The Cafes

Among the XML cognoscenti, the debate is effectively over. Everyone is choosing RELAX NG as their schema language, and compiling to DTDs or W3C XML Schemas as necessary. I don’t know of a single project in the last couple of years that considered both RELAX NG and W3C Schemas and chose to go with the latter. Certainly, there’ve been a lot of W3C Schema adoptions. However those seem to have been made mostly by people who didn’t know they had a choice. In particular, the W3C imprimatur seems very appealing to larger, more bureaucratic organizations such as government agencies.

With that in mind, I thought it might be useful to list some of the groups (including some of the W3C’s own working groups) who have chosen to do their work in RELAX NG:
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Here’s a robots.txt file from a company whose software I’m currently evaluating:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /mantis/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /synk/unreg.html
Disallow: /synk/de/unreg.html
Disallow: /synk/fr/unreg.html
Disallow: /synk/it/unreg.html
Disallow: /synk/email.psn
Disallow: /synk/help/

This is from a small company whose main product is experiencing solid growth. In fact, they are growing so fast, they are having trouble responding to support e-mails and are consequently requesting that users check the FAQ list and read the forums before sending them e-mail. Keeping that in mind, can you tell what’s wrong with this robots.txt?
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The Xerces XML parser recently localized its error messages, which seems like a nice thing to do. However sometimes good actions have unintended consequences. It turns out the localized error messages are a lot harder to find with Google than the English ones. Paste an English exception message into Google, and you’ll probably find 10 people who have already had and solved your problem. But the same message in Greek or Croatian? Maybe not.
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Old Fortran weenies like me still remember with fondness (or loathing) RatFor. For those who don’t remember Fortran, you have to understand that it was the first compiled programming language. Consequently it made a lot of mistakes and had major design flaws. For instance, you couldn’t put anything except a line number or a comment marker in the first six characters of each line. That was a relic of its design for punched cards. (Remember those? Probably not if you’re under 40.) These design flaws weren’t trivial or academic problems. Spaceships could crash when you replaced a comma with a period, though the program would still compile.

RatFor was a 1970s era effort to clean up the language. It was an alternate syntax designed around the then hot-idea of structured programming. (OOP hadn’t escaped academia yet.) For instance, it added while loops and got rid of GOTO. It cleaned up the syntax by letting you write >= instead of .GE.. (Some of the early computers that Fortran ran on didn’t have lower case letters, much less angle brackets in their native character sets.) However, RatFor was compiled (more accurately preprocessed) to standard Fortran code, after which it used the same optimizers and libraries that standard Fortran did. That meant it was fully interoperable and could play in a world where not everyone was rational.

Fortran’s not the only language where this happens. For instance, JRuby is a way of writing Java code the Java VM in Ruby. That’s great if you like Ruby, but what if you actually like Java and just want to make it a little more rational? Well, as it so happens I just got an invitation to a Sun event on Monday where I expect Sun to finally pull the trigger and open source Java. Great. Let’s fork!
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Over long distances, airplanes are the fastest way to travel (at least until we invent teleportation) but over short distances that isn’t true. If you want to get from La Guardia Airport to O’Hare, take a plane; but if you want to go from La Guardia to JFK, take a cab. Over shorter distances still, a bicycle may beat a car; and over the shortest distances, the fastest way to get somewhere is usually walking. Terry Pratchett explained it well in Interesting Times:

Of the three things that most people know about the horse, the third is that over a short distance, it can’t run as fast as a man. As Rincewind had learned to his advantage, it has more legs to sort out.

You naturally choose your mode of transport according to the distance you plan to travel. A few hundred meters or less, walk. A kilometer or two, take a horse (or more likely these days, a bicycle). 10K to a few hundred kilometers, take a car. And beyond a few hundred kilometers, airplane is the fastest choice; and the longer the journey the better a choice it becomes.

Programming is much the same. Read the rest of this entry »