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Linus Is A Hero
oever writes "The dutch broadcaster KRO has chosen 365 modern saints or heros. One of them is Linus Torvalds, chosen for his work in on Linux and 'Open Source'. Too bad RMS or Saint Ignuciuis he wasn't chosen, even though he was recommended."
... Flash is the most horribly evil thing ever to come out of the computer industry. It chokes the flow of free information and turns pages (of information) into giant full-screen animated talking commercials.
:)
That rant's over for now, so I'll just have to ask for somebody to get a text list or something.
At the very least, he contributed largely to the QA-ing of Slashcode ;)
I'm not one to usually feed the trolls, but I think this is a great time to do this wonderful High-level vs. Low-level debate.
High-level languages can be useful. Visual Studio and the like can serve certain purposes.
However, there are many cases where it can severely hamper your abilities.
Let me give you an example. Visual Basic is an extremely high-level language. Very little programming is required for quick and easy programs. It all has hard-wired Access usage (*shudder*) so Databasing is actually pretty simple if you've ever used Microsoft Office and Access and the like.
However. (This is where the audience says "There's _always_ a however")
This semester that has most recently come to pass I was involved in a Software Engineering course in which we were given a term-long project to work on in development teams. Each group was 5 people each and picked from 4 different projects what they wanted to do. Our team and another team picked a PocketPC-based Application, based on making an E-guide for a Museum.
So, the Prototyping phase comes around, and we decide to do a simple throw-away prototype in HTML, which would just generally show how it would work, how it would look, and get customer feedback so as to clarify the requirements for the project.
The other team decided to do _theirs_ in Visual Basic, with a similar intention: code it in VB, then move on to either Java or C++ or something like that.
Now, after we finish with that, we say "Great. Let's now start coding this in Java."
The other team, however, said "Wait a minute... All we really need to do is implement a database into the VB code and spruce it up and boom, we have a working E-guide... this'll save us on a bunch of coding effort. Woohoo!"
Fast Forward to the end of the semester and we're all giving our presentations.
Ours is presented, it's slick as hell, really nice Graphical interface, simple, easy to use and looks really really nice, and it was entirely coded using text editors.
The other team presents, and theirs is pretty dull (I really don't want to shoot it down, cuz the people were really nice... but it was). The interface was a clunky windows UI which loses a lot of the ease-of-use that was required for the project. Heavy on the pull-down menus and the like, obviously making good use of the Visual Basic toolkit.
This basically gives contrast to those people who shoot down on Assembler purists who tell the story of the brilliant yet misguided hacker who makes a graphics engine in Assembler based on physical principles of matter, and spending an entire night making a slick and efficient wireframe animation of a spaceship flying across the screen, and then the C++ hacker makes, in one hour, an incredibly beatiful animation of a ship flying over Mars and around the moon and the like...
So my point is, yeah, High Level is nice, but going too high a level starts hampering your useability.
Karma: Non-Heinous
is *my* hero!
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)