I don't see how OO changes it. To me you would run into a problem with not wanting to implement everything twice or 100x. For example the connection between sin(x) and the Taylor series I would have in Algebra not Matrix. But if I want to compute a sin function on a matrix space I'm going to want to use the Taylor series. Why should I have to re-implement all that code?
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Or to be less mathy. I have "imports" and "cars" as classes why not inherit both for Toyota objects?
And Ada doesn't support tail recursion for the simple reason that well written software shouldn't need recursion. Additionally it's actually terribly inefficient, Ada was also meant for embedded systems. Do you realise what happens every time you call a function? Your processor puts the program counter and other registers on the stack and then jumps to the function call.
That's what happens without tail recursion which is why you want tail recursion. What happens with tail recursion is the call gets rewritten for iterative execution. Wikipedia has a good article describing the difference is C and assembler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_call You don't get stack overflow from tail recursion anymore than you would in any procedural approach with iterators.
As for well written software not needing recursion of course of it does. Many problems can be handled by:
If complex do a simple computation that results in a modifier and a simpler input If simple do a simple computation.
That situation calls for recursion. Of course anything recursive can be expressed iteratively but then the iterative implementation details end up hiding the core algorithm. Boilerplate code hides the function.
So for example here is quicksort written recursively:
Well in languages like Haskell I use them all the time. For example if I'm doing algebra on a matrix I want to inheret from the algebra library and the matrix library.
So something like 3x^2 + 4x + 7, where x = [[2,3], [1,1]] can be used.
What platform agnostic languages exist that operate through browsers? That takes you back to Flash... I'm not getting what it is you really want. If it is going to work in a non hackish way there needs to be something on the client's system to handle it.
If it is the browser then HTML, otherwise it is a pluggin. Unless you want some other entirely different system that's just triggered by the browser like Active X or Java.
Ada wasn't bad and certainly capturing more bugs at compile time is wonderful. One of things I love about Haskell is that generally if the program compiles it does what you wanted it to. I save a ton of time with debugging.
A new Ada like language prodecedural with light object orientation, static and strong compile time checks with extensive libraries and financial backing would be good.
As an aside, Ada doesn't have closures, it doesn't have tail recursion... even in the 1970s this was the reason ironically enough that the LISP community wasn't worried about Ada. So in term of Clojure... no it wouldn't solve the problems that Clojure is best suited for.
We have technologies for web apps. The arguable most feature rich best was from Microsoft, Active-X. But Flash, Java, Shockwave are also all contenders. So was Silverlight. But they failed because web developers are skeptical of Microsoft.
It'll be used more by web developers wanting to make desktop apps, but I guess that's the idea.
Well yes that's precisely the idea. The entire next generation of developers is learning to develop for the web. They don't know how to make desktop apps. Microsoft doesn't want to be be IBM trying to teach younger developers how to write COBOL.
The problem is that just as C and COBOL were designed to solve totally different problems.NET and HTML5 were designed to solve totally different problems.
You may be missing a crucial component of the tablet buyers teens to early 20s who have access but don't own computers i.e. they have one at school, their parents own one... Otherwise I agree that tablets are 2ndary not primary computers.
As for Microsoft.... I doubt they will pull the trigger in the end. Every time they bring out an OS they struggle with powerful new technologies (windows filesystem and palladium in the last cycle) and every time they are confronted with the fact that the reason people use Windows is backwards compatibility. Lose backwards compatibility and
a) enterprises refuse to upgrade b) people who do upgrade re-evaluate their OS choices.
Now the good thing for Microsoft is that most people re-evaluating their OS choices today would still pick Windows (and I say this as quarter century Unix guy who just bought the Retina Mac).
Windows XP mode, seems like a 1/2 way OK transition. If they could make it a little more seamless: i.e. run the XP windows against a virtualized XP kernel but no XP desktop, like OS/2 used to do for Window 3 that would be better and I think that will allow them to move people off their legacy applications. But the main thing is Microsoft has to commit to their users in a believable way to breaking compatibility longer term and so far they've been unwilling to do that.
Take language A and use libraries from language B where A and B have totally different ideologies about everything. We need a good LISP and we need a good set of modern libraries for that LISP. But yeah mixing them kinda sucks.
That's why there is no easy to explicitly do things such as pointers, gotos, and operator overloading
The reason there was no pointers was that pointer manipulations were highly machine dependent. Java emerged out of Oak and the slogan "write once run anywhere" was key to its popularity.
Goto -- came from the whole philosophy that goto leads to bad code.
Operator overloading and multiple inheritance are both examples where subtle shifts in code can lead to enormous shifts in how the compiler views the code. One of the key aspects of Java was making sure that side effects to changing code were contained.
Yes I would suggest that. And this isn't unique, for example with IBM's G5 processor they moved the bulk of the line downmarket when Microsoft offered to commit to 50m units for the XBox. A large committed customer can shift a producer's view of the market. We've had very high resolutions screens for a while, they sold mostly for medical uses at the $10k-20k range. No one, was building them in a way for mass distribution. Without the subsidies and commitments that Apple provided it wasn't safe.
I agree that Samsung could easily do whatever they want on screens. But without Apple, why would they? What products do they have that need those screens?
For a product that has expensive fixed costs, how you depreciate effects how you compute profit margins. That's the point. There is no objective way to look at this for which statistics exist easily or possibly at all. The companies might not even know that data.
The point I'm making is that you are trying to think of this across all their factories in a single quarter. A better way to think of this is in terms of the life cycle of a factory. A young factory (high end) needs high end products, they don't care what's happening to the older factories. While the older factories need low end products.
I would suggest to you thinking about this problem the wrong way. Generally the same equipment in a factor is not used to make low end or high parts. Often these are totally different factories. The manufacturers may own both but the high end factories serve the high end market and the low end factories serve the low end market.
As far as the profit model... it comes down to how they choose to depreciate their assets. Lets say a factory costing $1b makes a computer widget that can make 1m units a month:
for months 0-6 costs $150 to fabricate and sells for $500 for months 7-12 costs $140 to fabricate and sells for $400 for months 12-24 costs $130 to fabricate and sells for $300 for months 24-36 costs $120 to fabricate and sells for $200 for months 36-48 costs $100 to fabricate and sells for $150 for months 48-60 costs $100 to fabricate and sells for $100
And anytime after month 36 that factory could be converted in 3 months time for $A to make widget v2 that sells for the same but only costs $75 to fabricate.
How you choose to depreciate the factory during those 60 months has a lot to do with how you view your profits. For example you could depreciate the entire factory during the 36 months since it becomes obsolete...
Apple is about 90% of the laptops over $1000. Apple is around 0% of the laptops under $1000. It depends whether you are talking low end or high end screens.
As far as profits, Apple is a phone company that also makes other stuff. As far as computers Apple is incredibly dominant, approaching 90% of the over $1000 laptop market.
VS and XCode support statically typed languages. How to provide anything like those services to dynamically typed languages has been complex. There are some IDEs out there for dynamic but the development is definitely much stronger on the static side.
Those things are all UI. They might be beneath the covers, like the very first one "Quartz Extreme" but that's what allows for GUI effects. Saying that those are UI changes is like saying engine changes don't effect driving.
Chrome OS still uses the same tools, it just uses cloud storage.
No it isn't just cloud storage, the applications aren't meaningfully local. That's a huge change.
Even thin clients back to an AS/400 with text based forms provide you the same interface whether you use a laptop with full software stack or a thin client.
What laptop ran OS/400 (now I-Series OS)?
I don't see corporate computers going 100% web due to restrictions when you're traveling. By the time SaaS catches up to allow offline use you circle back to beefier machines and the cycle continues.
Once you allow offline use you are no longer a truly thin client. That's where I'm drawing the line.
As for the last comment about blowing images on.... I agree. VMWare View type stuff is great. That's just not what the article is about.
Well that's fine. But if he wants to hire for a highly specialized skill set he should have to pay much more. That makes it obviously that training would be the better option.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how OO changes it. To me you would run into a problem with not wanting to implement everything twice or 100x. For example the connection between sin(x) and the Taylor series I would have in Algebra not Matrix. But if I want to compute a sin function on a matrix space I'm going to want to use the Taylor series. Why should I have to re-implement all that code?
___
Or to be less mathy. I have "imports" and "cars" as classes why not inherit both for Toyota objects?
And Ada doesn't support tail recursion for the simple reason that well written software shouldn't need recursion. Additionally it's actually terribly inefficient, Ada was also meant for embedded systems. Do you realise what happens every time you call a function? Your processor puts the program counter and other registers on the stack and then jumps to the function call.
That's what happens without tail recursion which is why you want tail recursion. What happens with tail recursion is the call gets rewritten for iterative execution. Wikipedia has a good article describing the difference is C and assembler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_call You don't get stack overflow from tail recursion anymore than you would in any procedural approach with iterators.
As for well written software not needing recursion of course of it does. Many problems can be handled by:
If complex do a simple computation that results in a modifier and a simpler input
If simple do a simple computation.
That situation calls for recursion. Of course anything recursive can be expressed iteratively but then the iterative implementation details end up hiding the core algorithm. Boilerplate code hides the function.
So for example here is quicksort written recursively:
quicksort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]
quicksort [] = []
quicksort (p:xs) = (quicksort (filter (< p) xs)) ++ [p] ++ (quicksort (filter (>= p) xs))
Doing that iteratively gets you involved in all sorts of bounds checking and computing lengths of arrays and....
Well in languages like Haskell I use them all the time. For example if I'm doing algebra on a matrix I want to inheret from the algebra library and the matrix library.
So something like 3x^2 + 4x + 7, where x = [[2,3], [1,1]] can be used.
What platform agnostic languages exist that operate through browsers? That takes you back to Flash... I'm not getting what it is you really want. If it is going to work in a non hackish way there needs to be something on the client's system to handle it.
If it is the browser then HTML, otherwise it is a pluggin. Unless you want some other entirely different system that's just triggered by the browser like Active X or Java.
How is what you are proposing different from SEAM ( http://seamframework.org/ ).
Ada wasn't bad and certainly capturing more bugs at compile time is wonderful. One of things I love about Haskell is that generally if the program compiles it does what you wanted it to. I save a ton of time with debugging.
A new Ada like language prodecedural with light object orientation, static and strong compile time checks with extensive libraries and financial backing would be good.
As an aside, Ada doesn't have closures, it doesn't have tail recursion... even in the 1970s this was the reason ironically enough that the LISP community wasn't worried about Ada. So in term of Clojure... no it wouldn't solve the problems that Clojure is best suited for.
We have technologies for web apps. The arguable most feature rich best was from Microsoft, Active-X. But Flash, Java, Shockwave are also all contenders. So was Silverlight. But they failed because web developers are skeptical of Microsoft.
So what can Microsoft do?
It'll be used more by web developers wanting to make desktop apps, but I guess that's the idea.
Well yes that's precisely the idea. The entire next generation of developers is learning to develop for the web. They don't know how to make desktop apps. Microsoft doesn't want to be be IBM trying to teach younger developers how to write COBOL.
The problem is that just as C and COBOL were designed to solve totally different problems .NET and HTML5 were designed to solve totally different problems.
You may be missing a crucial component of the tablet buyers teens to early 20s who have access but don't own computers i.e. they have one at school, their parents own one... Otherwise I agree that tablets are 2ndary not primary computers.
As for Microsoft.... I doubt they will pull the trigger in the end. Every time they bring out an OS they struggle with powerful new technologies (windows filesystem and palladium in the last cycle) and every time they are confronted with the fact that the reason people use Windows is backwards compatibility. Lose backwards compatibility and
a) enterprises refuse to upgrade
b) people who do upgrade re-evaluate their OS choices.
Now the good thing for Microsoft is that most people re-evaluating their OS choices today would still pick Windows (and I say this as quarter century Unix guy who just bought the Retina Mac).
Windows XP mode, seems like a 1/2 way OK transition. If they could make it a little more seamless: i.e. run the XP windows against a virtualized XP kernel but no XP desktop, like OS/2 used to do for Window 3 that would be better and I think that will allow them to move people off their legacy applications. But the main thing is Microsoft has to commit to their users in a believable way to breaking compatibility longer term and so far they've been unwilling to do that.
Clojure has an incredibly hard job.
Take language A and use libraries from language B where A and B have totally different ideologies about everything. We need a good LISP and we need a good set of modern libraries for that LISP. But yeah mixing them kinda sucks.
That's why there is no easy to explicitly do things such as pointers, gotos, and operator overloading
The reason there was no pointers was that pointer manipulations were highly machine dependent. Java emerged out of Oak and the slogan "write once run anywhere" was key to its popularity.
Goto -- came from the whole philosophy that goto leads to bad code.
Operator overloading and multiple inheritance are both examples where subtle shifts in code can lead to enormous shifts in how the compiler views the code. One of the key aspects of Java was making sure that side effects to changing code were contained.
Just saw numbers: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120612PD219.html
Retina screens (in volume) are running them 4x the cost of the other screens. So about 8% by volume of screens but about 30% by volume of cost.
Yes I would suggest that. And this isn't unique, for example with IBM's G5 processor they moved the bulk of the line downmarket when Microsoft offered to commit to 50m units for the XBox. A large committed customer can shift a producer's view of the market. We've had very high resolutions screens for a while, they sold mostly for medical uses at the $10k-20k range. No one, was building them in a way for mass distribution. Without the subsidies and commitments that Apple provided it wasn't safe.
I agree that Samsung could easily do whatever they want on screens. But without Apple, why would they? What products do they have that need those screens?
For a product that has expensive fixed costs, how you depreciate effects how you compute profit margins. That's the point. There is no objective way to look at this for which statistics exist easily or possibly at all. The companies might not even know that data.
The point I'm making is that you are trying to think of this across all their factories in a single quarter. A better way to think of this is in terms of the life cycle of a factory. A young factory (high end) needs high end products, they don't care what's happening to the older factories. While the older factories need low end products.
I would suggest to you thinking about this problem the wrong way. Generally the same equipment in a factor is not used to make low end or high parts. Often these are totally different factories. The manufacturers may own both but the high end factories serve the high end market and the low end factories serve the low end market.
As far as the profit model... it comes down to how they choose to depreciate their assets. Lets say a factory costing $1b makes a computer widget that can make 1m units a month:
for months 0-6 costs $150 to fabricate and sells for $500
for months 7-12 costs $140 to fabricate and sells for $400
for months 12-24 costs $130 to fabricate and sells for $300
for months 24-36 costs $120 to fabricate and sells for $200
for months 36-48 costs $100 to fabricate and sells for $150
for months 48-60 costs $100 to fabricate and sells for $100
And anytime after month 36 that factory could be converted in 3 months time for $A to make widget v2
that sells for the same but only costs $75 to fabricate.
How you choose to depreciate the factory during those 60 months has a lot to do with how you view your profits. For example you could depreciate the entire factory during the 36 months since it becomes obsolete...
Apple is about 90% of the laptops over $1000. Apple is around 0% of the laptops under $1000. It depends whether you are talking low end or high end screens.
As far as profits, Apple is a phone company that also makes other stuff. As far as computers Apple is incredibly dominant, approaching 90% of the over $1000 laptop market.
That model of Mac came out in early 1984 not 1986. Computers were improving rapidly back then.
Well RedHat has bought a cert for Fedora. I assume Suse will do the same thing. So hopefully Joe Blow gets pushed towards Suse.
VS and XCode support statically typed languages. How to provide anything like those services to dynamically typed languages has been complex. There are some IDEs out there for dynamic but the development is definitely much stronger on the static side.
Tell me what you think the word "proprietary" means. I don't think you are using the word correctly which is why you are having trouble.
Standards compliance is far better now than it was 10 years ago. I've been using KHTML and Gecko exclusively for over a decade with few problems.
Those things are all UI. They might be beneath the covers, like the very first one "Quartz Extreme" but that's what allows for GUI effects. Saying that those are UI changes is like saying engine changes don't effect driving.
Chrome OS still uses the same tools, it just uses cloud storage.
No it isn't just cloud storage, the applications aren't meaningfully local. That's a huge change.
Even thin clients back to an AS/400 with text based forms provide you the same interface whether you use a laptop with full software stack or a thin client.
What laptop ran OS/400 (now I-Series OS)?
I don't see corporate computers going 100% web due to restrictions when you're traveling. By the time SaaS catches up to allow offline use you circle back to beefier machines and the cycle continues.
Once you allow offline use you are no longer a truly thin client. That's where I'm drawing the line.
As for the last comment about blowing images on.... I agree. VMWare View type stuff is great. That's just not what the article is about.
Well that's fine. But if he wants to hire for a highly specialized skill set he should have to pay much more. That makes it obviously that training would be the better option.