The other day's entry on why Perl is not my favorite language produced an interesting comment exchange between me and a friendthat touched on how transparently Perl can embed data structures inother data structures. (In specific, that one can't transparentlyput aggregates, lists and hashes, straight into and out of otheraggregates.)

Why does this matter? Because every time you have a lack oftransparency with data structures, you have to be aware of the actualtypes that you are working with. Being aware

The University of Toronto doesn't have a firewall. There, I've saidit and you can all gasp in horror: how could any organization on theInternet in this day and age fail to have such a basic thing as afirewall between them and the nasty net?

Because it doesn't help all that much; because it has the wrong threatmodel. A perimeter firewall protects you from evil people out there onthe net, but does nothing to protect you from evil people inside, onyour

There are many things that puzzle me about common web design. One ofthe biggest thing is this: why do so many sites reduce the font sizeof their main content? This is the single largest readability problemthat I run into on the web. (For some reason this seems to be especiallyprevalent on blogs.)

I see it over and over again, in CSS like 'font-size:small', 'font-size: 80%', 'font: normal 76%/