Slashdot Mirror


User: Alomex

Alomex's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
2,843
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 2,843

  1. Re:Patience on TSA Fails To Find Links To Terrorism of Airport Workers · · Score: 1

    Except that sane people tend not to go crazy without indication. This should allow you to stop the majority of attacks if you keep an ear to the ground rather than waste so much time patting down grannies.

  2. Re:Because no one else does on Why Apple and Google Made Their Own Programming Languages · · Score: 1

    Huh?

    Swift is a strongly typed language, though it uses type inference to reduce the amount of characters typed by the developer. Types can be provided explicitly, and for numeric types, specific sized elements such as UInt8 or Int32 can be used.The type engine also provides for Optional valued types; an optional value can be dereferenced with a ? or ! depending on whether the value is expected to exist. The collections in Swift provide literal support for both arrays (with []) and dictionaries/maps (with [:]) and can include generic types.

    and

    Swift is a strongly-typed language by default; however, it also uses type inference which again reduces code length for developers. The strong type attribute is always in place unless specified by special keyword weak.

  3. Re:Because no one else does on Why Apple and Google Made Their Own Programming Languages · · Score: 1

    Lambda functions are awesome? were you seriously being held back by having to name the function before passing it on as a parameter?

    Immutability makes you more productive? in what way?

    curious mind wants to know.

  4. Re:Because no one else does on Why Apple and Google Made Their Own Programming Languages · · Score: 1

    It's a combination of fashion, libraries, how big is the improvement over the nearest commonly used competitor, commercial backing, luck, and yes technical merit.

    For example, Perl is a language that succeeded on the basis of its powerful string manipulation primitives, which is technical merit, and in spite of its many other technical deficiencies.

  5. Re:Because no one else does on Why Apple and Google Made Their Own Programming Languages · · Score: 1

    ..and do you know why is interpreted? because it was supposed to run in countless cable boxes which never did. I know, because I was heard the language design and spec in the pre-WWW days.

  6. Re:Because no one else does on Why Apple and Google Made Their Own Programming Languages · · Score: 1

    Nothing you said there contradicts what are said.

  7. Re:Because no one else does on Why Apple and Google Made Their Own Programming Languages · · Score: 1

    "Fast" is such a vague term as to be meaningless

    If only someone could invent an objective measure of speed of execution, using a newly developed unit which we shall call "microseconds" and use that to compare the performance.

    On a more serious note, I agree that for many applications time is not that important, but there are many others for which it is. The rendering engine in the browser is one. Any app running in a battery constrained phone is another.

  8. Because no one else does on Why Apple and Google Made Their Own Programming Languages · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The reason why companies develop new languages is because the ones coming from academia are focused on the wrong things. Product development requires an industrial strength, strongly typed (for the most part) fast language.

    Projects coming from academia are interpreted, JVM based, functional, obsessed with (im)mutability, closures, and lambda functions.

    This is not to say those things are not nice, however they are not central to a programming language as used in large scale industrial systems.

  9. Re:Don't give money to your alma mater. on Everyone Hates Harvard · · Score: 1

    they could quite literally abolish tuition forever if they wanted to.

    You know that essentially they have, right? You pay a much as you can reasonably afford.

  10. Re:Due to stupid security warnings, security on Ask Slashdot: Options After Google Chrome Discontinues NPAPI Support? · · Score: 1

    Perl, Lisp, Python, Haskell, Javascript, ever heard of them?

    Are they "vanishingly few" or rather the most common non-statically typed/untyped languages out there?

  11. Re:Due to stupid security warnings, security on Ask Slashdot: Options After Google Chrome Discontinues NPAPI Support? · · Score: 1

    As I said, Golang, wift, and Rust on one side, Javascript on the other.

    The stupid have stood up and been counted.

  12. Re:Due to stupid security warnings, security on Ask Slashdot: Options After Google Chrome Discontinues NPAPI Support? · · Score: 1

    type-safety in that "we never add 3 to a string" is only a limited version of what type declaration does. For example, let's say I accidentally have a real variable where I meant it to be an integer, and because of overloading the code never breaks. Yet there is a bug there since my mental model says that i is an integer and sooner or later in my code I will do something incorrect with it which might or might not be caught by the type-inference engine.

    On the other hand a statically typed language will catch it right away. and say you said i was an integer, how come you are using it to catch a real value?

    Think of statically typing as a massive assert throughout the program that checks for type consistency before shipping the product. In what world would this be not preferable to dynamically typed systems.

    I do agree that polymorphism/dynamic typing is needed at times and makes sense to allow it on as a per-needed basis. By default type checking is a must for any program bigger than a few hundred straight lines of code.

  13. Re:Due to stupid security warnings, security on Ask Slashdot: Options After Google Chrome Discontinues NPAPI Support? · · Score: 1

    Many dynamically typed languages require you to declare identifiers as variables, but don't require you to declare a static type.

    If by "many" you mean a mere handful (e.g. Smalltalk) you would be correct.

    Also once you declare a variable is it so hard to declare a type, union of types or a polymorphic type? Does it not help in catch bugs? Dynamically typed languages are an academic solution in search of a problem.

  14. Re:Due to stupid security warnings, security on Ask Slashdot: Options After Google Chrome Discontinues NPAPI Support? · · Score: 1

    If so, then it shows that do not understand what are the two main objectives of a typed language: (1) this is how the name is spelled and (2) this is the type is supposed to carry.

    We declare the name and type so that the compiler/interpreter, can let us know if either one is different later on, because we sure didn't mean that.

    Type inference systems can determine if you use types inconsistently and that's about it. It cannot check against the original intent.

  15. Re:Due to stupid security warnings, security on Ask Slashdot: Options After Google Chrome Discontinues NPAPI Support? · · Score: 1

    The fact that people keep on missing the error proves why statically typed languages are so much better.

    And it is right there in front of them, not buried in 100KLC as it usually is in real life.

  16. Re:Due to stupid security warnings, security on Ask Slashdot: Options After Google Chrome Discontinues NPAPI Support? · · Score: 1

    Some statements are so obviously true that they wouldn't appear in a paper. Like 134+56=190. The way to confirm them is to spend a minute thinking about what they claim and saying... gee that's right.

  17. Re:Due to stupid security warnings, security on Ask Slashdot: Options After Google Chrome Discontinues NPAPI Support? · · Score: 1

    Dude, Java was developed in industry, while most dynamically typed languages (as well as funcitonal languages) have been developed in academia.

  18. Re:Due to stupid security warnings, security on Ask Slashdot: Options After Google Chrome Discontinues NPAPI Support? · · Score: 0

    many dynamically typed languages have no type loopholes at all.

    Again false. Here's the error that is common to all dynamically typed languages:

    transform := foo;
    .
    .
    transform := bar;
    .
    .
    transfrom := foobar;

  19. Re:Due to stupid security warnings, security on Ask Slashdot: Options After Google Chrome Discontinues NPAPI Support? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is demonstrably false. While one can write good/bad applications in any language, the set of insecure programs in an untyped language is a superset of the set of insecure programs in a typed language of similar syntax.

  20. Re:Due to stupid security warnings, security on Ask Slashdot: Options After Google Chrome Discontinues NPAPI Support? · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Actual industrial scale applications require static typing. Scripting which is done by kiddies doesn't.

    Is Golang typed? How about Swift? Or Rust?

    See the difference?

  21. Re:What DOES an ISIS Command Center Look Like? on US Bombs ISIS Command Center After Terrorist Posts Selfie Online · · Score: 1

    ISIS is the former Saddam army and bureaucracy. They have extensive experience in running a country and derive income from oil operations and a taxation system.

  22. Re:It's going to be painful... on Yahoo Killing Maps, Pipes & More · · Score: 3, Insightful

    But you forgot to add that they refused to pay 1 million for Larry and Sergei's search engine.... which forced them to go on their own and create Google.

    How's that for a fscked corporate M&A department?

  23. Re:I agree somewhat... on Building Amazon a Better Warehouse Robot · · Score: 1

    Perhaps a better way to phrase my original point would be this:

    I disagree. People are being re-purposed all the time. Same goes for horses.

    You are correct that there was a massive drop in the number of horses in use with the invention of the automobile.

  24. Re:I agree somewhat... on Building Amazon a Better Warehouse Robot · · Score: 1

    Wild horses for the most part live in Federal land. Statistics about those are published by the US government.

    Indeed finding the data isn't easy. It took me a long time to find them back when I was doing research on this.

  25. Re:I agree somewhat... on Building Amazon a Better Warehouse Robot · · Score: 1

    Those figures are combined, but the number of wild horses is very small: less than 1% of the total above.