Watch the video:

I love this phrase:

And everyone must breathe
Until their dying breath

And my favourite bit:

You peer inside yourself
You take the things you like
And try to love the things you took

And then you take that love you made
And stick it into some
Someone else’s heart
Pumping someone else’s blood

And walking arm in arm
You hope it don’t get harmed
But even if it does
You’ll just do it all again

Being casual may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on who you are targeting. But being unprofessional is never a good thing.

<Edit: I’ve taken off the rant about a particular website that I had here.>

The worrying thing is that this kind of unprofessional-ism is all too common among Indian startups. (Even my own company’s corporate website is an offender. At least we are not trying to use it as the forefront of our offerings. But that’s not an excuse.) We need to buckle up and get our act straightened out.

Now, I’m no spelling/grammar Nazi. Heck, my grammar sucks and I look up spellings on Google at least five times a day. But that’s no excuse for putting up a public website that is sprinkled with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Your website is an indicator of how professionally you handle everything else.

Here are some concrete suggestions (based on my observations):

• Use a spell-checker. They are now integrated into most of the modern Web Browsers. It’s unfortunate that I even have to state this.
• Don’t write “its” when you mean “it’s”. Or “thats” when you mean “that’s”.
• Don’t write “few” when you mean “a few“. Or “little” when you mean “a little“.
• Use apostrophes correctly (hat-tip to Varum M).

I’ll keep updating this list. You can make suggestions in the comments.

It doesn’t take a lot to avoid these mistakes. Please do.

I’ve been wanting to learn a functional programming (FP) language for quite a while now.

Ruby being my current fav programming language while also being malleable to FP, I thought I will dabble with some FP in Ruby. But that was not to be. While Ruby does have some basic features like closures that are necessary for FP (although it does not boast of a a lot of clarity), one has to go through a lot of hooplas to achieve immutability — the language offers no assistance here. The following video provides a good overview of what it takes to do FP using Ruby: Better Ruby through Functional Programming by Dean Wampler.

With Ruby out, I now needed a language that embraced FP wholeheartedly. And there is no dearth of choices here; see the Functional Languages category on Wikipedia. I decided to narrow down the list by picking up the more popular and/or adopted languages. This left me with Clojure, Common Lisp, Erlang, F Sharp, Haskell and Scala (but many don’t seem to consider Scala to be truly functional). That’s still too many languages. But the list is small enough that I could learn enough about each of these languages to be able to pick one that I want to learn right now.

Clojure: Lisp dialect, dynamically typed, runs on JVM (and embraces it; implying that any Java library can be used with Clojure with little extra effort), great community. Moreover, it is embraced by my company (one of our very important backend platforms is written mostly in Clojure). More on Clojure later.

Common Lisp: The oldest of them all, dynamically typed, really cool. But too many parens for my liking!

Erlang: Runs on its own rock solid concurrent runtime system, offers distributed concurrency for free, dynamically typed, allows hot swapping and…

Meanwhile, back at Ericsson, some Erlang-based products that were already in progress when the “ban” went into effect came to market, including the AXD 301, an ATM switch with 99.9999999 percent reliability (9 nines, or 31 ms. downtime a year!), which has captured 11% of the world market. The AXD 301 system includes 1.7 million lines of Erlang: This isn’t just some academic language.

(from: Erlang in BYTE.com; emphasis mine.)

F Sharp: Runs on the CLR (.NET Framework).

Haskell: Pure FP language, static typing.

Scala: Runs on JVM, static typing. Very complicated type system, from what I hear.

The above is obviously not a very thorough overview of the languages. It was not my intention to develop an overview at all; I just gathered enough information to be able to make a decision.

I like dynamic typing, working on Linux. My company’s main platform is the JVM. I mostly write Information Retrieval (IR) software and a lot of IR libraries are in Java. Clojure!

But I also like Erlang. I’ll get to it after I have tamed Clojure. And I also want to learn R programming language so that I can implement statistical algorithms with ease.

But what’s the point of this blog post? Nothing. I plan to blog a bit about FP in general and Clojure in particular and thought that it would be nice to provide some context. Also, I wanted to document at least part of the decision making process I have been through for picking up Clojure.

(Yes, I’m preaching. Only for today.)

Social networks — Facebook in particular — have created a super-culture of show-off. So when it’s the Indian Independence Day, everyone wants to show off how patriotic they are. In come shouts of “Proud to be an Indian.” The following ad by Airtel is an embodiment of all such sentiments:

(Make no mistake, they’re not talking about parental pride here. That I don’t have a problem with.)

This annoys me to no end. I just don’t get how anyone is able to take pride in something to which their own contribution has been an absolute zilch. I can understand a feeling of greatfulness. Or reverence. Or even happiness. But pride? How can you ever be proud of something you were merely born into? This applies to taking pride in a country as much as taking pride in a religion, caste or family.

PS: Lest somebody misunderstands me: I love India as much as anyone else, I’m happy to be here and would rather be here than anywhere else.

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny , and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge , not wholly or in full measure , but very substantially . At the stroke of the midnight hour , when the world sleeps , India will awake to life and freedom . A moment comes , which comes but rarely in history , when we step out from the old to the new , when an age ends , and when the soul of a nation , long suppressed , finds utterance . Its fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity .

At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest , and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success and her failures . Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength . We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again . The achievement we celebrate today is but a step , an opening of opportunity , to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us . Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future ?

The glaringly obvious problem: there is a space before every comma, full stop and question mark. It is so obvious only because your brain wasn’t expecting it; the brain has certain ideas about how these should be used which clashes with how the above snippet uses them. I call this conflict cognitive dissonance of the comma.

(I do realize that cognitive dissonance may not be the most appropriate term to use here. However, it’s pretty close and makes it sound like I know what I’m talking about. Maybe I do.)

Now, I’m not suggesting that people are going around thinking “this is how a comma should be used” all the time. Neither am I suggesting that people will have any problem in understanding the above — our brain is capable of ignoring such aberrations to some extent, thus allowing us to understand what is being said. But years of setting expectations for the brain takes its toll. When expectation isn’t met the brain takes notice, at least at a sub-concious level. I can’t imagine a prose where you would want to divert the reader’s attention towards the punctuation — the only accomplishment would be to take away some of the focus from the message.

I have heard some very amusing reasons for why people continue to use punctuation like this. The common theme seems to be: “I like it this way. I find text more readable when it is this way.” Great, so your brain is wired differently from most other people; nothing wrong with that. But the question you need to ask yourself is: “Who am I writing for? For myself or for others?”

Another mistake in the above reproduction — one that is not as obvious but far more common — is the use of “its” where “it’s” should have been used. http://www.its-not-its.info/ does a great job at explaining the difference, so I’ll not attempt to repeat it here. In summary: “it’s” is just short for “it is” and “its” indicates possessiveness.

Yet another mistake that I notice being made very often (this is not present in the above snippet): using “few” when one means “a few.” This is a big problem because the meaning is the exact opposite! “Few” has a negative connotation, indicating an almost complete absence where as “a few” has a positive connotation, indicating the presence of something. This discussion at the EnglishForums.com offers some good examples: Difference between ‘few’ and ‘a few’. Here are a few posts from PluGGd.in, a popular blog on Indian startups, where this mistake has been made in the title of the post itself:

• Few Questions Before We Say GoodBye to Yahoo! Search
• Content Seeding: Few Great Lessons from Twitter and FriendFeed
• Bridging the Divide between Enterprise and Startups – Few Ideas
• Why Seasonality Matters? Few Lessons from Google
• MouthShut launches Mobile Reviews..Few Questions?

(My intention for pointing to PluGGd.in is only to show how common this mistake is, not to pick on them; Ashish, the guy who runs the blog, is a friend.)

When PluGGd.in says “Content Filtering: Few Great Lessons from Twitter and FriendFeed,” it seems like they want to say that Twitter and FriendFeed have done a terrible job and offer almost no lessons we can use, when, in fact, they list out some very good lessons they have gleaned out for us!

PS: This post is shorter than 140 characters. It should have been a tweet.

Shoes — A cross-platform Ruby graphics toolkit.

I had given up on developing desktop applications, mainly because they were running out of fashion. But also because the tools involved were a good deal of pain to use (and I’m no fan of pain.) So when I came across these two cool frameworks/toolkits that allow desktop app development in Ruby, my brain directed my mouth to exhale a “sweeeeeeeet!”

Yes, I enjoy programming in Ruby, more than programming in any other language. Yes, that is in spite of that fact that I’m pretty darn bad at it.

I like Bowline more than I like Shoes, so I’m going to talk only about it (but let me just say that in trying to be extra-cool, Shoes has rendered their website virtually information-less; proof in point: their about page mentions Ruby exactly once, in the last line, and that too just in passing.)

I came across Bowline through this article, which also shows off a simple Twitter app developed using it. Like the article says, “Twitter apps are the new ‘Hello World’!”

Apart from the fact that it uses Ruby as the programming language, the thing I like most about Bowline is that it uses HTML/JS for the view. I have been creating websites at the pace of a Ninja for a few years now and this much I can say: while HTML/JS is less expressive than regular desktop GUI toolkits, it is far easier to express the interface in it. And don’t forget intuitive. Well, at least for me it is.

Bringing MVC architecture to desktop app development is also commendable. Since the time I started developing websites using Rails/Sinatra (which almost force one to use an MVC architecture), I have never looked back. I believe this is the way to develop applications. At least until someone comes up with an even better way. (To be sure, there are several GUI toolkits that also encourage MVC architectures to some extent or other; for example: QT4 and above, Adobe Flex, Java Swing, MFC, Cocoa/AppKit etc.)

All I need now is an idea for a desktop app and I can start exploring Bowline. Sweeeeeeeet!

While I was at it, I also got myself a new domain name and pointed to it to that page: www.siddhartha-reddy.com. Among other things, this has helped me reclaim the top position for a search of my name on Google I’m using the new domain for the home page and the old domain for everything else; this is made possible by some pretty slick Apache mod_rewrite rules.

In other news, I’m planning to get back to regular blogging. Let’s see how that goes.