Slashdot Mirror
Pledge of Allegiance Ruled Unconstitutional
VUSE g-EE-k and entirely too many other people wrote in about an Appeals Court decision holding that the Pledge of Allegiance, as recited in its current form in various public schools (often by law), is unconstitutional. The court's decision (PDF) is available.
Gentlemen the time has come for a serious discussion on whether or not to continue using C for serious programming projects As I will explain I feel that C needs to be retired much the same way that Fortran Cobol and Perl have been Furthermore allow me to be so bold as to suggest a superior replacement to this outdated languageTo give you a little background on this subject I was recently asked to develop a clientserver project on a Unix platform for a Fortune 500 company While Ive never coded in C before I have coded in VB for fifteen years and in Java for over ten I was stunned to see how poorly C fared compared to these two more lowlevel languagesCs biggest difficulty as we all know is the fact that it is by far one of the slowest languages in existance especially when compared to more modern languages such as Java and C Although the reasons for this are varied the main reasons seems to be the way C requires a programmer to laboriously work with chunks of memoryRequiring a programmer to manipulate blocks of memory is a tedious way to program This was satisfactory back in the early days of coding but then again so were punchcards By using what are called pointers a C programmer is basically requiring the computer to do three sets of work rather than one The first time requires the computer to duplicate whatever is stored in the memory space pointed to by the pointer The second time requires it to perform the needed operation on this space Finally the computer must delete the duplicate set and set the values of the original accordinglyClearly this is a horrendous use of resources and the chief reason why C is so slow When one looks at a more modern and a more serious programming language like Java C or even better Visual Basic that lacks such archaic coding styles one will also note a serious speed increase over CSo what does this mean for the programming community I think clearly that C needs to be abandonded There are two candidates that would be a suitable replacement for it Those are Java and Visual BasicHaving programmed in both for many years I believe that VB has the edge Not only is it slightly faster than Java its also much easier to code in I found C to be confusing frightening and intimidating with its nonGUIbased coding style Furthermore I like to see the source code of the projects I work with Javas source seems to be under the monopolistic thumb of Sun much the way that GCC is obscured from us by the marketing people at the FSF Microsofts shared source under which Visual Basic is released definately seems to be the most fair and reasonable of all the licenses in existance with none of the harsh restrictions of the BSD license It also lacks the GPLs requirement that anything coded with its tools becomes property of the FSFI hope to see a switch to VB very soon Ive already spoken with various luminaries in the nix coding world and most are eager to begin to transition Having just gotten off the phone with Mr Alan Cox I can say that he is quite thrilled with the speed increases that will occur when the Linux kernel is completely rewritten in Visual Basic Richard Stallman plans to support this and hopes that the great Swede himself Linux Torvaldis wont object to renaming Linux to VBLinux Although not a C coder himself Im told that Slashdots very own Admiral Taco will support this on his web site Finally Dennis Ritchie is excited about the switchThank you for your time Happy coding
-pwpbot
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dbblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Teach people, don't censor them. You live on planet of 6.2 billion people. Everyone is a minority on this planet. Learn about the people you live with don't intellectually ghettoize their cultures and lifestyles. Schools are a place for learning, damnit. So learn about your neighbour before you decide to shoot them based on the what TV news (owned by CocaCola, et al) tells you with sensationalism. I'm including all you rationalist bigots in this too and your blind worship of your own brain cells. You're as bad as someone on a holy crusade.