I like Joe’s Goals and I’m glad to see that Ian Smith is making something out of it. On top of that, I never even noticed that it was written in ColdFusion and, at the end of the day, I don’t care. Obviously someone’s choice of programming languages is like their choice of pizza toppings and people agree and disagree about those things all the time.
Of course none of that changes the fact that ColdFusion is rubbish. AJAX widgets or not, it’s based on Java, which means that it’s full of memory leaks. Why? Abysmal garbage collection (wait, it has garbage collection?) ColdFusion has some things about it that are very likable. Among them:
- Really sweet SQL query inline syntax
- Tag-based statements mingle effortlessly with HTML
- Easier to learn than Chinese checkers
Unfortunately, it’s horrendously inefficient in manipulating text, has the least consistent syntax of any language I’ve ever used (example: structkeyexists takes the arguments structure followed by key, whereas find takes the arguments substring followed by string. Why couldn’t they have put the thing you’re looking for either first or second in both cases? It’s hard to remember syntax when it’s full of exceptions), and is rife with logical oddities that you don’t find in any other language (example: the literal string “no” evaluates to false, though all other literal strings evaluate to true. The compare and comparenocase functions return some weird comparative result, so if the two strings are the same, the result is negative, which fills your code with tests like NOT comparenocase(). None of that would be necessary if the EQ operator wasn’t twice as slow as comparenocase at comparing strings. I’m glad they thought that one out fully.)
I use ColdFusion daily and I derive much pleasure from solving programming problems and implementing efficient solutions in any language, but sometimes it gets under my skin!
Tonight on NBC, the first episode of their new “reality” show, Age of Love, will air. The concept? Get a few girls in their ’20s and a few girls in their ’40s and pit them against one another to win the favor of a 30-something tennis star.
It’s the same “reality” show formula we’ve seen before: impose surreal emotional constraints on a group of people and air seemingly candid footage of them all clashing with one another. I guess this holds a great deal of interest for the regular viewers of the Jerry Springer show, who comprise fully 99% of the American population (I fear). Why would anyone want to watch this? How is this realistic or dramatic?
What sucks the entertainment value out of these shows for me is exactly how premeditated the clashes between people seem. You know they’re coached into having disagreements and then filmed “candidly” while they fight it out. For some reason, the mainstream television-watching population derives a great deal of pleasure from watching other people who are angry.
What is it about anger, strife, disagreement, and fighting that is so attractive? Why do people tune in the Jerry Springer show to watch a whole new group of people fight over who their child’s real father is every day? Don’t we have enough anger and strife in the real world? Must we vent our irritations vicariously through these staged clashes?
The truth is, more people will probably watch Age of Love than vote in the presidential elections. It’s no wonder people are so angry.
New data released by the federal government reveals that a tremendous number of people have received farm subsidies. People who are not farmers. People who don’t even own farm land. They own land, sure, but they don’t farm on it.
An article on examiner.com boils down some of this new information for you.
It is my staunch belief that the majority of social issues can be resolved by the free market. Time and time again we have found that the free market is an effective arbiter of disputes, but the definition of subsidy is to override the free market, and therefore sabotage its capacity to do so.
Not only does this new farm subsidy data demonstrate rather clearly that the entire system is corrupt (paying out subsidies to completely undeserving parties), but it reminds me just how distasteful I find the federal government’s meddling in the affairs of the marketplace. Toss David Letterman $8,000 because he owns a ranch somewhere? I think not.
MySpace: a place for “friends.” Is that what they call themselves now? Thanks to Colin Poitras at the Hartford Courant:
Christopher Montefusco 30, of West Haven, was taken into custody Thursday by state Department of Correction officials. He was one of what is now believed to be more than 200 sex offenders in Connecticut using MySpace. He had registered two different profiles of himself on the site, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said.
Evidently the terms of Christopher’s parole had forbidden him from using “social networking” sites. Whoops. Finally, a reliable news source confirms what I always suspected: MySpace is full of stalkers and idiots. Please, someone, reassure me that MySpace is not a statistically accurate cross-section of the American population.