
Mark Pilgrim Ask Me Anything on Reddit - thamer
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/f545e/i_am_a_fourtime_published_author_i_write_free/
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runjake
Somewhat off-topic, but related:

Zed, I wish you were more polite. I bought that the Rails Ghetto thing was an
act, but now I'm not so sure. The Mark Pilgrim post was a big turn off.

I wonder how much more of a positive impact you would've made if you had
refrained from flaming Mark and just written LPTHW.

You have a lot of valuable insight, and you do great work, that could be
distributed a lot more effectively by simply being less offensive.

~~~
kmfrk
As someone new to Python (at the time), I think he did aspiring programmers a
great service by telling them to stay the hell away from DiP.

When you're new to something, and it seems insurmountably difficult, you are
faced with the question of whether you are awful at something, or if the
teacher - for the sake of politeness - didn't do a good job.

Feelings may have been hurt, but he's prevented some, if not a lot, of people
from being scared away from Python and programming.

His style serves a purpose, and it lets him cut the bullshit and reach out to
people.

The people who wanted to learn programming and Python were the recipients of
Zed's soapbox speech, not Mark Pilgrim.

LPtHW was created in the context, and the story of that context was laid out.

~~~
stinkytaco
I don't understand why it was neccessary to be an asshole though. It's not
like Mark went around pitching his book to beginners. The jacket description
is pretty clear about who it's aimed at.

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shortlived
Mark says _Python 3 is a commercial disaster_. Would someone like to expand on
this statement? I don't follow python at all and would like to know the
reasons.

~~~
samdk
As other commenters have said, he meant the book was a commercial disaster.
However, that's probably at least in part because Python 3 adoption has been
really, really slow in general, in large part because it's backwards-
incompatible and a lot of the big existing libraries still haven't been ported
yet.

One of the biggest offenders is scipy, Python's very good and very widely used
statistical computing library. The soon-to-be-released scipy 0.9.0 does
support Python 3 [0], but Python 3 was released in 2008, so it's taken quite a
while.

Another big problem has been with web applications. Python has WSGI, a
standard interface for implementing webapps that allows you to use a lot of
different frameworks with a lot of different servers. (Similarly to Ruby's
Rack and Java's servelets.) However, the WSGI standard for Python 3 (which has
to be changed because the existing specification has encoding-related issues
in Python 3) has only just been finalized as PEP 3333 [1].

[0] <http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/roadmap#python-3> [1]
<http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3333/>

~~~
MarkPilgrim
This is essentially everything I would have said on the subject. Python 3 is
technically very good, but no one is using it, hence no commercial interest in
the book. The optimist would say it was just ahead of its time. The pessimist
would say Python 3 is a dead end and I backed the wrong horse. I'd say the
jury is still out.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
When you say a book "earned out", what exactly does that mean, to someone like
me who has no clue about writing books and/or publishing deals?

~~~
telemachos
He discusses "earning out" on a recent post from his blog[1]:

> The book went on sale in mid-August and earned out almost immediately.
> “Earning out” is a publishing term which means that the book has sold enough
> copies that my cut of the profits has paid back the advance payments that
> O’Reilly gave me during the writing process. Which means that I’m already
> receiving royalty checks for real money.

[1]: <http://diveintomark.org/archives/2011/01/09/dive-into-2010>

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morganw
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/f545e/i_am_a_fourtime_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/f545e/i_am_a_fourtime_published_author_i_write_free/c1dco3b)

'I stand by my prediction that, by the end of 2015, Apple will not sell any
computing devices with root access available.

'Here's what it will sound like: "iOS has been a runaway success. With 1
million apps now available in the App Store, blah blah blah. We've heard from
countless people that their iPad is now their primary computer. And we've
heard from developers that they use their iPad for everything except...
developing iPad applications! ... Introducing XCode for iOS. With a bluetooth
keyboard and mouse, you can now write AND TEST your apps directly on your own
iPad. It's free, and it's available right now in the new Developers sections
of the iOS App Store."'

You can write an entire Mac application and run it without having root access.
In fact you can write an iPad web app inside the ECMAScript sandbox now. For
more [http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/1285-ipad-friendly-
browser-...](http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/1285-ipad-friendly-browser-
based-programming-environments/)

I'm an embedded guy, but it seems like most of Hacker News's readers are just
the kind of very-high-level-language (and framework) people who could bring a
Commodore 64-style safe intro to computing environment to MobileSafari and
Chrome OS. If you want (your kids) to go further like PEEK and POKE let you do
on Ataris and Commodores, you can go native and do crazy things like extend
the WebView like PhoneGap does.

Remember: you don't need Apple's permission to do perverse things to the
JavaScript interpreter. You can even run interpreters on that interpreter.

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gcb
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/f545e/i_am_a_fourtime_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/f545e/i_am_a_fourtime_published_author_i_write_free/c1dcqxa)

