Agreed. Frankly, I think that starting people out on OO stuff is a mistake. I went through two and a half years of CS/CIS and quit. The reason? I coded The Library Program in C++. I coded The Library Program in FORTRAN. I coded The Library Program in Pascal. When the assembly professor assigned The Library Program, I said "f*** this." I think if I had started in college learning assembly, and then started moved to higher level languages as my hours got higher, I'd have stuck with it. I developed a natural block against assembly, because I had coded every one of the programs in some other language.
So to answer the question, No, I don't think Java as a first language is a good idea, for all of the reasons it's a good language. Code simple things in a simple language, and by the time you reach java, you'll also be ready to build the good stuff.
I thought the argument "don't support the hardware if the customer changes the software" was rather weak.
I agree. The law firm I work for uses IBM 560 series Thinkpads, and we have a Z that won't recognize any pcmcia card you stick in it. Granted, we use our own image on these things & ghost them as soon as we get one in. Our image sits on the network, and I've ghosted 3-4 other Z's off of the image & their slots work fine. The Z in question was under warranty at the time, so I called IBM tech support up to ask them about it. "Sorry, we can't do anything unless you're using the image that came on the machine." It's a classic picture of whoever pays the most gets the most (I didn't contact them with any kind of corporate account information, I just dialed the 800 number. Stupid me.) IBM's more than happy to help you out all they can when you buy a NUMA from them. (The main office in Chicago bought one for us complete with on-site build a coupla weeks later.)
Kudos to VA for working on the machine even if it wasn't factory standard!
Amen. And, if we ever do go to pic-oriented programming, it'll be ten years before colleges actually start teaching it (my age-old recurring theme of slamming our educational system cropping up again, sorry). Besides, on the code end of it, it seems like the whole thing would be slower. There's just too many steps between you & the binary data. After all, didn't we all learn in progging 101 that the fastest executables are generated when you code in pure assembly? Pictures, in my opinion, are inherently generic. Thus, our programs might start resembling our first C++ prog where we said "cout "Hi Everyone!";" without knowing what "cout", " " or " ; " actually meant - we just knew that was what we typed to get it. I know it's paranoia and an unwilligness to give up text, but that's my two cents, for what market depreciation they're worth.
Re:Predicted Slashdot response to Katz's argument
on
Selfish Society
·
· Score: 1
Duh. That's generally how I feel about Katz's stuff. Of Course we're selfish & narcissistic. Probably 99% of us were tortured by our peers growing up. We hated school with a passion. Not because of the books or the homework because we had all of ours done before we left school. We rarely had to take a book home. It wasn't the teachers, they let us get away with bloody murder. It was the student body that made us hate life. Everyone either bullied us or just ignored us. Only the few geeks in large school districts could find anyone else to hang out with. We fear people. We snap back at them. We don't trust them. Why should they? Our own lives tell us to never actually trust a non-geek. Not even siblings can be trusted to not dig knives into our backs. So what'd we do? We turned to boxes. Little black boxes called guitar amps or bass amps, or Little putty, grey, or tan boxes called computers. We poured ourselves into our hobbies. After all, no one was going to invite us to the mall, or the movies, or anything else. Then, we grew up. We graduated high school, some of us from college. We started looking for jobs. What? Someone wants to pay me to play with computers?? I get money to make these boxes not crash?? If I'm sysadmin, you'll leave me alone?? You'll let me do my job and when I need new toys you just hand me the money because you don't have a clue what I'm talking about but I say you need it??? And people wonder why we're selfish, power hungry, and greedy. We don't see ourselves as such. We just know what power you've given us. You've let us take over you lives. We have the gift of making fire, and your tribe doesn't. Do we have to give it to you? Do we want to? So, Duh, Katz. I'm selfish, narcissistic, greedy, and proud of it. I want all of the knowledge I can get my hands on. I don't care about other humans having that knowledge. They never did anything for me. In fact, they only hurt me. Why should I care for them? Remember good old Doc Frankenstein? He created a being and gave it life. Then he lost control of it. Society created us when we were children. During our "formative years" society shunned us. Technology in some form or fashion stretched its arms to us and embraced us. We grew up. We didn't change. And all the/.'ers are now saying, duh, T_Wit:)
I'm totally sick of Universities' attitudes toward computer science. I majored in CS at two universities - ETBU, & UT Dallas. ETBU we had to do everything in Windows, at UT Dallas, everything is in Windows and you're "highly encouraged" to use Visual Studio. VS is good for turning out windows stuff. Other than that, like everybody says, It Sucks! There's too much crap between the actual code of the program that I write and the pretty buttons you see on the screen.
Now, for my personal rant - why are we learning this stuff backwards? At school they try to teach pretty interfaces and making your program user friendly... and then a year or so down the road learning assembly. Why don't we learn assembly first, then basic C, etc, and then by the time we're making those oh-so-spiffy interfaces we're turning out real-world aps that are actually useful. I can only code The Library Program so many times, ya know:) Doing The Library Program in first one language, then another, then another doesn't actually further my knowledge of programming. Give me a book of syntax and I can learn languages. I pay these people umpteen bux I don't have every semester to teach me programming, not pretty interfaces. Okay, end of my explosion about the status quo:)
In my opinion, credibility comes from two places. One, who you are. Two, what you say.
The paper comes from a credible source. So they they win the who you are. Now, what you say.
Let's see, intro sounds fine to me. Now, let's move on to the first few lines of the actual paper. Let's see, it's @#$#ing Columbine. Could these dopeheads please use something other than that media baby to start a paper with??? I couldn't even read any more after that! It's like hanging out a big sign that says "If you play computer games, you're from Satan and you're going to go on a violent killing spree!"
/me takes his railgun and goes to fix the problem by finding the blue key to their lab and killing the evil scientists, and after i kill them i open the panel to get the red key to go on to the next level. Suuuure.
It's not the games that make me want to kill people, it's the people telling me games make me want to kill
I know I may be smoking something, but I want both - paper & paperless. For reading straight through, paper's always best... like other people have said, good luck taking an online manual to bed with you, or to the couch to read & watch tv at the same time. But at the same time, if I'm working on a program for class, and I've found one way to do it but don't like it, I find myself wishing I had an online version of my textbook so I could quickly search for simmilar code that does more of what I want it to.
I had the same thought, that it's like Starship Troopers, and that led me to the second thought I had - would we really be too far away from Heinlen's (sp?) military? Sci-fi-ing out on this, a miniature nuclear reactor would provide almost endless power for one of these suits for the life of the suit (although, in practice it'll probably have some kind of glorified laptop battery in it). That opens the door for missions longer than the timeframe listed on the site (4-24 hours). That, then, opens the door for sleep-deprivation research of Vietnam to come back (maybe). Granted, I may be a little paranoid (& the stories I've heard about sleep deprivation could be false, too:), but it seems to me Heinlen was a little worried about technology outsripping our social conscience... and that's a little worrisome to me, too.
On the other hand, it'll lower the death toll in battle. Just think about what would happen when the "bad guys" saw the first wave of American Mechs headed towards them:) Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court:)
Of course, as others have mentioned, think about the uses in real life. Guy gets stuck under a flipped car? No prob, just have an emt in a mech suit move the vehicle. Of course, by the time it's viable, medical technology will get so small that an arsenal of diagnostic equipment will fit in the spaces between actuators. And then there's the stripped down technology that could be used in spinal injury patients, etc.
I guess it's all a question of the benfits outweighing the disadvantages, like always:)
Well, I guess I'd better come to my defense. I think some people read the details of my post, guessed at my political afiliations, then missed the gist of what I was saying completely.
I did not have any intention, nor in any way, questioned, acknowledged, denied, or otherwise discussed the motivations for the bombs we dropped on Japan. I thank those who clarified me on whether they were fission of fusion bombs. Frankly, I couldn't remember.
My Point was thus: Nuclear reactions and the ensuing engergies released are not harmless, and, in fact, quite harmful to what we define as life. My purpose was to point out the logical flaws of another person in the spirit of debate. My aim was scientific and rhetorical. It was not to comment on the right or wrong of weaponry or sources of power. Those are my personal opinions. And they shall stay my personal opinions, and not my public ones.
The reason for my posting to the thread at all is found below every reply box we type into: "Please try to keep posts on topic". Going from Compaq's building of a 2000/2500 processor supercomputer to "You suck because you think it was okay to bomb Japan" & "You suck because you think it's not!" in just a few postings is, in my opinion, far off topic.
However, I know that these are open forums, free of charge, and a wonderful expression of the First Amendment. For myself, I limit my freedom of expression. On the rare occasions where I post to Slashdot (I actually only have one other current posting and maybe one or two more a coupla months ago), I try to stay as much on the topic at hand as possible. I have strayed from that goal, and have in doing so incited a political discussion more appropriate for the open forums of HissyFit. I apologize for doing so. To avoid further debate, I would like to say that my opinion to limit the Slashdot Forums to purely technological topics is aimed purely at myself. It does not bother me in any way that others follow threads like this one, and post to this one. It's America. You can do it, so go do it!:)
I am, first and foremost, a Christian. But, regarding my opinions on posting, this says it best: "Do as thou wilt, an it harm none."
I did as I wished, but it did harm. What I had intended to be a slightly sarcastic and slightly humorous rebuttal turned into its own little flame war. And so, I apologize again for my post. And so I shall not post again, so that it harm none.
I think you're right, that Delphi is more or less solely owned my Borland. At least, when I was going to every geek shack in Dallas looking for Assembly compilers (don't ask! it's a long story, trust me!:), the only Delphi compilers/toolkits were Borland products, and I'm not aware of Visual Studio suportting Delphi (at least, there's no such thing as Visual Delphi++ or the like) Come to think of it, I'm really suprised it's not Visual Basic++.
I agree with all of your concerns. I'm not sure about the size of the company in question, but if it has a very large IS department, at least give all of your source code to employees. Where I work we use customized word, but the back end of the customization is as hidden as they could make VBasic scripts. Thus, when our branch calls "upstairs" on a bug problem, we can't give them a very good idea of what's actually going on, just the symptoms.
I also just want to say that as far as the theory of "Will open source work for Windows?", in theory, Heck Yeah! I think the abundance of Quake & Q2 & (in the very near future) Q3 mods proves that it's not a Linux-only phenomenon. No, I'm not saying I consider Quake an open-source project, but as far as the user community goes, the spirit is there. I think that there's a lot of us out there who don't have any choice but live in a Windows World (especially in the educational community. I have yet to go to a class where the professor said "Oh, by the way, I do have a Linux box in my office, so if you would prefer to program for Linux, I encourage it").
Besides, starting open source projects for Windows would rattle Bill's cage more than a little:)
"Come on Baby (Don't fear the Penguin) Baby grab the tools (Don't fear the Penguin) You'll be able to fly (Don't fear the penguin) Baby it's your Chance...." ~The Dust Puppy (Don't Fear the Penguin)
The sun has been shining on the earth for at least six thousand years. Nobody has been killed by it. No cities have been destroyed by it. The sun is as safe as anybody could want. Fusion is not dangerous or harmful.
Um, sure, go right ahead & believe that. Oh, and since you believe that, I have some great Ocean-front property in Dallas, Colorado that I can sell you for a buck an acre. The only reason we aren't all dead from the solar radiation is that little thing called the Ozone layer. What produces the radiation the sum emits? Nuclear reactions. And Nobody killed by it? The families of victims of skin cancer would, I'm sure, beg to differ with you.
I've had about enough of the paranoid, sick, vicious, bigoted hate that the Liberals vomit forth every day of their lives. LIES, okay? Everything you see in the media about nuclear war IS A LIE. Nuclear conflict poses no significant dangers.
Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Ring a bell? (Even though I'm sure I spelled one of them wrong. Maybe both.) No, the sun didn't cause those cities to be leveled. But. No human tissue puts up any resistance to the energy outpoured by a nuclear reaction.
In short, if the reactions going on in the sun were safe for humans, then I guess you'll be the first in line to volunteer for the mission to the heart of the sun? I guess that's actually a good idea, because you're either brilliant in seeing beyond the lies the media gives us, or a crackpot. A mission to the sun would prove which. If you succeed, you'd be a hero to millions, the next John Glen (also insuring you a Senate seat too!), or you'd burn up and we'd never hear from you again.
Lady Lovelace should definitely be in the list. After all, didn't she lay the groundwork for programming as we know it? (structured, I mean, not OOP) Plus I guess I oughta put Blaise Pascal in there too... how many of us started out with Pascal as our first Language? (I know he didn't create it, but still.)
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. Frankly, I think that starting people out on OO stuff is a mistake. I went through two and a half years of CS/CIS and quit. The reason? I coded The Library Program in C++. I coded The Library Program in FORTRAN. I coded The Library Program in Pascal. When the assembly professor assigned The Library Program, I said "f*** this." I think if I had started in college learning assembly, and then started moved to higher level languages as my hours got higher, I'd have stuck with it. I developed a natural block against assembly, because I had coded every one of the programs in some other language.
So to answer the question, No, I don't think Java as a first language is a good idea, for all of the reasons it's a good language. Code simple things in a simple language, and by the time you reach java, you'll also be ready to build the good stuff.
I thought the argument "don't support the hardware if the customer changes the software" was rather weak.
I agree. The law firm I work for uses IBM 560 series Thinkpads, and we have a Z that won't recognize any pcmcia card you stick in it. Granted, we use our own image on these things & ghost them as soon as we get one in. Our image sits on the network, and I've ghosted 3-4 other Z's off of the image & their slots work fine. The Z in question was under warranty at the time, so I called IBM tech support up to ask them about it. "Sorry, we can't do anything unless you're using the image that came on the machine." It's a classic picture of whoever pays the most gets the most (I didn't contact them with any kind of corporate account information, I just dialed the 800 number. Stupid me.) IBM's more than happy to help you out all they can when you buy a NUMA from them. (The main office in Chicago bought one for us complete with on-site build a coupla weeks later.)
Kudos to VA for working on the machine even if it wasn't factory standard!
Amen. And, if we ever do go to pic-oriented programming, it'll be ten years before colleges actually start teaching it (my age-old recurring theme of slamming our educational system cropping up again, sorry). Besides, on the code end of it, it seems like the whole thing would be slower. There's just too many steps between you & the binary data. After all, didn't we all learn in progging 101 that the fastest executables are generated when you code in pure assembly? Pictures, in my opinion, are inherently generic. Thus, our programs might start resembling our first C++ prog where we said "cout "Hi Everyone!";" without knowing what "cout", " " or " ; " actually meant - we just knew that was what we typed to get it. I know it's paranoia and an unwilligness to give up text, but that's my two cents, for what market depreciation they're worth.
Duh.
That's generally how I feel about Katz's stuff. Of Course we're selfish & narcissistic. Probably 99% of us were tortured by our peers growing up. We hated school with a passion. Not because of the books or the homework because we had all of ours done before we left school. We rarely had to take a book home. It wasn't the teachers, they let us get away with bloody murder. It was the student body that made us hate life. Everyone either bullied us or just ignored us. Only the few geeks in large school districts could find anyone else to hang out with. We fear people. We snap back at them. We don't trust them. Why should they? Our own lives tell us to never actually trust a non-geek. Not even siblings can be trusted to not dig knives into our backs.
So what'd we do? We turned to boxes. Little black boxes called guitar amps or bass amps, or Little putty, grey, or tan boxes called computers. We poured ourselves into our hobbies. After all, no one was going to invite us to the mall, or the movies, or anything else.
Then, we grew up. We graduated high school, some of us from college. We started looking for jobs. What? Someone wants to pay me to play with computers?? I get money to make these boxes not crash?? If I'm sysadmin, you'll leave me alone?? You'll let me do my job and when I need new toys you just hand me the money because you don't have a clue what I'm talking about but I say you need it???
And people wonder why we're selfish, power hungry, and greedy. We don't see ourselves as such. We just know what power you've given us. You've let us take over you lives. We have the gift of making fire, and your tribe doesn't. Do we have to give it to you? Do we want to?
So, Duh, Katz. I'm selfish, narcissistic, greedy, and proud of it. I want all of the knowledge I can get my hands on. I don't care about other humans having that knowledge. They never did anything for me. In fact, they only hurt me. Why should I care for them? Remember good old Doc Frankenstein? He created a being and gave it life. Then he lost control of it. Society created us when we were children. During our "formative years" society shunned us. Technology in some form or fashion stretched its arms to us and embraced us. We grew up. We didn't change.
And all the
Now, for my personal rant - why are we learning this stuff backwards? At school they try to teach pretty interfaces and making your program user friendly... and then a year or so down the road learning assembly. Why don't we learn assembly first, then basic C, etc, and then by the time we're making those oh-so-spiffy interfaces we're turning out real-world aps that are actually useful. I can only code The Library Program so many times, ya know :) Doing The Library Program in first one language, then another, then another doesn't actually further my knowledge of programming. Give me a book of syntax and I can learn languages. I pay these people umpteen bux I don't have every semester to teach me programming, not pretty interfaces. Okay, end of my explosion about the status quo :)
In my opinion, credibility comes from two places. One, who you are. Two, what you say.
The paper comes from a credible source. So they they win the who you are. Now, what you say.
Let's see, intro sounds fine to me. Now, let's move on to the first few lines of the actual paper. Let's see, it's @#$#ing Columbine. Could these dopeheads please use something other than that media baby to start a paper with??? I couldn't even read any more after that! It's like hanging out a big sign that says "If you play computer games, you're from Satan and you're going to go on a violent killing spree!"
It's not the games that make me want to kill people, it's the people telling me games make me want to kill
I know I may be smoking something, but I want both - paper & paperless. For reading straight through, paper's always best... like other people have said, good luck taking an online manual to bed with you, or to the couch to read & watch tv at the same time. But at the same time, if I'm working on a program for class, and I've found one way to do it but don't like it, I find myself wishing I had an online version of my textbook so I could quickly search for simmilar code that does more of what I want it to.
And like others said, too... Binders Rule!
I had the same thought, that it's like Starship Troopers, and that led me to the second thought I had - would we really be too far away from Heinlen's (sp?) military? Sci-fi-ing out on this, a miniature nuclear reactor would provide almost endless power for one of these suits for the life of the suit (although, in practice it'll probably have some kind of glorified laptop battery in it). That opens the door for missions longer than the timeframe listed on the site (4-24 hours). That, then, opens the door for sleep-deprivation research of Vietnam to come back (maybe). Granted, I may be a little paranoid (& the stories I've heard about sleep deprivation could be false, too :), but it seems to me Heinlen was a little worried about technology outsripping our social conscience... and that's a little worrisome to me, too.
On the other hand, it'll lower the death toll in battle. Just think about what would happen when the "bad guys" saw the first wave of American Mechs headed towards them :) Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court :)
Of course, as others have mentioned, think about the uses in real life. Guy gets stuck under a flipped car? No prob, just have an emt in a mech suit move the vehicle. Of course, by the time it's viable, medical technology will get so small that an arsenal of diagnostic equipment will fit in the spaces between actuators. And then there's the stripped down technology that could be used in spinal injury patients, etc.
I guess it's all a question of the benfits outweighing the disadvantages, like always :)
Well, I guess I'd better come to my defense. I think some people read the details of my post, guessed at my political afiliations, then missed the gist of what I was saying completely.
I did not have any intention, nor in any way, questioned, acknowledged, denied, or otherwise discussed the motivations for the bombs we dropped on Japan. I thank those who clarified me on whether they were fission of fusion bombs. Frankly, I couldn't remember.
My Point was thus: Nuclear reactions and the ensuing engergies released are not harmless, and, in fact, quite harmful to what we define as life. My purpose was to point out the logical flaws of another person in the spirit of debate. My aim was scientific and rhetorical. It was not to comment on the right or wrong of weaponry or sources of power. Those are my personal opinions. And they shall stay my personal opinions, and not my public ones.
The reason for my posting to the thread at all is found below every reply box we type into: "Please try to keep posts on topic". Going from Compaq's building of a 2000/2500 processor supercomputer to "You suck because you think it was okay to bomb Japan" & "You suck because you think it's not!" in just a few postings is, in my opinion, far off topic.
However, I know that these are open forums, free of charge, and a wonderful expression of the First Amendment. For myself, I limit my freedom of expression. On the rare occasions where I post to Slashdot (I actually only have one other current posting and maybe one or two more a coupla months ago), I try to stay as much on the topic at hand as possible. I have strayed from that goal, and have in doing so incited a political discussion more appropriate for the open forums of HissyFit. I apologize for doing so. To avoid further debate, I would like to say that my opinion to limit the Slashdot Forums to purely technological topics is aimed purely at myself. It does not bother me in any way that others follow threads like this one, and post to this one. It's America. You can do it, so go do it! :)
I am, first and foremost, a Christian. But, regarding my opinions on posting, this says it best: "Do as thou wilt, an it harm none."
I did as I wished, but it did harm. What I had intended to be a slightly sarcastic and slightly humorous rebuttal turned into its own little flame war. And so, I apologize again for my post. And so I shall not post again, so that it harm none.
Again, I apologize for the post.
I think you're right, that Delphi is more or less solely owned my Borland. At least, when I was going to every geek shack in Dallas looking for Assembly compilers (don't ask! it's a long story, trust me! :), the only Delphi compilers/toolkits were Borland products, and I'm not aware of Visual Studio suportting Delphi (at least, there's no such thing as Visual Delphi++ or the like) Come to think of it, I'm really suprised it's not Visual Basic++.
I agree with all of your concerns. I'm not sure about the size of the company in question, but if it has a very large IS department, at least give all of your source code to employees. Where I work we use customized word, but the back end of the customization is as hidden as they could make VBasic scripts. Thus, when our branch calls "upstairs" on a bug problem, we can't give them a very good idea of what's actually going on, just the symptoms.
I also just want to say that as far as the theory of "Will open source work for Windows?", in theory, Heck Yeah! I think the abundance of Quake & Q2 & (in the very near future) Q3 mods proves that it's not a Linux-only phenomenon. No, I'm not saying I consider Quake an open-source project, but as far as the user community goes, the spirit is there. I think that there's a lot of us out there who don't have any choice but live in a Windows World (especially in the educational community. I have yet to go to a class where the professor said "Oh, by the way, I do have a Linux box in my office, so if you would prefer to program for Linux, I encourage it").
Besides, starting open source projects for Windows would rattle Bill's cage more than a little :)
"Come on Baby (Don't fear the Penguin) Baby grab the tools (Don't fear the Penguin) You'll be able to fly (Don't fear the penguin) Baby it's your Chance...." ~The Dust Puppy (Don't Fear the Penguin)
Um, sure, go right ahead & believe that. Oh, and since you believe that, I have some great Ocean-front property in Dallas, Colorado that I can sell you for a buck an acre. The only reason we aren't all dead from the solar radiation is that little thing called the Ozone layer. What produces the radiation the sum emits? Nuclear reactions. And Nobody killed by it? The families of victims of skin cancer would, I'm sure, beg to differ with you.
Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Ring a bell? (Even though I'm sure I spelled one of them wrong. Maybe both.) No, the sun didn't cause those cities to be leveled. But. No human tissue puts up any resistance to the energy outpoured by a nuclear reaction.
In short, if the reactions going on in the sun were safe for humans, then I guess you'll be the first in line to volunteer for the mission to the heart of the sun? I guess that's actually a good idea, because you're either brilliant in seeing beyond the lies the media gives us, or a crackpot. A mission to the sun would prove which. If you succeed, you'd be a hero to millions, the next John Glen (also insuring you a Senate seat too!), or you'd burn up and we'd never hear from you again.
Lady Lovelace should definitely be in the list. After all, didn't she lay the groundwork for programming as we know it? (structured, I mean, not OOP) Plus I guess I oughta put Blaise Pascal in there too... how many of us started out with Pascal as our first Language? (I know he didn't create it, but still.)