As far as I can see, object oriented programming is basically common sense (ie what some people call "structured programming", as if there were any other sort) plus a bit of discipline (whether or not the language forces that discipline is largely irrelevant) plus rather too much mysticism and hype, which I ignore.
Let's get buzzword compliant. OOP requires encapsulation, polymorphism and inheritance, right? I don't think I absolutely need the language to force me to use those methods. Encapsulation is struct + discipline. Polymorphism is basically a way of providing type-safety to all those old C-style hacks where you pass a pointer-to-godknows into a function and treat it however you like; if you're disciplined you don't need the language to help, tho gods help you if you mess it up. Inheritance can be simulated by "has-a" if "is-a" is not available. It's ugly but it works fine.
My programs are OO because I'm immersed in the way of thinking that OO requires, not because I use an OO language. Most of the programmers I know who use C++ or Delphi don't write OO, because they do their damnedest to get around the discipline and just produce unstructured crap. This is easy to do in C++, which is really just a PDP-8 macro assembler anyway, and harder but not really hard to do in Delphi. Some of these guys could probably do it in Smalltalk tho -- they really have talent!
As for me, I can write OO in just about any language except MS-DOS batch and Prolog, because that's how I program. Maybe I'm just a legend or something, I dunno.
: Fruitbat:
BTW, I'm not going to flame you simply cos you tend to get annoyed easily, but maybe you should take a rest and cut out the stimulants, cos you don't sound healthy at the moment.
I'm not so sure that data hiding is all that important. I program object-orientedly (sorry) just about all the time, by:
Minimizing small blobs of global data, but instead putting things into record/struct/hash structures.
Bunching procedures together, whether or not the syntax allows it, to make it clear that they operate on a particular object.
Inheriting, whether through IS-A or HAS-A relationships. Making every procedure generic enough to be useful outside the original designed domain. This is what I mean by code re-use.
Applying a reasonable amount of discipline regardless of what the language allows.
I'm sick of hearing all this rubbish from hammer users and saw geeks. A screwdriver is all the tool I've ever needed.
I started, I admit, with a simple little toy hammer, just using it to whack screws into wood. But the problem with hammers is they don't support threaded processing. Using a screwdriver makes things a lot easier. I reckon anyone who would use a hammer or saw or (gods forbid!) a chisel for this sort of thing is just a lame luser.
I've heard plenty of morons claiming that screwdrivers don't drive nails into walls as well as other tools, but that's bu||$h!+. I've tried using a saw to whack things, and the design flaws are obvious. Stick with a screwdriver and you won't have nearly as much trouble. Or how about the time I tried building a scale model of the USS Enterprise entirely from balsa wood using only a hammer? Fiasco! And yet a screwdriver can install AND de-install screws into wood, metal and plastic with absolute ease of use. Why bother with anything else?
Check out The Machine Room for specs on this and many other classic 8-bit machines. I believe the PET 2001 had 8K RAM, a tape drive, a built-in screen and Commodore BASIC, a MicroSoft BASIC from about 1981, and a bizarre variant on ASCII that they called CBMSCII (ka-boomsky?). Later versions fixed some bugs, added a few extra commands to the BASIC, and replaced the chiclet keyboard with a very good quality one. It got up to 32K RAM using a 6502 chip, and possibly more with some psychotic paging techniques.
My parents bought a Commodore CBM-8032 in 1983, and it's what hooked me on computers. I still have a huge number of the cryptic SYS and POKE commands programmed into my fingers -- I sat down at an emulator recently, wondered out loud what was the system command to hard-reboot the machine, and my fingers typed SYS 64790 without the slightest hesitation. Eerie!
The best PET/CBM/C64/VIC/etc emulator is the VICE emulator. I recommend it to anyone running Unix, MS-DOS, Win95/NT, OS/2 or RiscOS who wants to remember the good old Commodore beasts. I've used it in the DOS and Windows versions, but not since I migrated (graduated?) to Linux. I might just check it out tho...
I propose the following as a complement to Godwin's Law:
As a SlashDot discussion grows longer, the probability that it will become a discussion of the Gnu Public License or the US Constitution approaches one.
Maybe it pegs me as an inveterate newbie, but I always log in as root on my system. The reason? Our darling friends at Red Hat have not seen fit to provide a version of kppp that runs for anyone but root, and although I could probably go grovelling through the chain of batch files -- uh, sorry, I mean shell scripts -- I don't feel like it. I have better things to do. I'm one of the new generation of non-newbie newbies. I can program in a dozen languages, I've been using computers for nearly 20 years, and I use Linux as a single user, with no networking apart from a modem to my ISP. I even switch my computer off when I'm finished, which some of my geek friends just can't get their heads around -- those geek friends have universities or company tax breaks to pay for their electricity, and don't sleep next door to the buzzing CPU fans.
So maybe I'm vulnerable, and maybe I should do Red Hat's job for them and make my system at least minimally usable (a working sendmail config would be nice too, guys...) but I've managed to use Windows for a decade without ever getting infected, so I think I'll be OK with root on Linux.
The essential problem, Nick ol' chum, is that you and I are among the very few/. readers who have any faith in human nature. The people who are attributing all these nasty motives to Mr Chaney are sad, scrooge-like creatures, who can't understand generosity because they have so little of their own. Maybe their mothers were unkind to them. Maybe they just have small minds. They need a stiff dose of Pelagius and a good lie down.
BTW, in case this doesn't isn't trollish enough already: Linus is Satan! Bill is a sex god! WordPad is better than vi! Fnord!
Regarding companies being considered individuals in the eyes of the law:
It's certainly true in Australia, so it's probably also true in Britain and the Commonwealth, South Africa, Canada, the USA and India. I can't speak for non-english-speaking countries.
Disclaimer: I Am Not An Accountant. But my mother is, and I've learnt at her knee, and written a lot of software with what I learned.
Billy, Steve, and all the rest Try to make their code the best, Flapping hard against the storm, Going nowhere, getting warm. Linus T. and RMS Found the way to true success: Hiding errors makes no sense; You can fly with turbulence!
Here's my understanding of creoles, pidgins and dialects.
Suppose you kidnap a hundred Texans, a hundred Parisians (that's Paris in France, not Paris in Texas) and a hundred Klingons, and put them all to work in the chocolate mines on Planet X. Presuming there are none among the kidnapees who speak any language but their own, sooner or later you will find they develop a pidgin -- the Texan learns to say "merde" and the Parisian learns to say "Qu'vatlh", and so on.
So, a Klingon lad trying to pick up a Parisian lass may suggest "Soir - me - tu - sleep-a?" (Night (Fr) me (Eng) you (Fr) sleep (Eng) [question-suffix] (Kl)?) It's nothing much more than a string of words with a tiny bit of grammar. That's a pidgin.
Eventually the slaves interbreed (this being a Star Trek universe, it's almost inevitable!). Their children are taught a bit of their parents' language(s) and a lot of the pidgin that's grown up.
So, a Klingon-Parisian lad of the second generation trying to pick up a Texan-Parisian lass may suggest "Ce soir me-DaQ tu sleep-a?" (This night (Fr) with (Kl) me (Eng) you (Fr) sleep (Eng) [question-suffix] (Kl)?) Note how the grammar has evolved; this is no longer a string of words, but actually has a structure. That's what a creole is.
Please note, I Am Not A Linguist, but that's what I understand from Stephen Pinker's _The Language Instinct_ on this subject.
I recommend Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct for an excellent coverage of creoles, dialects, grammar, and a thousand other languagey thingummies.
As he said (quoting gods-only-know-who), a language is just a dialect with an army and a navy.
Background: I'm a Delphi programmer, with some recent exposure to Linux. I use Windows NT at work and Red Hat 6.0 at home. I've been a programmer for about 15 years. Religious preferences: KDE not Gnome, Perl not Python, Emacs for big stuff and vi for small stuff, IE not Netscape (I got sick of the bugs - so sue me). There: now you know what you hate about me.
I want a license that does all of the following:
Allows me to distribute my programs and ideas ("public stuff") if I want.
Allows me to distribute source with my public stuff.
Allows other users to use my public stuff. I don't care whether they make money from it or not.
Does not allow other users to distribute programs that use my public stuff unless they:
make the source publicly available, with various bits clearly labelled as to author, and
grant all of these rights to their paying users.
It seems that the GPL and possible the MPL grant these rights; the AL and the BSDL don't, to the best of my knowledge (IANAL!!!). That's why I prefer them.
I'll say it again, in case you missed it: I don't care if someone makes a million dollars, pounds or Tongan pa'angas off my work, as long as every bit of the source code they use is available to me and everyone else. So: if you take a program I've written and improve it, you can sell it to people who don't want to download and compile it (eg people without copies of Delphi) but you can't stop me getting at your changes and using them myself without paying for them. Otherwise, you owe me royalties, and that would be a pain for everyone to handle. This way is fair.
I'm happy with contracting, but that sometimes confuses the IT job agencies when I'm looking around for a new job.
In Canberra (Australia's capital city), I used to work for the public service or for quasi-autonomous non-goverment organisations (QANGOs). There, since the conservative Liberal Party gained power, all the permanent IT employees have been getting packages (ie being sacked) and they've been mostly replaced by contractors, money permitting. Conventional wisdom _was_ that contractors are cheaper (think of the Dilbert cartoon about PHBs throwing temps into the dumpster when they're done with), but they're beginning to wake up to the problems now.
Anyhow, I was happy to be a contractor there. Contractors seemed to have more security, not less. Permies kept getting thrown out (at least, the competent ones took packages, and the incompetent ones put up with pay decreases and worse conditions) but they always needed to keep paying the contractors cos otherwise the actual work never got done. I have never once NOT been asked to extend a contract; every time I changed contracts it was because I wanted to change, not cos they didn't want me back. That counts as security for me.
Here in Sydney (largest city in Australia, but NOT the capital city) there are far fewer Public Service departments, and it surprises the agencies when I tell them all this. But this is significant: one permie I work with says that, during the rush times, he's "working for love" from Wednesday afternoon onward. That's because by Wednesday lunchtime he's usually already done 37.5 hours, and that's what he's theoretically paid for. Meanwhile I'm charging an hourly rate and muttering about the PHBimbo-in-charge, and if anyone asks I tell them I'm selling my abilities and my knowledge but NEVER my loyalty.
In Australia, the term "wog" used to be a 100% derogatory name for Greeks and Italians, of whom we have a large number. It came from England, I believe, where it means (or meant) anyone from elsewhere in Europe or India, apparently.
There used to be a wider range of terms like this in Australia - wogs were Italian or Greek, dagos were Italian, nips or japs were Japanese, chinks were Chinese, abos or boongs were the native Australian aboriginals, etc etc etc. Mostly they're dying out (the terms, not the people!).
Anti-Asian sentiment in particular is seen much more as an undesirable throw-back to our grandparents' generation now, thanks to the rise and fall of a political party called One Nation, but that's another story.
I notice nowadays that "wog" has become a positive term in the Greek and Italian spheres. A bunch of Greek comedians have done a bunch of plays under the banner "Wogs Out Of Work", and I have Italian friends who introduce themselves as wogs all the time, much as I call myself a professional geek. It's come to mean, more precisely, "Australian citizen of Greek/Italian descent".
As for me... I'm Australian-born, but my Dad's a pom.
The Minister for Recurrent Ephemera, Dr Laocoon van Arkady, has already been on television here in Australia several times, slamming this entire urban legend. Her efforts seem to be for nought, however, if the reaction of/. is anything to go by. I myself firmly believed that/.ers would have no trouble sifting through the EchelonWatch site and realising that it is entirely content-free. I hope I won't be disappointed. But surely the same minds that can skilfully detect the FUD factor coming from Redmond should be able to see the same tactics in use by conspiracy theorists.
: Eric T. F. Bat, DRE #1089 : ** DRE: Trust The Voices In Your Head. ***
The English author Terry Pratchett, talking about the difficulty of finding publishers in America, wrote:
"That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans:
A European says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with me? An American says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?
I make no suggestion that one side or other is right, but observation over many years leads me to believe it is true."
I think it applies to this poster too. Please reread Mr Katz's article; although it is strongly focused on a small number of issues, the point it makes is a worthy one, and I would like to think that "my" people (geeks in general, Slashdotters in particular) could mostly see its value.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I can see, object oriented programming is basically common sense (ie what some people call "structured programming", as if there were any other sort) plus a bit of discipline (whether or not the language forces that discipline is largely irrelevant) plus rather too much mysticism and hype, which I ignore.
Let's get buzzword compliant. OOP requires encapsulation, polymorphism and inheritance, right? I don't think I absolutely need the language to force me to use those methods. Encapsulation is struct + discipline. Polymorphism is basically a way of providing type-safety to all those old C-style hacks where you pass a pointer-to-godknows into a function and treat it however you like; if you're disciplined you don't need the language to help, tho gods help you if you mess it up. Inheritance can be simulated by "has-a" if "is-a" is not available. It's ugly but it works fine.
My programs are OO because I'm immersed in the way of thinking that OO requires, not because I use an OO language. Most of the programmers I know who use C++ or Delphi don't write OO, because they do their damnedest to get around the discipline and just produce unstructured crap. This is easy to do in C++, which is really just a PDP-8 macro assembler anyway, and harder but not really hard to do in Delphi. Some of these guys could probably do it in Smalltalk tho -- they really have talent!
As for me, I can write OO in just about any language except MS-DOS batch and Prolog, because that's how I program. Maybe I'm just a legend or something, I dunno.
: Fruitbat :
BTW, I'm not going to flame you simply cos you tend to get annoyed easily, but maybe you should take a rest and cut out the stimulants, cos you don't sound healthy at the moment.
- Minimizing small blobs of global data, but instead putting things into record/struct/hash structures.
- Bunching procedures together, whether or not the syntax allows it, to make it clear that they operate on a particular object.
- Inheriting, whether through IS-A or HAS-A relationships. Making every procedure generic enough to be useful outside the original designed domain. This is what I mean by code re-use.
- Applying a reasonable amount of discipline regardless of what the language allows.
That's what makes my programs Object Oriented.: Fruitbat :
I started, I admit, with a simple little toy hammer, just using it to whack screws into wood. But the problem with hammers is they don't support threaded processing. Using a screwdriver makes things a lot easier. I reckon anyone who would use a hammer or saw or (gods forbid!) a chisel for this sort of thing is just a lame luser.
I've heard plenty of morons claiming that screwdrivers don't drive nails into walls as well as other tools, but that's bu||$h!+. I've tried using a saw to whack things, and the design flaws are obvious. Stick with a screwdriver and you won't have nearly as much trouble. Or how about the time I tried building a scale model of the USS Enterprise entirely from balsa wood using only a hammer? Fiasco! And yet a screwdriver can install AND de-install screws into wood, metal and plastic with absolute ease of use. Why bother with anything else?
Lusers.
: Fruitbat :
My parents bought a Commodore CBM-8032 in 1983, and it's what hooked me on computers. I still have a huge number of the cryptic SYS and POKE commands programmed into my fingers -- I sat down at an emulator recently, wondered out loud what was the system command to hard-reboot the machine, and my fingers typed SYS 64790 without the slightest hesitation. Eerie!
The best PET/CBM/C64/VIC/etc emulator is the VICE emulator. I recommend it to anyone running Unix, MS-DOS, Win95/NT, OS/2 or RiscOS who wants to remember the good old Commodore beasts. I've used it in the DOS and Windows versions, but not since I migrated (graduated?) to Linux. I might just check it out tho...
: Fruitbat :
As a SlashDot discussion grows longer, the probability that it will become a discussion of the Gnu Public License or the US Constitution approaches one.
: Fruitbat :
So maybe I'm vulnerable, and maybe I should do Red Hat's job for them and make my system at least minimally usable (a working sendmail config would be nice too, guys...) but I've managed to use Windows for a decade without ever getting infected, so I think I'll be OK with root on Linux.
: Fruitbat :
The essential problem, Nick ol' chum, is that you and I are among the very few /. readers who have any faith in human nature. The people who are attributing all these nasty motives to Mr Chaney are sad, scrooge-like creatures, who can't understand generosity because they have so little of their own. Maybe their mothers were unkind to them. Maybe they just have small minds. They need a stiff dose of Pelagius and a good lie down.
BTW, in case this doesn't isn't trollish enough already: Linus is Satan! Bill is a sex god! WordPad is better than vi! Fnord!
: Fruitbat :
Regarding companies being considered individuals in the eyes of the law:
It's certainly true in Australia, so it's probably also true in Britain and the Commonwealth, South Africa, Canada, the USA and India. I can't speak for non-english-speaking countries.
Disclaimer: I Am Not An Accountant. But my mother is, and I've learnt at her knee, and written a lot of software with what I learned.
: Fruitbat :
Billy, Steve, and all the rest
Try to make their code the best,
Flapping hard against the storm,
Going nowhere, getting warm.
Linus T. and RMS
Found the way to true success:
Hiding errors makes no sense;
You can fly with turbulence!
: Fruitbat :
Here's my understanding of creoles, pidgins and dialects.
Suppose you kidnap a hundred Texans, a hundred Parisians (that's Paris in France, not Paris in Texas) and a hundred Klingons, and put them all to work in the chocolate mines on Planet X. Presuming there are none among the kidnapees who speak any language but their own, sooner or later you will find they develop a pidgin -- the Texan learns to say "merde" and the Parisian learns to say "Qu'vatlh", and so on.
So, a Klingon lad trying to pick up a Parisian lass may suggest "Soir - me - tu - sleep-a?" (Night (Fr) me (Eng) you (Fr) sleep (Eng) [question-suffix] (Kl)?) It's nothing much more than a string of words with a tiny bit of grammar. That's a pidgin.
Eventually the slaves interbreed (this being a Star Trek universe, it's almost inevitable!). Their children are taught a bit of their parents' language(s) and a lot of the pidgin that's grown up.
So, a Klingon-Parisian lad of the second generation trying to pick up a Texan-Parisian lass may suggest "Ce soir me-DaQ tu sleep-a?" (This night (Fr) with (Kl) me (Eng) you (Fr) sleep (Eng) [question-suffix] (Kl)?) Note how the grammar has evolved; this is no longer a string of words, but actually has a structure. That's what a creole is.
Please note, I Am Not A Linguist, but that's what I understand from Stephen Pinker's _The Language Instinct_ on this subject.
: Fruitbat :
As he said (quoting gods-only-know-who), a language is just a dialect with an army and a navy.
: Fruitbat :
I want a license that does all of the following:
- Allows me to distribute my programs and ideas ("public stuff") if I want.
- Allows me to distribute source with my public stuff.
- Allows other users to use my public stuff. I don't care whether they make money from it or not.
- Does not allow other users to distribute programs that use my public stuff unless they:
- make the source publicly available, with various bits clearly labelled as to author, and
- grant all of these rights to their paying users.
It seems that the GPL and possible the MPL grant these rights; the AL and the BSDL don't, to the best of my knowledge (IANAL!!!). That's why I prefer them.I'll say it again, in case you missed it: I don't care if someone makes a million dollars, pounds or Tongan pa'angas off my work, as long as every bit of the source code they use is available to me and everyone else. So: if you take a program I've written and improve it, you can sell it to people who don't want to download and compile it (eg people without copies of Delphi) but you can't stop me getting at your changes and using them myself without paying for them. Otherwise, you owe me royalties, and that would be a pain for everyone to handle. This way is fair.
: Fruitbat :
I'm happy with contracting, but that sometimes confuses the IT job agencies when I'm looking around for a new job.
In Canberra (Australia's capital city), I used to work for the public service or for quasi-autonomous non-goverment organisations (QANGOs). There, since the conservative Liberal Party gained power, all the permanent IT employees have been getting packages (ie being sacked) and they've been mostly replaced by contractors, money permitting. Conventional wisdom _was_ that contractors are cheaper (think of the Dilbert cartoon about PHBs throwing temps into the dumpster when they're done with), but they're beginning to wake up to the problems now.
Anyhow, I was happy to be a contractor there. Contractors seemed to have more security, not less. Permies kept getting thrown out (at least, the competent ones took packages, and the incompetent ones put up with pay decreases and worse conditions) but they always needed to keep paying the contractors cos otherwise the actual work never got done. I have never once NOT been asked to extend a contract; every time I changed contracts it was because I wanted to change, not cos they didn't want me back. That counts as security for me.
Here in Sydney (largest city in Australia, but NOT the capital city) there are far fewer Public Service departments, and it surprises the agencies when I tell them all this. But this is significant: one permie I work with says that, during the rush times, he's "working for love" from Wednesday afternoon onward. That's because by Wednesday lunchtime he's usually already done 37.5 hours, and that's what he's theoretically paid for. Meanwhile I'm charging an hourly rate and muttering about the PHBimbo-in-charge, and if anyone asks I tell them I'm selling my abilities and my knowledge but NEVER my loyalty.
: Fruitbat :
There used to be a wider range of terms like this in Australia - wogs were Italian or Greek, dagos were Italian, nips or japs were Japanese, chinks were Chinese, abos or boongs were the native Australian aboriginals, etc etc etc. Mostly they're dying out (the terms, not the people!).
Anti-Asian sentiment in particular is seen much more as an undesirable throw-back to our grandparents' generation now, thanks to the rise and fall of a political party called One Nation, but that's another story.
I notice nowadays that "wog" has become a positive term in the Greek and Italian spheres. A bunch of Greek comedians have done a bunch of plays under the banner "Wogs Out Of Work", and I have Italian friends who introduce themselves as wogs all the time, much as I call myself a professional geek. It's come to mean, more precisely, "Australian citizen of Greek/Italian descent".
As for me... I'm Australian-born, but my Dad's a pom.
: Fruitbat :
: Eric T. F. Bat, DRE #1089 : ** DRE: Trust The Voices In Your Head. ***
"That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans:
A European says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with me?
An American says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?
I make no suggestion that one side or other is right, but observation over many years leads me to believe it is true."
I think it applies to this poster too. Please reread Mr Katz's article; although it is strongly focused on a small number of issues, the point it makes is a worthy one, and I would like to think that "my" people (geeks in general, Slashdotters in particular) could mostly see its value.
: Fruitbat :