After 10 paragraphs of history we finally reach the point where Lipton explains the "general principle" behind both and the relation to computing science. This principle is

...do not rely on an action, but on the structure of the system. Make the default, a passive state, a safe state so that when the system fails, it gets to the safe state by default.

He suggests that inline comments are unnecessary when method/function/procedure names are specific and they have one specific purpose.

Ford may be onto something here but he obsesses over the latest and supposedly greatest software methdologies. Some of the obsessions are dynamic languages, "agile" methodology, and "test/behaviour-driven" development. What I found worse was the re-labeling and mis-crediting of an old software development idea. Ford credits Kent Beck and calls it the "compose method" pattern but everyone else (at least those who know their history) will recognize it as a central idea in structured programming. This apparent pattern, really an old idea given a new name, describes the writing of smaller functions/methods with a clear, specific purpose. The beauty of structured programming is that it gives us a way to convert blocks of code into smaller functions.

Here are some quotes that I found especially good.

So today I'm giving it a go. I downloaded moe via the GNU project's FTP server and installed it. The compilation was insanely fast, I think it took less than 10 seconds to get it all built and installed.

HTML pages as containing structure and storing their contents in separate files. Easier for everyone to deal with and splits up your page into logical pieces.

Update: I found a copy of the essay here but it appears to be a reprint with a different title, “Time To Liberate The Web”. Same content though, so it doesn't matter.

I found an essay by Ted Nelson titled “Way Out Of The Box”, and it's about limitations imposed by technical-minded people on everyone else. It's about the assumptions made when programs and computers are designed.

Here is a particularly good passage that tells us what we sacrifice when we force users to become distinct from programmers,

Suppose they gave you MTV, and in return took away your right to vote? Would you care? Some of us would. That's how I think of today's computer world, beginning with the Macintosh. The Macintosh gave us Fonts, pretty fonts to play with, and graphic arts tools that previously were out of reach, except in the most high-budget realms of advertising and coffeetable book production. Those fonts and graphic arts tools were a great gift.

But nobody seems to have noticed what the Macintosh took away.

It took away THE RIGHT TO PROGRAM.

If you bought an Apple II, you could begin programming it right out of the box. I have friends who bought the Apple II without knowing what programming was, and became professional programmers almost overnight. The system was clean and simple and allowed you to do graphics.

But the Macintosh (and now the Windows PC) are another story. And the story is simple: PROGRAMMING IS ONLY FOR OFFICIAL REGISTERED “DEVELOPERS”.

(Emphasis mine)

So instead of studying, I created a quick checklist on what a Free Software website should have in order to be considered helpful by users. I won't post that list here just yet, because I want to write up a few other checklists and notes on marketing.

I hve been re-arranging my TODO lists using Emacs's Org-Mode and when I realized that it could calculate the exact hours taken for a bunch of tasks, I felt I should explore the rest of the Org-Mode manual and see what else I had been missing out on.

Org-Mode allows you to use relative timers which, it says, are useful for recording notes during a meeting or video viewing. I did not understand exactly how to use the relative timers, but it looks like they are like timestamps. Here's a brief run-down and example on how to use them.