An ideal programming environment makes it easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing, makes easy things easy, and hard things possible.
The latter two PHP does a tolerable job on, considering what it is. It's not a good job by any means, but there are worse.
Where people like me start bagging on PHP is that for a very long time, PHP just about forced you to do the wrong thing. Then, they'd fix the wrong thing by adding another wrong thing. Then, they'd add backwards compatibility options for the first two wrong things, which set incorrectly constituted a new wrong thing entirely, and added a fourth wrong way to do something.
The canonical example of this was their handling of the construction of strings to go to the database. A number of wrong answers were provided. At least some of them are now deprecated and scheduled for total removal, but at least some of them remain, and I'm not sure that the officially supported libraries support the right answer even now. Even if they do, it took them way too many programmer years to get around to it.
Finally, after ignoring the people who knew what they were talking about for nigh unto a decade, PHP finally implements something sort of like the right thing, albeit making it hard to find underneath all the wrong things that are still there. And best of all, inexperienced programmers have absolutely no clue that all these things are wrong things, and go happily using them to create application upon application that has all the security of swiss cheese.
Ironically, considering the target audience, it took an extremely experienced developer to actually create a safe PHP application, and even the good projects have tended to have little problems with certain combinations of those reverse compatibility flags and stuff like that.
Now, I've carefully written all this in the past tense because I'll admit I have long since written off PHP. I could name 5 languages easy I'd rather do a web app in today, and heck, I'd rather learn a new language from scratch than use PHP. But it may be the case that it has significantly improved to the point where none of this applies. However, from what I have heard from here and elsewhere, it's mostly not the case; the security issues have gotten somewhat better but it sounds like the language has become a monstrosity. (Note that while this is the inevitable fate of any developing language... some are concerned that Java recently passed this point with the Generics feature that seems to defy even Java book author's abilities to understand, let alone explain... PHP is hitting this point without actually passing through any point at which it was the best solution for any but the very smallest of problems.)
Generally speaking, the PHP programmer community is the least mature community I know. And I don't mean like not swearing and being respectful; I mean it's just like 15-year-olds are designing the language from their base of six months of experience programming. I find it ironic to find out PHP started as a collection of perl scripts; by dint of great effort and years of work, they managed to produce a product inferior to Perl in almost every way.
And why are the hardware demands so high? Is it because the games are that much cooler?
It's because the PS3 is so fast, it can complete an infinite loop in under a second. This allows them to do some amazing things with the graphics that the XBox360 is far too slow to accomplish.
If I found a nifty gadget and sent a link into Slashdot, and I had no attachment to it whatsoever, I just thought it was nifty, how would you know?
If you think about it, honestly maintaining your cynicism (e.g., even if I said I had no attachement to the product, you're not going to believe me), and follow through the implications, I think you'll come to the conclusion that there are one of two choices: Stop talking about products entirely, or run things that somebody, somewhere is going to consider a "slashvertisement". All things considered, for the purposes of the site, the former is preferable.
I wouldn't mind a clear statement of Slashdot's advertising policy. On the other hand, I'd lay money they don't run every ad that gets sent in, because I bet they're getting at least 25 a day, and I wouldn't be surprised if they said it was in the hundreds per day (because of people re-submitting the same products over and over, not necessarily hundreds of distinct products). Presumably the editors actually think this is neat and aren't just being handed wads of cash. If you want to hand Slashdot wads of cash and get your product advertised, that's what the banner ads are for.
There is a machine to clear a landmine field. There's a picture in this article, and if you catch it, an episode of Modern Marvels or something on the History Channel or the Discovery Channel about it.
It doesn't really contradict what you say about there being no easy way, though; this is the "easiest" but I still wouldn't call it easy. It's reasonably safe compared to any other technique, but still dangerous.
The thing about the MIHOP people is that they start with the strong belief that Bush is evil.
Fascinating. You have a blanket label for anyone who thinks Bush is evil.
"X is a MIHOP person -> X starts from the presumption that Bush is evil" -/-> "X believes Bush is evil -> X is a MIHOP person."
As further evidenced by that hey!'s reply.
This almost isn't a logical fallacy because the clause "X believes Bush is evil" is made up out of whole cloth, existing only in your criticism and not appearing at all in what you criticized.
You're in no position to be making implicit accusations about the intelligence of Bush supporters.
And to point out what you really ought to already be able to tell, this post simply points out that your argument is bad; it implies nothing about my own beliefs. I actually put them here but it just complicated things, and besides, they are irrelevant to my point. Suffice it to say they are neither black nor white on this issue.
I don't think this is a smokescreen.... the threat of a global caliphate is right up there with the threat of "The northern migration of killer bees", which is to say- insubstantial.
Your reply seems to contain the implicit assumption that it is impossible for the terrorists to have irrational goals, as you seem to be arguing "The possibility of them extending the global caliphate over the US is minimal, so they can't possibly be acting towards that goal."
You grant them much more rationality than I do, or than the evidence suggests.
I completely agree the logistics of what they want are completely impossible, but I don't think that they realize that, and even if they did I'm sure they'd just say Allah will fill in the blanks.
As for calling that "armchair psychology"... are you seriously going to deny that there are people who always want or need just a little bit more? "Greed" of all kinds dismissed as "armchair psychology"? Unfortunately, labelling that "armchair psychology" isn't going to make it go away.
I didn't make up the word "global" in "global Caliphate". It comes from the big-name terrorists themselves, including bin Laden.
Last I checked, the US is in fact located on the globe.
Like all conquerors with delusions of grandeur, they want N + 1, for all N. (And this is not an unusual trait; witness the number of people driven by wealth who just need 10% more to be happy.) If they get us out, they'll start wanting the next country. When they get that next country, they'll want the next. There is no "enough" for people like that. If you implement one part of Sharia, they'll want the next. If you manage to implement all of it, they'll start adding parts. Until we all bow to Allah, and of course to them as the representatives of Allah, they'll want more.
In fact it would be somewhat interesting to see what would happen if such conquerors actually did take over the globe, but it would probably be some variant of breaking up due to internal power squabbling.
Claiming to just want us gone is a smokescreen they use to convince people like you that what they want is reasonable, taking advantage of the fact that you believe their claims are stable and constant, rather than ever-changing in response to events. (That last bit is of course not a terrorist trait; changing conditions warrent changing responses. Failing to adapt has its usual penalties.) Today it advances their goals to claim they just want us out, but if we actually left, suddenly a new claim would be added. This is just simple psychology; for them to act any other way would be non-human, to expect them to act any other way is to expect them to be non-human. See also our amazing "rationalization" skills; there a similar process at work here, there's always (a reason it's not my fault)/(another thing you must do to satisfy me), without end.
OK, mods and repliers, let me spell it out more clearly. In the following argument:
The terrorists want to take away our freedoms.
The administration is taking away our freedoms.
The administration is therefore doing the terrorists work for them.
there is a logical fallacy. The two "freedoms" are not the same thing. The administration is taking away what we usually call our "civil liberties". The terrorists we are fighting are trying to take away, as I said, the freedom to not be muslim, to live under something other than the Islamic Caliphate, to choose something other than being Muslim, Dhimmi, or dead.
Terrorists don't care about "civil liberties" as such. They claim to care about creating the Islamic Caliphate, and taking it one step further, one can assume that they believe they will of course be running it, being Chosen by Allah and all that.
This is pretty close to objective truth, unless you really think that the Muslim terrorists really do just want to take your free speech away, and are willing to murder, kill, and even die just to strip of your civil liberties and for no other reason. If that's "flamebait", frankly that says more about the community or the moderator than me.
Thus, the argument is over-simplified and not really useful for thinking. The argument that "If our enemies want X, we must not give them X" (which is what this is trying for) is always oversimplified; to use that logic is to concede far too much control to the enemy. The question of whether or not a given civil liberty must be modified somehow is one that must be considered independently from whether "the terrorists" want it.
A couple of you lept to the conclusion that this therefore implies that I think civil liberty must be curtailed. That's even weaker thinking than the original argument; that an argument is bad does not imply that the conclusion is false! Plus I have an established history of being on the side of civil liberties; I ran a website about it for years. That means I want to see good arguments used all the more, and I dislike bad arguments that lead to conclusion I agree with all the more. There are good reasons not to curtail civil liberties. We don't need bad ones!
While there is some truth to this, the real freedom the terrorists of today want to take away is The Freedom To Be Not Muslim.
This does not immediately "disprove" your argument, but it does show your argument is a radical oversimplification, to the point where it has more rhetorical value than any sort of substantiative policy discrimination value.
You either license to everyone you intend to allow use of your patent or you lose it.. you should not be allowed to hide in wait and opportunistically/arbitrarily ambush companies and developers.
That would be disasterous. You forget to account for the number of companies who do real work and hold patents for MAD purposes. Give those companies lawyer's a choice between "enforcement" and "losing the patent", and a significant proportion of them will choose "enforcement".
Perl is an overly complicated, syntactically-challenged, unstructured kitchen sink of a language. The next major version of perl needs to be developed with more of a plan, and less of a "a little of this, and a little of that" philosophy.
Rest assured, Perl 6 has planning in abundance.
You'll probably be less happy to learn that the guiding principle seems to be a "lot of this, lot of that" philosophy.
But, this time with a plan.
(My personal call on Perl 6? It's time to just ship it. Whatever "it" is. After a while the value lost to not having anything at all outweighs the cost of shipping nothing useful. Although, honestly, I'd rather see a useful Parrot that makes it possible to run Python, Perl, Ruby, and TCL through the same VM than Perl 6.)
No programming methodology I know of says "just shut your eyes and follow this recipe and you can stop planning and thinking entirely!" Now, plenty of people's misconceptions about methodologies incorporate that, but I've never seen anybody actually say that.
XP, probably the one the most people think this of, really just says to pull your planning window in much closer to the immediate future than most methodologies do; nowhere does it say to not think at all, it just says not to think about the next use, only this use and the existing uses.
(Personally I don't advocate something quite that radical, but I do agree that people do very often make the mistake of planning too far into the uncertain future and getting it wrong. However, while I won't pretend I can reliably see six months into the future, I am capable of discerning many needs I'll have next week, and I don't feel guilty about sometimes risking a bit of extra functionality built correctly into the system now rather than a refactoring later. But it is important to realize that every time you try to read the tea leaves, it is a risk, subject to standard cost/benefit and risk/reward analysis. XP goes a little too far by saying you should just set the benefit and reward to "0" in your planning.)
Re:Not so sure about the visit count being useful.
on
Dealing with Phishing
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· Score: 1
Honesty compels me to admit I read that as a feature provided by the site, not the browser.
If you program the browser to do something noxious if you go straight to a site and submit a form on your very first visit, you might get some value out of it. However, that might false positive too often to be useful; only trying it could tell.
Which leads to a lot of code churn and a system where noone really knows what a given subsystem is doing, unless you were the last one to touch it.
Two counterpoints:
This is different than normal coding practice how?
It's all about costs and benefits. Sure, there are the downsides you mention, but on the other hand, aggressive refactoring means you don't necessarily live with your first design forever and ever, amen, as (go figure!) your first design also happens to be your worst. So, is it worth it? Depends on your situation. But in my experience, between "code churn" and "first generation design enshrined in concrete forever", the former is very preferable on all but the shortest time scales. YMMV.
Why do we constantly look for the "next big thing" when the "big thing" is simply experience?
To know how important experience is, one of two things needs to be true: You either need to have it, or you need to be someone who is still interested in "wisdom" in this knowledge-centric era, and be willing to listen to those who have experience, and pick the correct people who say experience is important and believe them*.
Both are fairly rare.
The rest follows from "rarity" in the obvious manner.
(*: I believe wisdom is underrated nowadays, but I won't pretend that the problem of figuring out who to listen to is not itself hard.)
The other thing is that there are next big things, but I suspect we are slowly but surely running out of "next big things" that will be comprehensible to more than, say, 25% of practicing programmers. Switch to Ruby, learn how to really use it, and add a good automated testing philosophy in, and you've gone a long ways towards extracting all the additional productivity you can get out of your environment without a major upheaval. For instance, I think it's reasonably likely (although not certain) that functional programming is finally going to come out as a reasonable paradigm over the next 10 years as it will be best able to take advantage of multi-core systems without completely upheaving how you write programs, but we're going to lose a lot of programmers on that transition, because it just doesn't click for some people. And that's a major change.
and yet this writeup seems to focus very strongly on the straw man that private activites can be curtailed on the idea that the students are being graciously allowed athletic scholarships.
Expanding on ScentCone's point, a strawman argument is an argument imputed to the opposition, which is then the focus of the rebuttal.
If people are actually arguming that "private activites can be curtailed on the idea that the students are being graciously allowed athletic scholarships" then by definition it can't be a straw man.
Straw man isn't a label you can just apply willy-nilly to this argument and then use it to discard the argument; that's weak thinking.
But I find the true irony of your post is this:
The state also gives out medicare and a number of other social benefits to people.. maybe washington should be allowed to selectively deny us those benefits in the same way?
This actually is a strawman. The point of the athletic argument is the right of the athletes to voluntarily enter in to some sort of contract that has real effects. Medicare and other social benefits are not contracts, and are thus not comparable.
(And anybody in a rush to smack on the reply button and "correct" that statement had better be able to describe the difference between "a law granting benefits" and a "contract". There may be similarities, but there are significant differences which would need to be carefully addressed too.)
Of course, like most straw men, I believe you aren't actually trying to be disingenuous; I think you actually don't fully understand the argument in question or you'd realize your strawman point doesn't apply to the given arguments. So, is it any wonder that you are mystified at how anybody could argue for what you think they are arguing for?
Not so sure about the visit count being useful.
on
Dealing with Phishing
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· Score: 1, Insightful
You have read this comment 42 times, therefore it is trustworthy. Please reply with your social security number and mother's maiden name.
I'm not sure that visit counts are very useful, as there is only a narrow window between the very beginning, where it is useless because it is basically 0, and where it becomes useless because it's just a big, meaningless number. Will you notice if your visit count goes from 123 straight to 125? Will you even notice if it goes from 124 to 543?
Of course you want to say yes, because it looks like I'm asking "Can you tell the difference between 543 and 124?" and of course the answer is yes. But the real question I'm asking is, "Can you tell if a number secreted away in the corner of a busy webpage that you probably don't even know exists and have probably forgotten about if you did changes from 124 to 543?" I think that if you're honest with yourself, the answer is no.
It's a good brainstorming idea, but I don't think that's going to help much.
On the other hand, customizable interfaces would probably help a lot, but that's a lot of work, and you're going to have to half-force people to do customizations if you want it to work, because most people would just stick with the default. Perhaps randomize (within reason) some of the customization parameters? Sure, it'll add support load, but so does phishing, so you'd have to do a careful analysis to see if you come out ahead; it could go either way.
If you change your statement to: The winning bid on ebay is the highest that someone will pay for it, *if they put their maximum bid in on time*, then I'll agree with you.
Damn. That's what I meant to say. You are correct.
Beyond that, I still disagree, but I'd just be repeating myself (and I hate threads that amount to people just repeating their arguments back and forth at each other), so I'll just let the reader decide which of us is more convincing.
Slashdot Mirror
All civilization [is] just an effort to impress the opposite sex; and sometimes the same sex.
I don't see why everyone is so critical of PHP.
An ideal programming environment makes it easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing, makes easy things easy, and hard things possible.
The latter two PHP does a tolerable job on, considering what it is. It's not a good job by any means, but there are worse.
Where people like me start bagging on PHP is that for a very long time, PHP just about forced you to do the wrong thing. Then, they'd fix the wrong thing by adding another wrong thing. Then, they'd add backwards compatibility options for the first two wrong things, which set incorrectly constituted a new wrong thing entirely, and added a fourth wrong way to do something.
The canonical example of this was their handling of the construction of strings to go to the database. A number of wrong answers were provided. At least some of them are now deprecated and scheduled for total removal, but at least some of them remain, and I'm not sure that the officially supported libraries support the right answer even now. Even if they do, it took them way too many programmer years to get around to it.
Finally, after ignoring the people who knew what they were talking about for nigh unto a decade, PHP finally implements something sort of like the right thing, albeit making it hard to find underneath all the wrong things that are still there. And best of all, inexperienced programmers have absolutely no clue that all these things are wrong things, and go happily using them to create application upon application that has all the security of swiss cheese.
Ironically, considering the target audience, it took an extremely experienced developer to actually create a safe PHP application, and even the good projects have tended to have little problems with certain combinations of those reverse compatibility flags and stuff like that.
Now, I've carefully written all this in the past tense because I'll admit I have long since written off PHP. I could name 5 languages easy I'd rather do a web app in today, and heck, I'd rather learn a new language from scratch than use PHP. But it may be the case that it has significantly improved to the point where none of this applies. However, from what I have heard from here and elsewhere, it's mostly not the case; the security issues have gotten somewhat better but it sounds like the language has become a monstrosity. (Note that while this is the inevitable fate of any developing language... some are concerned that Java recently passed this point with the Generics feature that seems to defy even Java book author's abilities to understand, let alone explain... PHP is hitting this point without actually passing through any point at which it was the best solution for any but the very smallest of problems.)
Generally speaking, the PHP programmer community is the least mature community I know. And I don't mean like not swearing and being respectful; I mean it's just like 15-year-olds are designing the language from their base of six months of experience programming. I find it ironic to find out PHP started as a collection of perl scripts; by dint of great effort and years of work, they managed to produce a product inferior to Perl in almost every way.
Did you pay?
('course, at $7, is it really worth fighting for it?)
And why are the hardware demands so high? Is it because the games are that much cooler?
It's because the PS3 is so fast, it can complete an infinite loop in under a second. This allows them to do some amazing things with the graphics that the XBox360 is far too slow to accomplish.
(Old joke, old joke...)
If I found a nifty gadget and sent a link into Slashdot, and I had no attachment to it whatsoever, I just thought it was nifty, how would you know?
If you think about it, honestly maintaining your cynicism (e.g., even if I said I had no attachement to the product, you're not going to believe me), and follow through the implications, I think you'll come to the conclusion that there are one of two choices: Stop talking about products entirely, or run things that somebody, somewhere is going to consider a "slashvertisement". All things considered, for the purposes of the site, the former is preferable.
I wouldn't mind a clear statement of Slashdot's advertising policy. On the other hand, I'd lay money they don't run every ad that gets sent in, because I bet they're getting at least 25 a day, and I wouldn't be surprised if they said it was in the hundreds per day (because of people re-submitting the same products over and over, not necessarily hundreds of distinct products). Presumably the editors actually think this is neat and aren't just being handed wads of cash. If you want to hand Slashdot wads of cash and get your product advertised, that's what the banner ads are for.
A "product" category wouldn't be all bad, though.
There is a machine to clear a landmine field. There's a picture in this article, and if you catch it, an episode of Modern Marvels or something on the History Channel or the Discovery Channel about it.
It doesn't really contradict what you say about there being no easy way, though; this is the "easiest" but I still wouldn't call it easy. It's reasonably safe compared to any other technique, but still dangerous.
Fascinating. You have a blanket label for anyone who thinks Bush is evil.
"X is a MIHOP person -> X starts from the presumption that Bush is evil" -/-> "X believes Bush is evil -> X is a MIHOP person."
As further evidenced by that hey!'s reply.
This almost isn't a logical fallacy because the clause "X believes Bush is evil" is made up out of whole cloth, existing only in your criticism and not appearing at all in what you criticized.
You're in no position to be making implicit accusations about the intelligence of Bush supporters.
And to point out what you really ought to already be able to tell, this post simply points out that your argument is bad; it implies nothing about my own beliefs. I actually put them here but it just complicated things, and besides, they are irrelevant to my point. Suffice it to say they are neither black nor white on this issue.
I don't think this is a smokescreen.... the threat of a global caliphate is right up there with the threat of "The northern migration of killer bees", which is to say- insubstantial.
Your reply seems to contain the implicit assumption that it is impossible for the terrorists to have irrational goals, as you seem to be arguing "The possibility of them extending the global caliphate over the US is minimal, so they can't possibly be acting towards that goal."
You grant them much more rationality than I do, or than the evidence suggests.
I completely agree the logistics of what they want are completely impossible, but I don't think that they realize that, and even if they did I'm sure they'd just say Allah will fill in the blanks.
As for calling that "armchair psychology"... are you seriously going to deny that there are people who always want or need just a little bit more? "Greed" of all kinds dismissed as "armchair psychology"? Unfortunately, labelling that "armchair psychology" isn't going to make it go away.
I didn't make up the word "global" in "global Caliphate". It comes from the big-name terrorists themselves, including bin Laden.
Last I checked, the US is in fact located on the globe.
Like all conquerors with delusions of grandeur, they want N + 1, for all N. (And this is not an unusual trait; witness the number of people driven by wealth who just need 10% more to be happy.) If they get us out, they'll start wanting the next country. When they get that next country, they'll want the next. There is no "enough" for people like that. If you implement one part of Sharia, they'll want the next. If you manage to implement all of it, they'll start adding parts. Until we all bow to Allah, and of course to them as the representatives of Allah, they'll want more.
In fact it would be somewhat interesting to see what would happen if such conquerors actually did take over the globe, but it would probably be some variant of breaking up due to internal power squabbling.
Claiming to just want us gone is a smokescreen they use to convince people like you that what they want is reasonable, taking advantage of the fact that you believe their claims are stable and constant, rather than ever-changing in response to events. (That last bit is of course not a terrorist trait; changing conditions warrent changing responses. Failing to adapt has its usual penalties.) Today it advances their goals to claim they just want us out, but if we actually left, suddenly a new claim would be added. This is just simple psychology; for them to act any other way would be non-human, to expect them to act any other way is to expect them to be non-human. See also our amazing "rationalization" skills; there a similar process at work here, there's always (a reason it's not my fault)/(another thing you must do to satisfy me), without end.
Touche.
- The terrorists want to take away our freedoms.
- The administration is taking away our freedoms.
- The administration is therefore doing the terrorists work for them.
there is a logical fallacy. The two "freedoms" are not the same thing. The administration is taking away what we usually call our "civil liberties". The terrorists we are fighting are trying to take away, as I said, the freedom to not be muslim, to live under something other than the Islamic Caliphate, to choose something other than being Muslim, Dhimmi, or dead.Terrorists don't care about "civil liberties" as such. They claim to care about creating the Islamic Caliphate, and taking it one step further, one can assume that they believe they will of course be running it, being Chosen by Allah and all that.
This is pretty close to objective truth, unless you really think that the Muslim terrorists really do just want to take your free speech away, and are willing to murder, kill, and even die just to strip of your civil liberties and for no other reason. If that's "flamebait", frankly that says more about the community or the moderator than me.
Thus, the argument is over-simplified and not really useful for thinking. The argument that "If our enemies want X, we must not give them X" (which is what this is trying for) is always oversimplified; to use that logic is to concede far too much control to the enemy. The question of whether or not a given civil liberty must be modified somehow is one that must be considered independently from whether "the terrorists" want it.
A couple of you lept to the conclusion that this therefore implies that I think civil liberty must be curtailed. That's even weaker thinking than the original argument; that an argument is bad does not imply that the conclusion is false! Plus I have an established history of being on the side of civil liberties; I ran a website about it for years. That means I want to see good arguments used all the more, and I dislike bad arguments that lead to conclusion I agree with all the more. There are good reasons not to curtail civil liberties. We don't need bad ones!
While there is some truth to this, the real freedom the terrorists of today want to take away is The Freedom To Be Not Muslim.
This does not immediately "disprove" your argument, but it does show your argument is a radical oversimplification, to the point where it has more rhetorical value than any sort of substantiative policy discrimination value.
You either license to everyone you intend to allow use of your patent or you lose it.. you should not be allowed to hide in wait and opportunistically/arbitrarily ambush companies and developers.
That would be disasterous. You forget to account for the number of companies who do real work and hold patents for MAD purposes. Give those companies lawyer's a choice between "enforcement" and "losing the patent", and a significant proportion of them will choose "enforcement".
Hmmm, is this a legitimate expansion of that acronym now?
I know it as "Sadism & Masochism".
Ask your mom to explain "S&M" to you.
(Sorry, "your mom" jokes are like the lowest form of humor, but boy did you walk into this one.)
The Sony Playstation S&M: Sony's got the "S" covered, guess where that leaves you?
Go here, click the button that makes Backslash go away, and hit save.
Slashdot has a lot of filtering features.
Perl is an overly complicated, syntactically-challenged, unstructured kitchen sink of a language. The next major version of perl needs to be developed with more of a plan, and less of a "a little of this, and a little of that" philosophy.
Rest assured, Perl 6 has planning in abundance.
You'll probably be less happy to learn that the guiding principle seems to be a "lot of this, lot of that" philosophy.
But, this time with a plan.
(My personal call on Perl 6? It's time to just ship it. Whatever "it" is. After a while the value lost to not having anything at all outweighs the cost of shipping nothing useful. Although, honestly, I'd rather see a useful Parrot that makes it possible to run Python, Perl, Ruby, and TCL through the same VM than Perl 6.)
There's a such thing as "unplanned refactoring"?
No programming methodology I know of says "just shut your eyes and follow this recipe and you can stop planning and thinking entirely!" Now, plenty of people's misconceptions about methodologies incorporate that, but I've never seen anybody actually say that.
XP, probably the one the most people think this of, really just says to pull your planning window in much closer to the immediate future than most methodologies do; nowhere does it say to not think at all, it just says not to think about the next use, only this use and the existing uses.
(Personally I don't advocate something quite that radical, but I do agree that people do very often make the mistake of planning too far into the uncertain future and getting it wrong. However, while I won't pretend I can reliably see six months into the future, I am capable of discerning many needs I'll have next week, and I don't feel guilty about sometimes risking a bit of extra functionality built correctly into the system now rather than a refactoring later. But it is important to realize that every time you try to read the tea leaves, it is a risk, subject to standard cost/benefit and risk/reward analysis. XP goes a little too far by saying you should just set the benefit and reward to "0" in your planning.)
Honesty compels me to admit I read that as a feature provided by the site, not the browser.
If you program the browser to do something noxious if you go straight to a site and submit a form on your very first visit, you might get some value out of it. However, that might false positive too often to be useful; only trying it could tell.
Two counterpoints:
Why do we constantly look for the "next big thing" when the "big thing" is simply experience?
To know how important experience is, one of two things needs to be true: You either need to have it, or you need to be someone who is still interested in "wisdom" in this knowledge-centric era, and be willing to listen to those who have experience, and pick the correct people who say experience is important and believe them*.
Both are fairly rare.
The rest follows from "rarity" in the obvious manner.
(*: I believe wisdom is underrated nowadays, but I won't pretend that the problem of figuring out who to listen to is not itself hard.)
The other thing is that there are next big things, but I suspect we are slowly but surely running out of "next big things" that will be comprehensible to more than, say, 25% of practicing programmers. Switch to Ruby, learn how to really use it, and add a good automated testing philosophy in, and you've gone a long ways towards extracting all the additional productivity you can get out of your environment without a major upheaval. For instance, I think it's reasonably likely (although not certain) that functional programming is finally going to come out as a reasonable paradigm over the next 10 years as it will be best able to take advantage of multi-core systems without completely upheaving how you write programs, but we're going to lose a lot of programmers on that transition, because it just doesn't click for some people. And that's a major change.
and yet this writeup seems to focus very strongly on the straw man that private activites can be curtailed on the idea that the students are being graciously allowed athletic scholarships.
Expanding on ScentCone's point, a strawman argument is an argument imputed to the opposition, which is then the focus of the rebuttal.
If people are actually arguming that "private activites can be curtailed on the idea that the students are being graciously allowed athletic scholarships" then by definition it can't be a straw man.
Straw man isn't a label you can just apply willy-nilly to this argument and then use it to discard the argument; that's weak thinking.
But I find the true irony of your post is this:
The state also gives out medicare and a number of other social benefits to people.. maybe washington should be allowed to selectively deny us those benefits in the same way?
This actually is a strawman. The point of the athletic argument is the right of the athletes to voluntarily enter in to some sort of contract that has real effects. Medicare and other social benefits are not contracts, and are thus not comparable.
(And anybody in a rush to smack on the reply button and "correct" that statement had better be able to describe the difference between "a law granting benefits" and a "contract". There may be similarities, but there are significant differences which would need to be carefully addressed too.)
Of course, like most straw men, I believe you aren't actually trying to be disingenuous; I think you actually don't fully understand the argument in question or you'd realize your strawman point doesn't apply to the given arguments. So, is it any wonder that you are mystified at how anybody could argue for what you think they are arguing for?
You have read this comment 42 times, therefore it is trustworthy. Please reply with your social security number and mother's maiden name.
I'm not sure that visit counts are very useful, as there is only a narrow window between the very beginning, where it is useless because it is basically 0, and where it becomes useless because it's just a big, meaningless number. Will you notice if your visit count goes from 123 straight to 125? Will you even notice if it goes from 124 to 543?
Of course you want to say yes, because it looks like I'm asking "Can you tell the difference between 543 and 124?" and of course the answer is yes. But the real question I'm asking is, "Can you tell if a number secreted away in the corner of a busy webpage that you probably don't even know exists and have probably forgotten about if you did changes from 124 to 543?" I think that if you're honest with yourself, the answer is no.
It's a good brainstorming idea, but I don't think that's going to help much.
On the other hand, customizable interfaces would probably help a lot, but that's a lot of work, and you're going to have to half-force people to do customizations if you want it to work, because most people would just stick with the default. Perhaps randomize (within reason) some of the customization parameters? Sure, it'll add support load, but so does phishing, so you'd have to do a careful analysis to see if you come out ahead; it could go either way.
If you change your statement to: The winning bid on ebay is the highest that someone will pay for it, *if they put their maximum bid in on time*, then I'll agree with you.
Damn. That's what I meant to say. You are correct.
Beyond that, I still disagree, but I'd just be repeating myself (and I hate threads that amount to people just repeating their arguments back and forth at each other), so I'll just let the reader decide which of us is more convincing.