Java is a much more straightforward language, but occasionally the lack of nuance makes it difficult to achieve subtle hackery.
You say this as if it's a bad thing.
I've reached the point in my life where the more obvious a program is, the better it is. Thus Java has an advantage over C++, and Python over Perl for the same reason. C++ and Perl contribute to subtle hackery, whereas with Java and Python, your intention is explicit in the code. I think this point in my life is called "Maintainer" by some, but I prefer "Software Engineer".;)
And no, you didn't have to click on it. That damn preview pane was enough to trigger it off.
Well, I have the preview pane on, and I clicked on it, and it didn't run. My guess is that you would have to have "Automatically open attachments" set for the preview pane to fire it off, and if you have that set, you deserve what you get. (It's off by default, you have to set it explicitly.)
Later, Blake. -- "People get the OS they deserve" - Nick Bauman.
Perl has a very handy construct that can render almost all code highly maintainable:
# # it looks like this #
Is that the magical Perl comment construct that automatically updates itself when the code changes? I've been burned by erroneous comments more often than Obi-Wan errors.
Perl has a huge feature set. The key thing to understand is that you DON'T NEED TO KNOW THE WHOLE LANGUAGE Sure, unless you need to maintain it. If there are five different ways to write something, then I as the writer only need to know one of them, but I as the maintainer need to know all five, since any of them might have been used. If there's only one way to do it, then as the writer, I don't have to waste mental power choosing between them, and as the maintainer, I only need to learn the one.
But the set of features you need to know is still not the whole language, its just the set of features which the author used. Unless you're dealing with more than one author, or an author who's learning more about Perl the more they use it, or more than one program. While the set of features in Perl is large enough that you'll probably never see all of them used, as the number of programs you're responsible for increases the set that you'll have to know grows faster than many people are comfortable with. Especially people who look at other languages where the amount you have to remember at any given time is much smaller, and are jealous.
Anyways, I doubt anyone here will convince anyone else here to switch languages. Some people like Perl, some people don't. 5 Karma points to the first person who guesses which camp I'm in, and which camp I was in five years ago.
ajs said: As for whitespace and style issues, I dislike Python's way so much that I've put off learning the language for years. It's just so... FORTRAN. Why, of all things would you, in this day and age, subject people to a DEFINITION of TABS?! Why not enforce variable-naming at the same time?
We will perhaps eventually be writing only small modules which are identified by name as they are used to build larger ones, so that devices like indentation, rather than delimiters, might become feasible for expressing local structure in the source language.
-- Donald E. Knuth, "Structured Programming with goto Statements", Computing Surveys, Vol 6 No 4, Dec. 1974
Now somehow the RIAA has got to force all players to support the SDMI standard, which they may just do, suppositivly the new RIO'S will use SDMI as will most other players, possibly even winamp.
Which is all the more reason to switch to an MP3 player where you can remove the check for the SDMI information. Freeamp. The more people use it, the better it gets.
It seems to me that esr is interested in the results of Free Software, but doesn't much care how he gets them. (Of course, Free Software is the easiest way to get there currently.)
Sheesh, it makes one wonder why any company would think of signing any business deal with M$. Maybe it will help out in the beginning, but then it seems you'd be hampered by M$.
Take a look at Corel for an example of a company who wouldn't sign a business deal with M$. M$ has systematically gone after their biggest cash cows, and nearly driven them to bankruptcy.
As far as I know (I'm just a coder, down in the trenches, so this shouldn't be considered gospel), PCDocs has signed a deal with M$, and they're still moving into our area. But at least they gave us some warning, and so we can go somewhere else, or build on top of what they will be offering.
I'll go see it after everybody else has. I won't be there at midnight listening to a bunch of 13 year old kids cheering whenever Yoda appears on the screen, and throwing popcorn arond. No, I'm going to enjoy it with a group of my friends well after all those people are done trashing the place. And it'll be a better experience for me as well.
I was planning on the same thing. Wait about a month, and then go and see the uber-late show to avoid the screaming masses. But a friend was picking up tickets for the 19th, and decided to get an extra 12. Am I going out of my way to see it on opening night? No. Will I still see it after all the commotion has passed? Probably. Would I have seen it on opening night if the tickets hadn't fallen into my lap? No. Will I be condemned for believing all the hype, and being taken in by the evil marketing geniuses? Yup.
If I remember, I'll post a reply to this in a month, detailing the two experiences (opening night, and after all the hype), and letting you all know which one was better for me. If I forget, and any of you care, feel free to email me and give me a gentle reminder. (You can figure my email address out from my url. Or if you can't I don't want to hear from you anyways.)
I don't know much about Tcl, but there is a version of Scheme for the PalmPilot. (Well, okay, Lisp. Well, alright, a Lisp-like language, anyways...) It's called LispMe. Y'all can look the URL up for yourselves.
These days, you don't have to understand, remember, or type These days, you don't have to understand, remember, or type find -type f -exec grep -i "meeting notes" '{}' ';' to find a file containing "meeting notes" on a *nix machine, but you CAN'T get the same kind of interaction from MacOS or Windows without a third-party utility.
find "meeting notes" *.*
Found this out a while ago. Used it a lot since then.
And using the WinNT (and 95/98?) "Find Files" application, you can specify "contains the text..."
"But if the deeper complexity is totally hidden from the viewer (GUI user), then they will never have the chance to learn more, because they won't even know it is there to be learned. "
Not quite. You are automatically assuming everyone wants to learn. I can show you a whole crowd who don't. Not because they're ignorant or clueless, but because they have more important things to do with life.
He isn't assuming any such thing. He is stating that the information should be there for those of us who want to learn. He's not talking about the whole crowd who don't.
I don't know why I'm posting this. It seemed pretty simple to me. Maybe I'm just one of those kind of freaks.
I don't want to know how the microwave works... I just want to nuke the ham sandwich for lunch. That doesn't make me ignorant...just hungry.
There's a radioactive part inside which emits microwaves. The microwaves cause the water molecules inside the food to vibrate, careening into the other molecules, thus heating up the food. It's not a precise description, but it's good enough.
As a question, would you rather nuke a ham sandwich, or give it to me, and wait for me to nuke it for you, when I get around to it? This whole argument is a matter of where you choose to draw certain lines, and what you consider important. I think that it's important to know what happens when I interact with the things around me, but that might be because I make my living writing software which has to work around various undocumented "features".
Brilliant engineers don't need to produce orders of magnitude more code than 10 lines a day.
Two stories: A person is sitting near me at my current company. He's not the brightest person I've met, but man does he code. He's written more lines of code than most of the rest of us put together. Most of it is crap.
My boss once made a fix to a driver for some random hardware the company he worked at was building. It was a 2 byte fix, but it took a week to find and make. It's one of the pieces of code he's most proud of.
A good programmer should be able to write excellent code. A great programmer is someone who knows when they don't have to.
My only question is, when DivX finally goes under, how big is the class action lawsuit by all the people who were duped into buying into it going to be?
If they all were talked into it by sales droids, then they might have a fairly decent chance at winning too... (Or am I just watching way too much Ally McBeal?:)
Slashdot Mirror
I thought it was people like Kevin Spacey who gave a bad name to showers...
Later,
Blake.
If I have to put up with "an email", then the rest of you have to put up with "virii".
Later,
Blake.
Java is a much more straightforward language, but occasionally the lack of nuance makes it difficult to achieve subtle hackery.
;)
You say this as if it's a bad thing.
I've reached the point in my life where the more obvious a program is, the better it is. Thus Java has an advantage over C++, and Python over Perl for the same reason. C++ and Perl contribute to subtle hackery, whereas with Java and Python, your intention is explicit in the code. I think this point in my life is called "Maintainer" by some, but I prefer "Software Engineer".
Later,
Blake.
And no, you didn't have to click on it. That damn preview pane was enough to trigger it off.
Well, I have the preview pane on, and I clicked on it, and it didn't run. My guess is that you would have to have "Automatically open attachments" set for the preview pane to fire it off, and if you have that set, you deserve what you get. (It's off by default, you have to set it explicitly.)
Later,
Blake.
--
"People get the OS they deserve" - Nick Bauman.
Is that the magical Perl comment construct that automatically updates itself when the code changes? I've been burned by erroneous comments more often than Obi-Wan errors.
Later,
Blake.
Perl has a huge feature set. The key thing to understand is that you DON'T NEED TO KNOW THE WHOLE LANGUAGE
Sure, unless you need to maintain it. If there are five different ways to write something, then I as the writer only need to know one of them, but I as the maintainer need to know all five, since any of them might have been used. If there's only one way to do it, then as the writer, I don't have to waste mental power choosing between them, and as the maintainer, I only need to learn the one.
But the set of features you need to know is still not the whole language, its just the set of features which the author used.
Unless you're dealing with more than one author, or an author who's learning more about Perl the more they use it, or more than one program. While the set of features in Perl is large enough that you'll probably never see all of them used, as the number of programs you're responsible for increases the set that you'll have to know grows faster than many people are comfortable with. Especially people who look at other languages where the amount you have to remember at any given time is much smaller, and are jealous.
Anyways, I doubt anyone here will convince anyone else here to switch languages. Some people like Perl, some people don't. 5 Karma points to the first person who guesses which camp I'm in, and which camp I was in five years ago.
Later,
Blake.
"Worst Episode Ever."
Later,
Blake.
As for whitespace and style issues, I dislike Python's way so much that I've put off learning the language for years. It's just so... FORTRAN. Why, of all things would you, in this day and age, subject people to a DEFINITION of TABS?! Why not enforce variable-naming at the same time?
-- Donald E. Knuth, "Structured Programming with goto Statements",
Computing Surveys, Vol 6 No 4, Dec. 1974
Later,
Blake.
Now somehow the RIAA has got to force all players to support the SDMI standard, which they may just do, suppositivly the new RIO'S will use SDMI as will most other players, possibly even winamp.
Which is all the more reason to switch to an MP3 player where you can remove the check for the SDMI information.
Freeamp.
The more people use it, the better it gets.
I speak for PCDocs
What exactly, if not freedom, *does* he want?
High quality software that doesn't crash?
It seems to me that esr is interested in the results of Free Software, but doesn't much care how he gets them. (Of course, Free Software is the easiest way to get there currently.)
Later,
Blake.
I speak for PCDocs
Sheesh, it makes one wonder why any company would think of signing any business deal with M$. Maybe it will help out in the beginning, but then it seems you'd be hampered by M$.
Take a look at Corel for an example of a company who wouldn't sign a business deal with M$. M$ has systematically gone after their biggest cash cows, and nearly driven them to bankruptcy.
As far as I know (I'm just a coder, down in the trenches, so this shouldn't be considered gospel), PCDocs has signed a deal with M$, and they're still moving into our area. But at least they gave us some warning, and so we can go somewhere else, or build on top of what they will be offering.
Later,
Blake.
I speak for PCDocs
I'll go see it after everybody else has. I won't be there at midnight listening to a bunch of 13 year old kids cheering whenever Yoda appears on the screen, and throwing popcorn arond. No, I'm going to enjoy it with a group of my friends well after all those people are done trashing the place. And it'll be a better experience for me as well.
I was planning on the same thing. Wait about a month, and then go and see the uber-late show to avoid the screaming masses. But a friend was picking up tickets for the 19th, and decided to get an extra 12. Am I going out of my way to see it on opening night? No. Will I still see it after all the commotion has passed? Probably. Would I have seen it on opening night if the tickets hadn't fallen into my lap? No. Will I be condemned for believing all the hype, and being taken in by the evil marketing geniuses? Yup.
If I remember, I'll post a reply to this in a month, detailing the two experiences (opening night, and after all the hype), and letting you all know which one was better for me. If I forget, and any of you care, feel free to email me and give me a gentle reminder. (You can figure my email address out from my url. Or if you can't I don't want to hear from you anyways.)
Later,
Blake.
I speak for PCDocs
I don't know much about Tcl, but there is a version of Scheme for the PalmPilot. (Well, okay, Lisp. Well, alright, a Lisp-like language, anyways...) It's called LispMe. Y'all can look the URL up for yourselves.
Later,
Blake.
I speak for PCDocs
These days, you don't have to understand, remember, or type These days, you don't have to understand, remember, or type find -type f -exec grep -i "meeting notes" '{}' ';' to find a file containing "meeting notes" on a *nix machine, but you CAN'T get the same kind of interaction from MacOS or Windows without a third-party utility.
find "meeting notes" *.*
Found this out a while ago.
Used it a lot since then.
And using the WinNT (and 95/98?) "Find Files" application, you can specify "contains the text..."
Later,
Blake.
I speak for PCDocs
"But if the deeper complexity is totally hidden from the viewer (GUI user), then they will never have the chance to learn more, because they won't even know it is there to be learned. "
Not quite.
You are automatically assuming everyone wants to learn. I can show you a whole crowd who don't. Not because they're ignorant or clueless, but because they have more important things to do with life.
He isn't assuming any such thing.
He is stating that the information should be there for those of us who want to learn. He's not talking about the whole crowd who don't.
I don't know why I'm posting this. It seemed pretty simple to me. Maybe I'm just one of those kind of freaks.
I don't want to know how the microwave works... I just want to nuke the ham sandwich for lunch. That doesn't make me ignorant...just hungry.
There's a radioactive part inside which emits microwaves. The microwaves cause the water molecules inside the food to vibrate, careening into the other molecules, thus heating up the food. It's not a precise description, but it's good enough.
As a question, would you rather nuke a ham sandwich, or give it to me, and wait for me to nuke it for you, when I get around to it? This whole argument is a matter of where you choose to draw certain lines, and what you consider important. I think that it's important to know what happens when I interact with the things around me, but that might be because I make my living writing software which has to work around various undocumented "features".
Later,
Blake.
I speak for PCDocs
Sure, just by replacing INPUT type=radio with INPUT type=checkbox
Yeah, but is the backend set up to handle choices of that type or would we suddenly get totals way above 100, and break the poll?
Later,
Blake.
(I really gotta put that into my sig...)
I speak for PCDocs
At the workplace:
Visual C++, Visual Basic, VBScript, JScript, Java. HTML too, but I don't consider that coding.
Recreationally:
Python, C++ (Mmmm... STL...), C, a smattering of Perl.
Say, that would be an interesting poll question. Is there any way we can select more than one option in the poll?
Later,
Blake.
I speak for PCDocs
Brilliant engineers don't need to produce orders of magnitude more code than 10 lines a day.
Two stories:
A person is sitting near me at my current company. He's not the brightest person I've met, but man does he code. He's written more lines of code than most of the rest of us put together. Most of it is crap.
My boss once made a fix to a driver for some random hardware the company he worked at was building. It was a 2 byte fix, but it took a week to find and make. It's one of the pieces of code he's most proud of.
A good programmer should be able to write excellent code. A great programmer is someone who knows when they don't have to.
Later,
Blake.
I speak for PCDocs
2) Instead of a penguin, we'd have that dog from the Taco Bell commercials for a mascot.
:)
Hey! Don't mess with that Taco Bell dog. He might look wimpy, but he'll kick your ass!
Viva Gorditas!
Later,
Blake.
--
I speak for PCDocs
My only question is, when DivX finally goes under, how big is the class action lawsuit by all the people who were duped into buying into it going to be?
:)
If they all were talked into it by sales droids, then they might have a fairly decent chance at winning too... (Or am I just watching way too much Ally McBeal?
Later,
Blake.
I speak for PCDocs