The thing I find more amazing than an anonymous coward claiming to know Amazon's backend better than Amazon's chief technologist does, and saying "omg your system isn't nearly as clean as you say it is," is that other people at Slashdot are actually moderating him up.
I've actually seen Amazon's backend codebase, and it's remarkably cleanly modular. Whereas I suspect that cleanliness has been built progressively over the years, it becomes quite clear that Amazon believes deeply that seperating modules has an extreme importance; they've gone so much further with modularization than anything I've ever seen that it just boggles my mind to see some AC claiming otherwise.
In terms of software complexity, Amazon, by several orders of magnitude. In terms of hardware deployment, Google, by several orders of magnitude. The bulk of google's hardware is a huge replicated cluster performing parallel work.
Actually, some people did have that attitude - have you ever heard of the vaccuum tube vs. transistor debates in the sound field when transistor radios came out and still go on to this day?
That's a fidelity issue. That has absolutely nothing to do with whether transistors are useful. This is simply an observation that vacuum tubes have a characteristic impact on the domain of sound. Because that impact is reflexive - it's exactly opposite in production than recording - then when music is recorded with tubes, it will only sound correct reproduced with tubes. Have you ever noticed that the only people saying these things are the people listening to music recorded with tubes?
Either way, transistors weren't applied to sound generation for seven years (contact-point transistor was December 1947; Regency TR-1, the first transistor radio, was November 1956) after they were invented. That's a complete non-sequitor, and nobody in Bell Labs said "wow, we have a solid state switch that works at the frequency of electricity, but it's not going to be useful because two presidents from now someone's going to notice it has different sound reproduction characteristics."
I didn't say everyone had that attitude, but I should have specified some, and certainly in some niches.
Ahem. Until you can show even one person from the era of the transistor's invention having that attitude, you're still guessing. It's just false. Find me just one person saying that. When you realize nobody ever said "wow this thing that costs one tenth of a cent replacing twelve dollar vacuum tubes which works several orders of magnitude faster, doesn't die and takes several orders of magnitude less space, allowing machines which cost tens of millions of dollars to be produced for several hundred thousand is fairly pointless," you'll begin to understand why people get annoyed when you wave your hands speculating.
The only people who even knew about the transistor back then were the people involved in the kind of industry which made it blatantly obvious how important they were. You want to say there was a substantial minority of people yawning loudly? I'm calling bullshit. Find me one or quit lying through your teeth.
Guessing doesn't make you smart. Please talk about what you know about only.
Oh wow, he can repeat what I said while he's still guessing. I bet you think you're making a point. Rather than being coy, try spelling it out: exactly what guess do you believe that I've made? Or, do you just think saying "no you" makes you a master debater?
It's admittedly relatively amusing that you could mis-duplicate that sentence and break the grammar, though.
In all of the cases shown in the article (yes, I acually read TFA), I didn't spot an example where it actually showed anything useful.
Maybe you should have read TFA more carefully, as it in fact gives two specific cases of utility.
I'm not sure that the other graphics look more informative. They are all pretty, but if they do not convey information (and not lose a large amount of relevant information), then they are just a nice way to generate patterns for some nerd's tie.
Do not confuse your infamiliarity with the data being graphed with the inability to derive information from the graphs. The height of hubris is to look at the part of someone's work which they present as pretty and to say "why, I don't see how that's anything other than pretty." Of course you don't. You're not in their field.
Why didn't they give more data? Hm: maybe because they want you to buy the magazine. I base this on that the entire fourth paragraph says "if you want more information, buy the magazine."
I suggest that you begin to distinguish reading an article from skimming an article. As your current depth of observation shows, assuming that when you're interested you read carefully of course, they give quite different qualities of comprehension.
Isn't that kind of subjective? I mean, what's simple to one person...
Er, no. Complexity isn't the study of things that make you think hard. Complexity is the mathematical study of the uprising of effects from complex systems. Some computer scientists are familiar with a subset of this under the heading "emergent behavior." Weather is the result of complexity, as are volcanoes. Mutation is complexity. Radiation is complexity. This is one of those times at which the word is different when used as a label.
Complexity is in fact a fundamental part of our universe, if one subscribes to quantum mechanics.
The best part about you saying "yawn, seen it before" is that that's the same thing people are saying about your post. The difference is that the article gave us a few mildly pretty pictures to look at.
Yeah, Hitler, Mother Theresa and Abe Vogoda. Identical, I tell you; no difference in their behavior at all. In other news, we're also not as complex as the sum set of possible interactions of our atoms, or of a gigantic bag of legos.
I don't know much about chaos theory, but it mentions something along the lines of the sinple behaviour of complex systems and the complex behaviour of simple systems.
No, it doesn't. Chaos theory discusses the predictability locusses of confluent systems and the divergent behavior of attractors. Saying that that's discussing the complex behavior of simple systems is like saying that cars work by lighting dead plant matter on fire. It's such an absurd reduction that it carries no content. Please don't pose.
Thinking deeper, I am not sure which category this falls into.
The book chaos has exactly nothing to do with these images; it's about the unpredictable nature of confluent dynamic systems, not the pattern analysis of data in a graphic fashion. It's difficult to think of a mathematically oriented book which is actually less related to these images. Please don't pose.
He's talking about Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science." I tried to read the book four times. I can't get past chapter two without flipping out. The man spends the entire book wanking about how great he is. (That he actually is great doesn't make the book any less unpleasant.) It's honestly quite frustrating - I love automata and I really want to know what is in that book.
The reason they have hard screens is that the edge feeding circuits are inflexible. This is a reasonable, real-world flexible circuit. LCD and OLED screens aren't by their nature rigid; they're just plastic bubbles full of goo. This is (other than scratch resistance and the power supply, both of which are solvable but ugly) the last major barrier to rollable screens.
Er, no, they didn't. The importance of switching was well established by the time Bardeen/Shockley/Brattain did their work. Computers were already tremendously valuable, and the value of switching from vacuum tubes, which died on the order of a week and were at that time around the side of a lighter, to transistors, which even then could be clustered to a hundred in the size of a penny, was immediately obvious. Their boss at Bell Labs publically stated a week after the discovery that he thought it would be remembered as the most important discovery of the century.
Guessing doesn't make you smart. Please talk about what you know about only, thanks.
Actually, the Arm9 and Arm7 in the DS run so cool that you could touch them directly and you wouldn't notice the difference between on and off. The heat coming out of your DS is a combination of the battery (~70%) and the screen (~30%).
First, I'd like to express thanks at what has become a rather pleasent and certainly very interesting discussion. To my mind, arguments are only useful if you learn something from them.
It's rare for someone to be so polite here. Thank you in turn for the recognition.
I rather suspect that macros are used exensively and to rather good effect.
Boost::Lambda is primarily seriously scary template magic.
The problem with mixing these two purposes arises when you start calling methods from the constructor, before the fields are set. In other words, from a Design by Contract point of view, if you call a method before the invariant is valid. This means that the method called cannot assume the invariant is true. Worse, that method can call others.
Actually, through my dumb luck the example you've chosen is a wonderful case of why C++ is so strict. C++ has extremely concrete rules about in what order things occur in a constructor. Object construction occurs before execution begins. The initialization pass is indeed part of the constructor, but it occurs before functional behavior starts. In C++, the equivalent is:
class Widget { public: Widget(int foo); private: int bar; }; Widget::Widget(int foo) : bar(foo) {/* do stuff */ }
The important bit here is that C++ actually guarantees in what order initialization happens. For pragmatic reasons I won't get into here, C++ requires initialization to happen in declaration order; therefore in class foo { int a; int b; int c; };, initialization must occur in the order a,b,c . (Most compilers will let you get away with the constructor foo::foo() : c(1), b(1), a(1) {} and just do it in the correct order for you, but that's technically illegal, and a compiler on extreme strict mode should complain and shut off.)
So, sure, this is a thing that bites novice C++ programmers in the ass fairly frequently. However, since the language makes guarantees, an experienced C++ programmer can actually make an object which is only partially constructed call parts of itself quite happily. Furthermore, there are steps one can take to make it quite a bit safer, such as when the thing one is calling doesn't need object state, making it static, which should always be safe from a constructor (it's possible to make that unsafe, but you have to try pretty hard, and it's not possible IMO in realistic code.)
So, yeah, I guess in one sense you could say that C++ makes this split too. However, instead of making it two seperate methods, it's two distinct passes of one method. This has the advantage of a single constructor call, which means less passing stuff around on the stack, fewer copies, et cetera. In terms of efficiency, constructors are often pretty seriously important. Whereas efficiency isn't that big a deal in Python, since C++ is intended to be suitable for embedded and realtime programming, it's really an important difference.
I suspect not, since C++ constructors are not inherited
Er, yes they are.
#include <iostream>
class Base { public: Base() { std::cout << "Hello, "; } }; class Derived : Base { public: Derived() { std::cout << "world!\n"; } };
int main() { Derived d; }
Actually, C-based CGI is still more common than C++ and Java web applications put together, even given beans and tomcat and whatever else. Referring to "the usual choice" is called argumentum ad antiquitatem (a form of ad populum.) The reason I chose C++ is simply because people are frequently familiar with the superficial benefits I had previously relied on.
Hm? Do you have any statistical sources to back that up?
You know, I just saw numbers on this about two months ago; someone used them to put me in my place. Unfortunately, for the life of me I can't find them (I've been trying for the last 20 minutes,) so I
You would do well to toy with your optimization settings; GCC can be coerced into doing the right thing here. Do not forget that a compiler's behavior when creating machine code is heavily human-governed.
What's wrong with Ruby, as a replacement for a very ugly language called Perl?
What's wrong with a Gremlin as a replacement for a Yugo? What's wrong with rancid meat as a replacement for rotten meat? Or, since this is SlashDot, what's wrong with Mussolini as a replacement for Hitler?
Just because there's something worse doesn't mean the thing one references is good.
Key word is "relatively." C is low level compared to languages such as Java and C#
C is low-level compared to almost everything except assembly. Do remember please that when that quote was written in the 1970s, Java and C# would have seemed absurd and unrealistic.
Raistlin Magere is a character with 22 years of history. Billy West was talking about inventing characters to suit specific actors (Dreamworks in particular does this quite often in their ensemble films.) Big difference. The Dragonlance series of novels started in February of 1984; the Raistlin character is actually older, having begun in game supplements which sparked the establishment of that campaign world. I have one article from Dragon Magazine using the name in 1982, but it may be older than that. By contrast, Kiefer Sutherland's career starts in late 1983, and arguably his first significant part is in late 1986 in Stand By Me, or The Lost Boys in early 1987.
Raistlin was not invented to fit Kiefer. Billy west was talking about Mastodon Latifah from Ice Age, and that kind of nonsense. That slashdotters are saying there are better people for the role pretty much obviates that the role was built to suit Kiefer, don't you think?
I assume you're including the functionality of specialist preprocessors in that list, but even so you have listed a few items of which I was previously unaware. A quick Google search for lambda expressions in C++ brings up preprocessors such as Clamp, which seem rather interesting indeed.
Clamp notwithstanding, actually no: I don't consider preprocessors other than the one that's part of the language as a fair candidate for talking about what a language can do. For pure-C++ lambda, the best (though not the only) example is Boost Lambda.
That said, I have to be careful here. A while ago, I pointed out that one of the advantages of Python over Java was its mutable classes (which could also potentially be a disadvantage as well, but I digress). The person I was discussing this pointed out this wasn't the case, informing me that one could dynamically alter a class at runtime by altering the JVM bytecode. Whilst this was technically true, there's a large difference in practicality between a single line of "Foobar.new_method = method_impl", and a page of Java code manipulating the bytecode of a class.
I agree with you: whoever was discussing with you is taking what I believe to be an unreasonable stance, namely that of suggesting the alteration of the binary as a candidate for a language feature. That said, in C++ what you want to do is relatively easy to replicate, provided that if it's a function you know the signature you're calling (it's possible, but harder, if you don't;) just keep a map or a hash to Boost::Any (or if you need to be stabbed in the stomach, void pointers,) fill it with members and function pointers, and then overload operator->.
This is why I think C++'s flexibility is vastly underrated: things like that are easy to hack, if you're comfortable with the language.
I'm interested in the compile-time metaprogramming you mention. Perhaps you could point me toward some resources?
I don't actually know of any good ones online, though I've not looked for them. By far the best example I'm aware of is the book Modern C++ Design, which is both an excellent book and which covers quite a few other tremendously powerful techniques, such as template-based policy modules, typelists and type traits, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
I'm aware of the capabilities of templates
With all due respect, I used to say the same thing, and I was just dead wrong. For example, compile-time metaprogramming is accomplished using templates. What most people don't realize - what I didn't realize until I read that book - is that templates are when carefully used in fact a fully distinct third language within C++ (the first two being c++ itself and the macro preprocessor,) and that they create a radically different environment than traditional C++ does.
Do you know of many more preprocessors like Clamp? I'm something of a language nut, and learning something new about a language I thought I was reasonably familiar with is always very interesting.
I refuse to use tools like Clamp. Just a personal thing. Besides, C++ is large enough that, despite having 7 years of heavy industrial use under my belt, I'm still learning things in it at just a remarkable rate.
That all said, I still disagree with your assertion. Runtime metaprogramming can be very useful, especially with higher level functions (or partial functions, as some people apparently refer to them).
My assertion was simply that C++ is more powerful than most people expect. Runtime metaprogramming, well, I've never seen a definition of runtime metaprogramming which I was able to get much traction out of. Each time, people will give me an example, I'll show them how to do that in traditional languages, and they'll tell me I'm missing the point, which I quite possibly am.
The germane difficulty is that compile-time metaprogrammin
Los Angeles had a population of 9,519,338 at the 2000 census, and a current population estimate of 9,935,475. In 1960, the population at census was 6,038,771.
LA has a population of less than 4 million now. The second sentence in the wikipedia article on Los Angeles reads: "As of the 2005 U.S. Census estimate, the city had a population of 3.8 million.".
There's just something special about someone who will ignore three links into to the census page, and instead insist on a community collaboration effort which says it's derived from the census. Your ability for self deception is fantastic. That you spend half of your response ranting about Juniper Serra - you should do less of your research on Wikipedia, which is just built by other people like you - is indicative of quite a bit.
Neither of the links you provided contain you what claim they contain. One of the cited pages lists the population for a wide region which includes Long Beach! That is not Los Angeles!
It's called "Los Angeles County." Not very interested in understanding, are we?
First, they were missions, not monasteries--the two are completely different
I said monasteries for a reason. Get a history book.
and the nearest monastery was thousands of miles away.
Nonsense.
There is no method called the "McConnell/Sullivan method".
Don't be an ass. I linked to the books I was talking about. I just didn't feel like writing out six titles over and over.
Microsoft's turn toward agile methods is very recent.
As the various links I gave you point out, it was end 2002, beginning 2003. In software terms, that isn't recent, and the products you cite as examples start within that time frame.
I've got four life critical applications under active use, and have formal training in six different software engineering methodologies, two of whom are military.
Clap, clap, clap...
Huhu. First you demand to know what I've done, then you act like I'm bragging to answer you. What a loser.
Umm... try reading the sentence you're responding to. Try to understand it.
Snide comments don't make you any clearer. If people reading can't understand the writer, it's the writer's fault. You've said exactly nothing of value here.
I find it amusing how you've managed to make an entire reply out of tangents, and ignored all the industry data I gave you, and yet you've still managed to convince yourself that you're somehow giving deep and meaningful observations about an industry which just doesn't work the way you want to pretend it works, then followed through on a post that says "if you won't give facts, don't respond" by responding without facts, and screaming "no you" as loud as you can. Save myself what embarrassment? Do you honestly believe you've made a point here?
What advantage does C++ have over, say, Java for programming web applications in?
Well, the comparison was between C++ and RoR. The advantages I was citing are equally well held by Java. The advantages I believe in as regards C++ versus Java are typical holy war nonsense (I dislike Java.) There is a minor but not significant advantage for C++ in terms of the number of available libraries. That said, Java fills out my statements to the grandparent post in the same way that C++ does. Actually, there's a good argument that Java is better suited to the web than C++, because of its deep integration of sockets and things like Tomcat and Beans. I would tend to argue what I just said, but it is a viable argument and is contextually appropriate.
The issue I was citing was compiled languages versus quick-assembly toolkits, on terms that large applications would benefit far more from strict static analysis than they would from a quick grammar and extant boilerplate. In this way, C++, Java, Delphi, C#, ASP.Net and quite a few other languages offer the same set of referred-to advantages.
The other difficulty I have with C++ is that it's not particularly powerful, in terms of syntax and control structures, as some other languages, such as Python or Ruby.
I just don't agree. C++'s syntax is so powerful that many major language features have been implemented directly in native syntax, something I've never seen in any other language except Lisp and Lisp descendants, including aspects, properties, the lambda calculus, closures, compile-time metaprogramming, coroutines, inline lexing, message-based concurrency and so on.
I recommend highly that you familiarize yourself with modern C++ methods. It's quite a bit more powerful language than most people realize. A good book to start with is Modern C++ Design.
When you don't particularly need the efficiency that C++ offers, why favour a more syntaxically restrictive language?
Well, for one I don't believe it's syntactically restricted. However, syntax is a comparatively minor component of a language; more important in this case is the specific advantage I cited, that of very strict static analysis. On these terms, very few languages can compete with C++; it is one of the strictest languages on Earth, when used skillfully.
In my experience, very few bugs disappear.
Er. How many times have you actually replaced a rapid-development web toolkit with a fully statically compiled application? I don't mean to seem rude, but this is experience that almost nobody has in the first place.
However, if you find that this is the case, why use dynamically typed languages such as PHP and Erlang?
Because different tools are appropriate for different jobs. I wouldn't use PHP for a large web application. Erlang is a very special case, and has such a weird benefit/detriment pattern that I don't honestly want to get into it. Suffice it to say that I'd use Erlang where pattern analysis, list comprehensions, or linear scaling across a huge number of users were my primary concerns.
And there are surely languages that have stricter rulesets than C++; Eiffel, for instance, which is compiled, and strongly and statically typed, with design-by-contract built in
Contracts are easily implemented in C/C++, and actually, no, Eiffel is nowhere near as strict as C++ is. Yes, there are a few languages stricter than C++ is, such as Clean, Mozart/OZ and Forth; however, what I was trying to do was to make an example, and given that most people are at least passingly familiar with C++, it just makes a better example.
To be plain, I'm Joseph Conrad. It doesn't matter if my native language is Polish; I'm in America, so I write in English. Sure, there are better examples than C++, but they're too little known (in my opinion) to make good examples.
Honestly, if you think the PS3 is going to be monster hit at that price I'd say you should start looking in the mirror to see who is the fanboy.
Er, I don't, and moreover I never used the word fanboy. I said nothing about the PS3 at all. I just commented on my opinion regarding one man's media tirade. Where is this coming from?
Well, the last time I looked at the consumer market I saw a fickle group that is more than willing to jump on whatever the "hot" trend is.
Have another look. The PS2 is outselling the XBox360 almost four to one, and has never been outsold by the 360, even during the month it was first introduced. That fickle group isn't nearly as fickle as you imagine, and the statistics are easy to come by.
They will sell out at first because there are enough early adopters out there, but at the premium they are asking they won't sustain that level of sales for long past the holidays.
Amusingly, I remember the same thing being said about the PS1 and the PS2. I tend to agree with you, actually; I think the price will be a big problem. I've run the numbers, and it's my personal estimate that Sony is overdoing their market predictions by a little over 60%. I believe Sony is pulling a Neo-Geo. I don't understand why you're accusing me otherwise.
That said, I think you need to realize that you're not a market analyst; indeed I suspect you haven't ever actually looked at price-gauged trend data for consoles. You're speaking in firmaments when you're not apparently even passingly familiar with sales data. I don't understand why everyone thinks they're a marketer. If you understand the market so well, just short Sony's stock; the Playstation brand, including software, licenses and hardware, currently accounts for almost 35% of Sony's income. If the machine tanks as badly as you suggest, it'll do the company tremendous damage. If my personal estimates are correct, it's easy to calculate the actual damage, which weighs in at about $450m in the first six months (I'm not willing to estimate further than that, as that's the point at which price points traditionally start getting changed.) You would be rich in a matter of months.
And, frankly, you condescending to me about guesses you made about my opinions which aren't actually correct is a bit too boring to follow through on, so don't bother to reply, please.
- You don't like ad hominem attacks when they're directed at you, but you're perfectly prepared to sling them liberally in the direction of Mr. Minter.
I can't decide whether it's more amusing that you'd say that after resorting to the same, or whether it's just that you can't sort out the difference between an accusatory blog post and a discussion. I'm fine with ad hominem attacks. I am not fine with their being used to support arguments. The difference is enormous.
This appears to be a common theme in your line of reasoning.
Given that your accusation doesn't find itself correct there, I'd be interested to learn in what other places you believe I'm being a hypocrite. I suspect they're equally vapid.
- You accuse Jeff Minter of being a "nobody", and yet I'll wager that far more people in the industry have respect for him than have even heard of you.
That's a wager you'd lose. Jeff Minter is not respected. He is reviled. The average Joe Nobody on the street would win that bet, and I'm not Joe Nobody, your condescending tone applied to someone you know nothing of notwithstanding. It may interest you to know that I've been on G4 twice, so that you can free yourself from your nonsense guesses that I have no position to speak of.
I'm a little tired of the ongoing personal attacks in the stead of actual counterpoint. I know you're having trouble with this, so let me explain it again: there's nothing wrong with personal attacks. However, when you make guesses about a person and then say "wow anyone like my guesses is a douche," you really end up just looking foolish, and wasting other people's time.
If you have something to say about what I said, go ahead. If you have more to say about me, don't bother. I have games on the market, and I'm not even in the games industry. Until you reveal what your work is, your attempt to make me feel like an outsider simply fails; I've been saying I'm an outsider all along, and given your bearing, I suspect I'm still more successful in gaming than you are. Feel free to tell me what you've worked on in order to make your attempts at seeming like an authority ring something other than hollow. Don't bother attacking me anymore.
- You claim that Jeff Minter is "despised" in the games industry. That's news to me, and I've been in the industry for over 11 years.
I don't believe you, to be frank. It's a bit like the people in Chicago who would write into newspapers and claim that they were deeply involved in the local political scene, and couldn't imagine that Al Capone would be anything other than a paragon of virtue in the eyes of the law. All sorts of people who wanted to pat themselves on the back about being in touch did exactly that; they could not imagine that there was something going on which they didn't know about. Meanwhile, these people were essentially just wasting their time; nobody took them seriously, because the vast majority of them were themselves utter nobodies just straining to get someone to believe they were an expert.
If you want to look like an authority, don't say you've been in the industry for some amount of time. Hell, you've been in the industry less than a third as long as the person I'm currently claiming is a nobody; I can't imagine why you'd think that would impress me. Brian Reynolds impressed me six months after he entered the market, by generating a genuinely fun and highly profitable game without massive technology investments.
Either stand on your work, or sit down. Tubthumping is annoying. Nobody cares how long you've been around; only what you've done. You sit there screaming about my complete lack of hits (which in fact isn't true,) yet you claim to be in a much stronger position than I am.
Time to put up, or to shut up. Exactly what games have you been lead on? I'm happy to assume that you haven't said so before through omission or because you didn't believe it was important. If you cont
Slashdot Mirror
Myopic vision on his behalf imo.
The thing I find more amazing than an anonymous coward claiming to know Amazon's backend better than Amazon's chief technologist does, and saying "omg your system isn't nearly as clean as you say it is," is that other people at Slashdot are actually moderating him up.
I've actually seen Amazon's backend codebase, and it's remarkably cleanly modular. Whereas I suspect that cleanliness has been built progressively over the years, it becomes quite clear that Amazon believes deeply that seperating modules has an extreme importance; they've gone so much further with modularization than anything I've ever seen that it just boggles my mind to see some AC claiming otherwise.
I'm calling BS.
In terms of software complexity, Amazon, by several orders of magnitude. In terms of hardware deployment, Google, by several orders of magnitude. The bulk of google's hardware is a huge replicated cluster performing parallel work.
So, it depends a lot on how you define "bigger."
Actually, some people did have that attitude - have you ever heard of the vaccuum tube vs. transistor debates in the sound field when transistor radios came out and still go on to this day?
That's a fidelity issue. That has absolutely nothing to do with whether transistors are useful. This is simply an observation that vacuum tubes have a characteristic impact on the domain of sound. Because that impact is reflexive - it's exactly opposite in production than recording - then when music is recorded with tubes, it will only sound correct reproduced with tubes. Have you ever noticed that the only people saying these things are the people listening to music recorded with tubes?
Either way, transistors weren't applied to sound generation for seven years (contact-point transistor was December 1947; Regency TR-1, the first transistor radio, was November 1956) after they were invented. That's a complete non-sequitor, and nobody in Bell Labs said "wow, we have a solid state switch that works at the frequency of electricity, but it's not going to be useful because two presidents from now someone's going to notice it has different sound reproduction characteristics."
I didn't say everyone had that attitude, but I should have specified some, and certainly in some niches.
Ahem. Until you can show even one person from the era of the transistor's invention having that attitude, you're still guessing. It's just false. Find me just one person saying that. When you realize nobody ever said "wow this thing that costs one tenth of a cent replacing twelve dollar vacuum tubes which works several orders of magnitude faster, doesn't die and takes several orders of magnitude less space, allowing machines which cost tens of millions of dollars to be produced for several hundred thousand is fairly pointless," you'll begin to understand why people get annoyed when you wave your hands speculating.
The only people who even knew about the transistor back then were the people involved in the kind of industry which made it blatantly obvious how important they were. You want to say there was a substantial minority of people yawning loudly? I'm calling bullshit. Find me one or quit lying through your teeth.
Guessing doesn't make you smart. Please talk about what you know about only.
Oh wow, he can repeat what I said while he's still guessing. I bet you think you're making a point. Rather than being coy, try spelling it out: exactly what guess do you believe that I've made? Or, do you just think saying "no you" makes you a master debater?
It's admittedly relatively amusing that you could mis-duplicate that sentence and break the grammar, though.
Yeah, probably because John Conway and his crowd beat you to the punch by 30 years.
In all of the cases shown in the article (yes, I acually read TFA), I didn't spot an example where it actually showed anything useful.
Maybe you should have read TFA more carefully, as it in fact gives two specific cases of utility.
I'm not sure that the other graphics look more informative. They are all pretty, but if they do not convey information (and not lose a large amount of relevant information), then they are just a nice way to generate patterns for some nerd's tie.
Do not confuse your infamiliarity with the data being graphed with the inability to derive information from the graphs. The height of hubris is to look at the part of someone's work which they present as pretty and to say "why, I don't see how that's anything other than pretty." Of course you don't. You're not in their field.
Why didn't they give more data? Hm: maybe because they want you to buy the magazine. I base this on that the entire fourth paragraph says "if you want more information, buy the magazine."
I suggest that you begin to distinguish reading an article from skimming an article. As your current depth of observation shows, assuming that when you're interested you read carefully of course, they give quite different qualities of comprehension.
Complexity is everywhere
Isn't that kind of subjective? I mean, what's simple to one person...
Er, no. Complexity isn't the study of things that make you think hard. Complexity is the mathematical study of the uprising of effects from complex systems. Some computer scientists are familiar with a subset of this under the heading "emergent behavior." Weather is the result of complexity, as are volcanoes. Mutation is complexity. Radiation is complexity. This is one of those times at which the word is different when used as a label.
Complexity is in fact a fundamental part of our universe, if one subscribes to quantum mechanics.
The best part about you saying "yawn, seen it before" is that that's the same thing people are saying about your post. The difference is that the article gave us a few mildly pretty pictures to look at.
Next time, try adding a joke or something.
Yeah, Hitler, Mother Theresa and Abe Vogoda. Identical, I tell you; no difference in their behavior at all. In other news, we're also not as complex as the sum set of possible interactions of our atoms, or of a gigantic bag of legos.
I don't know much about chaos theory, but it mentions something along the lines of the sinple behaviour of complex systems and the complex behaviour of simple systems.
No, it doesn't. Chaos theory discusses the predictability locusses of confluent systems and the divergent behavior of attractors. Saying that that's discussing the complex behavior of simple systems is like saying that cars work by lighting dead plant matter on fire. It's such an absurd reduction that it carries no content. Please don't pose.
Thinking deeper, I am not sure which category this falls into.
Neither.
The book chaos has exactly nothing to do with these images; it's about the unpredictable nature of confluent dynamic systems, not the pattern analysis of data in a graphic fashion. It's difficult to think of a mathematically oriented book which is actually less related to these images. Please don't pose.
He's talking about Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science." I tried to read the book four times. I can't get past chapter two without flipping out. The man spends the entire book wanking about how great he is. (That he actually is great doesn't make the book any less unpleasant.) It's honestly quite frustrating - I love automata and I really want to know what is in that book.
But, I just can't stand it.
Never seen a George Burns or a Vincent Price movie?
And Canada buys 2/3 of their export oil from ... wait for it ...
The reason they have hard screens is that the edge feeding circuits are inflexible. This is a reasonable, real-world flexible circuit. LCD and OLED screens aren't by their nature rigid; they're just plastic bubbles full of goo. This is (other than scratch resistance and the power supply, both of which are solvable but ugly) the last major barrier to rollable screens.
Er, no, they didn't. The importance of switching was well established by the time Bardeen/Shockley/Brattain did their work. Computers were already tremendously valuable, and the value of switching from vacuum tubes, which died on the order of a week and were at that time around the side of a lighter, to transistors, which even then could be clustered to a hundred in the size of a penny, was immediately obvious. Their boss at Bell Labs publically stated a week after the discovery that he thought it would be remembered as the most important discovery of the century.
Guessing doesn't make you smart. Please talk about what you know about only, thanks.
Actually, the Arm9 and Arm7 in the DS run so cool that you could touch them directly and you wouldn't notice the difference between on and off. The heat coming out of your DS is a combination of the battery (~70%) and the screen (~30%).
It's rare for someone to be so polite here. Thank you in turn for the recognition.
I rather suspect that macros are used exensively and to rather good effect.
Boost::Lambda is primarily seriously scary template magic.
The problem with mixing these two purposes arises when you start calling methods from the constructor, before the fields are set. In other words, from a Design by Contract point of view, if you call a method before the invariant is valid. This means that the method called cannot assume the invariant is true. Worse, that method can call others.
Actually, through my dumb luck the example you've chosen is a wonderful case of why C++ is so strict. C++ has extremely concrete rules about in what order things occur in a constructor. Object construction occurs before execution begins. The initialization pass is indeed part of the constructor, but it occurs before functional behavior starts. In C++, the equivalent is:
class Widget { public: Widget(int foo); private: int bar; };
Widget::Widget(int foo) : bar(foo) {
The important bit here is that C++ actually guarantees in what order initialization happens. For pragmatic reasons I won't get into here, C++ requires initialization to happen in declaration order; therefore in class foo { int a; int b; int c; };, initialization must occur in the order a,b,c . (Most compilers will let you get away with the constructor foo::foo() : c(1), b(1), a(1) {} and just do it in the correct order for you, but that's technically illegal, and a compiler on extreme strict mode should complain and shut off.)
So, sure, this is a thing that bites novice C++ programmers in the ass fairly frequently. However, since the language makes guarantees, an experienced C++ programmer can actually make an object which is only partially constructed call parts of itself quite happily. Furthermore, there are steps one can take to make it quite a bit safer, such as when the thing one is calling doesn't need object state, making it static, which should always be safe from a constructor (it's possible to make that unsafe, but you have to try pretty hard, and it's not possible IMO in realistic code.)
So, yeah, I guess in one sense you could say that C++ makes this split too. However, instead of making it two seperate methods, it's two distinct passes of one method. This has the advantage of a single constructor call, which means less passing stuff around on the stack, fewer copies, et cetera. In terms of efficiency, constructors are often pretty seriously important. Whereas efficiency isn't that big a deal in Python, since C++ is intended to be suitable for embedded and realtime programming, it's really an important difference.
I suspect not, since C++ constructors are not inherited
Er, yes they are.
#include <iostream>
class Base { public: Base() { std::cout << "Hello, "; } };
class Derived : Base { public: Derived() { std::cout << "world!\n"; } };
int main() { Derived d; }
Hm? Do you have any statistical sources to back that up?
You know, I just saw numbers on this about two months ago; someone used them to put me in my place. Unfortunately, for the life of me I can't find them (I've been trying for the last 20 minutes,) so I
You would do well to toy with your optimization settings; GCC can be coerced into doing the right thing here. Do not forget that a compiler's behavior when creating machine code is heavily human-governed.
What's wrong with Ruby, as a replacement for a very ugly language called Perl?
What's wrong with a Gremlin as a replacement for a Yugo? What's wrong with rancid meat as a replacement for rotten meat? Or, since this is SlashDot, what's wrong with Mussolini as a replacement for Hitler?
Just because there's something worse doesn't mean the thing one references is good.
Key word is "relatively." C is low level compared to languages such as Java and C#
C is low-level compared to almost everything except assembly. Do remember please that when that quote was written in the 1970s, Java and C# would have seemed absurd and unrealistic.
Raistlin Magere is a character with 22 years of history. Billy West was talking about inventing characters to suit specific actors (Dreamworks in particular does this quite often in their ensemble films.) Big difference. The Dragonlance series of novels started in February of 1984; the Raistlin character is actually older, having begun in game supplements which sparked the establishment of that campaign world. I have one article from Dragon Magazine using the name in 1982, but it may be older than that. By contrast, Kiefer Sutherland's career starts in late 1983, and arguably his first significant part is in late 1986 in Stand By Me, or The Lost Boys in early 1987.
Raistlin was not invented to fit Kiefer. Billy west was talking about Mastodon Latifah from Ice Age, and that kind of nonsense. That slashdotters are saying there are better people for the role pretty much obviates that the role was built to suit Kiefer, don't you think?
I assume you're including the functionality of specialist preprocessors in that list, but even so you have listed a few items of which I was previously unaware. A quick Google search for lambda expressions in C++ brings up preprocessors such as Clamp, which seem rather interesting indeed.
.
Clamp notwithstanding, actually no: I don't consider preprocessors other than the one that's part of the language as a fair candidate for talking about what a language can do. For pure-C++ lambda, the best (though not the only) example is Boost Lambda.
That said, I have to be careful here. A while ago, I pointed out that one of the advantages of Python over Java was its mutable classes (which could also potentially be a disadvantage as well, but I digress). The person I was discussing this pointed out this wasn't the case, informing me that one could dynamically alter a class at runtime by altering the JVM bytecode. Whilst this was technically true, there's a large difference in practicality between a single line of "Foobar.new_method = method_impl", and a page of Java code manipulating the bytecode of a class.
I agree with you: whoever was discussing with you is taking what I believe to be an unreasonable stance, namely that of suggesting the alteration of the binary as a candidate for a language feature. That said, in C++ what you want to do is relatively easy to replicate, provided that if it's a function you know the signature you're calling (it's possible, but harder, if you don't;) just keep a map or a hash to Boost::Any (or if you need to be stabbed in the stomach, void pointers,) fill it with members and function pointers, and then overload operator->
This is why I think C++'s flexibility is vastly underrated: things like that are easy to hack, if you're comfortable with the language.
I'm interested in the compile-time metaprogramming you mention. Perhaps you could point me toward some resources?
I don't actually know of any good ones online, though I've not looked for them. By far the best example I'm aware of is the book Modern C++ Design, which is both an excellent book and which covers quite a few other tremendously powerful techniques, such as template-based policy modules, typelists and type traits, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
I'm aware of the capabilities of templates
With all due respect, I used to say the same thing, and I was just dead wrong. For example, compile-time metaprogramming is accomplished using templates. What most people don't realize - what I didn't realize until I read that book - is that templates are when carefully used in fact a fully distinct third language within C++ (the first two being c++ itself and the macro preprocessor,) and that they create a radically different environment than traditional C++ does.
Do you know of many more preprocessors like Clamp? I'm something of a language nut, and learning something new about a language I thought I was reasonably familiar with is always very interesting.
I refuse to use tools like Clamp. Just a personal thing. Besides, C++ is large enough that, despite having 7 years of heavy industrial use under my belt, I'm still learning things in it at just a remarkable rate.
That all said, I still disagree with your assertion. Runtime metaprogramming can be very useful, especially with higher level functions (or partial functions, as some people apparently refer to them).
My assertion was simply that C++ is more powerful than most people expect. Runtime metaprogramming, well, I've never seen a definition of runtime metaprogramming which I was able to get much traction out of. Each time, people will give me an example, I'll show them how to do that in traditional languages, and they'll tell me I'm missing the point, which I quite possibly am.
The germane difficulty is that compile-time metaprogrammin
Los Angeles had a population of 9,519,338 at the 2000 census, and a current population estimate of 9,935,475. In 1960, the population at census was 6,038,771.
LA has a population of less than 4 million now. The second sentence in the wikipedia article on Los Angeles reads: "As of the 2005 U.S. Census estimate, the city had a population of 3.8 million.".
There's just something special about someone who will ignore three links into to the census page, and instead insist on a community collaboration effort which says it's derived from the census. Your ability for self deception is fantastic. That you spend half of your response ranting about Juniper Serra - you should do less of your research on Wikipedia, which is just built by other people like you - is indicative of quite a bit.
Neither of the links you provided contain you what claim they contain. One of the cited pages lists the population for a wide region which includes Long Beach! That is not Los Angeles!
It's called "Los Angeles County." Not very interested in understanding, are we?
First, they were missions, not monasteries--the two are completely different
I said monasteries for a reason. Get a history book.
and the nearest monastery was thousands of miles away.
Nonsense.
There is no method called the "McConnell/Sullivan method".
Don't be an ass. I linked to the books I was talking about. I just didn't feel like writing out six titles over and over.
Microsoft's turn toward agile methods is very recent.
As the various links I gave you point out, it was end 2002, beginning 2003. In software terms, that isn't recent, and the products you cite as examples start within that time frame.
I've got four life critical applications under active use, and have formal training in six different software engineering methodologies, two of whom are military.
Clap, clap, clap...
Huhu. First you demand to know what I've done, then you act like I'm bragging to answer you. What a loser.
Umm... try reading the sentence you're responding to. Try to understand it.
Snide comments don't make you any clearer. If people reading can't understand the writer, it's the writer's fault. You've said exactly nothing of value here.
I find it amusing how you've managed to make an entire reply out of tangents, and ignored all the industry data I gave you, and yet you've still managed to convince yourself that you're somehow giving deep and meaningful observations about an industry which just doesn't work the way you want to pretend it works, then followed through on a post that says "if you won't give facts, don't respond" by responding without facts, and screaming "no you" as loud as you can. Save myself what embarrassment? Do you honestly believe you've made a point here?
We're done here. Go try to impress someone else.
What advantage does C++ have over, say, Java for programming web applications in?
Well, the comparison was between C++ and RoR. The advantages I was citing are equally well held by Java. The advantages I believe in as regards C++ versus Java are typical holy war nonsense (I dislike Java.) There is a minor but not significant advantage for C++ in terms of the number of available libraries. That said, Java fills out my statements to the grandparent post in the same way that C++ does. Actually, there's a good argument that Java is better suited to the web than C++, because of its deep integration of sockets and things like Tomcat and Beans. I would tend to argue what I just said, but it is a viable argument and is contextually appropriate.
The issue I was citing was compiled languages versus quick-assembly toolkits, on terms that large applications would benefit far more from strict static analysis than they would from a quick grammar and extant boilerplate. In this way, C++, Java, Delphi, C#, ASP.Net and quite a few other languages offer the same set of referred-to advantages.
The other difficulty I have with C++ is that it's not particularly powerful, in terms of syntax and control structures, as some other languages, such as Python or Ruby.
I just don't agree. C++'s syntax is so powerful that many major language features have been implemented directly in native syntax, something I've never seen in any other language except Lisp and Lisp descendants, including aspects, properties, the lambda calculus, closures, compile-time metaprogramming, coroutines, inline lexing, message-based concurrency and so on.
I recommend highly that you familiarize yourself with modern C++ methods. It's quite a bit more powerful language than most people realize. A good book to start with is Modern C++ Design.
When you don't particularly need the efficiency that C++ offers, why favour a more syntaxically restrictive language?
Well, for one I don't believe it's syntactically restricted. However, syntax is a comparatively minor component of a language; more important in this case is the specific advantage I cited, that of very strict static analysis. On these terms, very few languages can compete with C++; it is one of the strictest languages on Earth, when used skillfully.
In my experience, very few bugs disappear.
Er. How many times have you actually replaced a rapid-development web toolkit with a fully statically compiled application? I don't mean to seem rude, but this is experience that almost nobody has in the first place.
However, if you find that this is the case, why use dynamically typed languages such as PHP and Erlang?
Because different tools are appropriate for different jobs. I wouldn't use PHP for a large web application. Erlang is a very special case, and has such a weird benefit/detriment pattern that I don't honestly want to get into it. Suffice it to say that I'd use Erlang where pattern analysis, list comprehensions, or linear scaling across a huge number of users were my primary concerns.
And there are surely languages that have stricter rulesets than C++; Eiffel, for instance, which is compiled, and strongly and statically typed, with design-by-contract built in
Contracts are easily implemented in C/C++, and actually, no, Eiffel is nowhere near as strict as C++ is. Yes, there are a few languages stricter than C++ is, such as Clean, Mozart/OZ and Forth; however, what I was trying to do was to make an example, and given that most people are at least passingly familiar with C++, it just makes a better example.
To be plain, I'm Joseph Conrad. It doesn't matter if my native language is Polish; I'm in America, so I write in English. Sure, there are better examples than C++, but they're too little known (in my opinion) to make good examples.
C++'s weak static
Honestly, if you think the PS3 is going to be monster hit at that price I'd say you should start looking in the mirror to see who is the fanboy.
Er, I don't, and moreover I never used the word fanboy. I said nothing about the PS3 at all. I just commented on my opinion regarding one man's media tirade. Where is this coming from?
Well, the last time I looked at the consumer market I saw a fickle group that is more than willing to jump on whatever the "hot" trend is.
Have another look. The PS2 is outselling the XBox360 almost four to one, and has never been outsold by the 360, even during the month it was first introduced. That fickle group isn't nearly as fickle as you imagine, and the statistics are easy to come by.
They will sell out at first because there are enough early adopters out there, but at the premium they are asking they won't sustain that level of sales for long past the holidays.
Amusingly, I remember the same thing being said about the PS1 and the PS2. I tend to agree with you, actually; I think the price will be a big problem. I've run the numbers, and it's my personal estimate that Sony is overdoing their market predictions by a little over 60%. I believe Sony is pulling a Neo-Geo. I don't understand why you're accusing me otherwise.
That said, I think you need to realize that you're not a market analyst; indeed I suspect you haven't ever actually looked at price-gauged trend data for consoles. You're speaking in firmaments when you're not apparently even passingly familiar with sales data. I don't understand why everyone thinks they're a marketer. If you understand the market so well, just short Sony's stock; the Playstation brand, including software, licenses and hardware, currently accounts for almost 35% of Sony's income. If the machine tanks as badly as you suggest, it'll do the company tremendous damage. If my personal estimates are correct, it's easy to calculate the actual damage, which weighs in at about $450m in the first six months (I'm not willing to estimate further than that, as that's the point at which price points traditionally start getting changed.) You would be rich in a matter of months.
And, frankly, you condescending to me about guesses you made about my opinions which aren't actually correct is a bit too boring to follow through on, so don't bother to reply, please.
- You don't like ad hominem attacks when they're directed at you, but you're perfectly prepared to sling them liberally in the direction of Mr. Minter.
I can't decide whether it's more amusing that you'd say that after resorting to the same, or whether it's just that you can't sort out the difference between an accusatory blog post and a discussion. I'm fine with ad hominem attacks. I am not fine with their being used to support arguments. The difference is enormous.
This appears to be a common theme in your line of reasoning.
Given that your accusation doesn't find itself correct there, I'd be interested to learn in what other places you believe I'm being a hypocrite. I suspect they're equally vapid.
- You accuse Jeff Minter of being a "nobody", and yet I'll wager that far more people in the industry have respect for him than have even heard of you.
That's a wager you'd lose. Jeff Minter is not respected. He is reviled. The average Joe Nobody on the street would win that bet, and I'm not Joe Nobody, your condescending tone applied to someone you know nothing of notwithstanding. It may interest you to know that I've been on G4 twice, so that you can free yourself from your nonsense guesses that I have no position to speak of.
I'm a little tired of the ongoing personal attacks in the stead of actual counterpoint. I know you're having trouble with this, so let me explain it again: there's nothing wrong with personal attacks. However, when you make guesses about a person and then say "wow anyone like my guesses is a douche," you really end up just looking foolish, and wasting other people's time.
If you have something to say about what I said, go ahead. If you have more to say about me, don't bother. I have games on the market, and I'm not even in the games industry. Until you reveal what your work is, your attempt to make me feel like an outsider simply fails; I've been saying I'm an outsider all along, and given your bearing, I suspect I'm still more successful in gaming than you are. Feel free to tell me what you've worked on in order to make your attempts at seeming like an authority ring something other than hollow. Don't bother attacking me anymore.
- You claim that Jeff Minter is "despised" in the games industry. That's news to me, and I've been in the industry for over 11 years.
I don't believe you, to be frank. It's a bit like the people in Chicago who would write into newspapers and claim that they were deeply involved in the local political scene, and couldn't imagine that Al Capone would be anything other than a paragon of virtue in the eyes of the law. All sorts of people who wanted to pat themselves on the back about being in touch did exactly that; they could not imagine that there was something going on which they didn't know about. Meanwhile, these people were essentially just wasting their time; nobody took them seriously, because the vast majority of them were themselves utter nobodies just straining to get someone to believe they were an expert.
If you want to look like an authority, don't say you've been in the industry for some amount of time. Hell, you've been in the industry less than a third as long as the person I'm currently claiming is a nobody; I can't imagine why you'd think that would impress me. Brian Reynolds impressed me six months after he entered the market, by generating a genuinely fun and highly profitable game without massive technology investments.
Either stand on your work, or sit down. Tubthumping is annoying. Nobody cares how long you've been around; only what you've done. You sit there screaming about my complete lack of hits (which in fact isn't true,) yet you claim to be in a much stronger position than I am.
Time to put up, or to shut up. Exactly what games have you been lead on? I'm happy to assume that you haven't said so before through omission or because you didn't believe it was important. If you cont