The retarded sacred cow of Web 2.0: online spreadsheets

So, first of all, the basic idea of a spreadsheet as it currently exists today is pretty lousy. Excel is a turd. Now consider the Ajax hacks that are supposed to pass as Excel substitutes. What a wonderful idea, imitating software that hasn’t seen significant innovation since VBA was introduced in the early 90s. Except a lot less powerful.

In even the lamest of spreadsheets, you can fly around a sheet with thousands of rows, using only keyboard shortcuts, moving around entire columns and rows effortlessly. Because of the ability to do large-scale manipulation, sorting, and so on, many people use Excel as a partial workaround for the fact that as a text editor Word is, remarkably, even worse than it is as at laying out and typesetting documents.

Can you do this with Google Sheets or DabbleDB, which has certain spreadsheet-like elements? No.

But ignore me. I’m wrong. Users never have spreadsheets longer than 50 rows. They’re perfectly happy to store their corporation’s unreleased financial figures at a remote data center they have no control over. This is Web 2.0!

How about instead making a numerical tableau manipulation environment that has some of the following features:

• Extensible in a fast, simple, customizable language so you can do things like data-driven estimation of distribution algorithms and Monte Carlo simulations without having to drop down to the plugin language (if you could get read/write Excel compatibility to work you could have all of Wall Street wrapped around your little finger). Think Stalin with reasonable compile times. Put a real library in there so you can do real work. Yes, I am advocating positioning Lisp as an extension language in an enduser product. It worked well for Emacs and AutoCAD. No, I don’t think having an indentation-based syntactic sugaring scheme of the kind found in Dylan and RTML makes prefix syntax more palatable.
• Version control. Not having this after 20 years of spreadsheet usage by businesses, and not having it well after the introduction of Sarbanes-Oxley, is unbelievably retarded.
• Real, programmable Internet connectivity. That means macho web scraping with information extraction algorithms from the literature along with brain-damaged-simple integration with web services.
• User-toggleable, user-extensible, first-class column/row constraints (“strongly-typed spreadsheets”) and other tools to reduce the probability of introducing errors in mature spreadsheets which are in maintenance mode.

Good luck bringing some real innovation to the boring, stale world of office suites in Javascript running on the browser, where even simple effects and operations bring a reasonably powerful computer to its knees.

(But it’s on the Web! There’s nothing to install!)

There’s also nothing worth using.

Another reason the Semantic Web will fail

The vast majority of the valuable information on the Internet is contained in unstructured formats.

Good luck getting it out safely and sanely, you poor bastards.

Dang you to heck

Attention, bloggers. This is the Internet. We are adults.

We can use words like “hell” and it’s OK.

Thank you.

Fair, balanced Metacircular Thoughts: What you must believe to be a Democrat, 2007 edition

• Governments elected on a death cult platform are friends to be courted.
• If only we took firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens, tragedies like the Columbine school shootings (which was carried with illegally purchased weapons) wouldn’t have occurred.
• If only we disarmed rural populations in developing countries, genocides like Rwanda (which was carried out to a significant degree with machetes) wouldn’t occur.
• If only we had more gun-free zones, tragedies like the Virginia Tech (a gun-free zone) shootings would never occur.
• Women, homosexuals, and others who feel they are in danger of being assaulted or mugged should battle it out in dark alleyways with 250-lb rapists/muggers/gaybashers rather than having an equalizer in the form of a concealed weapon. Moral righteousness is far more important than physical safety.
• The 1st Amendment is sacred and more relevant than ever. The 2nd Amendment is evil, outdated, and irrelevant.
• It’s possible to envision a future free of firearms. The weapon that has been a key element in all wars for the last 500 years can be uninvented, especially when in the past it was independently rediscovered by the Arabs, the Chinese, the Indians, and the Europeans.
• Open borders will enhance our quality of life. What would we do without ethnic restaurants?
• Open borders will enhance our quality of life. The racist Hispanic lynch mobs that cruise around Los Angeles looking for black children to kill are a blessing.
• Open borders will enhance our quality of life. Millions of anti-Semitic foreigners who don’t speak English and have a fourth-grade education will help America stay competitive in a future where knowledge and information are the key sources of value.

What you must believe to be a Republican, 2007 edition

• Believing in retarded 9/11 conspiracies makes you a persona non grata, but believing that 9/11 was a punishment from God for tolerating any belief system that isn’t fundamentalist Christian makes you a pious, respectable individual.
• Deviating from the party line even by a little, no matter how ridiculous the party line is, emboldens terrorists and endangers America. However, reckless, trillion-dollar wars that indirectly result in the death of tens of thousands of innocent people and destroy alliances with other countries make America stronger.
• America is a wonderful, free nation, which is why all decent people should have the good sense to keep their mouths shut if they disagree with military policy. Don’t they know that the troops died for their right to shut the fuck up?
• Muslims in the Middle East are too backward and uncivilized to appreciate noble Western notions of democracy, the sanctity of life, and the like. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a war so that the can experience the joys of democracy and civil liberties. What, you don’t think they can handle it?
• Because there are quite a few good things you can say about Israel, all the bad things its military does are irrelevant and untrue.

And finally, the most damning of them all:

Torturing people works and torture is a good way to fight terrorism.

See also What you must believe to be a Democrat, 2007 edition.

Committees don’t always produce bad technology

Well, friends, things have been busy lately. I have been up to my eyes in database processing and cleaning code. So, in lieu of deeper material, consider:

EJB2 and COBOL are often pointed to as examples of the dangers of design by committee. But, what about ANSI Common Lisp and Haskell? I ask you. Interestingly, both were intended to unify and reduce unnecessary diversity in programming languages of a particular variety, so they built on a lot of prior art, none of which was designed by committee.

I have plans to write about natural language processing and evolutionary computation in Scala. Stay tuned, babies.

If the Semantic Web depends on the availability of massive amounts of high-quality metadata

Then it won’t and can’t possibly work.

You know why?

BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE MOTHERFUCKING RETARDED MORONS AND COULDN’T PRODUCE QUALITY DATA IF THEIR LIVES FUCKING DEPENDED ON IT.

And all the propellerhead articles and theories and software and other bullshit in the world won’t change that fact.

Have a look at any publicly available set of data and try getting quality without paying through the fucking nose. Good luck, dumbass.

No, I’m not frustrated by my job at all, why do you ask?

What do you get in a commercial Common Lisp implementation?

Commercial Common Lisp implementations like LispWorks and Allegro Common Lisp cost thousands of dollars. What do you get in them which isn’t included in SBCL or something, which costs $0?

• ACL has AllegroCache, a true object database which has ACID transactions and scales to billions of objects. It is used transparently and integrates seamlessly with CLOS, Common Lisp’s ridiculously powerful object system. Depending on the project, this alone could be worth thousands of dollars.
• LW and ACL have fast embedded Prolog compilers which seamlessly integrates with everything else in the distribution, including AllegroCache. LW actually gives you a full-blown expert system IDE (which is LW’s distinguishing feature as it doesn’t have an object database). In the ’80s, the kind of expert system functionality LW provides costed thousands of 1980s dollars.
• Good cross-platform support so that you don’t run into the kind of problems the reddits had when working between Mac OS X and FreeBSD.
• Libraries for web programming: XML/SOAP/WSDL/yadda yadda parsers, HTML parsers, a Lispish web application server and HTTP server, and easy libraries for all major networking protocols bundled in.
• Cross-platform GUI libraries which are good enough for prototyping “programmer interfaces”.
• Database libraries: ODBC, MySQL, Postgresql, Oracle.
• Excellent foreign function interfaces for C libraries.
• ACL provides OLE/COM linkage and examples of things like creating a simple CLOS layer for working with Excel.
• Linkage to Java and/or .NET (e.g., jLinker and full support for RDNZL), which, together with the C FFI, means you can easily use code written in all the most popular languages.
• Native threading (I guess you don’t get this), Unicode, and other oft-neglected but essential stuff.
• Abundant working examples and comprehensive, helpful documentation for all of this.
• All these libraries are bundled in, they work, they’re efficient, and they are supported.

All Common Lisp distributions give you efficient implementations of CLOS, a metacircular multiple-dispatch multiple-inheritance object system with an amazing metaobject protocol, as well as mini-languages for pretty-printing and iteration. SBCL, LispWorks, and ACL all have optimizing native-code compilers that give you performance somewhere between C and Java. SLIME, LW, and ACL provide IDEs matched only by Squeak in power.

Clearly if you pay $3,000 or however much, you’re getting a helluva lot more than just an implementation of a spec from 1984.

Easter egg in SWI Prolog

?- True.
% ... 1,000,000 ............ 10,000,000 years later
%
%       >> 42 << (last release gives the question)