Small Thoughts

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends.

— Anton Ego, Ratatouille

John Gruber at Daring Fireball had this to say about Verizon dropping their unlimited data plans:

If you use more than 2 GB per month you’re going to pay more, but this strikes me as fair, because most people don’t use that much data.

I can’t understand this viewpoint at all. $30 for 2 GB, $80 for 10, and $10 for every GB over your allotment? How can he think that’s fair? And even if it’s true that most people don’t use that much data right now, aren’t phones becoming people’s primary computers? What happens when they want to start using it like their desktop, streaming music with Pandora or watching videos on Netflix and YouTube?

This seems to me a very shortsighted view, and I’m sad to hear it from somebody with as much reach as Mr. Gruber.

Today, many programmers believe that this complexity is best managed by using only a small set of well-understood techniques in their programs. They have composed strict rules about the form programs should have, and the more zealous among them will denounce those who break these rules as bad programmers.

What hostility to the richness of programming! To try to reduce it to something straightforward and predictable, to place a taboo on all the weird and beautiful programs. The landscape of programming techniques is enormous, fascinating in its diversity, still largely unexplored. It is certainly littered with traps and snares, luring the inexperienced programmer into all kinds of horrible mistakes, but that only means you should proceed with caution, keep your wits about you.

From the introduction to Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke.

Jeffrey Zeldman recently made the first post on Happy Cog’s new blog, Cognition. It’s basically a “hello world” post, but two things have a lot of people talking about it. First, the blog has a great design. The other, more interesting thing is that they decided to let Twitter and other people’s blogs host their comments, letting you post to Twitter right from their site and showing all of the tweets in their comments section.

It’s an interesting experiment, and I’m curious to see how it turns out. It could be a new form of TrackBack which, as mccreath said, is a great idea that never really seemed to catch on, and I’d love to see it make a comeback. It is using the web the way it has always worked, linking from one page to another to make a larger conversation. Distribute the conversation instead of keeping it all on one site, then link to it.

It’s tough to tell how Twitter will work for that at this point, since most of the comments on their first article are of the “How does this work?” and “Cool idea!” variety. We’ll see how things look when that has started to wear off.