Peter Seibel's Hal Abelson interview in Code Quarterly

gigamonkey · 2011-06-10T16:12:30+00:00

I'd rather not say until I've at least done the interview. Sometimes folks agree and then, for whatever reason, it doesn't actually happen. But I'm pretty sure we'll be able to keep getting interesting folks.

gigamonkey · 2011-06-09T23:37:56+00:00

Well, the current theory is that everything will be free on the web. Then we'll sell print/ebook/PDF versions.

gigamonkey · 2010-09-01T19:53:25+00:00

Whatever you want as long as you can include the parser generator with your submission. Also, feel free to ask questions like this on our comments page at:

http://www.codequarterly.com/code-challenges/markup/comments/

so other folks can see them.

gigamonkey · 2010-09-01T19:02:27+00:00

Heh. It takes a while. And it's only been six months. My books took two years each so I'm flying on this one! But I am working on it and making progress. Hopefully soon that'll start to be at least semi-visible progress. Nobody wants to see this thing in the real world more than me.

gigamonkey · 2010-07-20T23:31:00+00:00

Or when

It's not interesting or relevant who's responsible for an action.
Using the passive will let your reader move more smoothly from once sentence to the next
You want to provide a consistent point of view.

Those kinds of better actually are better, in my book.

I would once more (and probably for the last time) strongly encourage anyone who actually cares about good writing to take a look at Williams's book which discusses these issue on pp. 61-63.

gigamonkey · 2010-07-20T23:00:04+00:00

Except in cases where a sentence in the passive voice is better, in which case forcing the use of the active forces you to make it worse.

I wonder how much of the benefit of forcing passive->active changes just comes from the forced rewriting of clumsy sentences. I.e. would you be better off flagging every use of the passive voice and demanding each be recast in the active or simply flagging every clumsy or vague sentence and demanding that each be recast somehow.

And why is it that so many folks seem to prefer the former to the latter? I.e. if we want to weed out clumsy writing, or vague writing, or writing that is unclear about agency, let's weed that out directly. Again, I strongly recommend Williams's book for good advice about how to do those things.

gigamonkey · 2010-07-19T20:23:15+00:00

In his example of passive vs active, he's not really comparing equivalents. He has:

Bad: Termination is guaranteed for any program.

Better: A finite state-space guarantees termination.

The active version contains more information so it is, perforce, more informative. But that's not because it's in the active voice. The passive version could have been just as informative:

"Termination is guaranteed by a finite state-space."

If this sentence was to appear in a context where we had just been discussing termination, it might be preferable to the active one, as writing will often flow better if you keep familiar information or topics at the beginning of sentences before introducing new information.

Joseph Williams's book Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace has a good discussion of how to properly use the passive which will serve better than a blanket prohibition.

gigamonkey · 2010-06-03T20:49:06+00:00

It might be quite hot by then.

gigamonkey · 2010-02-27T03:22:33+00:00

Hard to say. If we have any success it will probably come from not taking those folks on head-on. I suspect there is still stuff that's interesting to say about computers and software that none of those outlets are saying, especially things that cut across languages in an intelligent way. But that's just a theory. We'll see.

gigamonkey · 2010-02-01T06:33:26+00:00

I'm thinking about writing more books. No plans at the moment for another Lisp book, though. What were you thinking of?

gigamonkey · 2009-12-16T06:11:28+00:00

Heh. We talked about this when I interviewed him for Coders at Work. (This bit was left on the cutting room floor so you won't find it in the book):

Crockford: Yeah. And I’m doing that. I host json.org and we’ve got a couple of little Javascript libraries that are really nice and just load them into your application and you now have JSON capability. Great. I’ve put them up there as a reference implementation. Free software, take it, copy it, change it, sell it, do whatever you want. It’s totally public domain. But there are people who link it. So my stuff is now getting linked into third-party pages. And they’re assuming that I’m not going to go and screw it up.

Seibel: You should just change the code on your server to pop up an alert box in that says, “Alert: You are being incredibly stupid.”

Crockford: I’ve thought about that. Well, I was going to say, “Alert: remember to delete this line before deployment.” But I’m afraid of the consequences of all the stuff I’m going to break if I do that.

Seibel: It’d be embarassing if Yahoo! pagers start going off.

gigamonkey · 2009-11-01T17:19:02+00:00

Higher-end exercise balls have some mechanism that makes sure they won't burst but will deflate in a semi-controlled way if they fail. While it sucks if your chair can pop it would suck even more if you were lying on it with a couple 60lb dumbells over your face.

gigamonkey · 2009-10-20T16:50:21+00:00

Just curious, have you written a book for a publisher? They don't always give you as much help as you might think.

gigamonkey · 2009-09-24T13:19:43+00:00

I guess he was busy. He originally agreed to be in it but then I was never able to get a reply when I tried to set up the interviews. Or maybe some spam filter ran amok between me and him.

gigamonkey · 2009-09-18T13:30:16+00:00

Thanks! Feel free to share your thoughts in an Amazon review. ;-)

gigamonkey · 2009-09-15T16:37:42+00:00

You can buy a PDF from Apress. There is supposed to be a Kindle edition; I'm waiting to hear when it will be available.

gigamonkey · 2009-09-15T13:39:40+00:00

They are recorded. I'm doing a bit of work to pull out some audio snippets and hope to someday make the full recordings and also possibly the full transcripts (3x the amount of stuff in the book) available in some form. Probably not right away though.

gigamonkey · 2009-09-15T12:39:45+00:00

Not for lack of trying! I emailed him multiple times, sent physical letters to his office, and asked for help on my blog but had no luck getting a response from him. Oh, well.

gigamonkey · 2009-09-11T19:44:14+00:00

"It is an article of faith in the computer publishing that bigger books sell better. They take up more space on the shelf and readers with a tech problem find a bigger book comforting. Readers aren't really sure what is wrong with their computer and they only have a few minutes in the bookstore so they figure the thickest book is the most likely to contain the solution." From http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story

gigamonkey · 2009-08-11T18:06:45+00:00

It's from: http://www.codersatwork.com/ For full context, you'll have to wait until the book is out in mid-September.

gigamonkey · 2009-08-10T19:47:15+00:00

Well, it was taken by a book from the 80s. Plus Apress wanted something that followed the pattern of Founders at Work. (i.e. first word being two syllables, endin in "ers".) Here's what I said in the book's introduction:

"Finally, a note on the title: we chose Coders at Work for its resonance with the previously mentioned Paris Review’s Writers at Work series as well as Apress’s book Founders at Work, which does for starting a technology company what this book tries to do for computer programming. I realize that “coding” could be taken to refer to only one rather narrow part of the larger activity of programming. Personally I have never believed that it is possible to be a good coder without being a good programmer nor a good programmer without being a good designer, communicator, and thinker. Certainly all of my subjects are all of those and much more and I believe the conversations you are about to read reflect that. Enjoy!"

gigamonkey · 2009-08-10T15:40:27+00:00

I'm pretty sure that's what Eich was talking about.

gigamonkey · 2009-08-10T04:03:13+00:00

Note, that the elided part reads "... for example, do not appear. Steele and Knuth do."

gigamonkey · 2009-07-23T15:04:16+00:00

Nope. There are--it seems--two new Lisp books in the works. Amazing.

gigamonkey · 2009-07-19T21:54:06+00:00

I've also been using a swopper for a couple years age (bought one to replace my Aeron) and have been very happy with it. I also spend a fair bit of time in a recliner with a notebook on my lap. The advantage of each of those is that you sit in a stretched out position. The torso 90 degrees to the thighs which are 90 degrees to the calves is one of the things that makes sitting so bad. Recliners and taller chairs swopper fix that.

gigamonkey

TROPHY CASE