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Actually , there are a heap load of conflicting storys . Some say he definantly did , some say he didn't others say he didn't with some comments saying oh yes he did and vice versa ..
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,1484,00.htm l
wired says he says he didn't
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Bill_Gates
another one here , its possible it was a slight misquote of something someone said
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BillGatesSixFortyKbytesQuot e
Although we only have his word to deny he ever said it ;) maybe i will cut him this slack , i can only find confirmation from bill gates denying he ever said it ... if i had said it i may deny it too ;)

Although i probably could of used his quotes that are definantly known , such as the internet being a fad or "Probably the fastest conventional telephone dial-up modem you'll ever have is 28.8."

So i withdraw the origional quote having been unable to find any concrete confirmation of him having said it.
But he dosn't have the best record of predictions which was my point

Now, I don't see how any other language (that isn't Lisp based itself) could actually support true macros without adopting the same syntax Lisp uses.

I always thought they were Greek letters and MS had finally shipped the mythical Cairo O/S:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MicrosoftCairo

Do you remember the GIF patent affair?

I'm sorry to say, you're distorting facts. The problem with GIF was that Unisys had a patent for the LZW compression algorithm, an algorithm used by GIF. The fact that the GIF standard was open and public only caused trouble because GIF was widely deployed with patented algorithm. There was a patent, and no one knew about it. Pick up any not-so-old book on compression, and you will see LZW. See here for more info on the GIF controversy.

What Mono has is an ECMA standard. This is entirely different. What they do is a clean room implementation. So, anything people say about MS claiming patent rights on Mono is just FUD, and probably boils down to prior art and the open standard published in a widely-known standards body. Seems hard to hold up in court...This is why a standard by a overseer like ISO, ANSI or ECMA is so important. This is not your de-facto-standard-via-implementation phenomenom, like Perl, Python, etc. This is different: big players, industry, corporations, etc. And no libre software license to go with it.

OTOH, as someone said in another thread, what if another company buys Sun Microsystems? What happens to the dear JCP? It all goes down the drain, because there's no garantee.

So, to sum it up, Java is a liability to the libre software community.

So they practice EatingYourOwnRabbitFood?

People do this all the time, in message boards and on blogs, usually with a standard disclaimer that opinions expressed are not of their employer.

There are so many examples of this... Look at how many Microsoft employees have blogs like Scoble or Don Box, or Oracle's Tom Kyte, or IBM's Kyle Brown, or BEA 's David Orchard (I work for BEA as well) , or Google's Bosworth.. Do you really think these people are vetted by PR? How many employees post to newsgroups or public tech support forums... I see people get into public flamewars too.

On the other hand, there is a problem here with what constitutes a company's "voice". Bosworth, for example, gets into controversy for people confusing his opinions with Google's (or BEA's , previously).

Frankly, I tend to side with the cluetrain. As long as you don't claim to hold the "official" position, and don't talk about internal confidential information, it's beneficial to the company, its investors, customers, and prospects for employees to engage in open and honest dialogue with others.

I guess it depends on how paranoid you are about your company firing you for speaking your mind. Generally I don't get too concerned about it, if they did such a thing, I wouldn't want to work for them anyway.

It's a synchronous dataflow system. Why no comparisons with previous similar work (e.g. Flow-Based Programming or LabView/G)? Do you have a rationale for the use of synchronous dataflow as opposed to, say, asynchronous message passing?

Lisp was the perfect language to run as a scripting language thanks to its interpreter.

OOGG admit Lisp was interpreted in stone-age. (Also, was called LISP in stone-age, but OOGG digress). However, since http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MacLisp MacLisp project, Lisp developers know how write efficient compilers for Lisp.

In heyday of Lisp Machines, whole OS (including FORTRAN compilers, etc.) written in Lisp, compiled to Lisp-based microcode execute directly on CPU.

Current Lisp standard support structures, arrays, hash-tables, strings, also sophisticated OOP using CLOS.

OOGG very happy not have to bang C++ rocks together in order to write powerful programs quickly.

Common Lisp is the only industry language which has full-featured multimethods in its object system (CLOS).

Though it is still somehwat alpha, there is an implementation of multiple dispatch for Python which goes beyond CLOS by also providing predicate dispatch. Unfortunately there isn't much in the way of documentation yet, but try these links for starters:

• "Generic functions have landed"
• Discussion of the API, with examples of predicate dispatch.
• Documentation for new CLOS-style method combination features

Or NeWS a competitor to X.

It is somewhat controversial.

According to many references, acronyms must be pronounceable (eg NATO, LASER), so WWF is only an abbreviation.

For example: http://www.alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxacrony .html

"Strictly, an acronym is a string of initial letters pronounceable as a word, such as "NATO". Abbreviations like "NBC" have been variously designated "alphabetisms" and "initialisms", although some people do call them acronyms. WDEU says, "Dictionaries, however, do not make this distinction [between acronyms and initialisms] because writers in general do not"; but two of the best known books on acronyms are titled Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations Dictionary (19th ed., Gale, 1993) and Concise Dictionary of Acronyms and Initialisms (Facts on File, 1988).

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AcronymVsAbbreviation

Others disagree. For example: http://www.ucc.ie/cgi-bin/acronym

"There is no requirement that an acronym be pronounceable as a normal word (this is a curious myth perpetuated by American dictionaries): IBM is just as much an acronym as LASER."

At the time Windows was registered windowing operating systems certainly existed, but no one marketed/sold them as that until Microsoft did.

Where'd you get that impression? I've read accounts of industry conferences of graphical and windowing systems from about the time Microsoft Windows was released and they certainly seemed to be under the impression that they were selling windowing operating environments. The thing I'm mostly thinking of here is a talk I read a transcript of called "ten years of windowing systems" given slightly after MS-Windows was first released and seemingly largely unaware of the idea Microsoft had done anything important at all in the area.

Anyway rather than try to hunt through Google-- which does an occasionally poor job of finding documents which predate the world wide web-- for examples of windowing systems sold as such, I will simply refer you to Sun Microsystems' Network Extensible Window System, a contemporary of early Microsoft Windows which was, in fact, sold under that name.

It's amazing and somwhat sad that programming languages and runtime environments from Smalltalk to Java to Python to C#/.NET keep reinventing the wheel while a language from the 1950s has the most advanced form of rabid language advocacy yet - smug lisp weenies

to TigerDirect.com

"Suing Apple over 'Tiger'? Yeesh, that's like Apple Records suing Apple over 'Apple'. 'Apple' and 'Tiger' are common names. If you don't want any confusion, call yourselves 'Butthead Computer Stuff'.

From now on I'll order from Newegg."

Reference:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CarlSagan

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GeneraOs

Lisp Machines

If you read the parent post you probably noticed something strange about the tone. But if you've never had anything to do with Lisp you won't have recognised it for what it was. This page may help.

good programmer ^ good musician

Elaborate please. Someone is claiming the opposite view that musicians are more prevalent in the programming profession than elsewhere!

Resource acquisition is allocation is a technique, not a language facet.

Of course, check out http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ResourceAcquisitionIsInitia lization

it works perfectly well in C.

How does it work without destructors?

hasn't use of Lisp been rising for about 50 years? When will it be used by more than 1% of programmers? I guess it hasn't reached the tipping point yet. at least its ahead of pascal.

Woops, forgot to add a C2 Wiki entry for Objective-C.

Woops, forgot to add a C2 Wiki entry for Objective-C.

you sould be good at CS, *AND* good at whatever you're developing hte software for.

Many of us have discovered that companies don't put much value on domain knowledge. I don't really know why, but here is a discussion on that.

Yup; it's even one of the three great virtues of a programmer. Gotta be the right kind of laziness though ;)

I decided to make a search on google for "just works"...seems its everyone's sales pitch at some stage or another:

- http://www.artima.com/spontaneous/upnp_digihome.ht ml
- http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2002/0715mustha ler.html
- http://www.apple.com/switch/whyswitch/
- http://bashburn.sourceforge.net/
- http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/6037

... just to name a few.

Also here is a page with an interesting write-up about "It Just Works": http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ItJustWorks

In the old days they didn't "target the weapons array", they freakin' took care of business.

And the funniest thing to me, these pussies are so Politically Correct that they still give the order to "target the (small) weapons array", when it is demonstrably impossible for them to even hit a ship with more than about half their shots.

They're just lucky everybody else's engineering is as crappy as theirs and if you so much as tap the one and only "weapons array" on the hull, not only will it be out of commision for hours, but it'll probably take out a couple of bridge members with PTTF; might even score the other ship's captain if you're lucky...

Resistance to destruction.

When they see things trolled, they immediately fix it and thus, the integrity of the article is preserved. At that point, it's their baby, and they want it accurate!

I guess this contribution is from a kind-of-not-too-regular Wikipedia contributor. When you see an article trolled once, twice... 10 times you get tired quite quick with reverting. No to say that you don't have time to face your screen 7/24 ! In that case the best thing you can do is leave it. (See below) So... I don't think this is a correct reason of WP resistance to troll. I'd suggest the following. The mere idea of open-right-now-edition is likely to trigger enthusiasm... in both direction: destruction/construction. BUT did you ever play at destructing things ? Well the outcome is pretty much inevitable: one get quickly bored of it! One just don't get any fun/credit out of it. Now, just imagine the following: you Mr. nothing write a two liner Wikipedia article (i.e. sub-stub). Leave it a week and come back. You discover it got formatted, expended... That gives a feekin kick of pleasure: even a "ridiculous" "small" contribution started a much better one within 7 days! WHAT A JOY ! (No joke! Real experience there.)

My point: troller get tired. I imagine there are more "good" contributors because it's more fun and exiting. I guess trolling is getting caught because "lots of eyes scrutinising WP, eventually catch errors". Here it sounds a lot like bazaar model. It is not because one contributor is passionate about one topic that WP is resisting to troll, but because a lot of people are displeased by it.

Not so much of a "natural" process.

...Wikipedia is the perfect example of how a "natural unregulated process" can regulate itself.

AFAIU, the whole point of the memoir is to say that it was not so natural. Especially: the success of WP may be due to it's insistence on the aim at being an encyclopaedia (no a dictionary, not an essay publication bench) ... There *were* and *are* some rules. (maybe a rta is needed here?)

A social experiment?

WP is an amazing social experiment. I guess what will be learned out of it won't be limited to it's (quite good) content, but from the way people interact almost real time, from radically different cultures (thus necessarily leading to culture shock). To me, it is a true wonder to be confronted with thoughts or behaviours so radically different to mine, that they have me jump... When later, I get to understand, appreciate and collaborate well, that's good. Again: it is a true wonder to see a very hot article being aggressively edited (not to say defaced) for later discovering a new version inclusive of all views... Leading to a stunning quality.

About the memoir. Maybe a little too much orientated at claiming credit... So what?
Interesting? Definitely.

Z.

One of the increasingly popular developpement technique is the Extreme Programming (XP) as envisionned by Kent Beck http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?KentBeck. It involves constant testing, not designing everything up-front, but rather progressively. A must read.

The incredibly amazing Wiki idea was first conceived and executed at C2.com by Ward Cunningham.

Personally, I think that Wiki is the most important part of the Wikipedia package. That's what attracted me there to begin with: the idea that Anybody could edit Anything, Anytime, Anyhow. It's like natural selection with words, and it's a lot of fun. If you make a big contribution with any worth, you're pretty much guaranteed that some of it is going to stay on for ages and ages - and it's a great kick coming back to a 'pedia article months down the line and thinking, hey, I came up with that sentence!

And then you go, what a stupid sentence, and hit the "Edit this page" button ...

C2 lays it out.
School is about learning the terminology and trying to get the most egregious errors out of the way, so that, after graduation, real work can commence.

My preference is to get a list of features from the customer in the form of User Stories, and turn those directly into Acceptance Tests.
Tests tell you what to do, and when to stop.
I also put a rough estimate on the various user stories, and then let my client prioritize the stories so the work I do first is what they want most.

In many cases, clients don't know what they want until you don't give it to them. The best approach I've found for those cases is to whip up a tiny prototype to show to the clients and ask them what they like and don't like about that prototype.
Clients know what they want, but they rarely understand what's hard and what's easy when it comes to software.
So, I think design documents are best as a bunch of 3x5 cards holding user stories, along with matching acceptance tests.

My preference is to get a list of features from the customer in the form of User Stories, and turn those directly into Acceptance Tests.
Tests tell you what to do, and when to stop.
I also put a rough estimate on the various user stories, and then let my client prioritize the stories so the work I do first is what they want most.

In many cases, clients don't know what they want until you don't give it to them. The best approach I've found for those cases is to whip up a tiny prototype to show to the clients and ask them what they like and don't like about that prototype.
Clients know what they want, but they rarely understand what's hard and what's easy when it comes to software.
So, I think design documents are best as a bunch of 3x5 cards holding user stories, along with matching acceptance tests.

Psssh 'ed'? Real men use TECO ;-)

More info on TECO for those who care.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TecoEditor
http://almy.us/teco.html

Ah, of course. The ancient art of voodoo chicken coding.

Prior art? I imagine Walt Cunningham, the acknowledged inventor of the Wiki, would be pretty pissed ...

It's a first year introductory course, which is teaching logic structure, vocabulary, and just plain good paper writing (which the student definitely need). They'll have three more years to express their hidden talent, but they first need the basics hammered into them.

Ohh, he saved some time.

My lord, this is Slashdot of all places. What happened to "working smarter not harder". Or the three great virtues of computer programming: Laziness Impatience Hubris?

Just an experiment in outtricking the "Google is a fine company" hivemind.

P.S.:

A HiveMind is not the same as a CollectiveIntelligence. A HiveMind has one thought process that controls each of its composite agents. Thus, there is a strong dictating force, the overmind, that implants an idea into the weaker subminds that enact it.

from: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HiveMind

I don't know if it is possible or practical to include/embed it directly in every language because the syntax would be different for each language. Further, it is not an imperative language, which tends to conflict with imperative implementation.

As far as making a relational language that is less COBOL-like, see:

http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?TqlRoadmap

I'm not sure why my previous post got marked "Troll". But for the record, I'm sincere, and I think my many previous posts here on server-side development bear that out.

I like Java and do most of my professional work in it, but I think EJBs were overhyped, and a lot of their use, along with fancy application servers, was managerial pursuit of silver bullets, rather than sound technical work.

It is also purposely verbose as it makes large projects involving many members in different teams easier. Comments are sure nice, but in the end the code does the talking

Errrr... so the more code there is, the easier it is to read and understand? That flies in the face of ideas like logical abstraction ( http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OnceAndOnlyOnce ), code reuse , and higher-level languages in general and certainly doesn't agree with my experience...

As has been pointed out, nobody agrees on exactly what set of features constitutes "object-oriented". "OO zealots will choose some subset of this menu by whim and then use it to try to convince you that you are a loser."

You can claim that, and in modern use it may be true. But the term "object oriented" was invented by Alan Kay to describe the programming model of Smalltalk. It wasn't used for Simula, which was the first language which was OO, not until Alan Kay coined the term. The far more elegant retort is this classic anecdote. I trust you'll read it before you reply. :)

I don't know why you bring up Lisp in this sense- CLOS happened way after Smalltalk. Sure, the first Lisp came about in the mid- to late-1950s. But McCarthy didn't invent CLOS. My assertion that Smalltalk was "first fully OO" language doesn't mean I dislike Lisp. Lisp is Smalltalk's most immediate intellectual anscestor, and if not for Lisp we'd all be using really shitty languages like C++, but most likely worse ones.

And yes, you can emulate/do OOP via lambdas pretty easily, but it gets messy quick without any proper inheritance, etc. Lisp and C are both capable of doing OOP, but neither are OO languages. By "Lisp" I don't mean Common Lisp w/ CLOS, ISLISP (which has a simpler OOP system built-in), or one of the other small-time Lisp implementations with a built-in OOP system, rather the pre-CLOS lisp that would pre-date Smalltalk, which first took proper form in the late 70s with Smalltalk-78 and then -80. Smalltalk-72 had the same OO qualities, but the language changed quite a bit between 72 and 80.

But if you want to get in a who did it first pissing contest, you'd do a lot better refering to Simula rather than Lisp. You make like Lisp a lot more than Simula, but it was the first language with features we'd call OO.

Sure, as long as you don't care about it looking like a normal app. It doesn't use Gtk+ or Qt on Linux, or Windows widgets on Windows, or Aqua widgets on the Mac. Stuff you write in Squeak feels even less native than Javascript on a webpage, and that takes some doing.

OK, for some folks maybe support for wxWidgets isn't enough. For the wxSqueak support, we've only got OS X and Win32 right now, but if you're talking about shippable apps, those are the two most important platforms. If you've never used wxWidgets, I'll fill you in: it's a cross-platform and multi-language widget set that gets you GUI support on Windows, Mac OS X, and plenty of Unixes.

So yeah, it's great if you're doing CS research and don't care how ugly or hard to use it is (I never could figure out what all the million different window-title-bar-buttons do). If you want to actually write an app to do something for people, it sucks.

Don't get me wrong, I think the default Squeak look is ugly. But like I cited with my own screenshots, it doesn't have to be. You can even get a boring native look via wxSqueak if you like.

As for the titlebars, I'm wondering if you're thinking of something else. There is minimize (aka collapse), maximize, close and the window menu. Same four buttons as Windows has, and most X11 WMs have the same four. Though if you're a minimalist using ionwm maybe that is a bit upsetting. For for newbies, it sure beats having them learn a pagefull of key-commands to do basic window management, wouldn't you agree?

Why is their user interface system not worth a bucket of warm spit? Or rather, since it can't be used to write normal apps, why are so many Squeak advocates trying to convince me that I'm a loser for not using Squeak?

No one said you were a loser. If you want to waste your time, be my guest. Just don't get so upset when some of us would rather not.

You think GNOME/KDE think about shipping a product for a user? Their dev community is no different than Squeak's, though quite a bit larger. I point you too the big "debates" that raged a month or three ago about what the users want in their DE vs what the developers feel like putting in.

Yes, you have discovered the critical difference between the GoalDonor and the GoldOwner.

I like your project execution template. I think if I were to get into contracting/consulting in a big way I would almost certainly want to use something very similar.

Yes, you have discovered the critical difference between the GoalDonor and the GoldOwner.

I like your project execution template. I think if I were to get into contracting/consulting in a big way I would almost certainly want to use something very similar.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PointyHairedBoss

This has been tried before, not successfully.

I would suggest learning J instead. It's essentially APL, but replaces all of APL's special characters with ASCII characters.

Assuming that by SDK you really mean "some sort of framework", you should read the Documenting Frameworks Using Patterns paper.

The approach they describe works quite well, and is easy to do incrementally, and easy to use for developers. Of course, you still want reference documentation for individual modules/methods/functions, but that's not going to be much use by itself.

I designed a system called MyNet for users to send email to a system that would add entries to a personal diary page. circa 1995. This was not in production though I made a proof of concept and manually updated a blog (web nikki or diary) in 1995 online for a designer named hachiya, who designed sony's pink bear.

David Blair's waxweb system (also about the same time) also should break parts of this as it included an advanced system allowing users to add annotations to a movie that is broken up into scenes, and edit the movie.

I think if you take apart the patent line by line you will find lots of things that beat it piece by piece, and some which have more than one piece. I don't buy it that these guys invented blogging.

For example Wiki's are based circa 1994 on work from the 80's.

It looks more like the patent describes some things that have been around a while, and some already established techniques to extend them. Maybe some good development in there but not the originality as far as I can see from Amazon to be worth a patent. Not if it is circa 2003.

Anyway, I'm against software patents in general since they seem to act opposite from the way patents are supposed to act, but the main thing here is that if there is going to be such a thing as a software patent it better be something more revolutionary and less obvious to experts in the field at the time, than what they have. I'm tired of seeing "software patents" for things that ought to be laughed out of the patent office if they were based on the physical world. And then you get more into mathematical / algorithmic discoveries which are not patentable for even better (similar) reasons. I wish Amazon would fuck off. They have enough of the fucking pie.

<dictionary>
<definition term="e-mail">electronic mail</definition>
<definition term="html">hypertext transport language</definition>
<definition term="xml">extensible markup language</definition>
</dictionary>

or is it:

<dictionary>
<word>
<id>e-mail</id>
<def>Electronic mail</def>
</word>
</dictionary>

Most people's productivity goes DOWN, sharply, if you work them more than 40 hours a week for more than one week in a row. Doing 60 or 70 or 90 hour weeks is ridiculous. How many of those 70 hours do you spend twiddling your thumbs, zombieing back and forth between your desk and the Coke machine, or surfing Slashdot?

I figured early on that my optimum work week is about 32 to 35 hours. If I spend much more than that at work, diminishing returns kick in fast. Of course I still show up for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week--its just that the last hour is often spent surfing the web, because I don't have enough brain cells left to do anything else.

For more information about this phenomenon, I suggest reading these: FortyHourWeek SustainablePace

Most people's productivity goes DOWN, sharply, if you work them more than 40 hours a week for more than one week in a row. Doing 60 or 70 or 90 hour weeks is ridiculous. How many of those 70 hours do you spend twiddling your thumbs, zombieing back and forth between your desk and the Coke machine, or surfing Slashdot?

I figured early on that my optimum work week is about 32 to 35 hours. If I spend much more than that at work, diminishing returns kick in fast. Of course I still show up for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week--its just that the last hour is often spent surfing the web, because I don't have enough brain cells left to do anything else.

For more information about this phenomenon, I suggest reading these: FortyHourWeek SustainablePace