I agree with you about 'the diamond age', it is one of the most interesting pieces of near future sf written in a long long time.
Those are the books that serve as inspiration for a generation of scientists and technology people and I really hope to see some of it's visions realized during my lifetime.
The main attraction of snowcrash was the 'street', the whole neural assembly language thing (with all the 'evidence' to support it) was a creative tour the de force but nothing that links with reality.
That depends. I've met some ace programmers that really were team players and that could probably code up a solution to whatever problem you threw at them in any language, including perl.
I've also met a lot of wannabe-ace-programmers that thought that obscurity equalled smarts and attitude indicated character. I call them 'prima donnas', and I avoid them as much as I can. Those are the people that create 'key person dependencies' because they like to feel indispensible, but that's just to compensate for their innate insecurities. These people are nothing but trouble. I would estimate that a fair amount of the 'perl fanboys' (and any other language fanboys actually, but perl, due to its cryptic syntax lends itself very well for this purpose) fall in to the latter category.
So, no it isn't the fault of the language but it does mean that certain languages have a higher incidence of such characters promoting it.
A really good programmer can thrive in any environment, because programming is at heart a method of solving problems ('divide and conquer'), not a religion. Every problem is solveable in every language (as long as it is Turing-complete), some languages are easier to learn and maintain than others. Perl is hardly ever the optimal solution to a certain class of problem when you're working from a blank sheet, if there already is a large body of code in a project written in perl then it may make sense to continue writing in perl.
True enough, unfortunately... Certificates were a pretty good idea but as it stands they are just false security. But there is no real need to make it even worse...
I think it is funny how people interpret the 'lock' item as being 'safe', whereas all it only indicates 'connection encrypted', there is no information at all that the party you are talking to is even who they say they are.
Certificates are just another scam which allows the certificate issuers to make a large amount of money without actually doing any real work for it.
exactly. Every time people jump through the hoops required to accept a lapsed certificate all the valid certificates in the world lose a little bit of value because the user just got conditioned a little bit more to see certificates as nothing but a hassle.
amen. Firefox works just fine. If those companies can't be bothered to update their certificates and firefox refuses to show the pages then I think that's fantastic news.
If all browsers would take such a strict approach then I'm pretty sure certificate lapses would occur much less frequently, especially not with such large companies.
If overriding security features is made too easy then you may as well do away with them completely.
that's a problem that's inherent in ebay, they basically allow people to list stuff for sale without verifying the seller actually exists.
For low value items that's not a big deal but if a seller is relatively new and you spend a lot of $ on the first transaction you know you're taking a risk.
I personally don't mind using ebay (and it's dutch cousin marktplaats) but as a rule if the seller is reasonably new then I go and pick it up or I buy it elsewhere.
Haven't been scammed yet... and I met some pretty neat people like that.
I think if peoples judgement is affected to the point where they would do that they should have their funds controlled by someone else. This routinely happens with the mentally disabled, trustees usually handle their funds.
One of the specific goals of this is to protect those people from falling victim to confidence tricksters. The fact that the scams get more elaborate and the cons more clever and so are able to tap in to a larger segment of the population is different.
However, most of the victims of these crimes are people that are simply driven by greed, not the few exceptions that were genuinely too gullible and that thought they were helping someone.
thought crime is not illegal. You may think about a rape but as long as you don't do it you are not guilty of *anything*. (Except maybe of having a sick mind, but that's not an offense).
the part that makes all of them unbelievable is that your email address should not be known to them, nobody in such a position would normally contact a random stranger whose email address was generated by psychic means.
I see it as evolution in action: Girls like guys with $ (or so the legend goes;) ), guys want more $, guys participate in scam, loses $, is less likely to procreate because girls no longer want them.
The nigerians are doing us all a favour by strengthening the human race.
And that, in one line is what it really is all about and what makes the difference between a language that will thrive in the corporate environment and one that you should avoid at all costs.
I know ada is (or was?) actually quite popular in some government agencies, but I have never seen Eiffel 'in the wild', only in studies. Was it ever widely adopted ?
no, but I really don't feel a need to go back to the seventies when 'significant whitespace' was all the fashion.
Especially the fact that tabs and whitespace are visually indistinguishable and will cause your code to suddenly not work is a real hoot. Similar gripes apply to makefiles and DNS configuration files that need significant tabs in some places. Utterly ridiculous.
Try switching editors, importing a chunk of code using cut-and-paste with a non-python aware tool and so on.
IMNSHO this was the biggest possible stumbling block that they could have installed to avoid large scale python adoption, it seems to have worked admirably so.
hm, as a dutch person, maybe I'm qualified to comment on those 'perfect' tomatoes, they *look* perfect but they taste like shit.
The best tomatoes are the ones that are not force grown to look perfect and be nothing but bags of water, but the ones that grow in real soil under a real sun with a bit of insect damage thrown in for authenticity.
I think you missed my point. The *code* usually does a pretty good job of saying what it is that it is doing, to the extent that comments are for the most part limited to describing what a function does, if you understand the context of the code then the rest is (more or less) obvious.
In perl you really need those play-by-play comments because without them you're pretty much lost. If you don't have them (and most perl code that I have seen uses comments only to document those cases where the original programmer foresaw a problem in later understanding of what the f*ck is going on) then you are sorely out of luck.
Even (shudder) visual basic is inherently more readable than perl.
IBM once had a programming language on their mainframes called 'APL', ('a programming language'), this was similar in that it allowed you to write amazingly dense code, but if you weren't current with the codebase you had no chance whatsoever of understanding what it was doing.
the game of life. Now if you read that and said (without looking at the title) oh, wow the game of life in one line, how elegant, then more power to you.
If your response was "wtf ??" then you understand how I feel about most perl code:)
Slashdot Mirror
there is no alas about it, and it's great, now we have more writers.
Just like Chopin wasn't Bach and Vermeer wasn't Rembrandt. It's all a matter of style and personal preference.
I like them both and have read pretty much all of their works and I think they both contributed in a pretty unique way to SF, and to the world.
owning books doesn't say much, you could just as well have read the entire floor of a library without owning a single book...
the solution, however gruesome is very easy...
my favorite line from snowcrash: "I'm sure they'll listen to Reason.". ;)
I agree with you about 'the diamond age', it is one of the most interesting pieces of near future sf written in a long long time.
Those are the books that serve as inspiration for a generation of scientists and technology people and I really hope to see some of it's visions realized during my lifetime.
The main attraction of snowcrash was the 'street', the whole neural assembly language thing (with all the 'evidence' to support it) was a creative tour the de force but nothing that links with reality.
That depends. I've met some ace programmers that really were team players and that could probably code up a solution to whatever problem you threw at them in any language, including perl.
I've also met a lot of wannabe-ace-programmers that thought that obscurity equalled smarts and attitude indicated character. I call them 'prima donnas', and I avoid them as much as I can. Those are the people that create 'key person dependencies' because they like to feel indispensible, but that's just to compensate for their innate insecurities. These people are nothing but trouble. I would estimate that a fair amount of the 'perl fanboys' (and any other language fanboys actually, but perl, due to its cryptic syntax lends itself very well for this purpose) fall in to the latter category.
So, no it isn't the fault of the language but it does mean that certain languages have a higher incidence of such characters promoting it.
A really good programmer can thrive in any environment, because programming is at heart a method of solving problems ('divide and conquer'), not a religion. Every problem is solveable in every language (as long as it is Turing-complete), some languages are easier to learn and maintain than others. Perl is hardly ever the optimal solution to a certain class of problem when you're working from a blank sheet, if there already is a large body of code in a project written in perl then it may make sense to continue writing in perl.
It was meant as a joke, but you are 100% correct if you interpret it as serious...
True enough, unfortunately... Certificates were a pretty good idea but as it stands they are just false security. But there is no real need to make it even worse...
I think it is funny how people interpret the 'lock' item as being 'safe', whereas all it only indicates 'connection encrypted', there is no information at all that the party you are talking to is even who they say they are.
Certificates are just another scam which allows the certificate issuers to make a large amount of money without actually doing any real work for it.
exactly. Every time people jump through the hoops required to accept a lapsed certificate all the valid certificates in the world lose a little bit of value because the user just got conditioned a little bit more to see certificates as nothing but a hassle.
amen. Firefox works just fine. If those companies can't be bothered to update their certificates and firefox refuses to show the pages then I think that's fantastic news.
If all browsers would take such a strict approach then I'm pretty sure certificate lapses would occur much less frequently, especially not with such large companies.
If overriding security features is made too easy then you may as well do away with them completely.
that's a problem that's inherent in ebay, they basically allow people to list stuff for sale without verifying the seller actually exists.
For low value items that's not a big deal but if a seller is relatively new and you spend a lot of $ on the first transaction you know you're taking a risk.
I personally don't mind using ebay (and it's dutch cousin marktplaats) but as a rule if the seller is reasonably new then I go and pick it up or I buy it elsewhere.
Haven't been scammed yet... and I met some pretty neat people like that.
funny, I thought it was England doing the sending...
I think if peoples judgement is affected to the point where they would do that they should have their funds controlled by someone else. This routinely happens with the mentally disabled, trustees usually handle their funds.
One of the specific goals of this is to protect those people from falling victim to confidence tricksters. The fact that the scams get more elaborate and the cons more clever and so are able to tap in to a larger segment of the population is different.
However, most of the victims of these crimes are people that are simply driven by greed, not the few exceptions that were genuinely too gullible and that thought they were helping someone.
thought crime is not illegal. You may think about a rape but as long as you don't do it you are not guilty of *anything*. (Except maybe of having a sick mind, but that's not an offense).
you should go and watch Forest Gump, I'm pretty sure shrimp on the bbq was in there somewhere.
the part that makes all of them unbelievable is that your email address should not be known to them, nobody in such a position would normally contact a random stranger whose email address was generated by psychic means.
I see it as evolution in action: Girls like guys with $ (or so the legend goes ;) ), guys want more $, guys participate in scam, loses $, is less likely to procreate because girls no longer want them.
The nigerians are doing us all a favour by strengthening the human race.
sure, here's one for you: You get a call from a number that you don't know and it hangs up before you can answer.
Don't call it back, it'll be a for-pay number that rakes in dough from curious people.
In general there is a really simple rule to protect yourself from scams: If you did not initiate the transaction it is with high probability a scam.
> it leads to key person dependencies
And that, in one line is what it really is all about and what makes the difference between a language that will thrive in the corporate environment and one that you should avoid at all costs.
I know ada is (or was?) actually quite popular in some government agencies, but I have never seen Eiffel 'in the wild', only in studies. Was it ever widely adopted ?
no, but I really don't feel a need to go back to the seventies when 'significant whitespace' was all the fashion.
Especially the fact that tabs and whitespace are visually indistinguishable and will cause your code to suddenly not work is a real hoot. Similar gripes apply to makefiles and DNS configuration files that need significant tabs in some places. Utterly ridiculous.
Try switching editors, importing a chunk of code using cut-and-paste with a non-python aware tool and so on.
IMNSHO this was the biggest possible stumbling block that they could have installed to avoid large scale python adoption, it seems to have worked admirably so.
I'll give you this though, perl is worse :)
I'm going to forward that to a friend of mine that is running (you've guessed it) a scoop site ( http://fieldlines.com/ ).
thanks again :) :)
hm, as a dutch person, maybe I'm qualified to comment on those 'perfect' tomatoes, they *look* perfect but they taste like shit.
The best tomatoes are the ones that are not force grown to look perfect and be nothing but bags of water, but the ones that grow in real soil under a real sun with a bit of insect damage thrown in for authenticity.
I think you missed my point. The *code* usually does a pretty good job of saying what it is that it is doing, to the extent that comments are for the most part limited to describing what a function does, if you understand the context of the code then the rest is (more or less) obvious.
In perl you really need those play-by-play comments because without them you're pretty much lost. If you don't have them (and most perl code that I have seen uses comments only to document those cases where the original programmer foresaw a problem in later understanding of what the f*ck is going on) then you are sorely out of luck.
Even (shudder) visual basic is inherently more readable than perl.
IBM once had a programming language on their mainframes called 'APL', ('a programming language'), this was similar in that it allowed you to write amazingly dense code, but if you weren't current with the codebase you had no chance whatsoever of understanding what it was doing.
Image lifted from wikipedia:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/ff/LifeInApl.gif
the game of life. Now if you read that and said (without looking at the title) oh, wow the game of life in one line, how elegant, then more power to you.
If your response was "wtf ??" then you understand how I feel about most perl code :)
j.