Slashdot Mirror

Ah, slashdot, I love you.

"Open-source is not innovative." "Yes it is. Look at these Java tools!" "That's not innovative. We had better than those 20 years ago." "Senseless Java bashing!"

(And the "senseless Java bashing" kneejerk response is rated higher than the observation that we had great tools 20 years ago.)

Gee, 60% insightful, 20% flamebait, 20% overrated. That really pulled an SICP here. There should be a *bonus* for that.

It's amazing how pro-Java slashdot is. If I was to claim that Microsoft was innovative for doing something other platforms did 20 years ago, I'd be modded to -1 in a New York minute (or maybe +5 funny). When somebody says that Java is innovative for doing something other platforms did 20 years ago, it shoots up to +4 insightful, and counterpoints get modded flamebait.

Peter Seibel was right: programmers are just as emotional as anybody, and they care more about looks than functionality, even in programming languages. Unix geeks like Java because it looks like C -- admit it! Other more powerful languages, don't. You can pretty much measure the popularity of programming languages by how much they superficially look like C: on this list, how many of the top 10 languages *don't* use C-style curly braces? I count 2: VB (the primary way to extend apps on the most common OS in the world), and Python (and despite not looking like C, I think the indentation thing makes it obvious that Python people care about aesthetics as much as anybody!). (Disclaimer: I'm a former Python programmer.)

With respect to Tony Hoare: I don't know what the language of the year 2050 will look like, but I know it will have curly braces.

String a = "hello " + "world!";

I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning. It smells like... coffee.

Seriously, operator overloading is a powerful technique that, done right, allows you to write clear, expressive, maintainable code. Done wrong it allows you to write foul spaghetti, but any language allows you to write foul spaghetti --- Flon's axiom: There does not now, nor will there ever, exist a programming language in which it is the least bit hard to write bad programs.

Not allowing operator overloading (except when the language authors break their own rules) has no effect other than to reduce the options available to the programmer. It means that while you can't use them in cases where operator overloading is not useful, it also means that you can't use them in cases where operator overloading is useful and would produce better code. It means you can't, for example, create an imaginary number class that works the same way as int or long. This is not the mark of a good, extensible, expressive language.

I think there is a world market for maybe five sexbots. (Thomas Watson of IBM)

Where the ENIBOT is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, sexbots in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons. (Popular Mechanics)

Most sexbots will probably still occupy a large room, however, because of the space needed for the ancillary software - the tapes and cards to be fed in, the operating staff, and the huge piles of paper for printing out the results. (Prof Desmond King-Hele)

The Sexintosh uses an experimental device called a breast. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. (John Dvorak)
No one knows what to do with seven sexbots at one time. (PC Week Magazine)

Hello everybody out there using minsex - I'm doing a (free) sexbot system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) ATbot clones. (Linus Torvalds)

and of course...

640K ought to be enough for anybody. (Bill Gates)

http://www.sysprog.net/quothist.html

"I knew I'd hate COBOL the moment I saw they'd used perform instead of do." --Larry Wall

'Nuff said.

All the IBM manuals are online. There's a list of most-used manuals and other mainframe literature at

http://www.sysprog.net/manuals.html

and organisations at

http://www.sysprog.net/orgs.html.

The techSupport magazine belonging to NaSPA has some especially good articles.

Celia Redmore

All the IBM manuals are online. There's a list of most-used manuals and other mainframe literature at

http://www.sysprog.net/manuals.html

and organisations at

http://www.sysprog.net/orgs.html.

The techSupport magazine belonging to NaSPA has some especially good articles.

Celia Redmore

"Unix is dead, but no one bothered to claim the body" (1986) (from this source.

Of all the pundits out there, Dvorak must have the largest database of being both for and against the same thing; perhaps multiple times. I can even recall him claiming that the Internet was dead. His credibility for me has been zero for several years. I'm amazed anyone reads anything he writes any more.