Update on my Reading as of 2008

Last Friday, Feb. 22, 2008 I just got up, and still feel tired. Five hours of sleep does not cut it for me. More than likely though, I'll be either having a coffee, black with lots of sweetener, later on or just buy a Red Bull and wake up.

Although I had taken out from the Burnaby Public Library three books on computers, my lack of enthusiasm is annoying. I thought for sure that I'd be more serious about learning Python, but the Essential Reference book by Beazley does not inspire me.

As well, I thought that my rediscovery of Gancarz's The UNIX Philosophy would inspire me to write my own UNIX manifesto. Even Graff & van Wyk's Secure Coding gets the programmer's creative juices flowing.

I suppose then that I am just another script kiddie, which sucks majorly. :"(

Later on that weekend I started reading from Gancarz's book and Graff & van Wyk's with no problems, but because Beazley's book is example only rather than a cookbook, it's slow-going.

Though I did find a few websites on my two favorite programming languages, Ruby and Python.

Here is Gancarz's UNIX Philosophy in a nutshell:

"In 1994 Mike Gancarz (a member of the team that designed the X Window System), drew on his own experience with Unix, as well as discussions with fellow programmers and people in other fields who depended on Unix, to produce The UNIX Philosophy which sums it up in 9 paramount precepts:

Small is beautiful.
Make each program do one thing well.
Build a prototype as soon as possible.
Choose portability over efficiency.
Store data in flat text files.
Use software leverage to your advantage.
Use shell scripts to increase leverage and portability.
Avoid captive user interfaces.
Make every program a filter."

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Mike Gancarz: The Unix Philosophy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Mike_Gancarz:_The_UNIX_Philosophy

New Year 2008: Truth and programming as meta-objects

In 2008 I plan to expose people to the truth in as subtle a form as I can manage. For starters I will quietly call the consensual truth that everyone learned in school "propaganda" aimed at marketing the consumer lifestyle. Just because nearly everyone agrees what we read and hear on the TV is "truth" does not make such propaganda true. We just consent to it being true within context of what that truth is selling us. It is still propaganda designed to sell a product. Ultimately, it isn't truth because it is based on the consumer model.

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From what I have learned about Python and Ruby as programming languages, Python is mildly object-oriented programming (OOP) while Ruby is much more OOP. As well, Ruby derives a lot of its flavor from Perl and its object-oriented features are mainly inspired by Smalltalk. It also shares some features with Python, Lisp, Dylan, and CLU.

Python is used to manipulate content derived from the Web, and has methods of displaying text in a window. It is object oriented. Perl is a powerful language used mainly to manipulate text. Smalltalk is one of the oldest of programming language, and the classic Apple Mac used an operating system based on it. Today, Mac OS X is based on FreedBSD and its desktop is derived from WM and NextStep.

Currently I am reading Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide.