The vast majority of coding styles I've seen in the wild will dicate that tabs never be used, ever, even in languages with delimiters, and even if some personal favorite IDE refuses to use spaces.
The major problem with using tabs and defining the indentation as however the user wants is that it does not translate to other programs and tools or users. For example, trying to print out something that looks nice in an IDE may end up with half the lines falling off the side of the paper.
Most of the people who argue against coding styles for projects or teams often fall back to the same idea that their personal editor is the best ever and can't everyone else just adapt to me instead of me adapting to you?
Coding style standards in the workplace. Use them. This is not just a problem with Python. I've seen this problem in C. Yes, in C you don't have to worry that indentation screws you up, but if every member of the team is allowed to use their own indentation styles then you end up with an unreadable mess. I've been there and seen it. If the coding style says "4 characters and no tabs" then you follow that style even if you hate it. It's more important that the team work together well than to satisfy personal egos.
As for whitespace, Python didn't invent this and is one a unique oddball, it just happens to be the most popular language that does this.
Actually I never even heard of 'duck typing' until a few years ago, and I've been programming for decades and have been in academia. If there's one thing to be said about computer science is that we invent new words for old ideas on a constant basis.
Not requiring delcarations is one reason Python is a scripting language. It is indeed reasonable that a scripting language be allowed some shortcuts otherwise we may as well write those quick and dirty utilities in C++. Yes, this can cause bugs. But so what?
For indentation, I still get the impression that people think Python invented this or is the only language to do so. It's not like just one language designer got a stroke of insanity one day and decided upon this, there were quite a lot of people who thought such things were a reasonable idea.
The story is hyped up. If they win the lawsuit, the chimpanzee would not be "freed" and allowed to roam the streets, instead it will be held in captivity in a chimpanzee habitat/sanctuary.
SIMH does a good job. I've got BSD 4.2 running on a Vax on my PC. Don't know what the cloud ones do differently except enable them to have a post that implies they invented the whole concept.
This scam is even worse than H1-B, and it's totally flouting all the rules, spirit and letter. It only works because despite the utterly incompetent workers you can hire 4 of them for the price of one competent person, which looks good on the balance book and you still get promoted up the management tree even though the project fails.
This is defensible, if it is indeed the case that the job requirements are to get the cheapest worker who can bluff through it. However I suspect many of these jobs intended to get the best workers they could find, which was what the recruiters were trying to do.
I haven't looked in on anything to do with infosys in ages, but I suspect they still try to market themselves as providing good and qualified workers. Which is contrary to the long standing rumor that they only provide the cheapest. But it's a lot of wink-wink-nudge-nudge between American companies and outsourcing companies.
Until they start outsourcing managers as well, at all levels of management up to and including execs, then this practice will continue.
I agree here, the "pros" are very much pro-game, no matter what it is. I've seen reviews that point out all sort of flaws and it still gets 7 out of 10. A recent game full of hype, all reviews glowing, probably get game of the year, yet I look at one game play video and I can tell it's crap and dishonors the source material. But by the professional reviews it looks to be the perfect game for any gamer at all and should even be purchased by non gamers.
Users reviews however will often bring up stuff the pros leave out. Reboots of a franchise for example, the pros will say how great the graphics are, they'll use language to appear to the mass market, whereas the fans of the series will actually point out how the reboot screws things up or is dumbed down or how the gameplay is not representative. The pros are really out of touch, they play too many games without enough time to adequately review them, they're heavily swayed by the fluff, and are completely inadequate to review niche games.
For example, no professional reviewer, paid by the big console makers, is going to write "this game was dumbed down for the console crowd". No pro will say "they should have left it alone instead of trying to a misguided reboot."
On the other hand, sometimes the fans get too emotional. Something that doesn't live up to their expectations is downgraded too harshly, or something that insults the source material becomes unforgiveable (I'm still raging over Mission Impossible movies).
I'd like to see ratings that are based on the style of play or a comparison to other genres or games. Ie, "if you loved assassin's creed, then you'll love this game, but if you loved Thief The Dark Project you will despise it with all your heart". Doesn't help out the mass market who play anything and everything, but it might help out the more selective game players who've never even seen a console.
I ended up buying Wasteland 2 on Steam which had a good price, without realizing it was still early access. Gah. Now that it's out I could have gotten it on GOG instead.
You can't really rate games on Steam that well. If you write a review you get a choice of thumbs up or thumbs down. Unless they've got some AI programming analzying the words that are written then how do they rate them? If they rely on number of thumbs up versus thumbs down, then how to they measure a tepid response?
People also believe their own memories. But these are easily distorted and often wrong. People will be shown pictures of something in their past that contradict their memories and then declare that the pictures must be fakes. I see this myself when I start to pay attention, realizing that my memory is wrong. This isn't just long term memories that degrade, but even for short term memories.
Essentially memory doesn't operate like a book or a photograph. Instead it's a network of concepts and ideas that get used together to create the memory, and any gaps are filled in with details that seem consistent. In other words, it's a highly lossy compression system.
Can you explain in a logical and coherent manner why his software is not good? By saying "pure excrement" and "ice sculpture in the middle of the Sahara desert", you end up being the sort of troll that gives open source a bad name, thus reinforcing Lennart's position that he wrote. If you don't like something, then say why you don't like it in the way that intelligent adults used to do. Dropping down to name calling is like listening to a political arguments or to sports fans of opposing teams.
That's a good point too. What what it, so we can replicate it? I presume you want to increase the number of women in computing, rather than have it decline or stagnate and are not defending the sad current state of affairs.
It's a case of unimportant code being written by the neophyte, intern, or the CEOs cousin who didn't have an actual interview. It may seem important today when things break, but back in the 90s no one cared as long as things shipped before funding dried up.
Especially when your code is something without easy access to APIs, like a scripting language, a spreadsheet macro, or you're a solitary programmer who never gets to talk to the people in the development department who know how things work. Maybe there's a little twinge that says something is not right, but they have specifications from the IT boss to "work with 98, 2000, and xp, which are the machines we have deployed" so that absolves them from delaying the deployment.
It's the Visual Basic problem. Market it as something so easy an idiot or manager can use and it results in idiots and managers writing code like this.
This seems plausible to me, it's very common with a lot of quick and dirty software to ship/deploy if the boss pushes a button and then something seems to happen correctly. Going back and making sure it is bullet proof is done on a developer's own personal time.
I suspect a lot of the problem is that Windows programmers grew up without much exposure to portability problems. As long as they could distinguish NT from 95/98 they were usually happy. And the idea that a problem might actually last a long time was not something they worry about much. Compare to unix programmers who had to get used to the same program and script working on aix, hpux, solaris/sunos, ultrix, bsd, sysv, etc, while dealing with big versus little endian, sockets vs streams, and the occasional port to mainframes.
Except that this is not true. Biology has not radically changed in the last few decades, yet the number of women wanting to enter engineering, math, or computing programs at school as dropped by a very large amount.
Now I could be persuaded that there might not be a problem, as you seem to imply, if you could show that all of these women are getting jobs that pay as much as the CS oriented jobs do.
The problem is that we have fewer women who want to get into computing today than there were 20 or 30 years ago. This is not some innate sex difference going on here.
There is indeed a problem because these degrees lead to higher paying jobs. Do you think that the best jobs should be dominated by men, and that 'women don't want higher paying jobs'? Is parity in income important or irrelevant to you? So the question here is not whether or not women want to go into CS, but *why* they don't want to go into it today despite the large economic advantages to it, and what was it that changed in the last few decades to cause this shift in attitudes?
Rather than just deny that there is anything wrong with the status quo, or implying that it is based on biology and has always been this way (demonstrably incorrect), perhaps try to find what is the reason for this disparity, the reason for the changes in disparity over time, and if a problem has been discovered why not try to fix it? For example, if we find teachers in schools who say "those aren't suitable jobs for girls" then that is a clear problem and we need to get fewer troglodytes teaching in schools, and I hope most people would agree with that hypothetical situation. The actual causes are likely to be a lot more subtle and with many diverse factors, but that doesn't mean we should just let it slide just because someone likes the status quo.
When I was an undergraduate we had plenty of women in the science, math, and computing courses. You could walk into any one of those classes and be unable to see a large demographic difference from any other sort of class on campus. But over time that changed. So why was a female freshman in 1980 more likely to declare as a CS type major than a female freshman in 2010?
This is not about coercing people. The mystery to me is why women used to be represented in computing and now they're not. What was it that once made women want to go into computer science and now they don't want to?
And it is a very important question: because this affects income. Computing jobs are higher paying than many. Therefore if those jobs are dominated by just a subset of the demographics then it should indicate that something is wrong. Even for the purposes of have multiple points of view in design you should absolutely want a diverse group of eyes being involved. When people imply that the status quo is good enough they are in essence trying to preserve the domain to be for their own subgroups.
Consider that not too long ago there were people in running companies who thought that it would be a great idea to get more non-engineers into computing and design. That is, fewer geeks designing hard to use programs and more normal people designing things that normal people could use. There was an explicit move made to try to entice graduates in the arts or humanities from becoming developers. So would the same argument apply in that case: were they being 'coereced' into taking jobs they didn't want? Or instead were the employers just trying to diversify?
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The vast majority of coding styles I've seen in the wild will dicate that tabs never be used, ever, even in languages with delimiters, and even if some personal favorite IDE refuses to use spaces.
The major problem with using tabs and defining the indentation as however the user wants is that it does not translate to other programs and tools or users. For example, trying to print out something that looks nice in an IDE may end up with half the lines falling off the side of the paper.
Most of the people who argue against coding styles for projects or teams often fall back to the same idea that their personal editor is the best ever and can't everyone else just adapt to me instead of me adapting to you?
Coding style standards in the workplace. Use them. This is not just a problem with Python. I've seen this problem in C. Yes, in C you don't have to worry that indentation screws you up, but if every member of the team is allowed to use their own indentation styles then you end up with an unreadable mess. I've been there and seen it. If the coding style says "4 characters and no tabs" then you follow that style even if you hate it. It's more important that the team work together well than to satisfy personal egos.
As for whitespace, Python didn't invent this and is one a unique oddball, it just happens to be the most popular language that does this.
Actually I never even heard of 'duck typing' until a few years ago, and I've been programming for decades and have been in academia. If there's one thing to be said about computer science is that we invent new words for old ideas on a constant basis.
We did learn from BASIC in the 80s to never touch Visual Basic in the 90s.
Not requiring delcarations is one reason Python is a scripting language. It is indeed reasonable that a scripting language be allowed some shortcuts otherwise we may as well write those quick and dirty utilities in C++. Yes, this can cause bugs. But so what?
For indentation, I still get the impression that people think Python invented this or is the only language to do so. It's not like just one language designer got a stroke of insanity one day and decided upon this, there were quite a lot of people who thought such things were a reasonable idea.
The story is hyped up. If they win the lawsuit, the chimpanzee would not be "freed" and allowed to roam the streets, instead it will be held in captivity in a chimpanzee habitat/sanctuary.
How does this different from any other potentially dangerous disease, most of which kill many more people? Things like bird flu.
SIMH does a good job. I've got BSD 4.2 running on a Vax on my PC. Don't know what the cloud ones do differently except enable them to have a post that implies they invented the whole concept.
This scam is even worse than H1-B, and it's totally flouting all the rules, spirit and letter. It only works because despite the utterly incompetent workers you can hire 4 of them for the price of one competent person, which looks good on the balance book and you still get promoted up the management tree even though the project fails.
This is defensible, if it is indeed the case that the job requirements are to get the cheapest worker who can bluff through it. However I suspect many of these jobs intended to get the best workers they could find, which was what the recruiters were trying to do.
I haven't looked in on anything to do with infosys in ages, but I suspect they still try to market themselves as providing good and qualified workers. Which is contrary to the long standing rumor that they only provide the cheapest. But it's a lot of wink-wink-nudge-nudge between American companies and outsourcing companies.
Until they start outsourcing managers as well, at all levels of management up to and including execs, then this practice will continue.
Whereas in America we are exactly the opposite, and prefer not to hire people from our own country.
I agree here, the "pros" are very much pro-game, no matter what it is. I've seen reviews that point out all sort of flaws and it still gets 7 out of 10. A recent game full of hype, all reviews glowing, probably get game of the year, yet I look at one game play video and I can tell it's crap and dishonors the source material. But by the professional reviews it looks to be the perfect game for any gamer at all and should even be purchased by non gamers.
Users reviews however will often bring up stuff the pros leave out. Reboots of a franchise for example, the pros will say how great the graphics are, they'll use language to appear to the mass market, whereas the fans of the series will actually point out how the reboot screws things up or is dumbed down or how the gameplay is not representative. The pros are really out of touch, they play too many games without enough time to adequately review them, they're heavily swayed by the fluff, and are completely inadequate to review niche games.
For example, no professional reviewer, paid by the big console makers, is going to write "this game was dumbed down for the console crowd". No pro will say "they should have left it alone instead of trying to a misguided reboot."
On the other hand, sometimes the fans get too emotional. Something that doesn't live up to their expectations is downgraded too harshly, or something that insults the source material becomes unforgiveable (I'm still raging over Mission Impossible movies).
I'd like to see ratings that are based on the style of play or a comparison to other genres or games. Ie, "if you loved assassin's creed, then you'll love this game, but if you loved Thief The Dark Project you will despise it with all your heart". Doesn't help out the mass market who play anything and everything, but it might help out the more selective game players who've never even seen a console.
I ended up buying Wasteland 2 on Steam which had a good price, without realizing it was still early access. Gah. Now that it's out I could have gotten it on GOG instead.
Goat Simulator has some great ratings...
You can't really rate games on Steam that well. If you write a review you get a choice of thumbs up or thumbs down. Unless they've got some AI programming analzying the words that are written then how do they rate them? If they rely on number of thumbs up versus thumbs down, then how to they measure a tepid response?
People also believe their own memories. But these are easily distorted and often wrong. People will be shown pictures of something in their past that contradict their memories and then declare that the pictures must be fakes. I see this myself when I start to pay attention, realizing that my memory is wrong. This isn't just long term memories that degrade, but even for short term memories.
Essentially memory doesn't operate like a book or a photograph. Instead it's a network of concepts and ideas that get used together to create the memory, and any gaps are filled in with details that seem consistent. In other words, it's a highly lossy compression system.
Can you explain in a logical and coherent manner why his software is not good? By saying "pure excrement" and "ice sculpture in the middle of the Sahara desert", you end up being the sort of troll that gives open source a bad name, thus reinforcing Lennart's position that he wrote. If you don't like something, then say why you don't like it in the way that intelligent adults used to do. Dropping down to name calling is like listening to a political arguments or to sports fans of opposing teams.
That's a good point too. What what it, so we can replicate it? I presume you want to increase the number of women in computing, rather than have it decline or stagnate and are not defending the sad current state of affairs.
It's a case of unimportant code being written by the neophyte, intern, or the CEOs cousin who didn't have an actual interview. It may seem important today when things break, but back in the 90s no one cared as long as things shipped before funding dried up.
Especially when your code is something without easy access to APIs, like a scripting language, a spreadsheet macro, or you're a solitary programmer who never gets to talk to the people in the development department who know how things work. Maybe there's a little twinge that says something is not right, but they have specifications from the IT boss to "work with 98, 2000, and xp, which are the machines we have deployed" so that absolves them from delaying the deployment.
It's the Visual Basic problem. Market it as something so easy an idiot or manager can use and it results in idiots and managers writing code like this.
This seems plausible to me, it's very common with a lot of quick and dirty software to ship/deploy if the boss pushes a button and then something seems to happen correctly. Going back and making sure it is bullet proof is done on a developer's own personal time.
I suspect a lot of the problem is that Windows programmers grew up without much exposure to portability problems. As long as they could distinguish NT from 95/98 they were usually happy. And the idea that a problem might actually last a long time was not something they worry about much. Compare to unix programmers who had to get used to the same program and script working on aix, hpux, solaris/sunos, ultrix, bsd, sysv, etc, while dealing with big versus little endian, sockets vs streams, and the occasional port to mainframes.
These are Windows developers. Of course that have difficulty in writing software that can't figure out revision differences.
Except that this is not true. Biology has not radically changed in the last few decades, yet the number of women wanting to enter engineering, math, or computing programs at school as dropped by a very large amount.
Now I could be persuaded that there might not be a problem, as you seem to imply, if you could show that all of these women are getting jobs that pay as much as the CS oriented jobs do.
The problem is that we have fewer women who want to get into computing today than there were 20 or 30 years ago. This is not some innate sex difference going on here.
There is indeed a problem because these degrees lead to higher paying jobs. Do you think that the best jobs should be dominated by men, and that 'women don't want higher paying jobs'? Is parity in income important or irrelevant to you? So the question here is not whether or not women want to go into CS, but *why* they don't want to go into it today despite the large economic advantages to it, and what was it that changed in the last few decades to cause this shift in attitudes?
Rather than just deny that there is anything wrong with the status quo, or implying that it is based on biology and has always been this way (demonstrably incorrect), perhaps try to find what is the reason for this disparity, the reason for the changes in disparity over time, and if a problem has been discovered why not try to fix it? For example, if we find teachers in schools who say "those aren't suitable jobs for girls" then that is a clear problem and we need to get fewer troglodytes teaching in schools, and I hope most people would agree with that hypothetical situation. The actual causes are likely to be a lot more subtle and with many diverse factors, but that doesn't mean we should just let it slide just because someone likes the status quo.
When I was an undergraduate we had plenty of women in the science, math, and computing courses. You could walk into any one of those classes and be unable to see a large demographic difference from any other sort of class on campus. But over time that changed. So why was a female freshman in 1980 more likely to declare as a CS type major than a female freshman in 2010?
This is not about coercing people. The mystery to me is why women used to be represented in computing and now they're not. What was it that once made women want to go into computer science and now they don't want to?
And it is a very important question: because this affects income. Computing jobs are higher paying than many. Therefore if those jobs are dominated by just a subset of the demographics then it should indicate that something is wrong. Even for the purposes of have multiple points of view in design you should absolutely want a diverse group of eyes being involved. When people imply that the status quo is good enough they are in essence trying to preserve the domain to be for their own subgroups.
Consider that not too long ago there were people in running companies who thought that it would be a great idea to get more non-engineers into computing and design. That is, fewer geeks designing hard to use programs and more normal people designing things that normal people could use. There was an explicit move made to try to entice graduates in the arts or humanities from becoming developers. So would the same argument apply in that case: were they being 'coereced' into taking jobs they didn't want? Or instead were the employers just trying to diversify?