REXX seems historically interesting but little in the article makes it clear why one ought to care about it today.
The first example is telling - munge a file and do something depending on the content of each line. This has been such a common problem for so many years that the number of very capable solutions exceeds the number of lines in the file it is often applied to. The usual suspects of unix command line utilities (easily available or shipping with many platforms in common use) handle 80% of this stuff with a command or two. For the rest, the entire battery of sed, awk, shell, perl, python, ruby, etc is available and easily applicable. For most basic file and text processing problems, you can just google for a solution and you'd probably have to constrain your search to your favourite tool or language in order not to be overwhelmed by the multitude of solutions.
The fact is, basic text processing and data sctructures beyond a simple integer indexed array (imagine that, a hash table keyed with strings!) are so deeply ingrained in most popular 'glue' languages that demonstrations of a particular tool's proficiency at such things seems quaint.
A less dated way to put a scripting language through its paces might be something like logging into a website, tracking the cookied session, navigating to some location without a stable URL (say, dependent on form posts) and parsing out some piece of data from the resulting page. Simple things in a few lines of perl or python. What about REXX?
While genetically engineered microscopic hamsters may be some years away, research into tiny internal combustion engines that could drive such a generator is definitely being done. The work of the Berkeley Combustion Processes Lab was in the news a couple of years ago when they showed some prototypes. The stuff can be seen in some detail at http://www.me.berkeley.edu/mrcl/
Are the submitter, editor and the 100 odd posters so incensed by this as to forget the meaning of common English words?
Dictionary definition:
Main Entry: deride Pronunciation: di-'rId, dE- Function: transitive verb Inflected Form(s): derided; deriding Etymology: Latin deridEre, from de- + ridEre to laugh 1 : to laugh at contemptuously 2 : to subject to usually bitter or contemptuous ridicule
Or did I miss something when reading the story, perhaps there was a reference to Senator Lieberman subjecting amoral game publishers to a withering barrage of yo mama jokes.
One reason is that evolutionary change is quite gradual and doesn't really "backtrack" so it's pretty hard for a two eyed, bilateral creature to suddenly start sprouting new eyes. Spiders have more than two eyes, for instance - but the common ancestors of humans and spiders are awfully far back. It is a lot more likely for small changes to the eyes to happen (through mutation) and for natural selection to make select eyes that somehow improve survivability. Once you start evolving a couple of eyes (and you got two because you were bilaterally symmetric) evolution starts evolving those - that's why it's evolution not, say, intelligent design. This is gradualism - a key element in the theory of evolution.
A more important point is, natural selection selects on one criterion alone - better fittness, better survivability. It doesn't care whether you have better eyes, it cares whether you live long enough and successfully pass on your genes. Since you framed the question in terms of predators, it makes sense to analyze it in those terms - "why did we not evolve at being massively better at avoiding being eaten by predators?". The answer there is obvious - we did, we evolved an organ that is immensly more powerful at ensuring survival than incredibly acute senses - the human brain which allows for traits and capabilities like social grouping, language and and more generaly, immensly adaptive behaviour. Incidentally, we got the big brains partially to handle the glut of complex information we get through the eyes. Once we started getting smarter, acting in groups, developing the capability for more and more sophisticated communication, those advantages made many of the "brawn" advantages far less likely to be selected for. Once the evolutionary process hits on any kind of advantageous development, it tends to operate on that because it is only existing traits that can be varied through mutation and sexual selection. The bigger brain that was necessary for better vision turned out, accidentally, to be so universally useful that it became one of the primary objects of selection. Eventually the brain became so capable the adaptive capacity it conferred on individuals completely outpaced the random, slow process of natural selection. Once language and its corollary, cultural memory, became possible an adaptive method vastly more expedient and directed than natural selection became available. This was a watershed moment. A key constraint of natural selection is that aquired traits generally cannot be passed on to subsequent generations - only inhereted ones can. With the development of more sophisticated comminicataion (essentially, language) everything changed. While predators were stuck in the random, millions-years-long process of getting better at what they do, humans had, evolutionarily, developed a process that helped pass on aquired traits. We no longer need sharper eyes, bigger ears and better noses to avoid getting eaten by sharper eyed, better hearing, finer smelling wolves - our overall adaptive capability is so much greater than theirs that their sensory advantages are essentially irrelevant. There is some evidence that suggests that some of the other higher primates are capable of passing on the advantageous aquired traits, such as the ability to use simple tools or use water to separate edible wheat from contaminats such as sand. The difference is that through the evolutionary roulette, we got there first and were able to use our evolutionary advantage. We face no threat from the almost-as-smart chimps, orangutans and gorillas. We easily displaced similar but competing species like the Neandrenthals. We are still assaulted by primitive organsisms such as viruses and bacteria, and yet, while we cannot claim an overwhelming victory on that front, our giant, adaptive brains have successfully fought these rapidly mutating organisms to a highly advantageous standstill. Why do we not have more eyes, bigger ears, or an acuter sense of smell? Because we evolutionarily developed an organ that is enourmously more capable of confronting a nearly immeasurable number of threats.
This sounds like a fine tool and it is great that established companies like Borland are supportin Linux but before we get over-excited, it's worth thinking about whether it really helps address the 'Decent desktop experience on the Free Unices' problem.
For one thing, the desktop environment efforts on Linux/xBSD are already fragmented and seemingly non-directed. From the user's point of view, both KDE and GNOME are sluggish, ugly Windows knockoffs. For developers, they are Yet Another Set of Toolkits/Component Models/APIs based on inelegant, obtuse cruft such as X11, C++, CORBA... Do we really need, say, another Qt and associated flamewars?
The more fundamental problem seems to be a sort of conceptual tunnel vision that the major desktop development efforts on Linux seem to share. Perhaps this has to do with the perceived need to 'catch up' with existing popular desktop environments. This may be because few Unix-based desktop environments have been considered something worthy of aspiring to - a problem that doesn't exist on the server side. But even if we imagined KDE or GNOME developed to the point of reasonable stability and responsiveness, what will we have? A toolbar, a start button, a file explorer, a nice desktop water rippling effect, a bunch of un-navigable control panels, endless hierarchal menus, artsy and unreadable 'themes', at best, _parity_ with the painful experience of other desktop environments. Is this really as good as it gets? Will these desktops engender the kind of attachment graphics designers have for their Macs and webmasters have for their ultra-tweaked install of Apache? Will propellerheads and grandmas flock to them, recognizing them as the easiest, most intuitive, powerful ways to interact with a computer? If not, how valuable is it to have another set of tools that help us get there faster?
Slashdot Mirror
REXX seems historically interesting but little in the article makes it clear why one ought to care about it today.
The first example is telling - munge a file and do something depending on the content of each line. This has been such a common problem for so many years that the number of very capable solutions exceeds the number of lines in the file it is often applied to. The usual suspects of unix command line utilities (easily available or shipping with many platforms in common use) handle 80% of this stuff with a command or two. For the rest, the entire battery of sed, awk, shell, perl, python, ruby, etc is available and easily applicable. For most basic file and text processing problems, you can just google for a solution and you'd probably have to constrain your search to your favourite tool or language in order not to be overwhelmed by the multitude of solutions.
The fact is, basic text processing and data sctructures beyond a simple integer indexed array (imagine that, a hash table keyed with strings!) are so deeply ingrained in most popular 'glue' languages that demonstrations of a particular tool's proficiency at such things seems quaint.
A less dated way to put a scripting language through its paces might be something like logging into a website, tracking the cookied session, navigating to some location without a stable URL (say, dependent on form posts) and parsing out some piece of data from the resulting page. Simple things in a few lines of perl or python. What about REXX?
-pvg
While genetically engineered microscopic hamsters may be some years away, research into tiny internal combustion engines that could drive such a generator is definitely being done. The work of the Berkeley Combustion Processes Lab was in the news a couple of years ago when they showed some prototypes. The stuff can be seen in some detail at http://www.me.berkeley.edu/mrcl/
Are described here. Rest of the site is also informative and insane.
http://racine13eme.site.voila.fr/100digang.htm
-pvg
Are the submitter, editor and the 100 odd posters so incensed by this as to forget the meaning of common English words?
Dictionary definition:
Main Entry: deride
Pronunciation: di-'rId, dE-
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): derided; deriding
Etymology: Latin deridEre, from de- + ridEre to laugh
1 : to laugh at contemptuously
2 : to subject to usually bitter or contemptuous ridicule
Or did I miss something when reading the story, perhaps there was a reference to Senator Lieberman subjecting amoral game publishers to a withering barrage of yo mama jokes.
One reason is that evolutionary change is quite gradual and doesn't really "backtrack" so it's pretty hard for a two eyed, bilateral creature to suddenly start sprouting new eyes. Spiders have more than two eyes, for instance - but the common ancestors of humans and spiders are awfully far back. It is a lot more likely for small changes to the eyes to happen (through mutation) and for natural selection to make select eyes that somehow improve survivability. Once you start evolving a couple of eyes (and you got two because you were bilaterally symmetric) evolution starts evolving those - that's why it's evolution not, say, intelligent design. This is gradualism - a key element in the theory of evolution.
A more important point is, natural selection selects on one criterion alone - better fittness, better survivability. It doesn't care whether you have better eyes, it cares whether you live long enough and successfully pass on your genes. Since you framed the question in terms of predators, it makes sense to analyze it in those terms - "why did we not evolve at being massively better at avoiding being eaten by predators?". The answer there is obvious - we did, we evolved an organ that is immensly more powerful at ensuring survival than incredibly acute senses - the human brain which allows for traits and capabilities like social grouping, language and and more generaly, immensly adaptive behaviour. Incidentally, we got the big brains partially to handle the glut of complex information we get through the eyes.
Once we started getting smarter, acting in groups, developing the capability for more and more sophisticated communication, those advantages made many of the "brawn" advantages far less likely to be selected for. Once the evolutionary process hits on any kind of advantageous development, it tends to operate on that because it is only existing traits that can be varied through mutation and sexual selection. The bigger brain that was necessary for better vision turned out, accidentally, to be so universally useful that it became one of the primary objects of selection. Eventually the brain became so capable the adaptive capacity it conferred on individuals completely outpaced the random, slow process of natural selection. Once language and its corollary, cultural memory, became possible an adaptive method vastly more expedient and directed than natural selection became available. This was a watershed moment. A key constraint of natural selection is that aquired traits generally cannot be passed on to subsequent generations - only inhereted ones can. With the development of more sophisticated comminicataion (essentially, language) everything changed. While predators were stuck in the random, millions-years-long process of getting better at what they do, humans had, evolutionarily, developed a process that helped pass on aquired traits. We no longer need sharper eyes, bigger ears and better noses to avoid getting eaten by sharper eyed, better hearing, finer smelling wolves - our overall adaptive capability is so much greater than theirs that their sensory advantages are essentially irrelevant.
There is some evidence that suggests that some of the other higher primates are capable of passing on the advantageous aquired traits, such as the ability to use simple tools or use water to separate edible wheat from contaminats such as sand. The difference is that through the evolutionary roulette, we got there first and were able to use our evolutionary advantage. We face no threat from the almost-as-smart chimps, orangutans and gorillas. We easily displaced similar but competing species like the Neandrenthals. We are still assaulted by primitive organsisms such as viruses and bacteria, and yet, while we cannot claim an overwhelming victory on that front, our giant, adaptive brains have successfully fought these rapidly mutating organisms to a highly advantageous standstill.
Why do we not have more eyes, bigger ears, or an acuter sense of smell? Because we evolutionarily developed an organ that is enourmously more capable of confronting a nearly immeasurable number of threats.
This sounds like a fine tool and it is great that established companies like Borland are supportin Linux but before we get over-excited, it's worth thinking about whether it really helps address the 'Decent desktop experience on the Free Unices' problem.
For one thing, the desktop environment efforts on Linux/xBSD are already fragmented and seemingly non-directed. From the user's point of view, both KDE and GNOME are sluggish, ugly Windows knockoffs. For developers, they are Yet Another Set of Toolkits/Component Models/APIs based on inelegant, obtuse cruft such as X11, C++, CORBA... Do we really need, say, another Qt and associated flamewars?
The more fundamental problem seems to be a sort of conceptual tunnel vision that the major desktop development efforts on Linux seem to share. Perhaps this has to do with the perceived need to 'catch up' with existing popular desktop environments. This may be because few Unix-based desktop environments have been considered something worthy of aspiring to - a problem that doesn't exist on the server side. But even if we imagined KDE or GNOME developed to the point of reasonable stability and responsiveness, what will we have? A toolbar, a start button, a file explorer, a nice desktop water rippling effect, a bunch of un-navigable control panels, endless hierarchal menus, artsy and unreadable 'themes', at best, _parity_ with the painful experience of other desktop environments. Is this really as good as it gets? Will these desktops engender the kind of attachment graphics designers have for their Macs and webmasters have for their ultra-tweaked install of Apache? Will propellerheads and grandmas flock to them, recognizing them as the easiest, most intuitive, powerful ways to interact with a computer? If not, how valuable is it to have another set of tools that help us get there faster?
-pvg
This may not be as complicated as it seems.
Check out http://www.bsdi.com/company/people
Simply put, BSDi just doesn't have Joe Random
Developer on staff. I don't see anyone having
a problem letting, say, Chris Torek have
commit privs.
-pvg