It isn't. But Perl is an utterly abysmal programming language choice.
I suspect the person who wrote the code disagrees--or else he would have used a different language. Working code trumps theoretical BS and religious language wars any day in the real world. If you hate perl so much, write your own version in your own preferred language, and offer it to GNU and see what they say. If you're not willing to put your code where your mouth is, though, then your opinion isn't worth squat.
And for the record, I disagree as well. Perl has plenty of warts, but it's got plenty of strengths as well. It wouldn't be my first choice these days, but it's powerful and expressive and can be perfectly straightforward. I do slightly prefer python, but I consider both languages fairly annoying, albeit for almost completely opposite reasons.
Heck, name a language, and I can probably give you a lengthy list of reasons why that language is an "utterly abysmal programming language choice".:)
Perhaps, but more likely it was modded down for being painfully obvious.
On Slashdot? Wow, I want to live in the universe that has the slashdot you imagine! Er, I mean, you must be new here. Get off my lawn. Natalie Portman. Hot grits:p;)
How is perl any more "outside of the GNU system" than TeX? Which is, after all, what texinfo is based on.
The GNU project's goal is to implement a free OS. Not to re-invent every wheel. (Except for the kernel, but that's just follow-through--work on the GNU kernel started before other free kernels were available.) Perl has a GNU-compatible license--why shouldn't they use it?
Eventually, they'll make guile able to interpet perl code, and the problem will solve itself.:)
Wow, whoever modded this down really showed their lack of knowledge of history and lack of a sense of humor.
(For those who have been living under a turnip truck for the last three decades, see [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect Streisand effect]].)
There's no such thing as a "lie detector". We do have stress detectors, like the polygraph, which a skilled operator can use to determine whether an average person is lying with better results than a coin flip, but that's a long way from certainty, even if you could guarantee that your subjects are average. Which you can't. And the danger of false positives is even greater than the danger of false negatives--no civilized society can allow a polygraph to be used as anything more than a source of hints for further investigation.
(As for newer devices like the voice stress analyzer, to the best of my knowlege, those have yet to demonstrate even the mediocre reliability of the polygraph under double-blind third-party testing. And note that I'm being careful of my words here, because I've heard that some of the companies involved with these are quite litigious, but you're welcome to guess my actual opinion in light of that statement.)
Despite what some people may believe, neither MS-Office nor Acrobat is required on Windows. There are viable alternatives to both. Acrobat, in particular, should be an easy app to abandon. Office may be a little trickier if you're used to/depend on some of its specific features (something I understand, since I'm just the opposite--Office is missing features I depend on in my office suite).
It's really a trade-off, though. If you absolutely want to keep flash around, and have something like flashblock to keep it under control, it's possible to do so with a reasonable degree of safety. And heck, it's not like those other two apps haven't had their own fair share of exploits over the years.:)
Wow, apparently the pro-MS contingent around here has gotten so touchy that you can get modded down for joking that you one heard something bad about their precious company.:p;)
I always assumed it was just a case of Microsoft playing to their core competancy. I mean, all the *NIX geeks i grew up around always referred to MS-based machines as toys.:)
Furthermore, it was limited to BMG, and BMG was bought by Sony at just about the same time the kit came out. Sony ended up with the blame for something that clearly had to be planned, designed, and implented before they even came into the picture. It should be referred to as the BMG rootkit, not the Sony rootkit, but who the heck remembers BMG these days?
Not that I want to defend Sony. They've made more than their share of horrible misteps over the last few years, and any lingering respect I might have had for them is long gone. But yeah, I think the rootkit thing gets seriously overblown around here. Heck, Microsoft has completely pwned the entire OS on many people's systems.:)
Then GP's on the wrong site. Here at slashdot, we're proud of our editors' inability and unwillingness to do anything that could actually be described as editing. Cuz writin' good isn't sumpin' real nurdz car about. U shld just B glad it ain't all writ in 1337-5p34|<, and STFU, n00b!
At least, that's the impression I've always had of what the so-called "editors" seem to believe.:)
When I was a kid, I knew some people that wrote a pro-RIII propoganda song (yes, my parents hung out with some strange folk). I still remember the beginning:
"When goodly King Richard--that's Richard of Glouster-- Ascended the throne, did he; He made good his promise to lower the taxes, And set all the debtors free."
Lua has the advantage that the language is pretty minimalist. It doesn't even offer inheritence--though it does give you all the tools you need to implement inheritence. Which makes direct comparisons between the languages tricky, though I have no doubt that V8 still has room for improvement.
(I'm actually far more familiar with lua than JS, but not deeply experienced with either one. So don't expect a detailed criticism/comparison of the two languages from me.)
Yes, "at least it's not mono" was exactly my reaction! For a while there, it really looked like installing the Mono VM was going to be mandatory for Gnome users. Fortunately, Miguel went on to work on other things, and slightly more sensible heads have prevailed.
At home, I use a personalized selection of apps that doesn't include any "desktop environment", but at work, I tend to like Gnome for its relative straightforwardness when it comes to interacting with a complex, heterogenous network.
JS is pretty fast for an interpreted language. Several companies, especially Google, have been putting a lot of work into improving the interpreter. I'm not sure it's caught up to lua, but I suspect it's well ahead of perl/python/ruby at this point. Note that you can still use any of those if you want, or even C or C++. I think there's even bindings for GNU Ada. I doubt the Mono bindings have disappeared either, but I'm really glad they're no longer pushing Mono, even though that can technically be considered a compiled language (for a huge, bloated monster of a virtual machine).
Python in particular will continue to be used for large chunks of Gnome, since nobody has said anything about rewriting the existing apps, and lots of them are currently in Python. (Which means they might actually be faster if they were rewritten in JS.)
I wonder how much harder it would be to support LUA, python, tcl, and some of the other common languages. Or whatever comes next...
You mean for documentation purposes? Since most, if not all of those are already supported for development?
Anyway, I'm just glad they're no longer pushing Mono/C#! Gnome has enough overhead by itself without adding in a huge, mandatory VM; especially one with the sort of dubious connections that Mono has. (Not that Java's VM has much better connections these days.) I guess they really have finally broken with Miguel.
It's cyclic, and nothing new. There's some standard line I'm supposed to use here. Get off my lawn...no, that's not it. Oh yeah--you must be new around here.:)
Wow, is your history mixed up. The term had no currency before the OSI was formed. I've lived and worked in Silicon Valley since it became Silicon Valley--before the GNU project started, let alone, the OSI--and I never once in my many years in the industry heard anything like "open source" until Raymond coined the term.
I'm not a fan of the term or of Raymond, but even if he hijacked it, he did so successfully, and attempting to use it for something else at this point (especially on slashdot) is strong evidence that you're either trolling (which I admit I'm not always above myself) or pushing your own political agenda. And I despise politics and politicians, so I consider you an asshat either way. (Though possibly a more entertaining one if my first guess is correct.):)
Open source is a standard term in the industry, with a well-defined meaning. If you opened a restaurant and sold "egg creams" that consisted of...cream with an egg, you'd piss a lot of people off, even if you could proclaim "technically, I'm correct." Technically, you're not, because the term has a well-defined meaning that you're deliberately ignoring. Technically, what you'd be is an "asshat" (a not-as-precisely defined term, but one that certainly covers the situation). Same if you misuse the term "open source", especially on a technical site like Slashdot.
In my case at least, you're wrong. I chose not to have a license on my open source, because I dislike licenses. It's not laziness.
If it doesn't have a license, it's not open source. It's simply...viewable. Untouchable and unusable by law. It's as open source as a song by Metallica played on the radio.
Of course, you could get around those astronomical per-minute costs using nothing more than a whistle from a box of Cap'n Crunch. But doing so could be fairly risky.:)
But yeah, anyone who thinks AT&T used to be a benevolent monopoly really needs to see the movie The President's Analyst with James Coburn. Yes, that was an over-the-top parody, but man did it ring true* at the time!
As a personal computer, yes, it was overpriced and sluggish. As a workstation that you could run UNIX on, though, it was one of the best deals around. And yes, UNIX was available for it almost as soon as it was released--that's why my company bought one. It wasn't supported by Apple, but it was a commercially supported BSD, and even with the price for the commercially supported version, it was hands-down the cheapest UNIX workstation available.
(As for the original Mac, it's often overlooked, but one of the problems with it was that you could not legibly display eighty columns of text on that dinky screen, which meant that straightforward ports from other systems often weren't possible. Which may have been what Apple wanted, but it certainly didn't help sales any.)
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't. But Perl is an utterly abysmal programming language choice.
I suspect the person who wrote the code disagrees--or else he would have used a different language. Working code trumps theoretical BS and religious language wars any day in the real world. If you hate perl so much, write your own version in your own preferred language, and offer it to GNU and see what they say. If you're not willing to put your code where your mouth is, though, then your opinion isn't worth squat.
And for the record, I disagree as well. Perl has plenty of warts, but it's got plenty of strengths as well. It wouldn't be my first choice these days, but it's powerful and expressive and can be perfectly straightforward. I do slightly prefer python, but I consider both languages fairly annoying, albeit for almost completely opposite reasons.
Heck, name a language, and I can probably give you a lengthy list of reasons why that language is an "utterly abysmal programming language choice". :)
Perhaps, but more likely it was modded down for being painfully obvious.
On Slashdot? Wow, I want to live in the universe that has the slashdot you imagine! Er, I mean, you must be new here. Get off my lawn. Natalie Portman. Hot grits:p ;)
How is perl any more "outside of the GNU system" than TeX? Which is, after all, what texinfo is based on.
The GNU project's goal is to implement a free OS. Not to re-invent every wheel. (Except for the kernel, but that's just follow-through--work on the GNU kernel started before other free kernels were available.) Perl has a GNU-compatible license--why shouldn't they use it?
Eventually, they'll make guile able to interpet perl code, and the problem will solve itself. :)
Wow, whoever modded this down really showed their lack of knowledge of history and lack of a sense of humor.
(For those who have been living under a turnip truck for the last three decades, see [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect Streisand effect]].)
Um, off the top of my head...tetris? :)
How about: wordstar-mode? changelog-mode? outline-mode? rich-text mode? terminal emulation? interactive sgml composer? interactive diff/merge mode? debugger-mode? bibliography mode? several mail readers? web browser? calendar? calculator? object-browser? version control browser? adventure game? Pong?
Seriously, emacs is competing more with X than with vim. :)
And Emacs has had wordstar mode for decades.
There's no such thing as a "lie detector". We do have stress detectors, like the polygraph, which a skilled operator can use to determine whether an average person is lying with better results than a coin flip, but that's a long way from certainty, even if you could guarantee that your subjects are average. Which you can't. And the danger of false positives is even greater than the danger of false negatives--no civilized society can allow a polygraph to be used as anything more than a source of hints for further investigation.
(As for newer devices like the voice stress analyzer, to the best of my knowlege, those have yet to demonstrate even the mediocre reliability of the polygraph under double-blind third-party testing. And note that I'm being careful of my words here, because I've heard that some of the companies involved with these are quite litigious, but you're welcome to guess my actual opinion in light of that statement.)
My, if a car were taking me at high speed to Belgium, I'd be scared to death, too.
Aren't you forgetting something? He was coming from France! He should have been overjoyed to see the border!
Now if he were coming from any other direction, then you might have a point. :)
Hey, this is slashdot, and geeks are obsessive about details.
Someone complaining about your post because it's really 23 years, four months, and six days, in...three...two...one... :)
Despite what some people may believe, neither MS-Office nor Acrobat is required on Windows. There are viable alternatives to both. Acrobat, in particular, should be an easy app to abandon. Office may be a little trickier if you're used to/depend on some of its specific features (something I understand, since I'm just the opposite--Office is missing features I depend on in my office suite).
It's really a trade-off, though. If you absolutely want to keep flash around, and have something like flashblock to keep it under control, it's possible to do so with a reasonable degree of safety. And heck, it's not like those other two apps haven't had their own fair share of exploits over the years. :)
Wow, apparently the pro-MS contingent around here has gotten so touchy that you can get modded down for joking that you one heard something bad about their precious company. :p ;)
I always assumed it was just a case of Microsoft playing to their core competancy. I mean, all the *NIX geeks i grew up around always referred to MS-based machines as toys. :)
Furthermore, it was limited to BMG, and BMG was bought by Sony at just about the same time the kit came out. Sony ended up with the blame for something that clearly had to be planned, designed, and implented before they even came into the picture. It should be referred to as the BMG rootkit, not the Sony rootkit, but who the heck remembers BMG these days?
Not that I want to defend Sony. They've made more than their share of horrible misteps over the last few years, and any lingering respect I might have had for them is long gone. But yeah, I think the rootkit thing gets seriously overblown around here. Heck, Microsoft has completely pwned the entire OS on many people's systems. :)
Then GP's on the wrong site. Here at slashdot, we're proud of our editors' inability and unwillingness to do anything that could actually be described as editing. Cuz writin' good isn't sumpin' real nurdz car about. U shld just B glad it ain't all writ in 1337-5p34|<, and STFU, n00b!
At least, that's the impression I've always had of what the so-called "editors" seem to believe. :)
When I was a kid, I knew some people that wrote a pro-RIII propoganda song (yes, my parents hung out with some strange folk). I still remember the beginning:
"When goodly King Richard--that's Richard of Glouster--
Ascended the throne, did he;
He made good his promise to lower the taxes,
And set all the debtors free."
Lua has the advantage that the language is pretty minimalist. It doesn't even offer inheritence--though it does give you all the tools you need to implement inheritence. Which makes direct comparisons between the languages tricky, though I have no doubt that V8 still has room for improvement.
(I'm actually far more familiar with lua than JS, but not deeply experienced with either one. So don't expect a detailed criticism/comparison of the two languages from me.)
Yes, "at least it's not mono" was exactly my reaction! For a while there, it really looked like installing the Mono VM was going to be mandatory for Gnome users. Fortunately, Miguel went on to work on other things, and slightly more sensible heads have prevailed.
At home, I use a personalized selection of apps that doesn't include any "desktop environment", but at work, I tend to like Gnome for its relative straightforwardness when it comes to interacting with a complex, heterogenous network.
JS is pretty fast for an interpreted language. Several companies, especially Google, have been putting a lot of work into improving the interpreter. I'm not sure it's caught up to lua, but I suspect it's well ahead of perl/python/ruby at this point. Note that you can still use any of those if you want, or even C or C++. I think there's even bindings for GNU Ada. I doubt the Mono bindings have disappeared either, but I'm really glad they're no longer pushing Mono, even though that can technically be considered a compiled language (for a huge, bloated monster of a virtual machine).
Python in particular will continue to be used for large chunks of Gnome, since nobody has said anything about rewriting the existing apps, and lots of them are currently in Python. (Which means they might actually be faster if they were rewritten in JS.)
I wonder how much harder it would be to support LUA, python, tcl, and some of the other common languages. Or whatever comes next...
You mean for documentation purposes? Since most, if not all of those are already supported for development?
Anyway, I'm just glad they're no longer pushing Mono/C#! Gnome has enough overhead by itself without adding in a huge, mandatory VM; especially one with the sort of dubious connections that Mono has. (Not that Java's VM has much better connections these days.) I guess they really have finally broken with Miguel.
It's cyclic, and nothing new. There's some standard line I'm supposed to use here. Get off my lawn...no, that's not it. Oh yeah--you must be new around here. :)
Wow, is your history mixed up. The term had no currency before the OSI was formed. I've lived and worked in Silicon Valley since it became Silicon Valley--before the GNU project started, let alone, the OSI--and I never once in my many years in the industry heard anything like "open source" until Raymond coined the term.
I'm not a fan of the term or of Raymond, but even if he hijacked it, he did so successfully, and attempting to use it for something else at this point (especially on slashdot) is strong evidence that you're either trolling (which I admit I'm not always above myself) or pushing your own political agenda. And I despise politics and politicians, so I consider you an asshat either way. (Though possibly a more entertaining one if my first guess is correct.) :)
cheers
Open source is a standard term in the industry, with a well-defined meaning. If you opened a restaurant and sold "egg creams" that consisted of...cream with an egg, you'd piss a lot of people off, even if you could proclaim "technically, I'm correct." Technically, you're not, because the term has a well-defined meaning that you're deliberately ignoring. Technically, what you'd be is an "asshat" (a not-as-precisely defined term, but one that certainly covers the situation). Same if you misuse the term "open source", especially on a technical site like Slashdot.
In my case at least, you're wrong. I chose not to have a license on my open source, because I dislike licenses. It's not laziness.
If it doesn't have a license, it's not open source. It's simply...viewable. Untouchable and unusable by law. It's as open source as a song by Metallica played on the radio.
Of course, you could get around those astronomical per-minute costs using nothing more than a whistle from a box of Cap'n Crunch. But doing so could be fairly risky. :)
But yeah, anyone who thinks AT&T used to be a benevolent monopoly really needs to see the movie The President's Analyst with James Coburn. Yes, that was an over-the-top parody, but man did it ring true* at the time!
* Pun intended.
As a personal computer, yes, it was overpriced and sluggish. As a workstation that you could run UNIX on, though, it was one of the best deals around. And yes, UNIX was available for it almost as soon as it was released--that's why my company bought one. It wasn't supported by Apple, but it was a commercially supported BSD, and even with the price for the commercially supported version, it was hands-down the cheapest UNIX workstation available.
(As for the original Mac, it's often overlooked, but one of the problems with it was that you could not legibly display eighty columns of text on that dinky screen, which meant that straightforward ports from other systems often weren't possible. Which may have been what Apple wanted, but it certainly didn't help sales any.)