Giacomo Graziosi

Can you find any way to escape?

People interaction is nothing more than a complex theatrical show: everytime you speak to someone your brain classify the one as belonging to a specific human group (friends, parents, strangers, beautiful girls and so on) and then it loads the proper interface to filter you, your personality and communication accordingly, that is, in other words, very similar to what actors do on the stage set. Don’t ask me for a proper scientific proof of this thesis as now it is for me nothing more than psychological reminiscences, the best source I can find for you came from italian literature and, of course, doesn’t provide any kind of proof. Let’s continue assuming that with a little introspection mixed with some decent observation of your social environment you should be able to keep this thought as not completely fool.
Now try to guess what happens when your brain loads the wrong interface because it fails to identify the proper human group. Yeah, you probably got the point: more space there is between the correct and the wrong interface, more retarded you are appearing, there is no escape.
The following question now is “Is it my fault? Can I avoid this kind of mistakes?”. I fear there can’t be an easy answer to this, it vaguely resemble a chess match and to me the only way appears to be observation and practicing: the more reactive you are and the more different kind of interfaces you master, the more you can move the error away.
As for me I found myself quite incapable with managing old friends that I haven’t met in a while (some years): I try to interact with them remembering how they used to be but this approach is sometimes faulty because of minor or major unnoticed changes. Handling them as strangers is faulty too bacause at the beginning you could look too formal. At the end, I don’t really have an answer but I’ll let you know if I will find one.
Maybe beer…

This morning I was browsing Planet OpenSolaris when my attention was caught by a post talking about some really strange new language: it introduces the Vala language, a new high level language that «aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C».
So, let me resume what’s happening here: «hey, C is cool, a lot of people know it, we like it, we should definitely choose it as a base for our framework/DE, it doesn’t matter if C isn’t object oriented and we want to write object oriented code, we will find a way to put objects in C, maybe writing some framework and anyway g++ now just suck so C++ is not an option at all»
then after some years «hey, look at those Python/Perl/Ruby/C#/Java guys’ attitude, they are not happy if they don’t create some kind of weird wrapper to our marvellous code, what’s their problem? They can’t get a better API than the original API, let’s be serious, the original API is wrote in/for C and C is so cooool, they are wasting their time. Anyway, let’s take a look on their code… Uhm… well… actually… it isn’t so bad, there is no way that it could be better than the C api of course, but well, they had a couple of good points… ok maybe three or four good points… Maybe we should backport something to the core but doing that with C isn’t very confortable, we aren’t saying that C isn’t (or wasn’t) the better choice of course, there is no way we could say something so silly (C is so coooool) but we must find a way… g++ got quite good in the meanwhile but hey, C++ is C++, it has so many features, it will confuse our users for sure and it is so old, it can’t be cool-looking/new-fashioned/modern-elegant(/marketing-brain-wash-powered someone says: odd fools, there is no way we could fall for suck stupid tricks, as my iPhone can prove I think different!), we must find another way, maybe… a new language? Yeah, this appears quite reasonable: we are not betraying C at all because our compiler will translate the new language code to C code hiding the pain to write C code from our users! Our users will be able to write C but will not suffer anymore because they will not write C! So coooool!»