Matt Hellige / blog

I find this argument pretty interesting. I'm ashamed to admit that I never thought about this before:

I don’t understand the resistance to the idea that the homosexuality taboo is about sexism. Homosexuality and deviation from gender norms (which, of course, are relentlessly hierarchical) are so tightly connected with each other in popular culture that each is normally and easily taken as a marker for the other. A "faggot" or a "dyke" is a person who fails to conform to normal gender norms; the term is routinely applied to people without regard to their sexual behavior.

I don't find the argument completely convincing (and I don't find the hypothetical about "miscegenosexual couples" as preposterous as I'm apparently meant to), but it's clearly an important aspect of this form of discrimination that deserves to be more widely recognized and addressed.

If you're a US resident, join up (more here). In case you aren't yet thoroughly enraged and disgusted, see here and then join up. What we really ought to demand is an accounting, but at a minimum we should have a commitment. SON OF A BITCH MUST PAY.

Three days of JavaOne was enough to completely sour me on the entire idea of programming. I'm not really sure what did it. But then I made the right decision and went to the BayFP meeting. I left feeling quite rejuvenated, my faith in humanity and love of programming fully restored.

The first two days of JavaOne have been precisely as expected. Big, silly, lots of hype. But there's been some good stuff as well. The big hype efforts this year seem to be around JavaFX and Glassfish. I don't care about JavaFX at all, and as far as I can tell, nobody really does. But my sample is surely biased. Glassfish looks like a good direction, but we've all seen Spring and OSGI, so I think it's a fairly obvious direction at this point. There's also lots of hype about the JVM running on all kinds of devices, but so what?

Donald Knuth:

If people do discover nice ways to use the newfangled multithreaded machines, I would expect the discovery to come from people who routinely use literate programming. Literate programming is what you need to rise above the ordinary level of achievement. But I don’t believe in forcing ideas on anybody. If literate programming isn’t your style, please forget it and do what you like. If nobody likes it but me, let it die.

I guess that means Haskell programmers... Sounds about right to me!

(For the record, I know he intends something considerably more sophisticated than lhs, but anyway it's closer than almost everything else. In any case, it's a nice interview. What a guy...)

Saw Stars of the Lid last night. Completely awesome, highly recommended.

Stanley Fish has been on a roll. This week's column is pretty awesome:

The difference is that I feel a little dirty just for having repeated a scurrilous rumor even as I rejected it. Apparently Obama’s two opponents have no such qualms and are happily retailing, and wallowing in, the dirt.

And more, now from ABC:

Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.

According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

This post from Jack Balkin about the (lack of) possibility of war crimes prosecution makes me really sad and frustrated. More accountability for current officials is precisely the thing I want most from the new administration. Congress hasn't delivered. The new President won't deliver. It's disgusting and shameful. What are we supposed to do?

"...how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions."

More interesting conversation on Roly Perera's blog, happening at a glacial pace over the course of some months. This is connected to Kiczales' OOPSLA keynote and the ensuing discussion. My comment is long, but I'll copy a bit here, because I think it captures my current thinking about this question:

In my last post, I translated the first part of Data types a la carte into Scala. I decided to push ahead into the next section, just for fun. The summary is: Scala's implicits are a very poor man's type classes, at least using the obvious encoding, and I am as always humbled by the cleverness of GHC.