All posts by John Goerzen

Garmin Nuvi 500

Geocaching, Reviews, , ,

I’ve owned two different GPSs in the past: a Garmin GPS III, and the Garmin eMap. Both are based on similar underlying firmware.

This week, I did some research on more modern GPS units and decided to buy a Garmin nuvi 500. Here’s my review.

Overview

The Garmin nuvi 500 is one of only two models in the nuvi line that are waterproof. The nuvi 500 and 550 are both designed as hybrid units: useful both in the car and outdoors. The 500 includes street-level maps (they appear to be the same quality as Google) for the entire United States, detailed topographical maps for the entire United States, and a global basemap. It also includes a microSD slot (or is it miniSD – I forget) for additional maps that you can buy — anything from marine maps to other countries.

It also includes a default POI (points of interest) database containing over 5 million points: restaurants, gas stations, parks, hospitals, you name it. Most contain an address and a phone number in additional to the coordinates. Unlike GPS units that you find built in to some cell phones, this is all stored on flash memory on the unit: no Internet connection required. The nuvi 500 is a portable yellow pages, topographical map, and incredibly detailed street atlas all in one.

Car Use

The nuvi 500 comes with a car charger and suction cup windshield mount in the box. (It doesn’t come with an AC charger, but it can charge over USB.) It also comes with — yay — a user-replaceable battery. The windshield mount is very sturdy and I am happy to have one that isn’t permanent.

In the car, the device performs admirably. I have read some other reviewers that have compared its routing to other GPSs and found that the nuvi generally picks the same route as Google, and almost always a better route than other GPSs. If you deviate from the selected route, it automatically re-calculates a new route for you. It will show you the next turn coming up, and has either 3D or flat map displays.

There’s a one-touch “where am I” feature. It displays your current coordinates, some sort of street address suitable to read to someone (“1234 S. Main” or “I-95 exit 43” type of thing), along with buttons to show you the nearest police stations and hospitals.

The unit also features multi-stop routing. You can either tell it where all you’re going in a defined order, or tell it all your stops and let it create an optimal route. This feature works, but it your stops are close by (and involve some of the same roads), it may wind up skipping some stops thinking you’ve made your first one.

The speaker announces upcoming maneuvers, though it doesn’t have a synthesizer for street names. It’s also supposed to work with Bluetooth headsets, though I haven’t tested that feature.

I found the map quality to be excellent. It seems to be on par with Google (in fact, I think both use data from Navteq). I was surprised with how many country dirt roads and side roads it knows about — and of course, regular city streets are all on there, with one-way indications and the whole lot. In fact, the quality of coverage was so good that I was surprised when it missed roads or got things wrong. Out in rural areas, or small towns, this happens from time to time: it thought that an abandoned railbed was an unnamed road and wanted me to drive on it (it was clearly not drivable), and in some other cases also thought some abandoned roads were still drivable. I don’t think this is a device issue though; it’s an underlying data issue, and everyone else probably has the same problem.

Its arrival time estimates are quite accurate, and its interface is smooth and easy.

It has some optional accessories I haven’t tried, such as real-time traffic reports from wireless sources, boating mode, etc.

Outdoor and Geocaching Mode

Our other main use for the device is outdoor hiking and geocaching. It really shines here. It has special support for the GPX files from geocaching.com. The device supports “paperless caching”. Not only can it put caches on the map, but if you download the GPX file for your caches, you’ll also get the full description, hint (behind a separate button, of course), most recent 5 logs, and the like right there on your screen. You can also log your finds on the device, and upload a file from it to geocaching.com later to log them on the site. This is an incredible time saver over my old method: printing out a bunch of maps, downloading waypoints to the eMap, taking notes, then logging things later.

I found outdoor mode not quite as refined as the auto mode, however. It kept forgetting that I wanted to use an arrow as my current position indicator (the default hiking boots for walking mode didn’t provide an accurate enough direction indication for my tastes). Finally realized that saying “don’t ask me about the configuration” was the key to getting it to remember the configuration. It sometimes took a surprisingly long time to realize we weren’t standing still any longer.

On the other hand, the quality of the GPS receiver was amazing. It even got a strong signal in my house. And I wasn’t even sitting at a window. The topographical maps are a nice addition, and the breadcrumb mode is always helpful when geocaching and hiking, too.

My natural way of holding it meant that I accidentally turned it off a few times, because I had a finger holding it right over the power button. But it powers back up and re-obtains the signal quite rapidly.

The different modes (automobile, outdoor, bicycle, and scooter) are mainly different collections of settings: 3D map or flat, what indicator to use, to navigate off-road or along roadways, to ignore one-way indications or heed them, etc.

PC link

The nuvi 500 has a USB port. Plug it into the PC, and you see its internal flash drive, vfat formatted. You can upload and download GPX files there, store photos if you like. Be careful what you mess with though, because its built-in maps and system data are also on that drive. If you have the SD card inserted, that will also be presented to your computer when you plug the device in. Garmin has some Windows software to make it easier to upload/download stuff, but I haven’t tried it.

Annoyances

As you can tell, I really like this GPS, but there are a few things about it that annoy me.

The thing that annoys me isn’t actually the GPS itself, but Garmin’s website. I went to register the device online, but it wouldn’t let me because I don’t have the Windows-only browser plugin on my Linux machine, and it wanted to talk to the GPS for some reason. I went to send them a support request about that, only to discover — after I had typed in the request — that their “email us” form is broken in Firefox on all platforms. Bad show, Garmin.

The on-screen keyboard (it’s a touch-screen device with only one hard button for power) isn’t QWERTY layout; it’s alphabetical layout, and it makes me inefficient when entering data. I found myself logging my finds on the unit, but taking notes about them on paper because that was faster. Garmin has a feature listed on their website for a toggle between QWERTY and alphabetical layout, which they apparently offer on only their more expensive GPSs. What? There is no reason to not but that in all your firmware.

The device lacks a few features I was used to on my GPS III and eMap. It doesn’t support any kind of real-time position indication to the PC; all communications is just accessing stored data on the internal flash drive. I used to think that was a nice feature, but in reality, I haven’t used it in years. It also lacks the display of the exact location of each GPS satellite, though the incredible quality of its receiver means that I don’t really care any more. (I used to use that information to help figure out which window to put it by if in a car/train or something.)

It also lacks the level of configuration that was present in the settings screens on the older units. There’s no “battery saver” mode (sample every 5 seconds when going at a constant velocity instead of every 1) like the older units had. The sun and moon screen likewise is gone, but added is awareness of timezones; the Nuvi 500 can show you the local time at your present position synced up with the GPS satellites.

The compass is not the most helpful screen, though after some practice, it is functional. The documentation about it is confusing, but really the thing that was more confusing was this: in walking mode, the arrow that indicates what direction you’re walking in updates faster than the arrow that indicates what direction you should be walking in. Once I realized what was going on there, it was easier to use.

The compass does tell you what your bearing is, in degrees, but only when you are not seeking a destination. It will not tell you the bearing to the destination, though you can estimate it from the simulated compass face on the display. When seeking a specific point, especially through terrain with obstacles such as trees, it is useful to be able to use a compass for the final approach because a GPS unit can’t tell you which direction it’s pointed — only which direction it’s moving, so when you’re not moving or moving slowly, it’s not helpful.

I did some experimentation today with the compass screen, as well as my real compass, and was able to navigate to my destination rather precisely using the combination of them. That said, a more functional compass screen would still be better.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m very happy with the nuvi 500. It’s not the same as a top-of-the-line device in either the outdoor or automotive category, but on the other hand, it’s cheaper and more convenient than buying two devices with similar features. The geocaching features are excellent, the build quality is excellent as well. The system is stable and performs well. (Some other reviews worried about whether the case is solid enough; it seems quite solid to me.) I wish there were a faster way to toggle between 3D and flat map views, and forgetting about my walking mode icon is annoying, but other than that I have very little to complain about. Garmin’s geocaching features (found on this unit and several other in their lineup) is great.

A Day with Jacob

Uncategorized

“Old train! Smoke inside.”

That’s what Jacob said today when he saw an old steam locomotive at the old Union Station in Wichita, KS. Never mind that it’s been sitting there for decades — he’s got that concept of smoke coming out of steam engines down, and apparently realizes that for smoke to come out of them, it must start out inside them. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about a steam engine in a more cute way. Two is a fun age.

Today I needed to return a power supply to Circuit City, so Jacob and I made a day of it. He came with me to town (yes, us country folk “go to town”). We returned the power supply, then ate lunch at a Mexican place. Jacob would call it a “chips and salsa” place. Today he drank from a straw for the first time, and loved it so much that I think he got more liquid than food in him over lunch. Oh well.

After that, we went to the “eye cream” (ice cream) store – Cold Stone Creamery. Whenever Jacob hears talk of Wichita, he comments with something like “Go ichita. Eat eye cream. Go town.” Jacob ate his entire kid-sized chocolate ice cream with sprinkles. He loves sprinkles.

While we were eating ice cream, I asked him, “After you are done, would you like to see skyscrapers or trains?” “NO! Eat eye cream!” I don’t think he quite got the after bit, so I asked him again in the car after we were done eating. His eyes lit up. “SEE KYCRAPER!!” So we drove to downtown Wichita and saw the skyscrapers. (Yes, I am aware that other cities have much taller buildings. It doesn’t matter when you’re 2.) We got out of the car and he got to touch a few of them. In fact, the only way I got him back into the car without a meltdown was by pointing out the train crossing above the road on a bridge, and the fact that he’d still be able to see it from in the car.

That, of course, led to us needing to see trains. I drove him up the ramp to be trackside by the old Wichita Union Station. There weren’t any trains going past right then, but he did get to see the locomotives at the Great Plains Transportation Museum through the fence.

We started to head home, but he really wanted to see the train again. So we stopped at the park in Newton to see the old ATSF locomotive there. By that point, it was waaaay past naptime and we narrowly averted a fit when I informed him that no, we could not go inside the adjacent grain elevators.

So all told, I think Jacob had a fun day with his dad.

Now, in case there is any doubt out there about what kind of child Jacob is, I should point out the things he notices in church lately.

First off, when we get into the sanctuary, we sit in the back. But first thing he said lately when we walked in was “TWO THERMOSTATS!” Yes, he saw two thermostats at opposite ends of the room up front, pointed right at them, and was very excited. He also notices the organ speakers (“oran peaker”), “big cross”, ceiling fans, and now “furnace vents”. Yes, furnace vents.

At the Christmas Eve service, there was a candlelight part. He loved it. “Daddy hold fire!” A few people nearby smiled. While we sang Silent Night, he really wanted to blow out the candle. When it was time, I said “OK Jacob, now you can blow it out.” A very excited “Fffffffffffffffff” followed, and several people nearby were chuckling by then. I also let Jacob put the candle in the box on our way out. He said, “I put fire in box. I did it!”

Real World Haskell update

Programming,

There’s been quite the activity around this book lately.

Pat Eyler of On Ruby published an interview with the three of us RWH authors. It apparently got some very positive comments on Reddit.

Over on Amazon, the book is continuing its streak of 5-star reviews. When I see a review there titled “Finally a Haskell book that I could understand”, I am very glad that we took the time to write Real World Haskell. It is great to know that people find it useful.

Some of you may know that the book is licensed under a Creative Commons license. This is most certainly not common in the publishing world these days, and O’Reilly took a risk by letting us do it. We had tremendous community participation while we were writing it, and O’Reilly is quite pleased with the sales so far. I hope that this bodes well for future books released under such a license.

Server upgraded to Debian lenny

Debian

This afternoon, I finally decided to upgrade my main server from Debian etch to lenny. Lenny is still testing, but is nearing release. This server is colocated with Core Networks, and I have no physical or console access to it. (Well, I can request the IP KVM if needed.) It also hadn’t been rebooted in over 200 days.

The actual upgrade itself was incredibly smooth. For those of you that don’t use Debian, you might be interested to know that you can upgrade a running system in-place. A reboot is not even strictly necessary, though you won’t get kernel updates without it.

There was a bit of config file tweaking for Exim and Apache, a small bit for PHP, and that was it for the entire thing.

EXCEPT for the two things that always really bug me: Horde/IMP and Ruby/Rails. Horde has the most annoying upgrade process of any web app I’ve used lately. You first go through reading two different upgrade docs. To upgrade imp, you pipe some SQL commands into a PostgreSQL psql process (only they only document the mysql command line). Ditto for horde. But for Turba, the address book, you have to run a PHP program from the command line. Only it doesn’t work from any place in your PATH, so you have to divine a location to copy it to, run it from there, hack up the database stuff in it, then remember to delete it.

And that concludes the documented upgrade process. Only — surprise — it’s not done. At this point, you’ll get weird PHP warnings all over your screen. Then you google them, and find you have to log in to the web app as an administrator, and run three different upgrade procedures from within it, each of which requires you to copy and paste a config file to disk.

A far cry from the WordPress single-click upgrade. And this is easier than Horde/IMP upgrades I’ve done in the past.

The other annoying thing is Ruby on Rails. I run one Rails app, Redmine, and it’s always annoying. You’ve got to get all sorts of these gems just right. Today they decided they didn’t like my new PostgreSQL driver for Ruby, but they weren’t exactly obvious about it. Try upgrading the Gems, and — surprise — AFTER they are upgraded, they say that I need a newer rubygems than’s in Debian. Oooookaaayy…. restore gems from backup, google some more, find a patch, apply it, hack for awhile, and finally it works. But I have no idea why.

So, overall, kudos to all the Debian developers for a smooth upgrade process. I hope I can say that about Horde and Rails in the future.

Oh, and by the way, I did reboot the server. It came right up with the new kernel an OS, no problem.

More Wiki Annoyances

Software, ,

So today, I discovered that MoinMoin has an “all or nothing” attachment setting: either everyone with write permission to a page can upload attachments, or uploading attachments is disabled for the entire site. No exceptions. Period.

Not only that, but there is no maximum attachment size setting — unless the attachment was uploaded embedded in a ZIP file. How’s that for irony?

Not wanting to have my railroad site turn into a file trading site, I don’t really want to let everyone upload attachments.

Oh, also MoinMoin doesn’t maintain a history of attachments. So if somebody drives by and vandalizes an attachment, you get to…. restore the original version from tape. Yay?

So I decided I’d look back at MediaWiki, which has better attachment controls.

I still had my test installation, so I went to use it. I edited the main page. I wanted to read about the markup, so I clicked the “Editing help” link. Whoops, broken link. It links to Help:Editing on the local wiki. Which MediaWiki does not install for you. I asked about it on . The answer was: copy from mediawiki.org. OK, fine. How? “Cut and paste.” Yes, that’s right. Every time a new version of MediaWiki comes out, you get to cut and paste dozens of pages from mediawiki.org to your wiki, or else you’ll have outdated help. Yay?

The MediaWiki folks on IRC seem to like it this way. “Not everyone wants the same help.” Fine, but provide a sane default for those that don’t care.

Who thought running a wiki would be so hard?

Update: since yesterday, I went to moinmo.in and fixed the ThemeMarket page to reflect what versions a MoinMoin theme works with. I’m happy to help out with fixing Free Software — though I don’t really have time to add fundamental features like working syntax help links on this particular project.

Wiki Software

Software,

I used to run a website for traveling by rail in the United States. I let it falter, and eventually took it down. But I still have the domain, and am working to bring it back as a wiki.

The first step in that process was selecting which wiki software to use. I have a few requirements for the site:

  • Availability of both WYSIWYG (friendly for beginners) and non-WYSIWYG editors
  • A number of nice-looking themes to choose from
  • Nice to have: a hierarchy or category system
  • The ability to search within only a particular section or category in the hierarchy
  • Easy to maintain software; not having tons of plugins to keep up-to-date for security
  • Stellar spam prevention
  • Nice to have: ability to redirect people to the new page after a rename

I’m frustrated that there is no wiki out there that does all of these. There are quite a few that do all but one, but which one they omit varies.

My two finalists were MoinMoin and MediaWiki.

MoinMoin

MoinMoin will let you easily define arbitrary categories (by creating a wiki page following a certain name). The search screen automatically presents checkboxes for restricting searches to a particular category. Some reviews have complained about its anti-spam features, but they are all talking about older versions and they seem to have done some work on this lately.

MoinMoin has tons of features and is easy to set up and maintain. But here’s where it falls down: themes.

Over at moinmo.in, there is a “theme market” for themes. Only most of the themes there haven’t been compatible with the current MoinMoin release since about 2005. Most of the rest have one download, then a long discussion page full of mixed bug reports, diffs, and non-diff “edit this to make it work” comments. Most of these don’t state what version of the theme they apply to. Most themes won’t work with current browsers and Moin releases without them. UGH. After discussing on #moin, I’ll probably go in there and at least organize the ThemeMarket page by release.

MediaWiki

Then there’s MediaWiki. It’s got a lot of features, and a lot of complexity. It has no current WYSIWYG feature, though apparently there is work on one.

MediaWiki has an amazing category system. It can generate sorted lists of pages in a category, supports subcategories, etc. Surprisingly, though, you can’t search in just one category. (Though it might be possible indirectly via some syntax; not sure.)

Searching in MediaWiki overall is less capable that in MoinMoin.

MediaWiki does offer namespaces, and namespaces are the sole way of searching just one part of a site. They’re used well over at, say, uesp.net. But namespaces are heavy-handed. You have to edit config files to define them, and they bring with them other associated namespaces for discussion and whatnot. It’s not as easy as creating a category in MoinMoin, and might not scale well to lots of future categories.

MediaWiki does appear to have good spam prevention, and support recaptcha.

Conclusions

I eventually selected MoinMoin and have set up most of my content in it. But now that I am to the point of selecting themes, I’m having some second thoughts.

I also looked at DokuWiki. Its design makes me nervous. The user list is stored in a single file. You can’t search by category. You can search by namespace, but there aren’t checkboxes for it in the search screen; you have to know the syntax. WYSIWYG is a plugin. Categories are a plugin. So — too many plugins to maintain, and no real features above MoinMoin.

Administering Dozens of Debian Servers

Debian, ,

At work, we have quite a few Debian servers. We have a few physical machines, then a number of virtual machines running under Xen. These servers are split up mainly along task-oriented lines: DNS server, LDAP server, file server, print server, mail server, several web app servers, ERP system, and the like.

In the past, we had fewer virtual instances and combined more services into a single OS install. This led to some difficulties, especially with upgrades. If we wanted to upgrade the OS for, say, the file server, we’d have to upgrade the web apps and test them along with it at the same time. This was not a terribly sustainable approach, hence the heavier reliance on smaller virtual environments.

All these virtual environments have led to their own issues. One of them is getting security patches installed. At present, that’s a mainly manual task. In the past, I used cron-apt a bit, but it seemed to be rather fragile. I’m wondering what people are using to get security updates onto servers in an automated fashion these days.

The other issue is managing the configuration of these things. We have some bits of configuration that are pretty similar between servers — the mail system setup, for instance. Most of them are just simple SMTP clients that need to be able to send out cron reports and the like. We had tried using cfengine2 for this, but it didn’t work out well. I don’t know if it was our approach or not, but we found that hacking cfengine2 after making changes on systems was too time-consuming, and so that task slipped and eventually cfengine2 wasn’t doing what it should anymore. And that even with taking advantage of it being able to do things like put the local hostname in the right places.

I’ve thought a bit about perhaps providing some locally-built packages that establish these config files, or load them up with our defaults. That approach has worked out well for me before, though it also means that pushing out changes isn’t a simple hack of a config file somewhere anymore.

It seems like a lot of the cfengine2/bcfg tools are designed for environments where servers are more homogenous than ours. bcfg2, in particular, goes down that road; it makes it difficult to be able to log on to a web server, apt-get install a few PHP modules that we need for a random app, and just proceed.

Any suggestions?

Why Do Web Applications Stink So Badly?

Programming,

So today, I happen to be looking at wikis for two small to mid-sized public proojects (MoinMoin and DokuWiki look like frontrunners right now — any suggestions?) Recently, I’ve also looked at blog and CMS software, and a host of other web apps. It’s as if these people have learned nothing about good software practices over the last 20 years.

Warning: Rant Ahead

So how many of you have been here before? You download WebApp X. It tells you to cd to your DocumentRoot and unzip/untar it there. At this point, most of them will tell you to chmod -R 777 the install directory. Some of the better ones, such as WordPress, will tell you to chmod it 777, or if that makes you nervous, to instead chown it to the user that your webserver runs as.

It is at this point that you realize that the Java-based programs ship with their own webserver that takes 2 minutes to load and uses 2GB of RAM, while the PHP-based programs want you to give them 32MB RAM per process, and probably modify your global PHP settings in a way that breaks some other PHP web app you’re already using.

As if that isn’t enough to scare you off, generally speaking, config files — including passwords to databases — are stored in the same directory, along with .htaccess files. Many of these programs are also downloading and updating plugins over the Internet, usually without any kind of cryptographic authentication, and overwriting their own program files in the process.

Oh, and this is a class of app that is notorious for security problems to start with, and makes your server known to billions of people via search engines.

Absolutely no opportunity for trouble here, of course! That sentence was dripping with sarcasm, in case you didn’t get it.

It also makes it almost impossible for people such as Debian maintainers to package up some webapps (such as just about every single one that uses Ruby on Rails) because there is just no sane way to make it behave with respect to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

I’d love to see web app developers do a few simple things:

  1. Separate code from data
  2. Separate code from configuration
  3. Separate all of the above from the DocumentRoot to the greatest extent possible

I realize that some of this is purportedly to make things easier to install when you have FTP access only. But to me it seems just really poor design. I’ve written webapps, and it’s not that hard to do this part right.

Plus, doing the above right means that I no longer have to do something like use git on my WordPress installations because it’s too much of a hassle to apply security and plugin updates on all three separate ones otherwise.

If Programming Languages Were Christmas Carols

Humor, Programming, , , , , ,

Last spring, I posted If Version Contol Systems Were Airlines, which I really enjoyed. Now, because I seem to have a desire to take a good joke way too far, it’s time for:

IF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES WERE CHRISTMAS CAROLS

I apologize in advance. (Feel free to add your own verses/carols in the comments.)

Away in a Pointer (C)

(to Away in a Manger)

Away in a pointer, the bits in a row.
A little dereference to see where they go.
I look down upon thee, and what do I see?
A segfault and core dump, right there just for me.

I saw thy init there, a reaping away
My process, from its address space, so sorry to say.
I thought I had saved thee, from void pointers all,
But maybe I missed one, and doomed you to fall.

Be near me, debugger, I ask thee to stay
Close by my terminal, and help me, I pray;
To find all the bugs and the void pointers too,
And if my kernel oopses, help me reboot for you.

Joy to the Wall (Perl)

(to Joy to the World)

Joy to the Wall, the Perl is come!
Let awk receive her King;
Let every grep prepare him room,
And bash and sed shall sing,
And bash and sed shall sing,
And bash, and bash, and sed shall sing.

Joy to the keyboard, we’ll use it all!
Let men, shift keys, employ;
Implicit variables, and globals never fall.
Repeat the line noise now,
Repeat the line noise now,
Repeat, repeat, the line noise now.

Perl rules the world with truth and ASCII,
And makes the doctors prove
The glories of carpal tunnel hands,
And we do it more than one way,
And we do it more than one way,
And we do it, and we do it, more than one way.

Hark! The Herald Coders Sing (Haskell)

(to Hark! The Herald Angels Sing)

Hark! The herald coders sing,
“Map and fold, recursive King;
Recursion and patterns wild,
Pure and IO — they’re reconciled!”
Joyful, all ye functions rise,
Join the typeclasses of the types,
With recursion, do proclaim,
“Laziness is born in this domain.”

Refrain
Hark! The herald coders sing,
“Map and fold, recursive king!”

Monads, by highest Heav’n adored;
Monads, their depths still unexplored;
Late in time, behold they’re good,
Never once were understood.
Veiled in functions, the Monads stay,
Used for IO, and more, each day,
With excitement, Monads say,
“Arrows are stranger, so with us stay.”

(Refrain)

Hail the glorious compiler of Glasgow!
Hail the threaded run-time system!
Join the beautiful Cabal of Hackage,
Upload there thy perfect package.
We know best, what we will Handle,
You’re safe with us: no pointers, no vandals.
Born to make your exceptions throw,
Unless you unsafePerformIO.

(Refrain)

Lispy the Paren

(to Frosty the Snowman)

Lispy the paren was a jolly happy soul,
With a lot of cars and a little cons
And two ends made out of curves.
Lispy the paren is a fairy tale, they say,
He was just common, but the children know
how he came to life one day.
There must have been some magic in that
Old Symbolics they found.
For when they placed him on its disk,
It recursed around and ’round.

O, Lispy the paren,
Was recursive as can be.
And the coders say it would take a day
To put his parens away.
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Look at Lispy go.
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Consing on the car.

Lispy the snowman knew
The keyboard was hot the day,
So he said, “Let’s cons and we’ll have some fun
now before they Scheme away.”
Down to the function,
With a list there in his RAM,
Running here and there,
all around the LAN, saying
“cdr me if you can.”
He led them down the streets of disk
Right to the traffic bus.
And only paused a moment when
He heard them holler (quit).

Oh BASIC Night

(to O Holy Night)

Oh BASIC night, the LEDs are brightly glinting;
It is the night of the dear GOSUB’s birth!
Long lay the world in sin and error printing,
Till you appeared and the RAM felt its worth.
Shiver of fear, line numbers do inspire,
For yonder breaks a mostly harmless GOTO.
Fall on your bits, O hear the Visual voices!
O BASIC divine, O BASIC where GOTO was born!
O BASIC, O Holy BASIC, O BASIC, you’re mine!

Some want to say, “GOTO is harmful always,”
But what of them, in their post-modern world.
We PRINT the truth, in the line-numbered goodness,
But Dijkstra appeared, and the faith, it was lost.
A thrill of hope, when .NET BASIC announces,
But Visual BASIC, what kind of thing are you?
Fall on your GUI, O see the old line numbers!
Behold BASICA, O BASIC when DOS was born!
O numbers, O lines, spaghetti divine!

Guido We Have Heard on High (Python)

(to Angels We Have Heard on High)

Guido we have hard on high
Sweetly indenting o’re the code,
And the functions in reply
Their exceptions sweetly flowed.

Refrain

Indent….. in your whitespace careful!
Indent…… in your whitespace careful!

Spaces, why this jubilee?
Why semicolons have you so wronged?
What backslashes must we use
If we want our lines so long?

(Refrain)

Come to Guido here to see
“One Right Way” is good, of course.
There’s no need for Perl, you know,
We have to be more verbose.

(Refrain)

Now the PEP will show the way
To the future, we shall see.
Banish lambda and the rest
Of the things we liked the best.

(Refrain)