Thank you... that's the way it should be done (though perhaps you could have picked a different metaphor for the effort he put out, in view of his later career...?). I suspect that the real motive for Pittsburgh is to be able to meet some acheivement requirement without actually having to improve. Earth to the general public: remember the old "We don't care. We don't have to; we're the phone company" from back when the phone companies had a monopoly? That's what you have in the US educational system. The schools are themselves more interested in gaming the system than in actually educating children.
People have already pointed at the 99 bottles of beer, so I'll give some more generic reasons:
verbosity: COBOL is at the opposite end from APL; both extremes are bad.
a major subset of Basic English as reserved words: back when I took COBOL, we joked about sticking XYZ at the start of every identifier to avoid colliding with a reserved word. Nobody laughed very loud.
Much of my attitude is admittedly formed by the language as it was when I was an undergraduate, which would be about thirty years ago. No recursion, no heap, no local variables, and the mimicking of English made it just as hard to see what THEN and ELSE clauses included as it is in English prose, or what the range of a loop was.
The ritual among student assistants at the university I went to was the COBOL card deck burning party. Alas, I didn't attend one after my semester's exposure to the language.
If that's the goal of the standard, then it ought to actually define what "like Word 95" means, rather than effectively saying "how Word 95 word wraps is so convoluted that we can't define it here".
Talk to the folks who do Intel's C/C++ compiler, because that's exactly what they do... it just happens to make AMD processors look bad.
Somewhere I still have a copy of a document Motorola put out about how Intel was playing fast and loose with benchmarks in comparisons with the 68020, for heaven's sake. I have to wonder whether Intel has a history of this kind of thing.
Doesn't matter--even Nobel laureates, people who have done amazing things in their fields, succumb to crackpot beliefs, e.g. that taking lots of Vitamin C is good for you, or parapsychology.
I wish I did have a source... I remember hearing about people avoiding long distance charges by that means long ago when I was young (before divestiture when long distance was expensive!), but forget where I read about phone switches trying to defeat the technique by intentionally ringing the caller and the callee out of sync.
Well, yes, but... you have no way to be sure that the receipient's cell phone doesn't ring (the phone company long ago made sure that the caller and callee's rings don't sync up so that the number of rings couldn't be used to encode messages, e.g. one ring for a boy, two for a girl), and there are reasons for that other than not wanting to talk to someone--say you know that the recipient won't want to be disturbed, but will want to get the message as soon as the meeting/surgery/fire drill/etc. is over.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, veteran cosmic rockers like them would know just what to do!
About mine? No... but how about the next Einstein's 7th grade paper, or the next Picasso's?
...the Doom (or was it Wolfenstein?) mod that let you blast Barney into oblivion.
It's a way to bind web sites to Windows, so it's of great value... to Microsoft.
Fine by me if they make that statement, but then I will make the following statement: they can get along without my business.
The Far Side? Feh!
B. Kliban!
"I'm Noko Marie. Don't mess with me."
I remember Tennessee Tuxedo... and I won't quibble about which penguin is the greatest. (Hey, nobody's even mentioned Chilly Willy...)
However, since we are talking to Linux fans--quick, somebody hurry up and finally implement the 3-DBB user interface!
A movie version of Ben Bova's "Zero Gee", or better still, the whole Kinsman saga, would have been great.
Heck, be generous, give him more than one. Kudoi to him!
"...at the lower ranks, you find people who really are trying to make the best product they can for computer users."
The Good Microsofties?
Thank you... that's the way it should be done (though perhaps you could have picked a different metaphor for the effort he put out, in view of his later career...?). I suspect that the real motive for Pittsburgh is to be able to meet some acheivement requirement without actually having to improve. Earth to the general public: remember the old "We don't care. We don't have to; we're the phone company" from back when the phone companies had a monopoly? That's what you have in the US educational system. The schools are themselves more interested in gaming the system than in actually educating children.
People have already pointed at the 99 bottles of beer, so I'll give some more generic reasons:
verbosity: COBOL is at the opposite end from APL; both extremes are bad.
a major subset of Basic English as reserved words: back when I took COBOL, we joked about sticking XYZ at the start of every identifier to avoid colliding with a reserved word. Nobody laughed very loud.
Much of my attitude is admittedly formed by the language as it was when I was an undergraduate, which would be about thirty years ago. No recursion, no heap, no local variables, and the mimicking of English made it just as hard to see what THEN and ELSE clauses included as it is in English prose, or what the range of a loop was.
The ritual among student assistants at the university I went to was the COBOL card deck burning party. Alas, I didn't attend one after my semester's exposure to the language.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jmvdveer/algol.html
Please elaborate; I'd like to hate C++ more effectively.
Thank you for at least being honest, and not claiming any sort of moral basis for social programs. "Give us your money or we'll mug/kill/rob you."
No, no... a blanket music license would cover performances of the "Linus and Lucy Theme."
If that's the goal of the standard, then it ought to actually define what "like Word 95" means, rather than effectively saying "how Word 95 word wraps is so convoluted that we can't define it here".
...something other than anecdotal?
I seriously hope that you don't come down with argyria.
Talk to the folks who do Intel's C/C++ compiler, because that's exactly what they do... it just happens to make AMD processors look bad.
Somewhere I still have a copy of a document Motorola put out about how Intel was playing fast and loose with benchmarks in comparisons with the 68020, for heaven's sake. I have to wonder whether Intel has a history of this kind of thing.
Augean?
So what do the Good Microsofties think about their company's actions? How do they rationalize them, or their association with MS?
And me without a bottle of Martian jabra water...
Doesn't matter--even Nobel laureates, people who have done amazing things in their fields, succumb to crackpot beliefs, e.g. that taking lots of Vitamin C is good for you, or parapsychology.
I wish I did have a source... I remember hearing about people avoiding long distance charges by that means long ago when I was young (before divestiture when long distance was expensive!), but forget where I read about phone switches trying to defeat the technique by intentionally ringing the caller and the callee out of sync.
Well, yes, but... you have no way to be sure that the receipient's cell phone doesn't ring (the phone company long ago made sure that the caller and callee's rings don't sync up so that the number of rings couldn't be used to encode messages, e.g. one ring for a boy, two for a girl), and there are reasons for that other than not wanting to talk to someone--say you know that the recipient won't want to be disturbed, but will want to get the message as soon as the meeting/surgery/fire drill/etc. is over.