Those platforms, applications, and servers you leave behind you will remain in the same language. If they are good useful hard to write systems, they will likely be there for a long time. That's a long term decision.
actually they do know. The legenday quote was of Bill Gates regarding piracy in China (from the 80's)... "if they are going to pirate software it might as well be our stuff". Further evidence, through the 80's and 90's when everyone was doing every sort of copy protection, even using custom disk reading formats, etc., Microsoft stuff was relatively easy to pirate. MSVC has had the all 0's ID and now, last I checked, all 1's still worked.
No, they understand, they are just trying to turn the corner and collect the payoff of this pro-piracy investment. The pressure is on because the stock price is flat.
> DR-DOS 5 was more compatible with MS-DOS 4 than MS-DOS 4
ok, that part wasn't too believable... um... than MS-DOS 5 was. Sorry.:) The ref for this was emails from the DR-DOS case Caldera brought against MS and settled for ~200 Million.
DR-DOS was certainly better. In fact, Microsoft showed in it's own tests that DR-DOS 5 was more compatible with MS-DOS 4 than MS-DOS 4 was, and it had history, etc. etc.
OS/2 better than Windows. Certainly.
Netscape better than IE... well, it was, but they got Netscape running scared so it was a pos from 3 onward with but a few bug fix builds as exceptions proving the rule.
PS: MacOS too.
Word vs. Word Perfect... I'm with you there.
Excel... won on the merits.
But certainly you would agree that xroach was cooler than Clippy...
Good point, but then... it's not like there are not going to be new growth areas, it's just that Microsoft can't seem to find them. They just find other small companies that have found them, and they are finding these companies later and later (i.e. Google ain't small anymore). It's pretty pathetic.
PS: I hate your stupid sig. But then, that's just what I think. But I'm right. It's a stupid sig. It's so bad that it colors how I interpret your posts, but maybe that is the point. But don't get me wrong... I fully support a person's right to have a stupid sig. Even one as stupid as your sig. Really! But I also support my right to point out that, gee, your comments are often interesting... why such a, well, sort of hateful sig like that?!
However, they are leveraging those tools to keep you specific to MS technology. I liked using MSDev Studio for C++. But MS is dragging people into their world via MFC, etc., and now they have a tool that is not the best if flexibility and freedom of choice are of any import. For some, or most, perhaps it isn't important.
For me, it has and will always be important to increase the granularity of my choices. The MS IDE is nice, but it's also a political/business tool that tries to make a pawn out of developers.
I couldn't agree more. As a software engineer with ~15 years experience... and a BA in Philosophy.
Indeed, I worked my way through school as a programmer and chose philosophy on purpose because I found that's where the logic courses were.
(I also took a lot of physics and math which no doubt helps, but the degree is philosophy) I feel the study of various logical abstractions helped widen my perspective. Not to mention you are trained to diagram any set of concept/relationships, which is also quite useful. My diagrams have consistent grammer, and I'm sure this is because I was trained how to create a legend that maps directly to real concepts (e.g. an arrow means something, and is only used for truly identical relationships. Of course, the arrow might mean different things in different diagrams, but within a given diagram: consistency). I'm not sure all Philosophy programs are so rigerous about logic... but it is the one thing, the only thing, that philosophers have any agreement over.
I have always thought of myself as totally non-evangelical when it comes to languages. But recently I have found myself defending C++, really as a proxy for compiled languages. The abstraction of a VM is a lot better in theory than practice, in my experience, unless the VM is special purpose.
But C++ does offer a "safe" general paradigm, declaring variables which are destroyed on leaving scope. This allows control of all the critical situations. A buffer class can be made as safe to use as the one the compiler or VM manages for you in another "safe language".
C++ programers used not do this because it's not optimal, you end up doing a lot of copying by default. Back when C++ programers had recently been C programmers that seemed like a waste. They availed themselves of the C paradigm still available in C++.
But now it's often a quite acceptable performance degredation.
When it is not acceptable, you can optimize it away without rewriting the code that uses the no-pointer paradigm. Generally, you can override the copy constructor and the "=" operator and start trading pointers and reference counting and avoid all the copying. Since you know your class is used as a variable and not referenced by pointers, you know your destructors will be called. You know no one is passing pointers out of the object that can be abused, they only return objects that encapusulate the evil buffers.
Although it's possible to eliminate use of pointers I don't think that is necessary, it's sufficient to reduce the amount of manipulation you do. So I'm not a purist, I allow myself a few pointers to track in any given object, and rely on a consistent use of the system. But when delivering classes that are more like SDKs, then I have in fact used these "safe" practices.
The real complaint seems to be, perhaps not in your case, but in general, that the fact that there are unsafe -options- means the language itself is unsafe. I think it's more like the operation of a car. A car can be operated safely, and that reduces the chance of an accident to an almost arbitrarily high percentage. But I guess I admit there will be a few accidents over all the roadways, due to recklessness. But I don't want to give up cars for a vehicle that can make recklessness safe, somehow, unless it's performance is really just as good as a car. I mean, going 5 miles an hour is a solution that won't really do compared to good defensive driving.
BUT! I actually do think you're right, I should look at ML, or OCaml, or Scheme. I'm far more suspicious of the idea that VM based languages are the new general purpose language, but other compiled languages, of course, offer their own unique paradigms that are not offered in C++ and if there isn't a sort of automatic pentalty that cannot be optimized away reliably, then I'm inclined to assume that the additional paradigm(s) are further useful tools.
Oh, C is compiled... learn something new every day, don't I?
uh, maybe because the VM doesn't produce machine code, it executes pseudo code. For each pseudo code instruction there is some amount of code it executes in the VM to actually run the program, code written in a compiled language.
And you may claim it's feasable and perfectly so to think that recompiling code while it's running can be faster than just running compiled code, but I don't think that's too feasable at all, because really there is just a single program running, the VM, and I do not think a general purpose program such as a VM designed to do anything the language can do, will, in fact, run faster than a program just designed to perform it's specific function.
If your savior is runtime-calculated optimization, keep in mind there is nothing to stop me from doing the similar runtime optimization in C... if there was, the VM couldn't do it either.
Slashdot Mirror
yes, that's what I meant.
You can change languages.
Those platforms, applications, and servers you leave behind you will remain in the same language. If they are good useful hard to write systems, they will likely be there for a long time. That's a long term decision.
re piracy:
actually they do know. The legenday quote was of Bill Gates regarding piracy in China (from the 80's)... "if they are going to pirate software it might as well be our stuff". Further evidence, through the 80's and 90's when everyone was doing every sort of copy protection, even using custom disk reading formats, etc., Microsoft stuff was relatively easy to pirate. MSVC has had the all 0's ID and now, last I checked, all 1's still worked.
No, they understand, they are just trying to turn the corner and collect the payoff of this pro-piracy investment. The pressure is on because the stock price is flat.
"Freedom Fries" is actually pro French... the word "French" is now synonymous with "Freedom".
> DR-DOS 5 was more compatible with MS-DOS 4 than MS-DOS 4
:) The ref for this was emails from the DR-DOS case Caldera brought against MS and settled for ~200 Million.
ok, that part wasn't too believable... um... than MS-DOS 5 was. Sorry.
DR-DOS was certainly better. In fact, Microsoft showed in it's own tests that DR-DOS 5 was more compatible with MS-DOS 4 than MS-DOS 4 was, and it had history, etc. etc.
OS/2 better than Windows. Certainly.
Netscape better than IE... well, it was, but they got Netscape running scared so it was a pos from 3 onward with but a few bug fix builds as exceptions proving the rule.
PS: MacOS too.
Word vs. Word Perfect... I'm with you there.
Excel... won on the merits.
But certainly you would agree that xroach was cooler than Clippy...
Good point, but then... it's not like there are not going to be new growth areas, it's just that Microsoft can't seem to find them. They just find other small companies that have found them, and they are finding these companies later and later (i.e. Google ain't small anymore). It's pretty pathetic.
PS: I hate your stupid sig. But then, that's just what I think. But I'm right. It's a stupid sig. It's so bad that it colors how I interpret your posts, but maybe that is the point. But don't get me wrong... I fully support a person's right to have a stupid sig. Even one as stupid as your sig. Really! But I also support my right to point out that, gee, your comments are often interesting... why such a, well, sort of hateful sig like that?!
... isn't a little fellow known as ...
KARL MARX
is he? if not... plagerism!
I take exception to the tone of this concept.
Refering to Microsoft as "those bastards" is innappropriate.
So what if someone's parents never wed. That's no reason to equate them to Microsoft executive.
Shame! Shame on you!
you can! The wormholes are very useful.
However, all your atoms will be ripped apart into a sort of quark-plasma dust, making it somewhat less than pleasant.
They do get put back together on the far end! But usually has an aged tin of spam, for some reason.
But hey, that doesn't mean it's not good enough for the feature sheet!
>which are 100% windows based and always will be (unfortunately)
you are making a short term decision, and trying to use the phrase above to justify it as a long term solution.
Nothing personal, but I guarantee that people will not be using 100% windows solutions "for ever".
MS is actually less entrenched than IBM was 15 years ago.
what is the matter with dozens of choices... I mean, "third party libs" exactly?
Am I really worse off to have xerces and libxml available than to just use MS's inferior xml libraries? What, to make it easier to learn.
Oh, well, not only do I enjoy becoming familiar with competing implementations, but I consider it a professional requirement.
MS has made the best IDE and CASE tools.
However, they are leveraging those tools to keep you specific to MS technology. I liked using MSDev Studio for C++. But MS is dragging people into their world via MFC, etc., and now they have a tool that is not the best if flexibility and freedom of choice are of any import. For some, or most, perhaps it isn't important.
For me, it has and will always be important to increase the granularity of my choices. The MS IDE is nice, but it's also a political/business tool that tries to make a pawn out of developers.
This is a serious issue.
see me when one of them actually runs the same applications!
but some of the stories today were true.
new directions:
(1) King Kong wins... New York or city of choice in ruins.
(2) Where are all the other giant apes? they escape their islands and rescue King Kong
(3) King Kong is a simian with a brain the size of a small house. Turn out he's smart. He runs linux. Likes Stallman. Runs for senate.
I know, the rash of complaints about how obvious these are and the real joke is all the ones that are real stories!
>or what a b-tree does
hey! that's a trick question... a b-tree doesn't do anything... it's a data structure!
...where I am! Need I add "insensitive clod"?
that's spelling stoopid.
no offense.
And anyway... that's right, I was talking about diagrams, not posts to slashdot.
suprisingly my professional work is worthy of proofreading and precision... slashdot posts, not.
Computer Science is Applied Philosopy...
I couldn't agree more. As a software engineer with ~15 years experience... and a BA in Philosophy.
Indeed, I worked my way through school as a programmer and chose philosophy on purpose because I found that's where the logic courses were.
(I also took a lot of physics and math which no doubt helps, but the degree is philosophy) I feel the study of various logical abstractions helped widen my perspective. Not to mention you are trained to diagram any set of concept/relationships, which is also quite useful. My diagrams have consistent grammer, and I'm sure this is because I was trained how to create a legend that maps directly to real concepts (e.g. an arrow means something, and is only used for truly identical relationships. Of course, the arrow might mean different things in different diagrams, but within a given diagram: consistency). I'm not sure all Philosophy programs are so rigerous about logic... but it is the one thing, the only thing, that philosophers have any agreement over.
the TV lied?!
> They left CMM level 5 behind a few years ago.
are they looking for it?
um, it's only downhill from there.
I have always thought of myself as totally non-evangelical when it comes to languages. But recently I have found myself defending C++, really as a proxy for compiled languages. The abstraction of a VM is a lot better in theory than practice, in my experience, unless the VM is special purpose.
But C++ does offer a "safe" general paradigm, declaring variables which are destroyed on leaving scope. This allows control of all the critical situations. A buffer class can be made as safe to use as the one the compiler or VM manages for you in another "safe language".
C++ programers used not do this because it's not optimal, you end up doing a lot of copying by default. Back when C++ programers had recently been C programmers that seemed like a waste. They availed themselves of the C paradigm still available in C++.
But now it's often a quite acceptable performance degredation.
When it is not acceptable, you can optimize it away without rewriting the code that uses the no-pointer paradigm. Generally, you can override the copy constructor and the "=" operator and start trading pointers and reference counting and avoid all the copying. Since you know your class is used as a variable and not referenced by pointers, you know your destructors will be called. You know no one is passing pointers out of the object that can be abused, they only return objects that encapusulate the evil buffers.
Although it's possible to eliminate use of pointers I don't think that is necessary, it's sufficient to reduce the amount of manipulation you do. So I'm not a purist, I allow myself a few pointers to track in any given object, and rely on a consistent use of the system. But when delivering classes that are more like SDKs, then I have in fact used these "safe" practices.
The real complaint seems to be, perhaps not in your case, but in general, that the fact that there are unsafe -options- means the language itself is unsafe. I think it's more like the operation of a car. A car can be operated safely, and that reduces the chance of an accident to an almost arbitrarily high percentage. But I guess I admit there will be a few accidents over all the roadways, due to recklessness. But I don't want to give up cars for a vehicle that can make recklessness safe, somehow, unless it's performance is really just as good as a car. I mean, going 5 miles an hour is a solution that won't really do compared to good defensive driving.
BUT! I actually do think you're right, I should look at ML, or OCaml, or Scheme. I'm far more suspicious of the idea that VM based languages are the new general purpose language, but other compiled languages, of course, offer their own unique paradigms that are not offered in C++ and if there isn't a sort of automatic pentalty that cannot be optimized away reliably, then I'm inclined to assume that the additional paradigm(s) are further useful tools.
Oh, C is compiled... learn something new every day, don't I?
uh, maybe because the VM doesn't produce machine code, it executes pseudo code. For each pseudo code instruction there is some amount of code it executes in the VM to actually run the program, code written in a compiled language.
And you may claim it's feasable and perfectly so to think that recompiling code while it's running can be faster than just running compiled code, but I don't think that's too feasable at all, because really there is just a single program running, the VM, and I do not think a general purpose program such as a VM designed to do anything the language can do, will, in fact, run faster than a program just designed to perform it's specific function.
If your savior is runtime-calculated optimization, keep in mind there is nothing to stop me from doing the similar runtime optimization in C... if there was, the VM couldn't do it either.