The clusterfuck was not that some stuff broke in version 3 but that the community wasted an inordinate amount of effort and time supporting version 2 and version 3 in parallel, backporting some things, writing shims, maintaining & building two code bases.
Version 3 should have come out and the community told that in 18 months version 2 was going to be mothballed. A clear timeline that would have focused minds and moved the language forwards.
That would have killed both versions. You underestimate the utility of backwards compatibility. Entire sub-optimal technology stacks currently owe their existence to being backwards compatible. The optimal ones with no backwards compatibility didn't make it.
The prime weakness of BASIC was goto. I suspect you're just trying to conflated the two because both are popular as teaching languages. Besides that, the two aren't comparable in any way.
Except that python is ALSO useful in the real world.
You think Basic wasn't useful in the real world? You must have been asleep for the latter part of the nineties.
I really hope not, Phyton is an ugly language, widely adopted or used doesn't say anything about the language being good.
People who complain that you can't build large scale systems without a compiler likely over-rely on the latter and are slaves to IDEs. If you write good unit tests and enforce Test Driven Development, the compiler becomes un-necessary and gets in the way. You are forced to provide too much information to it (also known as boilerplate) and can't quickly refactor code, which is necessary for quick iterations.
What nonsense is that? someone who says something like that has never really done any real development and is just a hack..
That's the problem with python - because someone can pick it up in a weekend the majority of the users are the weekend warrior types, which in turn means that the majority of the design decisions are for people with no aptitude for programming.
In a nutshell, this is why python is so popular.
Why the hell are you a slave to an IDE if you're using a compiler, how does the writer of the article do it's refactoring or test driven development. I don't buy for second he/she does everything by hand.
The odds are high that the author does TDD in order to catch errors that the compiler would have caught (wrong types in function calls, for example). They aren't unit-testing their application logic, they are integration-testing their call interface.
Successfully being the village idiot probably can be seen as a form of success.
This village idiot just finished installing, partationing, and formatting a 3TB hard drive in his Red Hat Linux box
I'm not sure I understand the point you are trying to make. Installing, partitioning and formatting a hard drive is "village idiot" type of work. It is not something to be proud of doing, it's the grunt work that get's passed off to interns to do.
they don't have the purchasing flexibility of currency
But they can be traded for currency, which solves that problem. In fact, bitcoin is far more flexible than gold by your definition: I can go to Newegg's website and buy a video card with bitcoin. If I take a chunk of gold into Best Buy though, I'm pretty sure they won't accept my payment.
Firstly, no you can't buy anything at newegg with bitcoin - they conveniently point you to an exchange which will turn your bitcoins into money, which they will then accept.
Secondly, if you walk into a newegg with a lump of gold I can guarantee that they will helpfully point you to the nearest exchange so you can turn your gold into money, which they will then accept.
What you're missing is that while the miner does need to take into account his expenditure for finding a block, that's not the determining factor in the price of BTC.
As with all things, the price is determined by demand : There's someone out there who desperately wants to buy some BTC because that's what he needs to complete some other transaction; for example, perhaps there is some "crazy" guy who is selling a dream car, but only for BTC,
Doesn't exist. There is no legal product, right now, that can only be purchased via bitcoin, and only one illegal product that can be purchased only with bitcoin. Anything you want to buy, you can buy *without* bitcoin.
This means that the insane demand is due mostly to people who simply want the bitcoin for sale value - i.e. speculators. People who want to buy something don't need to fuel the demand for bitcoin - it's cheaper to buy that something with money. When (if) there is actual demand for bitcoins for spending purposes the price will rocket.
As another poster upthread pointed out, wannacry only made 17BTC from the scam, yet demand for an extra 17BTC doubled the "value" of bitcoin. It doubled because so few people use it for actual spending that a minor increase in BTC spending fuels the demand immensely. If BTC were an actual currency,
then having people need 17 more units wouldn't cause the price to double.
TBH, bitcoins *are* useful - you can use them as an indicator about whether the person you're talking to actually has a clue about economics, or not.
The way that works is the two highest bidders have to pay, but only the highest bidder gets the money. People will bid up to the value of $20 because why not it's free money.
I'm not convinced that it would get bid up to $20. What idiot would enter an auction where the second place bidder still pays but gets nothing in return? Does this situation exist in some context?
Yes - it is the idiomatic analogy of an arms race.
One hundred and twenty years ago an automobile was a pretty unique sight, and I'm sure every fellow with a horse and carriage snorted "You got to find the gasoline for it, it's smelly a noisy. Who would want that when you've got a perfectly good horse?"
This fallacious argument is trotted out every time this topic comes up. You know, just because people who claimed "that won't catch on" were wrong about the automobile, does not mean that anyone who claims "that won't catch on" is wrong.
For every 1 time the naysayers were wrong, there's about a thousand times they were right. You are making a stupid argument, using that single time out of thousands to "prove" your point. That single time was an outlier - it doesn't mean anything, other than "tech is hard to predict".
Homeopathy is not like the hard sciences. It is very hard to reproduce results, and even very hard to make useful measurements. That's well understood and acknowledged.
If that was the case in, say, physics, the the results would of course be considered bunk and any conclusions ignored. But it's not physics, and that's the state of the art, and despite the limitations we still get some useful data and useful knowledge out of it.
See the problem yet?
These "soft" sciences have done a huge amount for us.
I disagree.
We learned how to cure mental illnesses like depression.
First - no, we did not. Secondly - "sciences" like gender studies did not contribute to the mitigation and treatment of depression.
We made huge strides in tackling racism and in gender equality.
Not based on the results from gender studies.
People who might have died because we didn't understand the psychology and social dynamic of policing are alive because we didn't demand the same rigorous proofs as we do in hard sciences.
Not based on the results of gender studies. Psychology is a great deal more rigorous than gender studies.
Of course we should keep trying to improve the methodology, but the way people on Slashdot simply dismiss all such science is stupid.
It's not "people on slashdot". It's "people who require evidence that isn't made up".
It's actually a lot like climate change denial - we don't have a second earth to reproduce results on, the predictions aren't always accurate to within some tiny margin of measurement error etc.
It's ironic that you say that - the far-right and the far-left both decry "hard science" because it upsets their chosen wordlview. You are displaying this amply.
Also, I don't think you know what "scientific evidence" means in the context of social sciences.
I think this line best sums up your worldview. To be clear - if you have to do away with standards of objectivity and evidence to make your argument work, it's almost certain that your argument is broken.
You are literally trying to twist reality to fit your delusions. The meaning of "scientific evidence" does not change just because you feels have been bruised.
There is no such thing as an objective measure of how welcome someone is. "Feels welcome" is the closest you can get.
If that's the case, why should one person's "feels" trump someone else's "feels"? Hmm?
You see, that's the core problem with using subjective "feels" to reach the conclusion that you did: why should one person's "I feel unwelcome" trump the other person's "I feel that they were welcome"?
Besides, you kicked off this thread by disputing that women simply claimed to feel unwelcome - you said that they were unwelcome. If there is no objective way to determine whether or not they are welcome somewhere, all we can do is say that they claim to be unwelcome.
IOW, your original contention is in fact incorrect.
Who do YOU think is objectively (measurably) the best of demographic in the world? Who do you think is the worst?
What does this question even mean? There is no such thing as a "best" demographic. The concept makes no sense.
The best-off demographic. The concept makes perfect sense: you can measure characteristics of a demographic and compare those measurements with other demographics. For example, there is a certain demographic of humans who:
Lives the longest,
Has the most college graduates,
Has the highest average income of all adults,
Are, compared to every other demographic, less likely to be the victims of violent crime,
Are less likely to be homeless,
Have fewer special-needs individuals (IQ less than 75)
Get prosecuted less often,
When prosecuted, get lighter sentences (up to 64%) for the same crime,
Has the highest employment / lowest unemployment,
...
If you guessed "white women", you're on the ball. (Yes, average income of white women exceeds avg income of just about every other demographic there is).
Dude I have a PhD in computer science, not that it matters at all to this conversation. Open minded people can appreciate research looks different from theirs.
I looked at the majority of women's studies research. Their data never supports their conclusions. For example, "women felt unwelcome" does not support the conclusion "women are unwelcome".
You are talking yourself in circles. How do we know if people are welcome somewhere? It is by definition a nebulous concept that has everything to do with how the person being judged FEELS. You cannot have a completely objective measure of it.
Yeah. That's what I said. It's subjective.
It is still valid to do scientific studies of subjective matters,
Yes, you can, but you cannot conclude "this is how they they were treated" when all you can determine is "this is how they felt they were treated". The minute you start using subjective "feels" as facts you are not doing science. You are doing something else entirely.
it is called social science.
Yeah... us real scientists (PhD holders - quite a few on/.) usually use those two words to refer to quackary.
Okay, putting aside your biased and incorrect assumptions about womens studies, again you have no idea who did the study. So kindly STFU.
Okay, putting aside all those things - Who do YOU think is objectively (measurably) the best of demographic in the world? Who do you think is the worst?
You don't know who it was performed by. It just says, "this survey was designed by GitHub." That you assume it is a womens studies major (which by the way would not prevent it from being rigorous) reflects your bias.
Actually, yes - the fact that a study is performed by a women's studies major does indeed mean that it would not be rigorous, in much the same way that an "IQ study" performed by the KKK would also not be rigorous.
FCOL - Women's studies make no attempt to hide the fact that they are for the advancement of women, in much the same way that the KKK make no attempt to hide the fact that they are for the advancement of caucasians. A study by a group for the advancement of women that produces a "women are victims" conclusion would get the same skepticism from normal people that a study produced by the KKK that concludes "whites are victims".
Btw: Who do you think is objectively (measurably) the best of demographic in the world? Who do you think is the worst?
It's called subtext bro, maybe you have heard of it?
It's called intellectual dishonesty, and you're exhibiting it - a claim of something is very different to an established fact. Women _claiming_ that they encounter something more than men _claiming_ that they encounter the same thing does not mean that women encounter that thing more than men do.
The minute you use subjective beliefs and feelings to produce a conclusion other than "this is what the subjects felt" is the minute you stop doing science. The subjects _FELT_ unwelcome: this does not mean that they were not welcome.
Sometimes I wish that the anti-science hard-left flat-earthers would find somewhere else to go virtue-signal.
At the time I wrote the above there were 35 posts. Based on the numbers in the survey, one of them would have been from a woman. But 10% of them were openly derogatory to women, another 10% of the "it's your own fault"
What are you complaining about? The numbers are too low? The numbers you posted[1] seem better than most stories about, well, anything. On other topics you get a much worse signal:noise ratio.
It it any wonder if that lone woman decides to give up and go somewhere else.
If random insults from ACs are enough to make women go elsewhere, then twitter, youtube, tumbler, etc will have much fewer numbers of women than they do now.
[1] I have no idea if your numbers are real or not - my quick scan of this page estimates two comments openly derogatory to women and none of the "it's your own fault" comments.
Read the article - it's an SJW calling for this (Policy Activist?)
Twitter is the most popular micro-blogging platform by far. If it becomes publicly owned they think it will abandon all rules and fall back to what is legal under US law, with zero enforcement because if someone is harassing you then you should call the police.
Well, they aren't enforcing their rules against racist statements right now, so it's moot.
It's brilliant.
Everyone on the planet joins a consortium where they each put in $2. The consortium then launches a $15b takeover bid for twitter and takes it private.
Maybe if twitter wasn't banning everyone who disagreed with their political stance you'd get many people. Right now twitter isn't going to get the basket of deplorables to help them out.
Slashdot Mirror
The clusterfuck was not that some stuff broke in version 3 but that the community wasted an inordinate amount of effort and time supporting version 2 and version 3 in parallel, backporting some things, writing shims, maintaining & building two code bases.
Version 3 should have come out and the community told that in 18 months version 2 was going to be mothballed. A clear timeline that would have focused minds and moved the language forwards.
That would have killed both versions. You underestimate the utility of backwards compatibility. Entire sub-optimal technology stacks currently owe their existence to being backwards compatible. The optimal ones with no backwards compatibility didn't make it.
The prime weakness of BASIC was goto. I suspect you're just trying to conflated the two because both are popular as teaching languages. Besides that, the two aren't comparable in any way.
Except that python is ALSO useful in the real world.
You think Basic wasn't useful in the real world? You must have been asleep for the latter part of the nineties.
I really hope not, Phyton is an ugly language, widely adopted or used doesn't say anything about the language being good.
People who complain that you can't build large scale systems without a compiler likely over-rely on the latter and are slaves to IDEs. If you write good unit tests and enforce Test Driven Development, the compiler becomes un-necessary and gets in the way. You are forced to provide too much information to it (also known as boilerplate) and can't quickly refactor code, which is necessary for quick iterations.
What nonsense is that? someone who says something like that has never really done any real development and is just a hack..
That's the problem with python - because someone can pick it up in a weekend the majority of the users are the weekend warrior types, which in turn means that the majority of the design decisions are for people with no aptitude for programming.
In a nutshell, this is why python is so popular.
Why the hell are you a slave to an IDE if you're using a compiler, how does the writer of the article do it's refactoring or test driven development. I don't buy for second he/she does everything by hand.
The odds are high that the author does TDD in order to catch errors that the compiler would have caught (wrong types in function calls, for example). They aren't unit-testing their application logic, they are integration-testing their call interface.
Successfully being the village idiot probably can be seen as a form of success.
This village idiot just finished installing, partationing, and formatting a 3TB hard drive in his Red Hat Linux box
I'm not sure I understand the point you are trying to make. Installing, partitioning and formatting a hard drive is "village idiot" type of work. It is not something to be proud of doing, it's the grunt work that get's passed off to interns to do.
A good product doomed by cheaper VHS technology.
Betamax was briefly superseded by VHS, which was then rendered obsolete by digital video.
There was no "brief" about it. VHS was the highest selling video medium for two decades.
they don't have the purchasing flexibility of currency
But they can be traded for currency, which solves that problem. In fact, bitcoin is far more flexible than gold by your definition: I can go to Newegg's website and buy a video card with bitcoin. If I take a chunk of gold into Best Buy though, I'm pretty sure they won't accept my payment.
Firstly, no you can't buy anything at newegg with bitcoin - they conveniently point you to an exchange which will turn your bitcoins into money, which they will then accept.
Secondly, if you walk into a newegg with a lump of gold I can guarantee that they will helpfully point you to the nearest exchange so you can turn your gold into money, which they will then accept.
What you're missing is that while the miner does need to take into account his expenditure for finding a block, that's not the determining factor in the price of BTC.
As with all things, the price is determined by demand : There's someone out there who desperately wants to buy some BTC because that's what he needs to complete some other transaction; for example, perhaps there is some "crazy" guy who is selling a dream car, but only for BTC,
Doesn't exist. There is no legal product, right now, that can only be purchased via bitcoin, and only one illegal product that can be purchased only with bitcoin. Anything you want to buy, you can buy *without* bitcoin.
This means that the insane demand is due mostly to people who simply want the bitcoin for sale value - i.e. speculators. People who want to buy something don't need to fuel the demand for bitcoin - it's cheaper to buy that something with money. When (if) there is actual demand for bitcoins for spending purposes the price will rocket.
As another poster upthread pointed out, wannacry only made 17BTC from the scam, yet demand for an extra 17BTC doubled the "value" of bitcoin. It doubled because so few people use it for actual spending that a minor increase in BTC spending fuels the demand immensely. If BTC were an actual currency, then having people need 17 more units wouldn't cause the price to double.
TBH, bitcoins *are* useful - you can use them as an indicator about whether the person you're talking to actually has a clue about economics, or not.
The way that works is the two highest bidders have to pay, but only the highest bidder gets the money. People will bid up to the value of $20 because why not it's free money.
I'm not convinced that it would get bid up to $20. What idiot would enter an auction where the second place bidder still pays but gets nothing in return? Does this situation exist in some context?
Yes - it is the idiomatic analogy of an arms race.
One hundred and twenty years ago an automobile was a pretty unique sight, and I'm sure every fellow with a horse and carriage snorted "You got to find the gasoline for it, it's smelly a noisy. Who would want that when you've got a perfectly good horse?"
This fallacious argument is trotted out every time this topic comes up. You know, just because people who claimed "that won't catch on" were wrong about the automobile, does not mean that anyone who claims "that won't catch on" is wrong.
For every 1 time the naysayers were wrong, there's about a thousand times they were right. You are making a stupid argument, using that single time out of thousands to "prove" your point. That single time was an outlier - it doesn't mean anything, other than "tech is hard to predict".
Homeopathy is not like the hard sciences. It is very hard to reproduce results, and even very hard to make useful measurements. That's well understood and acknowledged.
If that was the case in, say, physics, the the results would of course be considered bunk and any conclusions ignored. But it's not physics, and that's the state of the art, and despite the limitations we still get some useful data and useful knowledge out of it.
See the problem yet?
These "soft" sciences have done a huge amount for us.
I disagree.
We learned how to cure mental illnesses like depression.
First - no, we did not. Secondly - "sciences" like gender studies did not contribute to the mitigation and treatment of depression.
We made huge strides in tackling racism and in gender equality.
Not based on the results from gender studies.
People who might have died because we didn't understand the psychology and social dynamic of policing are alive because we didn't demand the same rigorous proofs as we do in hard sciences.
Not based on the results of gender studies. Psychology is a great deal more rigorous than gender studies.
Of course we should keep trying to improve the methodology, but the way people on Slashdot simply dismiss all such science is stupid.
It's not "people on slashdot". It's "people who require evidence that isn't made up".
It's actually a lot like climate change denial - we don't have a second earth to reproduce results on, the predictions aren't always accurate to within some tiny margin of measurement error etc.
It's ironic that you say that - the far-right and the far-left both decry "hard science" because it upsets their chosen wordlview. You are displaying this amply.
Usually companies will reward employees accomplishing the impossible project.
And then that reward will be used as "proof" of a gender pay gap. You can't win against ideological arguments.
Also, I don't think you know what "scientific evidence" means in the context of social sciences.
I think this line best sums up your worldview. To be clear - if you have to do away with standards of objectivity and evidence to make your argument work, it's almost certain that your argument is broken.
You are literally trying to twist reality to fit your delusions. The meaning of "scientific evidence" does not change just because you feels have been bruised.
There is no such thing as an objective measure of how welcome someone is. "Feels welcome" is the closest you can get.
If that's the case, why should one person's "feels" trump someone else's "feels"? Hmm?
You see, that's the core problem with using subjective "feels" to reach the conclusion that you did: why should one person's "I feel unwelcome" trump the other person's "I feel that they were welcome"?
Besides, you kicked off this thread by disputing that women simply claimed to feel unwelcome - you said that they were unwelcome. If there is no objective way to determine whether or not they are welcome somewhere, all we can do is say that they claim to be unwelcome.
IOW, your original contention is in fact incorrect.
Who do YOU think is objectively (measurably) the best of demographic in the world? Who do you think is the worst?
What does this question even mean? There is no such thing as a "best" demographic. The concept makes no sense.
The best-off demographic. The concept makes perfect sense: you can measure characteristics of a demographic and compare those measurements with other demographics. For example, there is a certain demographic of humans who:
Lives the longest,
Has the most college graduates,
Has the highest average income of all adults,
Are, compared to every other demographic, less likely to be the victims of violent crime,
Are less likely to be homeless,
Have fewer special-needs individuals (IQ less than 75)
Get prosecuted less often,
When prosecuted, get lighter sentences (up to 64%) for the same crime,
Has the highest employment / lowest unemployment,
...
If you guessed "white women", you're on the ball. (Yes, average income of white women exceeds avg income of just about every other demographic there is).
Dude I have a PhD in computer science, not that it matters at all to this conversation. Open minded people can appreciate research looks different from theirs.
I looked at the majority of women's studies research. Their data never supports their conclusions. For example, "women felt unwelcome" does not support the conclusion "women are unwelcome".
You are talking yourself in circles. How do we know if people are welcome somewhere? It is by definition a nebulous concept that has everything to do with how the person being judged FEELS. You cannot have a completely objective measure of it.
Yeah. That's what I said. It's subjective.
It is still valid to do scientific studies of subjective matters,
Yes, you can, but you cannot conclude "this is how they they were treated" when all you can determine is "this is how they felt they were treated". The minute you start using subjective "feels" as facts you are not doing science. You are doing something else entirely.
it is called social science.
Yeah... us real scientists (PhD holders - quite a few on /.) usually use those two words to refer to quackary.
Okay, putting aside your biased and incorrect assumptions about womens studies, again you have no idea who did the study. So kindly STFU.
Okay, putting aside all those things - Who do YOU think is objectively (measurably) the best of demographic in the world? Who do you think is the worst?
You don't know who it was performed by. It just says, "this survey was designed by GitHub." That you assume it is a womens studies major (which by the way would not prevent it from being rigorous) reflects your bias.
Actually, yes - the fact that a study is performed by a women's studies major does indeed mean that it would not be rigorous, in much the same way that an "IQ study" performed by the KKK would also not be rigorous.
FCOL - Women's studies make no attempt to hide the fact that they are for the advancement of women, in much the same way that the KKK make no attempt to hide the fact that they are for the advancement of caucasians. A study by a group for the advancement of women that produces a "women are victims" conclusion would get the same skepticism from normal people that a study produced by the KKK that concludes "whites are victims".
Btw: Who do you think is objectively (measurably) the best of demographic in the world? Who do you think is the worst?
It's called subtext bro, maybe you have heard of it?
It's called intellectual dishonesty, and you're exhibiting it - a claim of something is very different to an established fact. Women _claiming_ that they encounter something more than men _claiming_ that they encounter the same thing does not mean that women encounter that thing more than men do.
The minute you use subjective beliefs and feelings to produce a conclusion other than "this is what the subjects felt" is the minute you stop doing science. The subjects _FELT_ unwelcome: this does not mean that they were not welcome.
Sometimes I wish that the anti-science hard-left flat-earthers would find somewhere else to go virtue-signal.
But that's my point.
At the time I wrote the above there were 35 posts. Based on the numbers in the survey, one of them would have been from a woman. But 10% of them were openly derogatory to women, another 10% of the "it's your own fault"
What are you complaining about? The numbers are too low? The numbers you posted[1] seem better than most stories about, well, anything. On other topics you get a much worse signal:noise ratio.
It it any wonder if that lone woman decides to give up and go somewhere else.
If random insults from ACs are enough to make women go elsewhere, then twitter, youtube, tumbler, etc will have much fewer numbers of women than they do now.
[1] I have no idea if your numbers are real or not - my quick scan of this page estimates two comments openly derogatory to women and none of the "it's your own fault" comments.
The fact that you are calling women developers, as a group, liars is exactly the problem. This is a fact.
He didn't call them liars. He said they claimed something, which is true.
Look at who did the study before you write comments that make you look dumb.
Did you look? It's an unscientific "study" performed by a gender studies major.
Honestly, the major alone should be an indicator that the result is probably garbage
It's a Free Speech Warrior fantasy.
Read the article - it's an SJW calling for this (Policy Activist?)
Twitter is the most popular micro-blogging platform by far. If it becomes publicly owned they think it will abandon all rules and fall back to what is legal under US law, with zero enforcement because if someone is harassing you then you should call the police.
Well, they aren't enforcing their rules against racist statements right now, so it's moot.
It's brilliant.
Everyone on the planet joins a consortium where they each put in $2. The consortium then launches a $15b takeover bid for twitter and takes it private.
Maybe if twitter wasn't banning everyone who disagreed with their political stance you'd get many people. Right now twitter isn't going to get the basket of deplorables to help them out.
Right....
Exactly.
Muslims being responsible for, say, 99% or terrorists. Doesn't mean they arent responsible for terrorists if you point out the other 1%
(Emphasis mine) - see how that works?