The new Blogger update ... sucks.

I've been using Blogger to host this site, and, frankly, its probably been one of my worst experiences with Google software, ever.

First of all, let me cover the the good things about it (i.e. why I chose it in the first place). Its very quick to get started with a blog, its easy to add AdSense if you want it, and that's about it.

What's wrong with it?

First of all, the widgets model is broken beyond all belief. All of the widgets that are provided are pretty much useless, and most things like syntax highlighting and LaTeX involve tacking on bits of Javascript onto the page, which Blogger doesn't mix with all too well. 

Secondly, the editor sucks. We're in 2012 here people, and it STILL escapes out when I hit tab. Why is this so difficult? Isn't Blogger now developed by the same company that makes Google Docs? 

Then, once Google+ came along, all of the other "social" buttons have been pushed off to the side and made quite tiny, which, is understandable when considering it from Google's point of view, but, from my point of view, it doesn't make much sense.

The themes are also far from amazing (http://www.bloggerthemes.net/ does try to remedy this), and the selection in font is pretty much non-existent. 

And, most of all, Blogger, in general, seems to try to get in your way every single time you want to just "write a short entry", or "get this article on the internet". 

So, what did the update fix/add?

It added some analytics directly on the front page; I was surprised to find out this blog had over 50,000 page views in the past 2 weeks. 

Also, it cleaned up a editor a *tiny* bit (it still escapes out on the tab), and, the main replacement was just making the editing textarea/contenteditable larger.

The design is also much better and clearer.

But, they still completely ignored the actual problems that plague Blogger; so, I just can't keep waiting any longer, I'm going to try and pick from the enormous assortment of options (Posterous had caught by eye, but, its been acquired, so, I don't want to risk anything on it). 

Experiences in Go-ing

I've been messing around with Go for quite some time now and I wanted to share my experiences.

When I first looked at Go, I put it aside as "just another language", and moved on with whatever I was doing.

I mean, there are languages popping up every day that are worth nothing whatsoever because the ideas they bring to the table are too few to take the risk of using a language that isn't popular (less documentation, less support, less everything).

That summer, I began writing some more low-level C/C++ code to implement a Bayesian classifier stock recommend-er thing. It was a complete disaster.

Just some basic string parsing was a nightmare; C gave no utilities whatsoever, and C++ was good, until I hit an error and it gave me a 20 line long error report, and, I had to use all kinds of specialized templates for the simplest of things!

And, the worst problem I faced was of sockets. Non-blocking, multi-plexed and cross-platform socket support with C is basically non-existent (unless I wanted to use libev or libevent, which has documentation scattered across the internet in small chunks). With C++, there are many choices, such as Boost.Asio (basically no documentation), ACE and ICE (this one I'm genuinely excited about, but, I hate their specialized object format crap I have to deal with).

And, of course, there's no language support for anything so if I ever wanted to distribute my code, the client would have to have the libraries.

I couldn't sacrifice performance (lots of number crunching was involved with costs tight), so, I couldn't pick Python.

Then, I came back to Go, and looked at it again from a different perspective, and hoped it would offer me something that could rid me of all of this.

I never did in fact write the Bayesian classifier thing (the idea wasn't much good anyway), but, the project introduced me to Go, which, I must say, is an amazing language.

The first thing I immediately noticed is that they got rid of the parentheses in "if" and "for" statements. Coming from Python, I really like this.

And, here's a language that's FINALLY SUPPORTING UNICODE FROM THE START!

Closures are supported and functions can be passed around like salt shakers, its wonderful!

All of the language seems well-thought out and cohesive; there aren't really any points that I felt like didn't match with the rest of system. Its very much like a suit without any stitch marks on it.

As for the standard library, its no short of awesome. It includes a lot of things that I've frequently wanted with C/C++ as part of the runtime, such as json, xml, http, a cryptography package, even websocket support built right in.

And, when they say it feels dynamic and interpreted, they actually mean it; the type system steps out your way for most of the time.

The only thing I find lacking is that there are no books on the language as of yet, but, I expect that will be remedied once the language is "marketed" a bit more (Google hasn't put a ton of weight on it ... yet).

It also has support for RPC which makes writing distributed computations really easy and quick.

Unless I have to write some really low-level code, I refrain from using C/C++ these days and instead reach for Go; about the same speed with half the development time.

I really encourage you to go check out Go, and just play around with it; you might start using it all the time.

To all the people who say programming competitions are useless

There's been this general vibe on HN and r/programming that programming competitions (that involve problems one must solve) on the whole have little to do with programming in general.

I beg to differ.

99% of us can crunch out Javascript and some backend language pretty quickly; some ajax interaction, maybe some form validation and some Twitter and Facebook APIs. And, a lot of us can quickly learn new things when we need to. Need to learn Scala for next project? No problem. Client wants to use the Face.com API? Alright, let's do it.

But, that's not the only stuff that matters.

Your skills are *really* tested when you hit a roadblock that isn't covered by the abstractions you're working on.

For example, the database inserts aren't happening fast enough, and the company doesn't want to buy any more servers to fix the problem, so, you've go to optimize it.

Programming competitions don't test whether or not you can go about updating portions of code, they test whether you are able to write code to solve a problem you've likely never heard of under a time constraint.

And, that's what companies would like in programmers.

Math based problems are just one way of approaching timed problem solving, and they work quite well, since many of us are well versed in at least basic math, and are able to get our hands around the problem so that we can begin to think about implementing it.

So, programming competitions *do* have to do with programming and the ability to solve problems, which is what development is all about.