Yes, except:
- that the choice is on something you're most likely going to be stuck with for a while, and
- that the waiter makes his choice based on legal matters, not on quality alone; while that's ok by itself, people who thinks legal issues like licenses are more important than quality and think dealing with the consequences is worth it are a minority
- that usually the waiter doesn't mention any of this at all.
So Symantec's tools suck. Fine. But if Microsoft is allowed to integrate an equally sucky version into its OS, it'll win by default, and we'll be stuck with suckiness forever.
Let Microsoft bring out their own software, very welcome! But as a seperate product, sold in a box. If there's special hooks for it in Windows, they should be openly documented.
Then, both Symantec and Microsoft will have an actual reason to make a _good_ product!
Re:Languages continue to evolve into ... Lisp
on
Python 2.5 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I think C is too hard for most programmers too. I may be in a bad mood, but I think most programmers do PHP and Visual Basic, badly. They wouldn't grasp Lisp's macros. Of actually good programmers, a very small percentage know Lisp; I wouldn't start a professional project in it for that reason.
I personally love Python (used it for all the code I wrote for my thesis), but these days I program Perl at work. It's not that bad, really. It makes sense, in its own way and it's got a good solid set of libraries available out there. Java isn't half bad for bigger projects either, actually.
About half a year ago, I tried to get into Lisp. It sounds like the holy grail - execution speed and error checking of a compiled language with all the speed of development of more dynamic languages. Perhaps s-expressions should be perfectly suited for HTML too (I'm still stuck in this web app world, at the moment). So I picked up Practical Common Lisp, installed SBCL, joined some mailing lists, found some libraries, got experimenting...
Two things meant I got disinterested in a month or so: it has far too many slightly-differently-named functions in the standard language, many with non-obvious names too (that's what PHP gets its harshest criticism for); and also the huge library of things you need nowadays (internet stuff, databases, OS stuff, etc) is either missing or rather undeveloped.
But it's still promising. I'll probably have another look in a few more months:-)
Re:Languages continue to evolve into ... Lisp
on
Python 2.5 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Because 90% of programmers only know the simplest languages.
You often see arguments like this... I like this part, I think that part doesn't work well...
The XP books make very clear that it's either all or nothing. They don't claim that pair programming by itself is always useful, they just claim that this whole set of techniques taken together is useful. If you're going to do all the other things XP says, XP says you should combine it with pair programming.
If you're not using all the elements (on-site client, pair programming, collective code ownership, etc etc etc), then you're not doing XP.
Personally I think pair programming greatly boosts performance, if only because it usually stops them procrastinating on Slashdot.
Although it looks like the IDEs are getting features that the great text editors won't get any time soon; I was particularly impressed when I saw the Java refactoring things in Eclipse. Just select a few lines with a loop or so, right-click 'Extract method', name it and the rest is automatic. Emacs and vi won't get that sort of language integration ever, I think.
But since that won't work well for more dynamic languages anyway, and the current job is Perl... yay for Emacs:-)
Well yes, there are words that use umlauts, but they're imported words, and there are tremas which aren't actually umlauts, which is why I said they're not used "like that". We use a thing that looks like two dots on top of a letter, but they're not the same as umlauts.
Thanks for illustrating my point, not that this whole thread really needs all these posts. Sheesh:-)
No, it's Bram Moolenaar. He's Dutch, molenaar means miller, and moolenaar is an old spelling of that. Both Molenaar and Moolenaar are common names; Mölenaar is just wrong, Dutch doesn't use umlauts like that.
The other members of the board that did not resign in protest bear some of the responsibility as well.
Not entirely true. How do we know that we have all the details to this whole story? Perhaps everyone there watched her assume the moral high ground and gave it to her?
That they didn't stop it, and apparently thought it was acceptable, is exactly why they bear part of the responsibility.
Remember, they didn't just spy on and illegally obtain phone records of the board members, but also on at least 10 reports, and at least one father of a reporter. It's not up to the board to pardon that.
If you don't support IE, you're not talking about "in practice."
Re:Just like there will never be another Doom
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
·
· Score: 1
Dune 2 was the first real one (I loved Ancient Art of War, but I don't think it's exactly the same type of game).
Dune 2 was already great, but if you play it now, the most irritating thing is that you have to do 1. click unit, 2. click 'move', 3. click the destination. Warcraft 1 had that as well. Command and Conquer had the innovation (obvious in hindsight) of 1. click unit, 2. click destination. If I recall correctly, it also allowed selecting groups of units and even binding them to keys, so C&C was a huge improvement in UI.
But I stopped playing them around 1996, when I left Windows for Linux, so Starcraft may well be another huge step better.
We now believe that most of our new students have never used a library before they come to the university, so we're going to actually show them how we go about learning new things using books. Not sure how we're going to do that!
Perhaps you can get some inspiration from Adler and Van Doren's _How To Read a Book_? I read it after finishing my master's, and believe that it would have helped to read parts of it at the beginning instead.
Also:
US: Stop making nuclear bombs or we will attack you.
Iran: You have 150,000 soldiers sitting just across the border, not equipped for total land war. The majority of the Iraqi population would be on our side. Your men are sitting ducks.
US: Uhhh...
Raymond, a champion of all things open, said it is vital to the future uptake of Linux that the community compromise to win the new generation of non-technical users aged younger than 30. This group is more interested in having Linux "just work" on their iPod or MP3 player and "don't care about our notions of doctrinal purity",
Indeed they don't. So?
It seems that ESR has started believing that "overthrowing Windows" is the end goal of Linux. It's not, it's having a completely open and Free Unix system. That group he talks about, they'll just use Windows or whatever, and be happy. I don't see how that matters for Linux' direction.
Although this is true, it is also true that most programmers deliver crap looking, uncomfortable to use, half-assed interfaces if left to their own devices. I know I do...
The same is true of a lot of Open Source software. Fun to do, very powerful, but much of it does look unprofessional or at least unreasonably hard to use, except for other programmers who share the same mindset as the maker.
The tragedy is on one hand that the people who complain about the interface issues are themselves also totally untrained and unqualified to say what exactly needs to be changed, and on the other hand that of course a solid, great looking interface design should be made up front, in the design phase, by professionals. I don't think that ever happens.
But we programmers can start by looking a bit more critically at our own work. A bit. While bitching about those irritating users who think looking professional matters more than actual function. Right?
Think of the complexity of the new astrology that would be needed to cater for 50 planets that then influence our fortunes, I would like my destiny be determined by just 9 planets...
I think it would explain a whole lot about my life though, if it turns out it's controlled by 50 planets instead of 9...
Slashdot Mirror
Dupe: . Pity, I thought Slashdot had been pretty well lately.
Yes, except:
- that the choice is on something you're most likely going to be stuck with for a while, and
- that the waiter makes his choice based on legal matters, not on quality alone; while that's ok by itself, people who thinks legal issues like licenses are more important than quality and think dealing with the consequences is worth it are a minority
- that usually the waiter doesn't mention any of this at all.
Oops, I may have broken the analogy, sorry :-)
So Symantec's tools suck. Fine. But if Microsoft is allowed to integrate an equally sucky version into its OS, it'll win by default, and we'll be stuck with suckiness forever.
Let Microsoft bring out their own software, very welcome! But as a seperate product, sold in a box. If there's special hooks for it in Windows, they should be openly documented.
Then, both Symantec and Microsoft will have an actual reason to make a _good_ product!
I think C is too hard for most programmers too. I may be in a bad mood, but I think most programmers do PHP and Visual Basic, badly. They wouldn't grasp Lisp's macros. Of actually good programmers, a very small percentage know Lisp; I wouldn't start a professional project in it for that reason.
I personally love Python (used it for all the code I wrote for my thesis), but these days I program Perl at work. It's not that bad, really. It makes sense, in its own way and it's got a good solid set of libraries available out there. Java isn't half bad for bigger projects either, actually.
About half a year ago, I tried to get into Lisp. It sounds like the holy grail - execution speed and error checking of a compiled language with all the speed of development of more dynamic languages. Perhaps s-expressions should be perfectly suited for HTML too (I'm still stuck in this web app world, at the moment). So I picked up Practical Common Lisp, installed SBCL, joined some mailing lists, found some libraries, got experimenting...
Two things meant I got disinterested in a month or so: it has far too many slightly-differently-named functions in the standard language, many with non-obvious names too (that's what PHP gets its harshest criticism for); and also the huge library of things you need nowadays (internet stuff, databases, OS stuff, etc) is either missing or rather undeveloped.
But it's still promising. I'll probably have another look in a few more months :-)
Because 90% of programmers only know the simplest languages.
You often see arguments like this... I like this part, I think that part doesn't work well...
The XP books make very clear that it's either all or nothing. They don't claim that pair programming by itself is always useful, they just claim that this whole set of techniques taken together is useful. If you're going to do all the other things XP says, XP says you should combine it with pair programming.
If you're not using all the elements (on-site client, pair programming, collective code ownership, etc etc etc), then you're not doing XP.
Personally I think pair programming greatly boosts performance, if only because it usually stops them procrastinating on Slashdot.
Thanks! Stupid of me not to search.
I agree.
Although it looks like the IDEs are getting features that the great text editors won't get any time soon; I was particularly impressed when I saw the Java refactoring things in Eclipse. Just select a few lines with a loop or so, right-click 'Extract method', name it and the rest is automatic. Emacs and vi won't get that sort of language integration ever, I think.
But since that won't work well for more dynamic languages anyway, and the current job is Perl... yay for Emacs :-)
Presumably hjkl are much more reliably next to each other than jkl;?
Well yes, there are words that use umlauts, but they're imported words, and there are tremas which aren't actually umlauts, which is why I said they're not used "like that". We use a thing that looks like two dots on top of a letter, but they're not the same as umlauts.
Thanks for illustrating my point, not that this whole thread really needs all these posts. Sheesh :-)
No, it's Bram Moolenaar. He's Dutch, molenaar means miller, and moolenaar is an old spelling of that. Both Molenaar and Moolenaar are common names; Mölenaar is just wrong, Dutch doesn't use umlauts like that.
What would be worse, SMTP over HTTP or HTTP over SMTP? Probably the latter.
Mail a GET request, get the page back in an attachment on a reply mail... It doesn't even seem like a challenge, does it?
Not entirely true. How do we know that we have all the details to this whole story? Perhaps everyone there watched her assume the moral high ground and gave it to her?
That they didn't stop it, and apparently thought it was acceptable, is exactly why they bear part of the responsibility.
Remember, they didn't just spy on and illegally obtain phone records of the board members, but also on at least 10 reports, and at least one father of a reporter. It's not up to the board to pardon that.
Sounds more like a quadratic function to me.
If you don't support IE, you're not talking about "in practice."
Dune 2 was the first real one (I loved Ancient Art of War, but I don't think it's exactly the same type of game).
Dune 2 was already great, but if you play it now, the most irritating thing is that you have to do 1. click unit, 2. click 'move', 3. click the destination. Warcraft 1 had that as well. Command and Conquer had the innovation (obvious in hindsight) of 1. click unit, 2. click destination. If I recall correctly, it also allowed selecting groups of units and even binding them to keys, so C&C was a huge improvement in UI.
But I stopped playing them around 1996, when I left Windows for Linux, so Starcraft may well be another huge step better.
Why would we want to prevent it?
W/h is not the unit you're looking for. W already means J/s (or energy per time).
One Wh (Watt-hour) is what's used in an hour, so you could say a 50 W bulb uses 50 Wh/h, but that's silly. It's simply a 50 W bulb.
We now believe that most of our new students have never used a library before they come to the university, so we're going to actually show them how we go about learning new things using books. Not sure how we're going to do that!
Perhaps you can get some inspiration from Adler and Van Doren's _How To Read a Book_? I read it after finishing my master's, and believe that it would have helped to read parts of it at the beginning instead.
Also:
US: Stop making nuclear bombs or we will attack you.
Iran: You have 150,000 soldiers sitting just across the border, not equipped for total land war. The majority of the Iraqi population would be on our side. Your men are sitting ducks.
US: Uhhh...
Yes, but they can simply raise the CEO's pay to stay nonprofit.
Uhm, bacteriophages are in the food supply. They're everywhere that bacteria are - that includes a lot of them living inside you.
I don't see a reason why this specific bacteriophage would be more likely to turn harmful than the ones already preying on the bacteria you need.
Raymond, a champion of all things open, said it is vital to the future uptake of Linux that the community compromise to win the new generation of non-technical users aged younger than 30. This group is more interested in having Linux "just work" on their iPod or MP3 player and "don't care about our notions of doctrinal purity",
Indeed they don't. So?
It seems that ESR has started believing that "overthrowing Windows" is the end goal of Linux. It's not, it's having a completely open and Free Unix system. That group he talks about, they'll just use Windows or whatever, and be happy. I don't see how that matters for Linux' direction.
Although this is true, it is also true that most programmers deliver crap looking, uncomfortable to use, half-assed interfaces if left to their own devices. I know I do...
The same is true of a lot of Open Source software. Fun to do, very powerful, but much of it does look unprofessional or at least unreasonably hard to use, except for other programmers who share the same mindset as the maker.
The tragedy is on one hand that the people who complain about the interface issues are themselves also totally untrained and unqualified to say what exactly needs to be changed, and on the other hand that of course a solid, great looking interface design should be made up front, in the design phase, by professionals. I don't think that ever happens.
But we programmers can start by looking a bit more critically at our own work. A bit. While bitching about those irritating users who think looking professional matters more than actual function. Right?
Think of the complexity of the new astrology that would be needed to cater for 50 planets that then influence our fortunes, I would like my destiny be determined by just 9 planets...
I think it would explain a whole lot about my life though, if it turns out it's controlled by 50 planets instead of 9...