"We did not get access to kids as they were going through college"
At any university I've ever been, any university student or faculty can effectively get Microsoft software for free. Microsoft reps and speakers visit campuses frequently. There are Microsoft ads everywhere. What kind of access do they think they "didn't get"?
If students aren't choosing their products, it's not for lack of access or lack of money.
In the unchecked case I could get exceptions that I was completely unaware that could happen - even if I probably could _recover_ from them.
You always can get exceptions that you were completely unaware of, even in Java. Not only does Java have exception types that don't need to be declared, because the static exception declarations don't actually match the semantics of exceptions, people end up wrapping them so often that you still don't know what you're getting.
You shouldn't write recovery code where you think exceptions are thrown, you should write recovery code where it makes sense to write recovery code. Knowledge of the specific exceptions only helps with improving the quality of the recovery code, but the system really should do something sensible even for completely unknown exceptions.
Thinking like yours--namely driving recovery code through knowledge of where exceptions are raised--is why so many Java programs keep spewing out all those uncaught exceptions.
No, they only force people to indicate that they let that exception propagate upwards
That is what "concerning themselves with exceptions they don't know how to handle" means.
In the unchecked case I could get exceptions that I was completely unaware that could happen - even if I probably could handle them.
It's wrong handle exceptions just because you "could". Unless you have a clear reason and strategy to handle an exception, the correct thing is to leave it alone because there should be a reliable, general purpose exception handler above you in your call chain anyway.
Again with the presumptuousness. "No" Java GUI application runs flawlessly on Linux or OSX? Really? Perhaps you determine "flawless" as fully integrating as a native app with dbus or COM or whatever.
On Linux and OS X, Java GUI programs don't even reliably register the right characters in response to keystrokes, and they don't handle drag-and-drop quite right. I'd call that pretty big flaws.
Well, that's kind of the point: you don't want people messing with the booms, and if they try to get over the booms to the island, it seems pretty likely to me that they might be damaging them. I mean, how is a boat going to cross the boom without damaging it?
Sharron Angle's attempts to keep her old campaign pages out of the public record are reprehensible. However, Harry Reid's portrayal of her positions is also reprehensible, misrepresenting the reasons behind her votes (e.g., claiming that she is in effect supporting child molesters).
No, the real problem is that people don't give a damn about proper exception handling, checked or not.
Well, yes, that is the problem. Proper exception handling is to handle those exceptions that you know how to handle and to let all other exceptions propagate upwards.
Checked exceptions just make them more annoyed, because they have to do some work to get rid of them - therefore they go to the unchecked language.
Checked exceptions make proper exception handling harder because they force people to concern themselves with exceptions they don't know how to handle and they should just leave alone.
For one, if we are to keep copyright I would want compulsory global RAND licensing
Traditional US copyright has the doctrine of first sale. So, the free market works automatically: people could buy copies in the US and sell abroad and vice versa. Furthermore, technological protections against copying would automatically void copyright since they prevent content falling into the public domain after the copyright terms are up.
(Of course, for Europeans to complain that US content costs more in Europe is kind of ironic, given that the current copyright system was basically forced on the US by Europe under the assumption that there would be all this really valuable European content that needs protection against pirating by the un-creative minds of the US. As it turns out, most content people want to see actually comes from outside Europe these days, much of it from the US.)
(1) Render the table data in a canvas element. That's the direct equivalent of what Java does.
(2) Use a small HTML table and change the content dynamically in response to moving a slider. This is simple but won't look that good.
(3) Use a full HTML table but fill it in with empty, fixed size rows, then fill in the rows as they become visible. This is the least likely to work well on all browsers, but then Java isn't guaranteed to work well across browsers either.
It is reasonable if B also declares to throw that exception. Otherwise it must wrap it in XB. B must explicitly document that it is letting AX exception through. I don't see why is this a problem.
It's a problem because class B may have been written long before class A and because it knows nothing about class A other than those aspects of class A that are required by the interface between the two.
The problem is particularly serious with control abstractions. Just like a for(;;) {... } construct lets all exceptions pass through without declaration and without forcing you to catch them, so should classes, because many classes that implement control abstractions are just more sophisticated versions of for loops.
For example, class B may abstract a tree search, and it may be used with different classes. I may reasonably want to write (pseudo-code):
try {
result = new TreeSearch().search(new FileSystemTree("/"),"something"); } catch(IOException e) {... }
That is, TreeSearch.search invokes some methods on FileSystemTree that may trigger an IOException, but TreeSearch doesn't and shouldn't need to know about that.
The problem is kind of fixable if you have a file system in which classes like TreeSearch are parameterized not just by types but also by exceptions. But even that doesn't fix all cases, and it's a huge amount of bother for no demonstrable gain in program correctness.
The real problem with exception declarations is that they actually cause people to handle exceptions badly. Last I looked (a few years ago), the Java source code was full of bugs in exception handlers that people put in only because they were trying to make the compiler shut up about catching exceptions.
Parallel array is another topic on the agenda, which allows you to express in an almost declarative style operations on arrays,
And what "arrays" are those gioing to operate on? After 15 years and despite lots of broken promises, Java still doesn't even have usable multidimensional arrays.
But these are low-level techniques that should be used with care -- exactly because they can break things in unexpected ways. But this is not an argument against checked exceptions.
Java checked exceptions also fail for simple OOP techniques. If I define a class A with methods throwing exception AX and I give a reference to an instance of A to an instance of class B to get some work done for B, then it's reasonable to expect that I can get and catch AX exceptions when calling methods on B. In Java, I can't do that. It's a totally bizarre restriction that breaks common and basic abstractions.
Does Java still have checked exceptions in common use? In that case I envy you guys
Don't. Checked exceptions are unsound and a design mistake.
Scratching my head over which exceptions can spew out of a library is annoying,
You can never know which exceptions can spew out of a library, even in Java. You're supposed to catch the ones that are meaningful to you, let all others pass through, and then have a few general recovery points where you catch everything.
An HTML page with a table that has 20,000 lines with 8 columns takes just under a minute to render (depends on a machine, but it's a good estimate) and it only takes a second (or less) to render in a Java applet with the same table.
Well, the modern way of writing that is wit a mix of JavaScript and HTML; you can use the same tricks as you do in Java for incremental rendering, but it doesn't require the Java runtime.
Even today I am always mildly surprised to take a fairly complex GUI application I've developed on, say Windows, and drop it on another platform, like Linux or OSX, and watch it run flawlessly.
No Java GUI application runs "flawlessly" on Linux or OS X because the Java runtime gets a number of things wrong with desktop integration on Linux and OS X.
Besides Apple no one cares about consistency on the Desktop anymore. Have you looked at Microsoft apps lately?
The main problem isn't with looks, it's functional incompatibilities: keyboards not being mapped properly, drag-and-drop not working, preferences not getting stored properly, etc.
The Java software platform is a piece of software licensed as GPL. Anyone can take it, modify it and give it away to someone else.
Not quite; there is a separate non-GPL version. That happens to be the version that people actually use.
More importantly, Sun also had dozens of important patents related to Java that are now owned by Oracle. It is doubtful whether you can create a compliant Java implementation without infringing some of them.
While the phenomenon known as Java may in theory be owned by Oracle it is in practive decoupled enough to be independent.
In fact, Bach's situation is still the rule, not the exception: most composers, musicians, and other creative people have teaching or performing jobs. That's not just financially prudent, it's arguably artistically a good thing. Composers that live only off revenue from their sheet music are a small minority. Furthermore, for most people, copyright-related expenses are a net loss because the money they have to spend for their day jobs far exceeds what they themselves may make in income through copyright.
As the entity "Slashdot" I hereby decree that the whole idea of "Professional Artist" is forever banned. You have been demoted to busker.
Most "professional artists" make their living through teaching or performing; they need to buy tons of sheet music and other copyrighted materials to earn a living. Copyright is a net cost to them. Only a few stars actually manage to live just off of copyright-related revenues and not do anything else. In effect, copyright on sheet music ends up transferring money from a lot of artists with modest means to a few stars. It's far from clear that that's a good system.
Always remember - costs like studio time, special effects, actors, musicians, props, sets, insurance, essentially every cost involved in the production of your work magically disconnect from the work itself at the moment it is finalized. A ripped copy of that work has absolutely no moral, legal, or implied connection to any of those costs.
Perhaps those costs simply exceed the value that the end product has. That way, people are willing to listen/watch when the music/video is almost free, but they aren't willing to pay for it and they wouldn't consider it a great loss if the music/video hadn't been made in the first place. And some people even consider productions that involve large investments made in hopes of a large financial return to be generally bad, so that if elimination of copyright would discourage their creation, that would be a net gain for culture.
See, the arguments and background is a lot more complicated than the simplistic mantra of "copyright helps creative people get paid".
Unfortunately for him copyright is no longer a square deal and since people are now ignoring all copyrights, they're ignoring his too.
I don't know what you mean by "a square deal". Copyright has stopped being faithful to its original purpose, namely providing an incentive for the creation of useful content. Instead, it has turned into a convoluted set of laws that people build business empires on. It's not surprising that people are pissed off and starting to ignore it. Sheet music actually is a particularly obnoxious area of copyright law, with composers and music publishers having a long history of abusing copyright law and preventing works from ever entering the public domain.
Also, even if copyright were 100% enforced and enforceable, very few composers could live off copyright-related revenues; almost everybody needs a day-job anyway, usually teaching, and for those people, copyright-related revenue matters fairly little, but copyright-related expenses matter a lot. In effect, current music copyright funnels a lot of money from people who don't have that much to a few stars.
I'm not endorsing people breaking Brown's copyright (in fact, I find his music pretty awful and can't figure out why anybody would want to copy his stuff). Nevertheless, the current copyright system is broken, people are getting fed up, and that's why they violate copyrights. If Brown wants to do something about it, complaining isn't going to help, he needs to contribute to reforming the system. And reform means that people like him have to give something up.
Really, copyright debate boils down to free-loaders demanding free access to everything, and copyright holders demanding restrictions on everything. So long as either side refuses to acknowledge the flaws in their arguments we are not going to see reasonable debate about where copyright ought to be.
Really? How does it boil down to that? I thought there were lots of other parties to the debate, like librarians, archives, artists, etc. Many copyright holders (myself included) also don't like current copyright at all and would much prefer a different kind of copyright.
In fact, most of our copyright issues would vanish if we went back to traditional US copyright laws: 14 years + one 14 years extension if the author is still alive, with a registration requirement. I have yet to see an argument why traditional US copyright isn't the right choice.
Which "mainstream operating systems" would that be? Neither on OS X, UNIX, or Linux do you have to do anything special in order to get hardware acceleration of 2D graphics if the hardware and drivers support it. I got my first hardware accelerated 2D graphics card for X11 more than 20 years ago and even back then, it just accelerated all apps through the existing APIs.
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Does it also give me a world class soccer player's physique?
"We did not get access to kids as they were going through college"
At any university I've ever been, any university student or faculty can effectively get Microsoft software for free. Microsoft reps and speakers visit campuses frequently. There are Microsoft ads everywhere. What kind of access do they think they "didn't get"?
If students aren't choosing their products, it's not for lack of access or lack of money.
They may be polished and cheap, but I don't think they were ever particularly good compared to the state of the art.
In the unchecked case I could get exceptions that I was completely unaware that could happen - even if I probably could _recover_ from them.
You always can get exceptions that you were completely unaware of, even in Java. Not only does Java have exception types that don't need to be declared, because the static exception declarations don't actually match the semantics of exceptions, people end up wrapping them so often that you still don't know what you're getting.
You shouldn't write recovery code where you think exceptions are thrown, you should write recovery code where it makes sense to write recovery code. Knowledge of the specific exceptions only helps with improving the quality of the recovery code, but the system really should do something sensible even for completely unknown exceptions.
Thinking like yours--namely driving recovery code through knowledge of where exceptions are raised--is why so many Java programs keep spewing out all those uncaught exceptions.
No, they only force people to indicate that they let that exception propagate upwards
That is what "concerning themselves with exceptions they don't know how to handle" means.
In the unchecked case I could get exceptions that I was completely unaware that could happen - even if I probably could handle them.
It's wrong handle exceptions just because you "could". Unless you have a clear reason and strategy to handle an exception, the correct thing is to leave it alone because there should be a reliable, general purpose exception handler above you in your call chain anyway.
Again with the presumptuousness. "No" Java GUI application runs flawlessly on Linux or OSX? Really? Perhaps you determine "flawless" as fully integrating as a native app with dbus or COM or whatever.
On Linux and OS X, Java GUI programs don't even reliably register the right characters in response to keystrokes, and they don't handle drag-and-drop quite right. I'd call that pretty big flaws.
Well, that's kind of the point: you don't want people messing with the booms, and if they try to get over the booms to the island, it seems pretty likely to me that they might be damaging them. I mean, how is a boat going to cross the boom without damaging it?
Sharron Angle's attempts to keep her old campaign pages out of the public record are reprehensible. However, Harry Reid's portrayal of her positions is also reprehensible, misrepresenting the reasons behind her votes (e.g., claiming that she is in effect supporting child molesters).
No, the real problem is that people don't give a damn about proper exception handling, checked or not.
Well, yes, that is the problem. Proper exception handling is to handle those exceptions that you know how to handle and to let all other exceptions propagate upwards.
Checked exceptions just make them more annoyed, because they have to do some work to get rid of them - therefore they go to the unchecked language.
Checked exceptions make proper exception handling harder because they force people to concern themselves with exceptions they don't know how to handle and they should just leave alone.
For one, if we are to keep copyright I would want compulsory global RAND licensing
Traditional US copyright has the doctrine of first sale. So, the free market works automatically: people could buy copies in the US and sell abroad and vice versa. Furthermore, technological protections against copying would automatically void copyright since they prevent content falling into the public domain after the copyright terms are up.
(Of course, for Europeans to complain that US content costs more in Europe is kind of ironic, given that the current copyright system was basically forced on the US by Europe under the assumption that there would be all this really valuable European content that needs protection against pirating by the un-creative minds of the US. As it turns out, most content people want to see actually comes from outside Europe these days, much of it from the US.)
You have several options:
(1) Render the table data in a canvas element. That's the direct equivalent of what Java does.
(2) Use a small HTML table and change the content dynamically in response to moving a slider. This is simple but won't look that good.
(3) Use a full HTML table but fill it in with empty, fixed size rows, then fill in the rows as they become visible. This is the least likely to work well on all browsers, but then Java isn't guaranteed to work well across browsers either.
It is reasonable if B also declares to throw that exception. Otherwise it must wrap it in XB. B must explicitly document that it is letting AX exception through. I don't see why is this a problem.
It's a problem because class B may have been written long before class A and because it knows nothing about class A other than those aspects of class A that are required by the interface between the two.
The problem is particularly serious with control abstractions. Just like a for(;;) { ... } construct lets all exceptions pass through without declaration and without forcing you to catch them, so should classes, because many classes that implement control abstractions are just more sophisticated versions of for loops.
For example, class B may abstract a tree search, and it may be used with different classes. I may reasonably want to write (pseudo-code):
try { ...
result = new TreeSearch().search(new FileSystemTree("/"),"something");
} catch(IOException e) {
}
That is, TreeSearch.search invokes some methods on FileSystemTree that may trigger an IOException, but TreeSearch doesn't and shouldn't need to know about that.
The problem is kind of fixable if you have a file system in which classes like TreeSearch are parameterized not just by types but also by exceptions. But even that doesn't fix all cases, and it's a huge amount of bother for no demonstrable gain in program correctness.
The real problem with exception declarations is that they actually cause people to handle exceptions badly. Last I looked (a few years ago), the Java source code was full of bugs in exception handlers that people put in only because they were trying to make the compiler shut up about catching exceptions.
It is type safe (unlike ruby and groovy)
Ruby and Groovy are also type safe, they simply are dynamically typed.
Static typing is not necessarily an advantage.
Parallel array is another topic on the agenda, which allows you to express in an almost declarative style operations on arrays,
And what "arrays" are those gioing to operate on? After 15 years and despite lots of broken promises, Java still doesn't even have usable multidimensional arrays.
But these are low-level techniques that should be used with care -- exactly because they can break things in unexpected ways. But this is not an argument against checked exceptions.
Java checked exceptions also fail for simple OOP techniques. If I define a class A with methods throwing exception AX and I give a reference to an instance of A to an instance of class B to get some work done for B, then it's reasonable to expect that I can get and catch AX exceptions when calling methods on B. In Java, I can't do that. It's a totally bizarre restriction that breaks common and basic abstractions.
Does Java still have checked exceptions in common use? In that case I envy you guys
Don't. Checked exceptions are unsound and a design mistake.
Scratching my head over which exceptions can spew out of a library is annoying,
You can never know which exceptions can spew out of a library, even in Java. You're supposed to catch the ones that are meaningful to you, let all others pass through, and then have a few general recovery points where you catch everything.
An HTML page with a table that has 20,000 lines with 8 columns takes just under a minute to render (depends on a machine, but it's a good estimate) and it only takes a second (or less) to render in a Java applet with the same table.
Well, the modern way of writing that is wit a mix of JavaScript and HTML; you can use the same tricks as you do in Java for incremental rendering, but it doesn't require the Java runtime.
Even today I am always mildly surprised to take a fairly complex GUI application I've developed on, say Windows, and drop it on another platform, like Linux or OSX, and watch it run flawlessly.
No Java GUI application runs "flawlessly" on Linux or OS X because the Java runtime gets a number of things wrong with desktop integration on Linux and OS X.
Besides Apple no one cares about consistency on the Desktop anymore. Have you looked at Microsoft apps lately?
The main problem isn't with looks, it's functional incompatibilities: keyboards not being mapped properly, drag-and-drop not working, preferences not getting stored properly, etc.
The Java software platform is a piece of software licensed as GPL. Anyone can take it, modify it and give it away to someone else.
Not quite; there is a separate non-GPL version. That happens to be the version that people actually use.
More importantly, Sun also had dozens of important patents related to Java that are now owned by Oracle. It is doubtful whether you can create a compliant Java implementation without infringing some of them.
While the phenomenon known as Java may in theory be owned by Oracle it is in practive decoupled enough to be independent.
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
In fact, Bach's situation is still the rule, not the exception: most composers, musicians, and other creative people have teaching or performing jobs. That's not just financially prudent, it's arguably artistically a good thing. Composers that live only off revenue from their sheet music are a small minority. Furthermore, for most people, copyright-related expenses are a net loss because the money they have to spend for their day jobs far exceeds what they themselves may make in income through copyright.
As the entity "Slashdot" I hereby decree that the whole idea of "Professional Artist" is forever banned. You have been demoted to busker.
Most "professional artists" make their living through teaching or performing; they need to buy tons of sheet music and other copyrighted materials to earn a living. Copyright is a net cost to them. Only a few stars actually manage to live just off of copyright-related revenues and not do anything else. In effect, copyright on sheet music ends up transferring money from a lot of artists with modest means to a few stars. It's far from clear that that's a good system.
Always remember - costs like studio time, special effects, actors, musicians, props, sets, insurance, essentially every cost involved in the production of your work magically disconnect from the work itself at the moment it is finalized. A ripped copy of that work has absolutely no moral, legal, or implied connection to any of those costs.
Perhaps those costs simply exceed the value that the end product has. That way, people are willing to listen/watch when the music/video is almost free, but they aren't willing to pay for it and they wouldn't consider it a great loss if the music/video hadn't been made in the first place. And some people even consider productions that involve large investments made in hopes of a large financial return to be generally bad, so that if elimination of copyright would discourage their creation, that would be a net gain for culture.
See, the arguments and background is a lot more complicated than the simplistic mantra of "copyright helps creative people get paid".
Unfortunately for him copyright is no longer a square deal and since people are now ignoring all copyrights, they're ignoring his too.
I don't know what you mean by "a square deal". Copyright has stopped being faithful to its original purpose, namely providing an incentive for the creation of useful content. Instead, it has turned into a convoluted set of laws that people build business empires on. It's not surprising that people are pissed off and starting to ignore it. Sheet music actually is a particularly obnoxious area of copyright law, with composers and music publishers having a long history of abusing copyright law and preventing works from ever entering the public domain.
Also, even if copyright were 100% enforced and enforceable, very few composers could live off copyright-related revenues; almost everybody needs a day-job anyway, usually teaching, and for those people, copyright-related revenue matters fairly little, but copyright-related expenses matter a lot. In effect, current music copyright funnels a lot of money from people who don't have that much to a few stars.
I'm not endorsing people breaking Brown's copyright (in fact, I find his music pretty awful and can't figure out why anybody would want to copy his stuff). Nevertheless, the current copyright system is broken, people are getting fed up, and that's why they violate copyrights. If Brown wants to do something about it, complaining isn't going to help, he needs to contribute to reforming the system. And reform means that people like him have to give something up.
Really, copyright debate boils down to free-loaders demanding free access to everything, and copyright holders demanding restrictions on everything. So long as either side refuses to acknowledge the flaws in their arguments we are not going to see reasonable debate about where copyright ought to be.
Really? How does it boil down to that? I thought there were lots of other parties to the debate, like librarians, archives, artists, etc. Many copyright holders (myself included) also don't like current copyright at all and would much prefer a different kind of copyright.
In fact, most of our copyright issues would vanish if we went back to traditional US copyright laws: 14 years + one 14 years extension if the author is still alive, with a registration requirement. I have yet to see an argument why traditional US copyright isn't the right choice.
Which "mainstream operating systems" would that be? Neither on OS X, UNIX, or Linux do you have to do anything special in order to get hardware acceleration of 2D graphics if the hardware and drivers support it. I got my first hardware accelerated 2D graphics card for X11 more than 20 years ago and even back then, it just accelerated all apps through the existing APIs.