The fuss about Gmail and emails.

According to some recent news, "Google has finally admitted they don't respect privacy,". Understand Google has "admitted" they scan Gmail emails for profit.

I've been using Gmail for quite a long time now and well, this is no news at all. It's always been quite clear that by using Gmail, you agree that Google will scan your email content to target advertisement. This is how the (great) service remains free. No mystery there. Nothing to admit really, and as Google puts it, it's always been part of their standard Gmail ordinary business practises. Since 2007.
It's 2013 and Consumer Watchdog called the "revelation" a "stunning admission". Are those people so dumb it took them 6 years to realise what gmail is?

The answer is probably yes, given the fact that John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s privacy project director has declared:  "sending an email is like giving a letter to the Post Office. I expect the Post Office to deliver the letter based on the address written on the envelope. I don't expect the mail carrier to open my letter and read it.".

What is striking in this statement is that the man clearly doesn't know what he is talking about. Sending an email the standard way (meaning without using any additional encryption techniques) has never been like sending a letter (understand a message hidden in an envelope). From the late 60's/early 70's, sending an standard email is more like sending a post-card without envelope wrapping. It will arrive at destination, but you can't expect the postmen not to have a quick look at it. By the way, this is how spam/malware/virus detection works.

A good email analogy

The fact that this John Simpson is not already aware of that clearly demonstrate his lack of technical culture, which is quite ridiculous and worrying for a guy who is a "privacy project director". If I was a "privacy project director", I would probably encourage people who actually care about their privacy to use encryption techniques. Many solutions are available, and again this is no news at all and used routinely by businesses.

All of that makes me think that 20 or so years after the incredible expansion of the web, and 40 something years after the invention of emails, the general public (by that I mean people who are not in IT) is still lacking essential basic IT knowledge. Like how do emails work (not in details of course), or how a website (a simple one) works. Probably the solution resides on better basic computer education.

What Javascript programmers should learn from Perl mistakes

Although I spend most time developing stuff in Perl, sometime I have to fix Javascript code that's been written by JavaScript specialists. Sorry, ECMA script as it should be called. And the more I look at 2013 JavaScript programming, the more I can see some similarity with the state of Perl programming 12 years ago.

Remember the Perl obfuscated code contest? Basically it was all the "serious" Perl programmer boasting about being able to write the most f...d up original version of Yet Another Perl Hacker. While this was quite fun and made quite a good showcase of Perl's flexibility and expressiveness, some Perl programmers of the time were not quite serious enough and started to (unwillingly ?) use obfuscation techniques in production code, gaining Perl a reputation of being unreadable and unmaintainable, thus not fit for serious industrial development. You know the rest of the story: PHP, the offspring of 1994 Perl took over.
As programmers, we know that you can write unreadable and unmaintainable code in any language, and you can certainly write elegant things in any language too. Although I'm not sure about brainf.ck. The problem lies in the fact that non-programmers easily confuse the Programming language itself and the nasty habits of programmers. Have enough people write bad *any language* code, even for fun, and *any language* will gain a bad reputation. It comes from the extraordinary appetite our lazy human brains have for generalisation. Show enough retarded programs on TV and very soon people will think that the TV media itself is retarded.
So please, Javascript programmers, stop writing stuff like that:

var layout_options = {}, optgroups = {
                    globals: 'Public',
                    userones: 'Private'
                };
Or like that:
var block = conf[i], options, sel_conf, k, j;
Or like that:
opt.lytId == cfg.actLyt_id && opt.lytType === cfg.actLytType && (option_conf.selected = true);

Maybe some prehistoric browsers will actually run that faster than if you were using the 'var' keyword sensibly or if you were using good old 'if' statements. Otherwise, I think it's safe to assume these are completely useless optimizations, paid at the high price of unreadability. Plus, you know, text editors have auto-completion, so it's useless too to save keystrokes on variable names, specially if your code goes though some optimizer/packager in production.
Maybe I shouldn't rant about Javascript programming, maybe stuff like CoffeeScript or Dart will take over and it JavaScript will only live as an assembly language. Personally I have the feeling it would be a good thing. A higher level - cleaner language compiled to JavaScript taking all browsers specificities into account. Why not? I don't see anything wrong with that.
But JS programmers, if you love JavaScript and want to make sure it's still used in its current form over the next few years, stop writing code that's only barely readable by your fellow gurus.

Edit: Actually, someone has pointed out to me that Perl is still more popular than PHP in terms of Job offers.

Perl, Python, Php, Ruby trends

Perl jobs | Python jobs | Php jobs | Ruby jobs

Although PHP easily wins on Google fight.