When's the last time that the content on Scripting News had anything to do wtih scripting?
Yeah, once in a while you'll read about XML-RPC or something related, but that's maybe 10% of the time. Is it a case of misleading branding? If Dave renamed it "Dave's weblog" wouldn't anyone care?
I don't know why I just thought of it. I was scanning headines in NetNewsWire and thouht to myself "What does any of that have to do with scripting." And through the magic of MovableType, you now get to wonder about it too. :-)
Anyway, I'm not saying that Dave should change the name, I'm just remarking on how it's misleading if you bother to think about it.
Posted by jzawodn at February 15, 2003 03:23 PM
I started thinking that a while ago. It'll be interesting to see what changes, if any, Dave makes as he begins his adventure at Harvard.
No matter, Dave still has a cool weblog. But it is interesting to think about.
Oddly enough, I started reading Scripting News precisely because of the name - I think I actually found it through a google search when I was looking for sites with news on scripting languages such as Perl, PHP and Python. It took me a week or so to figure out that the site wasn't actually about scripting so much as it was about "weblogging" (whatever that was)...
Scripting led to weblogs.
And scripting philosophy permeates everything.
Saying "Scripting led to weblogs" sounds like a cop-out to me. You could also say that assembler programming led to Microsoft Word, so it would make sense to have http://assemblerprogramming.com be about how to effectively use Word.
"Ask not what the internet can do you for...", Dave. http://www.scripting.com and http://www.scriptingnews.com would better serve the internet if they were actually about scripting.
Laziness led to scripting, and weblogging is definitely not a lazy thing. I don't think scripting necessarily led to weblogging. I've never heard of people using shell scripts to generate logs or .plan's back in the old days.
However, people who use scripting languages tend to have a funny mindset. Not specifically a lazy one, but they seem much more likely to be extroverted. I have yet to come across a weblog that discusses such issues as disk-elevator algorithms, reverse page mapping, hyperpipelining, branch prediction, speculative scheduling, static instruction scheduling, lexical analysis, TCP slowstart algorithms, etc.
My point is that the people who are weblogging are on the "edges" of computer applications. The design, system and infrastructure guys don't seem to be involved. I've thought of going that route on my weblog, focusing on the lower level stuff. I'm not sure anyone would want to pay attention though; if you're not a real sadistic dweeb like me, you're probably best served assuming everything below your programming language in the abstraction stack is "magic."
Um, Perl came from laziness. But scripting came from busy people with too much work to do looking to optimize a few tasks. ;)
Hey Adam --
'I have yet to come across a weblog that discusses such issues as disk-elevator algorithms, reverse page mapping, ...........'
You may want to read Alan Cox' blog^Wdiary, at
http://www.linux.org.uk/diary/ , then revise that. But scroll down a bit past the Welsh postings first ;)
Justin: that's a pretty good point. Neither of them appear to have syndication though. Without syndication, a weblog is just a fancy, dolled up .plan file.
Dan: laziness and optimization would appear to be two sides of the same coin. "I'm too lazy to wait for this earthquake simulation to finish, so I'll throw more hardware at it and make a Beuwolf cluster." Now that I think about it, its more like three sides of a D&D die. "This is too slow and I'm too proud to use something so slow, so I'll make it faster." Laziness, hubris and impatience are the marks of the Perl programmer right? :)
No. It is possible that I have more tasks to on my list than I have time to do them. I may seek to automate some of those tasks so as to ensure they get done. Nothing about that indicates laziness. Quite the contrary.
As I said, Perl is indeed the fruit of laziness. But scripting in general is not.
Chad, got it -- I'll try to include more news about scripting. How about making some? ;->
Dave, Thanks (and, I mean that). I'll try to make some news. :)
Dave, you posted about the new features of Python 2.3! Thanks!
I've been working on trying to make some news about scripting for you. ;)
