Laurence Gonsalves

that clip is so classic. - Mark Foundos

simply awesome - Harjeet Taggar

It didn't land on me how awful Palin's response was until now. - Robert Konigsberg

I was thinking the exact same thing as I watched part II of the Couric interview. The comment about Putin and our airspace is a classic. - Wil Witherspoon

... for the children! - Chris Lamprecht

"Known as muktuk, this favorite food is eaten raw when fresh or boiled when it has been stored." I wonder when Trader Joes will carry it. - torque

"It is unlawful to sell or purchase edible portions of Cook Inlet beluga whales, and edible portions of threatened or endangered species may only be sold by Alaska Natives in Native towns or villages for Native consumption. Additionally, edible portions of marine mammals other than Cook Inlet beluga whales and threatened and endangered species may be sold either A) for Native consumption or B) to non Natives if sold in Native towns and villages in Alaska (Native villages include Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau). Once purchased, these products do not have to be consumed in the Native village or town." - http://www.fakr.noaa.gov/prote... - torque

But a tall glass of ice cold blubberade is downright butt-nasty. - DeWitt Clinton

Laurence, the discover article is great, you should FriendFeed it! - Sanjeev Singh

whales look up, roll their eyes, go back to munching - Gregory Lent

Yuck!!!! - Susan Beebe

Totally brilliant idea. I write my own bad html mockups in a text editor or whatever IDE I'm playing with at the time, but a tool to ease this process would mean I could get on to abandoning the half-finished project much sooner than usual. :-) - Slippy Lane

Um, isn't that what Balsamiq does?? - Cyndy

Please god no, don't create another "doesn't need to generate good html" code generator. srsly - Jason Wehmhoener

Well, as for the mockups, there is really great Firefox extension called Pencil. You should try it. - Mladen Srdić

using Cappuccino, an open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser? - huixing

Paul, have you checked out Axure http://www.axure.com/? I've typically used Visio or resorted to whiteboards/paper as they are easier to edit. - Jauder Ho

Jason, I would be fine with it not generating html at all. As for Balsamiq and some of the others, the idea is actually that it would look more like the final product instead of less. Photoshop gets fonts wrong and stuff because it isn't a web browser, and yet people still keep using it, so it seems that it must have some advantage over the other tools. - Paul Buchheit

Photoshop has two major advantages, multiple uses and precision. Photoshop can be used for more than just web mockups. One person can achieve multiple goals with Photoshop while a mockup tool just makes mockups. The second advantage is the mockups look great in presentations because the author has complete control. Photoshop mockups aren't real they're hyper-real. - Kevin D. White

Are mockups that look exactly like the finished product even desirable? I'm reminded of the "Napkin Look & Feel" (http://napkinlaf.sourceforge.n...) - Laurence Gonsalves

i would like to take my pencil on paper design straight into an app ... - Gregory Lent

Depends whether your goal is to sketch and idea or create a final design. For the latter, you really do want it to be pixel perfect. For the former, you want a "wireframe" or whatever the cool kids call it these days. - ⓞnor

What ⓞnor said. For "wireframes" a whiteboard is fine, but eventually you want pixel-perfect designs. - Paul Buchheit

Paul, you should check out Denim, http://dub.washington.edu:2007... - imabonehead

Paul have you tried Fireworks, that's what our designers use. - Michael

http://www.balsamiq.com I got this link from Cooper U boards a while back, and a lot of my co-workers have found it very useful. While it's not pixel perfect, it allows for really quick mock ups with the idea that the design of the end product will be done by actual designers. - Sam Ee

http://www.balsamiq.com/produc... That's a better link. The demo video sold me on the idea. - Sam Ee

Second attempt: http://friendfeed.com/e/9039a3... - Paul Buchheit

I relate. Got married July 5th of this year and my Reader usage dropped sharply because of wedding prep and post marriage fun. I do spend a TON of time on Friendfeed though :) - Mo J.

I don't know why this never occurred to me, as there are blogs about every possible subject but... there are wedding blogs? And people subscribe to them?? I can't imagine the content changes much from site to site. "Today my maid of honor pissed me off" or "I gained a pound and my dress no longer fits." And these blogs certainly don't have staying power. Sorry to momentarily hijack your thread; just surprised at this little trendlet. - Carla Thompson

I knew Reader caused stress! I just needed proof. - Dustin

It sounds like she's just unsubscribing from some blogs, not ditching Reader entirely. - Laurence Gonsalves

A good wedding blog would give tidbits on advice learned, like "when looking for a wedding photographer, make sure you find one that includes giving you ALL of the RAW pictures that they took on CD or DVD" - Alex "Maverick" Scoble

Serious question - do boys get all freaked out and crazy about weddings like some girls do? - Kaia is too young to die.

Kaia, you know women amplify and project their crazy to make their men crazy, right? - Jason Carreira

I guess I could see that. Like if you're not as freaked out as me about this then you don't care. - Kaia is too young to die.

Now you're getting into the (crazy) spirit... - Jason Carreira

Living in Vancouver restricts me to basically McDonalds, A&W, and Wendy's for fast food. This burger helps make this small selection of artery-clogging foods bearable. God I miss In-N-Out! - Brett Cannon

Brett: are there any Harvey's locations in Vancouver? I'm from Ontario originally, and Harvey's was my burger place of choice. I hardly ever eat burgers now that I've moved to the US due to the lack of Harvey's... - Laurence Gonsalves

It seems odd to classify "Visual programming language" as a "paradigm". Tinkertoy is a visual programming language that's isomorphic with Common Lisp (alternatively, it can be thought of as a graphical editor for Common Lisp). Does it have a different paradigm from Lisp? - Laurence Gonsalves

Every language is isomorphic with machine code :). I think it's worth including a "visual" paradigm if the visual aspect of the language allows you to express something much easier than in text (e.g. visual spreadsheet cells vs plain BASIC). I don't know enough about Tinkertoy to know if that counts. - Sanjeev Singh

By isomorphic I mean that you can translate between Tinkertoy and Common Lisp in either direction without any real loss of information. (you may lose spacing when translating from Lisp to Tinkertoy) I've seen Tinkertoy described as a visual programming language, and at other times described as a List editor/environment. - Laurence Gonsalves

Anyway, my point is just that whether a programming language is visual or not seems like it's orthogonal to the paradigm(s) of the language. To me, "paradigm" feels like it should be about deep semantics, while "visual" is about surface representation. Compare BNF to "railroad diagrams". They have identical expressive power, but one is textual and one is graphical. - Laurence Gonsalves

I think it is orthogonal in most cases, but in some cases, the visualness provides important usability benefits and in those cases, it should count as a separate paradigm (it sounds like Tinkeytoy wouldn't meet this bar). I see each paradigm as simply an easy way to express a certain kind of computation. I mean, you can do constraint programming in C too, it's just more painful / less usable, but I wouldn't argue that constraint programming is orthogonal. - Sanjeev Singh

I find "reasoning engine paradigms" (constraint programming, logic programming, rule programming, data-flow languages) unhelpful because you can't re-express the capability above the basic language level, so either all users of your system must program in the core language itself, or else they lose the benefit. Constraints are very useful for visual layout, for example, but a constraint language doesn't help you write a window manager or a GUI toolkit unless you're willing to inject code at runtime. - ⓞnor

(It's more useful, I think, to make that reasoning engine a system service or library that anyone can use when they need it.) I think of the other paradigms as defining things you *can't* do, with machine language as the ultimate multi-paradigm language. Functional, OO, or communicating-sequential-process models all basically prevent you from doing some key thing in order to make analysis more tractable. "Multi paradigm languages" let you exchange one straitjacket for another on the fly. - ⓞnor

I agree that visual programming is not a paradigm. It gets confused with other paradigms, especially dataflow and object/relational data definition languages, that are readily visualized. - ⓞnor

How I wish we have some digg/reddit/techmeme only for wikipedia articles - Varun Mahajan

Laurence, Egnor: what do you guys think is the best way to express that some language has a visual component that makes some operations an order of magnitude easier (like spreadsheets)? - Sanjeev Singh

I'm not sure if I understand the question. I'm not denying that being visual potentially enhances the usability of a language. (I'm actually a bit of a VPL fan, actually.) I just wouldn't call "visual" itself a paradigm, any more than I would call "text based" a paradigm. - Laurence Gonsalves

Sanjeev, I'd call it a visual language, or a visualizable language. I would argue that all languages are deeply visual, at least by conventional usage (which matters at least as much as formal syntax): blocks and indentation and formatting are important and necessary to the process of constructing and understanding programs. Conventional math notation, which almost all languages adopt, is highly spatial, and parentheses and braces have the physical appearance of containment. - ⓞnor

LabView, Lotus 1-2-3, Befunge, and Python all use spatial arrangement to represent concepts in very different ways, and they all offer very different means for the programmer to edit the program under development. Calling three of them "visual" and one "textual" seems like it sort of does a disservice to all of them, or to whatever discussion we're trying to have about paradigms. - ⓞnor

Visual in this case probably means graphics other than alpha-numeric characters, although I don't really think it's a paradigm. - Chris White

Lotus 1-2-3 and Befunge both use alpha-numeric characters, and Befunge programs are text files. Are they "visual"? (Is that question even interesting other than as a definitional exercise?) - ⓞnor

I think there are two parts to the definition of a paradigm: (1) whether it provides some descriptive power (if I tell you a language is functional, how much can you infer about it?) (2) is it really a different enough way of thinking about a problem. I agree that "visual" falls down on (1), but rather than simply excluding it completely from a discussion of paradigm, it needs to somehow be included because it often qualifies under (2). - Sanjeev Singh

For example, given the exact same problem, the Lotus 1-2-3 user probably thinks about and models the solution very differently from the python user (even if they are the same person). So here is the crux of the issue. If you take (1) as the definition of paradigm, then yes, visual is not a paradigm. If you take (2), then it definitely qualifies under some circumstances, though perhaps there is some better terminology that can be used in these cases. - Sanjeev Singh