Misc

Random Thoughts On Javascript

by

Random thoughts on Javascript.

As Matthew Butterick put it, Lisp makes me smarter, while anything named *Script kills brain cells on contact.

Here is a comment from Hacker News that sums it up for me: ..they feel like walled gardens of arbitrary knowledge that only applies to their ecosystem rather than to some fundamental learning about software. When I learned about OOP I was able to understand OOP code in a broad range of applications, languages and frameworks, but learning how react works gives me no insight into anything but react, and it’s even abstracted enough from JavaScript that you could learn React without ever properly knowing how to write JavaScript (which is something I’ve encountered in a handful of new devs).

It does seem like a lot of Javascript developers are like small children: They only know Javascript, and cannot imagine anyone not knowing only Javascript. Like iPhone users but worse. They seem to constantly re-invent the wheel, and there seems to be no collective learning. If Javascript is so wonderful, why are there so many libraries, frameworks and entire languages that transpile to Javascript? If Javascript is so wonderful, why do people go through all that effort to avoid dealing with Javascript directly?

Whenever I tell people I want nothing to do with Javascript, I get the same song and dance that “you have to know Javascript.” First off, I do not use it at my current job, so for a lot of jobs you do not. But I do have to use apps made by Microsoft. Because I have to. I am tired of using garbage because I have to. That is one reason I tend not to call in to the Austin Clojure Meetup when they talk about ClojureScript. Lisp is something I want to learn. I spend enough time with things I have to use. Don’t pollute the stuff I want to use with the stuff I have to use.

And usually you get to the first stage of “you have to use X” because a lot of people are too lazy or too stupid to investigate alternatives. The second stage is the X that you have to use is the only alternative, and most people are too lazy or too stupid to know there ever was an alternative. If I wanted to do what everybody else does, I would not be interested in Lisp or Clojure. You use Lisp because you know the world is wrong.

Maybe everybody else uses it because everybody else is stupid. JS is like Windows: It is a status quo that everybody defends, nobody actually chose, and very few actually like.

I don’t buy the argument that developers should learn Javascript because it is a combination of Lisp (the good parts) and C (everything else). “It has the stuff you like with the stuff you do not like.” I would like my life to have more of the stuff that I like, and less of the stuff I do not like, not to mix them together. “It’s Lisp and C” is really a reason to learn Lisp.

I am tired of being treated like a dog, and people thinking that I will just eat whatever is put in front of me.

But I am not the only one. The README for Coast states “It uses a relational database and renders html on the server without javascript which allows you to ship your web applications faster.” The Pragmatic Bookshelf has a book called Programming Phoenix LiveView: Interactive Elixir Web Programming Without Writing Any JavaScript. Granted, they do not seem to be against JS. I think that LiveView is like GWT: You write code in Elixir (LiveView) or Java (GWT), and it gets translated to JS. Because JS is too complicated.

The PDFs for that book said that we need JS to make single-page apps and give users all the “modern” features of the web: like notifications and infinite scroll. Personally, I need fewer notifications and I hate infinite scroll. JS seems to give nothing but bloat. Granted, there are some things it is useful for: I think a lot of video players are done with JS. But beyond that, all JS has given us is bloat and complexity. I feel like I am spending more and more time on websites waiting for circles to stop spinning.

I think we need to get back to CRUD apps. The kind we used to make 10 years ago. Yes, you had to know several languages, like HTML, CSS, SQL, maybe some Javascript. But you could focus on a language that interested you, like Java, or Ruby, or Python. Now it seems like a lot of people want to make it all Javascript all the time, now it’s Javascript AND maybe a little bit of the thing you really wanted to learn. Two years ago I took a course on Pluralsight about making web services in Go. The course included an Angular app to view the database. The Angular app takes up 589 megabytes on my hard drive. I took the course to learn how to use Go, not deal with Javascript. It reminds me of Joe Armstrong’s line about OOP: I just wanted a banana, not the monkey holding the banana and the tree it is sitting in.

Why they did not have a prerequisite course about making a web application in Go is beyond me.

Javascript is like someone comes to a restaurant, and at first they seem outgoing and charismatic. Then you realize the guy is groping all the women, he’s hammered and you can’t get rid of him.

I haven’t gotten around to reading any of the PDFs I have going over the history of Lisp. Perhaps for a couple of decades the Lisp world was total chaos like JS is today. But now it isn’t. Why not stand on the shoulders of giants?

If my impression of Javascript is out of date, so be it. It wasn’t my idea to ignore history and push a language which was described by its own creator as having “a lot of stupid in it.” He is still jerking around the world by giving us a browser that shields you from ads so they can give you their ads. And if that isn’t shady enough, Brave is involved with corrupt-o-currency. This guy is the poster jerk for crank magnetism.

I am open to learning new things. Lisp. Go. Elixir. Functional programming. Graph databases. I probably need to learn more about relational databases. Just using Emacs will help you to pick up new things: Org mode, CIDER. I learned some Scheme and Racket and how to get them working in Emacs so I could go through Simply Scheme so I could eventually go through SICP.

I have noticed that when people judge you for not being open to new ideas or learning something new, what they are really doing is being judgemental because you are not interested in what they are interested in. Being open to new ideas does not mean being open to all ideas.

You’re welcome.

Image from the Melisende Psalter, a 12th century manuscript assumed to have been created at the Monastery of the Holy Sepulchre; housed in the British Library as Egerton MS 1139, assumed allowed under Public Domain.

Notes On A Drupal Meetup And Estimates

by

Recently I went to the Austin Drupal Meetup. The topic was “What is this estimation thing? Why “no estimation” is not as crazy as it sounds“. The speaker was Michael Godeck.

Before the presentation, I did talk to someone about Drupal and Gutenberg. He said that right now Drupal uses the CKEditor. It recently got re-written from the ground up, and the new version has not been integrated with Drupal yet. He said that the Drupal community looked at Gutenberg, and saw that there was a lot of WordPress-specific code, so most people decided that Gutenberg was not the direction they wanted to go in.

However, some people kept going, and have ported Gutenberg to Drupal, or re-worked it to work with Drupal. He said that they will demo their results at the next DrupalEurope in September. I think he was referring to this presentation. So, Gutenberg in Drupal is not a sure thing. But if the demo in Europe shows promise, it might happen.

The main presentation was about estimations. He will be presenting at DrupalEurope.

One issue with estimation is that estimates are sometimes interpreted by managers as promises.

He talked about On the Theory of Scales of Measurement by S.S. Stevens which covers different types of measurement. One type is ordinal, which allows ranking, but no meaningful calculation. You can rank movies using a star-based system; usually people go up to four. We know that a four-star is better than a three-star, and a three-star is better than a two-star. But is the difference between a four-star and a three-star the same as the difference between a three-star and a two-star?

Another type is interval, which does allow you to know the differences between quantities. Think of things like time, temperature and distance.

He said one issue with some agile estimation strategies is that the numbers people give are really ordinal, but they are treated as interval. People think that all uses of numbers are the same, but that is not the case. The agile community still seems to be struggling to this day with the question as to whether or not a point is equal to some unit of time.

He also spoke of confidence intervals. It may be time to brush up on statistics.

He also mentioned Thomas Bayes and Claude Shannon.

Image from “Evangelia quattuor [Évangiles dits de François II] (1r-186r). Capitulare evangeliorum (187r-199v)”, a 9th century manuscript housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF; image assumed allowed under Fair Use.

Reasons I Do Not Like Sharepoint

by

Here are some reasons I do not like Sharepoint.

First off, I think the underlying concept is wrong. Putting office files in on the web is just stupid.

The web started out as HTML files; even dynamic sites make HTML files. Trying to make the web into a viewer for Office files adds a layer of friction. It is also vendor lock-in. The web was intended to be open. And again, MS is trying to close it.

Speaking of files adding friction to the web: I also do not like PDFs on the web, especially multi-column PDFs.

Second: A lot of the files on Sharepoint are Word files, and a lot of the things in Word files do not need to be in Word files. HTML would work just as well. Why are people putting stuff in Word files anyway? (Spreadsheets are another story.) Why not just use some kind of wiki? Or Atlassian Confluence? Or Drupal? Or Intranet DASHBOARD? Or Jive? Or MindTouch? Or anything on this list? (I think this list is a bit more up to date, but unordered.) WYSIWYG editors are not that hard to learn. Why pay for MS Word when you are not using all of its features? And yes, I know SP has a wiki. I have never tried it, and I have no desire to. It is probably terrible. SP is about trying to make proprietary Office files relevant in an open web-centered world. Making a decent wiki with SP would expose the absurdity of SP’s existence. Making proprietary Office files relevant in an open web-centered world is Microsoft’s problem. Not mine, and not yours either.

If you really need to print, I am sure there are other systems that can convert content to PDFs. There are systems that have single sign-on capabilities.

If you use files, why are you using an online system? The impedance mismatch causes problems. People still download the files and email them to each other and get out sync. And even though there is versioning, people will manually add different versions of files. I have seen files in folders like this: fileX.doc, fileX_002.doc, fileX_DECEMBER.doc. If you are going to put stuff in Sharepoint, I want to look at a folder and just see the files I need to see. Don’t make me figure out whether I should look at fileX, or fileX_002, or fileX_DECEMBER.
I think this is because SP tries to do so many things.

Another reason is almost everyone hates it. At least, almost everyone I have asked about it at companies where I have worked that have used SP have hated it. Maybe everybody tells the big shots they love it and everybody is lying to me, but I really do not have any decision-making authority. Why would people lie to me?

There are many developers who take a course that uses Lisp or Scheme, or get a job using Lisp, and they will rave about it years or even decades later. They will say that Lisp/Scheme changed their perception unlike anything else. That they learned more by using Lisp than they learned using anything else. Nobody really holds MS technologies in the same esteem. Does anyone ever look back years later, and say, “God, what a great piece of engineering ${SOME_MS_PRODUCT} was. I learned so much using ${SOME_MS_PRODUCT}”. A lot of non-technical people love MS products because they are generally unaware of any alternative. We should use technologies that we admire, not use technologies simply due to inertia or ignorance.

We are always told on the technology side that we have to “learn to understand the needs of the business.” Why don’t they have to learn anything about technology? Or what is good technology?

The only people who seem to like SP are managers and SP consultants. I asked someone at my current employer why we used SP, and he told me that we got a good deal from our cloud provider. Not that we need it. Or that it is good at its intended purpose (whatever that is).

I have found that many things that are justified based on cost and not quality are usually not very good. When I was at BofA, we had to use some computer-based training. Everybody hated it, except our finance guy. When he was asked to justify it at a meeting, he said it was “cost-effective.” If the users hate it and nobody learns anything from it, how is it effective?

Another reason is that it is from MS. It’s the same old bait and switch. They sell it as something easy, and you don’t need an admin. But when you hit a wall, or want to do something advanced, then MS says you need an admin.

Some people have this weird blindness about MS. If you present them with another spreadsheet or word processor, they will reject it because it is not exactly like MS Office. But if MS changes the interface (like from a toolbar to a ribbon), people just go along with it.

Another reason is that the search capabilities in SP are terrible. This is important for something used to store documents. I have always gotten better search results on blogs and wikis. Content on wikis can be versioned, so why put stuff into SP? I think most businesses could replace SP with a wiki. I think a lot of wikis can do single-sign on, permissions, whatever. Bookmarks would not change. A lot of people love to move SP folders.

SP is a complex product sold as a simple product. It is a desert topping and a floor wax. If SP does not fit your business, you have two choices: change your life to fit SP, or replace SP. Desktop PCs, laptops, cel phones induced people to change their behavior and workflow. SP is not amazing enough for people to want to change for it.

At my current employer, search is so bad that a committee was started to come up with solutions. I went to one meeting, and I realized it was a waste of time. Someone suggested a SP site with links to all the other SP sites. For some reason, dropping SP was not considered. I do not get the hold SP has on some people. Yes, migrating would be expensive. But using it is expensive. And painful.

complex product sold as a simple product
impedance mismatch
vendor lock-in
bad search

You’re welcome.

Image from Reichenauer Evangelistar, an 11th century manuscript housed at the Bavarian State Library, webpage information here, image from World Document Library, image assumed allowed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Drupal Update

by

I have started going to some of the Chicago Drupal Meetups. I tried Drupal before and dropped it. I started going to the meetups because I want to expand my portfolio.

One of the reasons that I dropped it is that there is not rich text editor out of the box in Drupal. WordPress has a rich text editor out of the box. I think it is TinyMCE. For Drupal, you have to install the WYSIWYG module, and THEN go and get the files for one of the supported editors. I am not clear why they did this, but to me it seems like bad design. If I want one thing, don’t make me do something else first. I can get up and running on WordPress much more quickly.

Someone at the last Chicago Drupal meeting said something that is making me rethink Drupal. He said if you know you want a blog, you should go with WordPress. If you know you want a wiki, go with MediaWiki (the software behind WikiPedia). But if you want a web site that can do a lot of things really well, then you should go with Drupal. He did not try to pass Drupal off as the best at everything. Or even the best at anything. But if your site changes (and it probably will) then you should go with Drupal. It can handle the most types of content and site structures and paradigms of any of the content management systems out there.

Image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use. Image from the Vatican Virgil, a 5th century manuscript of poems by Virgil.