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Your assumption that the idea stems from assumptions is erroneous.

The idea that you develop more rapidly in dynamically (FTFY) typed languages stems from observation and measurement. Like this one.

So, maybe Scala would do better than Java and C++ in such a study, I'm not saying it wouldn't. It would be interesting to see a newer study with contemporary languages.

What's next? Does Facebook flout the blasphemy laws in Saudi Arabia? What about the laws in Thailand that forbid criticism of the king?

In the 1990's, the idea of the internet was that it was a forum for free speech that would not pander to these special interests, and would "route around" their censorship attempts.

To quote Time Magazine from 1993:

Unlike the family-oriented commercial services, which censor messages they find offensive, the Internet imposes no restrictions. Anybody can start a discussion on any topic and say anything. There have been sporadic attempts by local network managers to crack down on the raunchier discussion groups, but as Internet pioneer John Gilmore puts it, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called “sciences as one would.” For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride, lest his mind should seem to be occupied with things mean and transitory; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections colour and infect the understanding.
Francis Bacon, Novum Organon (1620)

I wonder if there's any correlation between those reinventions and the level of bullshit in the world.

An email from Alan Kay on 23 July 2003 replying to a question from Stefan Ram about the term "object oriented programming": note that Kay's reply does not include inheritance or polymorphism as essential parts of OOP. (He does include encapsulation. I leave it to readers to decide if he's also including data abstraction.)
...
I wanted to get rid of data.
...
I didn't like the way Simula I or Simula 67 did inheritance (though I thought Nygaard and Dahl were just tremendous thinkers and designers). So I decided to leave out inheritance as a built-in feature until I understood it better.
...
(I'm not against types, but I don't know of any type systems that aren't a complete pain, so I still like dynamic typing.)
OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them.

--Here is a more detailed history of Smalltalk by Alan Kay.

It was John Gilmore, who said in 1993:

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

I wonder, if he could've envisioned the next generation to celebrate censorship as Slashdot-posters do today...

...are you serious?

The Open Society and Its Enemies [PDF, 3.3 MB]

...and then Narnia and Oz.

The Mongols didn't bury their dead. Their religion (like that of many nomadic pastoral societies) relied on open-air burials. The whole "tomb" myth was most likely invented by their Chinese neighbors.

WTF Slashdot? Why am I logged in on all pages _except_ this one?!

Lutz Prechelt, "An empirical comparison of seven programming languages", 2000.

Lutz Prechelt, "Are scripting languages any good? A validation of Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl against C, C++, and Java", 2003.

Just because someone at Fox News put "Noted Authority" on the Chiron under a TV guest doesn't mean they know what they are talking about.

I actually did a fair bit of research myself into this a few months back, to answer a question on History.SE. There is indeed a romantic notion of there being some undiscovered tomb with untold wealth in it. Then there's the reality:

• The Mongols didn't bury their dead. They practiced Open-air "burials".

  Depositing the corpse in the steppe was meant to sacrifice it to predatory animals. According to Mongolians this is the last virtous act a person can carry out. This idea is much older than Lamaism and exhibits a really strong shamanistic element of spiritual thought.

• All the assorted legends about where a supposed tomb might be came out of China (not Mongolia, where it happened) about 300 years after the fact, and describe things much closer to Chinese burial practices than Mongolian. In other words, they show all signs of being entirely made up.

Do you also like the tree conflicts you get when moving directories around in your project? Those are my favorite thing in SVN. In theory, they've made this better in the new version but I'll believe it when I see it myself. That's something about SVN that just really pisses me off.

Tree conflicts are inherent to any version control system, not just Subversion.

People complain about Subversion's tree conflict handling a lot. I believe this is because development work done so far was only about detection of tree conflicts, leaving many users helpless because tree conflicts can be complex and hard to understand and resolve.

The 1.8 release is taking some steps towards the eventual goal of helping users resolve any tree conflicts instead of merely detecting them. If you move a file or directory in Subversion 1.8, and need to update the working copy before committing the rename, and the update receives edits for the renamed file or directory, you'll now see a menu which allows you to apply the incoming changes to the renamed location:

Tree conflict on 'foo.txt'
> local file moved away, incoming file edit upon update
Select: (mc) apply update to move destination, (p) postpone,
(q) quit resolution, (h) help:

This only works for 'svn update', however. It doesn't work for 'svn merge', yet. That's planned for a future release.

"Earth is flat" was a consensus opinion.

No, that's a myth. There was never a consensus of flat-earthers amongst scholars, even religious ones, let alone a consensus of scientists. Scientists who have expressed an opinion on the the shape of the earth have always said it has a spherical nature.
http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/SS05/efs/materials/FlatEarth.pdf

The sin of belief without data is yours, superwiz. Your belief system is based on what you want to believe, not what is.

Oh, and TFA DOES NOT say what comrade soulskill put up there. 97% of the papers DID NOT claim AGW. Only 32.6% of the papers did.

If you'd actually read the paper you link to, you'd know why 33% didn't express a conclusion on AGW. It's because to get their corpus they simply searched for papers with certain key terms such as "global warming". Now that doesn't necessarily get you a paper that is aimed at the question of AGW, simply one that mentions it. It's unsurprising that papers that are not intended to answer the question of whether there is AGW do not do so. They have to be manually filtered down to those that address that question.

You know that Emacs does not parse most of its .elc or .el files at startup? These are parsed during Emacs compilation, then an image of the Emacs process' memory is dumped to disk and used for quick startup. Only system config files from /etc or ~/.emacs and dependent files need to be parsed.

What's you're definition of true entrepreneurship?

Specifically, high-tech Internet/software/IT entrepeneurship, since we have been talking about CS/IT degrees, pay attention here. I know Germany does very well in traditional manufacturing, but that's not what we were talking about and I said nothing about the German economy.

Apple: copied Xerox. Microsoft: copied CP/M, then copied Apple, and somewhere along the way copied umpteen others as well.

Yes, Apple and Microsoft's true success has come almost entirely from copying a few vague ideas 30 years ago. I mean, I can practically see the connection between a mouse and a $400B business with 75,000 employees! Thanks for parroting the usual /. bull, it's so relevant to the discussion.

Page, Brin, Yang, Filo - what they did is decide that their idea was worth dropping out of their PhD program, and their early investors and employees agreed with them rather than judging them for not getting a graduate degree. Semantics are aren't helpful here, either.

And bigot my ass. I work with 2 very intelligent and motivated German engineers, and we have discussed this very topic at length. Both of them are in the US because they wanted to work at innovative, fast moving Internet/software companies and they felt the opportunities for that in the US were (and still are) much better. In fact, both have co-founded and/or worked at several startups of various success; but that has been plenty enough success they own homes, have families, and have no plans to move back (and one even recently naturalized). In fact, a couple months ago he was saying he thought the traditional German educational and banking/venture capital/etc systems would have to undergo significant reform before you start seeing changes in that department...

But, if you don't want to to take the word of a second-hand conversation at face value, don't. Spend a couple minutes researching the topic yourself for the similar opinions.

http://www.dw.de/dw/article/0,,15126087,00.html
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~jmueller/its/conf/amsterdam06/downloads/papers/Weber.pdf
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-03/19/european-startups-lack-ambition

Yes, I am a real bigot for pointing out a fact that many analysts, academics, and business executives (many of who are German, as in the above links) think there is a lack of entrepeneurship and development in Internet services in Germany, and the most likely causes are aversion to risk and too much adherence to traditional university educational system ("can't blame me for hiring him, he had a PhD!)" I just thought it was interesting that the GP demonstrated this attitude fairly well (and, yes, I think was a bit overly insulting to him as I was responding directly to his insulting comment on my post. Oh well).

The Photosniper was my first thought. Though it's often thought of as a 'KGB' camera, they were made mostly for the civilian market, particularly (like the modern equivalent) for wildlife shots. They were exported to western Europe, and I remember seeing them in the catalogues of mainstream UK camera dealers in the 80s. Apparently they're surprisingly practical, despite the heavy lens and Zenit SLR:

http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/tobiko/fotosniper.html

Camera geeks might want to check out the very first version, which was designed in the 30s, came with a really nice wooden rifle stock, and used a FED I (Soviet copy of the Leica) as its camera:

http://tomtiger.home.xs4all.nl/fs-2/fs-2.html

Apparently Khrushchev was a fan, which may have been one reason why the factory introduced a mass-market SLR version in the 60s.

it's like believing that the earth is flat, which was widely held by even scientists centuries ago.

No, it wasn't. That's a fallacy.

"There never was a period of 'flat earth darkness' among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology." -- Stephen Jay Gould

Reference: http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/WS06/pmo/eng/Gould-FlatEarth.pdf

The ultimate issue is that renames (or moves) are implemented as delete+addition operations. Maybe back in the day, that appeared to be ok, but now its obvious it's a large failing.

That's not the problem. Mercurial also does this, and nobody (at least on slashdot :-) is complaining about Mercurial's rename implementation. If you look closely, Mercurial has problems with its rename implementation, as does *gasp* git. See my BSc thesis for details: https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/w/SE/ThesisTreeConflicts

The problem with Subversion's implementation is that people are much more likely to run into some of its very annoying shortcomings in practice. But there are only a handful of cases which Subversion needs to handle better to catch up (though making these cases happen is a lot of work, see my other comment here: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1934004&cid=34755596).

Take a look at the tables on pages 29 and 30 in the thesis pdf. Note that these were based on Subversion 1.5 behaviour. Subversion 1.6 already detects more of these cases than git and hg combined, but it doesn't even try to automatically resolve any of them, even trivial cases. This is why hg's and git's merging are working nicer in practice right now. In theory there is no tool that hasn't got severe problems if you put the bar up high enough. Would you possibly want sane conflict resolution when merging directories across branches (table on page 30)? Sorry, there is no open source tool that can do that, yet...

You don't have to wait. It exists. http://robotics.mi.fu-berlin.de/pmwiki/pmwiki.php

I have found a very interesting paper called "Are Scripting Languages Any Good? A Validation of Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl against C, C++, and Java"(2002).

You can find it here --> http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/prechelt/Biblio//jccpprt2_advances2003.pdf

Here is the abstract copied from the paper:

Four scripting languages are introduced shortly and their theoretical and purported characteristics are discussed and related to three more conventional programming lan- guages. Then the comparison is extended to an objective empirical one using 80 imple- mentations of the same set of requirements, created by 74 different programmers. The limitations of the empirical data are laid out and discussed and then the 80 implementa- tions are compared for several properties, such as run time, memory consumption, source text length, comment density, program structure, reliability, and the amount of effort re- quired for writing them. The results indicate that, for the given programming problem, “scripting languages” (Perl, Python, Rexx, Tcl) are more productive than conventional languages. In terms of run time and memory consumption, they often turn out better than Java and not much worse than C or C++. In general, the differences between languages tend to be smaller than the typical differences due to different programmers within the same language.

After reading the article I got so inspired that I decided to try and solve the programming problem using C++(and I finished it). It is a logical problem that will show the programming languages performance.

If you are only interested in the programming problem you can see the website here --> http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/prechelt/phonecode/

This paper is dated 2002 so I guess there has been a lot of updates to many of the programming languages used in this study. It would be very nice if we could do an up to date comparison today to see how big of a difference it is today. Perhaps we are mostly interested in performance, memory consumption, code length, development time. What do you think? Any takers on this?

Regards,
Krangelmat

I have found a very interesting paper called "Are Scripting Languages Any Good? A Validation of Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl against C, C++, and Java"(2002).

You can find it here --> http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/prechelt/Biblio//jccpprt2_advances2003.pdf

Here is the abstract copied from the paper:

Four scripting languages are introduced shortly and their theoretical and purported characteristics are discussed and related to three more conventional programming lan- guages. Then the comparison is extended to an objective empirical one using 80 imple- mentations of the same set of requirements, created by 74 different programmers. The limitations of the empirical data are laid out and discussed and then the 80 implementa- tions are compared for several properties, such as run time, memory consumption, source text length, comment density, program structure, reliability, and the amount of effort re- quired for writing them. The results indicate that, for the given programming problem, “scripting languages” (Perl, Python, Rexx, Tcl) are more productive than conventional languages. In terms of run time and memory consumption, they often turn out better than Java and not much worse than C or C++. In general, the differences between languages tend to be smaller than the typical differences due to different programmers within the same language.

After reading the article I got so inspired that I decided to try and solve the programming problem using C++(and I finished it). It is a logical problem that will show the programming languages performance.

If you are only interested in the programming problem you can see the website here --> http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/prechelt/phonecode/

This paper is dated 2002 so I guess there has been a lot of updates to many of the programming languages used in this study. It would be very nice if we could do an up to date comparison today to see how big of a difference it is today. Perhaps we are mostly interested in performance, memory consumption, code length, development time. What do you think? Any takers on this?

Regards,
Krangelmat

I guess if I'd written "The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" I'd be modded +5 Insightful.

Yeah, same thing.

As others have said, you'll need some kind of source control (SVN probably - easier to understand and will let the students concentrate on the tasks rather than the tools). Then you'll need a voice link. Either telephone, Skype or a SIP-compliant VOIP thing. IM would be useful for communication between one pair and other pairs.

Then an IDE with collaborative editing. Netbeans has it built in apparently, but I haven't tried it. Eclipse has a number of plugins to facilitate collaborative coding:

Shareclipse: Does voice and video inside Eclipse, but projects not genuinely shared. Project might be dormant. linky

Saros: Does voice, but not video. Whole project shared. Uses a local IRC server, like XMPP or Jabber. Great demo vid. linky

Xeclip: Dependent on CVS and costs $$s. linky

XPairtise: Shares both code and code/test execution. Shared whiteboard. Needs a server in your intranet. Doesn't highlight users' cursors in different colours. linky

XCDE: Uses a intranet-local server. Shares bookmarks and tasks too in Eclipse. Has integrated voice (but requires JMF). Project might be dormant. linky

Other projects which look very dormant or incomplete: PEP, Sangam. Me, I'm planning to try Saros.

I know it's not dead simple, but maybe it's still interesting to anyone reading the thread. My university's developing a realtime pair programming plugin for Eclipse, which I think is pretty cool. Check it out: https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/w/SE/DPP

I don't know, but they already exist.

"Where'd you graduate from?"

Could make for an amusing job interview.

If you're looking for an open source program for controlling spectrometers you may be interested in fsc2 http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~toerring/fsc2.phtml. Being its author I will refrain from pointing out it's advantages here;-)

I studied CS at FU-Berlin, the program can be quite demanding, but it's very good. Some courses are taught in English, and in those courses you can write the exams in either German or English. If you're just going to spend a semester abroad, you may be able to get away with taking all your courses in English. You'll inevitably need to learn some German though, if only for social life (even though many people are fluent in English), but the effort may well be worth it. There is also a welcoming Linux geek society at the faculty. Oh, and Berlin is a very nice city. There's the typical tourist attractions, but also a large and very active hacking community which naturally provides lots of entertainment for CS students (projects such as the CCC, freifunk, C-base, bootlab). Beware -- many students have been known to end up stranded in these communities. Check here for information about application procedures for students from abroad.

I studied CS at FU-Berlin, the program can be quite demanding, but it's very good. Some courses are taught in English, and in those courses you can write the exams in either German or English. If you're just going to spend a semester abroad, you may be able to get away with taking all your courses in English. You'll inevitably need to learn some German though, if only for social life (even though many people are fluent in English), but the effort may well be worth it. There is also a welcoming Linux geek society at the faculty. Oh, and Berlin is a very nice city. There's the typical tourist attractions, but also a large and very active hacking community which naturally provides lots of entertainment for CS students (projects such as the CCC, freifunk, C-base, bootlab). Beware -- many students have been known to end up stranded in these communities. Check here for information about application procedures for students from abroad.

I studied CS at FU-Berlin, the program can be quite demanding, but it's very good. Some courses are taught in English, and in those courses you can write the exams in either German or English. If you're just going to spend a semester abroad, you may be able to get away with taking all your courses in English. You'll inevitably need to learn some German though, if only for social life (even though many people are fluent in English), but the effort may well be worth it. There is also a welcoming Linux geek society at the faculty. Oh, and Berlin is a very nice city. There's the typical tourist attractions, but also a large and very active hacking community which naturally provides lots of entertainment for CS students (projects such as the CCC, freifunk, C-base, bootlab). Beware -- many students have been known to end up stranded in these communities. Check here for information about application procedures for students from abroad.

from the which-is-to-say-in-australia dept

I'd be surprised if research on sensor networks wasn't done across the entire planet. Our CS department (located in the northern hemisphere) does more or less the same thing:

http://cst.mi.fu-berlin.de/projects/ScatterWeb/index.html

A few pictures of the hardware are here:

http://cst.mi.fu-berlin.de/projects/ScatterWeb/hardware/index.html

It's fun to program these little guys, I made one of them blink LEDs and beep at people entering the room once, sooo cute :)

from the which-is-to-say-in-australia dept

I'd be surprised if research on sensor networks wasn't done across the entire planet. Our CS department (located in the northern hemisphere) does more or less the same thing:

http://cst.mi.fu-berlin.de/projects/ScatterWeb/index.html

A few pictures of the hardware are here:

http://cst.mi.fu-berlin.de/projects/ScatterWeb/hardware/index.html

It's fun to program these little guys, I made one of them blink LEDs and beep at people entering the room once, sooo cute :)

"Actually I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind." (From "The Computer Revolution hasn't happend yet", his keynote at OOPSLA 1997)

C++ has strengths and weaknesses - and, if you're skilled, you will recognize this.

Eivind.

Oh - wait - religion wants us to be all meek and follow the leader and his disciples.

There is only one religion that always works and that is Murphy's Law. But there are some who think's Murphy was an optimist. - In short "Shit happens".

"Religion is only a crutch"

UDP or TCP have nothing to do with this. Connections are not tracked and retained.

Actually, the authorities in Denmark are apparently requiring ISPs to retain, in addition to address allocation data, the header data (source and destination address, source and destination port number, transport protocol) of every 500th IP packet.

You may find this PowerPoint file an interesting read. It's from this presentation, which I higly recommend watching (MPEG-4 H.264 video file, 186 MiB).

I'm getting a little tired of seeing that "benchmark" posted. I am not some kind of blind perl-worshipper - I mostly program C++ these days. But I have to point out that the programs in this benchmark are far from the domain where Perl is commonly used. Calculating digits of PI? If you actually need to do that, use C. Trees? Not a common structure in Perl programming. The language has a built-in associative structure (hash).

The class of problems for which Perl was created is a bit more complex than integer math. The point of both Java and Perl is to manage complexity at the cost of some performance loss. In a typical Perl program, much of the CPU time is spent in the hash implementation and the regex engine. Both of these are written in C and well optimized.

Want a more real-world comparison? Check out the phonecode paper of Lutz Prechelt. (Warning - pdf).

Prechelt's data agree with my experience. Java applications are, on average, slow. Perhaps this is due to mistakes in coding or deployment. Either way, the "benchmark" on debian is self-serving nonsense.

http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/chemnet/use/info/gc c/gcc_4.html

>I love capitalism.

You mean "market economy", because not all market economys are capitalisim. In the capialism is capital the only god, while some market economys exists, where capital is only a normal player on the market, so that there are no need to sacrifice Humans to make more Money.

A Market Economy without Capitalism:
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~roehrigw/onken/engl. htm

Indeed, I should have said Free Software, not Open Source.

As to your question: other factors will determine it. The market fails to protect the rights of consumers in this case because there are not enough consumers who are aware that they have these rights and/or care to make use of them.

Indeed, I should have said Free Software, not Open Source.

As to your question: other factors will determine it. The market fails to protect the rights of consumers in this case because there are not enough consumers who are aware that they have these rights and/or care to make use of them.

Most studies show that this is blatantly untrue -- programmer productivity is generally independent of language chosen.

Excuse me? Which studies?

Certainly not this one:

http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpp rt_computer2000.pdf

Nor this one:

http://www.erlang.se/publications/Ulf_Wiger.pdf

Nor even this one:

http://www.theadvisors.com/langcomparison.htm

And this well-regarded programmer certainly doesn't agree that the choice of language doesn't matter:

http://www.mindview.net/WebLog/log-0025

I tell you what -- interview a group of experienced programmers for a prospective project to write a database-backed web application with complex requirements. Tell them that they will be required to program in assembly language because "most studies show that... programmer productivity is generally independent of language chosen." Record their responses and post them to Slashdot.

What is this "CND" shit? Who made that up?

If you want to use cutesy abbreviations, how about the ISO country code (CAN).

-ben

About HR-XML

The HR-XML Consortium is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to the development and promotion of a standard suite of XML specifications to enable e-business and the automation of human resources-related data exchanges.

Human resources-related e-business -- or any inter-company exchange of HR data -- requires an agreement among participants about how the transaction or data exchange will be accomplished.

The mission of the HR-XML Consortium is to spare employers and vendors the risk and expense of having to negotiate and agree upon data interchange mechanisms on an ad-hoc basis. By developing and publishing open data exchange standards based on Extensible Markup Language ("XML"), the Consortium provides the means for any company to transact with other companies without having to establish, engineer, and implement many separate interchange mechanisms.

The HR-XML Consortium is driven by the needs and priorities of its members. Any member can propose that the Consortium undertake a standards activity. Proposals are subject to a review process and must include the names of at least three sponsor organizations as well as satisfy other pre-requisites."

[Ontology based Recruitment Process]
Abstract: In our research we explore the benefits resulting from the application of
Semantic Web technologies in the recruitment domain. We use currently available
standards and classifications to develop a human resource ontology which gives us
means for semantic annotation of job postings and applications. Furthermore, we
outline the process of semantic matching which improves the quality of query results.
Finally, we propose an architecture of an evaluation system based on Semantic Web
technologies.

What 'bare metal' was the author actually banging on? Seems to me he was just banging on a DOS GPIB device driver. Not much different than this Linux GPIB device driver.

This article has an interesting comparison between C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl.

From http://robocup.mi.fu-berlin.de/buch/chap1/HistoryR oboCup.html :

But there was Korea and researchers there were also active organizing their own robotic league. In September 1995, Jong Hwan Kim started the Micro-Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament (MiroSot). The first MiroSot competition was held in November 1996 in Korea with 23 teams from 10 countries. Mirosot tournaments followed then every year from 1997 to 2002, sometimes in the same country as the RoboCup events, as was the case in 1998 (France) and 2000 (Australia). However, in the MiroSot league only small robots compete, there is nothing similar to the mid-size robots used in RoboCup and there was no legged league until 2002. There is of course a kind of rivalry between MiroSot and RoboCup, each one claiming to be the World Cup on Robotic Soccer, but the RoboCup events have become much larger, are better organized and publicized as the MiroSot tournaments.

See for example Margrit Kennedy's 140-page book Interest and Inflation free Money - you'll never look at money the same way again after reading the first chapter.

I actually wrote a paper on those in middle school. The problem with them is that the larger ones are very difficult to tune.

It turns out that if you have more than three layers (in other words, if you have any layers between the input and putput), you run into proplems in training when the network doesn't work as well as you want it to perform, but furthur cycles of your training algorithm don't seem to make it any better.

The comp.ai.neural-nets FAQ was my primary source for that paper. Read that if you're interested. (I felt like my brain went numb after a while back when writing the paper.)

The ENIAC Java Applet and the ENIAC on a chip project

Great move! Instead of just upgrading your 10Mbps line to something faster, you can now downgrade it to 200mbps! Millibits/second is a new concept to me, at least.

• Designing and writing the program in Perl, Python, Rexx, or Tcl takes no more than half as much time as writing it in C, C++, or Java and the resulting program is only half as long.
  
• No unambiguous differences in program reliability between the language groups were observed.
  
• The typical memory consumption of a script program is about twice that of a C or C++ program. For Java it is another factor of two higher.
  
• For the initialization phase of the phonecode program (reading the 1 MB dictionary file and creating the 70k- entry internal data structure), the C and C++ programs have a strong run time advantage of about factor 3 to 4 compared to Java and about 5 to 10 compared to the script languages.
  
• For the main phase of the phonecode program (search through the internal data structure), the advantage in run time of C or C++ versus Java is only about factor 2 and the script programs even tend to be faster than the Java programs.
  
• Within the script languages, Python and in particular Perl are faster than Tcl for both phases.
  
• For all program aspects investigated, the performance variability due to different programmers (as described by the bad/good ratios) is on average about as large or even larger than the variability due to different languages.

Rumors are that there is a very advanced search technology inside of HyperCard :-D. Remember, you could to full-text searches in your stacks at an amazing speed for the technology at this time?

Then there were plans to integrate a color-HyperCard into QuickTime (i think it was QuickTime 3.0), which would be the flash-killer today. I once implemented a windowing-interface complete with mouse-triple-click handlers and drag and drop, all in HyperTalk.

Awesome. Sad. Good Bye HyperCard.

The remainings can be found here:
plusLibs