2008 Mar 25 - Tue

How Not To Form a Standard

Rob Weir has a blog called An Antic Disposition where he discusses The Disharmony of OOXML. The eloquent center piece of his article is a table representing how various applications represent a smiple text string with one word in red, represented here verbatim:

Format	Text Color	Text Alignment
OOXML Text	<w:color w:val="FF0000"/>	<w:jc w:val="right"/>
OOXML Sheet	<color rgb="FFFF0000"/>	<alignment horizontal="right"/>
OOXML Presentation	<a:srgbClr val="FF0000"/>	<a:pPr algn="r"/>
ODF Text	<style:text-properties fo:color="#FF0000"/>	<style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align="end" />
ODF Sheet	<style:text-properties fo:color="#FF0000"/>	<style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align="end"/>
ODF Presentation	<style:text-properties fo:color="#FF0000"/>	<style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align="end"/>

Some wag once mentioned that a standard is nice, you have so many from which to choose. The standards writers for OOXML must have had this in mind when they allowed the diversity of Text Coloration and Alignment into the standard. Oh, wait. The applications were written first, then some general bucket was designed to hold the output these applications produced.

As the writer says, it would have been nice to create a 'single standard' and then retrofit the application's output to conform to the file format. If an application needs to store it differently internally, so be it, but conform to some level of operability in the file format. Hmmm, can each application read each other's handiwork? If not, what good is a standard?

The article indicates that once ODF was established, Open Office changed to match the standard. And from the table above, we can see all the tools within Open Office conform, with the result of twin goals of true universality of information interchange and simplicity of software design have been reached.

That would be a high standard for OOXML to achieve.

[/Personal/Technology] permanent link

Who Needs a SafeD Net?

Bartosz Milewski, a member of the 'D' design team, wrote an article about making the programming language D even safer than it purportedly already is. He called that subset: SafeD. In the process of making D and SafeD look good, the failings of C++ were highlighted in comparison. To his credit, the author was able to list a few good features: performance, low-level access, and powerful abstractions (the latter being slighted at the same time for apparently only being useful in operating systems or large systems design).

On the other hand, it is nice to hear that whenever people feel they have to make their language-of-choice look good, inevitably some subset of C++ comes in as a benchmark. I include the word 'subset' on purpose. There are specialized, productive, easy to learn languages out there. I've even used a few of them. Each of them is better than some specific aspect of C++, but few if any, can beat C++ in many areas. Ok, maybe Lisp does better.

B Milewski did acknowledge that "There are many other simplifications and safety improvements over C++. Unfortunately they all come at the expense of expressive power and performance." well said.

I used C# for a couple of years, buying into the theory that automated memory management and suborned pointers would be a good thing for me. Ah, no. I like the ability to be able to 'shoot myself in the foot'. Really good gun-slingers know their guns, know where to point them, know how to maintain them, know their useful range, and clean often to ensure good performance. Would a gunslinger hand his gun over to an acolyte for cleaning and maintenance? The same could be said of a programmer handing over memory management and object manipulation to some hidden behind-the-scenes mechanism which may not be optimal for the job.

Perhaps I'm just a control freak, but I had to depart C# and return to the wild west of C++ programming in order to feed my adrenalin requirement of walking the fine edge of writing elegant, flexible code.

Isaac Asimov wrote a book called the End of Eternity. The moral of that story was that if humanity is not allowed to push the boundaries, and get hurt a little in the process, stagnation sets in. Also, the hero of the story wouldn't have been able to look off into the sunset with the heroine at his side.

Perhaps C++ is indeed a difficult language to master. It's flexibility may be its undoing, but the for the tenacious learners, it provides a high level of satisfaction for allowing one to come up with good solutions for tough problems, big or small... and for being able to devise an appropriate solution from an excellent collection of varied tools.

Scott Meyers, in his book, Effective C++, eloquently expresses why C++ has the feel of an elephant being touched by a number of blind men. C++ is actually a federation of languages.

• Deep down, C++ is the structured programming language known as C.
• C++ is C with Object Orientedness added on.
• C++ is Generic Programming, template metaprogramming, which is said to rarely interact with mainstream C++ programming.
• STL is a sub-language of C++ based upon algorithmic programming, as defined by Alexander Stepanov.

In the referenced article from the last point above, a few enlightning quotations about Stepanov's strong views of C++ strengths and weaknesses: "STL is the result of a bacterial infection", "STL is not object oriented. I think that object orientedness is almost as much of a hoax as Artificial Intelligence.", "Always start with algorithms.", "Generic programming is a programming method that is based in finding the most abstract representations of efficient algorithms", and "So far, C++ is the best language I've discovered to say what I want to say".

          O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim 
          For preacher and monk the honored name! 
          For, quarreling, each to his view they cling. 
          Such folk see only one side of a thing. 

          Jainism and Buddhism. Udana 68-69: 
          Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant 

For those hoping to find the perfect language, here is what The Architect has to say about that:

"Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest 
strength, and your greatest weakness."

Perhaps C++'s flexibility is both its greatest strength as well as its greatest weakness.

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Programming Chaos on the Wings of a Butterfly

From xkcd, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

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Open Source Site of the Day -- Processing

This should actually be filed under a few different headings (which is something I'll do once I get the new blog software in place). Those headings being programming, software development, visualization, animation, imaging, interacting, and open source.

It is some software called Processing of which I speak. It is hard to put into words what this is. I first took a look at some animation samples that were produced for a FOX station's movie slot. They need to be seen to be believed. My next step was to look at programming examples. The programming examples included visualization of programming techniques...self referential, eh! More advanced examples provided the ground work for how to do some of the flocking behaviour I viewed in the first animation samples I viewed.

This site caters to the young and the old, programmers and visualizers. If only for the eye-candy, it is a site to be viewed.

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