That's exactly what the article is saying, and clearly you are missing the point. They aren't really complaining about students that learning enough languages, but rather that students aren't being shown the bigger picture.
I disagree. The training/teaching thing is just a red herring they've used to make people uncritically accept their main point, which is this:
As faculty members at New York University for decades, we have regretted the introduction of Java as a first language of instruction for most computer science majors.
They're complaining about Java being used as the introductory programming language for people who didn't previously know programming. They would like to saddle new programmers with such concepts as pointers and hardware-based optimisation (as opposed to optimisation based on computational complexity), or worse, with the pointlessly verbose and annoying syntax of Ada. Of course, that would benefit those professors as they've commited themselves to technologies that demand those particular skills. I'm not so sure it would benefit the students, and those concepts certainly don't belong in an introductory programming course, which is for example why MIT has long introduced people to programming using Lisp, which doesn't have pointers or complex syntax.
But then again, what can you expect from guys like these professors who say things like this with (I assume) a straight face:
Ada is the language of software engineering par excellence.
Well, of course learning Java will not help you with languages intended to be "high level assembler" like C, just like learning C will not help you with languages intended to be compiled to bytecode and executed under a VM like Java or C#. How that makes C the "solid language" and Java the usurper, I don't know. And here's a radical concept: what about learning both types of languages? You know, the purpose of education being to provide a wide-ranging vision and not just with what your teacher happens to like.
I haven't read TFA (this being Slashdot and all), but if those professors actually mention Ada as a better language for teaching than Java, I wouldn't trust anything else they say, because they obviously stopped caring about the evolution of Computer Science at some point in the 80s.
It's such lame and dishonest branding the marketing group should be ashamed.
I'm sure they will be ashamed all the way to the bank. Let's face it, Microsoft marketing does these things because they work, as proven by Microsoft's success.
For what is worth, I would make exactly the same comment about Perl.
Re:Tcl language vs. Tcl environment
on
Tcl/Tk 8.5.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
For what is worth, a lot of experienced people are fans of obscure antique technologies, because that's what they specialized on and they don't want to learn some "new-fangled" substitute from the start. There's still people that swear by VMS, it's just human nature.
As for what I don't like about the Tcl language, it's mostly just a collection of small things, such as:
Operators can only be used if you have an implicit or explicit expr, and no assignment operators. You've got "set" and "incr", but it isn't as readable. Using "$" for variable substitutions but not for variable references is also not very readable.
Loads of naming inconsistencies. Just in the predefined commands, you've got words together with no separations ("msgcat"), words together separated by underscores ("auto_load"), mixed case *and* underscores ("tcl_endOfWord"), double colons ("pkg::create"). Then, string operations are grouped together in the "string" command, but you've got separate commands for list operations.
The -something options are ugly, in addition to a potential gotcha, because if you have something like "switch $var" everything will work fine until the content of var is, say, "-glob".
The "everything can be treated as a string" philosophy sometimes leads to strange results if your program logic has errors. I quite often had to use trial and error to fix this sort of problems.
From what I've seen, the internals of the Tcl environment (the interpreter, libraries and so on) are pretty solid and nicely done. Unfortunately the Tcl language itself is peculiar, dated and just not very good. I wish the Tcl people would consider a thorough backward-incompatible revamp of the language into something a bit less off-putting.
Language attempts to convey limited information about reality. That information is not just conveyed through the explicit meanings of individual words, but also through more complex means such as context, emphasis and innuendo.
"Technology Breeds Crime" places the emphasis on technology whereas "Crime Feeds On Technology" places the emphasis on crime. I would say this is a story more about crime than about technology, so the second is more appropriate.
Sure, and those newlywed human-robot couples will travel in their flying cars to the Space Elevator to spend their honeymoon in Europa's famed tropical resorts.
Seriously, what's with all these long term technological "predictions"? We barely have any idea about what technology look like in 10 years, let alone 50. Personally, when I see any "expert" saying so-and-so technology will be available in 5 or more years, I just stop paying attention.
Sure, but Wikipedia's goal is not to produce new scientific breakthroughs, but to document current knowledge.
In the scientific world, you can judge the validity of theories or try to reproduce experimental results in those areas in which you are an expert. For anything else, your best bet for getting as close to the truth as feasible is relying on the consensus. And, as I said, I think this works pretty well.
I think reaching the truth via consensus is realistic; it seems to work pretty well in the scientific world. The problem with Wikipedia is that each editor self-selects himself to work on the tiny part of Wikipedia he wants to, and so people with an agenda are overrepresented in some articles. I do agree that people with agendas using legalism to try to weed out dissenting opinions seems to be one of Wikipedia's biggest problems (and I'm not even an editor).
as long as ZFS itself, the CPU, and RAM are working correctly, no other errors can corrupt ZFS data.
Sorry, but that is absurd. Nothing can absolutely protect against data errors (even if they only happen in the hard disk). For example, errors can corrupt ZFS data in a way that turns out to have the same checksum. Or errors can corrupt both the data and the checksum so they match each other.
The correct Spanish word for mountain is montaña, not a plain n but n with ~ on top.
That is correct.
Going on an offtopic tangent, I find it funny how many Spanish-derived English words have seemingly been adapted from their Spanish spelling, rather than from their pronunciation, as you would perhaps expect. Montana is a good example; if it had been adapted from the pronunciation it would have been something like montanja. Also Texas or Mexico: they have kept the spelling from a time, a few centuries ago, when in Spanish the "x" represented the gutural sound usually written as "kh" in English. Of course, English speakers now pronounce the "x" in Texas or Mexico as "ks", which has precisely nothing to do with the original pronunciation. There are many more examples of this.
I or anyone else who uses the BSD license for their work would probably not mind if someone took their source and did not contribute back changes
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Surely the whole fracas is ostensibly about Theo and others minding quite a bit about not getting back changes in a way they can use.
Perhaps what Theo wants is a greater dialogue and sharing between the OSS communities
If so, perhaps he should try to start the dialogue with something other than "Hey dude, you stole our stuff". Just sayin'.
I don't think the BSD camp is interested in enforcing code sharing, my interpretation of things is that the BSD camp would like some contributions back on an ethical basis.
So apparently they think it's wrong to demand legally what they believe it's right ethically. Furthermore, they demand other things legally, just not what they actually want. And when it turns out that people outside the BSD camp don't follow that twisted logic, it's time to call them names.
Well, their apparent position makes absolutely no sense to me, so perhaps I'm misrepresenting it. If so, perhaps someone more familiar with it can make me see where I've got it wrong.
It's really this simple: there is no clause in the BSD license to enforce code-sharing. In fact, this is perhaps the major difference between the BSD license and the GPL, and has been often touted as an ethical advantage by many BSD license proponents. Now apparently some of them have decided that they would like to enforce code-sharing after all, but through moaning and name-calling instead of making their demands explicit in the license.
Well, cry me a river. A license is a legal document and if you agree to one without knowing what you're doing, it's no one's fault but your own.
Haha. You totally pwned that kid. That'll teach him to trust you when he wants to learn something. </sarcasm>
I'm sorry, but I've never understood the joy some people find in deceiving children who come to them with honest questions. Those kids want to learn the truth and you tell them a lie for your own amusement while pretending to help them.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly what the article is saying, and clearly you are missing the point. They aren't really complaining about students that learning enough languages, but rather that students aren't being shown the bigger picture.
I disagree. The training/teaching thing is just a red herring they've used to make people uncritically accept their main point, which is this:
As faculty members at New York University for decades, we have regretted the introduction of Java as a first language of instruction for most computer science majors.
They're complaining about Java being used as the introductory programming language for people who didn't previously know programming. They would like to saddle new programmers with such concepts as pointers and hardware-based optimisation (as opposed to optimisation based on computational complexity), or worse, with the pointlessly verbose and annoying syntax of Ada. Of course, that would benefit those professors as they've commited themselves to technologies that demand those particular skills. I'm not so sure it would benefit the students, and those concepts certainly don't belong in an introductory programming course, which is for example why MIT has long introduced people to programming using Lisp, which doesn't have pointers or complex syntax.
But then again, what can you expect from guys like these professors who say things like this with (I assume) a straight face:
Ada is the language of software engineering par excellence.
Excuse me while I puke.
Well, of course learning Java will not help you with languages intended to be "high level assembler" like C, just like learning C will not help you with languages intended to be compiled to bytecode and executed under a VM like Java or C#. How that makes C the "solid language" and Java the usurper, I don't know. And here's a radical concept: what about learning both types of languages? You know, the purpose of education being to provide a wide-ranging vision and not just with what your teacher happens to like.
I haven't read TFA (this being Slashdot and all), but if those professors actually mention Ada as a better language for teaching than Java, I wouldn't trust anything else they say, because they obviously stopped caring about the evolution of Computer Science at some point in the 80s.
It's such lame and dishonest branding the marketing group should be ashamed.
I'm sure they will be ashamed all the way to the bank. Let's face it, Microsoft marketing does these things because they work, as proven by Microsoft's success.
For what is worth, I would make exactly the same comment about Perl.
For what is worth, a lot of experienced people are fans of obscure antique technologies, because that's what they specialized on and they don't want to learn some "new-fangled" substitute from the start. There's still people that swear by VMS, it's just human nature.
As for what I don't like about the Tcl language, it's mostly just a collection of small things, such as:
From what I've seen, the internals of the Tcl environment (the interpreter, libraries and so on) are pretty solid and nicely done. Unfortunately the Tcl language itself is peculiar, dated and just not very good. I wish the Tcl people would consider a thorough backward-incompatible revamp of the language into something a bit less off-putting.
This mail, which was linked from the summary, asks: "Why would they go to all this trouble to hide Windows Binary support?"
HTH.
But why would they try to hide this capability if that was the reason?
My guess would be that, backstab and all, Google makes more money this way than if they withdrew from China.
I would have enjoyed a few KISS songs on how The Man is being let down by "college kids". "Obey the law or be sued" would make for a catchy refrain.
The summary should include a link to the report itself.
I've been living and working in Germany for about a month now
Isn't it a bit early to make that sort of general statements about Germany?
Language attempts to convey limited information about reality. That information is not just conveyed through the explicit meanings of individual words, but also through more complex means such as context, emphasis and innuendo.
"Technology Breeds Crime" places the emphasis on technology whereas "Crime Feeds On Technology" places the emphasis on crime. I would say this is a story more about crime than about technology, so the second is more appropriate.
Sure, and those newlywed human-robot couples will travel in their flying cars to the Space Elevator to spend their honeymoon in Europa's famed tropical resorts.
Seriously, what's with all these long term technological "predictions"? We barely have any idea about what technology look like in 10 years, let alone 50. Personally, when I see any "expert" saying so-and-so technology will be available in 5 or more years, I just stop paying attention.
I can't see how anyone could complain about it.
You only say that because you want to keep your Internet connection.
Sure, but Wikipedia's goal is not to produce new scientific breakthroughs, but to document current knowledge.
In the scientific world, you can judge the validity of theories or try to reproduce experimental results in those areas in which you are an expert. For anything else, your best bet for getting as close to the truth as feasible is relying on the consensus. And, as I said, I think this works pretty well.
I think reaching the truth via consensus is realistic; it seems to work pretty well in the scientific world. The problem with Wikipedia is that each editor self-selects himself to work on the tiny part of Wikipedia he wants to, and so people with an agenda are overrepresented in some articles. I do agree that people with agendas using legalism to try to weed out dissenting opinions seems to be one of Wikipedia's biggest problems (and I'm not even an editor).
as long as ZFS itself, the CPU, and RAM are working correctly, no other errors can corrupt ZFS data.
Sorry, but that is absurd. Nothing can absolutely protect against data errors (even if they only happen in the hard disk). For example, errors can corrupt ZFS data in a way that turns out to have the same checksum. Or errors can corrupt both the data and the checksum so they match each other.
This is ECC 101 really.
Cue the "the server must be written in Pascal" jokes...
Here's a MirrorDot link for the FreePascal site.
The correct Spanish word for mountain is montaña, not a plain n but n with ~ on top.
That is correct.
Going on an offtopic tangent, I find it funny how many Spanish-derived English words have seemingly been adapted from their Spanish spelling, rather than from their pronunciation, as you would perhaps expect. Montana is a good example; if it had been adapted from the pronunciation it would have been something like montanja. Also Texas or Mexico: they have kept the spelling from a time, a few centuries ago, when in Spanish the "x" represented the gutural sound usually written as "kh" in English. Of course, English speakers now pronounce the "x" in Texas or Mexico as "ks", which has precisely nothing to do with the original pronunciation. There are many more examples of this.
I or anyone else who uses the BSD license for their work would probably not mind if someone took their source and did not contribute back changes
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Surely the whole fracas is ostensibly about Theo and others minding quite a bit about not getting back changes in a way they can use.
Perhaps what Theo wants is a greater dialogue and sharing between the OSS communities
If so, perhaps he should try to start the dialogue with something other than "Hey dude, you stole our stuff". Just sayin'.
I don't think the BSD camp is interested in enforcing code sharing, my interpretation of things is that the BSD camp would like some contributions back on an ethical basis.
So apparently they think it's wrong to demand legally what they believe it's right ethically. Furthermore, they demand other things legally, just not what they actually want. And when it turns out that people outside the BSD camp don't follow that twisted logic, it's time to call them names.
Well, their apparent position makes absolutely no sense to me, so perhaps I'm misrepresenting it. If so, perhaps someone more familiar with it can make me see where I've got it wrong.
It's really this simple: there is no clause in the BSD license to enforce code-sharing. In fact, this is perhaps the major difference between the BSD license and the GPL, and has been often touted as an ethical advantage by many BSD license proponents. Now apparently some of them have decided that they would like to enforce code-sharing after all, but through moaning and name-calling instead of making their demands explicit in the license.
Well, cry me a river. A license is a legal document and if you agree to one without knowing what you're doing, it's no one's fault but your own.
I can't believe nobody (at least at +3 and above) has linked yet to the FCC song.
Haha. You totally pwned that kid. That'll teach him to trust you when he wants to learn something. </sarcasm>
I'm sorry, but I've never understood the joy some people find in deceiving children who come to them with honest questions. Those kids want to learn the truth and you tell them a lie for your own amusement while pretending to help them.
It's just like religion.