- You seem to think your opinion is all that counts - You shout "conspiracy" about an anti-Linux-usability post, and then wonder why people think you're "shrill" - Anecdotal evidence is unreliable. Just because you and a buddy had a filesystem meltdown does not mean the average Windows user has to deal with this on a regular basis. This goes likewise for stories about Windows NT Workstation BSOD's during normal use.
For instance, I had an uptime of about 7 months with WinNT SP3 Workstation doing daily development in Java and C++. I don't count that as proof against those who say NT BSOD's when you sneeze, but I do take it as the "Grain of Salt" necessary when reading these scathing Microsoft diatribes.
In the end, resorting to blatant ad hominem attacks ["MS Fanboy"] makes you look like a fool.
[yes, i'm fresh from taking a macroeconomics class, so, apoligies in advance.]
Basing the future of your company primarily on entertainment is very dangerous. Movies for instance, are are very dependent on properly aligning consumer taste & artistic talent. While 1999 has been a banner year for both blockbuster & artsy films, there are still an impressive number of duds being released.
Because of this volatility in success, no one studio is going to have a "monopoly" on movies. It follows that future Internet content will be nearly as difficult (if not more difficult) to pull off properly.
Analysts are so convinced that AOL/TW is going to spell big content, big broadband, and therefore big profitability, but I don't see how re-runs of Bugs Bunny and back-issues of TIME are going to attract billions of eyeballs & dollars.
If this helps build the broadband infrastructure of tomorrow, more power to them, but plumbing isn't (by far) the "interesting" part of the Internet, and I don't think AOL/TW is well positioned to do "interesting" stuff.
If you hadn't noticed, there IS a court case going on to figure this out.
Furthermore, Microsoft is in its position precicely because WE PUT THEM THERE (WE being the majority of customers who refused alternatives such as OS/2 in the early 90's or DR-DOS in the late 80's.)
In any case, Microsoft is somewhat unrelated to the TW/AOL merger since we still DO have a choice and currently I fail to see how AOL/TW are going to wedge themselves into our lives in the way Microsoft did through OEM-bundling.
"In the summer of 1998, Caldera, Inc. created two separate companies to further focus the development, marketing and sales efforts of the company's two divisions: Caldera Systems, Inc. addressed its "Linux for Business" target, while Caldera Thin Clients, Inc. addressed the thin client embedded systems market. At present, Caldera Systems sells Linux-based products in various markets, with greatest profitability in the desktop and server market segments. Ransom Love, former VP of Marketing for Caldera Inc., is the current president and CEO of Caldera Systems, Inc. www.calderasystems.com In July 1999, Caldera Thin Clients changed its name to Lineo, Inc."
I don't get the impression that Caldera Systems bought its way out of Caldera - since the company was privately held I have a hard time believing the parent company would do such a strategically-silly move.
Netscape started embrace & extend back in 1994, when the web was barely an infant.
Restricting technologies to committee-resolved standards is shackling future innovations to a centralized political debate. Once the web moved past early adopter stages (i.e. around 1997 / 98), the "browser wars" pretty much ground to a halt, and the W3C standards body actually started to make sense.
In the end, premature standards underestimate the effectiveness of competition. We have a better web for it [assuming, of course, that Netscape 5.0 gets released].
- It always bothered me that there was regional-restrictions on what cable provider I can choose. For instance, people in Vaughn & Scarborough use Shaw cable, but the rest of the greater Toronto area is predominantly Rogers... choice, dammit, I want CHOICE!
- I thought that @HOME was actually providing the actual support & bandwidth since some time 1998 when Rogers & Shaw realized that they had no experience in dealing with the Internet... So, in effect AT&T is the driving force of cable modems in Canada, with Rogers being just the plumber. eeek.:)
AOL is an ISP with a really easy to use interface and (globally) the widest availability.
For people who travel a lot, or those who want minimal hassle, it is a godsend. One would hope now that this merger will give AOL-like ease of access to broadband.
The "AOL is for lamers" argument is getting really tired. Use the right tool for the job.
- Actually, I did go grocery shopping on the web a few weeks ago... pleasant experience.
- I have regular discussions with my friends & loved ones over IRC & ICQ while I'm out of town. No, it doesn't replace the telephone as the "best" way to talk to someone long-distance, but it has certainly been a help (even indirectly in bringing down LD rates)
- It's a company's purpose to attempt to change the way your world works - but whether this is evil or not is a matter of perspective. In the end, they *can't* change you unless you let them... and if you do let them, then it is most likely because your life is bettered by this new service. This is called *innovation*.
Your life is not dictated by corporations, it is dictated by the market, where your $$$ counts just as much as the next person.
- I *have* seen the unshowered, bad b.o. geek. Many of them in my faculty here at the university. They do exist.
- I suppose you could once call me the geek who had the "cruel dispassionate world" beat the happiness out of him. One day, I think I just switched gears: I'm going to make myself happy and find out what makes other people happy, and I'm just going to ignore those who insist on being mean-spirited. Here's what I discovered (ymmv):
- The world isn't in general hateful & cruel. It just happens that people in Grade 8 are.
- Most people want to be loved and appreciated. If you take the time to show them in a non-fake way that you do appreciate them, you've solved 1/2 of the "social skills" problem.
- The other half of the problem is the "shyness" hump, which is a problem I still sometimes have to deal with myself. I haven't found a foolproof solution to this other than to say, flip a switch on yourself that says "I am who I am, and I want to meet people", and just find ways to strike up conversation. Most people are about as nervous as you are, they just have had more experience in breaking out of it.
- It's always good to be yourself & not care about what people think about you, but the final key to social skills is: look & listen for feedback about what in your personality or your communication is irritating or rubbing people the wrong way. Then really -analyze- why that may be - or even better, ask people. The only way you can grow is by making mistakes in this way.
Squeak needs work ont he doucmentation, but more commercial Smalltalks have very good class docs (and method docs, when necessary).
The reason I say this is because I'm working professionally on a Gemstone/Java project and I'm cursing the fact that I can't use Smalltalk on a daily basis... the speed/power of developing a business system with that language is amazing.
I still remember connecting to Commodore 64 bbs' back in the mid 1980's. And there were *so* many BBS programs out there, many custom-modded by Sysops.. anyone remember C*Base, C-Net and ImageBBS? There were a few others. WWIV, All american BBS, etc.
The funniest were all of the pirate C64 BBS sites in the 80's.. there were HUNDREDS of them! Garden of Eden, anyone?:)
Quantum Link (QLink, aka. AOL now), was also pretty cool. Some of the technology was pretty amazing for its time.. Lucasfilm's habitat (Club Caribe), or Rabbitjack's Casino..
If Corel drops support, it's not the end of the world: It's just the sign of a struggling business making a tough business decision. The work they've put into the project should be remembered & respected - but it will go on with or without them.
While most of your points are good ones, here's my response to some of them:
- Enforced indentation & generated JavaDoc. I think this is somewhat of a nitpick - VA gives you lots of options for the different indentation conventions in Java. If you want to use a non-conventional indentation, you're being stubborn.
- Method ordering: I can see the benefit of this, but what's important to YOU may not be important to someone else. A better tradeoff is just what VA chose: alphabetical ordering, since you can select which method you want to look at.
- Poor cooperation wtih Version control: Sorry, I don't agree. The pro version integrates directly with PVCS & ClearCase, and I'm using it with CVS very easily. (though it's not integrated in this case)
- Poor runtime support: Line numbers are irrelevant in VA. And yes, it actually is fairly useable with multithreaded systems. The enterprise version hooks in with servlets very easily (we're doing this now on one of my projects).
Most experienced (10+ years) OO designers that I know prefer VisualAge for Java/C++/SmallTalk because it's the most expressive and flexible environment to program in... yes, it does tend to encourage ALL developers on a team to use VisualAge as well since it's not as file-based of an approach, but who the hell wants to use files anyway? Your job is to program, not to fudge with your source files.
Furthermore, the packages/classes/methods metaphor is a proven Smalltalk ui concept that is the most efficient way for learning a system through its source code.
In fact, most beginners do not use VisualAge because they find it too hard to use!
I'm with you dude. "Let's just be friends" seems to happen all too often, even though the signals are pretty clearly in the direction of "Let's be MORE than friends". Whatever.
I have had a medium-term relationship (2 years), so I'm not completely oblivious to what works with women, but it still can be difficult. That relationship just sort of "happened" out of mutual interest... most of the women I meet lately are "just friends" or already with someone..
There's a pretty decent book called "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", that explains that the "you're such a nice guy, let's just be friends" syndrome seems to happen because Men like to jump steps in the "relationship game". What I mean is this: if you give signals that you've got a major crush on a girl when she just likes you as a friend, chances are she won't be interested, and may get frightened off. That doesn't mean that she couldn't _potentially_ be hot for you - if she didn't have an immediate crush on you then it usually takes a while, since women are like ovens... they start liking you mentally & emotionally first, and then if that reaches a peak, they'll start becoming physically attracted. So, if you make your advances gradually by like aiming at her "stage" of what she thinks of you, it may work out better....
Unfortunately, that plan doesn't help when deep down you're tearing yourself apart with anxiety & impatience because you're majorly infatuated wtih this girl... My own thoughts on this matter are: women can smell discomfort & lack of confidence as well as dogs can smell a T-bone. Women dig confidence - and it has to be genuine. That means resisting the urge to have huge crushes, which usually are more destructive than anything 'cause they turn you into a blubbering idiot [i've been there, recently too]. Only solution here is to stop communicating for a while.. it's a harsh solution, and it's hard to manage it while maintaining a real friendship, but it WILL numb your crush after a few weeks.
Life is always an ongoing journey anyway, so if we had all the answers, it wouldn't be as much fun.. yea that sounds hokey, but it's true. just keep learning & things tend to work out...
- IBM typically releases dozens of patents a year, some of which are related to techniques to increase hard drive capacity. These innovations have been one of the chief reasons that fat hard drives are so cheap today.
- Jini. Source is available, but it's not open source. Jini is sweet innovation in some respects (i.e. finally a widely-applicable distributed object framework!) & not as sweet in other respects (i.e. nothing major uses it yet)
- Internet Explorer 4.5 for the mac - featured innovations such as auto form-fill, better caching performance and CSS rendering.
- New Enterprise JavaBeans application server releases from Persistence, GemStone, BEA WebLogic, etc. all provided innovative ways of accessing corporate data and providing a high performance environment for e-commerce apps.
The list could go on & on.. pretty much any product enhancement is, on some level, an "innovation", except for the usual minor cosmetic changes & bug fixes. Innovation isn't a "big idea" usually, it's the process of filling a customer need.
Innovation isn't necessarily a breakthrough idea, it usually is an idea to improve an existing product or process, or an idea to exploit an opportunity in the marketplace based on trends or demographics.
Most successful innovations are not clever, or complex. One of Microsoft's greatest innovations is the "Office Suite" - they bundled together a word processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation package together for 1/3 the price you'd have to pay by purchasing them seperately.
That innovation alone explains billions of $$$ of Microsoft's profits - they make almost as much money on Office as Windows.
It's the geek dream to be respected for doing something "clever", but in a competitive market place, an innovation has to be comprehended by morons or near-morons. Cleverness does not equal success, it usually is just an investment in ego.
Think big, but innovate gradually, one step at a time - and execute those steps well. That's the mantra of entrepreneurship. Microsoft has followed this very well, and I find it disappointing that the Linux community is stuck on the belief that the only respectable problems worth solving in this world are the hard ones.
This survey seems to be geared to client-side business applications.
I can almost guarantee you that there are more *new* COBOL applications being written today on the server than other languages. (Primarily for Y2K, but even for new apps. CICS+COBOL is proven, it scales, even if it can be monotonous.)
Actually, I think most experienced server programmers are already well versed in COBOL, RPG, or Smalltalk.
C++ on the business enterprise server? Sure, it exists, but, uh, it didn't really work out too well. That is why this Java thing is pretty popular... it's the successor to the server-side languages that DID work. [Though i'd argue that the successor to Java should ironically be Smalltalk , but, that's for another time]
Track 7 (the instrumentals) on both disks rule. I could have them on auto-repeat...
All too often I begin to play disk 2, get into some sort of trance, and the next thing I know I'm hearing the whining guitars at the end of "Ripe (with decay)". And I have a lot of code on my screen. What happened to the last hour?:)
it's been way too long since I've had an album that can do this sort of thing....
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not an MS fan boy, and:
- You seem to think your opinion is all that counts
- You shout "conspiracy" about an anti-Linux-usability post, and then wonder why people think you're "shrill"
- Anecdotal evidence is unreliable. Just because you and a buddy had a filesystem meltdown does not mean the average Windows user has to deal with this on a regular basis. This goes likewise for stories about Windows NT Workstation BSOD's during normal use.
For instance, I had an uptime of about 7 months with WinNT SP3 Workstation doing daily development in Java and C++. I don't count that as proof against those who say NT BSOD's when you sneeze, but I do take it as the "Grain of Salt" necessary when reading these scathing Microsoft diatribes.
In the end, resorting to blatant ad hominem attacks ["MS Fanboy"] makes you look like a fool.
These people will be remembered almost precicely because they combined character WITH brains.
Meaning, "geeks that can speak" are those who can change the world & be remembered for it.
[yes, i'm fresh from taking a macroeconomics class, so, apoligies in advance.]
Basing the future of your company primarily on entertainment is very dangerous. Movies for instance, are are very dependent on properly aligning consumer taste & artistic talent. While 1999 has been a banner year for both blockbuster & artsy films, there are still an impressive number of duds being released.
Because of this volatility in success, no one studio is going to have a "monopoly" on movies. It follows that future Internet content will be nearly as difficult (if not more difficult) to pull off properly.
Analysts are so convinced that AOL/TW is going to spell big content, big broadband, and therefore big profitability, but I don't see how re-runs of Bugs Bunny and back-issues of TIME are going to attract billions of eyeballs & dollars.
If this helps build the broadband infrastructure of tomorrow, more power to them, but plumbing isn't (by far) the "interesting" part of the Internet, and I don't think AOL/TW is well positioned to do "interesting" stuff.
If you hadn't noticed, there IS a court case going on to figure this out.
Furthermore, Microsoft is in its position precicely because WE PUT THEM THERE (WE being the majority of customers who refused alternatives such as OS/2 in the early 90's or DR-DOS in the late 80's.)
In any case, Microsoft is somewhat unrelated to the TW/AOL merger since we still DO have a choice and currently I fail to see how AOL/TW are going to wedge themselves into our lives in the way Microsoft did through OEM-bundling.
From the Lineo website:
"In the summer of 1998, Caldera, Inc. created two separate companies to further focus the
development, marketing and sales efforts of the company's two divisions: Caldera
Systems, Inc. addressed its "Linux for Business" target, while Caldera Thin Clients, Inc.
addressed the thin client embedded systems market.
At present, Caldera Systems sells Linux-based products in various markets, with greatest
profitability in the desktop and server market segments. Ransom Love, former VP of
Marketing for Caldera Inc., is the current president and CEO of Caldera Systems, Inc.
www.calderasystems.com
In July 1999, Caldera Thin Clients changed its name to Lineo, Inc."
I don't get the impression that Caldera Systems bought its way out of Caldera - since the company was privately held I have a hard time believing the parent company would do such a strategically-silly move.
Netscape started embrace & extend back in 1994, when the web was barely an infant.
Restricting technologies to committee-resolved standards is shackling future innovations to a centralized political debate. Once the web moved past early adopter stages (i.e. around 1997 / 98), the "browser wars" pretty much ground to a halt, and the W3C standards body actually started to make sense.
In the end, premature standards underestimate the effectiveness of competition. We have a better web for it [assuming, of course, that Netscape 5.0 gets released].
- It always bothered me that there was regional-restrictions on what cable provider I can choose. For instance, people in Vaughn & Scarborough use Shaw cable, but the rest of the greater Toronto area is predominantly Rogers... choice, dammit, I want CHOICE!
:)
- I thought that @HOME was actually providing the actual support & bandwidth since some time 1998 when Rogers & Shaw realized that they had no experience in dealing with the Internet... So, in effect AT&T is the driving force of cable modems in Canada, with Rogers being just the plumber. eeek.
AOL is an ISP with a really easy to use interface and (globally) the widest availability.
For people who travel a lot, or those who want minimal hassle, it is a godsend. One would hope now that this merger will give AOL-like ease of access to broadband.
The "AOL is for lamers" argument is getting really tired. Use the right tool for the job.
- Actually, I did go grocery shopping on the web a few weeks ago... pleasant experience.
- I have regular discussions with my friends & loved ones over IRC & ICQ while I'm out of town. No, it doesn't replace the telephone as the "best" way to talk to someone long-distance, but it has certainly been a help (even indirectly in bringing down LD rates)
- It's a company's purpose to attempt to change the way your world works - but whether this is evil or not is a matter of perspective. In the end, they *can't* change you unless you let them... and if you do let them, then it is most likely because your life is bettered by this new service. This is called *innovation*.
Your life is not dictated by corporations, it is dictated by the market, where your $$$ counts just as much as the next person.
- I *have* seen the unshowered, bad b.o. geek. Many of them in my faculty here at the university. They do exist.
- I suppose you could once call me the geek who had the "cruel dispassionate world" beat the happiness out of him. One day, I think I just switched gears: I'm going to make myself happy and find out what makes other people happy, and I'm just going to ignore those who insist on being mean-spirited. Here's what I discovered (ymmv):
- The world isn't in general hateful & cruel. It just happens that people in Grade 8 are.
- Most people want to be loved and appreciated. If you take the time to show them in a non-fake way that you do appreciate them, you've solved 1/2 of the "social skills" problem.
- The other half of the problem is the "shyness" hump, which is a problem I still sometimes have to deal with myself. I haven't found a foolproof solution to this other than to say, flip a switch on yourself that says "I am who I am, and I want to meet people", and just find ways to strike up conversation. Most people are about as nervous as you are, they just have had more experience in breaking out of it.
- It's always good to be yourself & not care about what people think about you, but the final key to social skills is: look & listen for feedback about what in your personality or your communication is irritating or rubbing people the wrong way. Then really -analyze- why that may be - or even better, ask people. The only way you can grow is by making mistakes in this way.
this is my opinion anyway, for what its worth
Squeak needs work ont he doucmentation, but more commercial Smalltalks have very good class docs (and method docs, when necessary).
The reason I say this is because I'm working professionally on a Gemstone/Java project and I'm cursing the fact that I can't use Smalltalk on a daily basis... the speed/power of developing a business system with that language is amazing.
And I wish.
The "land of the curly braces" seems to be infatuated with speed above all else, static type checking, and syntactic sugar over a usable language.
I'd love to see ObjC to resurge, and I'd love Smalltalk to come back too, but I'm skeptical, at best. Java isn't HORRIBLE, it's just in-between.
Why would you be tracking a variable through 6 methods? (Encapsulation, ahem.)
As for obfuscation, are you telling me that it's easier to read a C program because it has types? Even a C++ program?
The Smalltalk class libraries (including Squeak) have some of the tightest, simplest & cleanest code ever written.
I still remember connecting to Commodore 64 bbs' back in the mid 1980's. And there were *so* many BBS programs out there, many custom-modded by Sysops.. anyone remember C*Base, C-Net and ImageBBS? There were a few others. WWIV, All american BBS, etc.
:)
The funniest were all of the pirate C64 BBS sites in the 80's.. there were HUNDREDS of them! Garden of Eden, anyone?
Quantum Link (QLink, aka. AOL now), was also pretty cool. Some of the technology was pretty amazing for its time.. Lucasfilm's habitat (Club Caribe), or Rabbitjack's Casino..
If Corel drops support, it's not the end of the world: It's just the sign of a struggling business making a tough business decision. The work they've put into the project should be remembered & respected - but it will go on with or without them.
While most of your points are good ones, here's my response to some of them:
- Enforced indentation & generated JavaDoc. I think this is somewhat of a nitpick - VA gives you lots of options for the different indentation conventions in Java. If you want to use a non-conventional indentation, you're being stubborn.
- Method ordering: I can see the benefit of this, but what's important to YOU may not be important to someone else. A better tradeoff is just what VA chose: alphabetical ordering, since you can select which method you want to look at.
- Poor cooperation wtih Version control: Sorry, I don't agree. The pro version integrates directly with PVCS & ClearCase, and I'm using it with CVS very easily. (though it's not integrated in this case)
- Poor runtime support: Line numbers are irrelevant in VA. And yes, it actually is fairly useable with multithreaded systems. The enterprise version hooks in with servlets very easily (we're doing this now on one of my projects).
Most experienced (10+ years) OO designers that I know prefer VisualAge for Java/C++/SmallTalk because it's the most expressive and flexible environment to program in... yes, it does tend to encourage ALL developers on a team to use VisualAge as well since it's not as file-based of an approach, but who the hell wants to use files anyway? Your job is to program, not to fudge with your source files.
Furthermore, the packages/classes/methods metaphor is a proven Smalltalk ui concept that is the most efficient way for learning a system through its source code.
In fact, most beginners do not use VisualAge because they find it too hard to use!
anyway, this is my opinion.
If you set a breakpoint in your debugger, you can edit code while debugging in VisualAge. Quite cool.
I'm with you dude. "Let's just be friends" seems to happen all too often, even though the signals are pretty clearly in the direction of "Let's be MORE than friends". Whatever.
I have had a medium-term relationship (2 years), so I'm not completely oblivious to what works with women, but it still can be difficult. That relationship just sort of "happened" out of mutual interest... most of the women I meet lately are "just friends" or already with someone..
There's a pretty decent book called "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", that explains that the "you're such a nice guy, let's just be friends" syndrome seems to happen because Men like to jump steps in the "relationship game". What I mean is this: if you give signals that you've got a major crush on a girl when she just likes you as a friend, chances are she won't be interested, and may get frightened off. That doesn't mean that she couldn't _potentially_ be hot for you - if she didn't have an immediate crush on you then it usually takes a while, since women are like ovens... they start liking you mentally & emotionally first, and then if that reaches a peak, they'll start becoming physically attracted. So, if you make your advances gradually by like aiming at her "stage" of what she thinks of you, it may work out better....
Unfortunately, that plan doesn't help when deep down you're tearing yourself apart with anxiety & impatience because you're majorly infatuated wtih this girl... My own thoughts on this matter are: women can smell discomfort & lack of confidence as well as dogs can smell a T-bone. Women dig confidence - and it has to be genuine. That means resisting the urge to have huge crushes, which usually are more destructive than anything 'cause they turn you into a blubbering idiot [i've been there, recently too]. Only solution here is to stop communicating for a while.. it's a harsh solution, and it's hard to manage it while maintaining a real friendship, but it WILL numb your crush after a few weeks.
Life is always an ongoing journey anyway, so if we had all the answers, it wouldn't be as much fun.. yea that sounds hokey, but it's true. just keep learning & things tend to work out...
- IBM typically releases dozens of patents a year, some of which are related to techniques to increase hard drive capacity. These innovations have been one of the chief reasons that fat hard drives are so cheap today.
- Jini. Source is available, but it's not open source. Jini is sweet innovation in some respects (i.e. finally a widely-applicable distributed object framework!) & not as sweet in other respects (i.e. nothing major uses it yet)
- Internet Explorer 4.5 for the mac - featured innovations such as auto form-fill, better caching performance and CSS rendering.
- New Enterprise JavaBeans application server releases from Persistence, GemStone, BEA WebLogic, etc. all provided innovative ways of accessing corporate data and providing a high performance environment for e-commerce apps.
The list could go on & on.. pretty much any product enhancement is, on some level, an "innovation", except for the usual minor cosmetic changes & bug fixes. Innovation isn't a "big idea" usually, it's the process of filling a customer need.
Innovation isn't necessarily a breakthrough idea, it usually is an idea to improve an existing product or process, or an idea to exploit an opportunity in the marketplace based on trends or demographics.
Most successful innovations are not clever, or complex. One of Microsoft's greatest innovations is the "Office Suite" - they bundled together a word processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation package together for 1/3 the price you'd have to pay by purchasing them seperately.
That innovation alone explains billions of $$$ of Microsoft's profits - they make almost as much money on Office as Windows.
It's the geek dream to be respected for doing something "clever", but in a competitive market place, an innovation has to be comprehended by morons or near-morons. Cleverness does not equal success, it usually is just an investment in ego.
Think big, but innovate gradually, one step at a time - and execute those steps well. That's the mantra of entrepreneurship. Microsoft has followed this very well, and I find it disappointing that the Linux community is stuck on the belief that the only respectable problems worth solving in this world are the hard ones.
This survey seems to be geared to client-side business applications.
I can almost guarantee you that there are more *new* COBOL applications being written today on the server than other languages. (Primarily for Y2K, but even for new apps. CICS+COBOL is proven, it scales, even if it can be monotonous.)
Software and money DO mix well. Ask most of the highly paid engineers out there, I'm sure they'll tell you.
Sometimes I begin to think that people play the "captialism sucks" card because they don't know much about the system & how to use it for good.
try NetBeans running the IBM JDK 1.1.8.
It's a decent speed.
for compiled Java code, try Borland JBuilder... it's a memory hog, unfortunately.
Actually, I think most experienced server programmers are already well versed in COBOL, RPG, or Smalltalk.
C++ on the business enterprise server? Sure, it exists, but, uh, it didn't really work out too well. That is why this Java thing is pretty popular... it's the successor to the server-side languages that DID work. [Though i'd argue that the successor to Java should ironically be Smalltalk , but, that's for another time]
Track 7 (the instrumentals) on both disks rule. I could have them on auto-repeat...
:)
....
All too often I begin to play disk 2, get into some sort of trance, and the next thing I know I'm hearing the whining guitars at the end of "Ripe (with decay)". And I have a lot of code on my screen. What happened to the last hour?
it's been way too long since I've had an album that can do this sort of thing