Up through about mid 2010 their total userbase was still growing, but slowly. With a few exceptions like Dec 2011, they've been losing users even in the face of a growing market. Basically, even people who own and like BlackBerry find the competition more compelling. Because the vast majority of the cost is the carrier data fees they can't compete on price. Of cours if they were willing to move down market to the prepay carriers and go back to their strong suit: email and texting they could be a dominant player, but I think a company that still views itself as being essentially on par with Apple has a tough time building a strategy around fighting for the $12-20 / mo market. Further going low end might poison their ability to still sell to enterprise customers, where they do still have (but are losing fast) real advantages.
This is especially true given the billions in subsidies over the years.
What billions in subsidies? Telcos are heavily taxed, infrequently subsidized. The only subsidies they get are to deliver connection to rural parts of the country to compensate them for a losses.
I'm not sure where you are getting those numbers about elsewhere as far as speeds and costs. You are talking dual DS3 speeds there, I'm shocked at what a good deal consumer broadband is compared to commercial internet. America has some of the cheapest internet around. In terms of cost, FIOS for example tops out at 300/65 (for about $180/mo more). I get 25/25 for a $10/mo premium over the standard 15/5.
My daughter does this. From my perspective I've spending $60 / yr on Spotify for a teenager for all the music she wants. So I'm happy. Building a music collection costs a lot more.
I also pay for Pandora for myself since it has done a wonderful job of introducing me to new music I like and commercials are just painful. since Amazon's selection is better than Spotify' I still end up buying CDs, of the groups Pandora turns me onto. But I could see switching.
We get a sweet heart deal. In every state there is a public utility commission that sets rates and policies. States have the right to do that because utilities utilize government services. The government doesn't get to set the price of a meal at restaurants.
I think you mean Senator Sessions. And he didn't say that. What he said was that the US troops can help enforce a UN no fly zone without further approval because we have already signed the UN treaties which state we can do that. I'd love to see the War Powers act extended to essentially prevent the president from doing anything but purely emergency defensive actions without congressional approval. But we can't have that and have hundreds of thousands of troops actively deployed in hot spots.
All that being said, Panetta isn't changing policy that's been policy for 60 years. How do you think we got into Korea?
The deal is completely unusable for a single. You just can't consider Verizon with one phone. At 2 phones it is slightly worse. I have a 3 phone family plan. It is more or less a wash.
Apple defines Retina based on average distance held relative to pixels. Retina for a bill board is different than retina for a phone.
tan(a/s) = s/2d
where d = distance from displace, s = spacing between pixels and a = viewing angle of pixels (the angle till you see overlap). To get to what Apple calls "Retina" you need to get "a" down to 1 arc minute.
* = As an aside let me just point out that 1 arc minute is not correct in terms of the limits of human vision especially for kids. Likely we have to go through one more round of doubling to actually have "retina" displays.
I have no doubt that if local governments charged utilities fees they could be very very large. But we were talking about money generated by utilities charging them extra fees just makes the economic problem worse not better.
As an aside I don't think it really turns into much more than a tax. The utility pays a right of way fee to the owners of land which then get passed through as a cost for the using the utility i.e. water, gas, telco... All that does is move money from utility users to landowners which the local government could just do directly by decreasing property taxes and taxing utility use more.
We were talking about generating revenues for telcos. You are talking about an addition fee you want to change them. That's money flowing in the opposite direction.
Why can't this go in a base class in the way it does perfectly well in Java and.NET? Why would you want a different class for each of these?
I actually like JAVA's implementation with an over rideable.equals operator. The only problem with that implementation is that it kills one of the crucial components of equals, reflexivity i.e. a.equals(b) and b.equals(a) should in general be the same value and in Java you aren't guaranteed that. That solution of adding this sort of functionality into the base class is fine, though it moves away from OO design but in general data equality is what you want.
Read and Show though are exactly what I'm looking for. By bundling these with java.io (writeObject) objects can either have or not have this method, i.e. they can either implement or not implement the interface. And I'd say the fact that Java has this sort of interface approach is an example of the importance of MI that the designers of Java recognized. All interfaces are is multiple inheritance with better handling of the diamond problem. Similarly your comments on Database.
As for Alan Kay, you should read the article yourself, "that objects are a kind of mapping whose values are its behaviors." He talks about the reflexivity of data and functions which came from LISP. And that's precisely what I'm talking about and what is completely lost in languages like Java and C#.
This is the problem though, you can keep on adding cases until you break a solution and say "Hey look, I told you multiple inheritance was the solution!" but you're still completely wrong.
This is the same case from the start. Its just taken several rounds for you to see why you can't use a single hierarchy.
In this case you need to then question whether import even needs to be a class, or whether you just have, say, a product class with a country of origin property from which you can derive if it's imported, or just have an isImport property if you want, and a taxes data structure that includes the import taxes in it.
I don't want a taxes data structure I want hundreds of methods and objects having to do with imported vs. domestic. Imported objects may have far service offices. They have shipping times. They may have multiple conflicting law sets that apply to them.
And the whole point of object orientation is that methods are tied to data. That the object can respond to calls. If I have to go back to dealing with the data of an object and not the method I've just broken the whole OO paradigm and then I am doing procedural code.
You have a very computer oriented view of what OO was designed to be which is ironically precisely what OO was about moving away from.
No it wasn't. I was citing Meyer's Object Oriented Software Construction. I'd like a cite for your position about the origins of OO. Of course OO is computer oriented, it is a computer language design paradigm. I way of designing programming languages.
That's irrelevant to the point. A broken down problem is no less extensible, and no less reusable, it's arguably more so because a broken down component is far likely to be reusable.
Why would it be likely to be reusable? The reason is because it is generic, abstract. It is the abstraction processes not the object hierarchy that creates reusability.
This just demonstrates that you still don't get OO. You would simply have a property that defines where an animal originates/lives - tropical, temperate, etc
What's a property? A property in the OO sense has to respond to a method call. if x is a type of frog I want x.acceptableTemperature() to be a method. I don't want to do: x.origination.acceptableTemperature() otherwise I suddenly need to understand the internal structure of x and then I might as well just do:
acceptableTemperature (x.(*originationFunction())) and I'm back to procedural.
Optimally you Toyota to inherit from dozens of classes: Show -- that is can export to a string its structure Read -- that it can import a structure from a string Eq -- That I can determine if two car objects are the same car or not Cars -- Discussed Imports -- Discussed Database -- That is has methods for saving and recovering itself from the Database
etc... And it should inherit hundreds if not thousands of methods from that chain. Some but not most will be over ridden. When the programmer types "x.==(y)" the fact that way up in the chain equality of cars is inherited and they never even had to consider why this works, is the goal. That's not a failure of OO it is allowing OO to free the programmer for the mundane details of the base class. The person creating the finance component of the import export system shouldn't need to concern themselves with how the Cars class works anymore than they should need to understand in detail how the hard drive works.
Anyway... I think I've made the point that single hierarchies break down very fast. Obviously you can get buy with SI, people got by fine with no inheritance at all.
I remember those days. And what's changed other than far better access and a much larger base. For about $20 / mo over my cable bill I've got the equivalent of dual T1s at worst and often as much as 20 T1s worth of bandwidth which I can use pretty much however I like offering services. If I want a static IP and space on a shared server I can get that for about $100 for 3 years to offer pretty much what I like.
I'm sorry but I fail to see how I'm not far freer today than I was a quarter century ago with regard to the internet.
We don't hold all the cards if we want the internet to be a global system. We do hold all the cards if we want it to be a national system. But nothing they are proposing will effect internal communication.
when those in power here not only are against that, but want to turn over more of our sovereignty to the UN?
Huh? America is tremendously hostile to the United Nations. We violate UN provisions and resolutions constantly with little public disagreement. I don't see anything like what you are describing.
The "media bullshit" is what paid for the pipes. Without the media component the pipes very well might not be economically viable. The model of a generic carrier passing data selling bandwidth neutrally is a nice model in terms of minimizing interference, the problem is there is no evidence that it is actually marketable to most customers. People, and even most companies buy a service that includes are requires bandwidth they don't buy bandwidth.
So do as I said, if an import sits below a car, then have Import as your base class, so:
Import -> Car -> Mini Cooper
Import -> Suit -> Gucci
Stick your international duties in import, your wheels in car. This only further serves to demonstrate the point that most people think they need MI when they fail to grasp proper OO structure.
And with that structure how do you handle a GM or a Brooks Brother's Suit? You can't have Import as a base class for Car because not all cars are imports. You can't have Cars fork into Import and Domestic because you also need Import / Domestic for Suits and no Suits are Cars.
No, the whole idea of object orientation is to allow you to represent data, and actions on data in terms of objects. It does not do your job for you.
Why do you think programmers wanted to "represent data in terms of objects"? There was no desire to do this originally, the desire came from wanting to build complex trees of types.
Programmers wanted reusability. They wanted reusability for saving in time and reduction of errors. The approach to get reusability was genericisity (inheritance) and overloading (polymorphism). What made this safe was encapsulation. So yes the whole point is to do this job for you. To make it possible for people to use object libraries they don't understand. The same way people casually hit "square root" on a calculator long before they know how calculators determine a square root.
I don't know why you'd ever favour great hulking monolithic functions rather than breaking down the problem
Because I want software extensible. And that means that the vast majority of my code, hopefully 90% or more is not specific to the problem but is very general. So if the problem changes the code can still be used. That's the whole idea of the STL in C++.
Your point in the side comment "Well a Frog is an Animal and an Amphibian so it should inherit from both!" isn't what's being talked about. A better analogy is a "Well a Tropic Frog is an Amphibian and a tropical animal".
"Or to be less mathy. I have "imports" and "cars" as classes why not inherit both for Toyota objects?"
I don't really understand this example. Are you saying you might have imported cars? If not why not have Toyota inherit from ImportedCar, which inherits from Car? If your assertion is that you might have other types of imports than cars, then your base class is Import, from which Car inherits. I don't really see the problem?
Then I still have a problem
Car -> ImportedCar -> Mini Cooper is fine but
Suit -> ImportedSuit -> Gucci I have to re-implement the entire imported structure again.
A Mini has properties of Car (like wheels) and properties of imports (like international duites)
-----
Most of the solution revolves round breaking down the problem, and reusing those broken down chunks. If you're implementing a functon that has many many lines of code and then complaining about needing to reimplement that then the chances are that you could have broken down that function more and reused parts of it.
True, but the whole idea of object orientation in terms of encouraging reuse is to make that easy. If I have to do that sort of analysis why not just use a procedural language? The whole idea of object orientation is that I can casually inherit without having to have a deep understanding of what I'm inheriting and just use the properties I want. Having to take an already existing piece of code and break in entirely new ways just to add another class, is precisely the kind of problem OO programming was invented to avoid.
I agree with you that a touch screen won't work. Though Apple is switching people from mice to laptop style trackpads ( http://www.apple.com/magictrackpad/ ) more like a laptop configuration even for desktop users. And as a laptop & tablet & iPhone user I agree I use keyboard / mouse for my desktop I don't want to touch the screen. Heck I use ( http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/p/natural-ergonomic-keyboard-4000 ) when I use windows so I can touch the mouse less, much less wanting to touch the screen. The only place I've seen touch screen work well is where people are always choosing from a list of items, like a restaurant order / register and even there they would probably be faster typing.
On the other hand, exclude all that. The rest of the list above (i.e. vector graphics...) make sense.
As for Office on Arm you are basically talking about totally forking their product lines with an Arm: OS, office suite... The problem with that from Microsoft's perspective is keeping things in sync. Your point about different upgrade cycles for phones and computers being a great example of the problem.
Funny enough Haskell allows you to do that. What you are looking for is Monadic operators (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(functional_programming))
You can define arbitrary types and then use functions which invoke either
So for example say you are using Nat (natural numbers). type Nat = Zero | Suc Nat so for example 8 = Suc (Suc (Suc (Suc (Suc (Suc (Suc (Suc (Zero))))))))
Now you have fromInt:: Integer -> Either Nat given by fromInt x = if x >= 0
then Left x
else Right "Range Check Failure"
but you don't have to do that, rather you just use a bind (a function that tells you how to treat naturals like integers for computation) and return (a function that tells you how to make integers into Naturals... i.e. fromInt) and the system handles the details everywhere.
s. But I would argue the bigger problems is they are doing as they have done a million times in the past, they are creating a half assed copy of a popular thing and thinking their money and name will let them muscle their way in, and its a bad move.
I agree it is likely to be half assed. Microsoft as a company can't come together. And if they can't send out a clear message like Apple would, "this is the new direction, we are going here and you will be going here too" they can't get their base over this hump.
OTOH the Metro team is thinking in a substantial way about the issue of an interface for the next 20 years. If they are allowed to create a new interface and allowed to semi-rapidly diminish compatibility (i.e. com apps run in some sort of virtualized window) then it might not be half ased at all.
Things they are considering: -- searchable commands, no more hierarchical menus. -- unified notifications, no more pop up windows (same as Gnome, and OSX 10.8) -- multiple icons depending on size both within and outside apps (again like Apple)
etc... are really really good changes. I'm not sure how willing they are going to be to force this paradigm on their developers though. Microsoft has never had the relationship with developers that Apple has, there is no Microsoft equivalent of WWDC where Microsoft developers get their orders.
Your suggestion of Metro and Windows as two products is a good one. But then the problem shifts to Office. When Office builds a Metro version using Metro standards... or do they release two versions?
Tail recursion doesn't imply the compiler rewriting what the programmer wrote to me, it simply means using recursion in the return line.
A "tail recursive call" is one where recursion happens in the return line. For any language that allows recursion at all, "Tail recursion" as a language property means the language rewrites tail recursive calls as iterative during compile or execution.
In any case if the language wanted to allow recursion and offer reliability it could just flag on recursive calls it couldn't see how to transform.
You should really consider what the language was designed for. Anything that's unpredictable or might lead to problems at runtime was eliminated. And then people complain about not having them.
You can't simultaneously offer Ada as a general purpose language and then fall back on embedded systems and reliability when someone mentions Ada's limitations. Particularly when you were offering it as alternative to Clojure.
Either you want to argue that:
a) Ada is a special purpose language offering reliability at the expense of many paradigms b) Ada is a general purpose language.
And if (b) then its flaws get examined in contexts where reliability are not necessarily a primary concern. Clojure doesn't even pretend to offer a high degree of reliability. What is offers is the ability to use LISPs powerful abstraction and at the same time Java's vast libraries neither of which is particularly reliable.
Liking a special purposes languages isn't a problem, I was very sorry to see PostScript die. But you kind of have to decide in your own head how you want to pitch Ada. Ada is not a replacement for Clojure because it doesn't offer abstractions. It doesn't offer full closures (partial execution) either. That's a paradigm I use in virtually every program I write. Even memoizing is kinda painful (again it makes sense since easy memoizing means the run time engine makes choices about how to allocate tables).
So anyway I think you get my point. I agree with you that Ada might have been a good replacement for Java or for Visual Basic or any number of languages that don't encourage abstraction. This particular thread though, but Clojure is on the opposite extreme.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the nice things about Metro is that to get all the features you'll need:
excellent quality and responsive touch screens with higher dpis
a very good built in trackpad
light weight
All of which are expensive. So Microsoft is on your side.
Up through about mid 2010 their total userbase was still growing, but slowly. With a few exceptions like Dec 2011, they've been losing users even in the face of a growing market. Basically, even people who own and like BlackBerry find the competition more compelling. Because the vast majority of the cost is the carrier data fees they can't compete on price. Of cours if they were willing to move down market to the prepay carriers and go back to their strong suit: email and texting they could be a dominant player, but I think a company that still views itself as being essentially on par with Apple has a tough time building a strategy around fighting for the $12-20 / mo market. Further going low end might poison their ability to still sell to enterprise customers, where they do still have (but are losing fast) real advantages.
This is especially true given the billions in subsidies over the years.
What billions in subsidies? Telcos are heavily taxed, infrequently subsidized. The only subsidies they get are to deliver connection to rural parts of the country to compensate them for a losses.
I'm not sure where you are getting those numbers about elsewhere as far as speeds and costs. You are talking dual DS3 speeds there, I'm shocked at what a good deal consumer broadband is compared to commercial internet. America has some of the cheapest internet around. In terms of cost, FIOS for example tops out at 300/65 (for about $180 /mo more). I get 25/25 for a $10/mo premium over the standard 15/5.
At the state level, agreed. The policy right now is only to allow LFAs to tightly control rates in near monopoly situations: http://www.fcc.gov/guides/regulation-cable-tv-rates
However they are doing major cost shifting from urban to rural: http://www.broadband.gov/download-plan/
What would you want regulated that isn't?
My daughter does this. From my perspective I've spending $60 / yr on Spotify for a teenager for all the music she wants. So I'm happy. Building a music collection costs a lot more.
I also pay for Pandora for myself since it has done a wonderful job of introducing me to new music I like and commercials are just painful. since Amazon's selection is better than Spotify' I still end up buying CDs, of the groups Pandora turns me onto. But I could see switching.
We get a sweet heart deal. In every state there is a public utility commission that sets rates and policies. States have the right to do that because utilities utilize government services. The government doesn't get to set the price of a meal at restaurants.
I think you mean Senator Sessions. And he didn't say that. What he said was that the US troops can help enforce a UN no fly zone without further approval because we have already signed the UN treaties which state we can do that. I'd love to see the War Powers act extended to essentially prevent the president from doing anything but purely emergency defensive actions without congressional approval. But we can't have that and have hundreds of thousands of troops actively deployed in hot spots.
All that being said, Panetta isn't changing policy that's been policy for 60 years. How do you think we got into Korea?
The deal is completely unusable for a single. You just can't consider Verizon with one phone. At 2 phones it is slightly worse. I have a 3 phone family plan. It is more or less a wash.
Apple defines Retina based on average distance held relative to pixels. Retina for a bill board is different than retina for a phone.
tan(a/s) = s/2d
where d = distance from displace, s = spacing between pixels and a = viewing angle of pixels (the angle till you see overlap). To get to what Apple calls "Retina" you need to get "a" down to 1 arc minute.
* = As an aside let me just point out that 1 arc minute is not correct in terms of the limits of human vision especially for kids. Likely we have to go through one more round of doubling to actually have "retina" displays.
I have no doubt that if local governments charged utilities fees they could be very very large. But we were talking about money generated by utilities charging them extra fees just makes the economic problem worse not better.
As an aside I don't think it really turns into much more than a tax. The utility pays a right of way fee to the owners of land which then get passed through as a cost for the using the utility i.e. water, gas, telco... All that does is move money from utility users to landowners which the local government could just do directly by decreasing property taxes and taxing utility use more.
We were talking about generating revenues for telcos. You are talking about an addition fee you want to change them. That's money flowing in the opposite direction.
Why can't this go in a base class in the way it does perfectly well in Java and .NET? Why would you want a different class for each of these?
I actually like JAVA's implementation with an over rideable .equals operator. The only problem with that implementation is that it kills one of the crucial components of equals, reflexivity i.e. a.equals(b) and b.equals(a) should in general be the same value and in Java you aren't guaranteed that. That solution of adding this sort of functionality into the base class is fine, though it moves away from OO design but in general data equality is what you want.
Read and Show though are exactly what I'm looking for. By bundling these with java.io (writeObject) objects can either have or not have this method, i.e. they can either implement or not implement the interface. And I'd say the fact that Java has this sort of interface approach is an example of the importance of MI that the designers of Java recognized. All interfaces are is multiple inheritance with better handling of the diamond problem. Similarly your comments on Database.
As for Alan Kay, you should read the article yourself, "that objects are a kind of mapping whose values are its behaviors." He talks about the reflexivity of data and functions which came from LISP. And that's precisely what I'm talking about and what is completely lost in languages like Java and C#.
OK so you can show me the billions of dollars in invoices your right of way generated?
This is the problem though, you can keep on adding cases until you break a solution and say "Hey look, I told you multiple inheritance was the solution!" but you're still completely wrong.
This is the same case from the start. Its just taken several rounds for you to see why you can't use a single hierarchy.
In this case you need to then question whether import even needs to be a class, or whether you just have, say, a product class with a country of origin property from which you can derive if it's imported, or just have an isImport property if you want, and a taxes data structure that includes the import taxes in it.
I don't want a taxes data structure I want hundreds of methods and objects having to do with imported vs. domestic. Imported objects may have far service offices. They have shipping times. They may have multiple conflicting law sets that apply to them.
And the whole point of object orientation is that methods are tied to data. That the object can respond to calls. If I have to go back to dealing with the data of an object and not the method I've just broken the whole OO paradigm and then I am doing procedural code.
You have a very computer oriented view of what OO was designed to be which is ironically precisely what OO was about moving away from.
No it wasn't. I was citing Meyer's Object Oriented Software Construction. I'd like a cite for your position about the origins of OO. Of course OO is computer oriented, it is a computer language design paradigm. I way of designing programming languages.
That's irrelevant to the point. A broken down problem is no less extensible, and no less reusable, it's arguably more so because a broken down component is far likely to be reusable.
Why would it be likely to be reusable? The reason is because it is generic, abstract. It is the abstraction processes not the object hierarchy that creates reusability.
This just demonstrates that you still don't get OO. You would simply have a property that defines where an animal originates/lives - tropical, temperate, etc
What's a property? A property in the OO sense has to respond to a method call. if x is a type of frog I want x.acceptableTemperature() to be a method. I don't want to do: x.origination.acceptableTemperature() otherwise I suddenly need to understand the internal structure of x and then I might as well just do:
acceptableTemperature (x.(*originationFunction())) and I'm back to procedural.
Optimally you Toyota to inherit from dozens of classes:
Show -- that is can export to a string its structure
Read -- that it can import a structure from a string
Eq -- That I can determine if two car objects are the same car or not
Cars -- Discussed
Imports -- Discussed
Database -- That is has methods for saving and recovering itself from the Database
etc... And it should inherit hundreds if not thousands of methods from that chain. Some but not most will be over ridden. When the programmer types "x.==(y)" the fact that way up in the chain equality of cars is inherited and they never even had to consider why this works, is the goal. That's not a failure of OO it is allowing OO to free the programmer for the mundane details of the base class. The person creating the finance component of the import export system shouldn't need to concern themselves with how the Cars class works anymore than they should need to understand in detail how the hard drive works.
Anyway... I think I've made the point that single hierarchies break down very fast. Obviously you can get buy with SI, people got by fine with no inheritance at all.
I remember those days. And what's changed other than far better access and a much larger base. For about $20 / mo over my cable bill I've got the equivalent of dual T1s at worst and often as much as 20 T1s worth of bandwidth which I can use pretty much however I like offering services. If I want a static IP and space on a shared server I can get that for about $100 for 3 years to offer pretty much what I like.
I'm sorry but I fail to see how I'm not far freer today than I was a quarter century ago with regard to the internet.
We don't hold all the cards if we want the internet to be a global system. We do hold all the cards if we want it to be a national system. But nothing they are proposing will effect internal communication.
Huh? America is tremendously hostile to the United Nations. We violate UN provisions and resolutions constantly with little public disagreement. I don't see anything like what you are describing.
The "media bullshit" is what paid for the pipes. Without the media component the pipes very well might not be economically viable. The model of a generic carrier passing data selling bandwidth neutrally is a nice model in terms of minimizing interference, the problem is there is no evidence that it is actually marketable to most customers. People, and even most companies buy a service that includes are requires bandwidth they don't buy bandwidth.
And with that structure how do you handle a GM or a Brooks Brother's Suit? You can't have Import as a base class for Car because not all cars are imports. You can't have Cars fork into Import and Domestic because you also need Import / Domestic for Suits and no Suits are Cars.
Why do you think programmers wanted to "represent data in terms of objects"? There was no desire to do this originally, the desire came from wanting to build complex trees of types.
Programmers wanted reusability. They wanted reusability for saving in time and reduction of errors. The approach to get reusability was genericisity (inheritance) and overloading (polymorphism). What made this safe was encapsulation. So yes the whole point is to do this job for you. To make it possible for people to use object libraries they don't understand. The same way people casually hit "square root" on a calculator long before they know how calculators determine a square root.
Because I want software extensible. And that means that the vast majority of my code, hopefully 90% or more is not specific to the problem but is very general. So if the problem changes the code can still be used. That's the whole idea of the STL in C++.
Your point in the side comment "Well a Frog is an Animal and an Amphibian so it should inherit from both!" isn't what's being talked about. A better analogy is a "Well a Tropic Frog is an Amphibian and a tropical animal".
"Or to be less mathy. I have "imports" and "cars" as classes why not inherit both for Toyota objects?"
I don't really understand this example. Are you saying you might have imported cars? If not why not have Toyota inherit from ImportedCar, which inherits from Car? If your assertion is that you might have other types of imports than cars, then your base class is Import, from which Car inherits. I don't really see the problem?
Then I still have a problem
Car -> ImportedCar -> Mini Cooper
is fine but
Suit -> ImportedSuit -> Gucci
I have to re-implement the entire imported structure again.
A Mini has properties of Car (like wheels) and properties of imports (like international duites)
-----
Most of the solution revolves round breaking down the problem, and reusing those broken down chunks. If you're implementing a functon that has many many lines of code and then complaining about needing to reimplement that then the chances are that you could have broken down that function more and reused parts of it.
True, but the whole idea of object orientation in terms of encouraging reuse is to make that easy. If I have to do that sort of analysis why not just use a procedural language? The whole idea of object orientation is that I can casually inherit without having to have a deep understanding of what I'm inheriting and just use the properties I want. Having to take an already existing piece of code and break in entirely new ways just to add another class, is precisely the kind of problem OO programming was invented to avoid.
Yep. We are in a classic situation. People want:
a) Full featured applications
b) Web distribution
c) Security
d) No centralized approvals.
And don't understand they can only have 3 out of 4.
I agree with you that a touch screen won't work. Though Apple is switching people from mice to laptop style trackpads ( http://www.apple.com/magictrackpad/ ) more like a laptop configuration even for desktop users. And as a laptop & tablet & iPhone user I agree I use keyboard / mouse for my desktop I don't want to touch the screen. Heck I use ( http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/p/natural-ergonomic-keyboard-4000 ) when I use windows so I can touch the mouse less, much less wanting to touch the screen. The only place I've seen touch screen work well is where people are always choosing from a list of items, like a restaurant order / register and even there they would probably be faster typing.
On the other hand, exclude all that. The rest of the list above (i.e. vector graphics...) make sense.
As for Office on Arm you are basically talking about totally forking their product lines with an Arm: OS, office suite... The problem with that from Microsoft's perspective is keeping things in sync. Your point about different upgrade cycles for phones and computers being a great example of the problem.
Funny enough Haskell allows you to do that. What you are looking for is Monadic operators (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(functional_programming))
You can define arbitrary types and then use functions which invoke either
So for example say you are using Nat (natural numbers).
type Nat = Zero | Suc Nat
so for example
8 = Suc (Suc (Suc (Suc (Suc (Suc (Suc (Suc (Zero))))))))
Now you have fromInt:: Integer -> Either Nat
given by
fromInt x = if x >= 0
then Left x
else Right "Range Check Failure"
but you don't have to do that, rather you just use a bind (a function that tells you how to treat naturals like integers for computation) and return (a function that tells you how to make integers into Naturals... i.e. fromInt) and the system handles the details everywhere.
s. But I would argue the bigger problems is they are doing as they have done a million times in the past, they are creating a half assed copy of a popular thing and thinking their money and name will let them muscle their way in, and its a bad move.
I agree it is likely to be half assed. Microsoft as a company can't come together. And if they can't send out a clear message like Apple would, "this is the new direction, we are going here and you will be going here too" they can't get their base over this hump.
OTOH the Metro team is thinking in a substantial way about the issue of an interface for the next 20 years. If they are allowed to create a new interface and allowed to semi-rapidly diminish compatibility (i.e. com apps run in some sort of virtualized window) then it might not be half ased at all.
Things they are considering:
-- searchable commands, no more hierarchical menus.
-- unified notifications, no more pop up windows (same as Gnome, and OSX 10.8)
-- multiple icons depending on size both within and outside apps (again like Apple)
etc... are really really good changes. I'm not sure how willing they are going to be to force this paradigm on their developers though. Microsoft has never had the relationship with developers that Apple has, there is no Microsoft equivalent of WWDC where Microsoft developers get their orders.
Your suggestion of Metro and Windows as two products is a good one. But then the problem shifts to Office. When Office builds a Metro version using Metro standards ... or do they release two versions?
Tail recursion doesn't imply the compiler rewriting what the programmer wrote to me, it simply means using recursion in the return line.
A "tail recursive call" is one where recursion happens in the return line.
For any language that allows recursion at all, "Tail recursion" as a language property means the language rewrites tail recursive calls as iterative during compile or execution.
In any case if the language wanted to allow recursion and offer reliability it could just flag on recursive calls it couldn't see how to transform.
You should really consider what the language was designed for. Anything that's unpredictable or might lead to problems at runtime was eliminated. And then people complain about not having them.
You can't simultaneously offer Ada as a general purpose language and then fall back on embedded systems and reliability when someone mentions Ada's limitations. Particularly when you were offering it as alternative to Clojure.
Either you want to argue that:
a) Ada is a special purpose language offering reliability at the expense of many paradigms
b) Ada is a general purpose language.
And if (b) then its flaws get examined in contexts where reliability are not necessarily a primary concern. Clojure doesn't even pretend to offer a high degree of reliability. What is offers is the ability to use LISPs powerful abstraction and at the same time Java's vast libraries neither of which is particularly reliable.
Liking a special purposes languages isn't a problem, I was very sorry to see PostScript die. But you kind of have to decide in your own head how you want to pitch Ada. Ada is not a replacement for Clojure because it doesn't offer abstractions. It doesn't offer full closures (partial execution) either. That's a paradigm I use in virtually every program I write. Even memoizing is kinda painful (again it makes sense since easy memoizing means the run time engine makes choices about how to allocate tables).
So anyway I think you get my point. I agree with you that Ada might have been a good replacement for Java or for Visual Basic or any number of languages that don't encourage abstraction. This particular thread though, but Clojure is on the opposite extreme.