I'm putting together a scripting language that targets j2me, called Hecl: http://www.hecl.org/, with the idea being that you can write quick apps/most of the app in a high level language and then add java bits as needed to do any heavy lifting. So far I have it running and last weekend started work on making the GUI portion of it. So far, so good. The language is also portable to other Java environments, so perhaps someone will find other interesting niches for it.
which comes from Sicily. They are made with real fruit, and are absolutely delicious. I made a point of having at least one a day during a recent vacation in Sicily.
Sounds like the Lua approach is pretty smart for what it's meant for. Build it small and make it extensible is often a pretty good way of doing things. One thing that's missing from Tcl in terms of sandboxing that your comments don't exactly cover WRT Lua is the ability to really limit things. For instance, Tcl's sandbox won't stop a "while { 1 }" type of situation - you'd have to have a control thread or some other means of defeating it (it's certainly possible, just not as easy as it could be).
You do make a common mistake regarding Tcl though, that it is "string based and therefore slow". Tcl has been internally byte compiled for a number of years. I still don't think it's as fast as Lua, but there's more to it than just "string based", because while strings are very important to Tcl, internally it's bytecodes and the correct 'C' types.
I read one of the links above, comparing Python and Lua, but it doesn't talk about sandboxes. Does Lua have one or does it just do multiple interpreters?
I have to say that Tcl is pretty good for this kind of thing too, although it is certainly bigger than Lua. It has sandboxes and multiple interpreters that you can control from both C and Tcl itself. You can also do threads, if you want. And the language is also pretty easy to learn for newcomers, like most scripting languages - especially considering the really friendly user community.
Of course, if you want really small, there are Tcl versions and related languages like Jim and Hecl .
The thing that interests me about Skype is that I think my parents have a shot at setting it up, something that doesn't seem very plausible with some of those other programs that require "just a few modifications to your firewall settings"... yeah right.
Skype is self contained and very easy to set up and use, and any open source competitor must match that.
I actually wrote an advogato article asking about this a while back:
Taken as a whole, Europe is pretty big too. What is very different is that not everyone thinks they have a god-given right to a spread-out, one story home with a big garden. People have learned to build up, rather than out, and out, and out some more so that it takes 1+ hours to cross some major areas by freeway (Phoenix, AZ, Los Angeles from personal experience).
Sure, it's a compromise, like most things are. It's nice to have a big back yard, at times. But that compromise begins to look less favorable when you have to drive 5 kilometers to even get food or go to otherwise basically available services. At some point, maybe it's good enough to have an appartment of your own, and a common green area that you can share with others...
Your point about who gets hit first is a good one, however, at some point, you've got to start changing, even though that means some pain. Perhaps the next time you are in the housing market, you will give some consideration to whether you could use the car a little bit less. Perhaps you will start appreciating politicians who do something about implementing changes making it easier to do more with less car use. Perhaps you will pay attention to vehicle fuel efficiency when you buy one...
As the article states, fuel efficiency in the US has been *declining*, which is absurd, considering that technology continues to improve energy usage in vehicles.
The US needs to learn to use energy more efficiently. Experts suggest that current prices are driven by growth and demand, rather than a supply shortage causing a spike as has happened in the past. This means that prices are not likely to drop quickly. Interestingly The Economist (not generally in favor of big government, taxes, or other impediments to business) says:
The best long-term solution--for America as well as the world economy--would be higher petrol taxes in the United States. Alas, there is little prospect of that happening. America, unlike Europe, has preferred fuel-economy regulations to petrol taxes. But even with those it has failed abysmally. These regulations have been so abused that the oil efficiency of its vehicles has fallen to a 20-year low. This week, the Bush administration announced proposals for changing the fuel-economy rules governing trucks and sport-utility vehicles, but failed to close loopholes that allow these gas guzzlers to use more petrol than normal cars, a shameful concession to carmakers.
America and China, in their different ways, are drunk on oil consumption. The longer they put off taking the steps needed to curb their habit, the worse the headache will be. George Bush once learned that lesson about alcohol. It is time for him to wean America off oiloholism too.
The real problem is more of an ethical one than something legal. Of course, you can link. No problem. But it was stupid to do without making some kind of agreement with the game's author. I'm sure if they'd asked, he would have been happy to make a deal with them. Since they didn't, they learned a lesson about just including other people's content willy-nilly. Imagine the damage to their image had he used some really filthy image - that's a big risk to take.
I regularly get people including my photos ( http://www.dedasys.com/photos/ ) inline without so much as a thanks or credit. If they ask, I almost always say "sure, go ahead!". I don't use nasty pictures, but do redirect the abusers to a "thanks for your interest in my pictures, they are online at.... " jpeg.
... are the way to go. They are the most efficient means of transportation in terms of how many kilometers you can go with X amount of energy (or so my physics professor said). This also means that, if it's hot out, you can go nice and slow and not arrive all sweaty. Things like scooters or in line skates might be ok if you have to involve a bus or some other public transport in your commute, but... otherwise nothing really beats a bicycle. And riding a bike is just so much more fun than walking or driving a car!
I agree 100% with the strategy of having a clunker for use around town. It might be more fun to ride a nice mountain bike around, but the peace of mind is really worth it.
If the demand stays the same, and supply shrinks, it just means those developers/admins will make more money, or cost more in terms of training. That, or the whole thing will just get too expensive and cheaper alternatives will be found.
This situation of smaller, less-capable, cheaper technologies undercutting a market leader is what's described in The Innovator's Dilemma - new, disruptive technologies (Unix, Windows, etc...) originally aren't powerful enough to do what the "big boys" want, so they find uses in other applications. By the time they catch up with the established tech, it's often too late for the established systems to fend off the competition.
As the article says, there are still important areas where that hasn't happened yet with mainframes, but I suspect things are headed that way, sooner or later.
Those numbers don't sound right to me. How many people work at google? Say their salaries are really high.. there are still many other places that *aren't* google out there who are not going to pay those prices. Perhaps salaries have gone up for the cream of the crop, but 25-50 percent still sounds like a huge spike in an area with such a large quantity of software people.
To me this seems like one of those times where someone just threw out a number and that number instantly becomes the focus of everyone's attention because they don't have any better numbers.
In this model, as quality is undistinguishable ex ante by the buyer (due to the asymmetry of information), incentives exist for the seller to pass off a low-quality good as a higher-quality one. The buyer, however, takes this incentive into consideration, and takes the quality of the good to be uncertain. Only the average quality of the good will be considered, which in turn will have the side effect that goods that are above average in terms of quality will be driven out of the market. This mechanism is repeated until a no-trade equilibrium is reached.
Other than by talking with friends (which isn't very scalable), it's hard to know who's good, and who is just some random loser thinking he's going to make a buck. It's really easy to put up a fancy site, even answer the phone professionally, but you only learn they're no good when your server dies on Friday evening and no one can fix it untill Monday!
Layeredtech are very professional, seem well organized, and respond quickly to any problems I have. That said, the server I rent from them runs nothing special (debian stable), and seems to hang pretty often (a few times a week), which seems really wrong:-(
I'm a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and I don't see how it's particularly interesting to VC's (we are talking about Venture Capitalists, right?). The ASF certainly has a lot of bright people involved, but it's a non-profit. "non-profit" and "investment community" are generally two things that don't have much in common.
Java might be ok for some people - I think that's what AP Comp Sci classes use. However it has a few drawbacks:
1) It doesn't "scale down" as well as languages like Python, Ruby, Tcl etc... So might not be as well suited for those who aren't as interested/motivated/quick on the uptake.
2) It's kind of dubious, IMO, to be promoting a product of one company.
In any case, that would leave us with the scripting languages, which I think are all worth considering for different reasons, and all have in common a faster, easier development cycle with no need to recompile each time.
Python: clear, easy to read, and very general purpose. Good introduction to OO without beating you over the head with it or forcing you to adapt to it from day 1.
Tcl: because of the interesting introspection that it has and uses for certain common programming tasks, I'm not sure it's the best to start with, but on the other hand, being able to create something *visible* on the screen with a few lines of code is pretty gratifying, especially for a beginner. (Python has Tkinter which is pretty good too, but slightly more complex to start with than regular old Tk).
Ruby also seems like a good, reasonably generic language - I don't know it as well, but from a casual glance, don't like the (willful) resemblance to Perl in terms of the syntax. But I think you could do a lot worse - you'd certainly have some advanced concepts available to teach with it.
If you teach them PHP, you're going to be teaching them web programming, basically. I'd stick to a more general purpose language (you can use PHP for general purpose tasks, but it's still really oriented towards the web).
On the other hand, if you've got bright kids and are willing to explore something interesting, you might try languages like Smalltalk or Scheme, that introduce some really interesting ideas.
I used Erlang professionally some, and liked it, but I have some doubts as well. It did not make me 10 times more productive, nor my code error free. It was not quite as good as a "scripting language" in terms of productivity, I felt, although it runs quite quickly, and like the concurrency model a lot.
In any case, I was left with a feeling of "yeah, I like this and would use it again, but it's not something that is going to wipe the floor with older models".
Also, I have some doubts as to how much FP "Scales Down" in the sense that it initially confuses people who are used to "normal" languages. I think perhaps FP might be more successful if someone were to take a more bottom up approach - let it "escape from the ivory tower". Languages like Erlang are doing this already, and of course people will be able to provide links to this or that Haskell or ML system used commercially, but to really make inroads, you've got to bridge the gap...
If they're not interested, they're not interested
on
Brain Teasers for Coders?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If you've already been exposed to programming, and haven't got the desire to carry on learning on your own, I don't know that any amount of brain teasers will give you that spark. More likely, they'll just regard it as another pain in the ass to be dealt with.
1) Is a very easy language to learn, so it can be used in the templates as well as the backend.
2) Has lots of nifty introspection features, so you can do quite fancy programming if you care to - since the syntax is so simple, you can even write new control structures in Tcl itself.
Don't forget Tcl and Tk, either. Tcl is quite a capable language, once you get some extensions loaded (and it's nice and small too, because it doesn't make them built-ins). On Windows, ActiveTcl is a sensible proposal.
As far as GUI's, Tk is still one of the best cross-platform things going out there. Especially when using the new Tile system.
... people have been doing houses for several thousand years. We've got the basic idea down pretty well. We've been doing graphical computer systems for how long? 30 years, maybe? And computers, how long have we had those?
Not to excuse poor design, but sometime's it's easier to piss on stuff than figure out how to fix it.
What you are missing is that it takes more to do Java. More resources, more knowledge, more expertise. You may have those things, but many more do not.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm putting together a scripting language that targets j2me, called Hecl: http://www.hecl.org/, with the idea being that you can write quick apps/most of the app in a high level language and then add java bits as needed to do any heavy lifting. So far I have it running and last weekend started work on making the GUI portion of it. So far, so good. The language is also portable to other Java environments, so perhaps someone will find other interesting niches for it.
No no no... the original and still the best is the "granita":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_ice
which comes from Sicily. They are made with real fruit, and are absolutely delicious. I made a point of having at least one a day during a recent vacation in Sicily.
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granita
Sounds like the Lua approach is pretty smart for what it's meant for. Build it small and make it extensible is often a pretty good way of doing things. One thing that's missing from Tcl in terms of sandboxing that your comments don't exactly cover WRT Lua is the ability to really limit things. For instance, Tcl's sandbox won't stop a "while { 1 }" type of situation - you'd have to have a control thread or some other means of defeating it (it's certainly possible, just not as easy as it could be).
You do make a common mistake regarding Tcl though, that it is "string based and therefore slow". Tcl has been internally byte compiled for a number of years. I still don't think it's as fast as Lua, but there's more to it than just "string based", because while strings are very important to Tcl, internally it's bytecodes and the correct 'C' types.
I read one of the links above, comparing Python and Lua, but it doesn't talk about sandboxes. Does Lua have one or does it just do multiple interpreters?
I have to say that Tcl is pretty good for this kind of thing too, although it is certainly bigger than Lua. It has sandboxes and multiple interpreters that you can control from both C and Tcl itself. You can also do threads, if you want. And the language is also pretty easy to learn for newcomers, like most scripting languages - especially considering the really friendly user community.
Of course, if you want really small, there are Tcl versions and related languages like Jim and Hecl .
Is it a "graphics solution" or a PCI card? Sheez.
The thing that interests me about Skype is that I think my parents have a shot at setting it up, something that doesn't seem very plausible with some of those other programs that require "just a few modifications to your firewall settings"... yeah right.
Skype is self contained and very easy to set up and use, and any open source competitor must match that.
I actually wrote an advogato article asking about this a while back:
http://www.advogato.org/article/838.html
Taken as a whole, Europe is pretty big too. What is very different is that not everyone thinks they have a god-given right to a spread-out, one story home with a big garden. People have learned to build up, rather than out, and out, and out some more so that it takes 1+ hours to cross some major areas by freeway (Phoenix, AZ, Los Angeles from personal experience).
Sure, it's a compromise, like most things are. It's nice to have a big back yard, at times. But that compromise begins to look less favorable when you have to drive 5 kilometers to even get food or go to otherwise basically available services. At some point, maybe it's good enough to have an appartment of your own, and a common green area that you can share with others...
Your point about who gets hit first is a good one, however, at some point, you've got to start changing, even though that means some pain. Perhaps the next time you are in the housing market, you will give some consideration to whether you could use the car a little bit less. Perhaps you will start appreciating politicians who do something about implementing changes making it easier to do more with less car use. Perhaps you will pay attention to vehicle fuel efficiency when you buy one...
As the article states, fuel efficiency in the US has been *declining*, which is absurd, considering that technology continues to improve energy usage in vehicles.
The US needs to learn to use energy more efficiently. Experts suggest that current prices are driven by growth and demand, rather than a supply shortage causing a spike as has happened in the past. This means that prices are not likely to drop quickly. Interestingly The Economist (not generally in favor of big government, taxes, or other impediments to business) says:
From:
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystor
(You have to pay for access...sorry).
The real problem is more of an ethical one than something legal. Of course, you can link. No problem. But it was stupid to do without making some kind of agreement with the game's author. I'm sure if they'd asked, he would have been happy to make a deal with them. Since they didn't, they learned a lesson about just including other people's content willy-nilly. Imagine the damage to their image had he used some really filthy image - that's a big risk to take.
.... " jpeg.
I regularly get people including my photos ( http://www.dedasys.com/photos/ ) inline without so much as a thanks or credit. If they ask, I almost always say "sure, go ahead!". I don't use nasty pictures, but do redirect the abusers to a "thanks for your interest in my pictures, they are online at
... are the way to go. They are the most efficient means of transportation in terms of how many kilometers you can go with X amount of energy (or so my physics professor said). This also means that, if it's hot out, you can go nice and slow and not arrive all sweaty. Things like scooters or in line skates might be ok if you have to involve a bus or some other public transport in your commute, but... otherwise nothing really beats a bicycle. And riding a bike is just so much more fun than walking or driving a car!
I agree 100% with the strategy of having a clunker for use around town. It might be more fun to ride a nice mountain bike around, but the peace of mind is really worth it.
If the demand stays the same, and supply shrinks, it just means those developers/admins will make more money, or cost more in terms of training. That, or the whole thing will just get too expensive and cheaper alternatives will be found.
This situation of smaller, less-capable, cheaper technologies undercutting a market leader is what's described in The Innovator's Dilemma - new, disruptive technologies (Unix, Windows, etc...) originally aren't powerful enough to do what the "big boys" want, so they find uses in other applications. By the time they catch up with the established tech, it's often too late for the established systems to fend off the competition.
As the article says, there are still important areas where that hasn't happened yet with mainframes, but I suspect things are headed that way, sooner or later.
Those numbers don't sound right to me. How many people work at google? Say their salaries are really high.. there are still many other places that *aren't* google out there who are not going to pay those prices. Perhaps salaries have gone up for the cream of the crop, but 25-50 percent still sounds like a huge spike in an area with such a large quantity of software people.
To me this seems like one of those times where someone just threw out a number and that number instantly becomes the focus of everyone's attention because they don't have any better numbers.
As seen here:
http://news.yahoo.com/i/528
a fairly good percentage of these go on to appear as slashdot stories.
Other than by talking with friends (which isn't very scalable), it's hard to know who's good, and who is just some random loser thinking he's going to make a buck. It's really easy to put up a fancy site, even answer the phone professionally, but you only learn they're no good when your server dies on Friday evening and no one can fix it untill Monday!
Layeredtech are very professional, seem well organized, and respond quickly to any problems I have. That said, the server I rent from them runs nothing special (debian stable), and seems to hang pretty often (a few times a week), which seems really wrong:-(
I'm a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and I don't see how it's particularly interesting to VC's (we are talking about Venture Capitalists, right?). The ASF certainly has a lot of bright people involved, but it's a non-profit. "non-profit" and "investment community" are generally two things that don't have much in common.
Java might be ok for some people - I think that's what AP Comp Sci classes use. However it has a few drawbacks:
1) It doesn't "scale down" as well as languages like Python, Ruby, Tcl etc... So might not be as well suited for those who aren't as interested/motivated/quick on the uptake.
2) It's kind of dubious, IMO, to be promoting a product of one company.
In any case, that would leave us with the scripting languages, which I think are all worth considering for different reasons, and all have in common a faster, easier development cycle with no need to recompile each time.
Python: clear, easy to read, and very general purpose. Good introduction to OO without beating you over the head with it or forcing you to adapt to it from day 1.
Tcl: because of the interesting introspection that it has and uses for certain common programming tasks, I'm not sure it's the best to start with, but on the other hand, being able to create something *visible* on the screen with a few lines of code is pretty gratifying, especially for a beginner. (Python has Tkinter which is pretty good too, but slightly more complex to start with than regular old Tk).
Ruby also seems like a good, reasonably generic language - I don't know it as well, but from a casual glance, don't like the (willful) resemblance to Perl in terms of the syntax. But I think you could do a lot worse - you'd certainly have some advanced concepts available to teach with it.
If you teach them PHP, you're going to be teaching them web programming, basically. I'd stick to a more general purpose language (you can use PHP for general purpose tasks, but it's still really oriented towards the web).
On the other hand, if you've got bright kids and are willing to explore something interesting, you might try languages like Smalltalk or Scheme, that introduce some really interesting ideas.
I used Erlang professionally some, and liked it, but I have some doubts as well. It did not make me 10 times more productive, nor my code error free. It was not quite as good as a "scripting language" in terms of productivity, I felt, although it runs quite quickly, and like the concurrency model a lot.
In any case, I was left with a feeling of "yeah, I like this and would use it again, but it's not something that is going to wipe the floor with older models".
Also, I have some doubts as to how much FP "Scales Down" in the sense that it initially confuses people who are used to "normal" languages. I think perhaps FP might be more successful if someone were to take a more bottom up approach - let it "escape from the ivory tower". Languages like Erlang are doing this already, and of course people will be able to provide links to this or that Haskell or ML system used commercially, but to really make inroads, you've got to bridge the gap...
Just some musings.
Sounds like you'd appreciate the Mr Cranky review, which starts out "I hate penguins. I just fucking hate them.":
. html
http://www.mrcranky.com/movies/marchofthepenguins
If you've already been exposed to programming, and haven't got the desire to carry on learning on your own, I don't know that any amount of brain teasers will give you that spark. More likely, they'll just regard it as another pain in the ass to be dealt with.
Tcl:
1) Is a very easy language to learn, so it can be used in the templates as well as the backend.
2) Has lots of nifty introspection features, so you can do quite fancy programming if you care to - since the syntax is so simple, you can even write new control structures in Tcl itself.
3) Tcl is sort of a pragmatic Lisp: http://philip.greenspun.com/tcl/
Unfortunately, we don't have the fancy web framework in place just yet, but I think Tcl is still one of the best languages out there for web coding.
Don't forget Tcl and Tk, either. Tcl is quite a capable language, once you get some extensions loaded (and it's nice and small too, because it doesn't make them built-ins). On Windows, ActiveTcl is a sensible proposal.
As far as GUI's, Tk is still one of the best cross-platform things going out there. Especially when using the new Tile system.
Good stuff - be sure the check out the incompatibility list at http://leenooks.com/ next time you want to know what *not* to buy!
... people have been doing houses for several thousand years. We've got the basic idea down pretty well. We've been doing graphical computer systems for how long? 30 years, maybe? And computers, how long have we had those?
Not to excuse poor design, but sometime's it's easier to piss on stuff than figure out how to fix it.
What you are missing is that it takes more to do Java. More resources, more knowledge, more expertise. You may have those things, but many more do not.
I wrote up some of my thoughts on the issue here:
http://dedasys.com/articles/scalable_systems.html