We've been using SVN for six months now for a huge VB.NET project. SourceSafe repositories need to be uncorrupted every couple of months, whereas our SVN repository -- at 47MB and counting -- uses BDB and has yet to be corrupted. (Oh great -- I've just jinxed myself.)
Can you give us a few more specifics on what the language will be used for? Will it be embedded? Database connected? Real-time? Interactive?
While this seems like beaucoup fun, I'd question the need to extend an existing language by altering the compiler. Towards that end, you might want to use LISP or Scheme, as language extension is built into the language. (
See what Paul Graham has to say about the subject)
Mesopotamia is also a great B52's song from the 80's. It's pretty much a song about nothing, except to say that "there's a lot of ruins in Mesopotamia."
In one of the Friedman articles I read, he describes how everywhere in Iran he went this spring he was treated with courtesy, and sometimes people were eager to speak to him, buy him dinner, drinks, etc. The only time anyone gave him trouble was at a restaurant where some Europeans saw him, figured out he was American, and then verbally abused him about the war in Iraq.
You're very right. That's why it's ironic that ordinary Iranians love Americans. They probably don't like American leadership (especially when they seem to be threatening Iran with invasion), and the Iranian leadership certainly doesn't like America or Americans. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has written a lot about this. I'm not some right-wing apologist -- quite the contrary.
Iran is strange -- its people, by and large, are trying to be more free, whereas its leadership is trying to hang onto power. But then, this is probably the rule when repressive leaderhip is in power in any country. I've had friends travel to Cuba and they tell me that Americans are welcomed with open arms by ordinary Cubans. And yes, this is despite the fact of the forty-year American economic embargo of Cuba.
Oops. I did not mean to say that the Iranian leadership does not speak Farsi. That was an editing error. The Iranian leadership does not like the United States.
Iraq was Mesopotamia, Iran is Persia. Don't confuse them -- Iranians (except for the leadership) speak Farsi and are not Arabs. We've never launched a war against Iran (although there was an ill-fated special forces mission to rescue the hostages back in 1980), and -- except for the leadership -- Iranians love the United States.
I really don't think you want to do this. I've had friends who've worked in the horrible job of telemarketing, and they get pissed at people who they deem rude or assholes and they retaliate. They share the numbers of the most obnoxious people on the other end of the phone and harrass them, have different people repeatedly call them back, sometimes hanging up as soon as they get an answer, etc. I've heard of other nasty tricks, such as signing these people up to multiple magazine subscriptions, which they've got to take the time and energy to cancel.
I'm not justifying what they do, but it's important to know who you're dealing with when you pull stuff like that.
They say the best way to deal with these people is to say, "No thank you" and just hang up.
Thank god you corrected this! I just heard about this on Nova. That's a fascinating story.
As for the "Dewey Defeats Truman" episode, my understanding is that this was exit polling conducted by the Chicago Tribune in a massive, first of its kind, nationwide effort. Exit polling, as I'm sure you know, is generally highly accurate, since it reflects actual voters, not people who claim they're going to vote some months or weeks hence (or not).
My father worked at the Tribune in 1948 and described to me the massive bank of telephone operators they had there, with stringers throughout the nation phoning in exit poll results, which were then tabulated by electromechanical adding machines. It was a very labor intensive effort.
Anyway, despite its apparent "failure" -- i.e. in predicting the winner -- I believe that the Tribune's use of exit polls was actually looked at as quite a success, because it did produce good numbers. Their problem wasn't the data they received from exit polling, it was hubris: they looked at the data, which showed a very close election, and decided to predict the winner despite the closeness. They gambled, and "lost," but didn't lose much.
Much polling is done not for public consumption, but for private (read: corporate or political). I'd be willing to bet that the majority of polls conducted are never published. So who cares about the accuracy of polling? The organizations or political candidates who paid bigtime to have these done. Decisions that can be worth millions of dollars are based sometimes on polling data. Poll results are a form of business or political intelligence. Certainly in war time we all appreciate the value of intelligence. The stakes aren't as high in the polling biz, but that doesn't mean those stakes are zero.
I agree -- participating in a poll is annoying and time-consuming. And the news media perhaps do put too much emphasis on the horserace nature of political races, based on frequent polling results. But I believe that's market-driven. People want to see that polling data, so they publish it as often as they get it.
You're right -- it's Hessler. It's changed so much the previous poster apparently didn't even know it had once been a hippy street. Well, there's still the street fair. Other than that, who would know?
Nope -- just University Circle. It's less than ten square miles. Still -- mighty impressive, especially if they get places that are technically off-campus like bars and coffee shops. Hell, even some off-campus housing might be in range! The old "hippy street" there might be wi-fi accessible. Ironic, sitting outside on your balcony in your bare feet drinking herbal tea and writing an anti-capitalist screed, all the while hooked up via free wi-fi.
How cool is that?! I live two miles from that campus, my alma mater.
I often work from home on my company-provided laptop. It's been my dream to work from a Starbucks or, in the case of Case, the locally-owned, thirty-year-old Arabica coffee shop. Hell, there's even a bar on Case campus I could probably work from!
NOTE: This is not at all an informative post. I'm just gloating. >:-)
In my opinion, good automated tools work well for large projects that are hard to code and maintain by hand.
I agree with you that one may have problems understanding and maintaining the detailed code resulting from code builders/generators/etc., but that can result from two things:
1) Generated code is inherently trickier to read than hand-written code. The good code generators amply comment so that you know the difference between what's been generated and what you've coded.
2) Such tools are intended for a higher layer than the code layer (to coin a phrase). An analogy (that stretches the point a little) may help explain what I'm saying: it's similar to reading the assembler output from a good compiler and complaining that it's hard to understand the programmer's intent. Correct! The assembler is not meant to be read; the higher-level source code is the real code.
Such design tools work well if they incorporated good "round-trip engineering," which means you can switch back and forth between the generated code (SQL) and the "source" code (the diagram).
(I hate to say it, but VC++ does a pretty good job of this when writing COM objects. You point and shoot and it creates skeleton code and interface code based upon your declarations, but you may still tweak the hell out of the resulting code. This is because they did a good job of putting markers in the comments.)
If the product being considered has good round-trip engineering or can otherwise track well the code it's generated, I believe you've got the best of both worlds.
Reading the other posts, in my opinion the XML-based package (Dia) rocks (at least on paper -- I've never used it). From the resultant XML a series of good code generators can be written.
Subject for a future Ask Slashdot: what's a good convention for such round-trip comments?
"Devising a proper schedule to satisfy a set of constraints is fundamental to many applications. A critical aspect of any parallel processing system is the algorithm mapping tasks to processors. Poor scheduling can leave most of the expensive machine sitting idle while one bottleneck task is performed. Assigning people to jobs, meetings to rooms, or courses to final exam periods are all different examples of scheduling problems.
"Scheduling problems differ widely in the nature of the constraints that must be satisfied and the type of schedule desired. For this reason, several other catalog problems have a direct application to various kinds of scheduling.
"We focus on precedence-constrained scheduling problems for directed acyclic graphs. These problems are often called PERT/CPM, for Program Evaluation and Review Technique/Critical Path Method. Suppose you have broken a big job into a large number of smaller tasks. For each task you know how long it should take (or perhaps an upper bound on how long it might take). Further, for each pair of tasks you know whether it is essential that one task be performed before another. The fewer constraints we have to enforce, the better our schedule can be. These constraints must define a directed acyclic graph, acyclic because a cycle in the precedence constraints represents a Catch-22 situation that can never be resolved.
Hmmm. Next time I'll read up on Newton's Laws before I open my big mouth. Seems that the efficacy of any pushing results from Newton's Third Law. However, I was still correct about rockets working in space and jet engines not.:)
I'm no expert, but it's my understanding that a rocket works by expelling exhaust at a high rate of speed, which uses Newton's First Law to add momentum to the rocket as an exact reaction to the momentum of the expelled gas; i.e. the more exhaust and the faster it's expelled, the more speed is added to the rocket in the opposite direction. Rockets can work in space or in the atmosphere.
Jet engines, on the other hand, though they superficially make look like a rocket because they have very hot gases coming out from the back, actually use a turbine to push the air; thus they pull themselves through the air in a way similar to a boat propeller (or, for that matter, an airplane propeller). Jet engines cannot work in space.
Rocket engines that work in space must have a source of oxygen, perhaps in an oxydizing agent and not necessarily gaseous or liquid oxygen.
Jet engines, I believe, have the earth's atmosphere as their only source of oxygen, and so this is another reason they cannot work in space.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone notice this at the top of the page? .mine ======= >>>>>>> .r15918
<<<<<<<
Someone screwed up a merge over at Mozilla.org.
We've been using SVN for six months now for a huge VB.NET project. SourceSafe repositories need to be uncorrupted every couple of months, whereas our SVN repository -- at 47MB and counting -- uses BDB and has yet to be corrupted. (Oh great -- I've just jinxed myself.)
On the other hand, Paul Graham seems to like creating new programming languages. Very useful observations on how to go about creating a new language.
While this seems like beaucoup fun, I'd question the need to extend an existing language by altering the compiler. Towards that end, you might want to use LISP or Scheme, as language extension is built into the language. ( See what Paul Graham has to say about the subject)
Mesopotamia is also a great B52's song from the 80's. It's pretty much a song about nothing, except to say that "there's a lot of ruins in Mesopotamia."
In one of the Friedman articles I read, he describes how everywhere in Iran he went this spring he was treated with courtesy, and sometimes people were eager to speak to him, buy him dinner, drinks, etc. The only time anyone gave him trouble was at a restaurant where some Europeans saw him, figured out he was American, and then verbally abused him about the war in Iraq.
You're very right. That's why it's ironic that ordinary Iranians love Americans. They probably don't like American leadership (especially when they seem to be threatening Iran with invasion), and the Iranian leadership certainly doesn't like America or Americans. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has written a lot about this. I'm not some right-wing apologist -- quite the contrary.
Iran is strange -- its people, by and large, are trying to be more free, whereas its leadership is trying to hang onto power. But then, this is probably the rule when repressive leaderhip is in power in any country. I've had friends travel to Cuba and they tell me that Americans are welcomed with open arms by ordinary Cubans. And yes, this is despite the fact of the forty-year American economic embargo of Cuba.
Oops. I did not mean to say that the Iranian leadership does not speak Farsi. That was an editing error. The Iranian leadership does not like the United States.
Iraq was Mesopotamia, Iran is Persia. Don't confuse them -- Iranians (except for the leadership) speak Farsi and are not Arabs. We've never launched a war against Iran (although there was an ill-fated special forces mission to rescue the hostages back in 1980), and -- except for the leadership -- Iranians love the United States.
I really don't think you want to do this. I've had friends who've worked in the horrible job of telemarketing, and they get pissed at people who they deem rude or assholes and they retaliate. They share the numbers of the most obnoxious people on the other end of the phone and harrass them, have different people repeatedly call them back, sometimes hanging up as soon as they get an answer, etc. I've heard of other nasty tricks, such as signing these people up to multiple magazine subscriptions, which they've got to take the time and energy to cancel.
I'm not justifying what they do, but it's important to know who you're dealing with when you pull stuff like that.
They say the best way to deal with these people is to say, "No thank you" and just hang up.
As for the "Dewey Defeats Truman" episode, my understanding is that this was exit polling conducted by the Chicago Tribune in a massive, first of its kind, nationwide effort. Exit polling, as I'm sure you know, is generally highly accurate, since it reflects actual voters, not people who claim they're going to vote some months or weeks hence (or not).
My father worked at the Tribune in 1948 and described to me the massive bank of telephone operators they had there, with stringers throughout the nation phoning in exit poll results, which were then tabulated by electromechanical adding machines. It was a very labor intensive effort.
Anyway, despite its apparent "failure" -- i.e. in predicting the winner -- I believe that the Tribune's use of exit polls was actually looked at as quite a success, because it did produce good numbers. Their problem wasn't the data they received from exit polling, it was hubris: they looked at the data, which showed a very close election, and decided to predict the winner despite the closeness. They gambled, and "lost," but didn't lose much.
Much polling is done not for public consumption, but for private (read: corporate or political). I'd be willing to bet that the majority of polls conducted are never published. So who cares about the accuracy of polling? The organizations or political candidates who paid bigtime to have these done. Decisions that can be worth millions of dollars are based sometimes on polling data. Poll results are a form of business or political intelligence. Certainly in war time we all appreciate the value of intelligence. The stakes aren't as high in the polling biz, but that doesn't mean those stakes are zero.
I agree -- participating in a poll is annoying and time-consuming. And the news media perhaps do put too much emphasis on the horserace nature of political races, based on frequent polling results. But I believe that's market-driven. People want to see that polling data, so they publish it as often as they get it.
You're probably not a big fan of Alanis Morissette's use of the word irony, either. :)
You're right -- it's Hessler. It's changed so much the previous poster apparently didn't even know it had once been a hippy street. Well, there's still the street fair. Other than that, who would know?
Nope -- just University Circle. It's less than ten square miles. Still -- mighty impressive, especially if they get places that are technically off-campus like bars and coffee shops. Hell, even some off-campus housing might be in range! The old "hippy street" there might be wi-fi accessible. Ironic, sitting outside on your balcony in your bare feet drinking herbal tea and writing an anti-capitalist screed, all the while hooked up via free wi-fi.
I often work from home on my company-provided laptop. It's been my dream to work from a Starbucks or, in the case of Case, the locally-owned, thirty-year-old Arabica coffee shop. Hell, there's even a bar on Case campus I could probably work from!
NOTE: This is not at all an informative post. I'm just gloating. >:-)
Performing trivial pseudo-scientific research is the Meaning Of Life!
I agree with you that one may have problems understanding and maintaining the detailed code resulting from code builders/generators/etc., but that can result from two things:
1) Generated code is inherently trickier to read than hand-written code. The good code generators amply comment so that you know the difference between what's been generated and what you've coded.
2) Such tools are intended for a higher layer than the code layer (to coin a phrase). An analogy (that stretches the point a little) may help explain what I'm saying: it's similar to reading the assembler output from a good compiler and complaining that it's hard to understand the programmer's intent. Correct! The assembler is not meant to be read; the higher-level source code is the real code.
Such design tools work well if they incorporated good "round-trip engineering," which means you can switch back and forth between the generated code (SQL) and the "source" code (the diagram).
(I hate to say it, but VC++ does a pretty good job of this when writing COM objects. You point and shoot and it creates skeleton code and interface code based upon your declarations, but you may still tweak the hell out of the resulting code. This is because they did a good job of putting markers in the comments.)
If the product being considered has good round-trip engineering or can otherwise track well the code it's generated, I believe you've got the best of both worlds.
Reading the other posts, in my opinion the XML-based package (Dia) rocks (at least on paper -- I've never used it). From the resultant XML a series of good code generators can be written.
Subject for a future Ask Slashdot: what's a good convention for such round-trip comments?
This is online community at its best. I bookmark disussions such as these because they help me with my job.
If only I could cite Slashdot to my skeptical PHB. Such is life.
Click here for the algorithms.
Disclaimer: I haven't used them.
Hmmm. Next time I'll read up on Newton's Laws before I open my big mouth. Seems that the efficacy of any pushing results from Newton's Third Law. However, I was still correct about rockets working in space and jet engines not. :)
Sheesh, for that matter I might be wrong about the definition of a rocket engine versus a jet engine! :)
Jet engines, on the other hand, though they superficially make look like a rocket because they have very hot gases coming out from the back, actually use a turbine to push the air; thus they pull themselves through the air in a way similar to a boat propeller (or, for that matter, an airplane propeller). Jet engines cannot work in space.
Rocket engines that work in space must have a source of oxygen, perhaps in an oxydizing agent and not necessarily gaseous or liquid oxygen.
Jet engines, I believe, have the earth's atmosphere as their only source of oxygen, and so this is another reason they cannot work in space.
(I know, I know, we Americans name dates differently from the rest of the world.)
Famous last words!
I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Bill's pretty crafty. This'll probably be revived in a more sinister form next year.