Pretty cool!

But what lies beyond this eye catching presentation is an awful truth. By using Chrome Notebook you remove any privacy you might have left and lose the possibility to truly delete a file. Everything you search, everything you see, everything you write or do, will be logged forever on Google’s servers.

And, of course, sooner or later, governments will get access to these databases, using the already old rhetoric: “it will help us to stop terrorism”. A hollow affirmation, because given the crappy internet connections they have in their caves in Afganistan, it’s very likely that terrorists will never use such systems. But everybody else might be spied, from the average Joe to UN diplomats. If you ever use such a system think twice before bragging to your friends about breaking the speed limit with your new car or emailing your accountant about bending the rules…

I can’t wait to see it on the market. More details on wave.google.com.

What I like about python

Well, I loooooooooove the indentation. I really do. Python made it impossible for lamers to write ugly “one liners”. Everything must be indented and in its place or it won’t even compile (compiling aka no syntax errors as python is an interpreted language). After years of dealing with ugly sources with no braces, no indentation and so on, this feature is like a gift from heavens for me. I really hope it will catch on and be implemented in other languages.

I also like the for in iteration over…well…everything. This code:

for item in collection:
    do_stuff(item)

…works in most cases, even when collection is a file. In which case the loop iterates over the file’s lines. Tuples, dictionaries and lists are cool features.

What I don’t like about python

Of course, there are some things I dislike about this programming language. The first thing is that sometimes is too verbose. Python doesn’t have an post/pre increment operator. You can’t write i++ or ++i, although this code compiles. Further more, it compiles and does nothing, taking the act of debugging to a whole new level of annoyance.

You always have to write i += 1. It also doesn’t have a ternary operator. If you write a = (condition) ? b : c it will give you an compiling error.

Another weak point is its OOP capabilities. Object orientated programming is very strangely implemented in python. A class example in python looks something like this:

class MyClass:
    def __init__(self):
        self.attribute = 'default value'
    def custom_method(self, attribute):
        self.attribute = attribute
    def print_data(self):
        print self.attribute

obj = MyClass()
obj.custom_method('wassabi')
obj.print_data()

As you can see, there are no access modifiers (private, protected, public), no instantiation operator (new), the this keyword is replaced by self, and you must write it every single time you define a new method in the class. And python also allows multiple inheritance, which does one thing: annoys people.

Conclusion

Apart from some really annoying “features”, I’m starting to like python. It provides a quick way and pretty clean way to do get things done. And in the end, this is all that matters…Python is cool!

This is the very definition of cool…

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

I consider Microsoft’s point of view to be very optimistic. I’m not sure that in only 10 we’ll reach that level of technology, and even if we do, there will be a lot of people that will reject it, due to traditions, personal convictions that it “was better back in the days”, religious beliefs and so on. And, before developing that technology, we should figure out some new energy sources, to have enough juice to power it all. But the ideas expressed in the movie are impressive, not the less…

Credits for finding the movie go to Radu.