C++ brought object oriented programming to the mainstream.
Since C++ doesn't do object oriented progamming, that's hard to beleive. Do you perhaps mean that it brought enough of the semblance of OOP to the mainstream to hold back the development of proper OOP systems by at least a decade?
C++ brought exception handling to the mainstream.
Nope, not with you on that one. Exception handling was being done for years. Did you perhaps think that programs just crashed when they hit an error in data?
More recently, C++ brought generic programming to the mainstream.
Again, that's not really true. Generic programming helps you get around some of the shortcomings in C++, but it was no big deal to people used to real OOP, who by and large have better ways to do the same stuff.
What would it take for you to not consider C++ a failure?
To see adverts for it in the job market. To find it hard to work as a professional programmer without using it. To be told by clients and employers that they require C++ skills. These things haven't happened in the last five years and they were never common. C, Java, Perl, VB are all much more successful than C++, which was and always will be an ugly hack.
Given that it's likely most of the software that most of the people reading your comment use today is written in C++, I can only assume that you're trolling?
No. I use Gentoo and I don't see a lot of C++ go past during updates and the programs that do use it are not particularly "self documented". As to the earlier point, Java and C# would have appeared in some form regardless of C++. They owe much more to the failure of Smalltalk to take off than they do to the supposed success of C++, while their syntax comes from C, just like the vast majority of C++'s does. Java certainly would have happened as long as no popular language had a garbage collector, which is a basic requirement of an Object Oriented system.
I must have missed the memo that C++ had "failed".
In the sense that it made no real difference. The programming world today is largely the way it is because of C, not C++. If C++ had never happened, but C, Smalltalk and Simula etc. still had happened, then I don't think there would be any noticable difference in modern programming style or technique, not even much difference in syntax. I think, anyway.
C++ is more "self documenting" than most languages, when coded properly.
That's what they all say. Every language is self documenting when "coded properly". C++ failed in part because of the unfounded belief that its supporters had in its abilities, all of which resided not in the language itself but in the programmer's ability to "code properly". Sadly, there is nothing in the language to enforce such coding practice and it is as rare in C++ as any language.
you were my student I would ask you to leave my class.
I would gladly leave a class taken by someone that values learning so little.
You are a fool and a selfish bastard to boot. No one said anything about hiding knowledge away, the issue was those who have spent the time to become skiled and then put the effort into teaching should have the right to be paid so they can eat. Who the hell are you to call people like that lazy? What's so amazing about you that other people should just work for you for free?
You sir show no ability to one analyze another person's thoughts and two create his own.
Because I refuse to be your info-slave? Catch a grip. Better yet: piss off.
The first dictionary writers were mostly hobbyists and received very little compensation for their work.
Yes, and three hundred years later their work is interesting but not anything like the depth and quality we use now.
Sure you probably need a Phd to write an article on magnetism but that doesn't mean you couldn't write one during your free time. I never suggested a pure amateur could produce good work. However people with experience can donate some free time to a good cause. It can be done. Einstein while working in a patent office finished his PhD thesis and wrote 3 influential papers.
That's true, but there is no reasonable argument that people that have spent years, decades even, getting to the level where they understand a deeply complex topic so well that they can explain it to those outside the field are "lazy" if they don't then share it all with the rest of the world for free.
Calling someone a fucking moron because you felt threatened is not grown-up.
This is also true, but calling someone a fucking moron for saying something fucking moronic like "the professionals who discredit Wikipedia are lazy because they themselves have the time and resources to donate a professional article to the public" is perfectly grown-up. If you want to be treated like an intelligent person then you need to try acting like one.
Is it so complicated and technical that only its author could possibly understand it, and only then after devoting years of his professional life to it?
If you replace "and" with "or" in that question the answer is: yes, this is professional level material that would take years to understand well enough to write down an explanation of this detail that a non-professional could at least understand and follow. That's HARD.
People can be brilliant in their spare time. To say otherwise belies a defeatist attitude that sets the creativity bar very low: then the only valid option becomes to give up and just start watching "reality" TV.
On the contrary, I think the Wiki-fanatics' attitude is the defeatist one. The idea that anything which is so hard that only years of study can reveal its subtleties is not worth knowing strikes at the very basis of civilisation. It's the equivilent of Bart Simpson's "You can't win; don't even bother trying".
Personally, I find it to be plenty useful already. I don't necessarily trust it as authoritative but I'm fairly paranoid about trusting anything I haven't personally witnessed anyway.
That's how I feel too, and I have contributed to it in some small ways. Suggesting that simply getting a lot of hobbiest together and setting them to the task will ever result in a top-lievel encycopedia is simply fantasy, though. Real hard-core, in-depth articles in any field need a level of research that only a tiny, tiny number of hobbiest could approach today.
The so-called professionals and academics who frown on Wikipedia are ignorant and lazy.
Or maybe they're not all living at home/university with buckets of free time that they don't need paid for.
Wikipedia is good, but if you want consistantly high quality you need to give people compensation for the amount of time they would need to spend to do a good job. Unless you're indepedantly weathy this is a real issue: people have to eat.
Did he work something out with his wife so she could keep hers?
In ye olden days an heiress (usually an only surviving child who happened to be a woman) would carry on the family name by splicing it with her husband's. This is also reflected in heraldry and is the origin of many quartered and "per pale" coats of arms where the two coats were combined.
Presumably, TBL is decended from one of these families.
Is is a good book in itself but the emotional connection with Vimes that had been built up over the series gave it an extra punch. Without that I think it's "just" a very good book; with it, it's a great book.
I've always considered "Lords and Ladies" to be the best of the discworld novels.
No, that would be "Nightwatch". Admittedly it needs the other 25 books standing behind it, but the power that gives the characters and the setting make Nightwatch one of the best fantasy books I've ever read. L&L's good, though.
I do have the British animated features, but to be honest, those look like only negligibly more than 300 EUR were spent...
The problem with those is there's no sense of timing in the delivery. It sounds as if everyone recorded their lines separately and the director just spliced them together. I know that's probably how it was done, but the art of directing an animation lies at least partly in hiding that fact.
I.T. workers can glean all the information they need to do their job from google, because we put all that information in there.
Did we? I thought a mindless, badly programmed robot program put it in with no editorial intervention from IT workers or anyone else for that matter, and then left it to a hoplessly easily rigged ranking system to pull out again in no coherent order. Also, of course, anything before about 1995 may as well be in a locked filing cabinet on the moon for all Google knows about it.
Google does not contain everything on the Web.
The Web does not contain everything on the Net.
The Net does not contain everything humans have discovered or thought.
Until then, you may well have to read the entire book, just to glean that one paragraph of information you really required.
God, yes! Imagine having to actually have context! Actually understand the point being made!? How barbaric! Thank heaven for all those little bloggers working away to distill all knowledge into tiny little factoids that can be "published" on their sites so no one need ever read or write a substantial argument again. Heroes, they are, heroes.
maybe he *could* find the results he's looking for in google.
If he could he'd have to, like everyone else, wade through the mountains of innane uneducated, misinformed shit that google throws up from the bloggers. The idea of using Google as a serious research tool today is childish and moronic and only shows how low your expectation of quality is. Google has become almost worthless for anything more advanced than "who was in that film?"
May be he wants us to search the catalogue and browse through thousands of books to find that one paragraph about something I wish to know for my paper.
A perfect vindication of what the man was saying. That's a classic blogger response: just give me the paragraph. No context needed, no weighing up of the argument, just give me the bit that backs up my pre-conceived idea so I can spew it back out again somewhere else.
But considering that the threats were true, if the wars were not waged, then another building would have collapsed or a nuclear bomb would have hit LA.
Is that "LA" as in "La-la land" which seems to be where you live? Talk about clueless.
Bloggers, the prawns of the information superhightway.
Well, this isn't flamebait either, but I was very, very glad when I finally convinced my girlfriend that after sitting through Jacksons first two craptastic Rings films I was not going to waste any more money on him. I hope I never see the third one (or the first two again for that matter).
I can't think of a worse director than Peter Jackson.
So there you have it: one man's meat and all that. Funny old world, isn't it?
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Since C++ doesn't do object oriented progamming, that's hard to beleive. Do you perhaps mean that it brought enough of the semblance of OOP to the mainstream to hold back the development of proper OOP systems by at least a decade?
C++ brought exception handling to the mainstream.
Nope, not with you on that one. Exception handling was being done for years. Did you perhaps think that programs just crashed when they hit an error in data?
More recently, C++ brought generic programming to the mainstream.
Again, that's not really true. Generic programming helps you get around some of the shortcomings in C++, but it was no big deal to people used to real OOP, who by and large have better ways to do the same stuff.
What would it take for you to not consider C++ a failure?
To see adverts for it in the job market. To find it hard to work as a professional programmer without using it. To be told by clients and employers that they require C++ skills. These things haven't happened in the last five years and they were never common. C, Java, Perl, VB are all much more successful than C++, which was and always will be an ugly hack.
TWW
No. I use Gentoo and I don't see a lot of C++ go past during updates and the programs that do use it are not particularly "self documented". As to the earlier point, Java and C# would have appeared in some form regardless of C++. They owe much more to the failure of Smalltalk to take off than they do to the supposed success of C++, while their syntax comes from C, just like the vast majority of C++'s does. Java certainly would have happened as long as no popular language had a garbage collector, which is a basic requirement of an Object Oriented system.
Does this really matter?
TWW
In the sense that it made no real difference. The programming world today is largely the way it is because of C, not C++. If C++ had never happened, but C, Smalltalk and Simula etc. still had happened, then I don't think there would be any noticable difference in modern programming style or technique, not even much difference in syntax. I think, anyway.
Obviously, C++ programmers might not agree!
TWW
Err, as soon as it came out? It has not really revolutionised even C programmers, let alone the world of programming generally, has it?
B) No worthwhile language will stop you from writing crap code, because it will also stop you from writing anything useful.
Possibly true.
TWW
That's what they all say. Every language is self documenting when "coded properly". C++ failed in part because of the unfounded belief that its supporters had in its abilities, all of which resided not in the language itself but in the programmer's ability to "code properly". Sadly, there is nothing in the language to enforce such coding practice and it is as rare in C++ as any language.
TWW
I would gladly leave a class taken by someone that values learning so little.
You are a fool and a selfish bastard to boot. No one said anything about hiding knowledge away, the issue was those who have spent the time to become skiled and then put the effort into teaching should have the right to be paid so they can eat. Who the hell are you to call people like that lazy? What's so amazing about you that other people should just work for you for free?
You sir show no ability to one analyze another person's thoughts and two create his own.
Because I refuse to be your info-slave? Catch a grip. Better yet: piss off.
TWW
Yes, and three hundred years later their work is interesting but not anything like the depth and quality we use now.
Sure you probably need a Phd to write an article on magnetism but that doesn't mean you couldn't write one during your free time. I never suggested a pure amateur could produce good work. However people with experience can donate some free time to a good cause. It can be done. Einstein while working in a patent office finished his PhD thesis and wrote 3 influential papers.
That's true, but there is no reasonable argument that people that have spent years, decades even, getting to the level where they understand a deeply complex topic so well that they can explain it to those outside the field are "lazy" if they don't then share it all with the rest of the world for free.
Calling someone a fucking moron because you felt threatened is not grown-up.
This is also true, but calling someone a fucking moron for saying something fucking moronic like "the professionals who discredit Wikipedia are lazy because they themselves have the time and resources to donate a professional article to the public" is perfectly grown-up. If you want to be treated like an intelligent person then you need to try acting like one.
TWW
If you replace "and" with "or" in that question the answer is: yes, this is professional level material that would take years to understand well enough to write down an explanation of this detail that a non-professional could at least understand and follow. That's HARD.
People can be brilliant in their spare time. To say otherwise belies a defeatist attitude that sets the creativity bar very low: then the only valid option becomes to give up and just start watching "reality" TV.
On the contrary, I think the Wiki-fanatics' attitude is the defeatist one. The idea that anything which is so hard that only years of study can reveal its subtleties is not worth knowing strikes at the very basis of civilisation. It's the equivilent of Bart Simpson's "You can't win; don't even bother trying".
TWW
That's how I feel too, and I have contributed to it in some small ways. Suggesting that simply getting a lot of hobbiest together and setting them to the task will ever result in a top-lievel encycopedia is simply fantasy, though. Real hard-core, in-depth articles in any field need a level of research that only a tiny, tiny number of hobbiest could approach today.
TWW
I don't see what you mean. Why are they not there? Why do you think they are helping with Wikipedia?
TWW
Writing the article on magnetism that's in my copy of Britannica is not something anyone could do as a hobby.
Go away and play with Google and pretend it's a research tool; come back when you've grown up.
TWW
Or maybe they're not all living at home/university with buckets of free time that they don't need paid for.
Wikipedia is good, but if you want consistantly high quality you need to give people compensation for the amount of time they would need to spend to do a good job. Unless you're indepedantly weathy this is a real issue: people have to eat.
TWW
However, Tim is British and most of the options you list are very very rare here.
TWW
In ye olden days an heiress (usually an only surviving child who happened to be a woman) would carry on the family name by splicing it with her husband's. This is also reflected in heraldry and is the origin of many quartered and "per pale" coats of arms where the two coats were combined.
Presumably, TBL is decended from one of these families.
TWW
Superb. Made me laugh.
Is is a good book in itself but the emotional connection with Vimes that had been built up over the series gave it an extra punch. Without that I think it's "just" a very good book; with it, it's a great book.
Site navigation is not a valid use. Links are a valid navigation method, plugins and other shit are not.
Blocking *.swf would render some sites completely unusable.
This is true, but by definition those sites weren't worth visiting in the first place.
TWW
Yes, why not have him shit all over every good writer's work? Commit suicide would be more like it. Talentless fuck.
TWW
No, that would be "Nightwatch". Admittedly it needs the other 25 books standing behind it, but the power that gives the characters and the setting make Nightwatch one of the best fantasy books I've ever read. L&L's good, though.
I do have the British animated features, but to be honest, those look like only negligibly more than 300 EUR were spent...
The problem with those is there's no sense of timing in the delivery. It sounds as if everyone recorded their lines separately and the director just spliced them together. I know that's probably how it was done, but the art of directing an animation lies at least partly in hiding that fact.
TWW
Did we? I thought a mindless, badly programmed robot program put it in with no editorial intervention from IT workers or anyone else for that matter, and then left it to a hoplessly easily rigged ranking system to pull out again in no coherent order. Also, of course, anything before about 1995 may as well be in a locked filing cabinet on the moon for all Google knows about it.
TWW
God, yes! Imagine having to actually have context! Actually understand the point being made!? How barbaric! Thank heaven for all those little bloggers working away to distill all knowledge into tiny little factoids that can be "published" on their sites so no one need ever read or write a substantial argument again. Heroes, they are, heroes.
maybe he *could* find the results he's looking for in google.
If he could he'd have to, like everyone else, wade through the mountains of innane uneducated, misinformed shit that google throws up from the bloggers. The idea of using Google as a serious research tool today is childish and moronic and only shows how low your expectation of quality is. Google has become almost worthless for anything more advanced than "who was in that film?"
TWW
A perfect vindication of what the man was saying. That's a classic blogger response: just give me the paragraph. No context needed, no weighing up of the argument, just give me the bit that backs up my pre-conceived idea so I can spew it back out again somewhere else.
But considering that the threats were true, if the wars were not waged, then another building would have collapsed or a nuclear bomb would have hit LA.
Is that "LA" as in "La-la land" which seems to be where you live? Talk about clueless.
Bloggers, the prawns of the information superhightway.
TWW
I can't think of a worse director than Peter Jackson.
So there you have it: one man's meat and all that. Funny old world, isn't it?
TWW
Didn't your mama tell you not to run in the house? This is exactly what she was thinking of!
Interesting moderation: factual information is trolling now, is it?