"Really? Are you "vindicated" that Google tracks your information ( like Apple, AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo and many more has for decades)?"
No, they don't. I have 3rd-party cookies turned off, I run a dynamic script blocker, and routinely use tools like Collusion for Firefox, and I explicitly exclude domains that try I catch tracking me. And I catch almost all of them.
"German scientists were rounded up and shipped over to US at the gunpoint - look up Operation Paperclip."
They were nothing of the sort. Look it up yourself.
JOIA went so far as to expunge some of their records as Nazis before bringing them over... not at gunpoint at all, but through negotiatons and lucrative offers.
Sheesh. Talk about twisting the truth.
"How much von Braun really took from Goddard is debatable..."
No it isn't. Liquid fuel rocketry did not exist before Goddard. Sheesh again.
"... but it's beside the point of OP"
It might have been beside the point of OP, but it wasn't beside the comment I made, or the many other comments in response to it.
"Goddard did not develop his work from scratch in a vacuum, either."
Actually, yes, he pretty much did. Nothing even remotely like it had existed before, and just about everybody thought the very idea was nuts.
"They sent their kids over her to be educated and what do you know, they paid attention in class and the asian kid always got the good grades in Engineering and Physics and now they have their own universities and departments and can build their own stuff. They "bought" the technology too"
I felt it was pretty clear that it wasn't the HONEST part I was referring to. I don't deny there was plenty of that as well.
Let's hope that they emphasize the "streamline" and minimize the "regulate". Look at how much both the FAA and NASA accomplished in the beginning, then look at how (relatively) little they have accomplished now that they are huge bureaucracies. Then look again at how much small operations, without all the bureaucracy and regulation, have accomplished. Like Scaled Composites and SpaceX.
"It's trivial to decompile Java bytecode, and even decompiling machine code isn't all that hard. It really doesn't matter, just use Ruby for desktop apps if you like it."
It is trivial for knowledgeable people to decompile bytecode. It isn't trivial for the majority of commercial software customers. And it is far more trivial to simply read the raw code from non-compiled programs.
Further, don't confuse the task of decompiling with the task of making sense of the decompiled code. In most cases there are no meaningful variable names; instead they get named things like "integer0", or whatever the decompiler decides is a good designation. And it is not generally well-formatted, either. All in all, the decompiled code I have seen is vastly harder to read and make sense of than regular source code.
"Well, we can't keep you from inserting it into the discussion..."
The error was due to my mis-reading of what the commenter was saying. I thought he was comparing the Chinese economy of the 60s to the US economy of the 60s. But I see now that is not what he meant.
Nevertheless, you could have corrected me without being snide about it.
"Admittedly the spoils of war go to the victor and the Nazi Germans can't really complain now about the "theft" of their technology"
Almost everybody who keeps mentioning "Nazi" technology here has missed a couple of very large points:
(A) The V2 rocket was a failure. Yes, some of them hit England and caused havoc. But more than half of them didn't. Many exploded en route, and less than half actually hit near their targets.
(B) We did not "steal" that Nazi technology, we bought it, after the war. Von Braun was in the U.S., and other German engineers were contracted. They were neither enslaved, or robbed.
(C) The Germans got most of that technology from us in the first place. They made some improvements, but this is precisely the kind of "incremental improvement" you refer to.
But having said that:
"... most progress is nothing but a series of incremental improvements on existing technology."
True. But manned space exploration was an exception. Most of the technology was invented wholesale, independently, in the U.S. and Soviet Union. (I'm not just talking rocket engines.) Other countries honestly didn't contribute much, until AFTER it was a done deal.
"know. American scientists were able to get to the Moon without using any technology from any other cultures. Every other country should have to do the same."
And for those of you who are understatement challenged: that's not quite the same thing.
The Nazis didn't get their liquid-fuel rocket technology from the Chinese. They got it from the United States. And we didn't get it from China either. We invented it.
In fact, up until the moon landings and for quite some time after, the US and Russia invented just about every bit of technology that went into manned space exploration, with -- just fact -- very little help from other countries.
And all the while (and even recently), we kept catching Chinese spies scattered around the space program.
is only a relative figure. Per capita (which along with total economy MUST be included), their economy was nowhere near the U.S. during that time, as measured in U.S. dollars. The total "GDP" (if there is such a think in a socialist country -- definitions must be clarified) might have been greater, but it was for a far larger population.
The fact is that during most of that period, China could not even feed itself, "large" economy or not.
Look... I apologize already for the insult, okay? But it isn't entirely undeserved.
Making extensive use of, well, let's say "borrowed" technology -- not to mention the outright theft of some of it -- is hardly equivalent to doing this stuff on your own.
If it's a success, I will be somewhat surprised, and not very inclined to credit them for it.
"Ruby is far from consistent in my opinion. But that's subjective so I'll skip that one.
Chaining dot operators doesn't add to the readability of a language as some people seem to think it does. Yet for some reason the Ruby crowd seems to assume this is a good idea.... It actually is slower than the competing languages."
It must all be kept in perspective. If you think Ruby syntax is inconsistent in comparison to Python, you need your head examined.
And I will grant that Ruby is -- a little, not a lot -- slower than Python on benchmark suites, code maintainability is important and if you want to compare readability (and, as I mentioned, actual syntactical consistency), Ruby is the clear winner. Significant-whitespace languages simply aren't as readable as other infrastructures. I know some die-hards disagree, but blind studies show that pretty clearly. There was one posted on Slashdot not that long ago.
"And your assumption that Java can only be run by a virtual machine is just plain wrong. There are a lot of processors that offer native support for Java."
I "assumed" no such thing. I merely mentioned that it normally is. But I am intrigued: please tell me what current makes and models of processors have "native" support for uncompiled Java. Because this is complete news to me. Really. I want to know.
"And I wouldn't call it a significant success. Getting it to run at Java-like speeds means that Perl is still able to beat the crap out of it."
Significant success commercially. Nobody these days (nobody in their right mind anyway) offers commercial programs written in Perl. But to say that commercial Java programs are a multi-billion-dollar business, just in the US, is an understatement. And some of those are even open-source.
"And it's unreliable cause it's layered too much on other technology. Too much that can go wrong."
Cite this technology, please. I have been using Ruby for years and I know nothing of the "technology" of which you speak.
I can hardly wait for Ruby 2.0. They have promised at least the ability to bytecode-compile scripts and that should do a great deal to promote it for making desktop apps. Currently, it is not usually used for desktop apps because your code is 100% exposed.
Even MacRuby does not really compile, but exposes your raw code. JRuby does, of course, but it's not 100% compatible and requires JVM. JRuby is an admirable project, don't get me wrong... but having native bytecode compilation would be tremendous.
One of the reasons for Java's success is that you can use bytecode-compiled programs across desktop platforms. Not much else is really doing that.
"According to my anecdotal knowledge, C is only an ubiquitous portable assembly language; nothing more, since a good set of macros in assembly can be more terse than C if you target only one type of CPU."
I would tend to agree with this. That was exactly the purpose of C. It wasn't "high level", but it played well cross-platform while Assembly did not. So it was "higher level" than Assembly, in that it abstracted out much of the hardware interface.
"I'm not sure that C is that old. FORTRAN, COBOL, and LISP (and a number of others) are all older than C and are higher level than C."
This is precisely what I was saying. It came later, but was lower-level.
And it was, for the specific purpose of being more performant. It is not easier to use, it is not "simpler" to learn to use wisely. It is just more efficient at the compiled level, which being drastically less "efficient" at the code level. Personally, I can barely stand to look at it.
I refused to use Google+ from the very beginning, due to its glaring lack of privacy protection. Sure, I have an account. I like to keep my options open. But there's next to nothing there.
And when their "umbrella" policy came into effect, my decision to ignore them was 100% vindicated.
So, on the contrary: people who were paying attention did indeed anticipate it.
"You can try to talk that down all you like, but that doesn't change the fact that in the only instance of a building ever doing that, in the history of the world, not just one but 3 major buildings fell, and at approximately the same time!
"It's all irrelevant. I once set the drapes on fire and my house didn't fall, so fires don't cause collapse."
No, it is not irrelevant. It is statistically VERY significant.
Repeat: since they have been building modern "concrete and steel" skyscrapers -- many decades now -- NONE of them has ever collapsed from fire. Even the very old ones.
You can try to talk that down all you like, but that won't make the fact that 3 major buildings did at approximately the same time.
The statistical odds against that happening are pretty close to that of a world-busting asteroid hitting the Earth yesterday.
"One important point: simpler != fewer characters in source code."
But you can be as verbose as you like in Ruby. Unlike many other languages, the "standard" way of getting things done is not mandatory. You have options.
So you can make your source code compact, or, if you think that's not easily readable, expand it to a "simpler" form.
Case in point: while working on a project, one of my fellow workers (very smart guy) refactored some of my code to a single line of nested lambdas.
I examined his code very carefully. But the simple fact was that it was too hard to mentally picture what was going on in his code.
So I changed it back. Readability is important in maintaining code, and who knows who would be looking in the same code in the future? But I maintain that Ruby is usually quite readable, as long as you aren't trying to be too clever with it.
"Ruby has a horrible syntax, it's slow and unreliable."
Ruby's syntax is exactly why most people who like it, use it. And it's not as if its syntax were unusual; almost all of it was "borrowed" from existing languages, though in a generally consistent way, so it is still coherent.
But okay. You don't like the syntax. That's your prerogative. About being "slow and unreliable", however:
It is no slower than other modern "dynamically typed" languages. While it is generally true that as a group they are slower than compiled languages like C or even Java. (And even Java is very slow, when compared to truly compiled languages; Java is only bytecode-compiled.)
But comparing those languages to statically-typed languages like Java is not really calid. They are different kinds of animals.
But of course, that is Nutter's motivation for porting Ruby to the JVM: to get Ruby to run at Java-like speeds. And with significant (though not 100%) success. But I must repeat that dynamically-typed languages present unique challenges when it comes to compiling.
As for your last assertion, that it is unreliable: hogwash. It is no more "unreliable" than any other modern language. One is tempted to wonder where and how you got that idea.
Slashdot Mirror
"The point is that the owner of copyright should be free to dictate the terms under which others can access that content. "
But of course, that's the way it already works.
If you mean they should be free to enforce the terms any way they want, however, then I must take the opposite stand.
"Really? Are you "vindicated" that Google tracks your information ( like Apple, AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo and many more has for decades)?"
No, they don't. I have 3rd-party cookies turned off, I run a dynamic script blocker, and routinely use tools like Collusion for Firefox, and I explicitly exclude domains that try I catch tracking me. And I catch almost all of them.
I am also on NAT behind a firewalled router.
Even Slashdot has no idea what my real name is.
So, take that.
"German scientists were rounded up and shipped over to US at the gunpoint - look up Operation Paperclip."
They were nothing of the sort. Look it up yourself.
JOIA went so far as to expunge some of their records as Nazis before bringing them over... not at gunpoint at all, but through negotiatons and lucrative offers.
Sheesh. Talk about twisting the truth.
"How much von Braun really took from Goddard is debatable..."
No it isn't. Liquid fuel rocketry did not exist before Goddard. Sheesh again.
"... but it's beside the point of OP"
It might have been beside the point of OP, but it wasn't beside the comment I made, or the many other comments in response to it.
"Goddard did not develop his work from scratch in a vacuum, either."
Actually, yes, he pretty much did. Nothing even remotely like it had existed before, and just about everybody thought the very idea was nuts.
"They sent their kids over her to be educated and what do you know, they paid attention in class and the asian kid always got the good grades in Engineering and Physics and now they have their own universities and departments and can build their own stuff. They "bought" the technology too"
I felt it was pretty clear that it wasn't the HONEST part I was referring to. I don't deny there was plenty of that as well.
Precisely.
Let's hope that they emphasize the "streamline" and minimize the "regulate". Look at how much both the FAA and NASA accomplished in the beginning, then look at how (relatively) little they have accomplished now that they are huge bureaucracies. Then look again at how much small operations, without all the bureaucracy and regulation, have accomplished. Like Scaled Composites and SpaceX.
"It's trivial to decompile Java bytecode, and even decompiling machine code isn't all that hard. It really doesn't matter, just use Ruby for desktop apps if you like it."
It is trivial for knowledgeable people to decompile bytecode. It isn't trivial for the majority of commercial software customers. And it is far more trivial to simply read the raw code from non-compiled programs.
Further, don't confuse the task of decompiling with the task of making sense of the decompiled code. In most cases there are no meaningful variable names; instead they get named things like "integer0", or whatever the decompiler decides is a good designation. And it is not generally well-formatted, either. All in all, the decompiled code I have seen is vastly harder to read and make sense of than regular source code.
"Well, we can't keep you from inserting it into the discussion..."
The error was due to my mis-reading of what the commenter was saying. I thought he was comparing the Chinese economy of the 60s to the US economy of the 60s. But I see now that is not what he meant.
Nevertheless, you could have corrected me without being snide about it.
"Admittedly the spoils of war go to the victor and the Nazi Germans can't really complain now about the "theft" of their technology"
Almost everybody who keeps mentioning "Nazi" technology here has missed a couple of very large points:
(A) The V2 rocket was a failure. Yes, some of them hit England and caused havoc. But more than half of them didn't. Many exploded en route, and less than half actually hit near their targets.
(B) We did not "steal" that Nazi technology, we bought it, after the war. Von Braun was in the U.S., and other German engineers were contracted. They were neither enslaved, or robbed.
(C) The Germans got most of that technology from us in the first place. They made some improvements, but this is precisely the kind of "incremental improvement" you refer to.
But having said that:
"... most progress is nothing but a series of incremental improvements on existing technology."
True. But manned space exploration was an exception. Most of the technology was invented wholesale, independently, in the U.S. and Soviet Union. (I'm not just talking rocket engines.) Other countries honestly didn't contribute much, until AFTER it was a done deal.
And to add to what Teancum stated:
There really wasn't all that much in V2 rocket technology to "borrow", except for some somewhat-improved engines over what the US already had.
Fun fact: V2 rockets did not work worth a damn. Many of them exploded, too, and half of them or more missed their targets.
"know. American scientists were able to get to the Moon without using any technology from any other cultures. Every other country should have to do the same."
And for those of you who are understatement challenged: that's not quite the same thing.
The Nazis didn't get their liquid-fuel rocket technology from the Chinese. They got it from the United States. And we didn't get it from China either. We invented it.
In fact, up until the moon landings and for quite some time after, the US and Russia invented just about every bit of technology that went into manned space exploration, with -- just fact -- very little help from other countries.
And all the while (and even recently), we kept catching Chinese spies scattered around the space program.
I didn't just make this stuff up, you know.
"... economy far in excess... "
is only a relative figure. Per capita (which along with total economy MUST be included), their economy was nowhere near the U.S. during that time, as measured in U.S. dollars. The total "GDP" (if there is such a think in a socialist country -- definitions must be clarified) might have been greater, but it was for a far larger population.
The fact is that during most of that period, China could not even feed itself, "large" economy or not.
Look... I apologize already for the insult, okay? But it isn't entirely undeserved.
Making extensive use of, well, let's say "borrowed" technology -- not to mention the outright theft of some of it -- is hardly equivalent to doing this stuff on your own.
If it's a success, I will be somewhat surprised, and not very inclined to credit them for it.
... no-one can hear you suffocate.
"Ruby is far from consistent in my opinion. But that's subjective so I'll skip that one. Chaining dot operators doesn't add to the readability of a language as some people seem to think it does. Yet for some reason the Ruby crowd seems to assume this is a good idea. ... It actually is slower than the competing languages."
It must all be kept in perspective. If you think Ruby syntax is inconsistent in comparison to Python, you need your head examined.
And I will grant that Ruby is -- a little, not a lot -- slower than Python on benchmark suites, code maintainability is important and if you want to compare readability (and, as I mentioned, actual syntactical consistency), Ruby is the clear winner. Significant-whitespace languages simply aren't as readable as other infrastructures. I know some die-hards disagree, but blind studies show that pretty clearly. There was one posted on Slashdot not that long ago.
"And your assumption that Java can only be run by a virtual machine is just plain wrong. There are a lot of processors that offer native support for Java."
I "assumed" no such thing. I merely mentioned that it normally is. But I am intrigued: please tell me what current makes and models of processors have "native" support for uncompiled Java. Because this is complete news to me. Really. I want to know.
"And I wouldn't call it a significant success. Getting it to run at Java-like speeds means that Perl is still able to beat the crap out of it."
Significant success commercially. Nobody these days (nobody in their right mind anyway) offers commercial programs written in Perl. But to say that commercial Java programs are a multi-billion-dollar business, just in the US, is an understatement. And some of those are even open-source.
"And it's unreliable cause it's layered too much on other technology. Too much that can go wrong."
Cite this technology, please. I have been using Ruby for years and I know nothing of the "technology" of which you speak.
I can hardly wait for Ruby 2.0. They have promised at least the ability to bytecode-compile scripts and that should do a great deal to promote it for making desktop apps. Currently, it is not usually used for desktop apps because your code is 100% exposed.
Even MacRuby does not really compile, but exposes your raw code. JRuby does, of course, but it's not 100% compatible and requires JVM. JRuby is an admirable project, don't get me wrong... but having native bytecode compilation would be tremendous.
One of the reasons for Java's success is that you can use bytecode-compiled programs across desktop platforms. Not much else is really doing that.
" thats great and all but I was responding to the line about Ceylon"
Pardon me then. My comments were well-meant.
"According to my anecdotal knowledge, C is only an ubiquitous portable assembly language; nothing more, since a good set of macros in assembly can be more terse than C if you target only one type of CPU."
I would tend to agree with this. That was exactly the purpose of C. It wasn't "high level", but it played well cross-platform while Assembly did not. So it was "higher level" than Assembly, in that it abstracted out much of the hardware interface.
"I'm not sure that C is that old. FORTRAN, COBOL, and LISP (and a number of others) are all older than C and are higher level than C."
This is precisely what I was saying. It came later, but was lower-level.
And it was, for the specific purpose of being more performant. It is not easier to use, it is not "simpler" to learn to use wisely. It is just more efficient at the compiled level, which being drastically less "efficient" at the code level. Personally, I can barely stand to look at it.
I refused to use Google+ from the very beginning, due to its glaring lack of privacy protection. Sure, I have an account. I like to keep my options open. But there's next to nothing there.
And when their "umbrella" policy came into effect, my decision to ignore them was 100% vindicated.
So, on the contrary: people who were paying attention did indeed anticipate it.
Editing error. That should have read:
"You can try to talk that down all you like, but that doesn't change the fact that in the only instance of a building ever doing that, in the history of the world, not just one but 3 major buildings fell, and at approximately the same time!
"It's all irrelevant. I once set the drapes on fire and my house didn't fall, so fires don't cause collapse."
No, it is not irrelevant. It is statistically VERY significant.
Repeat: since they have been building modern "concrete and steel" skyscrapers -- many decades now -- NONE of them has ever collapsed from fire. Even the very old ones.
You can try to talk that down all you like, but that won't make the fact that 3 major buildings did at approximately the same time.
The statistical odds against that happening are pretty close to that of a world-busting asteroid hitting the Earth yesterday.
Haha! Good point.
"One important point: simpler != fewer characters in source code."
But you can be as verbose as you like in Ruby. Unlike many other languages, the "standard" way of getting things done is not mandatory. You have options.
So you can make your source code compact, or, if you think that's not easily readable, expand it to a "simpler" form.
Case in point: while working on a project, one of my fellow workers (very smart guy) refactored some of my code to a single line of nested lambdas.
I examined his code very carefully. But the simple fact was that it was too hard to mentally picture what was going on in his code.
So I changed it back. Readability is important in maintaining code, and who knows who would be looking in the same code in the future? But I maintain that Ruby is usually quite readable, as long as you aren't trying to be too clever with it.
Slip of the fingers: that should have read "... not really valid."
"Ruby has a horrible syntax, it's slow and unreliable."
Ruby's syntax is exactly why most people who like it, use it. And it's not as if its syntax were unusual; almost all of it was "borrowed" from existing languages, though in a generally consistent way, so it is still coherent.
But okay. You don't like the syntax. That's your prerogative. About being "slow and unreliable", however:
It is no slower than other modern "dynamically typed" languages. While it is generally true that as a group they are slower than compiled languages like C or even Java. (And even Java is very slow, when compared to truly compiled languages; Java is only bytecode-compiled.)
But comparing those languages to statically-typed languages like Java is not really calid. They are different kinds of animals.
But of course, that is Nutter's motivation for porting Ruby to the JVM: to get Ruby to run at Java-like speeds. And with significant (though not 100%) success. But I must repeat that dynamically-typed languages present unique challenges when it comes to compiling.
As for your last assertion, that it is unreliable: hogwash. It is no more "unreliable" than any other modern language. One is tempted to wonder where and how you got that idea.