The next version will of course have features from Esperanto, Mandarin, and Martian.
I'm all for extending a language, but they haven't had C# around enough to be larding new stuff on. The language already had several ways to do most things, now they're adding more?
If we wanted ten ways to do anything, we'd use perl. If we're not using perl, that usually means we like to be a little more constrained.
You could just make an inner class with only data members. It would probably take you two more lines than it would to make a struct. You can make it private or make it public and use it in other classes.
But really, making a whole file isn't that hard either - you copy some other file and then change the innards. Done. You don't have to write get/set, you can just have accessible data members.
-andy
Re:their SE course sucks
on
MIT Everyware
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· Score: 1
MIT's CS stuff is in general not really big on realism. This course is the closest it gets - they do generally add and remove requirements on you in the middle of the final project. It's also generally not a realistic assignment, but that's okay with me - realistic assignments generally don't include an module that does alpha-beta search on a game space, which was a bit I wrote when I took it.
But really, I've had many years since to get realism. Reality provides it. In large doses. I haven't had so many chances to get a good theoretical underpinning, and I can generally tell someone who has had one (or gone out and built one for themselves) from someone who hasn't. Also, frankly, most software projects don't require much algorithmic thought - databases and hashtables don't really stretch that stuff much - whereas a constructed prolem can.
Your course does sound like a pretty good course, but I imagine it turns a lot of people from CS students into... well, anything else! It's a different course with different objectives from 6.170. You'd probably do best to take both.
I had the same problems. It sometimes treated a floor to carpet edge as a wall. It couldn't deal with complicated geometries created by furniture. It didn't pick up anything bigger than a speck.
If your home already looks like Martha Stewarts - clean, neat, organized - you might want a Roomba. If it doesn't, you'll have to move the furniture and stuff until it does, at which point running the vaccum yourself will take only a few moments and do a better job.
This is a product for people whose perfect houses have dust, not for people who really would want a robot vaccum.
I've almost never come into contact with any software that leaves me with a good feeling, but I still write software.
It's true that a lot of Java GUIs, well, suck. If your apps are pretty GUI driven, you'll probably be happier with something platform specific.
But if you're going to judge the whole language on the likability of its GUI libraries, you should judge C on the likability of UNIX command line utilities.;)
Have you actually tried writing a serious app in Java? Having worked on big apps in C, C++, and Java, I've liked it a great deal.
Of course, I don't really do GUI stuff much, and don't really care so much about how good the GUI is. That's someone else's problem.
I also feel like you're understating the requirements to get a typical C program running. You seem to have used well-packaged other programs and badly-packaged Java, but that's just a packaging problem. I've certainly had my share of C etc. programs which won't run because they need a library that's available somewhere to be set to something and good luck finding out.
Your milage obviously varies, but it doesn't sound like you've tried very hard.
Fair enough. But there's a wide difference between help get through tough times and many of the things workers are called to do.
When the company needs you to pull long hours for a few months, that's getting through tough times. When they lay off most of your department for the forseeable future with no change in work load, that's exploitation. Making one person do five people's work for a quarter to get over the hump is pulling together. Trying to get them to do that forever because you can't budget for enough people to actually do the work...
Employers do look for people they can do that to, but I'm not going to be one of them. I am, however, one of the former people - I've put in my long hours to make deadlines and taken my pay cuts in the hopes of making things better soon. But I won't wait around forever hoping eventually things will be better.
Also, brining up your gripes is important. But if management is asking you to pull 80 hour weeks forever, you shouldn't need to tell them you're pissed. Either they know, or they're too dumb to be told.
Well, you're welcome to play it safe that way, carefully moving from exploiting company to exploiting company.
Clearly you should spin it a little better than that sentence, but if a company looks at you and thinks "hm, when we want him to bend over and take it, he's not going to" and the doesn't give you a job... did you want to work for them?
This is the typical libertarian response, and it's true enough for things that can be owned. Although not entirely true, in that nothing can be entirely subdivided - it may make you happy to remove your trees from your mountain because you later plan to mine it, but when my valley land gets covered with mud, I'm not too thrilled anyway.
But further, what do you say to things that fundamentally cannot be subdivided and owned, like air?
Because what everyone knows is that the internet is about geographical location, and enabling those who are close together to work together. It's certainly not about letting people far away work together. And it certainly doesn't make location totally irrelevant. Location is more important now than ever.
Sheesh, this just proves that just because you can do something doesn't mean anyone is going to care.
You wouldn't expect people to design good bridges if they had never taken a math course, and programs are getting as complex as bridges (though with more graceful failure modes, Therac-25 excepted).
They do say that whatever hot new language X does, Lisp has been doing it and being ignored for years.
I think the problem with Lisp, as someone who has programmed in Lisp and in other languages, is that until you get quite good at it the language seems to run backwards from straightforward procedural programming. Switching from one to the other requires experience in both, and it's easy to get out of practice with the functional way of doing things... and it's hard to get a programmer trained in procedural languages to make that first climb to functional Lisp and thinking backwards.
Technically, this stores data you can find. It's a replacement for a database.
But most serious projects use a database in order to store data they never want to lose. That's why it all goes back to disk (often to multiple disks).
No one running anything that deals with money wants their system's state to be kept in volatile memory.
"I'm sorry, we can't tell how much money is in your account."
Re:That's not really the problem.
on
NYT on RFID Tags
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Also, on the less overarching but more embarassing side for young women, random guys with laptops can read the RFID tags of all the clothes worn by passing women and snicker about the brand, size, and whatever else of the panties worn by decoding the ID.
And that's just RFIDing clothes... what if over the counter medicines were tagged?
"Hey Bob! Digestion acting up? I see you're carrying immodium again!"
Re:Forgive the obvious question...
on
Superbowl XXXVII
·
· Score: 1
Congratulations, you wrapped your obvious statement - many people don't like sports where the difference between winning and losing is very subtle, or that rarely score - in a put down about American society. It's not that Americans have different taste, it's that they "don't grasp" real sports.
That's sure to make people realize how intelligent it was and mod it up. Give it a rest and watch your soccer quietly.
Clearly 32K games means "our game name space is large enough that we could have 32K different games eventually".
Which through the magic of marketing gets turned into "our game name space is large enough that We could have 32K different games! eventually".
I you want people to take what you've written seriously, you should take the effort to make it if not strictly grammatical then at least not obviously ignorant.
Just because you can type it out quickly doesn't make your thought better. And it's especially ironic when bad grammar is used to criticize a writer. It makes it hard to take seriously.
But pretty much I believe if you're writing it, you should write it coherently. No one worries about split infinitives and crap like that, but if you can't get your tenses correct take a little longer with your posts.
He may be average, but it's always funny for someone to criticize writing in a post that gets gets plural and singular tenses messed up and uses all caps.
Personally, I find him an above average fiction writer. Hardly my favorite, and his characters are not well developed, but head and shoulders above a lot of stuff that gets published. Perhaps head, shoulders, and bellybutton above the web average.
They're clearly trying to find a use for all the low-res porn from the BBS era.
Also, using this porn will really make you go blind - as you squint like crazy trying to figure out whether you've downloaded a naked woman or a big pink pig.
I have both season 1 and 2 on the British (R2) release... you can get them from amazon.co.uk if you want.
They're pretty excellent DVDs - not a huge amount of extras, but good ones, and the packaging is amazing (I'm sure the american version will have terrible packaging, given the way fox treats the show).
so if you've got a region-free or multi-region DVD and want futurama, don't hesitate.
Maybe real technical skills != good interviewee, but anyone with a real job to fill is hiring for more than just technical skills. Even the lowest programmer or sysadmin has a job that's at least half communication with the rest of the company, like it or not.
People skills aren't something you can punt just because you aren't a manager.
I agree. I'm working right now with a bunch of programmers who are in their 40s (though I'm only 28) and really it confirms my general experience that high quality people can keep being programmers. These guys are pretty damn smart.
And for the people my own age, the ones who had half a CS education are the ones still out of work. The ones who are really good may have spent a few months looking but they're back on the job.
Slashdot Mirror
The next version will of course have features from Esperanto, Mandarin, and Martian.
I'm all for extending a language, but they haven't had C# around enough to be larding new stuff on. The language already had several ways to do most things, now they're adding more?
If we wanted ten ways to do anything, we'd use perl. If we're not using perl, that usually means we like to be a little more constrained.
-andy
You could just make an inner class with only data members. It would probably take you two more lines than it would to make a struct. You can make it private or make it public and use it in other classes.
But really, making a whole file isn't that hard either - you copy some other file and then change the innards. Done. You don't have to write get/set, you can just have accessible data members.
-andy
MIT's CS stuff is in general not really big on realism. This course is the closest it gets - they do generally add and remove requirements on you in the middle of the final project. It's also generally not a realistic assignment, but that's okay with me - realistic assignments generally don't include an module that does alpha-beta search on a game space, which was a bit I wrote when I took it.
But really, I've had many years since to get realism. Reality provides it. In large doses. I haven't had so many chances to get a good theoretical underpinning, and I can generally tell someone who has had one (or gone out and built one for themselves) from someone who hasn't. Also, frankly, most software projects don't require much algorithmic thought - databases and hashtables don't really stretch that stuff much - whereas a constructed prolem can.
Your course does sound like a pretty good course, but I imagine it turns a lot of people from CS students into... well, anything else! It's a different course with different objectives from 6.170. You'd probably do best to take both.
I had the same problems. It sometimes treated a floor to carpet edge as a wall. It couldn't deal with complicated geometries created by furniture. It didn't pick up anything bigger than a speck.
If your home already looks like Martha Stewarts - clean, neat, organized - you might want a Roomba. If it doesn't, you'll have to move the furniture and stuff until it does, at which point running the vaccum yourself will take only a few moments and do a better job.
This is a product for people whose perfect houses have dust, not for people who really would want a robot vaccum.
Hell, Minsky himself was a big letdown when I finally took his class. Guy had a good idea once. He still has it. Now... what?
Not that I'm really excited by a lot of the AI lab projects, but Minsky no longer gets to criticize anyone.
I've almost never come into contact with any software that leaves me with a good feeling, but I still write software.
It's true that a lot of Java GUIs, well, suck. If your apps are pretty GUI driven, you'll probably be happier with something platform specific.
But if you're going to judge the whole language on the likability of its GUI libraries, you should judge C on the likability of UNIX command line utilities.
Have you actually tried writing a serious app in Java? Having worked on big apps in C, C++, and Java, I've liked it a great deal.
Of course, I don't really do GUI stuff much, and don't really care so much about how good the GUI is. That's someone else's problem.
I also feel like you're understating the requirements to get a typical C program running. You seem to have used well-packaged other programs and badly-packaged Java, but that's just a packaging problem. I've certainly had my share of C etc. programs which won't run because they need a library that's available somewhere to be set to something and good luck finding out.
Your milage obviously varies, but it doesn't sound like you've tried very hard.
Fair enough. But there's a wide difference between help get through tough times and many of the things workers are called to do.
When the company needs you to pull long hours for a few months, that's getting through tough times. When they lay off most of your department for the forseeable future with no change in work load, that's exploitation. Making one person do five people's work for a quarter to get over the hump is pulling together. Trying to get them to do that forever because you can't budget for enough people to actually do the work...
Employers do look for people they can do that to, but I'm not going to be one of them. I am, however, one of the former people - I've put in my long hours to make deadlines and taken my pay cuts in the hopes of making things better soon. But I won't wait around forever hoping eventually things will be better.
Also, brining up your gripes is important. But if management is asking you to pull 80 hour weeks forever, you shouldn't need to tell them you're pissed. Either they know, or they're too dumb to be told.
-andy
Well, you're welcome to play it safe that way, carefully moving from exploiting company to exploiting company.
Clearly you should spin it a little better than that sentence, but if a company looks at you and thinks "hm, when we want him to bend over and take it, he's not going to" and the doesn't give you a job... did you want to work for them?
-andy
China wants to filter the entire internet anyway, so they might as well only use one and point it at the Great Firewall of China.
I'm envisioning a billion little linksys router boxes glued together like bricks.
This is the typical libertarian response, and it's true enough for things that can be owned. Although not entirely true, in that nothing can be entirely subdivided - it may make you happy to remove your trees from your mountain because you later plan to mine it, but when my valley land gets covered with mud, I'm not too thrilled anyway.
But further, what do you say to things that fundamentally cannot be subdivided and owned, like air?
Geolocation.
Because what everyone knows is that the internet is about geographical location, and enabling those who are close together to work together. It's certainly not about letting people far away work together. And it certainly doesn't make location totally irrelevant. Location is more important now than ever.
Sheesh, this just proves that just because you can do something doesn't mean anyone is going to care.
Too true.
You wouldn't expect people to design good bridges if they had never taken a math course, and programs are getting as complex as bridges (though with more graceful failure modes, Therac-25 excepted).
They do say that whatever hot new language X does, Lisp has been doing it and being ignored for years.
I think the problem with Lisp, as someone who has programmed in Lisp and in other languages, is that until you get quite good at it the language seems to run backwards from straightforward procedural programming. Switching from one to the other requires experience in both, and it's easy to get out of practice with the functional way of doing things... and it's hard to get a programmer trained in procedural languages to make that first climb to functional Lisp and thinking backwards.
Technically, this stores data you can find. It's a replacement for a database.
But most serious projects use a database in order to store data they never want to lose. That's why it all goes back to disk (often to multiple disks).
No one running anything that deals with money wants their system's state to be kept in volatile memory.
"I'm sorry, we can't tell how much money is in your account."
Also, on the less overarching but more embarassing side for young women, random guys with laptops can read the RFID tags of all the clothes worn by passing women and snicker about the brand, size, and whatever else of the panties worn by decoding the ID.
And that's just RFIDing clothes... what if over the counter medicines were tagged?
"Hey Bob! Digestion acting up? I see you're carrying immodium again!"
Congratulations, you wrapped your obvious statement - many people don't like sports where the difference between winning and losing is very subtle, or that rarely score - in a put down about American society. It's not that Americans have different taste, it's that they "don't grasp" real sports.
That's sure to make people realize how intelligent it was and mod it up. Give it a rest and watch your soccer quietly.
Clearly 32K games means "our game name space is large enough that we could have 32K different games eventually". Which through the magic of marketing gets turned into "our game name space is large enough that We could have 32K different games! eventually".
I you want people to take what you've written seriously, you should take the effort to make it if not strictly grammatical then at least not obviously ignorant.
Just because you can type it out quickly doesn't make your thought better. And it's especially ironic when bad grammar is used to criticize a writer. It makes it hard to take seriously.
But pretty much I believe if you're writing it, you should write it coherently. No one worries about split infinitives and crap like that, but if you can't get your tenses correct take a little longer with your posts.
He may be average, but it's always funny for someone to criticize writing in a post that gets gets plural and singular tenses messed up and uses all caps.
Personally, I find him an above average fiction writer. Hardly my favorite, and his characters are not well developed, but head and shoulders above a lot of stuff that gets published. Perhaps head, shoulders, and bellybutton above the web average.
They're clearly trying to find a use for all the low-res porn from the BBS era.
Also, using this porn will really make you go blind - as you squint like crazy trying to figure out whether you've downloaded a naked woman or a big pink pig.
I have both season 1 and 2 on the British (R2) release... you can get them from amazon.co.uk if you want.
They're pretty excellent DVDs - not a huge amount of extras, but good ones, and the packaging is amazing (I'm sure the american version will have terrible packaging, given the way fox treats the show).
so if you've got a region-free or multi-region DVD and want futurama, don't hesitate.
Maybe real technical skills != good interviewee, but anyone with a real job to fill is hiring for more than just technical skills. Even the lowest programmer or sysadmin has a job that's at least half communication with the rest of the company, like it or not.
People skills aren't something you can punt just because you aren't a manager.
I agree. I'm working right now with a bunch of programmers who are in their 40s (though I'm only 28) and really it confirms my general experience that high quality people can keep being programmers. These guys are pretty damn smart.
And for the people my own age, the ones who had half a CS education are the ones still out of work. The ones who are really good may have spent a few months looking but they're back on the job.
And the roomba can run over the bump thus created?