Whatever idea + luck that got the Romans to rise up and dominate all around them eventually went away, and with it the Romans.
As an self-educated expert in ancient Roman history, I hate it when the "fall of the Roman empire" is compared to modern America. Regardless of what trends you may see in the rise and fall of civilizations, the Roman empire had 1200 years on its timeline... America has about 150-ish, give or take, when comparing the timelines that matter. And the economies, the societies, ugh... they're so fucking different. Please compare America to the British Empire if you must, but even then, we aren't an empire.
Do you really think that planes would be falling out of the sky every day if the FAA stopped regulating? Airlines whose planes crash regularly tend not to last long.
I am a proponent of a quasi-free market. I really do understand how regulation can erode an economy. But the biggest problem with the real free market is what you just said.
If milk producers sold sour milk, they wouldn't last very long. But without regulation, there is no way to prevent milk producers from selling sour milk. Sure, you may think the big corporations will go out of business, but guess what: in a real free market, there would be TONS of small businesses changing logos all the time. And guess what, this isn't a theory of mine: there ARE under-regulated businesses. Two of them are construction firms and moving companies.
Construction firms go until they run out of money. When they run out of money, the executives keep all their earnings and the laymen are told there is no more work (they don't get 2 weeks, btw). I see this happen on a regular cycle, approximately every few months in the Atlanta metro area. (Not every company goes under every few months, I mean a company of ~20 people goes under every few months, but the people behind them keep making new businesses). I'm not talking about regulations on building safety (of which thankfully there is regulation), I'm talking about the businesses behind them: they just keep changing names after their shitty business practices prevent them from continuing under the same name.
Another is moving companies. You may think that moving companies wouldn't last long once they get a bad reputation, but once again they do the same trick: make a buck until they get a bad enough reputation, and then switch logos. There is no history of their "bad reputation". The federal government has tried to help with a national moving company registry, but they don't help for shit. The help desks tell you "The only people who comment on moving companies are the people who had bad experiences; trust me, I've been in this business for twenty years and something bad is bound to happen. But it rarely happens." Yeah, bullshit, there are good companies and bad companies, you just can't tell without a trusted source... and a trusted source isn't an unregulated free market.
So when it comes to boarding an aircraft which could kill people, yes, I'm glad that a company had to work its way through expensive regulations. In doing so, they prevent executives from affording to making cheap products and switching the logos once a mistake is made. With those expensive regulations comes a economic imperative to produce nothing but ultra-safe products.
I don't have a citation, but it's been widely reported that the cost of regulation in the US has exceeded all revenue taken in from income taxes. That's just insane.
2008 US Revenues: 1,146 billion - individual income taxes 275 billion - corporate income taxes
So um, regulation costing almost 1.5 trillion dollars? Yes, that is insane. As in, your citation is insane.
LOL! This is a bunch of bullshit from someone who doesn't live and die off of getting as many users as possible.
But if what you're selling is something intelligent people already want to buy,
Yeah, exactly. You (if you really are someone who sells stuff, which I highly highly highly doubt) are not trying to get as many consumers as possible, you're apparently only after "intelligent people" or maybe better put "technologically savvy people", or in any case, a minority of people.
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;
- US Mint can take YOUR money (gold/silver) and make a coin for you and they can punish for counterfeiting the coin, that's the extent to which gov't is allowed to deal with creation of money.
LOL! No, that's not the correct conclusion of the first sentence. It says that Congress can make money and regulate the value of it. It does not say anything about allowing or preventing of making it from the U.S. citizens' precious metals.
LOL. You can blame a lot of the causes of the recent economic downturn on "liberals" and "democrats", for the right reasons. But you went the crazy route. Do you really think approximately half of this country voted for Obama because he was "historical" (black)? I don't even know what you mean by historical. And do you actually believe that the worldwide economic downturn was caused by investors who stopped investing and instead began hording? There's lots of explanations for the downturn, but nothing credible involves "because investors feared that a Obama was going to win the U.S. presidency". Most people at the time thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the U.S. Democratic nomination anyways.
the US North East, and California have been doing so well all these years! lol
The US north east and California have been doing just fine. They have some of the highest standards of livings in the world and they aren't feeling the current economic downturn nearly as much as the rest of the world. They have some of the same problems that everywhere else in the rich world has, like the housing crisis, but they are by no means examples of bad societies. A better example of places that are doing bad are Michigan and Mississippi/Louisiana/Arkansas.
That is why Democrats print so much money, it is the best way to steal from the rich.
Wooooah, woah, woah. I don't think you're being serious in your post because it's a lot of hyperbole (or actual craziness), but to anyone else reading this, let me respond because this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. The "democrats" have been a party of tax and spend for a long, long time. The republicans have been a party of borrow and spend since Reagan. In other words, the Democrats don't need to print money or borrow money, they paid for their spending. The party which prints money without paying for it is the Republicans. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these methods, but the facts are clear about which party tends to do which. There was a recent one time instance in the past few years where both the administrations of GW Bush and Obama spent a whole lot of money for bailouts/stimuli, but that was for a unique scenario, which was to prevent the "great recession" from turning into another "great depression" - that was done by both parties and is not indicative of what the Democrats have been doing for the past half century.
And when you print money, you cause inflation. Inflation, understood by even the most basic economic theories, is a tax on the poor, not the rich.
tl;dr the Republicans, not the Democrats, print so much money, and it fucks the poor, not the rich.
The only real change can come from people understanding that the government is not supposed to be involved in.... money printing....
Umm, no? Then who is supposed to mint money? Are we supposed to barter with beads and oil? Money is pretty darn nice to have. Why wouldn't you want a government making it? Who else would print it?
You're at best describing a small business, though. I've never, ever, ever once had a manager or boss whose decisions made the job for me, or had the vision, resources, and/or talent to make it real. We're all hired goons, even the people "above us", until you reach the very very top... of course, many companies are older than 20 years so even the very top were hired.
Yes, macros/templates/etc. are good... but the C preprocessor implementation of them are awful! As in, blind textual replacement isn't nearly as good as symbolic replacement. The c macro was made in the 70s when preprocessing was the best (or easiest?) way to do it, but to this day nobody's ever done it again with a new language.
Yep. Just switched jobs, was making plenty of money before and got 4 offers in 3 days in my interviews where I turned down an offer for $20K more than the offer I finally took. They were both for a lot of money so I had the luxury of taking the job I'd enjoy more.
Not showing off, but just saying that software devs have it good in this economy (if you're good I suppose).
Tell me how this is not Free Software, and while you are at it tell me how this stacks up against your original assertion (Java is as non-Free as Windows).
Huh? I never said that. What I meant in my comment was that anyone can contribute to Firefox 8.1, but not everyone can contribute to Java 8.1. Sure, people can download the source, but as I understand it, the reason Oracle is suing Google is over "Java patents", which to me makes Java "not free".
I wasn't talking to the GP, I was talking to who I responded to. That being said, D does improve on the type syntax of C, although it is similar. It replaces the function type syntax with the keyword "function". It always reads right to left, so you don't have that strange way of how "const" can apply either to the left or to the right in C.
However, if you don't like reading right to left, then there's no help there.
I've always thought operator overloading was awful. It isn't clear what happens when an operator overload occurs, especially with =. The only thing it's useful for is very simple math classes (like Vectors), and that's it. Everyone and their grandma thinks that they HAVE to put operator overloads in classes now.
Java hasn't been slow at all for a decade at best. Don't get me wrong, there are certain things that can be done quicker with C++, but it's few and far between of what most modern applications do.
Unfortunately, your assessment is not the case with Java. You are not allowed to change or use Java source based on the Java "open source" license, and more importantly due to patents by Oracle.
I'm not interested in some tweaks to syntax that save a few lines I type automatically (or that Eclipse could automatically generate) in Java already. The overhead of learning a new language at all, with its typos and brainos, is bigger than any productivity or accuracy benefit it brings.
I believe there's more than that. This is trying to fix some of the problems (or lack of features) that modern programming languages which have come out since Java first came out. Closures are a big feature - lack of parenthesis and semi-colons aren't. Type inferences are a nice thing. What I see promising in this is that I don't have to learn a new language... it's more like the next version of Java.
I don't think it's done yet and I'm not ready to start some programming projects in this language yet, however. That being said, I like the idea of it.
Hmmm, you seem to be complaining more about JavaScript and Java than this new language. This language is meant for people who use Java, not people who don't like it.
To me, the hugest difference between this and Scala is that this compiles to Java, not bytecode. It makes it easier for me (and perhaps others) to give it a try because it does.
Full disclosure: I'm not actually going to try it out yet:) According to the posts in this conversation, it's really annoying to install and seems to have some early bugs, and it doesn't support static methods.
Just because a language has a feature doesn't mean it should always be used. By your argument, Java shouldn't even have static methods/fields because it's an OO language.
Really type inference does NOT improve readability, someone taking a first look at the code will have to go all the way to the method declaration to know what the(hell) type of a variable.
If you have to go all the way to somewhere else, then one shouldn't have used type inference. It DOES improve readability in small methods.
But I really didn't like their flavour of switch, the ability of falling through, although requiring some additional care, is really the core feature of the switch, I use it quite often and it's just great because it allows a simple structure to represent multiple values taking to a single block of code, I really think that was unnecessary and mostly it will just be something "cool" that no one will use.
I've always thought the Java switch was severely hampered by it's way of matching to C's switch. It only works on convertible int values (and later Enums). There's so many places where switching on Objects and using.equals() would have made more readable and natural code.
The ability to fall through is not the core feature of switch. I say this in confidence because I'm sure this feature is used in less than 1% of cases ever written. (Sorry, no citations available, but I've been around the block and I'm just sure of this)
That being said, in my opinion, case block ends should NOT default to going to the next case block as they do in C/Java, although it would be nice to have the OPTION of doing so - and in either situation, the programmer must be explicit on what they intend (so you must ALWAYS have a break or a continue at the end of the case block). For example,
switch (value) { case 0: print("zero"); break; case 1: case 2: print("12"); continue case; case 3: print("3");// compiler error, there is no break or continue case case 4: print("4"); break; }
Just about everything you really depend on is written in C. The linux Kernel is written in C.
That's a complete strawman argument, and mostly incorrect. First of all, we're not talking about everything people depend on. Second of all, lots of modern stuff is not written in C (such as modern Windows, most of the services on the Internet, enterprise/business software, etc.) Some things are written in C, but that doesn't mean it's the best language for everything.
And just about every language that supports those things you plead for is written in C. Can we please just write in C
This statement implies that writing compilers is well suited for C - even if that were correct, then that does not therefore imply that everything should be written in C.
I don't hate C by any means whatsoever (even though I would change some things if I could). However, it's ridiculous to think that everything should be programmed with C. It sounds like you've never been in a lot of modern programming situations (your sig is a hint at this) in which C would be a wrong choice compared to other languages (I don't mean that as an insult).
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever idea + luck that got the Romans to rise up and dominate all around them eventually went away, and with it the Romans.
As an self-educated expert in ancient Roman history, I hate it when the "fall of the Roman empire" is compared to modern America. Regardless of what trends you may see in the rise and fall of civilizations, the Roman empire had 1200 years on its timeline... America has about 150-ish, give or take, when comparing the timelines that matter. And the economies, the societies, ugh... they're so fucking different. Please compare America to the British Empire if you must, but even then, we aren't an empire.
Do you really think that planes would be falling out of the sky every day if the FAA stopped regulating? Airlines whose planes crash regularly tend not to last long.
I am a proponent of a quasi-free market. I really do understand how regulation can erode an economy. But the biggest problem with the real free market is what you just said.
If milk producers sold sour milk, they wouldn't last very long. But without regulation, there is no way to prevent milk producers from selling sour milk. Sure, you may think the big corporations will go out of business, but guess what: in a real free market, there would be TONS of small businesses changing logos all the time. And guess what, this isn't a theory of mine: there ARE under-regulated businesses. Two of them are construction firms and moving companies.
Construction firms go until they run out of money. When they run out of money, the executives keep all their earnings and the laymen are told there is no more work (they don't get 2 weeks, btw). I see this happen on a regular cycle, approximately every few months in the Atlanta metro area. (Not every company goes under every few months, I mean a company of ~20 people goes under every few months, but the people behind them keep making new businesses). I'm not talking about regulations on building safety (of which thankfully there is regulation), I'm talking about the businesses behind them: they just keep changing names after their shitty business practices prevent them from continuing under the same name.
Another is moving companies. You may think that moving companies wouldn't last long once they get a bad reputation, but once again they do the same trick: make a buck until they get a bad enough reputation, and then switch logos. There is no history of their "bad reputation". The federal government has tried to help with a national moving company registry, but they don't help for shit. The help desks tell you "The only people who comment on moving companies are the people who had bad experiences; trust me, I've been in this business for twenty years and something bad is bound to happen. But it rarely happens." Yeah, bullshit, there are good companies and bad companies, you just can't tell without a trusted source... and a trusted source isn't an unregulated free market.
So when it comes to boarding an aircraft which could kill people, yes, I'm glad that a company had to work its way through expensive regulations. In doing so, they prevent executives from affording to making cheap products and switching the logos once a mistake is made. With those expensive regulations comes a economic imperative to produce nothing but ultra-safe products.
I don't have a citation, but it's been widely reported that the cost of regulation in the US has exceeded all revenue taken in from income taxes. That's just insane.
2008 US Revenues:
1,146 billion - individual income taxes
275 billion - corporate income taxes
So um, regulation costing almost 1.5 trillion dollars? Yes, that is insane. As in, your citation is insane.
LOL! This is a bunch of bullshit from someone who doesn't live and die off of getting as many users as possible.
But if what you're selling is something intelligent people already want to buy,
Yeah, exactly. You (if you really are someone who sells stuff, which I highly highly highly doubt) are not trying to get as many consumers as possible, you're apparently only after "intelligent people" or maybe better put "technologically savvy people", or in any case, a minority of people.
Article 1, section 8:
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;
- US Mint can take YOUR money (gold/silver) and make a coin for you and they can punish for counterfeiting the coin, that's the extent to which gov't is allowed to deal with creation of money.
LOL! No, that's not the correct conclusion of the first sentence. It says that Congress can make money and regulate the value of it. It does not say anything about allowing or preventing of making it from the U.S. citizens' precious metals.
LOL. You can blame a lot of the causes of the recent economic downturn on "liberals" and "democrats", for the right reasons. But you went the crazy route. Do you really think approximately half of this country voted for Obama because he was "historical" (black)? I don't even know what you mean by historical. And do you actually believe that the worldwide economic downturn was caused by investors who stopped investing and instead began hording? There's lots of explanations for the downturn, but nothing credible involves "because investors feared that a Obama was going to win the U.S. presidency". Most people at the time thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the U.S. Democratic nomination anyways.
the US North East, and California have been doing so well all these years! lol
The US north east and California have been doing just fine. They have some of the highest standards of livings in the world and they aren't feeling the current economic downturn nearly as much as the rest of the world. They have some of the same problems that everywhere else in the rich world has, like the housing crisis, but they are by no means examples of bad societies. A better example of places that are doing bad are Michigan and Mississippi/Louisiana/Arkansas.
That is why Democrats print so much money, it is the best way to steal from the rich.
Wooooah, woah, woah. I don't think you're being serious in your post because it's a lot of hyperbole (or actual craziness), but to anyone else reading this, let me respond because this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. The "democrats" have been a party of tax and spend for a long, long time. The republicans have been a party of borrow and spend since Reagan. In other words, the Democrats don't need to print money or borrow money, they paid for their spending. The party which prints money without paying for it is the Republicans. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these methods, but the facts are clear about which party tends to do which. There was a recent one time instance in the past few years where both the administrations of GW Bush and Obama spent a whole lot of money for bailouts/stimuli, but that was for a unique scenario, which was to prevent the "great recession" from turning into another "great depression" - that was done by both parties and is not indicative of what the Democrats have been doing for the past half century.
And when you print money, you cause inflation. Inflation, understood by even the most basic economic theories, is a tax on the poor, not the rich.
tl;dr the Republicans, not the Democrats, print so much money, and it fucks the poor, not the rich.
The only real change can come from people understanding that the government is not supposed to be involved in.... money printing....
Umm, no? Then who is supposed to mint money? Are we supposed to barter with beads and oil? Money is pretty darn nice to have. Why wouldn't you want a government making it? Who else would print it?
Funny hehe.
You're at best describing a small business, though. I've never, ever, ever once had a manager or boss whose decisions made the job for me, or had the vision, resources, and/or talent to make it real. We're all hired goons, even the people "above us", until you reach the very very top... of course, many companies are older than 20 years so even the very top were hired.
Yes, macros/templates/etc. are good... but the C preprocessor implementation of them are awful! As in, blind textual replacement isn't nearly as good as symbolic replacement. The c macro was made in the 70s when preprocessing was the best (or easiest?) way to do it, but to this day nobody's ever done it again with a new language.
Yep. Just switched jobs, was making plenty of money before and got 4 offers in 3 days in my interviews where I turned down an offer for $20K more than the offer I finally took. They were both for a lot of money so I had the luxury of taking the job I'd enjoy more.
Not showing off, but just saying that software devs have it good in this economy (if you're good I suppose).
Tell me how this is not Free Software, and while you are at it tell me how this stacks up against your original assertion (Java is as non-Free as Windows).
Huh? I never said that. What I meant in my comment was that anyone can contribute to Firefox 8.1, but not everyone can contribute to Java 8.1. Sure, people can download the source, but as I understand it, the reason Oracle is suing Google is over "Java patents", which to me makes Java "not free".
Java 7 has closures.
Really? I couldn't find any information on it in the release notes here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/jdk7-relnotes-418459.html I've heard people talking about it but I thought it didn't make it in.
I wasn't talking to the GP, I was talking to who I responded to. That being said, D does improve on the type syntax of C, although it is similar. It replaces the function type syntax with the keyword "function". It always reads right to left, so you don't have that strange way of how "const" can apply either to the left or to the right in C.
However, if you don't like reading right to left, then there's no help there.
I've always thought operator overloading was awful. It isn't clear what happens when an operator overload occurs, especially with =. The only thing it's useful for is very simple math classes (like Vectors), and that's it. Everyone and their grandma thinks that they HAVE to put operator overloads in classes now.
Java hasn't been slow at all for a decade at best. Don't get me wrong, there are certain things that can be done quicker with C++, but it's few and far between of what most modern applications do.
Unfortunately, your assessment is not the case with Java. You are not allowed to change or use Java source based on the Java "open source" license, and more importantly due to patents by Oracle.
I don't believe there was any implication that CoffeeScript was significant. It was just an analogy in the summary.
+1 to everything you said, brotha.
I'm not interested in some tweaks to syntax that save a few lines I type automatically (or that Eclipse could automatically generate) in Java already. The overhead of learning a new language at all, with its typos and brainos, is bigger than any productivity or accuracy benefit it brings.
I believe there's more than that. This is trying to fix some of the problems (or lack of features) that modern programming languages which have come out since Java first came out. Closures are a big feature - lack of parenthesis and semi-colons aren't. Type inferences are a nice thing. What I see promising in this is that I don't have to learn a new language... it's more like the next version of Java.
I don't think it's done yet and I'm not ready to start some programming projects in this language yet, however. That being said, I like the idea of it.
Hmmm, you seem to be complaining more about JavaScript and Java than this new language. This language is meant for people who use Java, not people who don't like it.
To me, the hugest difference between this and Scala is that this compiles to Java, not bytecode. It makes it easier for me (and perhaps others) to give it a try because it does.
Full disclosure: I'm not actually going to try it out yet :) According to the posts in this conversation, it's really annoying to install and seems to have some early bugs, and it doesn't support static methods.
Just because a language has a feature doesn't mean it should always be used. By your argument, Java shouldn't even have static methods/fields because it's an OO language.
Really type inference does NOT improve readability, someone taking a first look at the code will have to go all the way to the method declaration to know what the(hell) type of a variable.
If you have to go all the way to somewhere else, then one shouldn't have used type inference. It DOES improve readability in small methods.
But I really didn't like their flavour of switch, the ability of falling through, although requiring some additional care, is really the core feature of the switch, I use it quite often and it's just great because it allows a simple structure to represent multiple values taking to a single block of code, I really think that was unnecessary and mostly it will just be something "cool" that no one will use.
I've always thought the Java switch was severely hampered by it's way of matching to C's switch. It only works on convertible int values (and later Enums). There's so many places where switching on Objects and using .equals() would have made more readable and natural code.
The ability to fall through is not the core feature of switch. I say this in confidence because I'm sure this feature is used in less than 1% of cases ever written. (Sorry, no citations available, but I've been around the block and I'm just sure of this)
That being said, in my opinion, case block ends should NOT default to going to the next case block as they do in C/Java, although it would be nice to have the OPTION of doing so - and in either situation, the programmer must be explicit on what they intend (so you must ALWAYS have a break or a continue at the end of the case block). For example,
switch (value) { // compiler error, there is no break or continue case
case 0: print("zero"); break;
case 1: case 2: print("12"); continue case;
case 3: print("3");
case 4: print("4"); break;
}
Just about everything you really depend on is written in C. The linux Kernel is written in C.
That's a complete strawman argument, and mostly incorrect. First of all, we're not talking about everything people depend on. Second of all, lots of modern stuff is not written in C (such as modern Windows, most of the services on the Internet, enterprise/business software, etc.) Some things are written in C, but that doesn't mean it's the best language for everything.
And just about every language that supports those things you plead for is written in C. Can we please just write in C
This statement implies that writing compilers is well suited for C - even if that were correct, then that does not therefore imply that everything should be written in C.
I don't hate C by any means whatsoever (even though I would change some things if I could). However, it's ridiculous to think that everything should be programmed with C. It sounds like you've never been in a lot of modern programming situations (your sig is a hint at this) in which C would be a wrong choice compared to other languages (I don't mean that as an insult).