and whatever other language features are out there.
It's like the biggest silent majority in computing. All these people merrily hacking away in C without complaint.
I would like to hear someone talk about why they like to code in C. I'm not asking for a language war. I would just like to hear from this silent majority.
Audacity really rocks, and one of the reasons it rocks is because people like me (who know virtually nothing about sound engineering) can use it do do simple things (like cutting and pasting sound segments).
It's really a model for how to create usable software.
I am an English professor who teaches software engineering to humanists (long story). I also spent years as a professional software developer working.
Imagine if some English major skimmed through Knuth (TAOCP) and said:
"At first it seemed mostly like a bunch of squiggly lines and numbers. I suspected it might be bullshit (that was my working hypothesis), but in my magnanimity I decided to check it all out and see if it made any sense. I read a couple of books on how to write Perl programs, and I even hung out on the comp.algorithms newsgroup for awhile. I've now reached the conclusion that it is indeed mostly bullshit (I still can't understand Knuth), but there's really something there."
I'm quite at a loss reading this whole discussion. "Deconstruction" is held up as a blanket term for "anything goes" literary criticism, poststructuralist thought is repeatedly characterized as being 99% bullshit, and the language of modern critical theory is portrayed as a sort of nonsensical in-joke among a group of people who are fooling themselves into thinking they're actually saying something.
Yes, of course, there is much nonsense going around in contemporary literary criticism. There is also much nonsense going around in software engineering. I do not imagine there are many fields in which this is not the case (those who think the sciences are immune from this malady are suffering from a delusion that is at least as deadening as the worst excesses of poststructuralism).
Lacan, Lyotard, Barthes, Baudrillard, Gadamer, Zizec, Foucault, Habermas, Bakhtin . . . It is disheartening to sit here and listen to a bunch of people who manifestly have not read any of this talk about how it's all a bunch of nonsense. It is not. These are all brilliant, provocative thinkers with something very substantive to say. You don't get a sense of their conversation from going to a conference or two and hanging out on some postmodernity newsgroup. You get it by spending many years (not necessarily in a university context, though that certainly helps) studying their works. Looking into the previous 2500 years of hermeneutic philosophy doesn't hurt either.
How could it be any different? We're talking about some difficult questions here: what does it mean to interpret language, what is meaning, what criteria should we use for adjudicating truth from falsehood? The language we use for discussing these things need not be so opaque (I am a diehard fan of the plain style), but it's only natural that literary criticism would develop its own set of terms (as did mathematics and computer science).
One thing is certain: we (in literary criticism) have done a truly dismal job communicating the nature of our field. This discussion proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Unfortunately, the postmodernists have attempted to apply their idiotic claptrap to science, claiming the existence of such absurd concepts as "alternative scientific truths". What they miss is that science is empirical, and therefore deals with observed characteristics of the real world (i.e., "facts").
Most of modern science is concerned with interpreting the meaning of the observed "facts" -- and research science is seldom unanimous concerning that interpretation. They could appeal to the facts for answers, but, wel, the facts are precisely what's in question.
Does this destroy the notion of objective truth? Well, no. But it does render objective truth into something more closely akin to the things that everyone agrees about (as opposed to some metaphysical something or other). In this sense, science and humanistic inquiry are perhaps not so far apart.
I've just outlined (very tersely) something rather like the postmodern insight into science. It is not a meaningless idea or an idiotic insight. It's an engaging concept that in no way amounts to rampant relativism or this "everything is as valid as everything else" precis of poststructuralist thought that keeps getting thrown around in this forum.
But instead, it's a thousand-word, sophomoric rant accusing Darl McBride of being not as "smart" as people at IBM, boasting that he (Raymond) isn't afraid of lawyers, and topping it all off with that non sequitor about Utah.
Indeed. And frankly, it's consistent with ESR's extremely exaggerated sense of his own writing skills (not to mention his own importance). It's amazing how the letter he quotes emerges as a sea of rationality amidst the rest of his over-cocked ranting. If I received this letter, I think I would conclude that I was dealing with a high school student.
We're grateful for your service, Eric. Now please step aside and let cooler heads prevail.
The new series will examine why humans are inferior and why Cylons are obligated to wage total war to eliminate human evil.
Yes, and I think the general reaction of the Cylons should be one of insoucience. Rather than getting all worked up about "human evil," they should simply have a meeting in which they decide that the only reasonable response to this problem is the genocidal elimination of the human race.
The point of series then becomes the preposterous striving of the human characters in the face of this perfunctory act of bureaucratic expediency.
That was just positively hysterical. My favorite was: "We need you to be part of our team."
It is imperative that we ship that video off to the Smithsonian immediately.
I actually think articles like this advance the Linux cause immensely. The lead-off question is essentially "So, aren't you scared out of your wits by this whole Linux thing?"
Bill says: "Of course not," but the reader necessarily thinks, "Why is he asking that question? Apparently there's this other OS (I've never heard of) that's threatening MS. Hmm."
If you have a good simulation of the environment and the platform, you no longer need to build the hardware for AI research to proceed.
I made recently makde a remark like this to the head of a robotics lab at a prominent American university (I'm a software guy). I liked his response: "Problem is, simulations are doomed to success."
I assume (perhaps wrongly) that it was intended to cover a situation I now find myself in. I just wrote a dissertation. It goes on for about 250 pages, the last fifty pages of which is code (which you can use to generate programs using a literate programming tool) and some documentation for how to use the generated programs.
Now, I GPLed the code and GFDLed the docs. I'd be happy if anyone modified and redistributed the code or modified and redistributed the docs. I don't want anyone to modify the prose of my dissertation and I don't want it distributed without my consent. But it's all in the same document. Hence, the first 200 pages are "invariant." The rest you can do with as you like.
Now, that doesn't seem all that unreasonable to me.
I am not a purist. I like to get work done, and have other people understand what I am doing and why. Python has a highly usable object-oriented architecture that works very easily for 99% of what I need, and can be hacked (thanks to its marvellous introspection) for the other 1%.
and then the inevitable . ..
Either way, you apparently care more for theoretical concerns than practical
Please. If liking clean, well-encapsulated OO (without that absurd "self" business) makes you an impractical theorist . . . But of course, it doesn't. It makes the defenders of such misprisions sound like morons ("Don't know why you need that thar satelite -- my donkey works just fine!)
We all like to "get work done," and Python has a lot going for it in that department, but it is preposterous to argue that Python's OO system advances the cause of "getting work done" if you're serious about OO. People who think so are hardly impractical theorists. They might easily turn around and assume that you have never tried to design a serious object-based system in Python.
I understand what you're saying, and you're right.
But I'm thinking of the following scenario. A programmer has a job to do, and they do what most of us think of as a Good Thing: they look around and say, "This is a perfect job for [insert language] because it has [insert library], and I'll be able to knock out robust, readable code faster than with [insert language]."
Now, I think that really is a Good Thing. Java isn't good at everything, and neither is Python, and neither is Perl, and neither is C . . . On the other hand, these languages are all the best possible solution for certain kinds of jobs, and an adroit programmer can figure out which is which.
It's in that situation that the code standard starts to really get in the way, and it makes the "I know Perl. I'll rewrite it in Perl" attitude all the more odious.
I guess what we really need is some sort of rubric for multilanguage environments. People need to make the case to the group for why a particular language is ideal, and have a plan for what happens when that person leaves (or whatever). That would prevent not only the case of the Perl rewrite, but it might also help to mitigate the converse situation: I'm going to write it in Ruby (or whatever) because Ruby is cool."
I've worked places where the developers use whatever language they want. Guess what? Every time one of the developers leaves, their stuff gets rewritten since no one else likes their choice of language. That's not good business.
No, it's bad development. Re-writing code into a language "you like" is incompetence. Period.
Slashdot Mirror
Who do you think the PHB making the decisions is going to listen to - Linux, or FatherBusa?
Linus, undoubtedly. I'm not questioning the import of Linus making a statement on this. I'm suggesting that given that his statement retraces more or less precisely (though with less detail) what we've been talking about for the last two -- wait, make that three -- threads on this issue, that we might all do well to let it pass until there's some further development. No one doubted that Linus would make a statement, but the statement itself isn't all that worthy of discussion (because again, it doesn't actually propose anything new). As you said yourself, the PHB isn't reading SlashDot. I suppose they're reading Information Week. Perhaps we should too. But really, is there anything new to discuss here?
You are right. Linus couldn't possibly be a little bit more informed than the rest of us about the fundamentals of Linux.
Surely. Unfortunately, none of that insight is brought to bear on the issue at hand. Read the article. He says what everyone else has been saying for the last two days.
Linus's comments strike me as indistinguishable from the hundreds of comments we've had on Slashdot on this issue in the last 48 hours.
How about we wait until there's some actual news on this story?
Talk about gilding the lily!
What's next? A Windows emulator written in Intercal?
. . . the company has employed black hat hackers for what is called a penetration, or pen, test team.
Black Hat: "Sir, we've tried everything, and the system seems to be 100% pen proof."
Gates: "Even the disk drives?"
Black Hat: "Yes, sir, we tried putting a pen into one of those, but it won't fit. One of our guys almost knocked a pci card out with a pen, but we don't think he was using a Microsoft Pen (tm)."
Gates: "Good work, men."
Perseus has a (conjectural) gearing diagram for the mechanism:
s /Jesse/antik.gif
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/GreekScience/Student
But we're getting there.
Getting where?
I will never understand why it's so important that Linux court these kinds of users. I understand that there are certain technical challenges to making it so your grandmother can use a highly-configurable, high performance OS, and I can see why certain developers would be interested in a problem like that. I can also readily see why the folks at Red Hat would care. But there seems to be an enormous number of people (the majority of posters to this thread, for example), who take it for granted that people like the author of this article should be a major target audience for Linux.
Newsflash: Linux (and UNIX generally) is not for dummies. And thank God. It's for super ninja hackers who like to change their drive geometry, dot clock their X servers, hack window managers in Lisp, screw around with the framebuffer, add optimization switches to their compilers, program in assembly, and generally get down and dirty with things in the service of serious, expert-level computing.
Could Linux be easier to use? Sure. And there's some stuff that remains hard to use even if you're in the ninja set, but we're just not the kind of folks who use computers primarily for word processing and spreadsheets.
I'm happy (using Linux for ten years as my only OS). You're happy, I guess (using whatever). What's the problem? Why does Linux need "market share" among anyone beyond really good hackers who can make it even better for other hackers?
John pointed out the way the Fed actually works and this prof told him that John couldn't be right because he was the one with the degree in finances.
I'm certainly familiar with this phenomenon, and I'm deeply saddened by it every time I encounter it. Such obstreperousness is both elitist and unprofessional. For someone who teaches others, it borders on the unethical.
But I think ossification is something every scholar (and student) has to struggle against. It's impossible to be a supple thinker if you're so committed to your own viewpoint that you won't admit of any possible counterarguments. When education is successful, that struggle is similarly succesful. Sadly, education is not always successful in this way.
But I still think that the general method of higher education remains the best chance we have of heading off this kind of tunnel vision (which is so dangerous in so many contexts far outside the academy).
I remember having a conversation with my father years ago about CS grads. He was a software engineer/programmer at a tech company in Cambridge, MA, and had gotten to the point in his career where he was responsible for lots of hiring decisions. Being in Cambridge, they basically had their pick of the Ph.Ds coming out of the CS program at MIT. Once I asked him what they did with newly-minted Ph.D.s in CS. He said, "Retrain them."
I was surprised by this, and so I asked him if he thought all those years of CS education were essentially useless. "Oh, no," he said. "They're worth their weight in gold. They'd spent years working through extremely abstruse problems, and they'd learned how to absorb massive amounts of information quickly. Basically, they knew how to learn anything. Those guys would know nothing about building actual, production-level software for delivery to a customer. But they'd learn that quickly, because the foundation was strong."
Now that I am a professor (of English, not CS), I find myself taking a similar view of university education. It's not the content, per se (though certainly, the content is important), but the habit of mind one acquires by being confronted with difficult problems and issues over and over. If you want to learn VB or SQL, buy a book. If you want to think differently--more deeply and with fewer jerks of the knee--about the world, about engineering, about literature, about art, go to a university and let it change you.
Of course, I am one of those who did pursue an interdisciplinary degree of sorts (I use computers to study literature, and I teach software design in an English department). But that is another story . . .
Yes. Obviously. Your counterattack is well informed and your reasoning is perfectly sound. Ken Brown is an idiot. He has not slightest idea what he's talking about. Amen, amen.
/. headlines.
Now, could we please ignore this nonsense and start talking about something else? All we're doing is feeding the FUD by calling attention to it. If this blowhard wants to claim that Linux was written by a covert gang of CIA operatives with money from Al Queda, let him go ahead. There is absolutely, positively no way that any CTO faced with a decision about Linux migration is going to take advice from AdTI. There is also no way that SCO is going to enter this garbage into evidence and win their case with it. And certainly, there is not the slightest possibility of shock troops from the USPTO breaking down our doors and taking our laptops, because of Ken Brown's expert research.
It is really time to stop turning this guy's deluded ramblings into
You know, I never hear anyone disagree with the type of thing you're saying here. It's unsafe, there's no garbage collection, the pointer abstraction is confusing, the macro system is terrible, it's just high level assembler, etc., etc.
But there are lots and lots and lots of people who code Linux programs in C -- the vast majority of the programs I come across, at any rate. These people surely aren't being coerced into it by some manager. I assume that most of the people writing sophisticated software are multilingual (hard to get to get really good without learning at least half a dozen languages, in my opinion). They surely all know about OO, templates, assertions, abstract classes, and whatever other language features are out there.
It's like the biggest silent majority in computing. All these people merrily hacking away in C without complaint.
I would like to hear someone talk about why they like to code in C. I'm not asking for a language war. I would just like to hear from this silent majority.
Audacity really rocks, and one of the reasons it rocks is because people like me (who know virtually nothing about sound engineering) can use it do do simple things (like cutting and pasting sound segments).
It's really a model for how to create usable software.
Remember that letter Eric Raymond wrote to Darl McBride? Man, I'm glad he did that.
I am an English professor who teaches software engineering to humanists (long story). I also spent years as a professional software developer working.
Imagine if some English major skimmed through Knuth (TAOCP) and said:
"At first it seemed mostly like a bunch of squiggly lines and numbers. I suspected it might be bullshit (that was my working hypothesis), but in my magnanimity I decided to check it all out and see if it made any sense. I read a couple of books on how to write Perl programs, and I even hung out on the comp.algorithms newsgroup for awhile. I've now reached the conclusion that it is indeed mostly bullshit (I still can't understand Knuth), but there's really something there."
I'm quite at a loss reading this whole discussion. "Deconstruction" is held up as a blanket term for "anything goes" literary criticism, poststructuralist thought is repeatedly characterized as being 99% bullshit, and the language of modern critical theory is portrayed as a sort of nonsensical in-joke among a group of people who are fooling themselves into thinking they're actually saying something.
Yes, of course, there is much nonsense going around in contemporary literary criticism. There is also much nonsense going around in software engineering. I do not imagine there are many fields in which this is not the case (those who think the sciences are immune from this malady are suffering from a delusion that is at least as deadening as the worst excesses of poststructuralism).
Lacan, Lyotard, Barthes, Baudrillard, Gadamer, Zizec, Foucault, Habermas, Bakhtin . . . It is disheartening to sit here and listen to a bunch of people who manifestly have not read any of this talk about how it's all a bunch of nonsense. It is not. These are all brilliant, provocative thinkers with something very substantive to say. You don't get a sense of their conversation from going to a conference or two and hanging out on some postmodernity newsgroup. You get it by spending many years (not necessarily in a university context, though that certainly helps) studying their works. Looking into the previous 2500 years of hermeneutic philosophy doesn't hurt either.
How could it be any different? We're talking about some difficult questions here: what does it mean to interpret language, what is meaning, what criteria should we use for adjudicating truth from falsehood? The language we use for discussing these things need not be so opaque (I am a diehard fan of the plain style), but it's only natural that literary criticism would develop its own set of terms (as did mathematics and computer science).
One thing is certain: we (in literary criticism) have done a truly dismal job communicating the nature of our field. This discussion proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Unfortunately, the postmodernists have attempted to apply their idiotic claptrap to science, claiming the existence of such absurd concepts as "alternative scientific truths". What they miss is that science is empirical, and therefore deals with observed characteristics of the real world (i.e., "facts").
Most of modern science is concerned with interpreting the meaning of the observed "facts" -- and research science is seldom unanimous concerning that interpretation. They could appeal to the facts for answers, but, wel, the facts are precisely what's in question.
Does this destroy the notion of objective truth? Well, no. But it does render objective truth into something more closely akin to the things that everyone agrees about (as opposed to some metaphysical something or other). In this sense, science and humanistic inquiry are perhaps not so far apart.
I've just outlined (very tersely) something rather like the postmodern insight into science. It is not a meaningless idea or an idiotic insight. It's an engaging concept that in no way amounts to rampant relativism or this "everything is as valid as everything else" precis of poststructuralist thought that keeps getting thrown around in this forum.
But instead, it's a thousand-word, sophomoric rant accusing Darl McBride of being not as "smart" as people at IBM, boasting that he (Raymond) isn't afraid of lawyers, and topping it all off with that non sequitor about Utah.
Indeed. And frankly, it's consistent with ESR's extremely exaggerated sense of his own writing skills (not to mention his own importance). It's amazing how the letter he quotes emerges as a sea of rationality amidst the rest of his over-cocked ranting. If I received this letter, I think I would conclude that I was dealing with a high school student.
We're grateful for your service, Eric. Now please step aside and let cooler heads prevail.
The new series will examine why humans are inferior and why Cylons are obligated to wage total war to eliminate human evil.
Yes, and I think the general reaction of the Cylons should be one of insoucience. Rather than getting all worked up about "human evil," they should simply have a meeting in which they decide that the only reasonable response to this problem is the genocidal elimination of the human race.
The point of series then becomes the preposterous striving of the human characters in the face of this perfunctory act of bureaucratic expediency.
Anyone who describes their relationship to a television program as involving "strict belief" should probably stop watching television immediately.
That was just positively hysterical. My favorite was: "We need you to be part of our team."
It is imperative that we ship that video off to the Smithsonian immediately.
I actually think articles like this advance the Linux cause immensely. The lead-off question is essentially "So, aren't you scared out of your wits by this whole Linux thing?"
Bill says: "Of course not," but the reader necessarily thinks, "Why is he asking that question? Apparently there's this other OS (I've never heard of) that's threatening MS. Hmm."
If you have a good simulation of the environment and the platform, you no longer need to build the hardware for AI research to proceed.
I made recently makde a remark like this to the head of a robotics lab at a prominent American university (I'm a software guy). I liked his response: "Problem is, simulations are doomed to success."
I assume (perhaps wrongly) that it was intended to cover a situation I now find myself in. I just wrote a dissertation. It goes on for about 250 pages, the last fifty pages of which is code (which you can use to generate programs using a literate programming tool) and some documentation for how to use the generated programs.
Now, I GPLed the code and GFDLed the docs. I'd be happy if anyone modified and redistributed the code or modified and redistributed the docs. I don't want anyone to modify the prose of my dissertation and I don't want it distributed without my consent. But it's all in the same document. Hence, the first 200 pages are "invariant." The rest you can do with as you like.
Now, that doesn't seem all that unreasonable to me.
I am not a purist. I like to get work done, and have other people understand what I am doing and why. Python has a highly usable object-oriented architecture that works very easily for 99% of what I need, and can be hacked (thanks to its marvellous introspection) for the other 1%.
.
and then the inevitable . .
Either way, you apparently care more for theoretical concerns than practical
Please. If liking clean, well-encapsulated OO (without that absurd "self" business) makes you an impractical theorist . . . But of course, it doesn't. It makes the defenders of such misprisions sound like morons ("Don't know why you need that thar satelite -- my donkey works just fine!)
We all like to "get work done," and Python has a lot going for it in that department, but it is preposterous to argue that Python's OO system advances the cause of "getting work done" if you're serious about OO. People who think so are hardly impractical theorists. They might easily turn around and assume that you have never tried to design a serious object-based system in Python.
I understand what you're saying, and you're right.
But I'm thinking of the following scenario. A programmer has a job to do, and they do what most of us think of as a Good Thing: they look around and say, "This is a perfect job for [insert language] because it has [insert library], and I'll be able to knock out robust, readable code faster than with [insert language]."
Now, I think that really is a Good Thing. Java isn't good at everything, and neither is Python, and neither is Perl, and neither is C . . . On the other hand, these languages are all the best possible solution for certain kinds of jobs, and an adroit programmer can figure out which is which.
It's in that situation that the code standard starts to really get in the way, and it makes the "I know Perl. I'll rewrite it in Perl" attitude all the more odious.
I guess what we really need is some sort of rubric for multilanguage environments. People need to make the case to the group for why a particular language is ideal, and have a plan for what happens when that person leaves (or whatever). That would prevent not only the case of the Perl rewrite, but it might also help to mitigate the converse situation: I'm going to write it in Ruby (or whatever) because Ruby is cool."
I've worked places where the developers use whatever language they want. Guess what? Every time one of the developers leaves, their stuff gets rewritten since no one else likes their choice of language. That's not good business.
No, it's bad development. Re-writing code into a language "you like" is incompetence. Period.