You are being stupid. Yes you have to assign rights over if you want to contribute back to a dual-licensed project, but the fact that you "used the open license" does not mean this is impossible.
I do not think the parent post was being "stupid". As a free software developer I would be very hesitant to contribute my time to improving an open-source project so that the project maintainer can then use the restrictions in the free license to get companies to pay him for use of the code... I like to support free software with code contributions and money contributions - but supporting someone's for-profit enterprise does tend to put me off a bit. I know it's a bit silly since it's just another way of giving a contribution to a project that's given something to me - but nevertheless, it's not an idea I readily embrace, so I think it's a valid concern.
And likewise, as someone who works for a living, I would not be terribly inclined to pay for the right to use a package in my work, then find bugs, fix them myself, and contribute that fix back with no incentive... If I'm paying, then the person I'm paying should fix the bugs. If I fix their bugs, I should get something in return, since they're making a profit on that software.
I really can't envision a perfect system - one in which all contributions are appropriately rewarded, in which the problem of assigning rights isn't an issue, etc... There's cultural issues at play and general human nature which I think complicates the issue..
When I last used it heavily, my recollection was that the STL wasn't nearly as "standard" as it is today -- and that's a big part of the language.
Not to mention all of the new frameworks/libraries (such as Qt) that weren't around then.
Qt ten years ago probably wasn't what it is today but it was around. This was about the time the "KDE isn't Free" debacle - and Gnome - started.
As for STL - I definitely remember using it in 1998-1999 and it was very much as it is now. I think maybe the specification for stringstreams was still in flux at that point, but what GCC implemented then was pretty much what we've got now.
'Course, there's what the standard specifies, and there's what compilers implement... Probably the larger changes both in terms of the language spec and in terms of what compilers support properly have been in more challenging features such as template specialization, the "typename" keyword, etc. I'm not sure but some other features like integer template arguments and the named cast operations and the std:: namespace may not have been fully established yet...
Still, all of those things are fairly minor. Learning to prefix certain types and classes with "std::" is a very small thing. The extra-funky template stuff would probably be the most challenging way in which the language and tools have changed, but most people don't do a lot of template meta-programming or super-elaborate template hierarchies... (On the other hand, there's where I work.:D)
Actually I learned C++ a little over 10 years ago and I use it almost exclusively in my current job... I don't feel like much has changed, except that the compilers have gotten better and now support the standard much better.
University does *not* teach you to program. Employers know (or should know) this, so don't worry about that.
More importantly, I think, students should understand this. Looking back I feel like it's really important to not only learn what the classes teach you, but use your free time (if you've got some) to actually use that education... Write programs that have some relevance outside the classroom.
My gut feeling is that the more languages you learn, the less you are locked into one way of thinking.
Depends on the languages, I think. Languages like PHP or Bash don't really teach you anything, IMO - they're just useful, fairly domain-specific languages. Others, like Perl or Python, or even Java, are less domain-specific but also don't teach you much - they mostly just serve as comfortable environments in which to write code.
The point where learning other programming languages help snap you out of one-track thinking is where the language itself encourages a different way of thinking about problems... So I'd say there should definitely be classes along the way that deal in functional languages - and I think it's definitely worth exploring other languages as well (Erlang comes to mind...) But remember that it's the class, not the language used in the class, that teaches you what you need to know. Writing some programs in Scheme doesn't make you a functional programmer...
I make the hiring decisions at my company. I check to see if people can solve complex problems. I don't care what language you know. You can learn PHP in a couple of hours.
Sadly, it takes much, much longer to unlearn it.:)
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
If it teaches software development methodologies, or specific languages then it's not a pure CS degree. It may well be more valuable for most people - but call a spade a spade.
Is that from SICP?
I watched a few of the lectures on Youtube - that opening tirade about "Comp Sci is not Computer Science" just struck me as a waste of breath... And it missed the point that learning to understand the process of problem-solving with computers is part of the path to understanding of the science behind it.
I agree. This question has been asked on Slashdot more than once. Probably more than once in the past week. Every time, it's someone thinking that becoming adept at one language is the path to zen. Here are a couple of analogies to the question presented here:
I want to learn how to fix cars. Should I learn all about the carburetor* or should I focus more on the brake pads?
Phew... For a minute there I was afraid your list of analogies would omit the obligatory car analogy. Thanks, I can understand your point now!
It's really bothering me that there's so many postings here talking about sorting data. It's a freakin' solved problem. There's already a Sort() function in every language/framework under the sun.
Why do so many programmers love to re-invent the wheel constantly? To un-solve the solved problem? To write their own instead of using the one that Javascript, or C++, or.net, or whatnot provides in a single freakin' line of code?
There are good reasons for it, sometimes. I might not have believed it when I was fresh out of college - but there are still times where practical needs trump elegance, or principles like standard library usage. We have to code for performance where I work, and so it's often about what works best. We've "reinvented" certain tools we already had because our versions were faster or worked better than the versions from STL or Boost. Sometimes a library tool (boost::shared_ptr, for instance) adds an extra layer of indirection that pushes our memory fragmentation over the acceptable limit... Sometimes a library tool just implements an algorithm that isn't right for what we're doing... This comparison isn't just a theoretical thing, it directly impacts the real-world performance of our product.
And then consider an algorithm like A*... This isn't something you'll generally find in standard libraries... And it requires the use of a priority queue - but specifically a priority queue that includes a few operations you won't find in an ordinary heap implementation (specifically, the ability to change the score of an item on the heap is rather important...)
So, you know, it is definitely good for a programmer to know a thing or two beyond the comfortable sphere which most application programmers may inhabit. It's the difference between knowing your work and not.
"Electronics-oriented flea market"..? Just where do you live?
-dZ.
Grew up in Maine, now live in Massachusetts. As a kid we'd go to the Ham Radio flea markets in NH every year... Such a fixture of my childhood that I practically take it for granted (though that scene has gone downhill considerably since the old days...)
In Massachusetts, of course, there's still that but there's also the MIT flea which is held several times per year... Both are still a good place to offload (or acquire) some marginally worthless junk.
I had on old 386sx (didn't belong to me originally). I decided to try to make something out of it. I maxed out the ram, which meant buying VERY expensive cache chips (total cost >$80). At the end of the day, I had a very nice, very slow machine. The Oak video on it could do 800x600 at 256 colors, but that was all. Granted, for that time period, it was typical, but not something I would have purchased.
Given that people will pretty much give you their old P4 boxes nowadays, I don't think I'll ever go through this exercise again (I still have the machine btw).
I've been down this road many times before, myself...
I guess my favorite instance of this was an Everex 386-25 that I got in the mid 90s and used to play games from the early 90s. The thing had been stripped of its cache memory so I had to replace that - the fun thing about the machine was it had an 8-character alphanumeric display on the front of the machine... A little research and I found out how to write text to it.
It was fun but after a while it just starts to seem like a huge waste of time, money, and storage space. Consider: there's other old machines that actually offer unique experiences. Emulation can reproduce these machines but the effect isn't perfect. (For instance, emulation of the Commodore 64's sound chip is pretty good, but it's not quite like the real thing...) An old PC on the other hand... is pretty much just an old PC. There's not really anything you can get an old PC to do that you can't get a new PC to do for the same effect.
Another fun thing to do with a computer like this:
Wait for the next big local electronics-oriented flea market - take it there, stick a sign on it marked "Free, or best offer" and go wander off in the hope that some poor slob will think it looks like a fun machine and take it off your hands...
I mean, seriously, consider just how much of a piece of junk the thing is... You can pimp it out with all kinds of old surplus ISA hardware (which is getting harder to find, BTW, since the bus has long since been eliminated from modern PCs) but it's still going to be a piece of junk.
I do, since I have an original 233MHz Bondi Blue iMac with 64MB RAM.
Ever thought of getting rid of it? I mean, the computer's like 11 years old at this point... People regularly throw away computers no less than five times more powerful than that thing... And these days it costs money to dispose of a computer unless you can get somebody to take it from you... I had one and I decided it was just taking up too much space - and not getting used, since I had other, more powerful machines I used instead (including a five year old Mac laptop - which itself is at the ass end of the software availability spectrum now - but which nevertheless can effectively do tasks that would bring a classic iMac to its knees...)
For that matter - I've made a habit of collecting old computers for fun ever since I was in college. 8088's in 1996, 386es and 486es in the next couple years, and so on... and you know what? They were basically not worth the time, effort, or storage space to have 'em. They were junk then, just like the original iMac is junk now. This is why I think porting new software to a dead-end OS on ancient hardware is a waste of time.
Pretty sure you can install Mac OS X in that thing. Not saying you have to, or if those games are compatible with it, but if you wanted to...
In my experience, "old" versions of Mac OS X (like from five years ago) are very nearly as much of a pain in the ass to deal with, in terms of getting reasonably modern software on the thing, as Mac OS 8 was when I tried it several years back. OS 10.3, for instance, is now old enough that most new software doesn't support it. OS 10.4 is very nearly at that point as well.
I picked up a free G3 iMac awhile back, just because I've never had an Apple computer, nor does anyone that I know near here.
All I wanted to do with it was turn it into a handy Internet browsing machine. But I couldn't find a decent browser for it.
Dude! I did the exact same thing... I wanted to get a feel for how the classic Mac OS worked (both from a user standpoint and a developer standpoint)... But it really didn't seem like a terribly friendly environment for someone who didn't want to put a bunch of money into the machine. I had an old Mozilla on there for a while, but eventually it was just wasting space and collecting dust, so I sold it at a flea market for $20.
It's actually a bit of a drag that I didn't make it work out. It's frustrating sometimes, thinking about what it takes to really learn about an OS that you're interested in, but not interested in enough to really embrace. I wanted to learn from these different environments - but it seems like that requires too much of an investment.
absolutely, that's why people code in C#. Nothign to do with professionalism, fgood code, efficiency, and al the other bits and pieces that have been forgotten in today's rush for "developer productivity" (at the expense of end-user productivity, of course).
that's why, for example, Tomboy leaks memory like a sieve. Who cares, its fun to code note-let apps in the new language that doesn't have memory leaks anymore.
In the free software world, much of the software (not all of it, of course) is developed without financial incentive. A lot of useful stuff is written by people who are just in it because they enjoy it. This being the case, giving developers an environment they like is very important.
Also, I agree with what you have to say about efficiency - but at the same time, one can't put too much emphasis on how efficiently a program solves a program until the program is at least at the point of being capable of doing its job. This is why I believe it's sensible for people to write applications in Python or whatever, if that's what they're comfortable with. If their language choice allows them to focus on the problem they want to solve instead of the problems they don't want to deal with, then they can create something that otherwise wouldn't exist - and is thus infinitely more efficient than the alternative.
Your link regarding Tomboy... is less than compelling. The app grows to 80MB. Then what? Does it really continue growing further, or not? If there were a stress test of note creation and deletion which led to a footprint of hundreds or thousands of megabytes, that would be more convincing. It does seem pretty twisted to think we live in a world where that doesn't seem like a lot of storage space to waste any more... but honestly, it doesn't. And there's so many questions. Does the app keep an undo history? Is this a result of running a garbage-collected environment? And of that 80MB "memory footprint" (size of the process's addressable space, or what?) how much of that actually corresponds to actual resource usage (physical RAM or swap space) as opposed to memory mapping, or allocated-but-unused (and thus, unallocated) memory pages? The question of how this measurement was taken is very important, as is the question of whether the growth pattern continues up to values that actually make me care.:)
are you fucking kidding me? i'd program in sanskrit if they paid me enough. it isn't "fun", it's something to do to keep me from digging ditches. i cannot imagine why anyone gives a minor shit about languages, and features, and blah blah blah...if you care that much about what your piece of shit system that's going to be replaced in 2-6-8-12 months is written in then you're completely missing the point
Whatever one does for a job, however they go about it, becomes a big part of their life... Close to half their waking hours. That being the case, it's preferable to not work in an environment which causes needless frustration.
I haven't seen any Transformers, if bubble-bee isn't a vw-bug, then it's not real.
I liked him as a beat-up old muscle car... Can't say much for the movie he was in, though. I hear they made some kind of sequel or something? I don't know...
I'm going to write an Emacs clone that uses Brainfuck for its scripting.
You realize that if you actually did this, you would become a god. That might prove inconvenient for many of the powers that be.
Yeah, then they'd probably maneuver me from the shadows, hiding their conspiracy with the protective prescience of a Guild Steersman, and make various attempts to either get me under their thumb or turn me into something that I hate so much that I'll die rather than let it continue...
I can't be the only one who read this headline and thought, "What, Howling Mad Murdoch runs a newspaper? I thought he was too busy being crazy and flying the A-Team around?"
Java is dying. Python is good so is C#. I love attributes, LINQ, Master Pages, etc.
I'm not an MS fan, but C# is just so nice.
For the record I'm writing this on my debian sid laptop using Iceweasel.
Programming is fun. Did you know that rabbits aren't rodents? Storm clouds are the ones they call cumulonimbus. I forgot to bring lunch today so I ate my hat. In "Transformers: Masterforce" they showed news clippings in which the Destrons were referred to as "Decepticons", that seemed like a nice nod to the Transformers we knew in America... I'm going to write an Emacs clone that uses Brainfuck for its scripting.
Slashdot Mirror
You are being stupid. Yes you have to assign rights over if you want to contribute back to a dual-licensed project, but the fact that you "used the open license" does not mean this is impossible.
I do not think the parent post was being "stupid". As a free software developer I would be very hesitant to contribute my time to improving an open-source project so that the project maintainer can then use the restrictions in the free license to get companies to pay him for use of the code... I like to support free software with code contributions and money contributions - but supporting someone's for-profit enterprise does tend to put me off a bit. I know it's a bit silly since it's just another way of giving a contribution to a project that's given something to me - but nevertheless, it's not an idea I readily embrace, so I think it's a valid concern.
And likewise, as someone who works for a living, I would not be terribly inclined to pay for the right to use a package in my work, then find bugs, fix them myself, and contribute that fix back with no incentive... If I'm paying, then the person I'm paying should fix the bugs. If I fix their bugs, I should get something in return, since they're making a profit on that software.
I really can't envision a perfect system - one in which all contributions are appropriately rewarded, in which the problem of assigning rights isn't an issue, etc... There's cultural issues at play and general human nature which I think complicates the issue..
When I last used it heavily, my recollection was that the STL wasn't nearly as "standard" as it is today -- and that's a big part of the language.
Not to mention all of the new frameworks/libraries (such as Qt) that weren't around then.
Qt ten years ago probably wasn't what it is today but it was around. This was about the time the "KDE isn't Free" debacle - and Gnome - started.
As for STL - I definitely remember using it in 1998-1999 and it was very much as it is now. I think maybe the specification for stringstreams was still in flux at that point, but what GCC implemented then was pretty much what we've got now.
'Course, there's what the standard specifies, and there's what compilers implement... Probably the larger changes both in terms of the language spec and in terms of what compilers support properly have been in more challenging features such as template specialization, the "typename" keyword, etc. I'm not sure but some other features like integer template arguments and the named cast operations and the std:: namespace may not have been fully established yet...
Still, all of those things are fairly minor. Learning to prefix certain types and classes with "std::" is a very small thing. The extra-funky template stuff would probably be the most challenging way in which the language and tools have changed, but most people don't do a lot of template meta-programming or super-elaborate template hierarchies... (On the other hand, there's where I work. :D)
(C++ today isn't what it was 10 years ago...)
Actually I learned C++ a little over 10 years ago and I use it almost exclusively in my current job... I don't feel like much has changed, except that the compilers have gotten better and now support the standard much better.
University does *not* teach you to program. Employers know (or should know) this, so don't worry about that.
More importantly, I think, students should understand this. Looking back I feel like it's really important to not only learn what the classes teach you, but use your free time (if you've got some) to actually use that education... Write programs that have some relevance outside the classroom.
My gut feeling is that the more languages you learn, the less you are locked into one way of thinking.
Depends on the languages, I think. Languages like PHP or Bash don't really teach you anything, IMO - they're just useful, fairly domain-specific languages. Others, like Perl or Python, or even Java, are less domain-specific but also don't teach you much - they mostly just serve as comfortable environments in which to write code.
The point where learning other programming languages help snap you out of one-track thinking is where the language itself encourages a different way of thinking about problems... So I'd say there should definitely be classes along the way that deal in functional languages - and I think it's definitely worth exploring other languages as well (Erlang comes to mind...) But remember that it's the class, not the language used in the class, that teaches you what you need to know. Writing some programs in Scheme doesn't make you a functional programmer...
I make the hiring decisions at my company. I check to see if people can solve complex problems. I don't care what language you know. You can learn PHP in a couple of hours.
Sadly, it takes much, much longer to unlearn it. :)
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
If it teaches software development methodologies, or specific languages then it's not a pure CS degree. It may well be more valuable for most people - but call a spade a spade.
Is that from SICP?
I watched a few of the lectures on Youtube - that opening tirade about "Comp Sci is not Computer Science" just struck me as a waste of breath... And it missed the point that learning to understand the process of problem-solving with computers is part of the path to understanding of the science behind it.
I agree. This question has been asked on Slashdot more than once. Probably more than once in the past week. Every time, it's someone thinking that becoming adept at one language is the path to zen. Here are a couple of analogies to the question presented here:
I want to learn how to fix cars. Should I learn all about the carburetor* or should I focus more on the brake pads?
Phew... For a minute there I was afraid your list of analogies would omit the obligatory car analogy. Thanks, I can understand your point now!
It's really bothering me that there's so many postings here talking about sorting data. It's a freakin' solved problem. There's already a Sort() function in every language/framework under the sun.
Why do so many programmers love to re-invent the wheel constantly? To un-solve the solved problem? To write their own instead of using the one that Javascript, or C++, or .net, or whatnot provides in a single freakin' line of code?
There are good reasons for it, sometimes. I might not have believed it when I was fresh out of college - but there are still times where practical needs trump elegance, or principles like standard library usage. We have to code for performance where I work, and so it's often about what works best. We've "reinvented" certain tools we already had because our versions were faster or worked better than the versions from STL or Boost. Sometimes a library tool (boost::shared_ptr, for instance) adds an extra layer of indirection that pushes our memory fragmentation over the acceptable limit... Sometimes a library tool just implements an algorithm that isn't right for what we're doing... This comparison isn't just a theoretical thing, it directly impacts the real-world performance of our product.
And then consider an algorithm like A*... This isn't something you'll generally find in standard libraries... And it requires the use of a priority queue - but specifically a priority queue that includes a few operations you won't find in an ordinary heap implementation (specifically, the ability to change the score of an item on the heap is rather important...)
So, you know, it is definitely good for a programmer to know a thing or two beyond the comfortable sphere which most application programmers may inhabit. It's the difference between knowing your work and not.
Yes, but the picture draws nothing from you...
That depends entirely on the picture.
"Electronics-oriented flea market"..? Just where do you live?
-dZ.
Grew up in Maine, now live in Massachusetts. As a kid we'd go to the Ham Radio flea markets in NH every year... Such a fixture of my childhood that I practically take it for granted (though that scene has gone downhill considerably since the old days...)
In Massachusetts, of course, there's still that but there's also the MIT flea which is held several times per year... Both are still a good place to offload (or acquire) some marginally worthless junk.
I had on old 386sx (didn't belong to me originally). I decided to try to make something out of it. I maxed out the ram, which meant buying VERY expensive cache chips (total cost >$80). At the end of the day, I had a very nice, very slow machine. The Oak video on it could do 800x600 at 256 colors, but that was all. Granted, for that time period, it was typical, but not something I would have purchased.
Given that people will pretty much give you their old P4 boxes nowadays, I don't think I'll ever go through this exercise again (I still have the machine btw).
I've been down this road many times before, myself...
I guess my favorite instance of this was an Everex 386-25 that I got in the mid 90s and used to play games from the early 90s. The thing had been stripped of its cache memory so I had to replace that - the fun thing about the machine was it had an 8-character alphanumeric display on the front of the machine... A little research and I found out how to write text to it.
It was fun but after a while it just starts to seem like a huge waste of time, money, and storage space. Consider: there's other old machines that actually offer unique experiences. Emulation can reproduce these machines but the effect isn't perfect. (For instance, emulation of the Commodore 64's sound chip is pretty good, but it's not quite like the real thing...) An old PC on the other hand... is pretty much just an old PC. There's not really anything you can get an old PC to do that you can't get a new PC to do for the same effect.
and an XT clone isn't one of them.
This cuts to the heart of the matter more effectively and more succinctly than I could have managed. Nice work.
Another fun thing to do with a computer like this:
Wait for the next big local electronics-oriented flea market - take it there, stick a sign on it marked "Free, or best offer" and go wander off in the hope that some poor slob will think it looks like a fun machine and take it off your hands...
I mean, seriously, consider just how much of a piece of junk the thing is... You can pimp it out with all kinds of old surplus ISA hardware (which is getting harder to find, BTW, since the bus has long since been eliminated from modern PCs) but it's still going to be a piece of junk.
I do, since I have an original 233MHz Bondi Blue iMac with 64MB RAM.
Ever thought of getting rid of it? I mean, the computer's like 11 years old at this point... People regularly throw away computers no less than five times more powerful than that thing... And these days it costs money to dispose of a computer unless you can get somebody to take it from you... I had one and I decided it was just taking up too much space - and not getting used, since I had other, more powerful machines I used instead (including a five year old Mac laptop - which itself is at the ass end of the software availability spectrum now - but which nevertheless can effectively do tasks that would bring a classic iMac to its knees...)
For that matter - I've made a habit of collecting old computers for fun ever since I was in college. 8088's in 1996, 386es and 486es in the next couple years, and so on... and you know what? They were basically not worth the time, effort, or storage space to have 'em. They were junk then, just like the original iMac is junk now. This is why I think porting new software to a dead-end OS on ancient hardware is a waste of time.
Don't talk yourself into not liking Transformers. It was a good movie.
No... no, it really wasn't. I'm sorry.
Pretty sure you can install Mac OS X in that thing. Not saying you have to, or if those games are compatible with it, but if you wanted to...
In my experience, "old" versions of Mac OS X (like from five years ago) are very nearly as much of a pain in the ass to deal with, in terms of getting reasonably modern software on the thing, as Mac OS 8 was when I tried it several years back. OS 10.3, for instance, is now old enough that most new software doesn't support it. OS 10.4 is very nearly at that point as well.
I would've cared.
I picked up a free G3 iMac awhile back, just because I've never had an Apple computer, nor does anyone that I know near here.
All I wanted to do with it was turn it into a handy Internet browsing machine. But I couldn't find a decent browser for it.
Dude! I did the exact same thing... I wanted to get a feel for how the classic Mac OS worked (both from a user standpoint and a developer standpoint)... But it really didn't seem like a terribly friendly environment for someone who didn't want to put a bunch of money into the machine. I had an old Mozilla on there for a while, but eventually it was just wasting space and collecting dust, so I sold it at a flea market for $20.
It's actually a bit of a drag that I didn't make it work out. It's frustrating sometimes, thinking about what it takes to really learn about an OS that you're interested in, but not interested in enough to really embrace. I wanted to learn from these different environments - but it seems like that requires too much of an investment.
Programming is fun
absolutely, that's why people code in C#. Nothign to do with professionalism, fgood code, efficiency, and al the other bits and pieces that have been forgotten in today's rush for "developer productivity" (at the expense of end-user productivity, of course).
that's why, for example, Tomboy leaks memory like a sieve. Who cares, its fun to code note-let apps in the new language that doesn't have memory leaks anymore.
In the free software world, much of the software (not all of it, of course) is developed without financial incentive. A lot of useful stuff is written by people who are just in it because they enjoy it. This being the case, giving developers an environment they like is very important.
Also, I agree with what you have to say about efficiency - but at the same time, one can't put too much emphasis on how efficiently a program solves a program until the program is at least at the point of being capable of doing its job. This is why I believe it's sensible for people to write applications in Python or whatever, if that's what they're comfortable with. If their language choice allows them to focus on the problem they want to solve instead of the problems they don't want to deal with, then they can create something that otherwise wouldn't exist - and is thus infinitely more efficient than the alternative.
Your link regarding Tomboy... is less than compelling. The app grows to 80MB. Then what? Does it really continue growing further, or not? If there were a stress test of note creation and deletion which led to a footprint of hundreds or thousands of megabytes, that would be more convincing. It does seem pretty twisted to think we live in a world where that doesn't seem like a lot of storage space to waste any more... but honestly, it doesn't. And there's so many questions. Does the app keep an undo history? Is this a result of running a garbage-collected environment? And of that 80MB "memory footprint" (size of the process's addressable space, or what?) how much of that actually corresponds to actual resource usage (physical RAM or swap space) as opposed to memory mapping, or allocated-but-unused (and thus, unallocated) memory pages? The question of how this measurement was taken is very important, as is the question of whether the growth pattern continues up to values that actually make me care. :)
are you fucking kidding me? i'd program in sanskrit if they paid me enough. it isn't "fun", it's something to do to keep me from digging ditches. i cannot imagine why anyone gives a minor shit about languages, and features, and blah blah blah...if you care that much about what your piece of shit system that's going to be replaced in 2-6-8-12 months is written in then you're completely missing the point
Whatever one does for a job, however they go about it, becomes a big part of their life... Close to half their waking hours. That being the case, it's preferable to not work in an environment which causes needless frustration.
I haven't seen any Transformers, if bubble-bee isn't a vw-bug, then it's not real.
I liked him as a beat-up old muscle car... Can't say much for the movie he was in, though. I hear they made some kind of sequel or something? I don't know...
I'm going to write an Emacs clone that uses Brainfuck for its scripting.
You realize that if you actually did this, you would become a god. That might prove inconvenient for many of the powers that be.
Yeah, then they'd probably maneuver me from the shadows, hiding their conspiracy with the protective prescience of a Guild Steersman, and make various attempts to either get me under their thumb or turn me into something that I hate so much that I'll die rather than let it continue...
Clearly they were referring to BT...
I can't be the only one who read this headline and thought, "What, Howling Mad Murdoch runs a newspaper? I thought he was too busy being crazy and flying the A-Team around?"
I mean, seriously, who cares?
Java is dying. Python is good so is C#. I love attributes, LINQ, Master Pages, etc.
I'm not an MS fan, but C# is just so nice.
For the record I'm writing this on my debian sid laptop using Iceweasel.
Programming is fun. Did you know that rabbits aren't rodents? Storm clouds are the ones they call cumulonimbus. I forgot to bring lunch today so I ate my hat. In "Transformers: Masterforce" they showed news clippings in which the Destrons were referred to as "Decepticons", that seemed like a nice nod to the Transformers we knew in America... I'm going to write an Emacs clone that uses Brainfuck for its scripting.