“learning”

This is from Douglas Crockford’s Survey of Javascript (never program JS without your Crockford!). I thought it quirky at first, surprisingly helpful later. (Emphases added.)

Short-circuit logical operators are a well-known, simple idiom in several languages, but they can sometimes be confusing to read, specially when nested. What I want to point out here is that next time you have to go through code that uses them, try reading them as guard or default, as the case may be. You’ll grok^EE them immediately, trust me.

Isn’t it striking, the power of names?

Por diversos avatares del destino tuve hoy que imprimir incontables resmas^RAE a doble cara y me sorprendio mucho que fuera una extraña odisea. Desesperado acudi a la red y lo unico que encontre digno de destacarse es este articulo de HP España confuso, rollero, y comercialoide (“Impresión a doble cara en Microsoft Word 2000, por los árboles, por su espalda, por su dinero”). Para colmo, ni un pinche diagramilla perdido. Despues de muchas iteraciones y mucha hoja perdida, le haye el feeling a esto, asi que aqui va, por todo aquel que venga:

As I said on a previous post, I believe Spanish, my mother tongue, has a low status on the web. And as I laid there pondering the subjectivity of my assessment, I remembered Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi^WP’s fascinating account of how (and why) he became a scientist (it appears in John Brockman’s excellent Curious Minds^AM, a compilation of similar tales by top-notch scientists and a sure recommendation to anyone).

The particular anecdote that came to mind was when he and a friend quarrelled over whose neigborhood was the more communist (the matter was relevant because he was living in Italy and the country was then in political turmoil). Their brilliant analytic idea to try to settle the question was to count out the circulation of the left- and right-leaning newspapers in each of their neighborhoods’s newsstands. This of course sent them into all sorts of interesting statistical considerations, but it put them on the path of finding the subtle answers to their question, and it was certainly better than “the hocus-pocus most adults rely on to bolster their arguments”.

So I want to try to do something similar with my question—what is the linguistic vitality in the web of 14 languages?—and this post will be the beginning of my investigation. For reasons of practicality and personal bias, the 14 languages I’m going to settle to are: English^WP, German^WP, French^WP, Polish^WP, Japanese^WP, Dutch^WP, Italian^WP, Swedish^WP, Portuguese^WP, Spanish^WP, Farsi^WP, Chinese^WP, Esperanto^WP, and Hindi^WP.

I didn’t think much of this essay the first time around but it has worked its way into my head since. The distinction it makes, between perfection-oriented and performance-oriented individuals is crucial and thought-provoking. Read it.

I just finished reading Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Put simply, I’m floored. They were both deep, beautiful books, and, particularly interesting for me, both were superb criticisms (of, respectively, information design and comics). They both self-consciously embarked on the hard task of developing taste, of teaching how to see.

My current appreciation (read infatuation) of criticism has been long coming but perhaps inevitable. As far as I can now grok, there are two and only two genres of education: education in skill and education in taste. Every other truly educational book is a critique.

School would do well to acknowledge this. Skill is how to do, criticism is how to see. Both are pointless without one another and a great mistake of modern education is to concern itself only with the former. It doesn’t generally think of pupils as criticism-capable, which is bollocks, and, much more harmfully still, it perverts criticism by trying to cast it as a skill. That’s how you get to rote equation solving or sickening memorization of periods of literature and its important figures.

A week ago I learned two friends are coming from the US this July 21: that means empty cases. Two happy days later and hundreds of dollars less: 38 books on shipping parcels from Amazon. Book shopping is a pleasure in and of itself (I’m rarely this happy!), and hereforward’s my list (which is quite an intimate thing to share—it’s the perfect psychological text, if you know how to read it).

It’s one of those moments when my head spins, twirls, swirls, and whirls. I’ve been seriously reading JS, CSS, and UI, since yesterday but it was just a couple of hours that it all came together. Let’s begin this Bushean trail with Ashley Pond V’s mindblowing, free web-book Developing Featherweight Web Services with Javascript. Then hop on to Sergio Pereira’s excellent Developer Notes for prototype.js. (Prototype.js, if you must know, is the JS framework.) Glen Murphy (recent googler) has a lot of interesting JS projects up his sleeve (say, this clock), and if you want clarity in this muddleheaded webworld, read everything you can find from Douglas Crockford (recent Yahoo)—all he’s written on JS is gobble-up-worthy, specially recommended are Prototypal Inheritance in JavaScript (it’s so short and yet it will change completely how you write JS) and Private Members in JavaScript (a wonderfully clear and short overview of JS object-orientedness). Did you know about JSON (Javascript Object Notation)? One last word on JS coding (and learning), please don’t do it without an HTML Real-Time Editor, a Javascript Shell, and a Javascript Development Environment—just don’t.

Yahoo! has a pretty nice UI blog going on (a couple of days ago, for instance, they did a nice post on the Patterns Behind the Yahoo! Home Page Beta) and they recently released an awesome Pattern Library (Yahoo! is becoming pretty cool lately… at least for developers). UI patterns seem to be all the rage these days and deservedly so. Jenifer Tidwell recent O’reilly, Designing Interfaces, looks set to become a classic (and some very worthwhile excerpts are available online). Out in the wild web, there’s even a pattern of how to build patterns, an interesting conversation on patterns here (intro, 1, 2, 3, 4), and Nine Tips for Designing Rich Internet Applications to which I wholeheartedly agree.

Doesn’t it just floor you how smart and fast things are becoming?

OK, back to work.

Out of college but still smack in the very-naive-but-pretentious-worldviews phase.