You sound like you may be in a good position to understand what the authors of the Scheme Reports mean when they write that "programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary."
Lisp does this sort of thing by trying to find the really fundamental things that must be provided in order to allow you to do anything at all you could ever want. This is why R6RS Scheme has record types, libraries with controlled export, hygienic macros and call-with-current-continuation; if you have these four features, you can build nearly every interesting feature of any other language out there on top of them. Dynamic method dispatch, in the style of object-oriented programming? Easy. Lazy evaluation à la Haskell? Can do. Logic programming, like in Prolog? A few (admittedly a bit hairy) lines of code using call-with-current-continuation, but after that, it's easy to use. Pattern matching? Just a few moderately-complex macros. Synchronous message-passing concurrency? Sure, why not.
This isn't to say that the Lisp world is a panacea, but the languages are more flexible, period.
Great post overall, but I've gotta nitpick something:
You can't be guilty of failing to learn from your mistakes if you're not even aware of the alternate choices you could be making.
That's just not true in general. For example, people can be found guilty of a crime in a situation where they pursued the only choice they were aware of. These judgements normally take the form that a "reasonable" person in the same circumstances would have seen an alternative and taken it.
The fact that I'm claiming that the moral calculus involved in such situations is more complex than what you said only reinforces your point, of course. I'd make the following two points to add to what you've said:
Here we seem to have a case of scientists exploiting an equivocation between the everyday and technical uses of a term or phrase: in this case, "learning from your mistakes." A classic example: "intelligence," as used by advocates of IQ testing.
We also have a case where such equivocation can be used to lend the appearance of "scientific" support for what really is a value judgement, and not a factual judgement. "Intelligence" is again a great example: in everyday speech, when people call somebody "intelligent" they're passing positive judgement on some vague, ill-defined, contextually-dependent set of skills the person is perceived to have. When some psychologists devise a test that that scores everybody with numbers, call that a test that measures "intelligence," and try to use the results to get ordinary people to believe, in the ordinary sense, that "white" people are more intelligent than "black" people, and to drive social policy off that, that's an abuse of science.
Sadly, this sort of abuse is quite ordinary, because science has such authority in our society (arguably too much, but I don't want to argue that right now). So dressing up value judgements as scientifically supported fact judgements is a pretty standard strategy for influencing policy nowadays; e.g., when somebody thinks that more health care money should be allocated to help people who compulsively spend too much time playing video games, the result is scientific studies claiming that video game addiction is a mental disease.
The thing that bugs me a lot about this so-called semantic web is its reliance on humans to be accurate. Our minds do not operate on the same clear-cut logic as a machine, in other words we are able to make inferences from semantics.
Or, to generalize: the problem with the "semantic web" is that Good Old-Fashioned AI failed, and somebody seems to have failed to get the memo. The "semantic web" really is just "expert systems, now with XML! (but don't call them that!)." Somebody failed to read or understand late Wittgenstein.
[...] being able to easily attach another machine and copy your data off is real important.
But if you've been using Time Machine, then you just restore from that. The fact that the Macbook Air was announced together with Time Capsule is significant that way--Time Capsule apparently allows you to restore wirelessly.
There is no hard-and-fast rule that tells you what are the permissible uses of a trademark, a copyrighted work, or the image or likeness of a person. There's a family of statutes (i.e., laws passed by legislature) and case law (court decisions about specific cases in the past, that establish precedent about how future cases ought to be decided).
Let's say I go out and buy a Scion xB. It's square boxy vehicle like the Honda Element. Then I fiberglass it up, making it round, but don't take off the xB or Scion logo. It's my addition to the 'work' of that vehicle. I take a picture of it, like a million modders the world over might do, and post it, because I'm proud of my work. Let's say someone takes notice of it, and wants to include it in their calendar. Think of all the van and old pickup truck modders, the VW modders, and so on. Someone makes a buck from the calendar; after all, calendar makers aren't a not for profit group.
In this case, you have an argument that this is a permissible use of a photo of a Scion xB, because the value of the photo is the fact that it depicts that one particular, heavily modified vehicle. Does this argument mean that the use is permissible? That's a question for a judge to decide, and the way you convince a judge is by having your lawyer persuasively fit this argument within the context of relevant statutes and precedents.
This is why serious non-lawyers will disclaim their legal opinions with "IANAL," and why there are so many disclaimers that "X does not constitute legal advice"; when law proceeds by the adjudication of individual cases by appeal to precedent, it's not a question of "what does the law say" but of "how is this one specific case likely to be decided, given precedent," and that may require a lot of research.
Invoking image ownership is a sure ticket to hell. I own the vehicle; I took the photo, and I'll do whatever I want to do with the photo, without the onus of some vendor's spin control hanging over me. It's mine, baby, no one else's.
You're confusing two things:
Your copyright over any photos that you take.
The rights of other parties to control the uses to which their trademarks, their likeness, or the likeness of their products or copyrighted works are put to use.
Trivial example: I can take a recognizable photo of you in a public place, and by doing so, I have automatic copyright on that photo. However, even though I own the copyright on that photo, I may well not have the right put that photo in an ad for the American Nazi Pinko Party without your permission, much less if I caption it with "Hi, my name is postbigbang, and I endorse the American Nazi Pinko Party."
Should a vendor cite a vendor for infringement of a trademark or marque (think of putting a Bentley grill on a BMW--whoops-- BMW owns Bentley so a Rolls grill on a Subaru) and there might be some contention were it to be problem.... then what of the Rolls grills that were put on VWs as an aftermarket add-on? I see them around now and again.
What makes you think that the body of law in question, which you clearly fail to understand, forbids any of this?
If I own a VW, of course I can put whatever the hell grilles I want on it (that I've otherwise legally acquired). I can take a photo of the modified car. I can transfer copyright of the photo, and I can be paid for that. There are a lot of uses people can make of that photo without infringing on any trademarks. Things only start getting legally suspect when somebody sells photos of the car, and the only value the photos have seems to be derived from the fact that they depict those trademarks.
Though even in that case, you can argue that your photos of VWs with BMW grilles have serious artistic merit. For example, this work of art is a fair use of the Campbell's Soup trademark.
There are any number of ways in which a 'gold-based' currency could be rendered completely valueless, not the least of which (but the one that would make the best movie, in my opinion) would be the forcible removal of said gold from whatever repository it was being held in.
The professor wasn't trying to absolve the woman that you held the door for; she was trying to get you to understand what causes such encounters. However, you clearly are looking for others to rubberstamp your perspective on that encounter. That's not a luxury you deserve.
I'm truly impressed that you have been able to quote what this professor said all those many years ago in what I find a very convincing rendering of what she may have said. I'm disappointed, however, that you've not tried to understand it better. Are you aware to what extend women and people of color are subject to microaggressions throughout their lifetime, and what the effects of this may be? (Another good link.)
Last time I checked, isn't China censoring the living daylights out of the internet already? Is it really that far of a reach to say that they'd like to create their very own version of the internet, that they 100% control?
Let's grant your points. How the hell would that be relevant to whether we should have non-Latin domain names?
And now, let's assume otherwise, that there was no censorship of the Internet in China. Have you considered the possibility that the fact that, gee, most Chinese don't speak English, might be the biggest obstacle to their use of what you call "the public internet"?
Whether Russia or China are police states with heavy censorship is irrelevant to the question of whether there should be Cyrillic or Chinese domain names. It's a matter of whether people can easily use a computer in the first place.
Similarly, if you want to talk about snow, you can't beat the Inuit language, and if you want to talk about time as relative rather than discrete units Hopi is a good choice, and if you want to talk about burning things, you can't beat Latin - damn those Roman pyromaniacs.
And if you want to talk about urban legends and half-remembered bits of Whorf, English is just perfect.
While "ru" written with cyrillic letters may look confusingly similar to "py", it is not the same.
What does "the same" mean in this context, and does it always mean that?
Unicode certainly has separate codepoints for Latin and Cyrillic characters that look "confusingly similar." This is a technical choice that it adopts in that case, but not in all cases; the Unicode CJK unification, for example, takes the opposite approach, assigning the same codepoint to characters that are regularly written differently in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
(Though I've heard that for some languages, Google's indexing technology is not as smart as that of smaller players who specialize in that language. But come on, it's not really harder than indexing English.)
Isn't there at least some risk of two different sites at least appearing to have identical URLs?
Yup, this is an acknowledged risk. Is the appropriate response to that risk to ditch the whole concept of URLs in non-Latin scripts? Hell no. What about developing actual solutions to the problem instead?
Or is this really an attempt by countries like Russia and China to selectively cut their populations off from the public internet while not in actuality doing so?
So, by providing internet content that doesn't require the use of an alphabet or language that most Russians or Chinese don't master, Russia and China thereby "cut their populations off from the public internet." Good one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that American English should be imposed on the rest of the world (I'm not that guy!), but the system in place was founded on such and I see this really mucking up the works.
Well, suppose you were Chinese, and the only language you could speak and read is Chinese. They taught you a bit of pinyin in school, sure, but you have to look at Latin letters very carefully to tell apart a 'd' from a 'b', a 'p' from a 'q', or an 'r' from a 'v'. You don't speak any English beyond phrases like "hi, how are you?".
Wouldn't you think that the fact that you can't use the Internet in Chinese was "really mucking up the works"? As in, making it fundamentally and needlessly hard to use?
This is a practical abolition of copyright, at least compared to today's draconian standards. If you can't stomach the idea of copyright abolition, you are not going to be able to stomach the idea of copyright reduction.
I actually disagree on both points. Copyright abolition removes a very important incentive for making new works, since without copyright, you can't reliably get paid for new works. Excessively long copyright terms also remove an incentive for producing new works, since you can just keep getting paid for the same works for much too long.
Short copyright terms provide an incentive for making new works, but also demand that new ones be produced if any income stream is to come from licensing. Whether 5 years is a good number I don't know; my first reaction is "too short," but my mind is nowhere near made up on this.
The point that's important from my point of view is that the low cost of producing copies of an original work means that there is value for the government to intervene to create a market where one couldn't otherwise exist. This is exactly why we got copyright in the first place--without copyright, it's irrational for me to spend $20,000 producing your wonderful music album if any schmoe can just copy it for free afterwards. Without the $20,000, you very likely won't be able to make as good an album as you could've otherwise made--you know, good enough that people would be willing to pay for it if they couldn't get it for free.
The original poster in this thread, in effect, is arguing that music production costs today are so cheap that hobbyists will produce music as good as anybody else using equipment they would buy anyway as part of their hobby, and therefore, there is no need for a copyright regime to promote capital investments in music production. I certainly disagree with that.
This isn't something you do all the time in Python, but it's definitely possible.
...and this actually provides a decent answer to your original question as to what's different between Ruby and Python. It's less in the feature lists than in the programming styles implied by the libraries and the way the communities use the languages. This is something you do all the time in Ruby.
Something I always wonder when folks say that Ruby isn't competitive with, e.g., C with respect to speed is what the context for the competition is.
But note that GP did disclaim that he was not comparing Ruby with C as a competitor; the languages that were mentioned as competitors are Common Lisp, OCaml, Haskell, and Lua. I don't know Lua, and I think OCaml and Haskell aren't fair comparisons (being very static languages), but a performance comparison to Common Lisp certainly is fair; Common Lisp is a more featureful language than Ruby, that has implementations that run a lot faster.
The best comparison, however, would be between Ruby and various Smalltalk implementations.
I'm familiar with domain specific languages: m4, regular expressions, procmail.
You need to learn some Lisp.
Passing a hash of parameters to a method does not make a DSL. It's an API, no matter how many parentheses you remove from the argument list or how many colons you slap on bare-words.
The philosophy behind embedded DSLs is to "build up" your language to the point where your programs read, ideally, like descriptions in the problem domain. It's not possible to give it a very precise definition of what the approach is (even less so than in the case of the notoriously unclear "Object-Oriented Programming"), but one thing is clear: embedded DSLs are a kind of API, and there is no obvious dividing line between "just an API" and an embedded DSL.
The most classic sort of example is embedding a Prolog-like logic programming system into Lisp. Ruby's rake isn't too bad of an example, though; it's not because parentheses were removed, but rather, because rakefiles are declarative descriptions of tasks and dependencies between them.
I would have said "blocks, string eval monkeypatching, and vigorous self-handshaking by people far too awesome to write mere APIs". Of those, blocks are the only interesting concept.
Nope. I only really think you have a point in the "string eval monkeypatching" bit there. Ruby doesn't have Lisp-style macros, so the way they do metaprogramming with eval is pretty crap. The block syntax isn't as good as having first-class lambdas, either, so you're running a risk of overrating Ruby blocks there.
Domain-specific languages are a widespread technique. The dominant, crappy version is called "XML."
So you have an argument for shortening copyright terms. Sure, there are reasonable arguments to be made about that.
The problem is that this subthread started out as a criticism of the idea of tossing out copyrights completely. If somebody tells you that tossing out copyrights is bad for reason X, and you answer that copyright terms are too long, your answer is kind of topically irrelevant, isn't it?
Well, nobody's been given a monopoly on music or movie production. You can, in principle, record any original music or movies you make, and sell copies for whatever amount you agree to.
Different style of programming
on
Ruby 1.9.0 Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Alright, I know this is going to be flame fodder, but I'm genuinely curious: does Ruby have anything to offer for someone who's already very proficient in Python (and Django, so Rails is already covered)?
If you look at it from a features and libraries perspective, then you really won't find much different. But you shouldn't look at it that way.
There's a significant programming style difference between the Python and Ruby communities. Python programmers, as a general rule, tend to be more inclined toward imperative programming, while Ruby has much more of the feel of a multi-paradigm language. To understand a lot of Ruby code out there, you need to wrap your head around concepts like functional programming, metaprogramming, and domain-specific languages. Ruby code tends favor higher-order functional combinators over primitive looping syntax (an influence from functional programming), extending the system base classes extensively (an influence from Smalltalk), and a lot of it has the flavor of trying to extend the language to look more like the problem space itself (domain-specific languages; look at something like rake, for example).
Python aims to be "clean" in a very contentious sense of "clean." To put it in a way that will be taken very partisanly: Python is the language that you get when "clean and easy to understand" is taken to mean "only promotes the concepts that are easy to understand to a mediocre imperative programmer." For example, Guido is on the record that higher-order functions like reduce are supposedly hard to understand.
To be fair, yeah, Python is a reasonably clean imperative/OOP dynamic language, which is no mean feat, but many of us folks really would rather have a language that supports a broader range of programming paradigms. (Though I'm not as great of a fan of Ruby as I used to be before I got going on Scheme, I must say...)
Supply and demand, same as with any other asset. Population growth, desirability of location, land availability, demographics, age and condition of the home, and a host of other factors come into play to determine the value of real estate.
Sure, these factors make it so that the prices of houses fluctuate. It doesn't answer the question: why do you expect the value of houses to increase?
Not to mention that you can make improvements to the home and the land to increase its value to potential buyers in excess of your investment. Note that I never claimed any old real estate in any random location was a good investment. Clearly that's not true. But there are plenty of reasons why a house, or any other real estate, can and often does appreciate in value. Real estate is one of the few assets we cannot create out of thin air. There is a finite amount of land available, and only some is in desirable locations. My company can create all the new widgets I want but I can't manufacture land.
How do you know you're not underestimating the amount of land available, or the resources of the economy to either use more land, or make better use of the same land? I.e., sprawl and vertical housing.
By your reasoning why would anyone invest in bonds over stocks? After all stocks historically have a higher return. The answer is risk. Stocks are riskier and the returns less certain. Some people (like me and I presume you) can afford a lot of risk. Others (like my mother) cannot afford much risk at all. A home is a low yield but historically steady and generally safe investment if held for the long term.
So now you're changing your tune from "buy a house because they go go up, like stocks do" to "buy a house because houses aren't very risky, unlike stocks"? That's not what you were saying before!
And anyway, houses aren't nearly as safe as you make it sound. The normal way to buy a house is through a mortgage. The mortgage makes it a leveraged investment, which means that you can lose more than what you put into it. What happens if your house loses 5% after you bought it with 20% down? The value of equity becomes $0. Not so great, huh? (And yes, houses can lose a lot over a long term.)
And finally: by your reasoning, why would anybody invest in a house over REITs or TIPS?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not ironic! It's creepy. (God, kids these days.)
You sound like you may be in a good position to understand what the authors of the Scheme Reports mean when they write that "programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary."
Lisp does this sort of thing by trying to find the really fundamental things that must be provided in order to allow you to do anything at all you could ever want. This is why R6RS Scheme has record types, libraries with controlled export, hygienic macros and call-with-current-continuation; if you have these four features, you can build nearly every interesting feature of any other language out there on top of them. Dynamic method dispatch, in the style of object-oriented programming? Easy. Lazy evaluation à la Haskell? Can do. Logic programming, like in Prolog? A few (admittedly a bit hairy) lines of code using call-with-current-continuation, but after that, it's easy to use. Pattern matching? Just a few moderately-complex macros. Synchronous message-passing concurrency? Sure, why not.
This isn't to say that the Lisp world is a panacea, but the languages are more flexible, period.
Great post overall, but I've gotta nitpick something:
That's just not true in general. For example, people can be found guilty of a crime in a situation where they pursued the only choice they were aware of. These judgements normally take the form that a "reasonable" person in the same circumstances would have seen an alternative and taken it.
The fact that I'm claiming that the moral calculus involved in such situations is more complex than what you said only reinforces your point, of course. I'd make the following two points to add to what you've said:
Sadly, this sort of abuse is quite ordinary, because science has such authority in our society (arguably too much, but I don't want to argue that right now). So dressing up value judgements as scientifically supported fact judgements is a pretty standard strategy for influencing policy nowadays; e.g., when somebody thinks that more health care money should be allocated to help people who compulsively spend too much time playing video games, the result is scientific studies claiming that video game addiction is a mental disease.
Or, to generalize: the problem with the "semantic web" is that Good Old-Fashioned AI failed, and somebody seems to have failed to get the memo. The "semantic web" really is just "expert systems, now with XML! (but don't call them that!)." Somebody failed to read or understand late Wittgenstein.
I think it contributed less than you think, because it's still funny when dubbed to Spanish.
But if you've been using Time Machine, then you just restore from that. The fact that the Macbook Air was announced together with Time Capsule is significant that way--Time Capsule apparently allows you to restore wirelessly.
There is no hard-and-fast rule that tells you what are the permissible uses of a trademark, a copyrighted work, or the image or likeness of a person. There's a family of statutes (i.e., laws passed by legislature) and case law (court decisions about specific cases in the past, that establish precedent about how future cases ought to be decided).
In this case, you have an argument that this is a permissible use of a photo of a Scion xB, because the value of the photo is the fact that it depicts that one particular, heavily modified vehicle. Does this argument mean that the use is permissible? That's a question for a judge to decide, and the way you convince a judge is by having your lawyer persuasively fit this argument within the context of relevant statutes and precedents.
This is why serious non-lawyers will disclaim their legal opinions with "IANAL," and why there are so many disclaimers that "X does not constitute legal advice"; when law proceeds by the adjudication of individual cases by appeal to precedent, it's not a question of "what does the law say" but of "how is this one specific case likely to be decided, given precedent," and that may require a lot of research.
You're confusing two things:
Trivial example: I can take a recognizable photo of you in a public place, and by doing so, I have automatic copyright on that photo. However, even though I own the copyright on that photo, I may well not have the right put that photo in an ad for the American Nazi Pinko Party without your permission, much less if I caption it with "Hi, my name is postbigbang, and I endorse the American Nazi Pinko Party."
What makes you think that the body of law in question, which you clearly fail to understand, forbids any of this?
If I own a VW, of course I can put whatever the hell grilles I want on it (that I've otherwise legally acquired). I can take a photo of the modified car. I can transfer copyright of the photo, and I can be paid for that. There are a lot of uses people can make of that photo without infringing on any trademarks. Things only start getting legally suspect when somebody sells photos of the car, and the only value the photos have seems to be derived from the fact that they depict those trademarks.
Though even in that case, you can argue that your photos of VWs with BMW grilles have serious artistic merit. For example, this work of art is a fair use of the Campbell's Soup trademark.
The Nazis did this to Hungary in WWII...
The ironic thing is that the Garfield animated cartoons are somehow funny. Hard to believe, but true.
The professor wasn't trying to absolve the woman that you held the door for; she was trying to get you to understand what causes such encounters. However, you clearly are looking for others to rubberstamp your perspective on that encounter. That's not a luxury you deserve.
I'm truly impressed that you have been able to quote what this professor said all those many years ago in what I find a very convincing rendering of what she may have said. I'm disappointed, however, that you've not tried to understand it better. Are you aware to what extend women and people of color are subject to microaggressions throughout their lifetime, and what the effects of this may be? (Another good link.)
Let's grant your points. How the hell would that be relevant to whether we should have non-Latin domain names?
And now, let's assume otherwise, that there was no censorship of the Internet in China. Have you considered the possibility that the fact that, gee, most Chinese don't speak English, might be the biggest obstacle to their use of what you call "the public internet"?
Whether Russia or China are police states with heavy censorship is irrelevant to the question of whether there should be Cyrillic or Chinese domain names. It's a matter of whether people can easily use a computer in the first place.
And if you want to talk about urban legends and half-remembered bits of Whorf, English is just perfect.
What does "the same" mean in this context, and does it always mean that?
Unicode certainly has separate codepoints for Latin and Cyrillic characters that look "confusingly similar." This is a technical choice that it adopts in that case, but not in all cases; the Unicode CJK unification, for example, takes the opposite approach, assigning the same codepoint to characters that are regularly written differently in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
What do you think?
(Though I've heard that for some languages, Google's indexing technology is not as smart as that of smaller players who specialize in that language. But come on, it's not really harder than indexing English.)
Yup, this is an acknowledged risk. Is the appropriate response to that risk to ditch the whole concept of URLs in non-Latin scripts? Hell no. What about developing actual solutions to the problem instead?
So, by providing internet content that doesn't require the use of an alphabet or language that most Russians or Chinese don't master, Russia and China thereby "cut their populations off from the public internet." Good one.
Well, suppose you were Chinese, and the only language you could speak and read is Chinese. They taught you a bit of pinyin in school, sure, but you have to look at Latin letters very carefully to tell apart a 'd' from a 'b', a 'p' from a 'q', or an 'r' from a 'v'. You don't speak any English beyond phrases like "hi, how are you?".
Wouldn't you think that the fact that you can't use the Internet in Chinese was "really mucking up the works"? As in, making it fundamentally and needlessly hard to use?
I actually disagree on both points. Copyright abolition removes a very important incentive for making new works, since without copyright, you can't reliably get paid for new works. Excessively long copyright terms also remove an incentive for producing new works, since you can just keep getting paid for the same works for much too long.
Short copyright terms provide an incentive for making new works, but also demand that new ones be produced if any income stream is to come from licensing. Whether 5 years is a good number I don't know; my first reaction is "too short," but my mind is nowhere near made up on this.
The point that's important from my point of view is that the low cost of producing copies of an original work means that there is value for the government to intervene to create a market where one couldn't otherwise exist. This is exactly why we got copyright in the first place--without copyright, it's irrational for me to spend $20,000 producing your wonderful music album if any schmoe can just copy it for free afterwards. Without the $20,000, you very likely won't be able to make as good an album as you could've otherwise made--you know, good enough that people would be willing to pay for it if they couldn't get it for free.
The original poster in this thread, in effect, is arguing that music production costs today are so cheap that hobbyists will produce music as good as anybody else using equipment they would buy anyway as part of their hobby, and therefore, there is no need for a copyright regime to promote capital investments in music production. I certainly disagree with that.
...and this actually provides a decent answer to your original question as to what's different between Ruby and Python. It's less in the feature lists than in the programming styles implied by the libraries and the way the communities use the languages. This is something you do all the time in Ruby.
But note that GP did disclaim that he was not comparing Ruby with C as a competitor; the languages that were mentioned as competitors are Common Lisp, OCaml, Haskell, and Lua. I don't know Lua, and I think OCaml and Haskell aren't fair comparisons (being very static languages), but a performance comparison to Common Lisp certainly is fair; Common Lisp is a more featureful language than Ruby, that has implementations that run a lot faster.
The best comparison, however, would be between Ruby and various Smalltalk implementations.
You need to learn some Lisp.
The philosophy behind embedded DSLs is to "build up" your language to the point where your programs read, ideally, like descriptions in the problem domain. It's not possible to give it a very precise definition of what the approach is (even less so than in the case of the notoriously unclear "Object-Oriented Programming"), but one thing is clear: embedded DSLs are a kind of API, and there is no obvious dividing line between "just an API" and an embedded DSL.
The most classic sort of example is embedding a Prolog-like logic programming system into Lisp. Ruby's rake isn't too bad of an example, though; it's not because parentheses were removed, but rather, because rakefiles are declarative descriptions of tasks and dependencies between them.
Nope. I only really think you have a point in the "string eval monkeypatching" bit there. Ruby doesn't have Lisp-style macros, so the way they do metaprogramming with eval is pretty crap. The block syntax isn't as good as having first-class lambdas, either, so you're running a risk of overrating Ruby blocks there.
Domain-specific languages are a widespread technique. The dominant, crappy version is called "XML."
How about murder?
So you have an argument for shortening copyright terms. Sure, there are reasonable arguments to be made about that.
The problem is that this subthread started out as a criticism of the idea of tossing out copyrights completely. If somebody tells you that tossing out copyrights is bad for reason X, and you answer that copyright terms are too long, your answer is kind of topically irrelevant, isn't it?
Well, nobody's been given a monopoly on music or movie production. You can, in principle, record any original music or movies you make, and sell copies for whatever amount you agree to.
If you look at it from a features and libraries perspective, then you really won't find much different. But you shouldn't look at it that way.
There's a significant programming style difference between the Python and Ruby communities. Python programmers, as a general rule, tend to be more inclined toward imperative programming, while Ruby has much more of the feel of a multi-paradigm language. To understand a lot of Ruby code out there, you need to wrap your head around concepts like functional programming, metaprogramming, and domain-specific languages. Ruby code tends favor higher-order functional combinators over primitive looping syntax (an influence from functional programming), extending the system base classes extensively (an influence from Smalltalk), and a lot of it has the flavor of trying to extend the language to look more like the problem space itself (domain-specific languages; look at something like rake, for example).
Python aims to be "clean" in a very contentious sense of "clean." To put it in a way that will be taken very partisanly: Python is the language that you get when "clean and easy to understand" is taken to mean "only promotes the concepts that are easy to understand to a mediocre imperative programmer." For example, Guido is on the record that higher-order functions like reduce are supposedly hard to understand.
To be fair, yeah, Python is a reasonably clean imperative/OOP dynamic language, which is no mean feat, but many of us folks really would rather have a language that supports a broader range of programming paradigms. (Though I'm not as great of a fan of Ruby as I used to be before I got going on Scheme, I must say...)
Don't you think we ought to let the market decide that? Copyright is about creating a market where one could not exist otherwise, remember.
Sure, these factors make it so that the prices of houses fluctuate. It doesn't answer the question: why do you expect the value of houses to increase?
How do you know you're not underestimating the amount of land available, or the resources of the economy to either use more land, or make better use of the same land? I.e., sprawl and vertical housing.
It's funny for you to be saying this now, after having issued what amounts to a blanket recommendation to buy houses because "they always go up."
So now you're changing your tune from "buy a house because they go go up, like stocks do" to "buy a house because houses aren't very risky, unlike stocks"? That's not what you were saying before!
And anyway, houses aren't nearly as safe as you make it sound. The normal way to buy a house is through a mortgage. The mortgage makes it a leveraged investment, which means that you can lose more than what you put into it. What happens if your house loses 5% after you bought it with 20% down? The value of equity becomes $0. Not so great, huh? (And yes, houses can lose a lot over a long term.)
And finally: by your reasoning, why would anybody invest in a house over REITs or TIPS?