While this is a great idea, I wonder how many people will be willing to make the change. When moving to a fundamentally new type of language there must be some real big advantages over the current status quo.
I don't think things inherent to a language (language features, quality, beauty, etc.) do much to determine the acceptence of the language.
Lisp is better than C, Smalltalk is better than Java, Modula is better than Ada (not looking for flames, those "better"s are just my generalized opinion). But Unix was written in C, Java tools were cheaper than Smalltalk's and Smalltalk was fragmented (many incompatable vendors) and Java could make applets, the DOD required Ada be used for many things and pumped tons of money into Ada (back in the '80s)...
So, great idea or not, even if Eidola solves a significant number of problems significantly better than existing languages/tools, it won't be a major factor in Eidola's popularity. The major make or break factors will be things outside the language - for example, if IBM, MS, and Sun all get solidly and cooperatively behind it, that would make it. If Amazon decides the design of the Eidola kernel infringes on some of their patents, that could break it.
I too think it's a good idea, and I agree with It'll be hard for this to go mainstream. Nevertheless, it could be successful without being popular, couldn't it?
My understanding is that Java was originally intended to be a cross-platform language, so that there would be a VM for every os and applications would be written for the VM. When that seemed impractical, Sun tried to reposition it as a language for embedded systems.
Acutally, Java (Oak, back then) was originally developed to control set-top-boxes. Downloadability and safety/security were requirements from the start. Sun did not get the contract for the set-top-boxes, the web came into being, and it was not too hard to see the possibilities (applets and all that). The internet friendliness, portability (VM), and security were already there, so it didn't take much to move the target from set-top-devices to browsers. "Oak" couldn't be used as the official name of the language (I think it was already trademarked), and "Java" was an available and marketable term.
Applets, while very "cool" in 1996, were problem prone and not very useful. Java on the client (outside a browser) never made it because Sun couldn't produce a good GUI framework, but Java on the server is a winning combination.
I think it's a great language and I love programming in it, but I am more interested in applications that web stuff.
We use Java for web stuff (what else can you do with it?).
MS (and everyone else actually) cannot bastardize (er, I mean optimize) Java to allow Windoze specific Java code (or they'll get sued for it). They cannot change the JVM specs (e.g. add bytecodes) and still call it Java. I'll bet they can (legally speaking) create a "OS independent and language independent" superset of the JVM as long as they don't call it a Java VM. If this thing is technologically good (or even if it's not), and they produce these for many platforms, they may have the clout to displace the JVMs as the de facto VM for these platforms. My theory is that the C-pound languge is merely an excuse to get heavily into the VM business.
The marketing line is simple: you can have a JVM, which only runs Java (and a few fringy languages, like Pizza), or you have this super-duper VM that runs Java and a whole lot more. Difficult for a naive person to argue with.
The defacto VM is currently JVM, and Sun owns it. MS is starting to realize the strategic importance of this, and this is their attempt to steal it away from Sun. It's not an anwer to Java, it is an answer to JVM.
If you play center in TTT, and play intelligently (i.e., not to lose on purpose), you are guaranteed at least a draw
Actually, a competitive TTT player (such as myself) can make the initial move in any square and never do worse than a draw.
FWIW, an opening move to center square, while not technically weak, is certainly indicative of a lack of style. The French (of course) are especially critical of this kind of unimaginative play, and refer to the center square as the "pissant" square, and use the term "un pissant" to describe both the initial play to center and the person that makes it.
Why should we clean up the earth? I can't wait for global warming to take effect. It will turn the earth into a tropical paradise. Who wants to stop that?
Everyone who has an interest in real estate that's at an elevation close to sea level.
Fighting back is a win/win course of action for Slashdot. Any losses due to lawyer fees and court awarded damages (to MS) will be more than made for by a tremendous amount of very positive publicity.
Look at the many intertwined issues and conflicting forces:
freedom of press vs. corporate bullying
freedom of speech vs. censorship
open standards vs. proprietary extensions
open source vs. kludges hidden behind "trade secret"
interoperability vs. lock-out by design
David vs. Goliath
Good vs. Evil
It's not only a great time to be sued by Microsoft, it's a great set of issues to be sued over! It's really too perfect to have not been carefully orchestrated. My hat's off to whoever engineered this. It is a Beauty. I can see how Microsoft, being such an incredibly predictable and narrow minded beast, (and being somewhat preoccupied with other matters) could be led through a few hoops, but the one thing I can't figure out is how you got them to publish their Kerberos extensions on the internet and claim that it's a trade secret. That part must have been an "inside job". I'm sure/. will deny that any part of this was planned in any way. Of course, it couldn't have been (wink, nudge).
Congrats,/., on a job well done.
If blueberries are blue, y is orange juice orange?
on
Object Oriented Perl
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· Score: 1
Almost all UI designers are motivated by seeking the "holy grail" of UI's, so to speak.
This is pure nonsense. There are plenty of good UI designer's out there, and every good UI designer knows they cannot please everybody, and that the first item of business in designing a UI is to determine who you're designing it for.
Strange thing about UIs is that good ones tend to be unremarkable, only bad ones get attention.
Also AI for the most part is still a plaything and something that one really can't easily study or actually get a job in.
You probably use AI everyday (atleast I do), everytime you use a search engine (Google or Inktomi based, and probably most others), you're using AI. Just because it doesn't sound like HAL 9000 doesn't mean it's not AI based. And I don't know what makes it hard to study (relative to computing in general) other than some kind of inflexible religious bias against it.
It is true that knowledge of "AI" is not especially marketable right now (but the same could be said for knowledge of "algorithms").
The difference between "non-OO" programming and OO programming is NOT as significant as many CompSci professors would like to claim. Really, OO is just a form of parallelization that is then run sequentially.
That's got to be the worst characterization of OO that I've ever seen (and I've seen lots of bad ones).
(If you think of each object as a virtual computer, the methods as daemons, and public variables as SNMP data, then that is =ALL= there is to it.)
Well, my application only needs one computer, hence one object, right? Wrong.
There is some validity in your analogy, about the same as saying "The sun is like the nucleus of an atom, and the planets are like electrons". It may give school children some idea of the way things are, but it doesn't take one very far in the study of astronomy or particle physics.
Weak analogies and claims of similarity between OO and non-OO are one of the main reasons so many people think they know OO but don't!
The people that are responding to the initial question about nanotech are not doing research, they're just pitching in a chunk of knowledge, opinion, or whatever. Those chunks are not all high quality, authoritative, quotable pearls of wisdom (I don't mean to insult those that responded, but it's a fact of/.life that chaff comes with the wheat).
The original poster (the high school student), to produce a successful paper, must sort through all the responses and separate the wheat from the chaff, grind the wheat and knead the dough, etc.
Posting a question that garners a good sized response and processing that response can be a effective method of research. The proof will be in the (bread) pudding.
I don't claim such an approach replace the traditional focus on status quo authoritative sources, but augment it. Any educators that object to this style of research should be put out to pasture.
"You gonna get on Slashdot for thaaaat?!?! Kozmo.com's got research."
Perl is
perfectly suited to object-oriented programming
Yeh, so is Java. Oh, and so is Z80 assembler (which is kind of like Java, but without the Nazis). But Perl's naturally polymorphic nature is far better than those unnaturally polymorphic languages (which have been shown to cause cancer).
Get real. Object oriented langauges are better suited to object oriented programming. Perl is not an object oriented language. You do the math.
Re:Uh, doesn't seem very "rational" at all
on
The Mind of God
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· Score: 1
Do Animals Create? One person once said that everything that makes humans different from animals can be summed up in a human's ability to tell a lie. To lie you have to be able to create a universe based on evidence and know that it isn't true. You have to be able to communicate the untruth. You have to have the selfish interests to want to relay the untruth.
Yes, animals lie. I knew a dog that was on a regimen that required it take a pill twice a day. It became very adept at pretending to swallow the pill, and when no one was looking would nonchalantly wander off and spit the pill out and try to hide it. It was clearly an intentional deception. It was a very smart dog.
Do Animals Marry?
Marriage (as you define it) is hardly a universal human practice. Do animals play basketball?
Do Aminals have Morality?
By your definition of morality, I think ants have much more of it than humans.
Arthur Koestler identified a distinguishing characteristic of humans: they are the only species capabile of eradicating itself.
Having a purpose isn't the same as being "truly meant to be here." The "meant" in this context I assume was meant to mean someone/something else doing the meanting - someone/something else truly meant use to be here.
You can consider your purpose (or your underlying reason to exist, for that matter) to be your own or your meantor's. For me, the latter choice is more depressing.
Most people seem to be very bad at forming a mental model of how software works. Of course, this is partly because there is a lot of software which does not have any consistent model, but still a lot of users will only do a few linear operations they have learnt, and have to be taught further operations, rather than grokking the whole program. And then you end up with horrible, horrible "wizards" as the only way of getting things done.
Starting with a simplified system would perhaps alleviate this. But how can this be done? Simply taking out half the menu options seems a bit crude.:-)
I think you pointed to the answer when you said "there is a lot of software which does not have any consistent model". I'd say most software doesn't have a consistant model , and if it does, it's been buried deep beneath all those menu items and buttons bars and floating palettes.
Piles of features (and those 'horrible, horrible "wizards"') is evidence that the model has been lost. Piles of features, button bars, palettes, and those horrible wizards are the easy but poor substitutes for a good model. "Starting with a simplified system" is the easy part. Adhering to the model is the hard part (Netscape was never great at adhering to the model, but they really unadhered when they introduced frames).
Creating a model that can satisfy a reasonable set of requirements is difficult, and creating one that can grow and evolve is harder. It's much easier to get out of the modelling business and simply pile on features.
A pile of features is very easy to evolve. It's easy to quantify, and it's easy to sell, and I think this will be the case for some time because so many people have been convinced that "software application" means "pile of features" (distinguished from "operating system" which is the "big pile of features that comes with the computer").
But a pile of features is still a pile of features, and a well designed model is a better basis for an application. The problem is that the current software dev culture, economy, and market, isn't suited to building model based software.
Is there a solution? Hell yes. With all the dot-com billions, why doesn't some company put together a group that doesn't need to be fiscally accountable (call it a charity), has no deadline, and given a charter to solve a simple problem. The right way. With a catchy motto like "quality is job 1.0".
Slashdot Mirror
Lisp is better than C, Smalltalk is better than Java, Modula is better than Ada (not looking for flames, those "better"s are just my generalized opinion). But Unix was written in C, Java tools were cheaper than Smalltalk's and Smalltalk was fragmented (many incompatable vendors) and Java could make applets, the DOD required Ada be used for many things and pumped tons of money into Ada (back in the '80s)...
So, great idea or not, even if Eidola solves a significant number of problems significantly better than existing languages/tools, it won't be a major factor in Eidola's popularity. The major make or break factors will be things outside the language - for example, if IBM, MS, and Sun all get solidly and cooperatively behind it, that would make it. If Amazon decides the design of the Eidola kernel infringes on some of their patents, that could break it.
I too think it's a good idea, and I agree with It'll be hard for this to go mainstream. Nevertheless, it could be successful without being popular, couldn't it?
Applets, while very "cool" in 1996, were problem prone and not very useful. Java on the client (outside a browser) never made it because Sun couldn't produce a good GUI framework, but Java on the server is a winning combination.
We use Java for web stuff (what else can you do with it?).The marketing line is simple: you can have a JVM, which only runs Java (and a few fringy languages, like Pizza), or you have this super-duper VM that runs Java and a whole lot more. Difficult for a naive person to argue with.
The defacto VM is currently JVM, and Sun owns it. MS is starting to realize the strategic importance of this, and this is their attempt to steal it away from Sun. It's not an anwer to Java, it is an answer to JVM.
FWIW, an opening move to center square, while not technically weak, is certainly indicative of a lack of style. The French (of course) are especially critical of this kind of unimaginative play, and refer to the center square as the "pissant" square, and use the term "un pissant" to describe both the initial play to center and the person that makes it.
Look at the many intertwined issues and conflicting forces:
- freedom of press vs. corporate bullying
- freedom of speech vs. censorship
- open standards vs. proprietary extensions
- open source vs. kludges hidden behind "trade secret"
- interoperability vs. lock-out by design
- David vs. Goliath
- Good vs. Evil
It's not only a great time to be sued by Microsoft, it's a great set of issues to be sued over! It's really too perfect to have not been carefully orchestrated. My hat's off to whoever engineered this. It is a Beauty. I can see how Microsoft, being such an incredibly predictable and narrow minded beast, (and being somewhat preoccupied with other matters) could be led through a few hoops, but the one thing I can't figure out is how you got them to publish their Kerberos extensions on the internet and claim that it's a trade secret. That part must have been an "inside job". I'm sureCongrats, /., on a job well done.
Tough question.
...having recently dethroned object oriented (the former most improperly-used term on earth).
Strange thing about UIs is that good ones tend to be unremarkable, only bad ones get attention.
It is true that knowledge of "AI" is not especially marketable right now (but the same could be said for knowledge of "algorithms").
Your arguments seem to be a rephrasing of prior arguments against mechanical computing.
There is some validity in your analogy, about the same as saying "The sun is like the nucleus of an atom, and the planets are like electrons". It may give school children some idea of the way things are, but it doesn't take one very far in the study of astronomy or particle physics.
Weak analogies and claims of similarity between OO and non-OO are one of the main reasons so many people think they know OO but don't!
The original poster (the high school student), to produce a successful paper, must sort through all the responses and separate the wheat from the chaff, grind the wheat and knead the dough, etc.
Posting a question that garners a good sized response and processing that response can be a effective method of research. The proof will be in the (bread) pudding.
I don't claim such an approach replace the traditional focus on status quo authoritative sources, but augment it. Any educators that object to this style of research should be put out to pasture.
"You gonna get on Slashdot for thaaaat?!?! Kozmo.com's got research."
Get real. Object oriented langauges are better suited to object oriented programming. Perl is not an object oriented language. You do the math.
Arthur Koestler identified a distinguishing characteristic of humans: they are the only species capabile of eradicating itself.
You can consider your purpose (or your underlying reason to exist, for that matter) to be your own or your meantor's. For me, the latter choice is more depressing.
Piles of features (and those 'horrible, horrible "wizards"') is evidence that the model has been lost. Piles of features, button bars, palettes, and those horrible wizards are the easy but poor substitutes for a good model. "Starting with a simplified system" is the easy part. Adhering to the model is the hard part (Netscape was never great at adhering to the model, but they really unadhered when they introduced frames).
Creating a model that can satisfy a reasonable set of requirements is difficult, and creating one that can grow and evolve is harder. It's much easier to get out of the modelling business and simply pile on features.
A pile of features is very easy to evolve. It's easy to quantify, and it's easy to sell, and I think this will be the case for some time because so many people have been convinced that "software application" means "pile of features" (distinguished from "operating system" which is the "big pile of features that comes with the computer").
But a pile of features is still a pile of features, and a well designed model is a better basis for an application. The problem is that the current software dev culture, economy, and market, isn't suited to building model based software.
Is there a solution? Hell yes. With all the dot-com billions, why doesn't some company put together a group that doesn't need to be fiscally accountable (call it a charity), has no deadline, and given a charter to solve a simple problem. The right way. With a catchy motto like "quality is job 1.0".