I get really tired of this argument. A skilled programmer should be able to pick up a language well enough to maintain code in a weekend. If the developers are of the "if it ain't Perl we can't deal with it" camp, they may not be worth keeping around in the first place.
Indeed. We have a term for this: Turing completeness. You can write enterprise software in asm if you're a masochist. You can write device drivers in awk if you're wierd. That doesn't mean you should do either of these things
My belief is that there is a shimmering line between programming and scripting that doesn't really hold up in the face of technical definition. Compiled vs. interpreted doesn't work (few people think of Java as a scripting language), form processing versus standalong GUI development doesn't work (is it scripting when you design a complicated MVC framework that dispatches form data to variable types of backend storage?). Even "quick-and-dirty" versus slow and elegant doesn't work; you can do either in any language. I can't think of single reason why Java is a "systems" language and Ruby is a scripting language.
I think we're left, then, with an essentially social phenomenon, which helps explain why there is a perceptible divide between one type of activity and another. If I were dictator, they would all be called programming languages.
I am speaking more elliptically than I should have. For "because it started to feel like Windows," you may substitute, "because it is starting to seem like Windows -- which is a buggy, crash-prone GUI that forces me to mouse around forever over a desktop governed by a couple of dozen competing, incommensurate metaphors that barely make sense when taken individually."
I'm not trying to troll either. Whether you like Windows isn't really the point, I think. It's whether you believe trying to reach a user other than yourself (a user created out of market research and some dim vision of where people want to go today) makes any sense at all.
Yes, but why is it so necessary for Linux to take over the world? We have thousands of pieces of software, an extremely active user community, and we crank out absolutely fantastic stuff -- except, of course, the developers who are hell bent on trying to reach that 95%. That stuff, IMHO, is bloated, buggy, and derivative. And I think I know why.
Personally, I want to be able to hack the living daylights out of everything in my environment. I dropped Gnome 2 because it started to feel like Windows. It reminds me of the early days of the phone company: you can have any color phone you want, as long as its black.
One of the major reasons the Windows desktop sucks, is that the programmers are forced to pander to some mythical vision of what "users" want that is the direct product of marketing and usability studies. Linux software is created by programmers who actually intend to use the software themselves, and it's better stuff all around. I am mystified by the attempt to adopt a process that has resulted in a car crash of a UI in the name of "making Linux mainstream."
I'm 32 years old. I have more than once longed to explain to my people (the nerds currently suffering away at the D table) that they need only wait a little while.
You couldn't have been a bigger dork than me: a dreamy, introspective poetry freak with a penchant for computer games, D&D, and all the other stuff that goes along with geekdom.
I went off to college and discovered that all the things that had conspired to make me an outcast in college ended up making me (dare I say) attractive and popular (even with the girls, with whom I had been constitutionally incapable of having a conversation until I was about nineteen). I thought I had died and gone to heaven to suddenly find myself in a place where the members of the A table were dropping like flies and generally reviled by the much larger (and more powerful) group of smart, instrospective freaks who were all suddently blossoming into cultured, sensitive adults.
God, it sucked being in high school. It brings me nearly to tears thinking about it. But the fact is, all the things that make you unpopular then can at least make you comfortable in your own skin later on. I look at my beautiful wife, my incredibly fulfilling career, and think: Yes, the last, joyful laugh.
So use the docs -I think they are really good compared to many other OSS projects, and I am glad you like them.
They are good and I do like them.
But I think you should still find value in Java Development with Ant. Erik and I really pushed the envelope in section two, doing stuff nobody had done in ant before.
And I shouldn't assume that the book is either a rehash of the docs or roughly equivalent to what any good hacker could figure out on their own. If the book really does "push the envelope" as you say, then I commend you for your efforts.
But honestly, there's so much junk out there (including junk from O'Reilly, which has produced at least as many doorstops as outstanding technical publications). And when I browse the titles at the local bookstore, I can see a pattern to the doorstops: most of them are about end-user applications that any idiot could figure out from a cursory browse of the docs.
And then I think to myself, "Geesh, I could have written that in my sleep!" I pick it up, and sure enough, someone did apparently write it while sleeping.
I'd love to pick up the Ant book and find that it was really taking me into the nooks and crannies of the tool, but it's hard not be predjudiced at this point. Way too much garbage out there.
I've been using Ant for a long time, and frankly, I can't imagine why anyone would need to go out and buy an entire book on it. For heaven's sake, if you can figure out Java, you can figure out Ant in under an hour. It just ain't that complicated.
Sure, they want a review process, but the people often reviewing are other people who want credit for hacking, not the academic community at large. This is very bad; I am reminded of a card from the game "Survival of the Witless" (a satire of tenure politics) called "New York Times reviews of each others books".
This is a serious problem that troubles some of the members of the working group that I'm on. We are -- and we realize it fully -- the choir. It seems to me that any review process has to include people who are not part of the culture that is producing digital work in the humanities. Credibility is key.
It's not an unreasonable article, but it seems entirely unreasonable for any self-respecting hacker to give a shit.
This guy wants a plug-and-play system that makes him forget he's using a computer. I, and thousands of other hackers, want a machine that we can hack on. We don't mind trying to get some weird piece of hardware to work. We get excited when we see a that we can skin every single part of a window manager (using Lisp). We love trying to crack some wierd file format. It's cool. We like it.
The minute the major desktops become so braindead that anyone can use them without thinking, is the day I find a new one, because things that go that way tend to make things boring for people who like to play with computers. I don't know about y'all, but I'm in it for the code.
I'd rather have a powerful machine that's hard to use than a powerful machine that keeps me in handcuffs with a bunch of stupid installation wizards.
I was really dissappointed reading Bruce Eckell's article. I'm a big fan of his books, but in this case I really think he's talking out of his ass about something he really hasn't bothered to look into very carefully.
Python uses functions that can also masquerade as methods. Ruby uses methods that can also masquerade as functions. This has enormous ramifications for the way OO feels in Ruby. For one thing, there's none of this nonsense about "well, some things are called object.foo() and others are foo(object). Read some of Guido's powerpoint presentations on Python. He really thinks the entire OO paradigm is a form of syntactic sugar for doing stateful programming. No serious fan of OO agrees. For my part, I thought Python was just the greatest thing since sliced bread until I tried to create serious object-oriented software with it.
No one who's serious about programming would say, Hey, why do we need Java. It's the same thing as C++! Least of all Eckell. I can't imagine why this would be considered a legitimate thing to say about Ruby and Python either.
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I get really tired of this argument. A skilled programmer should be able to pick up a language well enough to maintain code in a weekend. If the developers are of the "if it ain't Perl we can't deal with it" camp, they may not be worth keeping around in the first place.
Indeed. We have a term for this: Turing completeness. You can write enterprise software in asm if you're a masochist. You can write device drivers in awk if you're wierd. That doesn't mean you should do either of these things
My belief is that there is a shimmering line between programming and scripting that doesn't really hold up in the face of technical definition. Compiled vs. interpreted doesn't work (few people think of Java as a scripting language), form processing versus standalong GUI development doesn't work (is it scripting when you design a complicated MVC framework that dispatches form data to variable types of backend storage?). Even "quick-and-dirty" versus slow and elegant doesn't work; you can do either in any language. I can't think of single reason why Java is a "systems" language and Ruby is a scripting language.
I think we're left, then, with an essentially social phenomenon, which helps explain why there is a perceptible divide between one type of activity and another. If I were dictator, they would all be called programming languages.
I am speaking more elliptically than I should have. For "because it started to feel like Windows," you may substitute, "because it is starting to seem like Windows -- which is a buggy, crash-prone GUI that forces me to mouse around forever over a desktop governed by a couple of dozen competing, incommensurate metaphors that barely make sense when taken individually."
I'm not trying to troll either. Whether you like Windows isn't really the point, I think. It's whether you believe trying to reach a user other than yourself (a user created out of market research and some dim vision of where people want to go today) makes any sense at all.
Yes, but why is it so necessary for Linux to take over the world? We have thousands of pieces of software, an extremely active user community, and we crank out absolutely fantastic stuff -- except, of course, the developers who are hell bent on trying to reach that 95%. That stuff, IMHO, is bloated, buggy, and derivative. And I think I know why.
Personally, I want to be able to hack the living daylights out of everything in my environment. I dropped Gnome 2 because it started to feel like Windows. It reminds me of the early days of the phone company: you can have any color phone you want, as long as its black.
One of the major reasons the Windows desktop sucks, is that the programmers are forced to pander to some mythical vision of what "users" want that is the direct product of marketing and usability studies. Linux software is created by programmers who actually intend to use the software themselves, and it's better stuff all around. I am mystified by the attempt to adopt a process that has resulted in a car crash of a UI in the name of "making Linux mainstream."
Who needs it.
I'm 32 years old. I have more than once longed to explain to my people (the nerds currently suffering away at the D table) that they need only wait a little while.
You couldn't have been a bigger dork than me: a dreamy, introspective poetry freak with a penchant for computer games, D&D, and all the other stuff that goes along with geekdom.
I went off to college and discovered that all the things that had conspired to make me an outcast in college ended up making me (dare I say) attractive and popular (even with the girls, with whom I had been constitutionally incapable of having a conversation until I was about nineteen). I thought I had died and gone to heaven to suddenly find myself in a place where the members of the A table were dropping like flies and generally reviled by the much larger (and more powerful) group of smart, instrospective freaks who were all suddently blossoming into cultured, sensitive adults.
God, it sucked being in high school. It brings me nearly to tears thinking about it. But the fact is, all the things that make you unpopular then can at least make you comfortable in your own skin later on. I look at my beautiful wife, my incredibly fulfilling career, and think: Yes, the last, joyful laugh.
Order form says you need "a mounting machine capable of soldering this type of component."
So where do I get my hands on one of those? Forty buck chip, I'll start putting them in everything . . .
So use the docs -I think they are really good compared to many other OSS projects, and I am glad you like them.
They are good and I do like them.
But I think you should still find value in Java Development with Ant. Erik and I really pushed the envelope in section two, doing stuff nobody had done in ant before.
And I shouldn't assume that the book is either a rehash of the docs or roughly equivalent to what any good hacker could figure out on their own. If the book really does "push the envelope" as you say, then I commend you for your efforts.
But honestly, there's so much junk out there (including junk from O'Reilly, which has produced at least as many doorstops as outstanding technical publications). And when I browse the titles at the local bookstore, I can see a pattern to the doorstops: most of them are about end-user applications that any idiot could figure out from a cursory browse of the docs.
And then I think to myself, "Geesh, I could have written that in my sleep!" I pick it up, and sure enough, someone did apparently write it while sleeping.
I'd love to pick up the Ant book and find that it was really taking me into the nooks and crannies of the tool, but it's hard not be predjudiced at this point. Way too much garbage out there.
Compiling Java programs is slow because you have to recompile everything? Well my make files don't do that. . .
Uh, and neither does Ant . . .
I've been using Ant for a long time, and frankly, I can't imagine why anyone would need to go out and buy an entire book on it. For heaven's sake, if you can figure out Java, you can figure out Ant in under an hour. It just ain't that complicated.
Sure, they want a review process, but the people often reviewing are other people who want credit for hacking, not the academic community at large. This is very bad; I am reminded of a card from the game "Survival of the Witless" (a satire of tenure politics) called "New York Times reviews of each others books".
This is a serious problem that troubles some of the members of the working group that I'm on. We are -- and we realize it fully -- the choir. It seems to me that any review process has to include people who are not part of the culture that is producing digital work in the humanities. Credibility is key.
This was modded as troll, but he's right -- it is a language, and one that deserves serious study.
Here are my favs:
http://busa.village.virginia.edu/devlinks.html
It's not an unreasonable article, but it seems entirely unreasonable for any self-respecting hacker to give a shit.
This guy wants a plug-and-play system that makes him forget he's using a computer. I, and thousands of other hackers, want a machine that we can hack on. We don't mind trying to get some weird piece of hardware to work. We get excited when we see a that we can skin every single part of a window manager (using Lisp). We love trying to crack some wierd file format. It's cool. We like it.
The minute the major desktops become so braindead that anyone can use them without thinking, is the day I find a new one, because things that go that way tend to make things boring for people who like to play with computers. I don't know about y'all, but I'm in it for the code.
I'd rather have a powerful machine that's hard to use than a powerful machine that keeps me in handcuffs with a bunch of stupid installation wizards.
I was really dissappointed reading Bruce Eckell's article. I'm a big fan of his books, but in this case I really think he's talking out of his ass about something he really hasn't bothered to look into very carefully.
Python uses functions that can also masquerade as methods. Ruby uses methods that can also masquerade as functions. This has enormous ramifications for the way OO feels in Ruby. For one thing, there's none of this nonsense about "well, some things are called object.foo() and others are foo(object). Read some of Guido's powerpoint presentations on Python. He really thinks the entire OO paradigm is a form of syntactic sugar for doing stateful programming. No serious fan of OO agrees. For my part, I thought Python was just the greatest thing since sliced bread until I tried to create serious object-oriented software with it.
Besides that, there's blocks, iterators, closures, true encapsulation, and access control.
No one who's serious about programming would say, Hey, why do we need Java. It's the same thing as C++! Least of all Eckell. I can't imagine why this would be considered a legitimate thing to say about Ruby and Python either.