FSF Weekend

I attended the FSF Meeting. I had a good time as I often do. Ben Klemens was my favorite speaker. I was sorry to not see Eben Moglen or Gerald Sussman.

It was interesting that some people seemingly new to the organization had misread the philosophy and were driving themselves mad with it. E.g. one person asked if it was unethical for him to use packets that went through routers running non-free software. The consensus was that he'd drive himself crazy worrying about that sort of thing and boycotting businesses that choose to use non-free software is silly. It's the service provider's choice and the non-freedom of their equipment is their problem. They are the victims of proprietary software, not the users. Furthermore if you're at your friend's house and want to borrow his computer to look something up and you use proprietary software you can still be a member of the Church of Emacs. Lighten up. There are better things you can do to help the FSF than seek purity like some sort of ascetic while annoying your friends.

I ran into a friend who shared some cool things that he's into: the Kinesis Advantage Pro and javascript. Everyone knows about javascript but after talking with him about what he's up to with it I realize that I was too dismissive of it in the past. I've known how handy it is when combined with web services (buzzword intentionally omitted) but I didn't know it was such a nice language in itself. It was written by a Lisper and supports higher order functions, lexical closures and other lisp similarities. He showed me some code which was dispatching event handlers within closures and I'm inspired. I'm going to learn more javascript. He said there weren't any great javascript books, especially for a lispy style, but that O'Reilly's book is decent.

I also ran into another friend who mentioned that ruby is not context-free and that its developers were unable to add a new syntax because they didn't understand the consequences of this. He said they even reported a bug to bison.