Kappa’s Lair v6

  • Python Luck

    For quite some time I was thinking that Python’s dominance as the main “scripting” general purpose programming language was temporary.

    To clarify: “scripting” as in the language of automation as opposed to program creation. With “scripting” languages people make computers do stuff they need by writing code instead of using some application that solves their task because it was pre-programmed to do so.

    Of course people create applications in Python too, that’s not the point. People don’t write scripts in Java. Controversially, people don’t write scripts in JavaScript very often these days either.

    So back to the main point. I thought Python was merely the scripting language du jour, following the successes of Lisp scripting, Unix shell and Windows Batch scripting, Perl scripting, Ruby and PHP scripting. Python would be dominated by the next even more simple and powerful something, I was imagining.

    And then it struck me. Python didn’t overcome those previous scripting tools. People keep scripting in Bash/Perl and Ruby if those are what they started with before Python. Python doesn’t actually provide enough upsides. What happened is that Python became the scripting tool for new people who started scripting when Python had already become the natural choice for the task.

    The beauty of the moment (and the luck of Python) is that these were the last people who had not been scripting their work before. All knowledge workers these days can write Python. Linguists, biologists, lawyers, bookkeepers, designers, project managers – they all can and do code. Not very often, but Python is easy enough to not require keeping up.

    What this means is that Python may very well be the last scripting language for quite some time. All the new languages will need to be so much better to cause infrequently coding people to invest in switching.

    Python happened at the right time, that’s all.

  • Startup Emails

    This happens every time. A startup is announced with a page and an email collecting form. A month later the founders feel guilty about all those thousands of email addresses they have in the database and decide to write a uplifting, zero-content message to everyone providing “updates” on how the application is progressing towards launch in an unprecedented rate and will be able to serve the customers Real Soon Now™. An attention-deprived user receives the email from bob@FooBaarGlobs.io, has no idea what that is and clicks “unsubscribe” or even worse, sends it to the Spam folder.

    The startup team eats, drinks and breathes their work and cannot imagine that the early adopters they managed to reach before the launch have invested exactly 10 seconds into remembering what FooBaarGlobs.io is.

    Please, do mention what your company does in all your emails up until you become a household name.

  • Hugo on Azure

    I’ve been spending some time learning the Azure stack. Traditionally, it is considered “the 3rd stack” after AWS and GCP. Google noticed AWS a little earlier than Microsoft, yes, but Azure is more than 3 times bigger than GCP revenue-wise.

    Azure has good Linux and even FreeBSD support at this point and also many high-level services (or resources) like static webapp hosting with CDN integration and intelligent CI pipelines similar to Github actions.

    Hugo is one of the static website engines that have pre-defined build recipes when set up on “Azure Static Web App” which is the type of the resource I am using for this blog.

    I will describe the process of launching a simple Hugo-powered blog on Azure step-by-step later. I’ve completed it myself just today and want to spend several days looking at how it behaves and what the costs are first.

  • Off we go

    I am opening the sixth version of my personal blog Kappa’s Lair. I’ll post in English on various topics, both professional and not, not too often.

    My most active social account is on Freefeed — in Russian.

    My old blog, also in Russian, was started in 2002.