This is a post I should have written yesterday, actually, since it is already June, ready for the next “Language of the Month“. Still, let’s finish off this May Edition.
Taking score
First, I should have spent more time on practicing Scala, as I haven’t actually finished anything in the end. It is probably an excuse, but after using Python for such a long time, getting used to a compiled language with its own weird path-, naming- and import conventions, was just a little bit too much. Mostly I was reading the Pragmatic Bookshelf: Programming Scala, practicing the examples within. That book uses Scala 2.7.x and the current version is 2.9.0.1, so there are a few things that work differently and I ended up having strange error messages with little to no clue how to fix them (mostly imports, and some method signatures must have changed as well). So it was a limited but exciting success.
Using them example code
All in all, I liked the language even if I don’t have a clear usage case for it in my mind (just yet). Some bullet-points of my experience:
Good
Different way of thinking about “batch” operations (i.e. foldLeft)
Once I figure out the Actors that well that I can write related code without referring to the tutorials, that’s going to be a very powerful tool
Pattern matching, pattern matching everything. This is one thing that blown my mind in the little Haskell I checked so far, and missing from Python a lot.
Flexibility with class definitions, they can handle so many different situations in a very logical and powerful way
Bad
Length of compilation and program start. Will have to get used to it, though I read some hints that this can be improved.
Ugly
Pretty frequent need of using things directly from Java, so one is never quite independent
Special methods that have reserved name for certain functionality (act, apply, …) that are non-obvious, and not easily distinguished from the arbitrarily defined methods.
Future
Definitely will come back to it and learn it in more detail. It looks like a fine language to do parts of larger projects in. In the meantime I will update the link collection in the previous post with new links that I find. I certainly notice more and more Scala posts on Hacker News these days.
For the last 3 weeks or so I was checking out Scala, and will do for a little while more, so just want to do a little catch up where things are at the moment.
Start
I tried to find a couple of starting points to start to know about Scala. First thought video tutorials or talks would be useful, so been around checking on YouTube. It seems the mainly referenced intro is Scala: a scalable language. Well, it told me a lot about how Scala compares to other languages and how is it better than those, but not much to start learning it. Though the talk made it sound like it is one of the best and most modern languages out there, taking the most useful ideas from loads of other languages.
Had a copy of the Pragmatic programmer: Programming Scala, and just finished going through it. By that I mean that skimmed all the chapters and did try some of the code samples that looked interesting or strange. Not bad, but from the book I just have a very limited answer to the question of: “but what is it really great for?” Concurrency, sure, but that is probably not all.
I don’t know a language before I code enough in it, but before I know it I don’t have to much inspiration what to code. In this case, programming puzzle sites come very handy, though not all of them support Scala. I went to Coderloop because they do and I can submit my solution for performance testing, or could use Project Euler because they are language agnostic (one sends the results only).
Experience
Since Scala is built upon the Java Virtual Machine and supports pretty much all of Java, it feels a little Frankenstein language: every now and then, even for some things that should be quite commonly used, things have to be programmed in Java. Lots of language features are cool, though, even if most of it feels just syntactic sugar. In a way, maybe the whole language is just that? It’s not bad, makes things very concise and powerful, but always feels there’s something more in the background.
Actors and concurrency are pretty cool, though. In the talks I’ve seen people compared them to Erlang, just even more powerful. This is something more to play around with, would like to make something interesting, scalable and fault-tolerant – those are the fun stuff aren’t they? (But this also makes me want to try Erlang soon so I can compare).
Since I was doing mostly Python lately, it feels a bit weird to use a compiled language. For simple programs, it takes quite a long time to do that compilation, enough to wind me up a little when I was troubleshooting. That said, maybe I’m doing a little bit too much “programming by accident“, so I deserve it? Also, starting a Scala program takes a while as well, though once it is up and running, it’s pretty fast.
At this point, I’m not totally sure yet what project to make until the end of the month. I need more programming itches to scratch. The only ideas I came up so far are self-playing games with actors. Or some server/provider. Well, just keep brainstorming, something better has to come up. Maybe when I dive a little bit more into it, since at the moment I cannot really “think Scala” yet.
There’s also a web framework for it, called Lift, which is probably not surprising. The close connection wit Java (and hence with so many of enterprise software) and event based, fault tolerant concurrency is just too juicy. Not sure if anyone’s hosing it, tough (got to check out), either way I can just try it on my local network. I wonder how does it compare to Django, since that’s what I have a bit of experience with.
This is the kind of thing I read so many times on Hacker News: someone manages a “page” on Facebook, only to have it disabled/deleted one day, out of the blue. The difference is that this time it was the page I was managing.
A few years back I took over the page for Inkscape, and updated it every now and then. Quite enjoyed it and even a relatively small following (3774 at the last count I had) people were very active. Then this week once when I logged in and wanted to send out an update – I just couldn’t find the page. Disappeared from the search, from the control panel, everywhere. I could only see the page that was created from its Wikipedia article, and there was the Inkscape “group” which is much smaller.
Draw up some good stuff with Inkscape
I was looking around for a long time for a support contact, and there was practically nothing. It’s a hell of a challenge for coming up with Google search keywords because there’s just too much noise for Facebook + support related terms (that’s a pretty bad sign). In the end I go to this form, that supposed to be used to report problems with a page. Too bad half of it I couldn’t fill out. What is my page’s web address? I don’t know, it was “on Facebook”. What happened to it? Have no idea, I haven’t had any notice about it. Attach a screenshot. I wish I could but did I mention that it disappeared? Anyway, after submission I’ve been told that I’ll receive an email and it is crucial to act on it, otherwise the procedure won’t go forward. That’s been 4 days ago, and no email since.
Contingencies
By now I have given up on getting it back, it’s just does not worth the effort. On the other hand, I do have another page, Ignite Taipei which we manage/organize together with a couple of friends. That would hurt much more if that would disappear, especially because there’s not much presence elsewhere on the net just yet.
Strange, but actually this whole issue bothers me much less than it would have about a year ago, even if I got locked into Facebook even more. Maybe I know now better that shit will always hit the fan, whatever you do, just have to be prepared for it.
Please exit in an orderly fashion
So, how about extending the idea of the World Backup Day to social identities? How can I prepare to lose the least in case my pages or even my profile gets blocked/hacked/deleted?
The personal information is the most valuable, who are my friends and how to reach them. Should write a script that can run somewhere in the background, backing that info up periodically. At least names and emails. Maybe even import them into GMail contacts right away…
Establish links with people outside of Facebook. I already use email instead of Facebook messages whenever I can, now I have to extend that really to everyone.
Build a proper site / blog for the pages I’m involved with and make people aware of it. Always have a point of contact outside of FB.
…. what else did I forget? (leave me a message in the comments if you have more idea)
Why Facebook?
Do I ever fret that Google might block me? That Tumblr would delete my stuff? That Twitter removes my account? Nope, didn’t even really occur to me, they are “not like that”. On the other hand, the power Facebook has over online identities makes people cringe. Why are they different? I feel it’s because they not at all transparent in their decisions and also quite arbitrary. Too many innocent were punished to go unnoticed, and every decision is final. Unless of course one is so big like Ars Technica who had contacts within the HQ.
I was reading an article lately how Facebook want to manage their growing pains algorithmically: more math instead of more people. To me that means that there will be just more arbitrariness and even less transparency…. I wish if instead they would have more support people and start to clean up the mess instead. But of course, if I’d know how to manage Facebook, I would have invented Facebook. :)
I’m not a big fan of subsidies, since then people cannot make decisions based on the real cost of things
Subsidy comes out of someone’s pocket anyway, so ultimately everyone does pay for it
Looking at the governing party‘s track record and the nearing elections (<1 year), this is likely to be politically motivated
Fuel is pretty cheap compared to other places already, so it must be already heavily subsidized.
The points 1, 2 and 3 are opinions and generalizations. I had to realize that point 4 I just thrown in there without knowing whether it is really true – I just believed it is. Now here’s a good example for [Citation needed].
XKCD: Wikipedia protester
Filling in the blanks
Yeah, what do I really know? I lived in Hungary and Britain before, and I remember there fuel was more expensive then in Taiwan. Also, it’s open knowledge that the US is pretty cheap, compared to most of the world, that is… But are there any patterns in the price, and what would I expect Taiwan’s level to be?
I was checking around for a while, fishing for the right keywords for the search (“fuel” / “petrol” / “gas”, depending where one’s from, as a starter). Found a couple of sites but they were mostly looking at price comparisons within a country (like Petrolprices for UK) or within a region (like AMZS for Europe, works weird – no real static link, click the UK flag then “fuel prices” in the menu on the left). After a while, however, I did come across a German organization, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) which in fact had a study about international fuel prices. Go ahead and check the 2009 version, it is very interesting to see all that data and some analysis as well. Historical trends, relative prices, some case studies too. I would have loved to see more analysis, but maybe next time, when I’ll be in the in a position to commission such research. :)
Anyway, looking at the Taiwanese data in from 2009, diesel is slightly subsidized while gasoline is, which means that they are somewhat – but not too much – below and above the US price, respectively. In the ranking, Taiwan is very much on the cheap end.
While looking around a bit more on their site, they have a Data preview for 2010/2011 as well. The more recent is the data the better. Took a look at that too. Now Taiwan is a bit above of the US price with both types of fuel, but still on the cheap end. All their data was in a picture, though, that’s not very handy… So did a little data entry, resulting in this datafile.
I was also thinking, whether the economy affects the prices, and if does then how? Wikipedia first for GDP/capita for all the countries of the world, but they were taking the data from the International Monetary Fund, so let’s go to the source. I checked out their data export tool and there were quite a few more fields to choose from. I went with GDP per capita, Implied purchasing power parity, Value oil exports, Value of oil imports (these last two are good catch:). The output is here. The bottom of the page has a download link, downloaded it into this file without modifications.
Next, had to write some analysis code for the whole thing as well, converting the data into suitable database, fixing some errors in the primary database’s data formats. So in the end I had a simple little script that does:
Clean up some of the names (some Unicode errors originally), and fixes one: I do want to convert the original “Taiwan Province of China” into “Taiwan”…
Fix formatting errors in the IMF data: they used number formats of “12,345.00” instead of just “12345.00”
Fill missing values with “-1” so it’s easy to filter out later
Rank countries by fuel price, ignore countries that have missing economic data or missing price data
I was looking around for some useful visualizer – something that can handle this much data better then an ordinary static plot. Fortunately, Highcharts JS seems to just the right thing…
The first plot I wanted to reproduce is the one from GIZ’s Data preview. Let’s see how it works out:
Instructions: “red”/”blue” countries are net oil exporter/importer respectively, hover over any of the lines to see which country it is, can click-and-drag zoom into area…
So yeah, Taiwan is down at 49 out of 161 countries, and just few net-importer (blue) countries ranking higher. Even those are mostly poor ones.
Now the second picture, how do fuel prices compare with GDP/capita – which I naively think to have some connection to economical power:
Instructions: note that the GDP scale is logarithmic, hover and zoom are the same as before.
Might be just my eyes, but it seems to me that there are two lines on this plot if one ignores the net exporter (red) countries for a second. From the middle to the right prices are increasing: the wealthier countries can pay more for the fuel. On the other hand, from the middle to the left prices are increasing again: poorer countries cannot really afford it. The cheapest (nominally) are the middle-to-poor, $1000-5000 GDP/person countries.
Bottom line: Taiwan is there at ~$18000/¢100, and if there are indeed these lines, then Taiwan is waaaay below the wealthy country line. Based on the economy, the price should be closer to ¢150. This suggest to me that the original assessment was correct: Taiwanese fuel is cheap.
Global Price API
All of this data-hunting and conversion and plotting should not be this much of a pain. I have a feeling there’s need and desire for open access for such information and that transparency would help people’s decision making – whether those people are in charge or part of the public (and should be “ultimately in charge”). Of course, I’m not the only one to say this, and I’m not even a very good one making this happen – just check out Hans Rosling’s TED talk.
I was thinking, how to build a globally accessible database of consumer prices? Fuel is a good choice because it’s universally needed and there are not too many kinds, one can compare apples to apples. On the other hand, there could be other items as well. Maybe recruit a few volunteers from a big bunch of countries so periodically they add more info to a database. Or fully crowdsource it, maybe even the item categories as well? Then build an interface that it can be easily queried and used by programmers and non-programmers as well. Or is there any such database already? Pitching version: “Archive.org for global price and other public data”. Not that I have a business model for this… I’m sure I’d prefer the same as SimpleGeo and completely open the data itself, but I know there are people who will still find opportunities – or make some.
Any thoughts on this? One selfish thought I have is that this would be lovely so I never ever again have to manually enter all the names of all the countries of the world. :) But I do believe there’s much more to this project.
I was thinking what what to write about, but then I realized that is doing this whole blogging thing completely the wrong way. I should be thinking what to do and interesting things to write about will come out of that. It always does.
I was watching the Programming Paradigms lecture series from Stanford. I quite enjoy it, mostly because Jerry Cain seems to be a good lecturer. A quick check confirms that others feel that too. I haven’t finished it yet (24 lectures in to the 27 long series, each ~50 minutes), he talked a lot about C, then Scheme, now about Python. He also mentioned a couple of other languages he suggest for the students to try. That got me thinking: I love languages (human and programming as well) and always looking out to learn more things. Why not do some more exploration in this area – trying out languages that are quite different from each other and see what can I take home from each. I did have similar idea last year, “Language of the Week”, but one week is just too little to get to any practical depth in a language and that idea died. Now, I’m hoping to resurrect it in the form of “Language of the Month”. It is conveniently the beginning of a month so I can just start right now. :) Also, let’s make it round – a 12 language series, one for each month until the same time next year. That should be a challenge. So I made a 12 item list for planning:
Many of these I was planning to check out for a long time and now I have proper motivation. Some of them I got intrigued about while I was checking this humbling list. Note, that “?” are not weird languages, but I keep things open to add more as I get more experience with this (you too can give me recommendation in the comments!:). Also note the absence of some languages, like C and Ruby: those I really should know more, that’s why I won’t do them here, they have enough intrinsic motivation, here I want to try somewhat more off-the-path things.
The simple rule for this series is: every month choose one new language and by the end of the month implement something practical in that language. Something that scratches a real life programming itch. Other than this, all bets are off. See what I can learn.
Now the hard part: which one to start with, since the above list is rather a “set” – ordering is not included. I did roll a dice, but didn’t like the result (like most rolls of dice:), so let’s just choose one: The Language of the Month for May is Scala (because I know absolutely nothing about that, unlike some of the others).
