The interpreted language trap

This is a small rant about programming languages.

Scripting languages are quite popular these days, and for a reason : changes you make to the source are reflected instantly, speeding up the development process; and thanks to Moore's law the performance hit does not matter as much as it used to.

But, it's a trap! The reason those should be avoided is because of code rot.
As the runtime depends on loading order, previous instructions, etc.; IDEs cannot reliably determine the type of an object or lookup references to it - unless, precisely, you are debugging..
IDEs (all I know of) cannot refactor reliably scripts.

It means that any change that will be made must be tested and validated under real-usage conditions, which makes people reluctant to make cosmetic changes : variable renaming, unused function removal, ...

So generations of programmers come and go. Codebase grows but never shrinks. Up to the point it becomes unusable and has to be rewritten/replaced! It is like a garden : unattended for too long, it cannot return to the pretty lawn state.
I have experience this several times with different scripting languages : PHP,  bash,  javascript, JSP EL, python... it all ends the same way. Even worse if the script does not output to the programmer but to the user, because there is a chance the programmer will never know what went wrong and since when.

So, if you happen to program and read this, do yourself (or your sucessors) a favour, and stay away from languages which sources you cannot easily refactor!

Social Gaming

Hi reader(s). It's been a while.

So last summer I was job-hunted by a few social gaming companies, and that forced me to actually try to understand what that was about.
I used to be a social gamer, too. Not the kind that are being fed upon these days though, my expenses were more like server hosting, hardware and travel.

Now, what is the new social gaming revolution? It comes from 3 precedent revolutions combined :
- MMORPGs (Wow...)
- SNS (Facebook..)
- Mobile devices

And they combine the addiction powers of all 3.
- progression of the player. time sink. fantasy universe.
- group inclusion
- play anytime, anywhere

The combination is very powerful, and explains why the market is booming all over the world, even with games which are not fun to being with. The typical hooks are :
- beautiful ads (in other games, sites...)
- friends advertising on SNS

Once you try it, you are usually walked through a forced tutorial in which :
- you are more or less forced to spend whichever credits you started with
- you are strongly encourage to advertise and propagate the game
- you get slightly better levels and inventory quite easily.

Then, in a usually linear and boring progression, you get more inventory and XP, while being starved of credits. The point is to make you *desire* the credits so much that you are willing to put in real money. Sometimes, you even need a special kind of credits (which cannot be harvested in-game) for instance to remove in-game ads.

Think you are immune? Most of the customers thought that too... And then they wanted the next piece of armor, for which they could farm for 2h (with a lot of boring actions to do) or just spend 1$. Once the first dollar is spent, quitting the game is acknowledging that is was a waste of time AND money.

In most countries, gambling is prohibited or at least severely restricted, because it is known that people can be manipulated through psychology tricks to spend all their money (and their friend's too); but social gaming has not be deemed a threat yet. It is. Mostly because it targets people who are not prepared to face those strong addictions ; in other words : non-gamers.

In Tokyo, there are 2 industries that pay quite more than the average for IT workers : banks and social gaming. Birds of a feather....

Nuclear scare

The situation at Fukushima Nuclear Plant #1 seems to be getting out of control. The release of radioactive materials by venting, followed by hydrogen bursts in reactors 1 and 3, seemed tame. But then a fire started in reactor 4, which should have been stopped for maintenance; and this morning the suppression pool (a doughnut-shaped coolant part, under the core) exploded in reactor 2, causing a large amount of radioactive materials to be released. This is the story that was (quite well) explained on TV.

This is not far from the truth; it cannot be. But how dangerous it is for the people around, the people in Tokyo, or even the people close to other plants in other countries, this is where the media and the authorities go astray and spread some scare. Not that they can help it, because under-estimating will cost them their jobs; while over-estimating only brings a few critics.

The right attitude in this situation is to stay away from mail chains, twits, cable channels... and ask someone you trust to get the real information. There are sources all over the net but often too technical to be understood without a scientific background. And don't spread info without its source!

This is also true outside Japan. And whatever the topic.