So i have travelled to Slovakia again, for a weekend this time.
I have been painting window frames. Since i have a new iPod (4G nano,
black, yummy), i could also listen to music (Tristania, In Flames,
Kamelot). The last time, it was somewhat of a patience exercise, but
this time... I guess i got better at painting and maybe i have become
more patient, too :). It was pretty enjoyable, more than i would have
thought a work like that could be. And i am sure the music helps, too.
(The next day)
And to continue the last blog... There, i have concluded that hardship
was important factor in becoming better:
And apart from hardship... Problem is, hardship alone, if it stays the
same, is not enough to make people change. It is the change from
contentment to unhappiness, that drives people forward. Because in
that change, one starts to change, and hardship together with dynamics
helps a lot. Static, unchanging hardship will only do little to change
a person. One can get used to it, like to anything else. Like to
contentment. So an initial change can start a cascade. Like for me,
breakup caused a domino effect. The change alone brought a lot of
hardship with it, and i had to change to accomodate to it. And the
change in me provoked more changes and so on. I have learned many new
things, or, things i have learned before but went unnoticed took my
notice. And in light of such things, i had to change again, because i
knew i couldn't be happy any other way.
A human being is as good as dead, when captured in a period of
stagnation, in an unchanging moment that lasts. Only through change,
through dynamics of life, we are alive. A man that does not change is
a statue, a dead piece of matter, only useful as a memento. And that
was what i have become, and now the statue is again starting to move,
to breathe, to live. Because there is just no perfection that one
could capture in a moment. No matter how perfect a moment, if frozen,
the perfection decays, the little cracks are noticed. That is why
trying to freeze time is futile, trying to preserve. One cannot enter
the same stream twice. Life is a constant change, and this constant
change is its only manifestation. Take the change away and you take
the life away.
The past is important. The past is what resulted into present, and
present is what makes future. Every moment, in a succession of
moments, is important. But without the moment before and the moment
after, the moment does not mean anything. The moment is void, without
predecessor and successor. We move in time, and the motion is what
becomes important, not the points we moved through. They are only
important in the relation to our trajectory, not in isolation. And so
is the direction which we take, the vector of our motion, and the
shifts in direction.
There is no eternity, only the eternity of its own
absence. Immortality and death are the same, the very same
notion. Because every time we change, there is a little death and a
little birth. And immortality is only possible in
staticness. Immortality is a point in time, without motion. And
without motion, there is no life to be.
And same goes for relationships. Make a relationship immortal and you
make it die. Relationship needs a possibility of death to live. Like
humans, like every living being. Without death, there is no life. The
transition from being into non-being is essential, because it is the
precondition to change. As i have already described, every change is a
death followed by rebirth, but the entity reborn is not the one that
has died. And therefore, without the ability to die, there is no
ability to change. And death, the conventional death, as we know it,
is just a death without rebirth. Something dies, and there is nothing
more to take its place. But... The death makes others change. And
therefore, the one who dies definitively, is again reborn, as part of
those others that have died, but haven't died, but are reborn. And the
one definitely dead enters those new, reborn creatures, as a little
fraction of them. And the cycle of life is closed, and the change can
perpetuate itself.
Every day, i die a thousand times. But there are deaths that are
important and deaths that go unnoticed. And most of the important ones
are only noticed in retrospect, by a being that resulted, after many
hours, or days, or weeks or even longer. And many more deaths. We only
exist through our succession, because only what is born from us
remembers what we were. And the very moment we are born, we die again,
and a new being remembers. The memory lives on, but the beings are
already dead. And the memory changes as well, because memory itself
does not mean anything, only the being possesing it can give it
meaning. And every successive being that we become gives it a slightly
different meaning.
And so the delicate, complex dynamics of individual life are
established. Not only the living being changes itself, but the
memories of the previous beings change. There is certain gravity
toward stagnation, because often the changes are only very slight, and
the being remembers his predecessors that were fairly happy and tries
to remain so. Because the bigger the change, the bigger risk. And
therefore all beings are susceptible to stagnation, to the stasis cell
of past success. Because past success is one's own enemy, even if it
is something that is a precondition to one's own being. So we need to
learn to live with our past success, but to not try to revive it. The
effort to bring back past is a wasted, contraproductive effort. It
seems so, it is almost natural, that if there was happiness in the
past, restoring the same past will bring the same happiness. But
there, that is not true, in the light of previous paragraphs. The trap
is so obvious, that description is probably redundant, but let me do
it once again anyway, maybe because i have fallen in it so many times
already. Yes, the trap is in the stagnation, in absence of new
things. Because even if one cannot restore the original condition no
matter how much he tries, one can, and that is for sure, replicate it
very closely. And that way lies a trap, a temporary (or even
permanent) thermal death of stagnation.
(Later that day, outside, on a nearby hill)
And now, like before, there's nothing more to stand between me and
myself. I sit in the grass, alone. My being alone complements me, in a
way. There are waves in the grass, as air moves. Music is playing,
apart from the few houses i can see downhill, my only connection with
the rest of people. And this what belongs to me, this paper, this
pen. This book by Italo Calvino that Enrico Zini has given me. If on a
winter's night a traveller. But it is late summer. I can see vineyard
in distance, on a slope different from mine. I call this slope mine
because i am the one sitting there. And the time to collect the grapes
is close. And here, next to me, an apple tree, with red apples on it.
And a white butterfly in the distance, beating the air with its light,
small wings. And i blow away a tiny spider who has lost its way on my
trousers. I feel being part of all this around me, and still so
foreign. And the butterfly appears again, but it may be a different
one.
The sun shines behind my back, alhtough i sit in shade of a tree. And
neither the sun nor the tree are my enemies, or my friends. But still,
i feel sympathy for both of them, one gives me light and warmth and
the other shields me from too much of it. And the setting, the scenery
soothes my senses, my mind, my feelings. Here, i am close to the
loving mother of us, living beings, the nature. Here she is tender and
forgiving and caresses my hair and it feels good.
And these feelings, i would love to pass on, to other people, so they,
too, could feel well. But i see that this is not quite
possible. Although these lines will hopefully give something to
someone, they probably can't carry what i feel. And i would bring
someone with myself here, so they could feel it with me. But presence
of other person would spoil it, it would be something else then. Maybe
beautiful in a way, different from this one, maybe very pleasant. I
love people, and when i see them happy, it fills me with gladness.
(And in the evening, on a train...)
And here i am, moving with speed, from one place to another. The
speed, sound of loud music in my ears, the landscape drifting away. I
could say i was happy, happy in the sense of change, everything
changing around me, sun setting behind distant horizon, the train
moving through the country. The semaphore lights. In the headphones,
heavy guitar riffs competing with the roaring of the train. Cold air
blowing in my face, flowing in my hair.
And now in another train, sitting in a compartment with stranger, a
girl, trying to guess who she could be, from her dress, from what she
is reading, from cues. Who she could become. What she means to me, a
passing stranger on the path of life. I have been reading the Calvino
book till now, but i thought i could write down my thoughts before
they perish, like they do. It is fairly silent now here, even while we
are on a train. The engine and the outside are muffled, the window and
the door are closed. We are in a strange kind of privacy with this
girl, neither knowing anything about the other. I, writing this text
here, she reading some sort of magazine. Looking up from what we do at
occasions. The train is accelerating now, and the sounds are more
intense. It is a bit shaky, too. My hearing is still lightly impaired
from the loud music from the previous train.
We arrived to a station. Short stop, then another long motion. Always
toward Brno, toward my flat, toward the night and tomorrow. The girl
is reading a horse races program. Here, i intrude her privacy and
write that here. I hope she wouldn't mind. I don't have a name other
than "the girl" for her, since all the words we exchanged was me
asking whether i can sit down in the compartment and her answer. And i
suppose i won't say anything and she won't, neither. Maybe a goodbye.
And now, we share a sort of almost intimacy. Two lone people in a
compartment, tired and waiting to arrive somewhere. An invisible bond
between us, doesn't mean anything, just that element at random brought
us there together, for a short moment. Chances are, we won't ever meet
again. And still, she is almost falling asleep, with her feet up, like
if i were a trustworthy friend of old. And i feel sympathy for that, i
feel honoured by a trust given by a complete stranger. She seems
comfortable, feeling safe. And it feels good to have that trust, it
feels important. It nearly gives warm fuzzies.
(To be continued, further...)
Today, as it was widely anticipated, the Superior Tribunal of the Judicial Power of the Federation (TEPJF)
declared Felipe Calder n, of the currently right-wing governing PAN party, elected as president for the 2006-2012 period.
My regular readers will know that my political views are against his party's, and that I completely oppose him - Of course, being consequent, in June I started, together with some friends,
FeCal.org.mx, a site destined to show the incongruencies and incoherences in the official version - and that evolved to a site I am quite fond of, having good and deep analysis of the political situation. Of course, it is time now to redesign and think forward for this site, now that FeCal is no longer a candidate - but lets leave it aside for now.
Today, we are mourning. We are not mourning an electoral loss - Wherever there is democracy, there are losers, and it might be right that we lost this time. Furthermore, in political systems such as ours, it is practically guaranteed that the majority of the citizens will lose (this means, it is terribly hard for any candidate to get over 50% of the votes - If Calder n wins with almost 35% of the votes, or if L pez Obrador wins by a similar amount, we will anyway have 65% of losers). But what we are mourning goes far beyond that: We lost faith in our electoral institutions, which we were so proud of a couple of years ago. They proved not to be serious, not to be adequate for a hard decision. Why am I saying this? Lets analyze a bit.
First of all, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE)'s main function is to organize the federal elections, and to make sure they are run with neutrality. Since the early months of the formal competition (as the campaigns themselves started way too early and we Mexicans are sick of the eternal electoral climate), the IFE has not acted in time to stop a dirty campaign, made not only by the PAN party but by the nation's President himself and by groups that, being privately owned, are said to be outside the reach of the IFE's regulatory spectrum. The IFE's general council should have been built with representants of all of the main political forces, but only PRI and PAN (which means, center-right and right wing) were represented.
Secondly, over the last six years, President Fox seems to have made constant efforts not only to prove us all
he is a complete fool and inept as a statesman (examples abound, there is no rush to prove Vicente Fox just cannot be trusted to run a country), but that his fight for democracy was nothing but a race for personal power. He took every oportunity he could to promote his party - while the Mexican law requires him to remain neutral during the electoral period. There are many proven examples of irregularities and corruption inside his cabinet (most notably those
carried out by Josefina V zquez Mota, who was in charge of all of the federal programs to fight poverty, and was the coordinator of Calderon's campaign) leading to inject resources into the campaign. Yes, this should have been stopped by IFE as soon as they were detected - But it was not. And, thank you Mr. Fox, by doing this you severely undermined the respect there should be for the Presidential figure.
Now, IFE's role ends shortly after the elections. After that, it is TEPJF's role to qualify the elections - To ratify they complied to the required equity, legality and certainty. Many of us had more trust in TEPJF than in IFE, mainly because of the series of personal and group connections that came up between IFE and the power groups. Most of us were quite vocal on the voto por voto, casilla por casilla front - Demanding from TEPJF to request to recount all of the votes. Having only 0.58% distance between the top candidates, with
lots of statistical anomalities, with tons of reports of
illegal tampering of the ballots, having a wide recount would surely make many among us believe and accept the results - Of course, the PAN repeated ad nauseam that the ballots had been counted and we should not go again over the same excercise, quoting all kinds of arguments that came from a too narrow interpretation of the law. And, in the end, too narrow was the response of TEPJF - Only 9% of the booths were reinspected, and not all of them were recounted. In fact, one week ago, they decided to discard over 300 appeals (this means, 300 requests for trial on a specific booth or on a whole district), without yet disclosing which appeals were they, on what basis were they discarded, what geographical areas did they impact, or anything. They nullified about 235,000 votes - And this number is quite scary, as it practically matches the official difference between the two lead candidates (244,000 votes before this partial recount, 233,000 after it). We can now state for certain that the difference between the candidates is smaller than the error margin.
Today, with a very important portion of the country in doubt on whether their decision was legal and correct, TEPJF ratified Felipe Calder n as the elected president. This would be good news. I would like to accept Felipe as my president - Sadly, I cannot, just because all of the TEPJF's principles were violated:
- Equity: The process didn't progress with equity. Illegal publicity was repeated over and over. Just as one example, the Presidency has had the equivalent of 24h a day of ads in the national electronic media for over six months - And IFE acknowledged it was used in a way that promoted the vote for their candidate. The final message was very subtly changed, many people were left unsatisfied, and... That was it.
Andr s Manuel L pez Obrador was often protrayed as a puppet of Fidel Castro and Hugo Ch vez, and there are still people who believe he was setting to create a communist regime in Mexico. Of course, this was also a direct result of what is now known as the hatred campaign that the ruling party and an important group of industrials pushed. So, no, we had no equity.
- Legality: Most of this posting has dealt with the ilegalities of the process, they are really not in short supply. The sad and alarming thing is that it was the TEPJF itself which commited the last and most important illegal acts.
- Certainty: In a strongly contested electoral scenario, I perceive this to be the sole most important principle. How many votes were cast for each of the top candidates? We have repeatedly stated that the difference between them is below the statistical error margin for a process where a million people counted the votes. And after last week's results where nearly 240,000 votes were discarded, the difference is objectively and undoubtely smaller than the error margin. Even if no fraud was made, people make mistakes, and it is too na ve to assume not even one out of each 200 votes was incorrectly accounted. And even if no fraud was done, not allowing the society to ensure the results of the process really match the reality is by itself a fraud. We will now probably never know if Felipe Calder n cheated, the same as we still don't know who won in 1988 and by how much. Then, official records say that Carlos Salinas had over 50% of the votes, Cuauht moc C rdenas almost 30% and Manuel Clouthier close to 20% - But both C rdenas and Clouthier were sure they had won. And while C rdenas (founder of the PRD, which now supports L pez Obrador) called off the civic resistence to start creating a strong political movement for future, PAN's Clouthier did exactly what his party criticizes L pez Obrador for. In fact, our president Vicente Fox was the Agriculture Secretary in Clouthier's parallel government. Only that Clouthier had a misterious accident some months later and died - giving way to the dark period of PRI-PAN concertacesiones led by Diego Fern ndez de Ceballos.
So... In short, what comes now? We are exhausted by this long process. As too many people, I just cannot accept the imposition of yet another fraudulent president. I had the hopes that Mexico had changed in the last 18 years - But it has not. We are still in a strong presidentialist regime, and we still don't have hopes of getting a democratic government. If we do have a democraticly elected president, perfect, I will accept it. Of course, criticizing and keeping a close eye on his government, as I don't think the social and economic principles they push, but accepting. But there are too many signs of a fraud, there are too many stinky bits in the decision. The stinkiest of them all, the refusal of their opportunity to shut us up. Is it better to have millions of angry citizens closing important streets and giving Mexico a bad name by writing about our trip back to the stone age than to allow for a legal recount? Is it too much asking giving some certainty to our elections? Is there any doubt we will keep fighting this imposition?
There's some discussion going on in Debian about firmware in main.
Some people want it, others don't. The main argument by the
firmware-in-main advocates seems to be that we can't install hardware if
there isn't any support for it in the installer, and that the installer
can only install by using stuff that is part of main. The obvious answer
to that would be to modify the installer so that it would support
retrieving stuff from non-free, but then that would require some changes
to the installer which, according to
Joey Hess, are rather
significant.
So we now have a GR proposal to allow for firmware in main anyway, so
that we can support non-free hardware. Obviously the proposal includes
overriding the social contract. And huge and insane flame wars.
I don't like the sound of that. And I'm not convinced that the only
way to get non-free udebs on a system is to download them from the
Internet; Windows, RedHat, SuSE and other operating systems have
supported the concept of "driver disks" for ages; I don't see why we
couldn't do the same. And since our system is way more flexible than
theirs anyway (it being modular and all), we can easily implement this
using udebs.
So rather than engaging in flame wars, I just sat down and wrote
some
code that would allow the concept of "customization disks": CD-ROMs,
hard disk partitions, USB keys, or floppy disks with udebs on them that
will be installed if the user chooses the right option in the
installation menu (requiring expert mode to get there, however). This
can be used for all kinds of interesting things: non-free modules, but
also OEMs (say, HP) providing udebs on their driver CD-ROMs so that they
can have the installer support their hardware which is supported by the
latest version of the Linux kernel, but occasionally not by the version
that Debian Stable ships with, by backporting a kernel driver to the
right version. Should they so choose. Or people could use it to test new
modules without having to upload them and without having to set up their
own repository. Or third-party developers could use it to add extra code
to the installer to support some automagic stuff, whatever.
It hasn't been tested at all yet, but at this point it's not much
more than a proof of concept anyway. Comments are welcome, but please
read
the
thread on -boot on the subject, too.
Simon has a similar view of the
situation.
With the stuff I proposed in my last entry and earlier (e.g. bug masters) -
I'm well aware that this means someone needs to write a lot of infrastructure
code. But given recent improvements e.g. on our bug tracking (user tags,
subscription, version tracking) this seems to be working okay. I've never
really used launchpad, so I can't comment on what it offers that we might
need and where it sucks. And I've said a dozen of times that I hate bugzilla.
Next I'm usually hard to convince that any "infrastructure improvement" will
help solving "social" issues. But here it might, if it "weakens" the formal
DDs power (isn't god on how the software is packaged and on how patches come
in) and strengthens the "occasional contributor" (pending patches repository,
DDs can easily approve patches and trigger an upload without being deeply
involved with the package, since NMUs are easier to do).
And I'm also aware that my point of view isn't consequent. On one hand I'm
convinced that any big "steering" won't work anyway, and those who do the job
(read: write the code, write patches) will largely be those who set the
direction. Linus didn't just pick a VCS and decide that everyone will have
to use it, but actually wrote his own to suit his needs. And others liked it,
picked it up, improved it. On the other hand I'm asking people to use
packaging practises that allow others to easily contribute. I
almost
suggested to make it policy to use debhelper and CDBS...
Well, it's one of the things I've learned myself: make it easy for others
to contribute - and you'll enjoy it more, because more people will contribute.
If it's hard to contribute, people will complain, will file bugs, will argue.
If it's easy to contribute, they are more likely to send patches and
enhancements. Read: more fun.
It's also one of the reasons I blame for my SELinux work being not too
rewarding: it's hard to get going, it's hard to contribute (well, that has
improved with the public readable SVN repository for the policy). Less people,
less contributions, less fun.
Anyway, I don't see the need for any steering or "global picture".
We're not lacking the big goals, but the low-level fun at development.
That doesn't mean I'm strongly "opposed" to the commitee. I just don't see
the benefits (but certain costs for electing it. Do we take group applications
and vote among groups? Then we could just have the DPL nominate the steering
comitee. Or will we vote on individuals, with the top n becoming the board?
Then we'll have lots of platforms to read (=boring, not fun), and we'll
probably have the same problems at a different level, different opinions in
the board.
And, given that the DPL has no real power, will the board have any?
We also have a technical comittee. Does it have any power (well, it's supposed
to, but was it ever enforced)? Did anyone ask it about something recently?
Debian has always defined itself as "the universal operating system", which to me means that, given two options A and B, each with their own advantages and disadvantages, we will incorporate them both, because there are people for whom A is better, and people for whom B is better. This is one of Debian's greatest strengths, and this is what makes it the "universal" distribution.
Now there has been discussion lately about whether Debian needs some sort of central authority to pull the project into a certain direction. The thing is, while everyone seems to agree that we lack direction, we cannot disagree more on which direction it would be if we had one.
At present, we have a number of groups pulling in different directions:
- The "release" group
- Debian's primary goal is/should be to make stable releases. In the time between releases, people should run the release candidate and iron out bugs, so we can release faster; new features are to be added only right after a release.
- The "usability" group
- Debian does not have any use if we do not support every user. As the admin users can already help themselves, we should focus more on the average user and make the system more simple to use and administer. Integration is a must, as is closed-source firmware.
- The "hacker" group
- Debian's purpose is essentially to give us a distribution we can use for ourselves, where all the tools that exist are there.
- The "freedom" group
- Debian is supposed to be only free software so I don't accidentally come into a situation where I'm in breach of a license.
- The "large installations" group
- It should be as easy as possible to deploy Debian to a set of boxes and remotely administer them. It should be easy to install the software the users need and to customize it for our organization. Users are not supposed to administer machines, and non-free software and drivers need to be clearly marked and easily avoidable so as to not put us at legal risk.
- The "supermarket" group
- Debian is a repository of packages that makes our lives easier when we build either a system or a distribution, but we don't really care whether stuff is integrated already, because in order to feel comfortable with it, we need to redo it anyway.
- The "small but beautiful" group
- The system should be as modular as possible, allowing me to leave stuff out that I don't need. I don't mind installing stuff later on.
There are others, and I have represented each only with their most extreme positions. These groups are not usually disjunct, and in some places, some groups share goals. But, for example the "usability" group and the "small but beautiful" group will always disagree on what should be in a base installation.
All of this is not new. What is new is that people are asking for a strong leader to strike down the unbelievers rather than discussing stuff on the mailing lists. This is generally a thing I wouldn't like to see happen in Debian, because anyone you pull into the discussion is either uninformed (so not qualified to answer) or already has an opinion (which will most likely conflict with either party's opinion). By forcing a decision, you essentially give one party the right to dismiss arguments with "we've already had this, it has been decided" and do not solve the problem at all, because the other party is still unhappy.
You might want to argue that a committee evens things out a bit as more groups are represented there. That is true to a certain extent, however you'd have to have a way to determine who gets to be on the committee, and to do so in a manner that noone is left out (even if there are new groups forming all of the time) and without giving any group too much power. We might just include everybody, which brings us to status quo, except that everyone got a job title now and people might feel more inclined to decide things by majority vote (because that is what committees do after debating, right) instead of based on actual merit.
Scott writes that implementing the same thing he just did in Ubuntu would have taken him ages to do in Debian because there are so many more people to coordinate in Debian. I have to disagree here, the number of people to coordinate is probably the same if not higher, except that the Ubuntu model seems to be that every core team member has commit access and is supposed to read up on the changelog when touching a package, making the coordination more implicit.
I happily give out Ubuntu CDs, which do have non-free drivers, firmware and documentation, to users. Telling them that they cannot use that driver or have a manual because it's not free will not help anyone, and it is unlikely that they will be taken to court over it. This is all fine and dandy considering Ubuntu's target audience. However, Debian has a much larger target audience, including Ubuntu itself. If Debian were to interpret licenses less strict for some perceived benefit for the users (cdrecord springs to mind here), then all derivers, including Ubuntu, would have to carefully cross-check all of the licenses for possible violations. Thus, I oppose GFDL documentation in Debian main, because when we say "our priorities are our users and free software", that includes
all of our users, not just end users.
So, what I ask of you people reading this via Planet Debian is the following:
Ask your "opponent" whether he'd be interested in finding a common solution that fits both use cases. Present it as a technical challenge. Accept that the outcome of such an endeavour might be that the other person is right.
Accept that not everyone shares your views and/or priorities. It is hard to accept for me that a lot of people still think that svn is superior to git, or emacs is superior to vi. So if you have a different opinion on some matter, keep in mind that the other person may be looking at things from a different angle, where his choice is the only "logical" choice. Oh, and that goes for both of you.
To conclude:
Debian's strength is its lack of a clear direction.
If we were to decide that the end users are what matters, we'd become another Ubuntu, which would be quite unnecessary because we already have one, and they are pretty good at being Ubuntu. If we decided only releases mattered, we'd probably release more often, but right after a release, unstable would be really broken (the elders might remember how it was before the "testing" distribution was introduced).
In the same way, the release team takes care to include your pet project in the release if at all possible. Every package that is added delays the release because they have to wait for autobuilders and make sure that everything is internally consistent. So, they are already respecting your goals. Are you going to respect theirs, and join the
release effort even if all your machines run unstable?
So in my opinion it is a good thing that we did not decide on a direction, because there is no right one. We'd always leave some people behind if we had to make a choice.
What needs to change is our attitude that software is to be used in one particular way, because the people actually using it would disagree. After all, free software is (also) about being able to do things your own way, and Debian as a whole should be supportive of that.
Thanks to a little glitch in planet, one of Lars'
posts from 2004 came to my attention. In it, he proposes a test for language benchmarking:
Read text from the standard input and count the number of times each word occurs. Convert letters to lower case. Order the words according to frequency, words with the same frequency should be ordered in ascending lexicographic order according to character code. Print out the top N words, where N is a decimal number given on the command line. Each output line must contain the count, a space, and the word (in lower case), and end in an ASCII LINE FEED character. Output must contain exactly N such output lines and no other output lines.
A word contains only ASCII letters A through Z and a through z (convert upper case to lower case) and ASCII digits 0 through 9 and is not empty. All other characters separate words and are ignored except to notice word boundaries. Word boundaries only occur at the beginning and end of the file and at non-word characters. You may not assume a maximum length for the word, line, or input file.
He provides a tarball with sample implementations in C, Python, and Shell.
His C code is 183 lines long, Python 57, and Shell 11. The specs for this test seem particularly suited for shell.
I wrote a version in Haskell, commented and formatted approximately the same as his Python version, but using an algorithm more like the shell version. It comes in at 18 lines. Here it is:
import System.Environment
import Data.List
import Data.Char
custwords = filter (/= "") . lines . map (conv . toLower)
where iswordchar x = isAlphaNum x && isAscii x
conv x = if iswordchar x then x else '\n'
wordfreq = map (\x -> (head x, length x)) . group . sort
freqsort (w1, c1) (w2, c2) = if c1 == c2
then compare w1 w2
else compare c2 c1
showit (word, count) = show count ++ " " ++ word
main = do args - getArgs
interact $ unlines . map showit . take (read . head $ args) .
sortBy freqsort . wordfreq . custwords
Taking a look at this, one thing that might strike you is the function composition in main. This takes the output from one function and feeds it into the next -- and the Haskell syntactic sugar for this makes it look a lot like pipes in the shell version. The interact call takes, as a parameter, a function that takes a string and returns a string. interact supplies stdin as the input and prints the output to stdout. Note that, since Haskell is lazily, this does not mean buffering up the entire input or output -- it is read and written on demand.
The rest of the functions are also standard in Haskell, and you can find them in the
index to the library reference if you want to learn more.
I understand and agree that short code doesn't necessarily mean good code, but I think that Haskell provides a very elegant and expressive solution to many problems -- one that also happens to be remarkably concise.
Updated 9/4: Changed isLower to isAlphaNum to fix a bug, and removed unnecessary Data.Map import
