Can good SF go stale?

Came of across this blog entry, by Ian Sales. And I disagree with it's message, I must say.
From the post,

Readers new to the genre are not served well by recommendations to read Isaac Asimov, EE 'Doc' Smith, Robert Heinlein, or the like. Such fiction is no longer relevant, is often written with sensibilities offensive to modern readers, usually has painfully bad prose, and is mostly hard to find because it's out of print. A better recommendation would be a current author - such as Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, Iain M Banks, Ken MacLeod, Stephen Baxter, and so on.

The author later goes on to bash 'Nightfall'. He cites literary reasons, like bad character names and the lackluster world building (to use his phrase). That might be the case (but I disagree with that too, see here), but IMO it has nothing to do with old and new. There is good and bad in SF, but not old and new. A good SF is good regardless of the time of its publication, like any other good story. Surely, it may not incorporate the latest scientific breakthroughs, it may hurt our modern sensibilities, but that does not make it bad, it can still enlighten. So it may not be right to recommend only the new stuff to new guys. The point is well taken that a few classics have been overrated, but that doesn't mean we start putting an expiry date on SF. But that's my (an average SF fan) opinion anyway.

Don't miss this..

(Discovered this on the badastronomy blog).
Boston Globe has this cool new feature, 'The big picture'. Basically collections of high-res images on a variety of topics. And it's amazing.
I especially liked Views of Jupiter, Recent Volcanic Activity and Riding the waves. But every one of them is great.
Don't miss it.

" " (I mean quotes..)

Today I chanced upon reading a recent interview of Bjarne Stroustrup about the emerging standard for C++, named C++0x. I just skimmed through it, though noticed one interesting development. The type of a variable can now be deduced from the initializer. This uses the 'auto' keyword (it was there in C too, but did anybody use it?)

So you can write,
auto p = v.begin();
instead of
vector<string>::iterator p = v.begin();

I always disliked the second (and current) form, so I am quite happy that it can be avoided at least in some places. Bjarne also points out the 'overuse first and correct use later' transitions that new features seem to undergo. This seems true even for languages themselves.

Next, I pointed my browser to /. to see what the junta is saying, and it didn't disappoint me, I must say. A few gems..

C++ is to C as Lung Cancer is to Lung.

When C++ is your hammer, everything looks like a thumb.

C gives you enough rope to hang yourself. C++ gives you enough rope to hang yourself and every programmer who comes after you.

(It might be a good time to explicitly say that I am no C++ hater, I was a big C++ fan while in college (mostly because I had recently discovered STL), here however, I am just quoting /.)

It's fun. Longing for a bit more, I googled for 'C++ quotes' and stumbled upon this. Go read that page, it's really funny.

My favorite

One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.
-Robert Firth

And this one rings true..

COBOL was designed so that managers could read code.
BASIC was designed for people who are not programmers.
FORTRAN is for scientists.
ADA comes from a committee - a government committee no less.
PILOT is for teachers.
PASCAL is for students.
LOGO is for children.
APL is for Martians.
FORTH, LISP and PROLOG are specialty languages.
C, however, is for programmers.

-Al Stevens

Enjoy!!

From OSCON 2008 proceedings..

OSCON 2008 proceedings are now online (Ok, I discovered them today). Much stuff worth reading. One that I particularly liked was the presentation on 'Apprenticeships on Open Source' by Hoover and Tatnall (find it here).
They promote a apprentice-journeymen-master approach to the field of software. This approach has had phenomenal success with construction activities of the past (eg Buildings). The idea is to apply a similar approach to software construction. Looking at software more as an art than a science. And as the saying goes (I think it was DEK), "Everything we learn to do, we learn by doing", this seems to be true for the software field. But there are issues (which the authors identify). Finding skilled people who are willing to mentor and finding the resources (time, money etc). One thing that aided the masters of the past was that their construction activities were seen as a duty towards god. That probably took care of willingness and resources both. Such is clearly not the case with software.
But that doesn't mean the situation is hopeless. There are good people both willing to teach and to learn (or so I like to think). The thing is, YMMV. And you can always turn to master G.

Another good one is 'How to become Normal, A guide for developers' (here). Well, it is not what the title may suggest, but good nonetheless.

Also 'Ruby 1.9: what to expect' is a quite interesting one (here). It's heartening to see that "abcd"[2] will finally return "c" and not 99.

General Knowledge

Pune Mirror had a poll in yesterday's edition, the question was 'What will you do if you go on date with Abhinav Bindra?' (or something of this sort). The thing about these polls is, the results are mostly predictable. So I was surprised a bit by the results. The majority answer (76%) was 'I don't know who he is'. This is unbelievable. I mean, everybody is shouting Abhinav's name from their rooftops. Govts are announcing rewards, newspapers are overflowing with his praise, and I am sure, TV channels are not lagging (If anything, they might be leading this shouting race). So what might be the cause of these strange results? Statistical glitch? general ignorance? or just plain apathy towards non cricket sports? I would have liked to conduct a poll of my own on this matter. But seeing the amount of traffic here, that seems futile. (AFAIK Google crawlers don't vote on such polls :-p). But still I wonder..

Clearing my bloggestive tract!! (Hold your nose!!)

(Disclaimer: The title is borrowed from Steve.)

Books

I had not even heard the name 'Orson Scott Card' before a friend handed me 'Ender's game'. To be honest, the book irritated me in the beginning. Ender was too mature for his age (or so I thought), plus I found the character development to be lacking. But slowly, I grew to like the book, and by the time I finished it, I had turned into an Ender fan. It's more of a fiction than a science fiction, but Card is a good storyteller. Currently I am busy reading the next installment of the Ender series, 'Speaker for the dead'. Will tell you about it when I am done.

Movies

Praise has already been heaped on 'The Dark Knight', but I don't feel it is enough. Direction, action, dialogs, acting, music.. the movie rocks!! Joker is awesome (and creepy). And the Batman Bike is supercool. I especially liked the dark tone of the movie. Good that they chose not to target the movie to kids. Will probably watch it once again...

Also watched 'Singh is Kinng' last Friday. To be honest again, our expectations were not very high. Despite it (or maybe because of it), we liked the movie. Akshay Kumar is cool, plus I liked the characters of Mika and Pankaj. Just don't forget to switch off your logic circuits. The story (if you could find one) might melt them..

India's first gold in Olympics 2008

Today is a big day. Congratulations Abhinav...
That reminds me of some of the statistics I recently read in Times. US 2000+ medals in Olympics, India 17...
Man is there room for improvement!! But the signs are good so far..

Rains

It's raining cats and dogs here in Pune. Which basically means I had to sit alone in my room almost over the whole weekend. And it does not help that rains are a powerful carrier of nostalgia. So missed college and all the good things it brought a bit more than usual. I just hope the roads stay in shape.


Ohk.. Bloggestive tract cleared.. I feel lighter again...

So you want Facts?

Fact: An honest observation

-from Wiktionary

Here they are:-

Bruce Schneier Facts
My favorite:
'NP' means 'No Problem' if you are Bruce Schneier.

Rusty Russell Facts
My favorite:
Rusty Russell is the penguin that bit Linus.

Enjoy...