This visual programming crap crops up from time to time because so many people are brainwashed by that crap about a picture being worth a 1000 words. Draw me a picture of "misguided".
This is also the reason why the GUI monkeys can never understand the power of a command line. The command line is a language. They are stuck on the "pictures are better than words" meme. Yes - certainly, until you learn to read.
Visual stuff, GUIs, languages etc, are more *intuitive* in the same way that picture books are more intuitive to babies. It doesn't mean they are superior. This is why the best interfaces are a combination of GUI and language. It's just like the way you give children picture books while they are learning to read. The fastest way
I took a look at your COSA stuff.. good luck, but you're barking up the wrong tree.
Programming is done with languages because programming is communication. It's communication between programmer and computer.
If the kind of drag and drop stuff you are proposing was a better mechanism for creating complex programs than languages, then we wouldnt use languages to communicate with each other. Instead we would push a bunch of colored blocks around and drag string between them. I don't think we're going to start doing that anytime soon either.
Much as I dislike java and approve of your general points, that last example is pure BS. The read-lines function is just looking at a string and recognising it starts http:/// before switching to dealing with a URL. Java could do the same thing just as easily. Its not a feature of the language that has made someone write the function like that, its a design choice, and debateable one at that.
or for_each(...) and the new [] lambda.. nevermind the really terrible stuff in there, lordy, you dont need * and ->, use * and . or just -> its almost like you're ignorant or out of date or something.
Goes to show how brilliant C++ is, in a normal language psychotic fuckers can do all sorts of damage, in C++ they can't even compile...
Whether one aspires to be normal or not, depends on which side of the mean you lie in a normal distribution. For you I'm pretty sure it would be a step in the right direction.
> Any group that is more than half democrats is biased to start with.
The majority of climate scientists are not American and thus neither democrats nor republicans. Does that make them more credible to you ? Or do scientists need to be predominantly right wing to be credible in your world ?
Here on earth, the clever managers invent some ridiculously optimistic number. The experienced guy who points out that the estimate is unrealistic gets passed over or demoted, since he lacks a "can-do" attitude. The one who came up with the daft estimate gets promoted and his penalty for just being plain wrong is never as great as the rewards he gets for giving senior management the answers it wants to hear [whoever wrong they may be]. In fact, they never even notice he was wrong, but blame cost overruns etc on the people who knew the answers.. the guy he said it would take 18 months is obviously at fault when it takes 18 months instead of the 5 promised.. he lacks can-do attitude.
I don't really mean disrespect, but this isnt easy to say politely. It's a filter. The people running those projects are not looking to take on apprentices on the whole, they are looking for help. If you don't have necessary experience for that stuff to be understandable in the terse way that it is explained, you are likely to be a net loss in terms of time gained because you did something useful against time lost because you asked a lot of questions or did something stupid that needed to be fixed later.
Let's try it like this: in US, unions act like dicks, because companies act like dicks. Where laws prevent companies acting like total dicks, unions act less like dicks.
God forbid, don't teach em python first. Learn assembly, c++, ML, fortran even fucking visual basic. You can't learn python first, it's like eating the pudding before the salad. Python is the *last* language you should learn.
ffs.. in vi or emacs, anything you do frequently can be turned into a single keypress easily.. that integrated enough for you ?
"why in god's name would anyone want to..." the fact that you've used vi a bit does not give you much insight into what a power user can get out of it, your ignorance as to why people use it is not a powerful argument against it.
> I'll reserve my rant on how shocked I've been lately at all the FAT kids I see running around these days for another thread.
I hardly ever see fat kids running around. I don't even see them walking that often. You're more likely to spot them in the back of an SUV at the drive-thru.
Ah ffs, what the hell do you think a 'general search engine' is ? Google's algorithms are seriously complicated too. I'll pretty much guarantee you Google use, or at very least have experimented with an algorithm which does very very close approximation to 'analysis of event shapes in e+ and e- annihilation' except it was implemented to run in scalable way on finite hardware. Also, quite aside from all that, why the hell wouldn't one compare it to google when people would be using it for the exact same purpose.
Without *actual* AI, their goal is completely impossible and their results will include millions of weird artifacts [or 'bugs' as far as users are concerned], so I predict that even in their chosen sub-domain, people will soon get frustrated and confused and return to Google.
Sheesh.. I can't believe this, do you take wrappers off chocolate bars before you eat them ? Or, maybe you take off your shades before you look at something ?
Having a barrier between your sense organs and the thing you are trying to experience is sub-optimal.
> I'll agree that 2x is in the ballpark, and I find that to be quite significant, considering that studies have found that developers tend to produce lines of (debugged, working) code at the same rate regardless of language.
It's not just that, a 2000 line program takes roughly 4 times as long to get right as a 1000 line program etc, so all else being equal, reducing line count by 50% can quadruple productivity.
Paying taxes does not make you a slave. Having people with better weaponry force you to work for them on pain of death makes you a slave. Paying people to stop this happening is not nuts. Of course, some people want to spend your tax money on other stuff and things get complicated.
Freedom is complicated - it gets encroached from all sides as your freedom butts up against other peoples'. Seems like right wingers get more upset when their freedoms are encroached by the government and left wingers get more upset when their freedoms are encroached by corporations. Being too fixated by the constraints imposed from one direction means you tend to get squashed from the other direction. Extreme corporatism enslaves people just as effectively as extreme socialism.
Slashdot Mirror
This visual programming crap crops up from time to time because so many people are brainwashed by that crap about a picture being worth a 1000 words. Draw me a picture of "misguided".
This is also the reason why the GUI monkeys can never understand the power of a command line. The command line is a language. They are stuck on the "pictures are better than words" meme. Yes - certainly, until you learn to read.
Visual stuff, GUIs, languages etc, are more *intuitive* in the same way that picture books are more intuitive to babies. It doesn't mean they are superior. This is why the best interfaces are a combination of GUI and language. It's just like the way you give children picture books while they are learning to read. The fastest way
I took a look at your COSA stuff.. good luck, but you're barking up the wrong tree.
Programming is done with languages because programming is communication. It's communication between programmer and computer.
If the kind of drag and drop stuff you are proposing was a better mechanism for creating complex programs than languages, then we wouldnt use languages to communicate with each other. Instead we would push a bunch of colored blocks around and drag string between them. I don't think we're going to start doing that anytime soon either.
(def words1 (read-lines "/usr/share/dict/words"))
(def words2 (read-lines "http://www.puzzlers.org/pub/wordlists/pocket.txt"))
Much as I dislike java and approve of your general points, that last example is pure BS. The read-lines function is just looking at a string and recognising it starts http:/// before switching to dealing with a URL. Java could do the same thing just as easily. Its not a feature of the language that has made someone write the function like that, its a design choice, and debateable one at that.
Not a fan of IP law myself, but I've never heard it blamed for our linear perception of time before.
Well, its your [genes] funeral. Admirable, but not necessarily smart. I think intelligent, responsible, people should breed more, not less.
God, that's terrible.
You should be using
for (auto i=...)
or for_each(...) and the new [] lambda.. nevermind the really terrible stuff in there, lordy, you dont need * and ->, use * and . or just -> its almost like you're ignorant or out of date or something.
Goes to show how brilliant C++ is, in a normal language psychotic fuckers can do all sorts of damage, in C++ they can't even compile...
Actually, that's what they're doing, its not a joke [my money's on C++0b though]
you really need to look at this http://www.amazon.co.uk/Invention-Scotland-Myth-History/dp/0300136862
> Who wants to be a mere normal? Certainly not I.
Whether one aspires to be normal or not, depends on which side of the mean you lie in a normal distribution. For you I'm pretty sure it would be a step in the right direction.
> Any group that is more than half democrats is biased to start with.
The majority of climate scientists are not American and thus neither democrats nor republicans. Does that make them more credible to you ? Or do scientists need to be predominantly right wing to be credible in your world ?
Sounds like a nice planet.
Here on earth, the clever managers invent some ridiculously optimistic number. The experienced guy who points out that the estimate is unrealistic gets passed over or demoted, since he lacks a "can-do" attitude. The one who came up with the daft estimate gets promoted and his penalty for just being plain wrong is never as great as the rewards he gets for giving senior management the answers it wants to hear [whoever wrong they may be]. In fact, they never even notice he was wrong, but blame cost overruns etc on the people who knew the answers.. the guy he said it would take 18 months is obviously at fault when it takes 18 months instead of the 5 promised.. he lacks can-do attitude.
I don't really mean disrespect, but this isnt easy to say politely. It's a filter. The people running those projects are not looking to take on apprentices on the whole, they are looking for help. If you don't have necessary experience for that stuff to be understandable in the terse way that it is explained, you are likely to be a net loss in terms of time gained because you did something useful against time lost because you asked a lot of questions or did something stupid that needed to be fixed later.
Let's try it like this: in US, unions act like dicks, because companies act like dicks. Where laws prevent companies acting like total dicks, unions act less like dicks.
God forbid, don't teach em python first. Learn assembly, c++, ML, fortran even fucking visual basic. You can't learn python first, it's like eating the pudding before the salad. Python is the *last* language you should learn.
Yes, I'm serious.
There are very good reasons for remaining silent even if innocent, I strongly recommend you watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
> if you can write the password on a post-it note, your disk isn't encrypted.
I call BS.. 20 random characters is plenty
ffs.. in vi or emacs, anything you do frequently can be turned into a single keypress easily.. that integrated enough for you ?
"why in god's name would anyone want to..."
the fact that you've used vi a bit does not give you much insight into what a power user can get out of it, your ignorance as to why people use it is not a powerful argument against it.
There's nothing wrong with fat. Fatty meat is far tastier. Just don't eat as much of it.
> I'll reserve my rant on how shocked I've been lately at all the FAT kids I see running around these days for another thread.
I hardly ever see fat kids running around. I don't even see them walking that often. You're more likely to spot them in the back of an SUV at the drive-thru.
Shit, I wish.. I bet they would do a better job than the current assclowns.
Ah ffs, what the hell do you think a 'general search engine' is ? Google's algorithms are seriously complicated too. I'll pretty much guarantee you Google use, or at very least have experimented with an algorithm which does very very close approximation to 'analysis of event shapes in e+ and e- annihilation' except it was implemented to run in scalable way on finite hardware. Also, quite aside from all that, why the hell wouldn't one compare it to google when people would be using it for the exact same purpose.
Without *actual* AI, their goal is completely impossible and their results will include millions of weird artifacts [or 'bugs' as far as users are concerned], so I predict that even in their chosen sub-domain, people will soon get frustrated and confused and return to Google.
Funny, very very dry, but damn funny.
Sheesh.. I can't believe this, do you take wrappers off chocolate bars before you eat them ? Or, maybe you take off your shades before you look at something ?
Having a barrier between your sense organs and the thing you are trying to experience is sub-optimal.
> However, things get messy when you start writing Object Orientated PHP, and you can't force a user to pass you an array, or an int.
Sorry, WHAT ?? How does Hungarian notation help there ?
> I'll agree that 2x is in the ballpark, and I find that to be quite significant, considering that studies have found that developers tend to produce lines of (debugged, working) code at the same rate regardless of language.
It's not just that, a 2000 line program takes roughly 4 times as long to get right as a 1000 line program etc, so all else being equal, reducing line count by 50% can quadruple productivity.
Quite right. Monkeys have too much common sense to learn all that j2ee crap.
Paying taxes does not make you a slave. Having people with better weaponry force you to work for them on pain of death makes you a slave. Paying people to stop this happening is not nuts. Of course, some people want to spend your tax money on other stuff and things get complicated.
Freedom is complicated - it gets encroached from all sides as your freedom butts up against other peoples'. Seems like right wingers get more upset when their freedoms are encroached by the government and left wingers get more upset when their freedoms are encroached by corporations. Being too fixated by the constraints imposed from one direction means you tend to get squashed from the other direction. Extreme corporatism enslaves people just as effectively as extreme socialism.