When there’s a long tradition for something and a lot of money behind keeping that tradition alive, it becomes very easy to say “that’s just how it is” and continue on your merry way. Change is hard, but you’ve got to start somewhere.
Larry Lessig wants to start some change. Specifically, he thinks that the current mode of operation in Congress is a little too beholden to business-backed lobbyists, and there’s evidence of that all over the place in the law books. Lessig hopes to change some of the fundamental dynamic in Washington in order to be able to start thinking about the bigger problems. Specifically, he wants to see members of Congress pledge to:
- Not accept money from lobbyists/PACs
- Ban earmarks in spending bills
- Support public financing of campaigns
He plans to put a bunch of energy into this Change Congress initiative to try to make this happen. As part of this, he’s considering a run for Congress in his own district.
I think it’s a worthwhile effort, and I want to support Larry by linking to him here: Lessig ‘08. If you want a better intro to Change Congress, check out the first few minutes of the video on the front page of Larry’s site.
Politics
I haven’t been there yet (it just opened today), but Borders has just opened their first new “concept” store right around the corner from my house. Eighteen months in development, this store is out to change Borders’ future prospects and help stop the losses.
At this point, it’s unclear to me what bookstores will look like in 10 years. The Kindle, while certainly not perfect, is a glimpse of a more paperless future that I think will come to pass at some point. In the meantime, though, something like this new Borders sounds like the right idea. They’re looking to blend their traditional book and music selling business with how people are actually making use of the content. They’ve got kiosks where you can buy prints of photos or custom burned CDs. You can also load up your MP3 player… except…
The only glitch so far: The digital services don’t work with Apple’s iPod, something Borders says it’s working on. [From Borders offers preview of new concept store - Latest from the Ann Arbor News - MLive.com]
It’s hard to say who’s at fault for this, be it the record labels or Apple, but Borders’ inability to sell music that can be loaded directly onto iPods eliminates 70% of the digital music players out there. Just as online sellers have been battling these past 10 years to sell content in convenient electronic forms online, brick and mortar stores like Borders are going to have a challenge creating interesting and useful physical destinations in an age of electronic content.
Product Management, Technology
So, we’ve got Jython and IronPython as Python language reimplementations. There’s also Boo, which is clearly heavily inspired by Python but has some interesting extensions (static typing, for example). I just came across Cobra.
Cobra, like Boo, is built on the .NET platform. The syntax is clearly inspired by Python, which I consider a good thing. In keeping line noise to a minimum, Cobra even ditches the “:” at the end of the line preceding a block of code. Chuck Esterbrook has also pulled inspiration from a number of other places. I recognize some D and Eiffel in there (it’s got design by contract and unit tests built right into the classes). There’s a comparison to Python available right on the Cobra site.
Something that’s interesting about Cobra is that it’s self-hosting. Even though C# has been getting more powerful over time, I’m sure that Cobra can move forward more quickly with its even more succinct syntax.
As a Python guy, though, I can’t help but notice things that seem to be missing (or are possibly just missing from the docs).
- Functions as first class objects. All of the examples are inside of classes, which just seems silly. I also haven’t seen the syntax for passing a function around (can you even do that?) This is a powerful feature.
- Metaclasses don’t seem to exist in Cobra. You don’t need them all the time, but you can make some APIs a lot nicer if you use them when appropriate.
- Function parameter declaration is weaker. Function parameter capabilities seem to be the same as in any other .NET language. It allows you to have variable arguments, but that’s about as fancy as you can get.
- Objects are not extensible. You can’t just go and hang random attributes off of an object, and there are actually some times when this is convenient to do.
I do think it’s interesting to see more languages popping up that offer both static and dynamic typing. I’ll be curious to see how that plays out over time.
Python
- 20:58 when was the last time you implemented binary search? #
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