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"Who knows enough to condense it into a few sentences?"

Here is comes: you'd be better off using the whitespace programming language: http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/

It would result in better readable and maintainable code.

"I've coded a lot of GUI code, in everything. Pascal, C, C++, Java, Tcl/Tk, Perl/Tk, HTML, you name it."

Brainfuck?

...a Whitespace program inside a C++ program. The Whitespace program coexists with the C++ program because of the "wiggle room" (to borrow a phrase from the article) that the C++ grammar givess you.

They forgot to mention that half of those 5000 lines are written in whitespace http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/

When I was at university doing my engineering degrees, I was able to type equations in to LaTeX on my Psion 5 faster than most were able to write. And I could then read and index my notes afterwards.

Learn LaTeX. It's the fastest way to record notes, be they mathematical or just text.

For diagrams it gets more complicated, but the Psion comes with some good drawing tools and you can just draw on the screen. Very easy.

Ok, then probably the right language to teach is Whitespace.

technically, there is nothing Python can do that Whitespace can't. That doesn't mean you have to use Whitespace..

trueineverusewhitespaceanditneverdidmeanyharm

(yes, I know about the programming language Whitespace. And, for good measure, let's throw in Brainfuck and its Pratchettesque dialect Oook)

In the entrance hall of the rochester physics building, Durham University, there was a cool demo of a magnetic 'not' gate. The model was an electric railway. the train had an arrow on it indicating the direction of the magnetic field. When triggered, the train moved round the track into a v shaped grove, the direction of the train was switched as it backed out of the V, as the direction of the field would be switched.

as well as showing (conceptually at least) that this worked, it gave rise to the possibility that the 'supercomputer' in the instituate for computational cosmology was just a really REALLY elaborate trainset..(turntables and everything).

also.. working in the group is a Dr Mike Hunt..

I thought that was the french although that has had odd effects.

But we already have a perfect language for such acrostic thingies:

perl.

Oh, and maybe whitespace

And if the scientists happen to know that what people want is going to kill them and the market ignores the scientists, the minority of people who want change will be punished with pain, suffering and even death, because of the way the actions of the ignorant majority dictate the actions of the market.

Ok. Let's suppose that you're right, and the mass market is choosing something that will kill them. I'm just curious as to how you'd organize any sufficiently large group of people differently so that the "right" decision is made? The only alternative that I can think of is vesting power in a group of people who "know better". The problem with this is that, historically, this has lead to totalitarianism. And, interestingly, it's frequently not very effective. The leadership may dictate "do X" but if the mass majority doesn't want to, and possesses the means to covertly avoid it, there's nothing that the leadership can do to enforce it. For example: don't share music online. There's a small minority who wants to stop this, and the mass majority who is contentedly ignoring them.

Second, what is the "right" decision? Are you sure that you know it? Are you sure you can predict every consequence of making the policy decision that you put forth? I think environmentalists are well positioned to predict the impact on the environment. But it takes economics before you can begin trying to predict the social impact of policy decisions. People can be hurt by smog and people can be hurt by an economy which loses productivity. Are you sure that the amount of hurt caused by smog is less than the amount caused by economic loss? Until you are able to weigh all the costs, I refer you to G.K. Chesterton, who wrote:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

Of course, I'm not convinced of your premise - that the mass market is choosing something that will kill them. The wisdom of crowds is frequent

When I was at Durham University, I was told that the university didn't insure their buildings because the cost was so great compared to the perceived risk. Instead they invested in good fire detection systems.

I'm a Whitespace user myself, you insensitive clod!

The case for dark matter is pretty strong. The Virgo Consortium does big simulations of the development of the universe. Check out their introduction page for how much evidence there is of dark matter.

The case for dark matter is pretty strong. The Virgo Consortium does big simulations of the development of the universe. Check out their introduction page for how much evidence there is of dark matter.

Hmm. Forced whitespace makes code more readable? I thought it was about the oposite.

On a more serious note: Allthough I have been programming for many years and in many different languages, and only breifly started with Python, I would agree that Python is one that can actually be recommended for students with no prior programming experience.

/Spiff

PART I. ON THE CREATURE CALLED MAN

I. THE MAN IN THE CAVE

Far away in some strange constellation in skies infinitely remote, there is a small star, which astronomers may some day discover. At least I could never observe in the faces or demeanour of most astronomers or men of science any evidence that they have discovered it; though as a matter of fact they were walking about on it all the time. It is a star that brings forth out of itself very strange plants and very strange animals; and none stranger than the men of science. That at least is the way in which I should begin a history of the world, if I had to follow the scientific custom of beginning with an account of the astronomical universe. I should try to see even this earth from the outside, not by the hackneyed insistence of its relative position to the sun, but by some imaginative effort to conceive its remote position for the dehumanised spectator. Only I do not believe in being dehumanised in order to study humanity. I do not believe in dwelling upon the distances that are supposed to dwarf the world; I think there is even something a trifle vulgar about this idea of trying to rebuke spirit by size. And as the first idea is not feasible, that of making the earth a strange planet so as to make it significant, I will not stoop to the other trick of making it a small planet in order to make it insignificant. I would rather insist that we do not even know that it is a planet at all, in the sense in which we know that it is a place; and a very extraordinary place too. That is the note which I wish to strike from the first, if not in the astronomical, then in some more familiar fashion.

One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen. And I remember that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it was blasphemous; which naturally amused me not a little. For the joke of it was, of course, that it never occurred to him to notice the title of the book itself, which really was blasphemous; for it was, when translated into English, 'I will show you how this nonsensical notion that there is God grew up among men.' My remark was strictly pious and proper confessing the divine purpose even in its most seemingly dark or meaningless manifestations. In that hour I learned many things, including the fact that there is something purely acoustic in much of that agnostic sort of reverence. The editor had not seen the point, because in the title of the book the long word came at the beginning and the short word at the end; whereas in my comments the short word came at the beginning and gave him a sort of shock. I have noticed that if you put a word like God into the same sentence with a word like dog, these abrupt and angular words affect people like pistol-shots. Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog made God does not seem to matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations of the too subtle theologians. But so long as you begin with a long word like evolution the rest will roll harmlessly past; very probably the editor had not read the whole of the title, for it is rather a long title and he was rather a busy man.

But this little incident has always lingered in my mind as a sort of parable. Most modern histories of mankind begin with the word evolution, and with a rather wordy exposition of evolution, for much the same reason that operated in this case. There is something slow and soothing and gradual about the word and even about the idea. As a matter of

Hello World uses the C libraries.

Who said we were talking about C? I'll go for a Hello World in Whitespace. :-p VIM even has syntax highlighting for it! And as far as I can see, Whitespace has never had a single security patch applied to it. :-p

Hello World uses the C libraries.

Who said we were talking about C? I'll go for a Hello World in Whitespace. :-p VIM even has syntax highlighting for it! And as far as I can see, Whitespace has never had a single security patch applied to it. :-p

It was the only way out of my university's network (probably still is) - it provided a decent-enough way of getting unrestricted Internet access when the only useful open port we had was SSH. No IPSec, no PPTP, just one big excuse to get one's hands dirty.

iqu :P

Oh no! In one fell swoop, you have patented all my code!

Wouldn't the Whitespace programming language be prior art? ;)

He is certainly not "someone who never finished reading that neat book about physics". In fact Frank Wilczek does know a thing or two about QCD and hence gluons.

Hi,

My favorite is G.K. Chesterton,

I agree. I may disagree with a lot of what he said (he was a staunch Catholic, I'm not even Christian), but he was one sharp writer. For people who don't want to spend money before having a chance to review his work, click here.

Bye,
Ori

I was unfortunate enough to subjected to Borland JBuilder whilst making the mistake of taking the Introduction to Programming module at the Computer Science department at Durham University in late 2000, and it was the worst piece of commercial software I have ever witnessed. It had a minimum recommended spec of 128MB of ram (this was nearly five years ago), or 256MB if you had it, and even then, doing simple stuff like selecting something from the menus could lock your machine up for minutes.

When I joined the course we were just using javac and a text editor of our choice, but a couple of weeks later they had to go and force us to switch to that, and to hand in our work in a JBuilder format. The slowness did make sense; apparently they had just rewritten the whole thing so that it was in Java itself, and this was 4-5 years ago, so of course it was going to be slow.

The software was so completely irritating and impossible to use that I decided it was more than my university career was worth and dropped out of university with nothing at the end of first year - which has now turned out to be one of the best career moves I've ever made. Thanks, Borland! My thoughts go out to any poor sod forced to use it.

I was unfortunate enough to subjected to Borland JBuilder whilst making the mistake of taking the Introduction to Programming module at the Computer Science department at Durham University in late 2000, and it was the worst piece of commercial software I have ever witnessed. It had a minimum recommended spec of 128MB of ram (this was nearly five years ago), or 256MB if you had it, and even then, doing simple stuff like selecting something from the menus could lock your machine up for minutes.

When I joined the course we were just using javac and a text editor of our choice, but a couple of weeks later they had to go and force us to switch to that, and to hand in our work in a JBuilder format. The slowness did make sense; apparently they had just rewritten the whole thing so that it was in Java itself, and this was 4-5 years ago, so of course it was going to be slow.

The software was so completely irritating and impossible to use that I decided it was more than my university career was worth and dropped out of university with nothing at the end of first year - which has now turned out to be one of the best career moves I've ever made. Thanks, Borland! My thoughts go out to any poor sod forced to use it.

Well, these guys do...

Whitespace

that this might be a story written using the whitespace programming language?

http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/index.php

Autopackage does support dependency resolution. And yes, it would be nice for it to integrate with dpkg/rpm so tools like apt can "see" it. The ignorance of apt to software not installed by it is a failing of apt not autopackage, but one we must work with. Doing so has been on the roadmap for a long time now, but as it's so very rare for one application to depend on another (think word processor needing drawing app - rare) it wasn't deemed essential to 1.0

From the maker of Autopackage:

In order to integrate with the web, MacOS X has some pretty awful hacks: self mounting disk images spring to mind. A DMG file is basically like a disk image that can be mounted as a loopback device: the web browser is responsible for downloading this, mounting it, extracting the appfolders if any are present then unmounting the disk image again. The end result is that clicking a link in a web page can silently place software on your desktop, sometimes with no notification that this has occurred.

Here http://bylands.dur.ac.uk/~mh/autopackage.org/ui-vi sion.html under 'Installation'.

You can't automatically convert pre-existing packages to autopackages. The process of building an autopackage is rather longer than an RPM because you have to improve the quality of the software at the same time to meet various standards. For instance a dependency audit may be useful, weakening various deps at runtime so you can run without them being present but use them if they are (relaytool) etc etc.

What the gp is asking for is something like this, I think.

All kinds of UIs become possible once you have the infrastructure in place. Apt-get "name that package" type UIs are of course very handy when you know what it is you want, and NeXT style appfolders are also quite convenient when browsing around. We can support all of them, if we want.

That's not a complete mirror :(

This is missing.

By default, autopackage either installs to /usr or to $HOME (depending on what the user wants). If you really want it to use another prefix, you still can. The reason we use /usr instead of /usr/local is because there are many broken distributions that don't setup paths for /usr/local correctly. And /usr is the standard for many/most distributions.

There's a mirror of the autopackage website's information here.

http://bylands.dur.ac.uk/~mh/autopackage.org/index .html

Mike setup a mirror of the autopackage website! It's here. The FAQ is also available on that mirror.

Whitespace

It is so obfuscated, you cannot even see it!

Not sure your quite right... From the PDG Handbook* High-energy electrons predominantly lose energy in matter by bremsstrahlung, and high-energy photons by e+e pair production. Section 24.7.1

I prefer to strip all the non-whitespace from my programs.
</div>

Maybe they are communicating in Whitespace!

The above is copright 2005 wolrahnaes

Sorry, you can't. It appears this guy has beat you to it.

Of course, I'm not sure if he copyrighted his material, but they say all you need to do is "put something out there" with a date and it's automatically protected.

would be to hide code written in whitespace. Encrypted, of course.

Crack that!

Does that mean all the hackers will have to send their malicious code written in this?

I was googling and just came across this SlimServer plugin that claims to be able to add support for RealAudio streams to SlimServer. Haven't tried it, but it looks promising.

Yeah, spammimic is a fun tool.

You might also look at the whitespace programming language. It's a fun example of a kind of steganography, in which the actual text is encoded in the white space, and printable characters are comments.

It would be pretty easy to combine the two. Encode your message in white space, generate a spam message, replace the white stuff in the message with the spaces and tabs of your encoded message, and send it to a few thousand recipients that include the real recipient.

The recipient would have the problem of discovering the real message among the zillions of real spams. Solving this is left as an exercise for the reader.

/*following code does p2p transfer*/

I'm at the University of Durham in the UK. All of the Uni computers use mozilla and mozilla mail by default. We get copies of mozilla given out free for our own computers in our rooms at the start of the year.
http://www.dur.ac.uk/
Unfortunately, M$ Office is still standard.

Significant whitespace sucks? Blasphemy.

It sure is if you are a Whitespace programmer!

you may also appreciate this language.

The group's publications page is here (click on observations section), but they don't seem to have a preprint of this paper. Nature will let you read the abstract of the paper for free.

The research seems to be just a more direct confirmation of something that was already thought to be understood, but had never really been verified.