-10, willing to learn; I'm sure they're all laughing about it now.
No, the fact of the matter is, my instructor is sold on getter/setter methods in any and all forms, regardless of how they may compromise a design, and any design other than that is suspect.
Surely you've heard similar Zealotry from the Extreme Programming people who think that no method should be longer than three lines of code?
Anyhow, if you haven't seen incompetence in action in the Java world, then congratulations. Maybe I should move to where you are. But it exists, and it is widespread. Maybe when it becomes more standardized and less buzzword-compliant, we'll see a reduction in the current level of cluelessness in the Java community.
But I'm not holding my breath. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Really? Cool. I've seen C compilers do this with C-style commments, but I can't seem to replicate that behavior now.
I would have hoped they'd stripped the comments first, but I swear I've seen it expanded the other way. Maybe that was indeed an ancient, buggy compiler...:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
For our other projects I managed to get by with a text editor, but they didn't tell us how to write all the Swing stuff we needed to write for the project without using their crappy recommended tools. I was much happier programming with a simple text editor and the JDK, although their style requirements got *very* tiresome, and I lost points for style regardless, no matter how vague the specifications...
Well, once you wrap a class instance over another class instance over another class instance. (for stdin, actually, I don't think I'm exaggerating here) And it's different depending on if that's Java 2^H1.2 or not.
I also don't see how this is *that* much different from getting a socket connection or a pipe in C. It's still just a file descriptor, and you use different methods to access it. In Java, you wrap the 'descriptor' (actually some sort of object) in another class that implements different methods, and use them... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
She actually claims that the way she teaches Java is somehow related to Smalltalk, which convinces me that she's never really used Smalltalk in her life.
I haven't either, mind you, but I know enough about it, and I know at least one programmer who has, and that's why he's working on compiler technology (I think), and she's teaching my course. That's my theory, anyhow.:)
I guess I haven't found a good use for Java yet, and she definitely hasn't shown me one, either. I don't really like their error handling model either, since there are so *many* exceptions out there that have to be caught... If I don't need to handle them specifically, I find myself writing a big 'try' around it all, and having catch do a stack trace on your basic exception, which definitely defeats the purpose.
Still, if I needed to catch a specific exception and handle it differently, I suppose I could, but doing it for the hell of it (even with basic I/O) is just bothersome.
I'd like to mention, by the way, that exceptions are covered in our book in at least Chapter 10 (not that I own the book; "Thinking in Java" is also online). Therefore, using stdin was covered after that. (???) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think Garbage Collection has gotten a bad rap, actually. Just because some Lisp implementations in the past have had bad garbage collection doesn't mean that all modern tools do now.
Although I love programming in C, I think that Scheme is a beautiful language too. I couldn't find that many uses for it besides writing Scheme in Scheme, but maybe that's just because I'm not used to it in the first place.
But making everything an Object (including functions) is a very cool approach, and having lists built-in to the syntax is very handy as well. I think that with a Scheme-like approach to this sort of thing, data structure building would become trivial.
Since this sort of thing was hacked on to Perl later, it makes Scheme style programming very ugly. It's possible, because I've tried it out, but not pretty. However, Java doesn't really support this well. Inner classes are not the same, and you can't really get a closure...
Maybe you missed that 'public' keyword. It's easy to do; Java has a lot of keywords. This is how I was *taught* to "hide" data in Java. It isn't hidden at all. I agree that if done properly and sparsely, accessor methods can be useful. But this is at best difficult to do in Java, and people aren't even encouraged to do it correctly.
And yes, operator overloading in C++ can be infinitely abused; that's because it's powerful. You can build very intuitive interfaces with it, but you don't have to. Similarly, the fact that Java doesn't have an actual 'goto' command means that when you actually need it, it isn't there. As much as people hate it, 'goto' still has some valid uses, when you want to implement proper tail-recursion, for example...
You're right; 'public static final' is much more complicated. In fact, 'final' itself is a much more complicated keyword than const. Could they at least have provided a 'const' keyword, since it had a simple, clear meaning, and I use it all the time? No...
Hey, want to be really evil? I'm sure you can randomly edit someone's java file to screw it up... Heck, leave a comment open somewhere. Randomly editing source is bad no matter what language you do it in. Heck, randomly delete a line from a BASIC program. Or for that matter, take a random byte out of the middle of your OS kernel; you didn't need that byte! So don't tell me that my examples are bad, now...;)
Interesting. Since we were encouraged to use Visual Age for Java, and it explicitly bugs us about capitalization conventions, (as well as the fact that all of our project have to follow the same fascist style guidelines) I figured this sort of thing would be promoted to a compiler error, or at least a warning.
Also, while I'm at it, I'd like to say that the implementation of 'stdin' is completely hideous in Java. Did they actually expect anyone to use this?
I mean, try to write this in Java...
10 PRINT "What is your name?"
20 INPUT NAME$
30 PRINT "Hello, ";NAME$
...and then explain to me how 'friendly' it is.:)
For all its faults, that's one task I'd gladly do even in C++...
I will agree with you completely if you can explain to me why our "professional in the industry" insists on teaching like this because "that's how it's done in the industry". That frightens me more than anything else. You would indeed get points taken off for writing intelligent code, and not having setters and getters for everything, blindly and preferably auto-generated, and entirely public...
Yes, I know how OOP should work, but that's apparently not the recommended approach according to Java, or at least IBM.
And no, I'm not confused; I explicitly mentioned the different parts of "Java" (it's all nebulously called "Java", and that's a trademark anyhow, but I did specify...) that I was blaming.
And when I tried to make methods protected with JavaBeans, (to protect my data; at least the 'set' method on our NINE identical variables, mind you) it all stopped working, but that might be due to my lack of understanding, and not Visual Age. (does JavaBeans allow a protected method? Please tell me it does...)
Well, you're right that if designed correctly, they can provide that benefit, but first it would have to be *taught* correctly, which is a separate problem.
However, since I generally do not wish to provide get/set methods for everything, my argument is that if you want to extend my class, then you can inherit it, and provide accessor methods for all of my *protected* variables.
...which, by the way, have to be in a separate *package*, and therefore a separate DIRECTORY just because I don't want anything else in the same *package* messing with it because it's supposed to be PROTECTED, and therefore only have CLASS SCOPE and not *package* scope!!! (my point being that Java itself makes it almost impossible for people to write good code in Java; in any case, it certainly isn't intuitive, and it isn't taught properly yet, either...)
Is it me, or is Java worse than the B&D-style languages that have come before it? I think it actually has more annoying keywords that always must be strung together than any other language I've ever seen. And I can't fix that, because it has no macro system!
#define const public static final// considered harmful in Java
Then I had to use a useless GUI-building tool that generated horrific code... In all fairness, I shouldn't blame the "Java Language" for that, so I'll blame the "Java API" and "JavaBeans" and IBM for that one. But still, the generated code was really ugly, and the suggested design methodology is horrible.
Am I the only one who remembers the 'data-hiding' portion of OOP, where you don't have public getFoo and setFoo methods for everything?
And what's with the fascist standards with regards to var^H^H^Hfield and func^H^H^H^Hmethod naming conventions? Really, WHAT IS THE DEAL?
For a language that is theoretically based on C++ and then C-style syntax, Sun has managed to break every single decent convention we ever had, and introduce several new, painful ones. And they aren't finished redesigning it, either, so why try to target a language that's slow, bloated, and constantly in flux in the first place? Managers are just dying to sign up!
So, I blame Sun for trying to embrace-and-extend C++ of all horrible things, and I blame Microsoft for trying to follow their lead. Whatever the "next-generation" programming language is, it'll be far uglier and slower than attempting to hack it all on top of C again...
But heck, maybe it'll increase the demand for programmers again, right?
Well, I do random binary hacks that assume twos-complement, but only in integer math...
I think the PDP-11 had both implemented; in any case, that's why C has ++ and -- today.
Oh, and I haven't done many big projects yet, but I definitely agree with you about the language design.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot just sucks lately, and getting karma is just too easy to be a worthwhile game for a while. It was hard for a while, and Siggy had to fight to get his insightful comments modded up; that was entertaining.
But if MEEPT!! was here (more) today (and not posting shit at -1) I guarantee you he'd be +5 material, yes siree.
Dude, one time I got a +1 bonus on a new account in a day. Mostly from one post. (I think I did get enough karma from that one post to get the +1 bonus, actually...) Oh, and if you don't know how that's possible, then just understand that the karma system is much more whacked out than you think it is; it surprised me... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Wow. I pretty much rely on everything being two's-complement these days, I guess I'm spoiled by only having one zero in my number system...
I wish x86 had adopted auto-increment mode from the PDP; it would have made implementing C a lot cleaner. (C is portable, but it's biased too:)
Nowadays, we've got x86 assembly, C++, and Java. I'm actually very happy that I managed to find the courses that still really teach C... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That way, if nuclear war breaks out in the US, you can still send a message to the other side of the country that says "NE1 HERE??? A/S/L???" on IRC... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'd like to see more Fuzz results. Maybe I'm just a benchmark nut, but I'd like to see some more real benchmarks. I always liked the BYTEMarks over whatever Intel was pushing this week, too...
Maybe if they used Fuzz to test the Cygwin utilities, versus the regular NT (DOS) utilities? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What, with all the votes split? What margin of error are you using?
Bush has 271 with Florida already, so there are some votes missing; sounds like some "fuzzy math".:)
Of course, I haven't done the math at all, so I'd like to see your reasoning, if you don't mind. I think less than half a percent would be small enough margin.
Either that, or split the representative votes by district (the way Maine does it already; it's up to the state) or ignore that state entirely (which would be less than ideal).
But there isn't much we can do for this election; it just proves that the system is broken. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
I did indeed.
And I was marked down for it.
-10, willing to learn; I'm sure they're all laughing about it now.
No, the fact of the matter is, my instructor is sold on getter/setter methods in any and all forms, regardless of how they may compromise a design, and any design other than that is suspect.
Surely you've heard similar Zealotry from the Extreme Programming people who think that no method should be longer than three lines of code?
Anyhow, if you haven't seen incompetence in action in the Java world, then congratulations. Maybe I should move to where you are. But it exists, and it is widespread. Maybe when it becomes more standardized and less buzzword-compliant, we'll see a reduction in the current level of cluelessness in the Java community.
But I'm not holding my breath.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Really? Cool. I've seen C compilers do this with C-style commments, but I can't seem to replicate that behavior now.
:)
I would have hoped they'd stripped the comments first, but I swear I've seen it expanded the other way. Maybe that was indeed an ancient, buggy compiler...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
For our other projects I managed to get by with a text editor, but they didn't tell us how to write all the Swing stuff we needed to write for the project without using their crappy recommended tools. I was much happier programming with a simple text editor and the JDK, although their style requirements got *very* tiresome, and I lost points for style regardless, no matter how vague the specifications...
Well, once you wrap a class instance over another class instance over another class instance. (for stdin, actually, I don't think I'm exaggerating here) And it's different depending on if that's Java 2^H1.2 or not.
I also don't see how this is *that* much different from getting a socket connection or a pipe in C. It's still just a file descriptor, and you use different methods to access it. In Java, you wrap the 'descriptor' (actually some sort of object) in another class that implements different methods, and use them...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
She actually claims that the way she teaches Java is somehow related to Smalltalk, which convinces me that she's never really used Smalltalk in her life.
:)
I haven't either, mind you, but I know enough about it, and I know at least one programmer who has, and that's why he's working on compiler technology (I think), and she's teaching my course. That's my theory, anyhow.
I guess I haven't found a good use for Java yet, and she definitely hasn't shown me one, either. I don't really like their error handling model either, since there are so *many* exceptions out there that have to be caught... If I don't need to handle them specifically, I find myself writing a big 'try' around it all, and having catch do a stack trace on your basic exception, which definitely defeats the purpose.
Still, if I needed to catch a specific exception and handle it differently, I suppose I could, but doing it for the hell of it (even with basic I/O) is just bothersome.
I'd like to mention, by the way, that exceptions are covered in our book in at least Chapter 10 (not that I own the book; "Thinking in Java" is also online). Therefore, using stdin was covered after that. (???)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, maybe you'll understand when I say that C programming style wasn't precisely *encouraged* in my Java class.
Then again, maybe you won't, judging from your encouragement so far...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think Garbage Collection has gotten a bad rap, actually. Just because some Lisp implementations in the past have had bad garbage collection doesn't mean that all modern tools do now.
Although I love programming in C, I think that Scheme is a beautiful language too. I couldn't find that many uses for it besides writing Scheme in Scheme, but maybe that's just because I'm not used to it in the first place.
But making everything an Object (including functions) is a very cool approach, and having lists built-in to the syntax is very handy as well. I think that with a Scheme-like approach to this sort of thing, data structure building would become trivial.
Since this sort of thing was hacked on to Perl later, it makes Scheme style programming very ugly. It's possible, because I've tried it out, but not pretty. However, Java doesn't really support this well. Inner classes are not the same, and you can't really get a closure...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Thanks, actually, that makes me feel a lot better.
;)
I'm not sold on Java yet, but it's nice to have some confirmation that she actually is a fool!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Maybe you missed that 'public' keyword. It's easy to do; Java has a lot of keywords. This is how I was *taught* to "hide" data in Java. It isn't hidden at all. I agree that if done properly and sparsely, accessor methods can be useful. But this is at best difficult to do in Java, and people aren't even encouraged to do it correctly.
And yes, operator overloading in C++ can be infinitely abused; that's because it's powerful. You can build very intuitive interfaces with it, but you don't have to. Similarly, the fact that Java doesn't have an actual 'goto' command means that when you actually need it, it isn't there. As much as people hate it, 'goto' still has some valid uses, when you want to implement proper tail-recursion, for example...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
You're right; 'public static final' is much more complicated. In fact, 'final' itself is a much more complicated keyword than const. Could they at least have provided a 'const' keyword, since it had a simple, clear meaning, and I use it all the time? No...
;)
Hey, want to be really evil? I'm sure you can randomly edit someone's java file to screw it up... Heck, leave a comment open somewhere. Randomly editing source is bad no matter what language you do it in. Heck, randomly delete a line from a BASIC program. Or for that matter, take a random byte out of the middle of your OS kernel; you didn't need that byte! So don't tell me that my examples are bad, now...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Interesting. Since we were encouraged to use Visual Age for Java, and it explicitly bugs us about capitalization conventions, (as well as the fact that all of our project have to follow the same fascist style guidelines) I figured this sort of thing would be promoted to a compiler error, or at least a warning.
Also, while I'm at it, I'd like to say that the implementation of 'stdin' is completely hideous in Java. Did they actually expect anyone to use this?
I mean, try to write this in Java...
10 PRINT "What is your name?"
20 INPUT NAME$
30 PRINT "Hello, ";NAME$
...and then explain to me how 'friendly' it is.
For all its faults, that's one task I'd gladly do even in C++...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I will agree with you completely if you can explain to me why our "professional in the industry" insists on teaching like this because "that's how it's done in the industry". That frightens me more than anything else. You would indeed get points taken off for writing intelligent code, and not having setters and getters for everything, blindly and preferably auto-generated, and entirely public...
Yes, I know how OOP should work, but that's apparently not the recommended approach according to Java, or at least IBM.
And no, I'm not confused; I explicitly mentioned the different parts of "Java" (it's all nebulously called "Java", and that's a trademark anyhow, but I did specify...) that I was blaming.
And when I tried to make methods protected with JavaBeans, (to protect my data; at least the 'set' method on our NINE identical variables, mind you) it all stopped working, but that might be due to my lack of understanding, and not Visual Age. (does JavaBeans allow a protected method? Please tell me it does...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, you're right that if designed correctly, they can provide that benefit, but first it would have to be *taught* correctly, which is a separate problem.
However, since I generally do not wish to provide get/set methods for everything, my argument is that if you want to extend my class, then you can inherit it, and provide accessor methods for all of my *protected* variables.
...which, by the way, have to be in a separate *package*, and therefore a separate DIRECTORY just because I don't want anything else in the same *package* messing with it because it's supposed to be PROTECTED, and therefore only have CLASS SCOPE and not *package* scope!!! (my point being that Java itself makes it almost impossible for people to write good code in Java; in any case, it certainly isn't intuitive, and it isn't taught properly yet, either...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
;) Yeah, actually, that would be REALLY bad in C++, but my point was that it all wouldn't work in Java.
/* C-style */ comments even work in Java? I didn't think they did; either that, or maybe they're "considered use^H^H^Hharmful" as well. :)
Do real
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Is it me, or is Java worse than the B&D-style languages that have come before it? I think it actually has more annoying keywords that always must be strung together than any other language I've ever seen. And I can't fix that, because it has no macro system!
// considered harmful in Java
#define const public static final
Then I had to use a useless GUI-building tool that generated horrific code... In all fairness, I shouldn't blame the "Java Language" for that, so I'll blame the "Java API" and "JavaBeans" and IBM for that one. But still, the generated code was really ugly, and the suggested design methodology is horrible.
Am I the only one who remembers the 'data-hiding' portion of OOP, where you don't have public getFoo and setFoo methods for everything?
And what's with the fascist standards with regards to var^H^H^Hfield and func^H^H^H^Hmethod naming conventions? Really, WHAT IS THE DEAL?
For a language that is theoretically based on C++ and then C-style syntax, Sun has managed to break every single decent convention we ever had, and introduce several new, painful ones. And they aren't finished redesigning it, either, so why try to target a language that's slow, bloated, and constantly in flux in the first place? Managers are just dying to sign up!
So, I blame Sun for trying to embrace-and-extend C++ of all horrible things, and I blame Microsoft for trying to follow their lead. Whatever the "next-generation" programming language is, it'll be far uglier and slower than attempting to hack it all on top of C again...
But heck, maybe it'll increase the demand for programmers again, right?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, I do random binary hacks that assume twos-complement, but only in integer math...
:)
I think the PDP-11 had both implemented; in any case, that's why C has ++ and -- today.
Oh, and I haven't done many big projects yet, but I definitely agree with you about the language design.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ah, but you'd think that being able to fake intelligence would be much harder to do than merely being intelligent.
;)
Therefore, anyone who could fake it would be quite intelligent indeed.
Heck, just watch the moderation on my posts sometime!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hey, I resent that.
Slashdot just sucks lately, and getting karma is just too easy to be a worthwhile game for a while. It was hard for a while, and Siggy had to fight to get his insightful comments modded up; that was entertaining.
But if MEEPT!! was here (more) today (and not posting shit at -1) I guarantee you he'd be +5 material, yes siree.
Dude, one time I got a +1 bonus on a new account in a day. Mostly from one post. (I think I did get enough karma from that one post to get the +1 bonus, actually...) Oh, and if you don't know how that's possible, then just understand that the karma system is much more whacked out than you think it is; it surprised me...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yes, they did patent some techniques.
So now the question is, what patent rights did IBM get out of them?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Wow. I pretty much rely on everything being two's-complement these days, I guess I'm spoiled by only having one zero in my number system...
:)
I wish x86 had adopted auto-increment mode from the PDP; it would have made implementing C a lot cleaner. (C is portable, but it's biased too
Nowadays, we've got x86 assembly, C++, and Java. I'm actually very happy that I managed to find the courses that still really teach C...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
...after all, that *is* what it's designed for!
That way, if nuclear war breaks out in the US, you can still send a message to the other side of the country that says "NE1 HERE??? A/S/L???" on IRC...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'd like to see more Fuzz results. Maybe I'm just a benchmark nut, but I'd like to see some more real benchmarks. I always liked the BYTEMarks over whatever Intel was pushing this week, too...
Maybe if they used Fuzz to test the Cygwin utilities, versus the regular NT (DOS) utilities?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
...is a large, spinning mirror, and a tracking device...
...and we could vaporize a human target from space!
Yeah, *sure*, that's why you want it. We believe you...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
More people voted for Not Bush than for Bush or Gore; therefore, Not Bush wins.
However, more people also voted for Not Gore than for Gor or Bush; therefore, Not Gore wins.
So, with Not Bush and Not Gore in office, I guess we're stuck with someone else. But who? Nader? BRAK? OOG? Slashdot Cruiser?
ANARCHY!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, that's about what I expect from slashdot.
Want to reply to me next time, you coward?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What, with all the votes split? What margin of error are you using?
:)
Bush has 271 with Florida already, so there are some votes missing; sounds like some "fuzzy math".
Of course, I haven't done the math at all, so I'd like to see your reasoning, if you don't mind. I think less than half a percent would be small enough margin.
Either that, or split the representative votes by district (the way Maine does it already; it's up to the state) or ignore that state entirely (which would be less than ideal).
But there isn't much we can do for this election; it just proves that the system is broken.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.