Python - Web Display Technology

[Paul Rubin]

"SamFeltus" <sam at nuevageorgia.com> writes:
> >  But your brain doesn't care.  It's got a shortcut to your wallet, and
> > the information on the screen is accessing that.

> This was the most useful comment for me.  I never fully considered that
> Flash was aiming at a different part of the brain.  HTML is resonant
> with the mindset of Python, Flash is not.  Perceptual match vs
> perceptual mismatch.

I'm reminded of a passage in "Cryptonomicon", about a guy trying to
gather info about how to organize a scuba dive to investigate a
150-meter-deep shipwreck.  He gets hold of a bunch of diving books and
finds that the tables in them only go down to 1/3rd of that depth and
are useless:

    Randy closes up all of the books and looks at them peevishly for a
    while. They are all nice new books with color photographs on the
    covers. He picked them off the shelf because (getting
    introspective here) he is a computer guy, and in the computer
    world any book printed more than two months ago is a campy
    nostalgia item. Investigating a little more, he finds that all
    three of these shiny new books have been personally autographed by
    the authors, with long personal inscriptions: two addressed to
    Doug, and one to Amy. The one to Amy has obviously been written by
    a man who is desperately in love with her. Reading it is like
    moisturizing with Tabasco.

    He concludes that these are all consumer-grade diving books
    written for rum-drenched tourists, and furthermore that the
    publishers probably had teams of lawyers go over them one word at
    a time to make sure there would not be liability trouble. That the
    contents of these books, therefore, probably represent about one
    percent of everything that the authors actually know about diving,
    but that the lawyers have made sure that the authors don't even
    -mention- that.

    Randy does a sorting procedure on the diving books now: he ignores
    anything that has color photographs, or that appears to have been
    published within the last twenty years, or that has any quotes on
    the back cover containing the words "stunning", "superb",
    "user-friendly",or, worst of all, "easy-to-understand".  He looks
    for old, thick books with worn-out bindings and block-lettered
    titles like DIVE MANUAL. Anything with angry marginal notes
    written by Doug Shaftoe gets extra points.

The Python mindset?