Yes, programmers survived for decades without these tools,but back in those days, software wasn't anywhere nearly as big, and real-world expectations on software were not as high (mostly because most of the real world didn't even know what computers could do yet).
As you say, the cause for such changes is usually the result of a lack of planning. But in my experience, the real world rarely has a clear picture of what they actually want when a project starts... and if we all just waited until we had a guarantee that functional requirements weren't going to change, a lot of software just wouldn't get written at all. In my experience, when you start writing, you just develop what you can as extensibly as you know how, with the expectation that you will have to refactor everything later, and at some point, through ongoing functional requirement changes, the software ultimately begins to asymptotically approach what the client says that they want, and you get paid for your work.
You said it yourself... "in messed up cases that might be true".
A great deal of the world of software development is made up messed up cases, incomplete and constantly changing functional requirement specifications, and just trying to freaking get the job done before your employer decides to replace you with somebody else who might even be less competent than you, but will tow the company line and work for less money than you will. In my experience, the real world demands results that are not humanly achievable *without* sophisticated software development tools, and that includes using an IDE, helping the programmer to get the job done on time and within budget.
I am entirely able to develop software without an IDE... but I've never once found it very productive to do so for anything larger than toy programs.
There's a big difference between being able to do something, and being able to do it before you get fired for not being able to finish it just because you think you have some sort of point to prove.
No... it's not.... but I really get tired of seeing people here suggest that programmers who might actually require an IDE to get their jobs done in a timely fashion are somehow less competent as programmers than people who've probably never had to work on large scale projects with schedules that aren't humanly possible to achieve if you were to just use manual tools and a plain text editor.
Whether this is not the programmer's fault is irrelevant... this is how the real world of software development actually is... and a programmer who doesn't get the job done in the time that he's expected to do so is soon going to find himself unemployed. Call me picky... but I would rather be able to afford to keep a roof over my head and eat than brag about being such an awesome programmer that I don't need modern software development environments like an IDE to get a job done.
My point about correctness was more along the lines of being writing code that didn't ever need to be changed after it was first written.
As for refactoring, try using just those tools to rename an identifier that is not, by itself, globally unique, but could nonetheless be uniquely identified by software that can understand the syntax of the language, and can realize the context of every single statement and identifier automatically.
Sure, you *CAN* do this by hand... but using a tool to accomplish it over a project that may be hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of code, spanning several hundred or thousand source files, is going to be orders of magnitude faster and more reliable.
Of course, if program requirements never changed after the initial implementation was written, this probably wouldn't be an issue.
So, suggesting that "aliens who predated us did it" is a supernatural explanation? I'll agree it's probably isomorphic to one for most practical purposes given what we know today, but is it actually one?
Is it somehow some sort of a heinous sin to be more vastly productive with an IDE? Sure, a good programmer may not really *need* an IDE to technically be able to simply do the functions of their job... but a good IDE can still save that programmer a whole lot of time while doing that job, and bearing in mind that the real world has things like deadlines... and programmers still need to do things like pay bills and most of them like to eat at least occasionally, so they need to finish those jobs on time, and not take 5 or 10 times longer on a large scale project than it would have if they had been using an IDE.
Clearly you underestimate the significance of being able to quickly refactor code. Of course, if you always write 100% correct code flawlessly the first time, this may not ever be an issue for you. Most human beings, however, suffer from flaws like imperfection... and having an automated device that compensates for that by remembering way more for you than you ever could possibly hope to at one time while you are writing your code is pretty damn convenient for a lot of people.
I personally see the whole panspermia with regards to the origin of life concept as not significantly different from the notion of intelligent design with respect to how we came to be.... they both just push the actual problem they claimt to solve back one level and do not actually offer any additional predictive power that genuinely scientific theories enjoy.
Does this theory predict that really high temperature (room temperature or higher) superconductors are possible, or that they are not? If it does, can it indicate anything about what sort of materials we should be trying to use to fabricate it?
First of all, the industry has cured many diseases. It just happens to be the case that no significant additions have been made to the list of fully curable diseases for several decades.
At most, this might suggest to the layman that current trends seem to indicate that the current health industry may no longer be interested in curing diseases, but in practice, to actually adopt the premise as genuinely true requires conspiracy theories which are not logically sustainable in a rational debate, and most notably fails to consider the possibility that actually curing diseases could be a really hard thing to do and may not be something that can be reasonably expected to happen regularly in the absence of any breakthroughs happening, which are not something that can generally be anticipated beforehand anyways.
Of the 40 or so example spews that I looked at, they mostly appeared to consist of a beginning that started in one work, and the ending which finished in the other... like two random sentences spliced together in a way that, at least around the words that they appear to have been joined on, made some degree of gramatical sense, even if the concept itself were absurd.
I come from Edmonton, Canada... I'm well acquainted with just how cold it gets up here.
And if your extremities are that cold, then you can be damn sure that frostbite is setting in. We're not talking about topical skin temperature here... we're talking about the temperature of what's underneath, and underneath your skin even at the extremities won't ordinarily deviate from core temperature more than about a couple of degrees. Any more than that and you have a problem.
If you are wearing proper gear for the weather, your extremity temperatures will not be any colder than normal.
You may want to consider the fact that having a temperature of only 29C would constitute the onset of very severe hypothermia (mild hypothermia starts at about 34C or so). Not that I think this is a good idea, but a person with even a moderate awareness of their surroundings should have plenty of warning that this is happening.
Unity 4.3 doesn't run under Linux either... it requires you to have a mac or windows box to develop with. You can target a Linux platform for your game binary with it, but the fact that the development tools aren't available for Linux suggests to me its ability to target that platform is unlikely to generate any significant increase in Linux use for games.
The only one that I can think of right offhand, Unity3D, might export to a Linux-playable format, but does not actually provide any environment that can be run within Linux. There is, as far as I am aware, absolutely no intent to change this anytime soon. This design decision carries some problems with it that inherently make it highly unlikely to expect it to significantly increase the Linux mind-share in the world of gaming.
Right... like it took DVD's centuries to knock VHS off.... oh, wait. No it didn't.
When an alternative presents enough advantages over what may have formerly and for all practical purposes been a monopoly in any given sector or industry, it doesn't take that long for the public to realize it and switch.
Swing is the most horrible toolkit I've ever tried to use
Why?
If you need an IDE, there is something wrong with your languag
And you accuse the GP of trolling? Talk about pot calling the kettle black. Although there are some cases where using an IDE is actually necessary part of using a particular programming language, Java is not one of them. For certain types of problems, many prefer using an IDE regardless of programming language... usually because the scope of the problem being solved is too large to manage efficiently with just a text editor.
Java does the opposite of trying to help you shoot yourself in the foot, by making the code bloated and spread out.
Although identifiers in Java are frequently very verbose compared to some languages, which can result in longer lines than what you'd get in terser languages such as C, for example, the actual number of LOC in my experience is roughly the same.
And stop smoking your crack for at least 5 seconds before lying to yourself about Fortune 500 companies not hiring anything but Java programmers. What do you think they coded Facebook chat in, for just one example? Not Java!
Facebook is only one fortune 500 company and not all of them. Try checking a job board, and add up the starting salaries for jobs that use different programming languages. Java is definitely up there... jostling for position with C++, usually.
"If [an injection of cash from outside the economy] is large enough and sustained for long enough... [W]e find that a large influx of capital is successful in escaping the poverty trap"
That should generally be true anyways... for individuals as well as for poor nations.
Slashdot Mirror
[nt]
I guess I fall into the category of not having a clue as to what using an IDE has to do with pushing "giant buttons".
What are you even talking about?
Yes, programmers survived for decades without these tools,but back in those days, software wasn't anywhere nearly as big, and real-world expectations on software were not as high (mostly because most of the real world didn't even know what computers could do yet).
As you say, the cause for such changes is usually the result of a lack of planning. But in my experience, the real world rarely has a clear picture of what they actually want when a project starts... and if we all just waited until we had a guarantee that functional requirements weren't going to change, a lot of software just wouldn't get written at all. In my experience, when you start writing, you just develop what you can as extensibly as you know how, with the expectation that you will have to refactor everything later, and at some point, through ongoing functional requirement changes, the software ultimately begins to asymptotically approach what the client says that they want, and you get paid for your work.
You said it yourself... "in messed up cases that might be true".
A great deal of the world of software development is made up messed up cases, incomplete and constantly changing functional requirement specifications, and just trying to freaking get the job done before your employer decides to replace you with somebody else who might even be less competent than you, but will tow the company line and work for less money than you will. In my experience, the real world demands results that are not humanly achievable *without* sophisticated software development tools, and that includes using an IDE, helping the programmer to get the job done on time and within budget.
I am entirely able to develop software without an IDE... but I've never once found it very productive to do so for anything larger than toy programs.
There's a big difference between being able to do something, and being able to do it before you get fired for not being able to finish it just because you think you have some sort of point to prove.
No... it's not.... but I really get tired of seeing people here suggest that programmers who might actually require an IDE to get their jobs done in a timely fashion are somehow less competent as programmers than people who've probably never had to work on large scale projects with schedules that aren't humanly possible to achieve if you were to just use manual tools and a plain text editor.
Whether this is not the programmer's fault is irrelevant... this is how the real world of software development actually is... and a programmer who doesn't get the job done in the time that he's expected to do so is soon going to find himself unemployed. Call me picky... but I would rather be able to afford to keep a roof over my head and eat than brag about being such an awesome programmer that I don't need modern software development environments like an IDE to get a job done.
My point about correctness was more along the lines of being writing code that didn't ever need to be changed after it was first written.
As for refactoring, try using just those tools to rename an identifier that is not, by itself, globally unique, but could nonetheless be uniquely identified by software that can understand the syntax of the language, and can realize the context of every single statement and identifier automatically.
Sure, you *CAN* do this by hand... but using a tool to accomplish it over a project that may be hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of code, spanning several hundred or thousand source files, is going to be orders of magnitude faster and more reliable.
Of course, if program requirements never changed after the initial implementation was written, this probably wouldn't be an issue.
So, suggesting that "aliens who predated us did it" is a supernatural explanation? I'll agree it's probably isomorphic to one for most practical purposes given what we know today, but is it actually one?
Is it somehow some sort of a heinous sin to be more vastly productive with an IDE? Sure, a good programmer may not really *need* an IDE to technically be able to simply do the functions of their job... but a good IDE can still save that programmer a whole lot of time while doing that job, and bearing in mind that the real world has things like deadlines... and programmers still need to do things like pay bills and most of them like to eat at least occasionally, so they need to finish those jobs on time, and not take 5 or 10 times longer on a large scale project than it would have if they had been using an IDE.
Clearly you underestimate the significance of being able to quickly refactor code. Of course, if you always write 100% correct code flawlessly the first time, this may not ever be an issue for you. Most human beings, however, suffer from flaws like imperfection... and having an automated device that compensates for that by remembering way more for you than you ever could possibly hope to at one time while you are writing your code is pretty damn convenient for a lot of people.
I see them as almost identical
Panspermia leaves the question open of where the life that supposedly seeded other worlds originated.
ID leaves open the question of where the intelligence that supposedly designed things came from.
I personally see the whole panspermia with regards to the origin of life concept as not significantly different from the notion of intelligent design with respect to how we came to be.... they both just push the actual problem they claimt to solve back one level and do not actually offer any additional predictive power that genuinely scientific theories enjoy.
Does this theory predict that really high temperature (room temperature or higher) superconductors are possible, or that they are not? If it does, can it indicate anything about what sort of materials we should be trying to use to fabricate it?
That would be false.
First of all, the industry has cured many diseases. It just happens to be the case that no significant additions have been made to the list of fully curable diseases for several decades.
At most, this might suggest to the layman that current trends seem to indicate that the current health industry may no longer be interested in curing diseases, but in practice, to actually adopt the premise as genuinely true requires conspiracy theories which are not logically sustainable in a rational debate, and most notably fails to consider the possibility that actually curing diseases could be a really hard thing to do and may not be something that can be reasonably expected to happen regularly in the absence of any breakthroughs happening, which are not something that can generally be anticipated beforehand anyways.
The surface of the skin may be freezing during mild frostbite, but underneath the skin it will still be fairly warm.
Of the 40 or so example spews that I looked at, they mostly appeared to consist of a beginning that started in one work, and the ending which finished in the other... like two random sentences spliced together in a way that, at least around the words that they appear to have been joined on, made some degree of gramatical sense, even if the concept itself were absurd.
I come from Edmonton, Canada... I'm well acquainted with just how cold it gets up here.
And if your extremities are that cold, then you can be damn sure that frostbite is setting in. We're not talking about topical skin temperature here... we're talking about the temperature of what's underneath, and underneath your skin even at the extremities won't ordinarily deviate from core temperature more than about a couple of degrees. Any more than that and you have a problem.
If you are wearing proper gear for the weather, your extremity temperatures will not be any colder than normal.
You may want to consider the fact that having a temperature of only 29C would constitute the onset of very severe hypothermia (mild hypothermia starts at about 34C or so). Not that I think this is a good idea, but a person with even a moderate awareness of their surroundings should have plenty of warning that this is happening.
Unity 4.3 doesn't run under Linux either... it requires you to have a mac or windows box to develop with. You can target a Linux platform for your game binary with it, but the fact that the development tools aren't available for Linux suggests to me its ability to target that platform is unlikely to generate any significant increase in Linux use for games.
[nt]
The only one that I can think of right offhand, Unity3D, might export to a Linux-playable format, but does not actually provide any environment that can be run within Linux. There is, as far as I am aware, absolutely no intent to change this anytime soon. This design decision carries some problems with it that inherently make it highly unlikely to expect it to significantly increase the Linux mind-share in the world of gaming.
Right... like it took DVD's centuries to knock VHS off.... oh, wait. No it didn't.
When an alternative presents enough advantages over what may have formerly and for all practical purposes been a monopoly in any given sector or industry, it doesn't take that long for the public to realize it and switch.
Why?
And you accuse the GP of trolling? Talk about pot calling the kettle black. Although there are some cases where using an IDE is actually necessary part of using a particular programming language, Java is not one of them. For certain types of problems, many prefer using an IDE regardless of programming language... usually because the scope of the problem being solved is too large to manage efficiently with just a text editor.
Although identifiers in Java are frequently very verbose compared to some languages, which can result in longer lines than what you'd get in terser languages such as C, for example, the actual number of LOC in my experience is roughly the same.
Facebook is only one fortune 500 company and not all of them. Try checking a job board, and add up the starting salaries for jobs that use different programming languages. Java is definitely up there... jostling for position with C++, usually.
"If [an injection of cash from outside the economy] is large enough and sustained for long enough... [W]e find that a large influx of capital is successful in escaping the poverty trap"
That should generally be true anyways... for individuals as well as for poor nations.