> It is business jargon, understood by the kind of people that Microsoft has the best relationship with - mid to upper management.
When it comes to business leaders (rather than, say, the IT department), Microsoft can talk to midlevel management or lower. It is SAP that talks to the business at the C-level.
Microsoft has products that run an employee directory or mail server. SAP, and to a different extent, Salesforce, have products that run the business.
Cortana is at least an existing thing. Leaders, rather than corporate drones like Nadella, can pull off stuff like this, even on products which are in development, most at-risk of failing a demo: http://appleinsider.com/articl...
> how does me wearing a seatbelt, or have airbags in my car, or a higher belt line, or taller head rests have anything to do with the safety of anyone other than myself
Who said the benefits are only limited to your safety. There's also cost. If you get maimed, it's pretty expensive to keep you from not dying, and you may never be able to work again. You may have dependents or loved ones for whom your tragic event would suck big time. Also, the article is about an active safety system that can actually reduce targets (e.g. other cars and their passengers, or pedestrians) being hit.
> (baring passengers in the car, who are also free to decide if they want to ride with me or not)
Children? I don't think so. Even their own parents aren't allowed to just 'decide' about stuff like that. It's a question even with adults, if they can legally agree to such thing. For an easy example, it may not be obvious or known to them that your car is unsafe, so the 'informed' is missing from informed consent.
> Maybe we should all live in bunkers surrounded by big mounds of cinder blocks. That would be the ultimate safety.
We're already doing that. What you describe is called 'walls', and the emerging structure, 'buildings'. These bunkers are rarely left, except for the purpose of expressly being outside of them, or much more frequently, just moving from one bunker to another. In this case, other 'wall' structures collectively called 'car chassis' provide some physical protection, which itself is dangerous to its surroundings as weighs a ton.
Walls are a successful defense and regulation tool and can be found everywhere, from cellular walls to country borders.
Since building cars from cinder blocks isn't a good option, people add other physical and behavioral elements to augment the protection part, including the horn, traffic rules and traffic lights, legal and police enforcement, safety belt, crumple zones, lights, airbags, ABS, traction control, and emergency braking, which e.g. Volvo has had as an option for several years. Over the course of time, if deemed effective, these elements become mandatory. This is just yet another small step.
I'm not saying that JS semicolon rules are good, just that semicolons are such an incredibly small issue in the grand scheme of things. A developer will write or alter millions of lines and fix thousands of bugs over his career and will probably run into the semicolon issue a handful of times or less.
You intentionally misrepresent the GP. He didn't say, exclusively or fully FP. If it is possible and convenient to do FP in JS, then I think what the GP said is fair - and it is. Doesn't matter that if you so choose, you can program fully imperatively as well. A programming language shouldn't mainly be used as a straightjacket, but as a tool that empowers you to make things. Sure you can use a hammer to open jars but it's not necessarily the tool's inherent fault.
> Then perhaps this should not have been allowed by the language?
Here's the thing. JS is in the browser and other languages aren't similarly embedded and supported. So once you accept this part of what surrounds us (i.e. reality) maybe your enquiry will shift from asking and bizarrely insisting on how many ways there are to shoot yourself on the foot. Many of the JS weirdness comes from an early decision to avoid runtime code failure, and just return something, for the obvious reason that it's better for a JS augmented web page to mostly work than not work at all.
So the enquiry is shifting to what you _can_ do with Javascript. For example, I like functional programming, and JS has fairly good support for it, e.g. immutable data libraries, ramda, transducers etc. And it's backed by one of the World's most optimized runtime JIT which profiles and replaces functions on the stack while running. This gives a boost to the execution of FP style code with no strong type system, because V8 etc. will notice that all your reductions etc. run on arrays, and homogenous arrays will be internally represented as typed arrays anyway, so V8 will do inlining, fusion of loops or of sequentially applied steps (think transducer mappings and reductions), type check elimination etc. where possible.
If your concern is something that shouldn't be allowed in the language, then don't use it, or eliminate the possibility by using JSlint, JShint or even roll your own, using a JS parser. But more often, you're interested what the language is capable of, and I find the combination of prevalence, execution without perceptible compilation time, execution speed and library support toward various programming paradigms more interesting than the knowledge that yeah, you shouldn't add a fscking array to a fscking object, duh.
Having done JS and WebGL, I can also say, you can cherrypick all day long among examples that no Javascript developer would do except maybe novices or the curious, but at the end of the day, you still prefer JS at least just enough that it can be your tool of programming, and you still get to work with interesting technologies, and the result of that is probably visible by large parts of the population. You might as well switch to iOS or something else and use OpenGL, without any Javascript but you don't do it. So it can't be that terrible.
Also, while there are no declarable 64 bit integers yet, programming WebG you know full well that there are plenty of typed arrays in Javascript like Uint32Array, Int32Array and Float64Array, which were first introduced to support WebGL. Also, the compiler is free to, and is often capable of, handling variables as typed variables, i.e. work with unboxed numbers. Again you pick an example which is specifically true, but someone who reads your post may be lead to believe that Javascript has zero support for typed numbers.
Type safety is nice and all that, but it's a remarkably shallow set of type errors that the most common statically typed languages capture. Mentioning 'type safety' without 'type system' doesn't make sense, and mentioning 'type system' and Java, C(++) etc. on the same day is not usually done.
While there are languages with decent type system support, for some reason lots of Haskell programmers are in academia or doing researchy back-end work. It is unfortunate that the browser is a single-language environment, but this is what there is now.
> Idiotic is an understatement. The entire language is one Pit of Failure followed by another.
Any alternative suggestions? Decent languages that run in the browser and have some semblance of a user base (e.g. ClojureScript) require a transpilation step, which is either around 10s or more with a nontrivial system, or you need to manually set up some dependency hierarchy so as to recompile only the changed file, so the latency is sub-second. UI development is so much easier if there's essentially no latency between the code change and the visible effect.
A lot of languages, e.g. CoffeeScript don't do a lot of good. Clojure is (or used to be) a half day to a day of setup, maybe ClojureScript is the same, maybe it bundles big libraries and slower than what can be achieved with lodash, transducers, and simple for loops on regular or typed arrays, which compile to incredibly fast code.
And how about a call stack or debugging in general? Source maps help, but you're still dropped back to Javascript if there's a problem. Call stacks are unusable, afaik.
So all in all, JS is actually suitable for work and play, given all the current constraints and network effects, collectively known as REALITY. You just don't practise what's bad practice anyway, e.g. relying on the default type coercions for comparison or sorting. In the overall scheme of software development, the negligible hurdles caused by the idiosyncracies of Javascript are negligible. Ruby, Python aren't waaaay superior by any means and don't get me started on something like Java. Python would actually be a nice language, but it's slow as hell, unless you use NumPy or some C compiled version, which has its own constraints, and it doesn't do more than Javascript.
You still need the semicolon in the rare and easily avoidable case when you do something like
callSomething();(function() {doSomething})()
otherwise it'll be interpreted as callSomething()(function() {doSomething})()
In some other cases, even the semicolon insertion doesn't help, e.g. if you write the return value on a line different from the return line.
So all in all, one way is not intrinsically better than the other. On one hand, most code in the wild (open source and in-house) use semicolons, on the other, you can actually use Javascript as a nice functional programming language with something like ES6 arrow functions and ramda.js, which can make even the curly braces as code blocks disappear.
Now that you mention, yes, I expect that thin vertical structures and gravity load bearing sections in general hold up better than on Earth. It's possible to print artwork in space that wouldn't be possible on Terra.
Don't make assumptions, I happened to live in a borough where the largest ethnic group was Bangladeshis, and it was a rather central location. While what you say about distributions may be valid for London or Greater London, there are a lot of boroughs where Muslims are above 20-30 percent, and the demographic trends point toward rapid increases. A more minor point is that Indians doesn't mean non-muslim - there are quite a few muslims in India. Another point is that there's a commonality between hindu people and muslims that their culture differs more from that of the host country than the traditional cultural and religious differences in Europe, e.g. Roman Catholic vs. Protestant; I believe people from India, irrespective of their religion, also have a higher birth rate than Caucasians.
Also, while there may be nitpicking along ways of segmenting places geographically - down to the street level, where a lot of people still live among those who are close to them in terms of heritage, or one can look at the entire Britain, France and Western Europe and determine that transcontinental immigrants and their offspring are still a minority overall, it masks the trends and the fact that a lot of parts of even London are markedly non-European, or resembling some third world place.
Here's an interesting article from 2009, no less, that describes e.g. the duplication of muslims in Europe over just 30 years. History isn't always written in just a couple of years, and the Western civilisation traces its roots to 2-3k years, mainly back to the Greek civilisation, so it's understandable that if someone is concerned about the loss of Western values in its very home territory, then those people don't just look at today's statistics, but also project clear trends, such as demography, and the remarkably slow uptake of European values and customs, and perhaps mass defiance, indifference and antagonism by migrant communities.
No contradiction there, I wasn't talking about our ancestors, rather, the current peaceloving nations of Western Europe, who do a lot more than even the Americans to stay out of armed conflicts, especially ground battle. Being too peaceful isn't particularly good for self-preservation.
> Of course, the error in summary goes is clearly not related to this issue
Indeed, 13.2 billion as the age of the universe is disambiguated only by what web site you read it on - if it's Slashdot, 1E9 years, while if it's on some religious blog, then about a thousand years or less.
Whatever the history was, there is a strong pattern in the Islamic world that breeds aggression, oppression and backwardness. For the most part of their territory, even many of the richest oil states look like Third World countries where human rights are stomped on as a way of life. There is also the pattern that while many of their countries got a fortune, in the form of oil, they haven't spent that to diversify their economy, educate their people or improve their surroundings. Instead of that, they are at war against each other and the rest of the World, based on concepts that were en vogue in the medieval times, like holding slightly different views of what Islam is.
To add to this: while Vienna wasn't captured by the Muslims, 1/3rd of neighboring Hungary was occupied by the Ottoman empire for a whopping 150 years, and another 1/3rd, Transylvania, retained its nominal independence as a vassal state partner of the Ottoman empire.
Another difference is that while the Ottoman empire was pretty lax about religious freedom and Christianty and local languages could be practised, good luck with that if something like the Arab Spring sweeps over Europe that's rapidly becoming Islam territory - some IS Caliphate won't tolerate the slightest diversity.
So if we know the Muslims, due to their religious and cultural background, are prone to turn whatever they can into their own fundamentalist territory, why hand them the key?
European liberals are selfish and egotistic if they project their own tolerance and acceptance of diversity to an essentially medieval value system.
It's ironic that the result of what is essentially a Muslim - Muslim fight (irrespective of the West breeding instability or not) is the outpouring of Muslims to Europe, i.e. the continued, aggressive Islamization of Europe. Not only will there be large cities where the original citizenry feel like visitors to some different country, but also it'll make it remarkably easy to establish jihadist cells, train and brainwash the Muslim masses.
It is established that even a minority can impose its will and its way of life on a culture or country if it's more dedicated, militant and less concerned about the negative consequences of its aggression. Europeans are wussies as compared to the Muslims whose stated mission is to impose Islam everwhere.
The thing is, at the time there had to be a f..ing WAR to claim territory, because the defense mechanisms of European countries worked at the time.
Now Muslim masses just show up, gently escorted through Europe by Europeans with humanitarian thinking. Add a bit of family unification, birth rate differences, adhesion to their traditional way of life and the inevitable resentment of their first few generations against European values, and bingo, Europe is part of the Muslim world.
Buy real estate in Eastern Europe, maybe this will be the last refuge of the European way of life, a reservatum of the future. Even now, when you travel to Eastern Europe, it'll be like a culture shock, white people everywhere you look!
What do you think will happen if Europe accepts them like there's no tomorrow? Will the number remain at a couple of thousands? Why, some solution is imminent and immigration will stop, AND the migrants' birth rate will not exceed the host nations' birth rate?
Soon there won't be large cities in Western Europe where people of Arab and/or muslim origin aren't the largest part of the population. With European style navel gazing and suicidal behavior in the name of liberal (here: defenseless, naive, self-centered) values, resulting in absolutely no border protection, people get encouraged in all parts of the World where they already stream from, from Pakistan to Syria to Libya to Nigeria, and a few tens of millions of migrants will make Western Europe look like it's just part of the Arab wold - well it looks quite a bit like this in Marseilles, London and lots of places.
Slashdot Mirror
> It is business jargon, understood by the kind of people that Microsoft has the best relationship with - mid to upper management.
When it comes to business leaders (rather than, say, the IT department), Microsoft can talk to midlevel management or lower. It is SAP that talks to the business at the C-level.
Microsoft has products that run an employee directory or mail server. SAP, and to a different extent, Salesforce, have products that run the business.
Cortana is at least an existing thing. Leaders, rather than corporate drones like Nadella, can pull off stuff like this, even on products which are in development, most at-risk of failing a demo: http://appleinsider.com/articl...
Yeah, the correctly collectively funny moderation would have been '+5 Informative'.
> how does me wearing a seatbelt, or have airbags in my car, or a higher belt line, or taller head rests have anything to do with the safety of anyone other than myself
Who said the benefits are only limited to your safety. There's also cost. If you get maimed, it's pretty expensive to keep you from not dying, and you may never be able to work again. You may have dependents or loved ones for whom your tragic event would suck big time. Also, the article is about an active safety system that can actually reduce targets (e.g. other cars and their passengers, or pedestrians) being hit.
> (baring passengers in the car, who are also free to decide if they want to ride with me or not)
Children? I don't think so. Even their own parents aren't allowed to just 'decide' about stuff like that. It's a question even with adults, if they can legally agree to such thing. For an easy example, it may not be obvious or known to them that your car is unsafe, so the 'informed' is missing from informed consent.
Yes you were BORN and thus became part of society and its legal system, deal with it or escape society. You can't just cherry-pick.
> Maybe we should all live in bunkers surrounded by big mounds of cinder blocks. That would be the ultimate safety.
We're already doing that. What you describe is called 'walls', and the emerging structure, 'buildings'. These bunkers are rarely left, except for the purpose of expressly being outside of them, or much more frequently, just moving from one bunker to another. In this case, other 'wall' structures collectively called 'car chassis' provide some physical protection, which itself is dangerous to its surroundings as weighs a ton.
Walls are a successful defense and regulation tool and can be found everywhere, from cellular walls to country borders.
Since building cars from cinder blocks isn't a good option, people add other physical and behavioral elements to augment the protection part, including the horn, traffic rules and traffic lights, legal and police enforcement, safety belt, crumple zones, lights, airbags, ABS, traction control, and emergency braking, which e.g. Volvo has had as an option for several years. Over the course of time, if deemed effective, these elements become mandatory. This is just yet another small step.
> There very well could be an alien species out there is just discovering radio while having already engaged in interstellar travel.
You can't be serious.
I'm not saying that JS semicolon rules are good, just that semicolons are such an incredibly small issue in the grand scheme of things. A developer will write or alter millions of lines and fix thousands of bugs over his career and will probably run into the semicolon issue a handful of times or less.
You intentionally misrepresent the GP. He didn't say, exclusively or fully FP. If it is possible and convenient to do FP in JS, then I think what the GP said is fair - and it is. Doesn't matter that if you so choose, you can program fully imperatively as well. A programming language shouldn't mainly be used as a straightjacket, but as a tool that empowers you to make things. Sure you can use a hammer to open jars but it's not necessarily the tool's inherent fault.
> Then perhaps this should not have been allowed by the language?
Here's the thing. JS is in the browser and other languages aren't similarly embedded and supported. So once you accept this part of what surrounds us (i.e. reality) maybe your enquiry will shift from asking and bizarrely insisting on how many ways there are to shoot yourself on the foot. Many of the JS weirdness comes from an early decision to avoid runtime code failure, and just return something, for the obvious reason that it's better for a JS augmented web page to mostly work than not work at all.
So the enquiry is shifting to what you _can_ do with Javascript. For example, I like functional programming, and JS has fairly good support for it, e.g. immutable data libraries, ramda, transducers etc. And it's backed by one of the World's most optimized runtime JIT which profiles and replaces functions on the stack while running. This gives a boost to the execution of FP style code with no strong type system, because V8 etc. will notice that all your reductions etc. run on arrays, and homogenous arrays will be internally represented as typed arrays anyway, so V8 will do inlining, fusion of loops or of sequentially applied steps (think transducer mappings and reductions), type check elimination etc. where possible.
If your concern is something that shouldn't be allowed in the language, then don't use it, or eliminate the possibility by using JSlint, JShint or even roll your own, using a JS parser. But more often, you're interested what the language is capable of, and I find the combination of prevalence, execution without perceptible compilation time, execution speed and library support toward various programming paradigms more interesting than the knowledge that yeah, you shouldn't add a fscking array to a fscking object, duh.
Having done JS and WebGL, I can also say, you can cherrypick all day long among examples that no Javascript developer would do except maybe novices or the curious, but at the end of the day, you still prefer JS at least just enough that it can be your tool of programming, and you still get to work with interesting technologies, and the result of that is probably visible by large parts of the population. You might as well switch to iOS or something else and use OpenGL, without any Javascript but you don't do it. So it can't be that terrible.
Also, while there are no declarable 64 bit integers yet, programming WebG you know full well that there are plenty of typed arrays in Javascript like Uint32Array, Int32Array and Float64Array, which were first introduced to support WebGL. Also, the compiler is free to, and is often capable of, handling variables as typed variables, i.e. work with unboxed numbers. Again you pick an example which is specifically true, but someone who reads your post may be lead to believe that Javascript has zero support for typed numbers.
Type safety is nice and all that, but it's a remarkably shallow set of type errors that the most common statically typed languages capture. Mentioning 'type safety' without 'type system' doesn't make sense, and mentioning 'type system' and Java, C(++) etc. on the same day is not usually done.
While there are languages with decent type system support, for some reason lots of Haskell programmers are in academia or doing researchy back-end work. It is unfortunate that the browser is a single-language environment, but this is what there is now.
I hear EcmaScript is pretty popular these days, and it has a standard.
> Idiotic is an understatement. The entire language is one Pit of Failure followed by another.
Any alternative suggestions? Decent languages that run in the browser and have some semblance of a user base (e.g. ClojureScript) require a transpilation step, which is either around 10s or more with a nontrivial system, or you need to manually set up some dependency hierarchy so as to recompile only the changed file, so the latency is sub-second. UI development is so much easier if there's essentially no latency between the code change and the visible effect.
A lot of languages, e.g. CoffeeScript don't do a lot of good. Clojure is (or used to be) a half day to a day of setup, maybe ClojureScript is the same, maybe it bundles big libraries and slower than what can be achieved with lodash, transducers, and simple for loops on regular or typed arrays, which compile to incredibly fast code.
And how about a call stack or debugging in general? Source maps help, but you're still dropped back to Javascript if there's a problem. Call stacks are unusable, afaik.
So all in all, JS is actually suitable for work and play, given all the current constraints and network effects, collectively known as REALITY. You just don't practise what's bad practice anyway, e.g. relying on the default type coercions for comparison or sorting. In the overall scheme of software development, the negligible hurdles caused by the idiosyncracies of Javascript are negligible. Ruby, Python aren't waaaay superior by any means and don't get me started on something like Java. Python would actually be a nice language, but it's slow as hell, unless you use NumPy or some C compiled version, which has its own constraints, and it doesn't do more than Javascript.
You still need the semicolon in the rare and easily avoidable case when you do something like
callSomething() ;(function() {doSomething})()
otherwise it'll be interpreted as callSomething()(function() {doSomething})()
In some other cases, even the semicolon insertion doesn't help, e.g. if you write the return value on a line different from the return line.
So all in all, one way is not intrinsically better than the other. On one hand, most code in the wild (open source and in-house) use semicolons, on the other, you can actually use Javascript as a nice functional programming language with something like ES6 arrow functions and ramda.js, which can make even the curly braces as code blocks disappear.
Didn't it arrive on Russian spacecraft?
Now that you mention, yes, I expect that thin vertical structures and gravity load bearing sections in general hold up better than on Earth. It's possible to print artwork in space that wouldn't be possible on Terra.
Don't make assumptions, I happened to live in a borough where the largest ethnic group was Bangladeshis, and it was a rather central location. While what you say about distributions may be valid for London or Greater London, there are a lot of boroughs where Muslims are above 20-30 percent, and the demographic trends point toward rapid increases. A more minor point is that Indians doesn't mean non-muslim - there are quite a few muslims in India. Another point is that there's a commonality between hindu people and muslims that their culture differs more from that of the host country than the traditional cultural and religious differences in Europe, e.g. Roman Catholic vs. Protestant; I believe people from India, irrespective of their religion, also have a higher birth rate than Caucasians.
Also, while there may be nitpicking along ways of segmenting places geographically - down to the street level, where a lot of people still live among those who are close to them in terms of heritage, or one can look at the entire Britain, France and Western Europe and determine that transcontinental immigrants and their offspring are still a minority overall, it masks the trends and the fact that a lot of parts of even London are markedly non-European, or resembling some third world place.
Here's an interesting article from 2009, no less, that describes e.g. the duplication of muslims in Europe over just 30 years. History isn't always written in just a couple of years, and the Western civilisation traces its roots to 2-3k years, mainly back to the Greek civilisation, so it's understandable that if someone is concerned about the loss of Western values in its very home territory, then those people don't just look at today's statistics, but also project clear trends, such as demography, and the remarkably slow uptake of European values and customs, and perhaps mass defiance, indifference and antagonism by migrant communities.
No contradiction there, I wasn't talking about our ancestors, rather, the current peaceloving nations of Western Europe, who do a lot more than even the Americans to stay out of armed conflicts, especially ground battle. Being too peaceful isn't particularly good for self-preservation.
> Of course, the error in summary goes is clearly not related to this issue
Indeed, 13.2 billion as the age of the universe is disambiguated only by what web site you read it on - if it's Slashdot, 1E9 years, while if it's on some religious blog, then about a thousand years or less.
Whatever the history was, there is a strong pattern in the Islamic world that breeds aggression, oppression and backwardness. For the most part of their territory, even many of the richest oil states look like Third World countries where human rights are stomped on as a way of life. There is also the pattern that while many of their countries got a fortune, in the form of oil, they haven't spent that to diversify their economy, educate their people or improve their surroundings. Instead of that, they are at war against each other and the rest of the World, based on concepts that were en vogue in the medieval times, like holding slightly different views of what Islam is.
To add to this: while Vienna wasn't captured by the Muslims, 1/3rd of neighboring Hungary was occupied by the Ottoman empire for a whopping 150 years, and another 1/3rd, Transylvania, retained its nominal independence as a vassal state partner of the Ottoman empire.
Another difference is that while the Ottoman empire was pretty lax about religious freedom and Christianty and local languages could be practised, good luck with that if something like the Arab Spring sweeps over Europe that's rapidly becoming Islam territory - some IS Caliphate won't tolerate the slightest diversity.
So if we know the Muslims, due to their religious and cultural background, are prone to turn whatever they can into their own fundamentalist territory, why hand them the key?
European liberals are selfish and egotistic if they project their own tolerance and acceptance of diversity to an essentially medieval value system.
It's ironic that the result of what is essentially a Muslim - Muslim fight (irrespective of the West breeding instability or not) is the outpouring of Muslims to Europe, i.e. the continued, aggressive Islamization of Europe. Not only will there be large cities where the original citizenry feel like visitors to some different country, but also it'll make it remarkably easy to establish jihadist cells, train and brainwash the Muslim masses.
It is established that even a minority can impose its will and its way of life on a culture or country if it's more dedicated, militant and less concerned about the negative consequences of its aggression. Europeans are wussies as compared to the Muslims whose stated mission is to impose Islam everwhere.
The thing is, at the time there had to be a f..ing WAR to claim territory, because the defense mechanisms of European countries worked at the time.
Now Muslim masses just show up, gently escorted through Europe by Europeans with humanitarian thinking. Add a bit of family unification, birth rate differences, adhesion to their traditional way of life and the inevitable resentment of their first few generations against European values, and bingo, Europe is part of the Muslim world.
Buy real estate in Eastern Europe, maybe this will be the last refuge of the European way of life, a reservatum of the future. Even now, when you travel to Eastern Europe, it'll be like a culture shock, white people everywhere you look!
What do you think will happen if Europe accepts them like there's no tomorrow? Will the number remain at a couple of thousands? Why, some solution is imminent and immigration will stop, AND the migrants' birth rate will not exceed the host nations' birth rate?
Soon there won't be large cities in Western Europe where people of Arab and/or muslim origin aren't the largest part of the population. With European style navel gazing and suicidal behavior in the name of liberal (here: defenseless, naive, self-centered) values, resulting in absolutely no border protection, people get encouraged in all parts of the World where they already stream from, from Pakistan to Syria to Libya to Nigeria, and a few tens of millions of migrants will make Western Europe look like it's just part of the Arab wold - well it looks quite a bit like this in Marseilles, London and lots of places.
Why not cut out the middleman? Integrate vertically and add the malware in the factory.