That's really a product of it's market. Lua has made it's name by being a light-weight, easily embeddable interpreter. The consequence is that no one really uses it for truly general-purpose programming (unlike the other languages in the list). That's not to say Lua couldn't be used for such a purpose, it's just that no one really bothers (at least, AFAIK, I could be wrong).
Perl 6 has made huge strides since 2000. The question is whether progress of the project will ever catch up with the goal posts.
Umm... the goalposts are set. The language spec is done. The test suite is being built. All that's left is to implement it, and that's being done as we speak. What else do you want?
After eight years, the best you can say about the language specification is that it's "largely" complete?
Last I checked, the C language spec was still being worked on. And yet, C compilers abound. So what's your point? The vast majority of the Perl 6 language is done. Period. As I understand it, there are a few places where work is still being done, but implementations can, and are, building on the existing spec, because it's *finished*.
Besides, you took one small quote and asked "is that best best you can say?". Funny how you completely ignored the rest, such as the test suite, and the two ongoing implementations. But, I guess if you want to be an alarmist cynic, the best way is to distort the discussion to your advantage.
Perl 6 is a much bigger disaster than DNF.
Umm... why? Perl 5 continues to exist, the implementation continues to evolve (eg, Unicode support didn't exist in the original Perl 5), so who cares if Perl 6 takes a bit of time?
Perl 6 keeps siphoning off mindshare and developers.
Uhh... okay. I can't say I've seen that, but if you say it's true, I guess it must be... despite the fact that you contradict yourself in the very same sentence, pointing out, as I already have, that Perl 5 continues to move forward.
Parrot threatened to throw other scripting languages into a similar state of confusion
Because it'll provide a new platform to target, much like the.NET CLR or the JVM? Yes, I can see how that's such a terrible disaster. I know when the CLR came out, the scripting world was thrown into a state of chaos...::rollseyes::
Umm... I'm not. I explicitly said there *wasn't* an imminent release. What I said was that Perl 6 is making huge strides, and that it's far from vapourware. Go to the Parrot project website, download a development snapshot, and see for yourself.
Until I see a schedule, the comparison to DNF sticks.
Only if you don't understand the two projects. DNF has an ever-changing target of requirements and specifications... hell, it's changed engines, what, three times? Perl 6 has a largely complete language specification, a large and growing test suite, two separate implementations in the works, and many people working hard to develop a complete implementation. Is there still a ton of work to do? Absolutely! But it's *far* from being the clusterf*ck that is DNF, and you do the project a great disservice by making such a poorly educated comparison.
I thought Perl had full Unicode support... is there something in particular in it's implementation that you feel is missing (I've never had to work with Unicode, so I honestly don't know)?
In my experience, Ruby syntax tends to be easy to read and maintain compared to Javascript or Perl,
My problem with Ruby is that it's just unlike Smalltalk enough to be annoying. See, when I first came across it, I thought "hey, it's like Smalltalk, but scripted! I can get behind this!" Then I started digging. For example, take the horrible hack that is passing closures to functions. WTF? A special, magic syntax so you can pass in closures, and you can only pass in *one*? Once you see that, suddenly you realize that closures *aren't* first-class objects in Ruby, despite what the language would have you believe.
Little things like that are what anger me about languages. Above all, a programming language should be internally consistent. Say what you will about Python or Perl, but at least they're consistent. The same can't be said for Ruby, which ends up looking a bit amateurish as a result; the product of someone who knew just enough Smalltalk to screw up what could've been a rather nice little language.
Applying web rendering principles and styles to a browser UI just seems sloppy to me
Meh, matter of taste. What about XAML? Or any of the other mechanisms used for defining UIs? I'm not sure Chrome is any worse of better than any of them. And it does have the advantage of being extremely malleable at runtime, which his pretty nifty.
not to mention all the troubles with integrating into various OSes and not looking horridly out of place
And, of course, that has absolutely nothing to do with Chrome, and is simply an artifact of Mozilla opting to write their own widget set, ala Swing, as opposed to binding to native controls, ala SWT. TBH, I'm not really sure how I feel about that decision... on the one hand, it makes maintenance a lot easier (no need to maintain platform-specific widget bindings), and ensures that the implementation is 100% consistent across all platforms. But, as you say, it does mean Mozilla seems a tad out of place. 'course, so does Winamp, Windows Media Player, Office 7...
I do have a problem with the huge bloat, though. Part of that is (notably the compile time) probably attributed to it being in C++
Buh? The latest round of tests have shown that, as far as memory usage is concerned, Firefox 3 is the leanest browser out there. Much of that comes down to optimizations in Gecko, changes in the way XPCOM-bound objects are garbage collected, etc.
There's a Perl 6 effort, with a major language redesign, expected to ship shortly after Duke Nukem Forever.
Only someone who hasn't been paying attention would believe that. Perl 6, the language, is largely completely specified at this point. Meanwhile, Pugs has gone a long, long way to a working Perl 6 implementation, and the vast strides in Parrot mean Rakudo, the Perl6-on-Parrot implementation, has made immense progress in the last six months.
Does that means Perl 6 will be out this year? No. There's still plenty of work to do. But the idea that Perl 6 has anything at all in common with DNF (which, unlike Perl 6, has suffered from constantly changing specs, engines, etc) is incredibly insulting to all those who are working to make Perl 6 a reality.
Perhaps. I suspect CPAN ironcailly also suffers from it's own ubiquity and ease of access. Any highschool student can whip together a quick Perl module, and I suspect more than a few do. The result is that poorly written or only half-baked projects end up there.
By contrast, the only people writing Tcl modules are those serious about using the language, and that immediately introduces a selection bias.
Long-term science might fade away, but that isn't to say an increase in short term research cannot accelerate the development of whatever field they are researching in.
Fundamental science is by it's very nature long term. And in a corporation, unless you can demonstrate real, tangible benefits to your work in a relatively short timeframe, the work simply won't get done.
Umm... only publicly traded companies have those demands on them. Private companies can execute their strategies as they see fit, no matter how ill-fated their decisions may be.
And yet, I'm unaware of any truly large private companies that have laid out funds to support fundamental science work. The goal of profit isn't unique to publicly traded companies.
You see how that works?
I can see how it doesn't. You really believe individuals will donate to support fundamental science?? Charities already have enough trouble drawing funds for supporting research into topics that have real, tangible benefits for individuals (eg, cancer research). Expecting individuals to donate in order to support multi-million dollar research into nanotechnology is, frankly, wildly naive. Hell, that's a classic example of why I like to compare libertarianism to communism: both rely on completely unrealistic beliefs about human behaviour (and in the case of libertarianism, free markets).
First, one company (or even many) cutting back on basic research does not mean all such research has stopped.
Read the other comments. There are those who've observed a continued trend in large American labs shutting down, in order to maximize short-term profits.
are you suggesting companies like AT&T and HP not be free to cancel these programs?
Of course not, and if you read my post, you'll see I said nothing of the kind.
I'm suggesting that private industry can't be left to perform basic science, and that government funding is vitally important.
the issues with government funding exist without regard to what private industry does.
What's your point? I never said government funding was perfect. I said private industry can't be trusted to perform basic science.
I doubt very much that is what libertarians are telling you.
Really? Perhaps you should read up on the platform. Your average libertarian (including many conservatives) believes that everything but national defense and a few other services should be privatized, period (Bob Barr included). Hell, the entire basis of the philosophy is that taxation is fundamentally evil (as you yourself espouse).
Let's take Soviet-style (now Chinese-style) nationalized althetics
Why? So you can make a bunch of loaded, outrageous claims in order to make a comparison that's so far from valid it's, frankly, rather hilarious, in a sad sort of way? I think I'll pass.
Of course, if you posit the elimination of "government and private financing" for any industry, it is equivalent to assuming the elimination of the industry. So what?
My problem is that there are those who erroneously believe that government should completely step out of the world of fundamental science funding (I presumed, perhaps incorrectly, that the original responder, who suggested that "startups" are doing this work, was among them). My belief is that, if you do this, those university facilities that you made mention of will disappear. Combine that with the continued shutdown of large private labs, and guess what: no one will be performing fundamental science in the United States. Now, you may not believe that's a bad thing, but I do, and I believe the right-wingers are living in a fantasy world if they believe that market forces will solve this problem.
if the USA enables the markets to work as they should/ought to
Which is... how? What magic tricks should the US perform that will encourage businesses to invest large funds in long-term science that may or may not have any payoff, short-term or long? How is taking one's hands off the market going to encourage such work when market forces explicitly work against such efforts (as this very story demonstrates).
that this research would be done in the private sector with an obvious motive to generate marketable products/services.
No, it would not, because a business is interested in optimizing short- to medium-term profits, as you say by creating "marketable products/services", which rules out long-term fundamental science. But no libertarian will admit to that, as you yourself demonstrate.
Now lets take your logic and apply it to another sector and see where it gets you.
And why would we do that? We're talking about fundamental research, here, not donating to your local pet shelter. If you can't see the difference, there's little point in continuing this discussion.
Umm... like who? Hell, what startup has the funds to perform basic materials science, anyway? Do you understand the kind of research facilities and monetary outlay required to study nanotechnology or materials science?
Meanwhile, you've got libertarians like Bob Barr telling us that the private sector will do this work, and therefore government funding of fundamental research is a bad thing. Interesting how that's working out... oh well, just yet more proof that, like communism, libertarianism is an amusing fantasy and little else.
It is how much resources a product *requires*, not uses, that is relevant.
What?? That's exactly the *opposite* of what actually matters. Why on earth would you care if Firefox uses a paltry 22MB extra disk space if it's runtime performance is superior? Honestly, that's absolutely ridiculous. Grasping at straws much?
Besides, 22MB? You really care about 22MB in a world of near-terabyte hard disks? Really??
But it seems like, ideally, there would be some sort of standardization on how those services are exposed to this sort of browser.
Yeah, it's call SOAP. Go talk to Amazon about it. Or Google. Or any number of other websites that expose proper web services. Sure, there are quite a few that don't, and in those cases Ubiquity is forced to interact with a clunky screen-scraping interface, but the technology is already there to solve that problem.
Continental scale infrastructure is a long term thing for humans
Problem is, in a world of privatized power infrastructure (like, say, the US), there's no incentive to modernize the grid. Just look at what happened during the blackout in NY a couple years back.
Which is rare, and whenever that happens and I launch Firefox, it prompts me if I want to update, which gets annoying
I'm not trying to convince you to use Firefox or anything (frankly, I couldn't care less what browser you use), but just FYI, you can turn update checking off (or, at least, Firefox claims you can)... Tools->Options->Advanced->Update, uncheck whatever you like (probably all of them).
Slashdot Mirror
That's really a product of it's market. Lua has made it's name by being a light-weight, easily embeddable interpreter. The consequence is that no one really uses it for truly general-purpose programming (unlike the other languages in the list). That's not to say Lua couldn't be used for such a purpose, it's just that no one really bothers (at least, AFAIK, I could be wrong).
Perl 6 has made huge strides since 2000. The question is whether progress of the project will ever catch up with the goal posts.
Umm... the goalposts are set. The language spec is done. The test suite is being built. All that's left is to implement it, and that's being done as we speak. What else do you want?
After eight years, the best you can say about the language specification is that it's "largely" complete?
Last I checked, the C language spec was still being worked on. And yet, C compilers abound. So what's your point? The vast majority of the Perl 6 language is done. Period. As I understand it, there are a few places where work is still being done, but implementations can, and are, building on the existing spec, because it's *finished*.
Besides, you took one small quote and asked "is that best best you can say?". Funny how you completely ignored the rest, such as the test suite, and the two ongoing implementations. But, I guess if you want to be an alarmist cynic, the best way is to distort the discussion to your advantage.
Perl 6 is a much bigger disaster than DNF.
Umm... why? Perl 5 continues to exist, the implementation continues to evolve (eg, Unicode support didn't exist in the original Perl 5), so who cares if Perl 6 takes a bit of time?
Perl 6 keeps siphoning off mindshare and developers.
Uhh... okay. I can't say I've seen that, but if you say it's true, I guess it must be... despite the fact that you contradict yourself in the very same sentence, pointing out, as I already have, that Perl 5 continues to move forward.
Parrot threatened to throw other scripting languages into a similar state of confusion
Because it'll provide a new platform to target, much like the .NET CLR or the JVM? Yes, I can see how that's such a terrible disaster. I know when the CLR came out, the scripting world was thrown into a state of chaos... ::rollseyes::
Can Perl 6 access Perl 5 modules while in Perl 6 mode?
Yes, Perl 6 will be able to use Perl 5 packages.
if you are talking about an imminent release
Umm... I'm not. I explicitly said there *wasn't* an imminent release. What I said was that Perl 6 is making huge strides, and that it's far from vapourware. Go to the Parrot project website, download a development snapshot, and see for yourself.
Until I see a schedule, the comparison to DNF sticks.
Only if you don't understand the two projects. DNF has an ever-changing target of requirements and specifications... hell, it's changed engines, what, three times? Perl 6 has a largely complete language specification, a large and growing test suite, two separate implementations in the works, and many people working hard to develop a complete implementation. Is there still a ton of work to do? Absolutely! But it's *far* from being the clusterf*ck that is DNF, and you do the project a great disservice by making such a poorly educated comparison.
I thought Perl had full Unicode support... is there something in particular in it's implementation that you feel is missing (I've never had to work with Unicode, so I honestly don't know)?
In my experience, Ruby syntax tends to be easy to read and maintain compared to Javascript or Perl,
My problem with Ruby is that it's just unlike Smalltalk enough to be annoying. See, when I first came across it, I thought "hey, it's like Smalltalk, but scripted! I can get behind this!" Then I started digging. For example, take the horrible hack that is passing closures to functions. WTF? A special, magic syntax so you can pass in closures, and you can only pass in *one*? Once you see that, suddenly you realize that closures *aren't* first-class objects in Ruby, despite what the language would have you believe.
Little things like that are what anger me about languages. Above all, a programming language should be internally consistent. Say what you will about Python or Perl, but at least they're consistent. The same can't be said for Ruby, which ends up looking a bit amateurish as a result; the product of someone who knew just enough Smalltalk to screw up what could've been a rather nice little language.
This is all decidedly off topic, but... :)
Applying web rendering principles and styles to a browser UI just seems sloppy to me
Meh, matter of taste. What about XAML? Or any of the other mechanisms used for defining UIs? I'm not sure Chrome is any worse of better than any of them. And it does have the advantage of being extremely malleable at runtime, which his pretty nifty.
not to mention all the troubles with integrating into various OSes and not looking horridly out of place
And, of course, that has absolutely nothing to do with Chrome, and is simply an artifact of Mozilla opting to write their own widget set, ala Swing, as opposed to binding to native controls, ala SWT. TBH, I'm not really sure how I feel about that decision... on the one hand, it makes maintenance a lot easier (no need to maintain platform-specific widget bindings), and ensures that the implementation is 100% consistent across all platforms. But, as you say, it does mean Mozilla seems a tad out of place. 'course, so does Winamp, Windows Media Player, Office 7...
I do have a problem with the huge bloat, though. Part of that is (notably the compile time) probably attributed to it being in C++
Buh? The latest round of tests have shown that, as far as memory usage is concerned, Firefox 3 is the leanest browser out there. Much of that comes down to optimizations in Gecko, changes in the way XPCOM-bound objects are garbage collected, etc.
There's a Perl 6 effort, with a major language redesign, expected to ship shortly after Duke Nukem Forever.
Only someone who hasn't been paying attention would believe that. Perl 6, the language, is largely completely specified at this point. Meanwhile, Pugs has gone a long, long way to a working Perl 6 implementation, and the vast strides in Parrot mean Rakudo, the Perl6-on-Parrot implementation, has made immense progress in the last six months.
Does that means Perl 6 will be out this year? No. There's still plenty of work to do. But the idea that Perl 6 has anything at all in common with DNF (which, unlike Perl 6, has suffered from constantly changing specs, engines, etc) is incredibly insulting to all those who are working to make Perl 6 a reality.
Perhaps. I suspect CPAN ironcailly also suffers from it's own ubiquity and ease of access. Any highschool student can whip together a quick Perl module, and I suspect more than a few do. The result is that poorly written or only half-baked projects end up there.
By contrast, the only people writing Tcl modules are those serious about using the language, and that immediately introduces a selection bias.
Ah, I see, you completely ignored the article I posted. So be it. *shrug*
What I imply requires a moral society which we do not have.
Fair enough, that I can accept.
In the past(30's-60s) we have had a moral society and hopefully we get back to that someday soon.
ROFL, tell that to women, or african americans. I hate to be the one to tell you, but that world you imagine existed never has.
Long-term science might fade away, but that isn't to say an increase in short term research cannot accelerate the development of whatever field they are researching in.
Fundamental science is by it's very nature long term. And in a corporation, unless you can demonstrate real, tangible benefits to your work in a relatively short timeframe, the work simply won't get done.
Umm... only publicly traded companies have those demands on them. Private companies can execute their strategies as they see fit, no matter how ill-fated their decisions may be.
And yet, I'm unaware of any truly large private companies that have laid out funds to support fundamental science work. The goal of profit isn't unique to publicly traded companies.
You see how that works?
I can see how it doesn't. You really believe individuals will donate to support fundamental science?? Charities already have enough trouble drawing funds for supporting research into topics that have real, tangible benefits for individuals (eg, cancer research). Expecting individuals to donate in order to support multi-million dollar research into nanotechnology is, frankly, wildly naive. Hell, that's a classic example of why I like to compare libertarianism to communism: both rely on completely unrealistic beliefs about human behaviour (and in the case of libertarianism, free markets).
First, one company (or even many) cutting back on basic research does not mean all such research has stopped.
Read the other comments. There are those who've observed a continued trend in large American labs shutting down, in order to maximize short-term profits.
are you suggesting companies like AT&T and HP not be free to cancel these programs?
Of course not, and if you read my post, you'll see I said nothing of the kind.
I'm suggesting that private industry can't be left to perform basic science, and that government funding is vitally important.
the issues with government funding exist without regard to what private industry does.
What's your point? I never said government funding was perfect. I said private industry can't be trusted to perform basic science.
I doubt very much that is what libertarians are telling you.
Really? Perhaps you should read up on the platform. Your average libertarian (including many conservatives) believes that everything but national defense and a few other services should be privatized, period (Bob Barr included). Hell, the entire basis of the philosophy is that taxation is fundamentally evil (as you yourself espouse).
Let's take Soviet-style (now Chinese-style) nationalized althetics
Why? So you can make a bunch of loaded, outrageous claims in order to make a comparison that's so far from valid it's, frankly, rather hilarious, in a sad sort of way? I think I'll pass.
Of course, if you posit the elimination of "government and private financing" for any industry, it is equivalent to assuming the elimination of the industry. So what?
My problem is that there are those who erroneously believe that government should completely step out of the world of fundamental science funding (I presumed, perhaps incorrectly, that the original responder, who suggested that "startups" are doing this work, was among them). My belief is that, if you do this, those university facilities that you made mention of will disappear. Combine that with the continued shutdown of large private labs, and guess what: no one will be performing fundamental science in the United States. Now, you may not believe that's a bad thing, but I do, and I believe the right-wingers are living in a fantasy world if they believe that market forces will solve this problem.
if the USA enables the markets to work as they should/ought to
Which is... how? What magic tricks should the US perform that will encourage businesses to invest large funds in long-term science that may or may not have any payoff, short-term or long? How is taking one's hands off the market going to encourage such work when market forces explicitly work against such efforts (as this very story demonstrates).
that this research would be done in the private sector with an obvious motive to generate marketable products/services.
No, it would not, because a business is interested in optimizing short- to medium-term profits, as you say by creating "marketable products/services", which rules out long-term fundamental science. But no libertarian will admit to that, as you yourself demonstrate.
Now lets take your logic and apply it to another sector and see where it gets you.
And why would we do that? We're talking about fundamental research, here, not donating to your local pet shelter. If you can't see the difference, there's little point in continuing this discussion.
they make arrangements to use university labs or those owned by other firms.
And if government and private funding for fundamental research dries up, what then? They'd have nowhere to go, that's what.
Umm... like who? Hell, what startup has the funds to perform basic materials science, anyway? Do you understand the kind of research facilities and monetary outlay required to study nanotechnology or materials science?
Meanwhile, you've got libertarians like Bob Barr telling us that the private sector will do this work, and therefore government funding of fundamental research is a bad thing. Interesting how that's working out... oh well, just yet more proof that, like communism, libertarianism is an amusing fantasy and little else.
It is how much resources a product *requires*, not uses, that is relevant.
What?? That's exactly the *opposite* of what actually matters. Why on earth would you care if Firefox uses a paltry 22MB extra disk space if it's runtime performance is superior? Honestly, that's absolutely ridiculous. Grasping at straws much?
Besides, 22MB? You really care about 22MB in a world of near-terabyte hard disks? Really??
But it seems like, ideally, there would be some sort of standardization on how those services are exposed to this sort of browser.
Yeah, it's call SOAP. Go talk to Amazon about it. Or Google. Or any number of other websites that expose proper web services. Sure, there are quite a few that don't, and in those cases Ubiquity is forced to interact with a clunky screen-scraping interface, but the technology is already there to solve that problem.
Continental scale infrastructure is a long term thing for humans
Problem is, in a world of privatized power infrastructure (like, say, the US), there's no incentive to modernize the grid. Just look at what happened during the blackout in NY a couple years back.
WTF?! Do you even following politics?
Business is greatest influence force in politics.
In the US, maybe, where legalized bribary is a way of life. In Canada, we tend not to accept quite the same level of corruption.
Except that Opera provides all of these things without the bloat.
And yet, Firefox 3 uses less memory than all the other browsers, including Opera. You were saying?
It's not that extensions are bad, it's just more of a hassle if the functionality is not included as standard.
So if they include features (eg, an RSS reader), Firefox is bloated. If they eliminate features in lieu of add-ons, it's a hassle.
They really can't win, can they?
Which is rare, and whenever that happens and I launch Firefox, it prompts me if I want to update, which gets annoying
I'm not trying to convince you to use Firefox or anything (frankly, I couldn't care less what browser you use), but just FYI, you can turn update checking off (or, at least, Firefox claims you can)... Tools->Options->Advanced->Update, uncheck whatever you like (probably all of them).