If it's scheduled for demolition, then it probably wasn't a very good bridge to begin with. The Brooklyn Bridge has been in use for 131 years, handles car and truck traffic that it was never designed for, and is still in good shape.
Ok, we're probably stretching the metaphor a bit now.
But, furthermore, Python 3.0 violates this principle as well: If there was one way to do it in 2.x, that way should continue to be the only way to do it in 3.0.
I think they should just admit it was a mistake and deprecate Python3. AFAIK many of its features have been backported to 2.7 anyway. Let's face it, if a major revision of a very popular language has been out for 5 years, and it's still not that widely used, there is something wrong with the new revision.
Some environments and languages prioritize backwards compatibility above all else. Those systems tend not to have much trouble running old code. Sounds great, but over long stretches of time this can result in entire ecosystems of code and software that looks old, acts old, feels old, and has difficulty selling to customers.
Conversely some environments incorporate change for the sake of change. I suppose unnecessary change is good for fashion design, but it sucks for serious tools. It's as though a car manufacturer decided to put the gas pedal on the left just so people didn't think their designs were stagnating.
As for languages, end customers don't care. Developers care, but serious developers are usually interested in backwards compatibility. That requires some sacrifices, but it's generally worth it. I have no desire to keep up with unnecessary futzing in someone's quest for the perfect language, which is why I've soured on Python.
For sufficiently small values of "standardised". The C standard is very loose leaving lots of stuff as "implementation dependent" or "undefined".
The standard looks scarily undefined in places, but in practice I've had very few problems with it. Mostly it's a few basic rules, like don't assume chars are signed or unsigned, avoid modulo with negative numbers, etc. I've had bigger problems with endianness, which AFAIK no language standard can pin down.
Anyone remember the whole strict aliasing thing where the gcc guys decided it was ok to break long established but strictly speaking undefined code in the persuit of performance.
That was dumb, but the fix was so easy. Just use -fno-strict-aliasing.
GCC also has competitors, the language is standardized, and other advantages.
There is no reason Python can't be standardized, and maintain backwards compatibility. It's all up to Guido, et al. It's actually much easier than when you have to deal with standards committees, compatibility tests, etc. This whole business of breaking Python in sometimes small, and sometimes big, ways, is very unprofessional. It's one thing to do that with a language that's still in it's infancy, and is only used by a handful of people who accept that it will change in incompatible ways. Python though is way past that point.
no system is so isolated that some external hardware, OS, language or other upgrade cannot break otherwise healthy unchanged software
True, but there's a difference between accepting that problems will always occur, and unnecessarily changing things in a way that means problems will occur more often. I may get killed on the way home from work tonight, but I'm not going to drive in a way that makes it much more likely.
Being crazy and then happening to be right doesn't make you less crazy.
They were called crazy precisely because of the things they said that "just happened" to be right. Where I come from repeatedly getting things right is called a good track record. It should make you question your original assumption about them being crazy.
And it was a major aspect of British tyranny that we fought a revolution to get rid of. What a shame these things aren't mentioned in textbooks on American history. Oh, wait...
To spy in the US, though, they need a FISA rubber stamp.
Since you already called it a rubber stamp, all I need say is that I agree.
If it were my company, I would have all the realms under my own authority as much as possible. Nobody could be served a warrant without my knowing about it.
Are you sure that's a good idea? Plausible deniability has it's uses.
This way were any of my data seized there's just cause to go looking for a copy of the warrant.
They don't seize your data like it was a physical item, they just make a copy of it. Usually that's surreptitious, so you don't even know it's happened. Look up things like recognized "national security exceptions" to the 4th Amendment.
What were previously known as tin foil hat types have been vindicated by recent revealed information. They've gone from being laughed at to being able to say "I told you so".
nuclear power designs that can't melt down to matter what. Plenty of them.
Such as? No sarcasm there - I'm interested. MSR's have always seemed great, but unfortunately we've lost 40 years of time in which they could have been developed. Pebble beds have proven to be troublesome for other reasons.
Loss of Fluid Test at National Reactor Testing Station (now Idaho National Laboratory) tried in the late 60s early 70s, but environmentalists got it blocked.
Cite? Some people blame environmentalists for everything including ingrown toenails. Did they also halt research on MSR's? Also, the anti-nuke part of environmentalism didn't really get started until TMI in 1979.
The paradigm where engineers attempt to make sure it never happens has its limits. Looking at what happens during the failure will allow engineers to develop meaningful "defense in depth" measures.
That was understood decades ago, and has been SOP for that long in other safety critical applications like aircraft. The fact that it wasn't done before this is extreme negligence.
The problem is that it should have been done decades ago. You're supposed to test failure modes before you declare something safe. That's doubly true of something as potentially dangerous as nuclear meltdowns.
I always try to be careful about such things, but those differences are strictly about the stupidity of spelling in the English language. I think bad spellers are mostly people who believed their teacher's claims that English is more than vaguely phonetic. I also think some "rebels" should get together, decide on a single spelling for each set of homophones, and tell everybody else to go screw themselves. No, I haven't had the guts to do it myself yet.
What the algorithm looked at was writing style. That's hardly new. Teachers have been recommending this or that writing style, probably since the preferred medium was stone tablets. Slavish devotion to such recommendations is obviously undesirable, and a few outliers and experiments are necessary if you don't want writing styles to become stultified. But taking some advice about it is nothing new or undesirable. This study said nothing about structure (for which there are also standard recommendations) or subject.
All creative endeavors require a certain amount of less creative craftsmanship to be done well.
there's a HUGE difference between successful and "good"
"Good" is subjective. It's some sort of consensus amongst people who are, for whatever reason, considered literary experts. Consider the "classics". Some are good and some suck. I tried to read "Moby Dick" and found the perfect cure for insomnia. People said "just get past all the boring and extraneous stuff". Sorry, but if a book is full of boring and extraneous stuff, then it's not a good book. Maybe it would have been if Melville had had a good editor. OTOH some classics are great. I just read "All Quiet on the Western Front", and it's one of the best books I've ever read. It's not self-consciously literate, which is part of why it's good. It was also a best-seller in it's day.
BTW, a contemporary author who is "literate", but also thinks novels should have a plot and be enjoyable to read, is Michael Chabon. He even promotes and has written what's usually dismissed by literary types as genre fiction.
Tale of Two Cities is in Gutenberg. That's where I read it from.
Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and others were heavily marketed in the 19th century. It's not a 20th century invention. Speaking of Mark Twain, you'll find satire about advertising in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court". Thanks to the protagonist, there were knights running around with advertisements for toothpaste on their suits of armor.
Never mention grammar on Slashdot. It'll bring out more responses than a programming language flame war.
P.S. That's why I always got a laugh out of the stereotype that engineers and programmers are semi-literate. My experience is that many are sticklers for the language, and that's not just limited to grammar.
I don't think there's any correlation between talent and success whatever. Wikipedia quotes Stephen King as saying that James Patterson "is a terrible writer, but very successful."
"Terrible writer" is subjective. While I'm sure that initial luck and subsequent promotion have something to do with it, he obviously writes stories that a lot of people like. I think Harry Turtledove is a complete hack of a writer, but I read his alternative history stuff because I like the subject so much.
wasn't very impressed with his writing, either, especially the switching back and forth between 1st and 3rd person
You may not like switching back and forth between 1st and 3rd person, but it's not an unusual technique. I like it when it's done well (never read Patterson so I couldn't say if he does it well).
'Growth' by spending borrowed money on imported products is not growth.
It can be. The US was a major debtor country in the latter 19th century when our industrial growth rate was at its highest. Much of the development of the US, including the "Old West", was financed by the British.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's scheduled for demolition, then it probably wasn't a very good bridge to begin with. The Brooklyn Bridge has been in use for 131 years, handles car and truck traffic that it was never designed for, and is still in good shape.
Ok, we're probably stretching the metaphor a bit now.
But, furthermore, Python 3.0 violates this principle as well: If there was one way to do it in 2.x, that way should continue to be the only way to do it in 3.0.
I think they should just admit it was a mistake and deprecate Python3. AFAIK many of its features have been backported to 2.7 anyway. Let's face it, if a major revision of a very popular language has been out for 5 years, and it's still not that widely used, there is something wrong with the new revision.
How good is a language when they must reinvent it for every major release? Python is a scourge. Use scheme.
Is the Python mafia modding tonight? That's an opinion, complete with a solid point to make.
I've had a gut full of having to refactor my code every time a new c++ standard comes out.
What refactoring have you had to do because of a new C++ standard?
Some environments and languages prioritize backwards compatibility above all else. Those systems tend not to have much trouble running old code. Sounds great, but over long stretches of time this can result in entire ecosystems of code and software that looks old, acts old, feels old, and has difficulty selling to customers.
Conversely some environments incorporate change for the sake of change. I suppose unnecessary change is good for fashion design, but it sucks for serious tools. It's as though a car manufacturer decided to put the gas pedal on the left just so people didn't think their designs were stagnating.
As for languages, end customers don't care. Developers care, but serious developers are usually interested in backwards compatibility. That requires some sacrifices, but it's generally worth it. I have no desire to keep up with unnecessary futzing in someone's quest for the perfect language, which is why I've soured on Python.
For sufficiently small values of "standardised". The C standard is very loose leaving lots of stuff as "implementation dependent" or "undefined".
The standard looks scarily undefined in places, but in practice I've had very few problems with it. Mostly it's a few basic rules, like don't assume chars are signed or unsigned, avoid modulo with negative numbers, etc. I've had bigger problems with endianness, which AFAIK no language standard can pin down.
Anyone remember the whole strict aliasing thing where the gcc guys decided it was ok to break long established but strictly speaking undefined code in the persuit of performance.
That was dumb, but the fix was so easy. Just use -fno-strict-aliasing.
GCC also has competitors, the language is standardized, and other advantages.
There is no reason Python can't be standardized, and maintain backwards compatibility. It's all up to Guido, et al. It's actually much easier than when you have to deal with standards committees, compatibility tests, etc. This whole business of breaking Python in sometimes small, and sometimes big, ways, is very unprofessional. It's one thing to do that with a language that's still in it's infancy, and is only used by a handful of people who accept that it will change in incompatible ways. Python though is way past that point.
no system is so isolated that some external hardware, OS, language or other upgrade cannot break otherwise healthy unchanged software
True, but there's a difference between accepting that problems will always occur, and unnecessarily changing things in a way that means problems will occur more often. I may get killed on the way home from work tonight, but I'm not going to drive in a way that makes it much more likely.
Yes but it enables and encourages the crazy which is never a good thing.
Don't worry about it. The NSA and our illustrious elected officials won't change regardless of whether they're "enabled and encouraged".
Being crazy and then happening to be right doesn't make you less crazy.
They were called crazy precisely because of the things they said that "just happened" to be right. Where I come from repeatedly getting things right is called a good track record. It should make you question your original assumption about them being crazy.
And it was a major aspect of British tyranny that we fought a revolution to get rid of. What a shame these things aren't mentioned in textbooks on American history. Oh, wait ...
To spy in the US, though, they need a FISA rubber stamp.
Since you already called it a rubber stamp, all I need say is that I agree.
If it were my company, I would have all the realms under my own authority as much as possible. Nobody could be served a warrant without my knowing about it.
Are you sure that's a good idea? Plausible deniability has it's uses.
This way were any of my data seized there's just cause to go looking for a copy of the warrant.
They don't seize your data like it was a physical item, they just make a copy of it. Usually that's surreptitious, so you don't even know it's happened. Look up things like recognized "national security exceptions" to the 4th Amendment.
What were previously known as tin foil hat types have been vindicated by recent revealed information. They've gone from being laughed at to being able to say "I told you so".
Canadian operations are firmly within the jurisdiction of the NSA.
So? They don't seem to let that keep them from spying in the US.
moving out of country makes you more hackable
Not necessarily. Hacking is easier when you can operate inside US operations, with the cooperation of management.
nuclear power designs that can't melt down to matter what. Plenty of them.
Such as? No sarcasm there - I'm interested. MSR's have always seemed great, but unfortunately we've lost 40 years of time in which they could have been developed. Pebble beds have proven to be troublesome for other reasons.
Loss of Fluid Test at National Reactor Testing Station (now Idaho National Laboratory) tried in the late 60s early 70s, but environmentalists got it blocked.
Cite? Some people blame environmentalists for everything including ingrown toenails. Did they also halt research on MSR's? Also, the anti-nuke part of environmentalism didn't really get started until TMI in 1979.
The paradigm where engineers attempt to make sure it never happens has its limits. Looking at what happens during the failure will allow engineers to develop meaningful "defense in depth" measures.
That was understood decades ago, and has been SOP for that long in other safety critical applications like aircraft. The fact that it wasn't done before this is extreme negligence.
This is science.
The problem is that it should have been done decades ago. You're supposed to test failure modes before you declare something safe. That's doubly true of something as potentially dangerous as nuclear meltdowns.
I always try to be careful about such things, but those differences are strictly about the stupidity of spelling in the English language. I think bad spellers are mostly people who believed their teacher's claims that English is more than vaguely phonetic. I also think some "rebels" should get together, decide on a single spelling for each set of homophones, and tell everybody else to go screw themselves. No, I haven't had the guts to do it myself yet.
What the algorithm looked at was writing style. That's hardly new. Teachers have been recommending this or that writing style, probably since the preferred medium was stone tablets. Slavish devotion to such recommendations is obviously undesirable, and a few outliers and experiments are necessary if you don't want writing styles to become stultified. But taking some advice about it is nothing new or undesirable. This study said nothing about structure (for which there are also standard recommendations) or subject.
All creative endeavors require a certain amount of less creative craftsmanship to be done well.
there's a HUGE difference between successful and "good"
"Good" is subjective. It's some sort of consensus amongst people who are, for whatever reason, considered literary experts. Consider the "classics". Some are good and some suck. I tried to read "Moby Dick" and found the perfect cure for insomnia. People said "just get past all the boring and extraneous stuff". Sorry, but if a book is full of boring and extraneous stuff, then it's not a good book. Maybe it would have been if Melville had had a good editor. OTOH some classics are great. I just read "All Quiet on the Western Front", and it's one of the best books I've ever read. It's not self-consciously literate, which is part of why it's good. It was also a best-seller in it's day.
BTW, a contemporary author who is "literate", but also thinks novels should have a plot and be enjoyable to read, is Michael Chabon. He even promotes and has written what's usually dismissed by literary types as genre fiction.
Tale of Two Cities is in Gutenberg. That's where I read it from.
Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and others were heavily marketed in the 19th century. It's not a 20th century invention. Speaking of Mark Twain, you'll find satire about advertising in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court". Thanks to the protagonist, there were knights running around with advertisements for toothpaste on their suits of armor.
All this time I thought adjectives described.
Never mention grammar on Slashdot. It'll bring out more responses than a programming language flame war.
P.S. That's why I always got a laugh out of the stereotype that engineers and programmers are semi-literate. My experience is that many are sticklers for the language, and that's not just limited to grammar.
I don't think there's any correlation between talent and success whatever. Wikipedia quotes Stephen King as saying that James Patterson "is a terrible writer, but very successful."
"Terrible writer" is subjective. While I'm sure that initial luck and subsequent promotion have something to do with it, he obviously writes stories that a lot of people like. I think Harry Turtledove is a complete hack of a writer, but I read his alternative history stuff because I like the subject so much.
wasn't very impressed with his writing, either, especially the switching back and forth between 1st and 3rd person
You may not like switching back and forth between 1st and 3rd person, but it's not an unusual technique. I like it when it's done well (never read Patterson so I couldn't say if he does it well).
'Growth' by spending borrowed money on imported products is not growth.
It can be. The US was a major debtor country in the latter 19th century when our industrial growth rate was at its highest. Much of the development of the US, including the "Old West", was financed by the British.