While I’ve come to love Javascript, I miss the syntactic beauty of Python. The stark modern minimalism of the language causes the meaning of code to float on the syntax like a feather on water. There are no extra braces, brackets, or parenthesis to saturate your visual bandwidth. In comparison, Javascript’s syntax is like the cluttered boudoir of a Victorian house: elaborate, ornate, and unnecessary. You can be left with half a dozen trailing braces and parenthesis, with no clear owner; their balance in an unstable equilibrium.

Note that I am not arguing that Javascript isn’t a beautiful or powerful language, just that its syntax is a vestigial meme left over from a time when we didn’t know better.

I’ve often wanted to bring Javascript and modern minimalism together: to strip the language of parens, braces, and semicolons. So that’s what I’ve done. I wrote a little parser for a slight modification of Javascript. I call it Pyscript.

(more…)

There was a lot of great feedback for my post Making Privacy Policies Not Suck. We are now in conversation with a whole slew of industry leaders and deep thinkers in the area of privacy (Lorrie Cranor, Jonathan Zittrain, Lauren Gelman, Ryan Calo to name a few).

With all of the work that’s been done before us, I wanted to touch on some of the way our thinking and position breaks from the mold.

(more…)