I have brought this up to the Rails community in my area and was told that if I really wanted to learn what was going on that I needed to read the source code. This was not a single person spouting off an answer but the general concensus of the community. Real docs would be better, of course, but did you try it? It's not like when you're tracing Java code in an IDE and accidentally wander into the internals. The code behind Rails is not hard to read, even for a novice -- I'd say it's on par with a W3C specification.
Retailers that used to push both Blu-ray and HD-DVD now push....nothing. I find it hard even finding a single Blu-ray player for sale. Nobody was buying standalone Blu-Ray players in the first place. The 40 gig PS-3 is basically the same price and can upgrade itself to new specs
If you feel like trying out some of the more esoteric features, I hear it can even play games.
Who do you give root access to? To people you trust. People who are loyal to your cause. If people leave, it means they are no longer loyal. It means working for you isn't what they want to be doing, anymore. It frequently doesn't mean they dislike you or are untrustworthy.
Besides, they knew they were going to quit before they told you, and could have done whatever they wanted, then.
You know, read the labels on the devices and such? To some degree, but some possible improvements would require a standardization mandate. For instance, I was reading here a few years ago that Google can make (or get made) hardware to their own specifications, and they save an awful lot of power by using strictly 12V DC to the motherboards, if not the whole boxes. They were advocating for the rest of the industry to do that, but if you run a data center and can't buy the hardware to do that, you're out of luck.
back then using models was cheaper & better than CG. I think CG just plain wasn't feasible then. Remember, this is before even Tron. I think The Last Starfight in 1984 was pretty much the first movie with anything like what we'd think of as CGI, and it still looked pretty fake.
the transition from anikin from emo teenager to psycopathic child murderer was way to fast for me. The novelizations of episodes 1-3 actually add a lot of supporting detail, and #3 added a lot to that area. It was enough to make me think that, power-crazy or not, Palpatine might have actually been right.
it doesn't make ANY sense to fly a jet from L.A. to New York - THAT trip would be much more sensibly done in a dirigible, even if it did take a few hours longer. I think it would be a lot more than a few hours longer. The highest top speed I can find for a zeppelin is 65mph, and something less for a blimp. Trains make a lot more sense than airships for this sort of thing, although coast-to-coast might be pushing it.
Now, I do think the navy should be using airships for anti-submarine work.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find Fortran/Cobol programs originally written for the IBM709 or CDC1604 still in use. Lisp was originally designed around the register architecture of the IBM 704 (IIRC), although the actual code turned out to be fairly machine independent. There might well be something John McCarthy wrote in the mid-50's, before telling anyone else about this LISP thing he was working on, that's still running somewhere. And if none of it is running now, it could probably be easily made to run.
It's really astonishing how much of that article rings completely false to me.
But information too has become an addiction. I don't know what it's like at your house, but we can't even watch a simple rerun of Friends without one of us saying "Who's that actress playing Joey's girlfriend? This has always been the case. The only thing new (since I got NetScape 1.1 at 19) is that I can actually get an answer, rather than just being frustrated.
Was the cell phone wasn't invented to fill a particular need?... Once we get the taste, we're hooked. I think that's as much because pay phones have disappeared as due to the nature of having a cell phone.
Some languages, such as classical Pascal, basically impose a bottom-up approach, but other languages do not. Some of my later reactions may be colored by the fact that Turbo Pascal was the first language I seriously learned.
In order to get IntelliSense to work correctly, bottom-up programming is best. IntelliSense wants every class, every method, every property, every field, every method parameter, every local variable properly defined before you refer to it. So when you realize you need something, you declare it and then go back to what you were doing. C#, VB.Net and Java make it easier by letting you put the declaration on the same line (unless the exception system interferes), but this is still the way I operate in PL/SQL where the variables are declared above the block and I'm coding in a text editor. It was also the way I did it in Turbo Pascal in 1993. From the very beginning, I was bothered by having my code in a state where it would not compile for more than a few seconds.
To get IntelliSense to work right... within each method or property, you must also write you code linearly from beginning to end... You must define all variables before you use them. No more skipping around in your code. It's more the opposite, isn't it? If you like your declarations at the top (which I usually do, and the author clearly does), IntelliSense encourages you to keep skipping back to the top to declare things as you realize you need them. It also encourages you to keep your procedures small enough that this is feasible.
Besides, I justify to myself, I may not want those 60,000 methods and properties cluttering up my mind. The real complaint here is about the size of the library. Granted, maybe nobody would write libraries that big without these tools to help, and that approach would have some advantages.
Generated Code Okay, I hadn't gotten here, yet, when I wrote above that the whole article rang false for me. I'm generally of the opinion that code generation is an indicator of weaknesses that would be better fixed in the language.
Or maybe you shouldn't be doing your "let's say" in a public place to begin with. It's just plain inconsiderate towards other people there. Only to people who don't want to see it. It's quite considerate to us voyeurs.
only one pair of bathrooms in the entire complex. This is to encourage people to run into each other and interact more frequently. I'm sorry, but that would just bug me. When I need to go to the bathroom, I don't want to be interrupted to have a conversation, nor do I want to hear other people yapping away while they do their business. I think my ideal would be a single big room with sinks and mirrors, and then toilet stalls that are real rooms with floor-to-ceiling walls and doors and ventilation fans. With a real acknowledgment of homosexuality these days, separating by gender is becoming something of an anachronism, and the fact that someone isn't my preferred gender for romance doesn't mean I want to breath little particles from their ass.
Is this better or worse than requiring a CD in the drive to play? They should bring back dongles, but in a more useful form.
Get a USB thumb drive maker to create a line with an extra feature to imprint a serial number. Sell the software on the thumb drive instead of disks, keyed to the ID on the thumb drive. Run directly from the thumb drive, without requiring any installation.
Substring() does the job, so it's not a big deal. MyString.Substring(MyString.length - n) will suffice (although I'm always going to look at that and suspect I have a one-off error). I just got used to having Right$(MyString, n) in VB 6. On the other hand.StartsWith and.EndsWith more than makes up for it, and the left-to-right string method calls are a big win. There are others I'm occasionally surprised to find aren't there; I'm just not coming up with them right now.
That one I agree with - while the utility methods such as Path.Combine are quite handy in cross-platform code, I'd prefer a full-featured class to handle filesystem paths, similar to boost::filesystem. On a side note - does Java has that? I've never used Boost, so I can't say for sure, but I think Java and.Net both have some semblance of that..Net's usually seem to be easier to use, but there are a lot of odd cases where something will only work with a string or only work with the structured objects. System.IO.FileInfo, for example, will tell you the extension of a file, but if you want the name without the extension, you need to make it a string and pass it to System.IO.Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension.
What's so difficult about it? Maybe I shouldn't have said anything about FTP. I didn't really get a chance to learn it before my coworker handed me a wrapper class to the WebRequest system that's 800-some lines and kinda flakey. Looking at your comment and then the code for the wrapper class, it appears the author wasn't really comfortable with streams.
I need to connect to an FTP site and scan a list of directories for any files, download them, and remove them from the site. Is there any built-in functionality that handles this sort of thing well?
Well, Java is a better example by virtue of not having the same backwards-compatibility cruft to deal with. My overall impression has been that.Net has the advantage of not having as much backwards-compatibility cruft to deal with. Sure, there's a lot of nastiness under the hood somewhere, and a little of it does come through the.Net libraries, but it's nowhere near as bad as the leftovers from early versions of Java. To use Swing, you still have to know AWT. To use Bloch's collection classes, you still need to know their predecessors. To use NIO, you still need to know the original IO system that builds up from individual bytes (I knew that was wrong the first time I saw it -- it's supposed to be starting at the lowest level, but the lowest level works with buffers). It's very hard to get a handle on the language if you're new, because you have to learn so much history.
The legacy cruft in Java is a lot more annoying, too, because it's stuff that would have been easily avoidable. The libraries are all modular, so they could have easily made clean breaks, letting people who are reliant on the old versions just keep using those old versions.
I haven't written off Java (for my own purposes -- I know plenty of other people do good things with it). I know my view of what it's like to work in a Java shop is colored by the fact that we used entirely Oracle tools and Oracle clearly sucks with Java. And JavaDoc is an utterly glorious thing that can make up for an awful lot. I'm just saying some of these criticisms of.Net are things that Java really isn't any better at.
I'll tell you this, if you don't run your work in a separate thread, you end up with unresponsive interfaces. But wouldn't you just have a primary thread for the UI and run the other stuff in threads that don't touch it? Maybe I have it wrong, because all my.Net work has been batch jobs where a responsive interface isn't important enough to bother with threading.
Give MySQL and PostgreSQL a spin. I'll be trying PostGreSQL a try when I find some time, but I don't really expect to ever be able to make a living with it. I've used MySQL, and I don't like it.
When Visual Studio 6.0 came out, it was a nightmare. only 20% of the code ported. From VB5 to VB6? People ridiculed VB6 for how little it changed from VB5. It came with some new database libraries (you could still use the old ones), and added four new string functions.
Just like icons, it is easier for the human mind to remember a small picture than the text associated with it. Can people really tell what those small pictures actually are more than half the time? The bigger ones on the desktop might have some value, but I'd be happy to get all the hieroglyphics out of the applications I have to use.
And I have yet to meet anyone in person who actually likes the Office Ribbon.
I think that it is fair to say that.NET is the best thing ever to come out of Microsoft, even though it wasn't a completely original idea After a couple years working with Oracle, I'm getting pretty fond of SQL Server. But then, I'm a bit of a Relational Weenie.
For anyone who has done programming between good languages and MS languages will know he's spot on Well, sort-of. He concentrates way too much on the Win32 API, which not too many people are using directly. His big complaint about Windows Forms was threading, which doesn't seem like a big issue (you may have multiple threads once-in-a-while, but will you have more than one working with the UI?) -- otherwise he just kinda says it sucks without suggesting anything better (SWT might be a possible candidate. Swing is not.).
And the.Net libraries are far from perfect. There are weird versions of a lot of things left over for the VB6-VB.Net porting wizard to use. The selection of functions on the String class has some very strange ommissions (.Right(n) would be nice). The IO libraries need a smooth system to switch between strings and structured objects when dealing with paths and filenames. FTP is still way too difficult. If you don't want to deal with those infernal visual designers, ADO.Net seemed to take several of the bad parts of JDBC without the huge positive that Type 4 drivers let you avoid any local installations. The settings system they push doesn't work with multi-project solutions. Etc. But he lost any credibility trying to hold up Java as a better example.
our generation's telling of Allegory of the Cave, which is the root of all Western European thought about both will and epistemology. Just because Plato was the first philosopher we remember much, that doesn't mean he's the root of philosophical thought. Aristotle didn't really reference Plato's ideas much, and he was a lot more influential (for good reason -- Plato was a hack). And every little detail of the world being part of a simulation really isn't the same idea as Plato's forms.
If The Matrix has a philosophical value, I think it's in providing an easily understandable counter to Descartes' "I think therefore I am." nonsense.
Define small-scale sites and explain how that definition applies to yellowpages.com. I don't have a full definition (I suspect it's going to be different for each tool), but "very few updates" would be part of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I have brought this up to the Rails community in my area and was told that if I really wanted to learn what was going on that I needed to read the source code. This was not a single person spouting off an answer but the general concensus of the community.
Real docs would be better, of course, but did you try it? It's not like when you're tracing Java code in an IDE and accidentally wander into the internals. The code behind Rails is not hard to read, even for a novice -- I'd say it's on par with a W3C specification.
Retailers that used to push both Blu-ray and HD-DVD now push....nothing. I find it hard even finding a single Blu-ray player for sale.
Nobody was buying standalone Blu-Ray players in the first place. The 40 gig PS-3 is basically the same price and can upgrade itself to new specs
If you feel like trying out some of the more esoteric features, I hear it can even play games.
Hacksaw. Meat grinder. Crab pots.
Will it blend?
Who do you give root access to? To people you trust. People who are loyal to your cause. If people leave, it means they are no longer loyal.
It means working for you isn't what they want to be doing, anymore. It frequently doesn't mean they dislike you or are untrustworthy.
Besides, they knew they were going to quit before they told you, and could have done whatever they wanted, then.
You know, read the labels on the devices and such?
To some degree, but some possible improvements would require a standardization mandate. For instance, I was reading here a few years ago that Google can make (or get made) hardware to their own specifications, and they save an awful lot of power by using strictly 12V DC to the motherboards, if not the whole boxes. They were advocating for the rest of the industry to do that, but if you run a data center and can't buy the hardware to do that, you're out of luck.
back then using models was cheaper & better than CG.
I think CG just plain wasn't feasible then. Remember, this is before even Tron. I think The Last Starfight in 1984 was pretty much the first movie with anything like what we'd think of as CGI, and it still looked pretty fake.
the transition from anikin from emo teenager to psycopathic child murderer was way to fast for me.
The novelizations of episodes 1-3 actually add a lot of supporting detail, and #3 added a lot to that area. It was enough to make me think that, power-crazy or not, Palpatine might have actually been right.
There are no "thorny ethical issues." It is immoral to sacrifice one life to benefit another
Are you a vegetarian?
it doesn't make ANY sense to fly a jet from L.A. to New York - THAT trip would be much more sensibly done in a dirigible, even if it did take a few hours longer.
I think it would be a lot more than a few hours longer. The highest top speed I can find for a zeppelin is 65mph, and something less for a blimp. Trains make a lot more sense than airships for this sort of thing, although coast-to-coast might be pushing it.
Now, I do think the navy should be using airships for anti-submarine work.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find Fortran/Cobol programs originally written for the IBM709 or CDC1604 still in use.
Lisp was originally designed around the register architecture of the IBM 704 (IIRC), although the actual code turned out to be fairly machine independent. There might well be something John McCarthy wrote in the mid-50's, before telling anyone else about this LISP thing he was working on, that's still running somewhere. And if none of it is running now, it could probably be easily made to run.
It's really astonishing how much of that article rings completely false to me.
But information too has become an addiction. I don't know what it's like at your house, but we can't even watch a simple rerun of Friends without one of us saying "Who's that actress playing Joey's girlfriend?
This has always been the case. The only thing new (since I got NetScape 1.1 at 19) is that I can actually get an answer, rather than just being frustrated.
Was the cell phone wasn't invented to fill a particular need?... Once we get the taste, we're hooked.
I think that's as much because pay phones have disappeared as due to the nature of having a cell phone.
Some languages, such as classical Pascal, basically impose a bottom-up approach, but other languages do not.
Some of my later reactions may be colored by the fact that Turbo Pascal was the first language I seriously learned.
In order to get IntelliSense to work correctly, bottom-up programming is best. IntelliSense wants every class, every method, every property, every field, every method parameter, every local variable properly defined before you refer to it.
So when you realize you need something, you declare it and then go back to what you were doing. C#, VB.Net and Java make it easier by letting you put the declaration on the same line (unless the exception system interferes), but this is still the way I operate in PL/SQL where the variables are declared above the block and I'm coding in a text editor. It was also the way I did it in Turbo Pascal in 1993. From the very beginning, I was bothered by having my code in a state where it would not compile for more than a few seconds.
To get IntelliSense to work right... within each method or property, you must also write you code linearly from beginning to end... You must define all variables before you use them. No more skipping around in your code.
It's more the opposite, isn't it? If you like your declarations at the top (which I usually do, and the author clearly does), IntelliSense encourages you to keep skipping back to the top to declare things as you realize you need them. It also encourages you to keep your procedures small enough that this is feasible.
Besides, I justify to myself, I may not want those 60,000 methods and properties cluttering up my mind.
The real complaint here is about the size of the library. Granted, maybe nobody would write libraries that big without these tools to help, and that approach would have some advantages.
Generated Code
Okay, I hadn't gotten here, yet, when I wrote above that the whole article rang false for me. I'm generally of the opinion that code generation is an indicator of weaknesses that would be better fixed in the language.
In what way was XP an improvement over Windows 2000?
As far as most users were concerned, Win98SE was the previous version of Windows.
Or maybe you shouldn't be doing your "let's say" in a public place to begin with. It's just plain inconsiderate towards other people there.
Only to people who don't want to see it. It's quite considerate to us voyeurs.
only one pair of bathrooms in the entire complex. This is to encourage people to run into each other and interact more frequently. I'm sorry, but that would just bug me. When I need to go to the bathroom, I don't want to be interrupted to have a conversation, nor do I want to hear other people yapping away while they do their business.
I think my ideal would be a single big room with sinks and mirrors, and then toilet stalls that are real rooms with floor-to-ceiling walls and doors and ventilation fans. With a real acknowledgment of homosexuality these days, separating by gender is becoming something of an anachronism, and the fact that someone isn't my preferred gender for romance doesn't mean I want to breath little particles from their ass.
Is this better or worse than requiring a CD in the drive to play?
They should bring back dongles, but in a more useful form.
Get a USB thumb drive maker to create a line with an extra feature to imprint a serial number. Sell the software on the thumb drive instead of disks, keyed to the ID on the thumb drive. Run directly from the thumb drive, without requiring any installation.
Substring() does the job, so it's not a big deal. .StartsWith and .EndsWith more than makes up for it, and the left-to-right string method calls are a big win. There are others I'm occasionally surprised to find aren't there; I'm just not coming up with them right now.
.Net both have some semblance of that. .Net's usually seem to be easier to use, but there are a lot of odd cases where something will only work with a string or only work with the structured objects. System.IO.FileInfo, for example, will tell you the extension of a file, but if you want the name without the extension, you need to make it a string and pass it to System.IO.Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension.
MyString.Substring(MyString.length - n) will suffice (although I'm always going to look at that and suspect I have a one-off error). I just got used to having Right$(MyString, n) in VB 6. On the other hand
That one I agree with - while the utility methods such as Path.Combine are quite handy in cross-platform code, I'd prefer a full-featured class to handle filesystem paths, similar to boost::filesystem. On a side note - does Java has that?
I've never used Boost, so I can't say for sure, but I think Java and
What's so difficult about it?
Maybe I shouldn't have said anything about FTP. I didn't really get a chance to learn it before my coworker handed me a wrapper class to the WebRequest system that's 800-some lines and kinda flakey. Looking at your comment and then the code for the wrapper class, it appears the author wasn't really comfortable with streams.
I need to connect to an FTP site and scan a list of directories for any files, download them, and remove them from the site. Is there any built-in functionality that handles this sort of thing well?
Well, Java is a better example by virtue of not having the same backwards-compatibility cruft to deal with. .Net has the advantage of not having as much backwards-compatibility cruft to deal with. Sure, there's a lot of nastiness under the hood somewhere, and a little of it does come through the .Net libraries, but it's nowhere near as bad as the leftovers from early versions of Java. To use Swing, you still have to know AWT. To use Bloch's collection classes, you still need to know their predecessors. To use NIO, you still need to know the original IO system that builds up from individual bytes (I knew that was wrong the first time I saw it -- it's supposed to be starting at the lowest level, but the lowest level works with buffers). It's very hard to get a handle on the language if you're new, because you have to learn so much history.
.Net are things that Java really isn't any better at.
My overall impression has been that
The legacy cruft in Java is a lot more annoying, too, because it's stuff that would have been easily avoidable. The libraries are all modular, so they could have easily made clean breaks, letting people who are reliant on the old versions just keep using those old versions.
I haven't written off Java (for my own purposes -- I know plenty of other people do good things with it). I know my view of what it's like to work in a Java shop is colored by the fact that we used entirely Oracle tools and Oracle clearly sucks with Java. And JavaDoc is an utterly glorious thing that can make up for an awful lot. I'm just saying some of these criticisms of
I'll tell you this, if you don't run your work in a separate thread, you end up with unresponsive interfaces. .Net work has been batch jobs where a responsive interface isn't important enough to bother with threading.
But wouldn't you just have a primary thread for the UI and run the other stuff in threads that don't touch it? Maybe I have it wrong, because all my
Give MySQL and PostgreSQL a spin.
I'll be trying PostGreSQL a try when I find some time, but I don't really expect to ever be able to make a living with it. I've used MySQL, and I don't like it.
When Visual Studio 6.0 came out, it was a nightmare. only 20% of the code ported.
.Net?
From VB5 to VB6? People ridiculed VB6 for how little it changed from VB5. It came with some new database libraries (you could still use the old ones), and added four new string functions.
Are you sure you're not thinking of
Just like icons, it is easier for the human mind to remember a small picture than the text associated with it.
Can people really tell what those small pictures actually are more than half the time? The bigger ones on the desktop might have some value, but I'd be happy to get all the hieroglyphics out of the applications I have to use.
And I have yet to meet anyone in person who actually likes the Office Ribbon.
I think that it is fair to say that .NET is the best thing ever to come out of Microsoft, even though it wasn't a completely original idea
After a couple years working with Oracle, I'm getting pretty fond of SQL Server. But then, I'm a bit of a Relational Weenie.
For anyone who has done programming between good languages and MS languages will know he's spot on
.Net libraries are far from perfect. There are weird versions of a lot of things left over for the VB6-VB.Net porting wizard to use. The selection of functions on the String class has some very strange ommissions (.Right(n) would be nice). The IO libraries need a smooth system to switch between strings and structured objects when dealing with paths and filenames. FTP is still way too difficult. If you don't want to deal with those infernal visual designers, ADO.Net seemed to take several of the bad parts of JDBC without the huge positive that Type 4 drivers let you avoid any local installations. The settings system they push doesn't work with multi-project solutions. Etc. But he lost any credibility trying to hold up Java as a better example.
Well, sort-of. He concentrates way too much on the Win32 API, which not too many people are using directly. His big complaint about Windows Forms was threading, which doesn't seem like a big issue (you may have multiple threads once-in-a-while, but will you have more than one working with the UI?) -- otherwise he just kinda says it sucks without suggesting anything better (SWT might be a possible candidate. Swing is not.).
And the
our generation's telling of Allegory of the Cave, which is the root of all Western European thought about both will and epistemology.
Just because Plato was the first philosopher we remember much, that doesn't mean he's the root of philosophical thought. Aristotle didn't really reference Plato's ideas much, and he was a lot more influential (for good reason -- Plato was a hack). And every little detail of the world being part of a simulation really isn't the same idea as Plato's forms.
If The Matrix has a philosophical value, I think it's in providing an easily understandable counter to Descartes' "I think therefore I am." nonsense.
Define small-scale sites and explain how that definition applies to yellowpages.com.
I don't have a full definition (I suspect it's going to be different for each tool), but "very few updates" would be part of it.