Why the Name

My wife tells me that my posts require too much context, and if I want anyone to understand what I am saying, I should provide a little background.

"Erethizon" is the genus of the North American porcupine, and I have been using "porcupine" and its cognates to generate usernames for years.

'Blub' is an imaginary programming language coined in an article by hacker-pundit Paul Graham. This language lies somewhere in the middle of the language "power-continuum" (which has Lisp at the top and assembler at the bottom). The language itself is not important to Graham's discussion, but rather the attitude of the people who program Blub.

As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.

One of the big dreads of hacker-pundits like Raganwald is that they might be Blub programmers (just read his article and the subsequent commentary). So as I read the hacker pundits, I keep coming across sneering disdain towards Blubs.

Starting this blog was a reaction to this disdain. It is an attempt to rise in the defense of we, the Blubs.