Re:Shell as a scripting language...
on
Bash Cookbook
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
For this reason, I wish that things like the
zoidberg
shell would hurry up & mature. (Yeah, yeah, I would work
on it myself except I would probably be about as useful as the
namesake Dr. Zoidberg is as a doctor.)
"Ask not what you can do for your shell, ask what your shell
can do for you!"
I've always avoided shell scripting as much as possible. Here is an
example of the kind of thing that drives me nuts about shell.
$ touch "file 1" "file 2" foo bar
$ for i in *; do touch "$i.titles"; done
$ ls
bar bar.titles file 1 file 1.titles file 2 file 2.titles foo foo.titles
$ grep -l beer `find . -name \*.titles -prune -o -print`
grep:./file: No such file or directory
grep: 2: No such file or directory
grep:./file: No such file or directory
grep: 1: No such file or directory
$ find . -name \*.titles -print -o -exec grep -l beer {}/dev/null \; ./file 2.titles ./bar.titles ./file 1.titles ./foo.titles
One needs to remember to quote the touch used in the
for loop because of the spaces in some of the names. However, when
using find with backticks, the spaces in the names become part of
the delimiter of the list of file names. An alternative version of
the find command works, but only if one remembers to
use the later instead of the former.
The idea behind Zoidberg is not new or unique. From the copyright
for Zoidberg, it seems that it was first released in 2003. However,
scsch, to Scheme
what Zoidberg is to Perl, seems to have been around at least as long
as 1994. And one should remember
Genera, an
operating system in which everything was Lisp from the ground up,
and dates back to the early 80s. A Lisp listener was a
"shell", from what I can tell, having only a second hand
familiarity with it.
But I personally like having the combination of Emacs and inferior
processes, especially SLIME. With it, I'm able to switch between
Emacs GUI, Emacs lisp commands, Emacs key commands, Common Lisp, or
even just running a standard bash shell all from within one
environment. So I can use the shell command approach, returning one
big string as a list of files, with the same problem of file names
with spaces looking like separate elements of the list, Emacs lisp
code, or even Common Lisp code.
Well, if you want to think about history, Socrates was essentially executed for trolling. He kept saying things that challenged the status quo and accepted behaviours, and made his countrymen uneasy. So they executed him.
Yes. Not many know this, but the orignal Socratric dialogues were written in Greek hx0r and the g00d city would have been ruled by the l33t. So, clearly, down moderating some pissant malcontent on/. is morally equivalent to killing Socrates.
Before Richard Stallman was even born, we had the university. In fact, as this seemingly much maligned article mentions, RMS was working on the Lisp Machine at MIT. It was here that he gave birth to the child of his angst and the beginning of these petulant debates about what is The Good or The Right Thing in the world of software. All too often these debates present a simplified view of a polarized world of blacks and whites, Open vs Close source. I don't think it would be too brash to claim that most of the advances in the realm of human knowledge, at least in this century, have come from people somehow associated with the university sytem. I recognize that there are notable exceptions. Unless I am mistaken, Thomas Edison did most of his work at an industrial research lab, Menlo Park. But there are many others deeply involved in academia. Issac Newton may have worked on calculus, optics, and his laws of gravitation during a period when Trinity College, Cambridge was closed due to fears of the plague, he was a member of that institution. Marie Curie studied at the Sorbonne. Einstein's stint as an examiner in the patent office are famous, studied at ETH Zurich, he was awared a PhD from the University of Zurich, held the position of Privatdozent at the University of Bern, among others. Alan Turing was a fellow at King's College, Camberidge when he invented the Turing machine and John von Neumann was a faculty member at the Institue for Advanced Study at Princeton which is, I belive, when he was working on EDVAC.
Open vs Close source is in its infancy, both in its newness in the history of intellectual endeavors and the all too often infinitile tone of the debate. It seems to me that to study the true source of creativity in Western civilization, one has to understand the role of university, which has always been a comingling of an open discourse on shared information and the rather closed interests and financing of powerful governmental and corporate entities. Both Neumann and Turing were working on secret government projects which fueled some of their greatest insights into computing, for example. The internet grew from the seed of the ARPANET, funded by the US DoD. (I'll pause here to let some smart ass make a joke about Al Gore having invented the internet.) To ignore the role of either one or the other is to sacrifice history on the alter of ideology.
/. loves violent games and we are, obviously, well adjusted. This is #$!@ ridiculous. Frag those fscking eggheads. How dare they question my favorite &!#$%! passtime. Taste my steel, Care Bear!
Research does not agree with common opinion on/. Researchers are tagged idiots. Obviously, there can't be anything wrong with violent video games as most of/. plays them and look how well adjusted a group we have here.
Senator Inhofe knows what is the real cause of global warming, gay sex and all the hot man-on-man action, which is why he is "really proud to say that in the recorded history of our family, we've never had a divorce or any kind of homosexual relationship" [ibid]. Thanks, Jim!
There is just as much scientific controversy over global warming as there is over evolution and whether or not the Earth is flat or round. Certainly there is a controversy over some of these issues but it is not a scientific controversy, regardless of whatever propagandists might try to sell to the public. The fact that nearly half of the US population actually believes that there is a controversy is another symptom of an educational system which results in how poorly the US scores on math and science with the rest of the industrialized world.
Censorship is no solution. However, denying someone who espouses a minority opinion a "seal of approval" is not censorship, it is simply not validating someone with an opinion that many consider to be wrong. Rejecting a submission to a peer reviewed journal because those reviewing the submission consider it to be flawed is not censorship, either. Be crazy all you want, you'll just have to do it on/. with the rest of the k00ks.
This must be why people in third world countries have such high life expectancies. <gesture what="shakes fist at the sky in anger"> Damn you, soap! Looks like they had it right in the Middle Ages, bathing is dangerous.
Go read the article. Read the last page. *sigh*
OK, for those of you who still didn't read it [...]
I had a hard time getting past the following snippet from the sixth paragraph.
Only, in contrast to the real world, Tolkien's portrayal of "good" resisting a darkly threatening "evil" offered something sadly lacking in the real struggles against Nazi or Communist tyrannies -- a role for individual champions. His elves and hobbits and über-human warriors performed the same role that Lancelot and Merlin and Odysseus did in older fables, and that superheroes still do in comic books. Through doughty Frodo, noble Aragorn and the ethereal Galadriel, he proclaimed the paramount importance -- above nations and civilizations -- of the indomitable Romantic hero.
One of the things that I had always liked about the character of Frodo is that he was so resolutely unheroic and that he contrasted from the "noble Aragorn and the ethereal Galadriel." He was just a simple hobbit upon whom was thrust a dreadful responsibility. I don't think it does the story justice to simply label it as the tale of the "indomitable Romantic hero." I seem to remember that Frodo was rather domitable. Even in the end, victory was not acheived through the strength of Frodo's heroism but rather in spite of his weakness.
Maybe I need to step away from the essay for a little bit, dash past that paragraph with my eyes closed, and try the rest of it on for size. However, my first impression is not a good one.
Sounds good in theory. Unfortunately, the specifications are both written and implemented by humans. The result, in practice, is that the plan-and-implement method does not work very well.
As manager of the OS/360 project, Rederick Brooks [...]
<grumble> Case in point being that Frederick Brooks was the manager of the OS/360 project, a project with which Rederick Brooks had no involvement.
The question is what type of mistake. Is your program crashing a lot? Then see the above poster. Is your program generating the wrong results? Then the problem is that you have not specified rigorously enough. With good engineering specs, the actual code is just data entry.
Reading the above comment made me remember the following from the introduction to ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham, as I am currently flipping through the book.
In the old model, bugs are never supposed to happen. Thorough specifications, painstakingly worked out in advance, are supposed to ensure that programs work perfectly. Sounds good in theory. Unfortunately, the specifications are both written and implemented by humans. The result, in practice, is that the plan-and-implement method does not work very well.
As manager of the OS/360 project, Rederick Brooks was well acquainted with the traditional approach. He was also acquainted with its results:
Any OS/360 user is quickly aware of how much better it should be... Furthermore, the product was late, it took more memory than planned, the costs were several times the estimate, and it did not perform very well until several releases after the first.
And this is a description of one of the most successful systems of its era.
The problem with the old model was that it ignored human limitations. In the old model, you are betting that specifications won't contain serious flaws, and that implementing them will be a simple matter of translating them into code. Experience has shown this to be a very bad bet indeed. It would be safer to bet that specifications will be misguided, and that code will be full of bugs.
And so I agree that we don't need a "prophet," that to slag someone for choosing family, for example, over fighting for our freedom, is misguided, and while one might very well choose to go play frisbee without a crystal clear consciene, we do need to recognize the importance of those figures, like Stallman and Lessig, who have made the decision to actively do something to fight for our freedom.
Doh! Stupid fingers. I meant to write the following:
[...] and while one might very well choose to go play frisbee
with a crystal clear conscience [...]
Take a look at the original post that I was replying to once again: [...]
My perception of this statement was that the poster was somehow denigrating Mr. Torvalds' preference for family vs. software jihad.
Fair enough. I understand your reading of the original post and your response to it. Even attempting to phrase the debate in terms of black and white distinctions between those who are or are not part of the software jihad is juvenile. I realize that you didn't start the discussion in this light and I'm sure we're both shocked at such a sophmoric display on/. as we usually find a higher caliber here <cough>. Of course, Linus himself seems to reject this black and white distinctions, too. Again, from the same interview with Lessig:
But if you don't want to become translators, if you don't want to write environmental impact statements, if you don't want to try to convince the North in California that if it gets taken over by the South, freedom and innovation ends, then you could do as Torvalds has recommended: give money to those who are fighting the battle, in particular, EFF. I'm on the board of EFF, so blissfully biased about to whom. But whether EFF or someone else, follow Torvalds and the other christ-figures in history: Tithe. Take the cost of Internet access (whether you pay it or not) for one year; send 10% to an organization fighting for your freedom.
While Torvalds himself might not want to "lead troups into the fray," even though he has started the creation of Linux which seems to be an effect weapon to use in the "war," while he might prefer to go "play frisbee," at least he seems to recognize the importance of those how are actively "fighting the good fight" as well as the importance of supporting those on the "front line," if we believe Lessig's representation of Linus' views. And so I agree that we don't need a "prophet," that to slag someone for choosing family, for example, over fighting for our freedom, is misguided, and while one might very well choose to go play frisbee without a crystal clear consciene, we do need to recognize the importance of those figures, like Stallman and Lessig, who have made the decision to actively do something to fight for our freedom. If each and everyone who, has Lessig phrases it, "got it" and understood the attacks being waged on our freedoms, did nothing but play frisbee with their kids, then the war would be over before it began. So, indeed, one shouldn't take oneself too seriously. Play frisbee all you want; just buy a war bond before you go to the park and remember the importance of those who are fighting the war. And whether or not one agree with his tactics or his methods, one has to admit that Stallman has made a significant contribution to the fight for our freedoms.
I am far from arguing that what the guy has done is unnecessary or spurious. But a prophet? Methinks that some people are taking themselves and their ideology a tad too seriously. There is more to life than software. I'm of the wacky persuasion that someone who decides to put his (however influential) software on the back burner to spend time raising his kids actually has his priorities straight. Your mileage (and values) may vary, of course.
Well, prohet was the original poster's wording, not mine. I was simply responding to the (half serious, judging from the orginal smiley) suggestion that one should merely just go play frisbee. I wouldn't presume to know anything about Stallman's personal life but I also don't see how anything to do with his personal life would be of any relevance to the importance of his having been a political vertebrates, as opposed to slug. I think that your implication that Stallman, or others like him that have worked towards fulfilling their non-familial principles, have their life priorities out of line is a bit misguided as well as being non sequitur. Are you seriously suggesting that one can either spend time raising one's children or work on influential software and that the two are entirely mutually exclusive? Are you seriously suggesting that anyone who has tried to make a difference in the world has his/her priorities "crooked"? Are you trying to claim that the greatest achievement in life is to breed and that anything that would stand in the way of sucessfully spawning offspring should be found deficient when measured against this standard? If you don't mean any of this, why have you even mentioned the subject?
No matter how controversial, the community needs RMS. Where Linus has openly admitted Linux is not the most important part of his life, RMS remains the prophet while Linus settles down with family life.
Why do we need a prophet? Are the MS Heathens out there going to hell if we don't convert them? Get over yourself, people. I suspect Linus has the right idea. Go play frisbee, dammit. =)
This reminds me of something that I read in Lawrence Lessig's answers to/. questions. In particular, he was responding to a question with the heading "Is Copyright Law a Sham?". In his response, Lessig wrote:
Yet obviously I believe copyright law has gone too far, at least in the digital age. [...] It must be changed. [...]
The question is how will it be changed?
[...]
We could make progress in demanding [change] if those who got it did something. If, for example, slashdot readers weren't such political slugs, something might happen. If more of you did something about this, whether spamming your Congressman, or giving money to those who resist this regulation (like the EFF), then we could resist this extremism.
I am not optimistic, however. Those who get it (e.g., you) are pathetically apolitical. You're proud of your apathy. You're disgusted with people who try to persuade politicians. So am I. But while you do nothing, the future of creativity and innovation is sold in DC - typically to the highest, and most disgusting bidder.
We need people like Stallman because, regardless of whether or not one agrees with particular aspects of the FSF or its mission, no one would ever accuse Stallman of being a "political slug." He may not be spending his time attempting to persuade politicians but rather he has devoted decades of his lifetime to make a direct contribution to what Lessig calls "the commons" by working on GNU, helping to develop the GPL, and contributing to the FSF's efforts to defend the GPL.
There is one thing wrong with this process; rebuild. The latest generation of Java dynamic compilation/optimization does its work behind the scenes and happens automatically which I think is a huge advantage over FDPR. It allows the optimizer to adapt to unforseen changes in the production environment.
Of course, in general, one should optimize for the normal case; i.e. forseen conditions. I would imagine that in most cases an optimization for a normal case would be a pessimization for unforseen cases and vica versa. In other words, optimizing execution for unusual cases would tend to slow down the usual case(s). Also, I don't think that there is anything built into the C/C++ standards that would disallow dynamic feedback from the runtime environment. For example, malloc/::operator new could very well track runtime memory characteristics in its implementation.
However, C/C++ probably do not have many implementations like this because, in practice, the performance of C/C++ programs has not needed this kind of improvement. Java, on the other hand, is new to the game and has certain language features (required array bounds checking) that trade performance for run-time safety which force it to find other ways to get performance improvements. Pure conjecture on my part, though.
Anyway, I continue to think that any/most of the good stuff in Java has been in Lisp for ages and that Lisp tends to do it better, including performance.
I think that the open-source phenomenon will quietly, undignifiably, dissapear soon. It is a lofty and noble goal to be sure, however as a sustainable movement, I believe it will become less important over time. Why? Because the high-flying VC money and gold-rush speculation that drove those fat boomtime salaries are what really paid for open-source. The time to code the time to host it, the time to collaborate, just aint there any more during the dot-bomb hangover.
It depends on how you define the term open source. You hint at this in the paragraph that follows.
Open-source is an idea; that will remain. Linux the kernel, and any derivatives; they will remain. Unix is still with us after 30 odd years, and so too will Linux and OSS. Good. But, making money and supplanting a capitalistic machine that is designed for high proiduct turn-over, planned obsolecence, and not giving the customer what they want is the sustainable model, not selling services to free products. If you pay for the product, then you will pay for support. Get a free product, and you find out its not up to par or whatver, why pay for support, just get another free clone....
When you write in the first paragraph that open source will "quietly, undignifiably [sic], dissapear [sic]" but then write in this paragraph that "Linux the kernel, and any derivatives [...] will remain," you are implying that the most important aspect of open source is "making money and supplanting a capitalistic machine." I'm more than a little confused as to how making money could possibly help supplant a capitalistic machine but I'm assuming that you meant something more like "supplanting the capitalistic machine based on proprietary software with one based on open source software." Well, perhaps it is an important element of what many people mean when they use the term open source as a conscious decision to avoid the term free software. In other words, I think that some people who use the term open source, e.g. Eric Raymond, invented the term specifically to describe the socio-economic concept of making money from non-proprietary software. So, what if we talk about free software, i.e. open source software without the libertarian, capitalist spin? Will free software disappear? You yourself even wrote that "Linux the kernel, and any derivatives [...] will remain." Not only Linux but GNU, BSD, et al, will remain for quite a long time. In this sense, how is free software failing? If I want to use software that I am free to copy, modify, and share with the community, I can still do it. Was this not the original aim of the FSF and the GNU project? Larry Wall can still keep providing Perl. I can still look at all of the source code to BSD and W. Richard Steven's TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 2 is as free to publish all the gory details of the BSD implementation of the TCP/IP stack today as it was when he first wrote it. How are any of these things failures for free software?
Personally, I think that free software will continue to flourish in the same way that it has always flourished, e.g. as a free exchange of ideas communicated with source code in the grand tradition of a academic community. Perhaps the views of those who supported the idea, for example, of "Open Source as a Business Strategy" might have try and buttress their arguments in the light of economic realities. Of course, if some of these open source businesses might even manage to survive the current economic downturn and come out strong on the upturn. However, for those who think that one can see "Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research", the particular market woes of any.bomb have little, if any, relevance. And what could possible interfere with Larry Wall's idea of open source development as an exercise in "Diligence, Patience, and Humility"?
I'll second the recommendation of ACE. In addition to ACE, The ACE ORB (TAO), Zen, their real-time ORB, and Jaws, An Application Framework for High Performance Web Systems, are all worth a look. This stuff has been around for quite some time and has been ported to nearly every compiler-platform imaginable.
But now let's suppose that, after years of lobbying, messrs Kuhn and Stallman get a law passed that makes proprietary licenses illegal. We are now in the world of the FSF's premise.
From where is Raymond getting this? I have never read anything from the FSF or Stallman that advocates making proprietary licenses illegal or anything even morally equivalent to this position. Can anyone supply a reference to any statement from the FSF or Stallman supporting Raymond?
Slashdot Mirror
For this reason, I wish that things like the zoidberg shell would hurry up & mature. (Yeah, yeah, I would work on it myself except I would probably be about as useful as the namesake Dr. Zoidberg is as a doctor.)
"Ask not what you can do for your shell, ask what your shell can do for you!"
I've always avoided shell scripting as much as possible. Here is an example of the kind of thing that drives me nuts about shell.
$ touch "file 1" "file 2" foo bar
$ for i in *; do touch "$i.titles"; done
$ ls
bar bar.titles file 1 file 1.titles file 2 file 2.titles foo foo.titles
$ grep -l beer `find . -name \*.titles -prune -o -print`
grep:
grep: 2: No such file or directory
grep:
grep: 1: No such file or directory
$ find . -name \*.titles -print -o -exec grep -l beer {}
One needs to remember to quote the touch used in the for loop because of the spaces in some of the names. However, when using find with backticks, the spaces in the names become part of the delimiter of the list of file names. An alternative version of the find command works, but only if one remembers to use the later instead of the former.
The idea behind Zoidberg is not new or unique. From the copyright for Zoidberg, it seems that it was first released in 2003. However, scsch, to Scheme what Zoidberg is to Perl, seems to have been around at least as long as 1994. And one should remember Genera, an operating system in which everything was Lisp from the ground up, and dates back to the early 80s. A Lisp listener was a "shell", from what I can tell, having only a second hand familiarity with it.
But I personally like having the combination of Emacs and inferior processes, especially SLIME. With it, I'm able to switch between Emacs GUI, Emacs lisp commands, Emacs key commands, Common Lisp, or even just running a standard bash shell all from within one environment. So I can use the shell command approach, returning one big string as a list of files, with the same problem of file names with spaces looking like separate elements of the list, Emacs lisp code, or even Common Lisp code.
LAMP-USER> !$(find
"/home/dkick/tmp/duff
"
#<SB-IMPL::PROCESS
LAMP-USER> (remove "titles" (list-directory "/home/dkick/tmp/duff/")
(#P"/home/dkick/tmp/duff/bar" #P"/home/dkick/tmp/duff/file 1"
#P"/home/dkick/tmp/duff/file 2" #P"/home/dkick/tmp/duff/foo")
LAMP-USER>
Yes. Not many know this, but the orignal Socratric dialogues were written in Greek hx0r and the g00d city would have been ruled by the l33t. So, clearly, down moderating some pissant malcontent on /. is morally equivalent to killing Socrates.
Before Richard Stallman was even born, we had the university. In fact, as this seemingly much maligned article mentions, RMS was working on the Lisp Machine at MIT. It was here that he gave birth to the child of his angst and the beginning of these petulant debates about what is The Good or The Right Thing in the world of software. All too often these debates present a simplified view of a polarized world of blacks and whites, Open vs Close source. I don't think it would be too brash to claim that most of the advances in the realm of human knowledge, at least in this century, have come from people somehow associated with the university sytem. I recognize that there are notable exceptions. Unless I am mistaken, Thomas Edison did most of his work at an industrial research lab, Menlo Park. But there are many others deeply involved in academia. Issac Newton may have worked on calculus, optics, and his laws of gravitation during a period when Trinity College, Cambridge was closed due to fears of the plague, he was a member of that institution. Marie Curie studied at the Sorbonne. Einstein's stint as an examiner in the patent office are famous, studied at ETH Zurich, he was awared a PhD from the University of Zurich, held the position of Privatdozent at the University of Bern, among others. Alan Turing was a fellow at King's College, Camberidge when he invented the Turing machine and John von Neumann was a faculty member at the Institue for Advanced Study at Princeton which is, I belive, when he was working on EDVAC. Open vs Close source is in its infancy, both in its newness in the history of intellectual endeavors and the all too often infinitile tone of the debate. It seems to me that to study the true source of creativity in Western civilization, one has to understand the role of university, which has always been a comingling of an open discourse on shared information and the rather closed interests and financing of powerful governmental and corporate entities. Both Neumann and Turing were working on secret government projects which fueled some of their greatest insights into computing, for example. The internet grew from the seed of the ARPANET, funded by the US DoD. (I'll pause here to let some smart ass make a joke about Al Gore having invented the internet.) To ignore the role of either one or the other is to sacrifice history on the alter of ideology.
/. loves violent games and we are, obviously, well adjusted. This is #$!@ ridiculous. Frag those fscking eggheads. How dare they question my favorite &!#$%! passtime. Taste my steel, Care Bear!
Research does not agree with common opinion on /. Researchers are tagged idiots. Obviously, there can't be anything wrong with violent video games as most of /. plays them and look how well adjusted a group we have here.
i++ Ha! Now all your for loops are belong to us!
They only have to pixelate things which are visible from space.
Lighten up, Francis.
There is just as much scientific controversy over global warming as there is over evolution and whether or not the Earth is flat or round. Certainly there is a controversy over some of these issues but it is not a scientific controversy, regardless of whatever propagandists might try to sell to the public. The fact that nearly half of the US population actually believes that there is a controversy is another symptom of an educational system which results in how poorly the US scores on math and science with the rest of the industrialized world. Censorship is no solution. However, denying someone who espouses a minority opinion a "seal of approval" is not censorship, it is simply not validating someone with an opinion that many consider to be wrong. Rejecting a submission to a peer reviewed journal because those reviewing the submission consider it to be flawed is not censorship, either. Be crazy all you want, you'll just have to do it on /. with the rest of the k00ks.
This must be why people in third world countries have such high life expectancies. <gesture what="shakes fist at the sky in anger"> Damn you, soap! Looks like they had it right in the Middle Ages, bathing is dangerous.
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." -- Albert Einstein
I had a hard time getting past the following snippet from the sixth paragraph.
One of the things that I had always liked about the character of Frodo is that he was so resolutely unheroic and that he contrasted from the "noble Aragorn and the ethereal Galadriel." He was just a simple hobbit upon whom was thrust a dreadful responsibility. I don't think it does the story justice to simply label it as the tale of the "indomitable Romantic hero." I seem to remember that Frodo was rather domitable. Even in the end, victory was not acheived through the strength of Frodo's heroism but rather in spite of his weakness.
Maybe I need to step away from the essay for a little bit, dash past that paragraph with my eyes closed, and try the rest of it on for size. However, my first impression is not a good one.
Well, prohet was the original poster's wording, not mine. I was simply responding to the (half serious, judging from the orginal smiley) suggestion that one should merely just go play frisbee. I wouldn't presume to know anything about Stallman's personal life but I also don't see how anything to do with his personal life would be of any relevance to the importance of his having been a political vertebrates, as opposed to slug. I think that your implication that Stallman, or others like him that have worked towards fulfilling their non-familial principles, have their life priorities out of line is a bit misguided as well as being non sequitur. Are you seriously suggesting that one can either spend time raising one's children or work on influential software and that the two are entirely mutually exclusive? Are you seriously suggesting that anyone who has tried to make a difference in the world has his/her priorities "crooked"? Are you trying to claim that the greatest achievement in life is to breed and that anything that would stand in the way of sucessfully spawning offspring should be found deficient when measured against this standard? If you don't mean any of this, why have you even mentioned the subject?
This reminds me of something that I read in Lawrence Lessig's answers to /. questions. In particular, he was responding to a question with the heading "Is Copyright Law a Sham?". In his response, Lessig wrote:
We need people like Stallman because, regardless of whether or not one agrees with particular aspects of the FSF or its mission, no one would ever accuse Stallman of being a "political slug." He may not be spending his time attempting to persuade politicians but rather he has devoted decades of his lifetime to make a direct contribution to what Lessig calls "the commons" by working on GNU, helping to develop the GPL, and contributing to the FSF's efforts to defend the GPL.
Of course, in general, one should optimize for the normal case; i.e. forseen conditions. I would imagine that in most cases an optimization for a normal case would be a pessimization for unforseen cases and vica versa. In other words, optimizing execution for unusual cases would tend to slow down the usual case(s). Also, I don't think that there is anything built into the C/C++ standards that would disallow dynamic feedback from the runtime environment. For example, malloc/::operator new could very well track runtime memory characteristics in its implementation.
However, C/C++ probably do not have many implementations like this because, in practice, the performance of C/C++ programs has not needed this kind of improvement. Java, on the other hand, is new to the game and has certain language features (required array bounds checking) that trade performance for run-time safety which force it to find other ways to get performance improvements. Pure conjecture on my part, though.
Anyway, I continue to think that any/most of the good stuff in Java has been in Lisp for ages and that Lisp tends to do it better, including performance.
deconstructionist physics?
It depends on how you define the term open source. You hint at this in the paragraph that follows.
When you write in the first paragraph that open source will "quietly, undignifiably [sic], dissapear [sic]" but then write in this paragraph that "Linux the kernel, and any derivatives [...] will remain," you are implying that the most important aspect of open source is "making money and supplanting a capitalistic machine." I'm more than a little confused as to how making money could possibly help supplant a capitalistic machine but I'm assuming that you meant something more like "supplanting the capitalistic machine based on proprietary software with one based on open source software." Well, perhaps it is an important element of what many people mean when they use the term open source as a conscious decision to avoid the term free software. In other words, I think that some people who use the term open source, e.g. Eric Raymond, invented the term specifically to describe the socio-economic concept of making money from non-proprietary software. So, what if we talk about free software, i.e. open source software without the libertarian, capitalist spin? Will free software disappear? You yourself even wrote that "Linux the kernel, and any derivatives [...] will remain." Not only Linux but GNU, BSD, et al, will remain for quite a long time. In this sense, how is free software failing? If I want to use software that I am free to copy, modify, and share with the community, I can still do it. Was this not the original aim of the FSF and the GNU project? Larry Wall can still keep providing Perl. I can still look at all of the source code to BSD and W. Richard Steven's TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 2 is as free to publish all the gory details of the BSD implementation of the TCP/IP stack today as it was when he first wrote it. How are any of these things failures for free software?
Personally, I think that free software will continue to flourish in the same way that it has always flourished, e.g. as a free exchange of ideas communicated with source code in the grand tradition of a academic community. Perhaps the views of those who supported the idea, for example, of "Open Source as a Business Strategy" might have try and buttress their arguments in the light of economic realities. Of course, if some of these open source businesses might even manage to survive the current economic downturn and come out strong on the upturn. However, for those who think that one can see "Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research", the particular market woes of any .bomb have little, if any, relevance. And what could possible interfere with Larry Wall's idea of open source development as an exercise in "Diligence, Patience, and Humility"?
I'll second the recommendation of ACE. In addition to ACE, The ACE ORB (TAO), Zen, their real-time ORB, and Jaws, An Application Framework for High Performance Web Systems, are all worth a look. This stuff has been around for quite some time and has been ported to nearly every compiler-platform imaginable.
ESR writes the following in his article:
From where is Raymond getting this? I have never read anything from the FSF or Stallman that advocates making proprietary licenses illegal or anything even morally equivalent to this position. Can anyone supply a reference to any statement from the FSF or Stallman supporting Raymond?
Unfortunately, posting unchecked, sensationalistic articles puts /. in "good company", e.g. the recent treatment of the scandal of the White House vandals.