That isn't science. It's philosophy. The fact that you can't tell the difference proves you need to take a remedial science class (and possibly a philosophy course, as well).
Not that I doubt you (though I don't believe you, either), but the least you could do is provide citations. An admonishment to "wake up!" isn't terribly compelling if you don't provide proof that people are deluded in the first place.
You think? Take BigTable. Wikipedia describes it as: '"a sparse, distributed multi-dimensional sorted map", sharing characteristics of both row-oriented and column-oriented databases'. Sounds, to me, like a specialized solution to a very specialized problem, a problem that, I presume, didn't fit with any existing solution. Same goes with GFS. After all, do you really think they didn't evaluate existing solutions before embarking on building an entirely new distributed filesystem? Do you really think they're that stupid?
As for Protocol Buffers, given the existing solutions out there (such as ASN.1 and CORBA) are generally ugly and/or over-engineered, it sounds to me like they're simply addressing a gap in the industry... after all, XML and SOAP aren't the end-all and be-all of generic object-passing protocols.
Umm... what? XML and this protocol differ in only one way: one is plain text, the other is binary. Period. In both cases, you have to emit the data in a structured format, and you have to encode it (in one case, it's a binary encoding, in the other, it's a plain-text encoding, but it's still encoded).
Moron, he didn't say it didn't have an economic effect at all. He said it wasn't responsible for the currently nose-diving US economy. And on that score, he's correct, as last I checked, no one in their right mind was attempting to link 9/11 to the current, ongoing American economic implosion.
For that you paid like $20k more than me, and you have an enclosed case with A/C, and heat, and all those other niceties.
Well, that and a significantly reduced risk of being turned into hamburger the moment a retarded driver clips you while unexpectedly switching lanes without shoulder checking.
That doesn't mean testers should be part of the design process. It means those designing the code should be taking testing and test results into account. But testers are not designers, and designers are not testers. Anyone making that claim misunderstands both roles, deeply.
Right. *Your* opinion. In my opinion, a web interface means I don't have to install software on any random computer from which I'd like to access my email, and as a plus I get a consistent interface across the board.
so I'm probably not Web 2.0 enough to understand how a hypertext rendering program is the best possible application framework.
That probably stems from your inability to see that a web browser is something more than a "hypertext rendering program". The very existence of javascript demonstrates that that's not true, and hasn't been for an exceedingly long time (not to mention Flash, the Canvas tag, SVG, XUL, etc, etc).
I want to know why the GP seems to associate a CS degree with IT... last I checked, I didn't take advanced algorithms so I could learn who to admin the local Cisco switch.
Let's promote him to management! He'll fit right in!
Clearly, you still possess the charmingly naive notion that good programmers should be promoted to management. Fortunately, anyone who's been in the industry for a while understands why that's an incredibly stupid idea.
Personally, I'd gladly take an incompetent coder as a manager, as long as they do a good job handling employee development, customer interactions, project management, etc, etc... you know, the stuff most programmers are incredibly *bad* at.
I have recently realized that I may be at the limit of my potential career growth because I don't want to get into management.
Just find a company that values senior designers or architects. Those jobs are typically the logical path for technically-minded developers who aren't interested in management (such as myself).
Of course, that's not software dev, in that you aren't writing code. But IMHO, design and architecture *are* the interesting parts of software development... coding is just a necessary evil (that's not to say I don't enjoy coding, but if my job had me designing solutions but not implementing them, I'd still be a happy camper).
That said, many companies don't understand the difference between an architect and a project manager... but, I'm not sure I'd want to work for a company like that.
Huh? Quality Assurance/Test is a *completely* difference discipline from software design and architecture. Should QA/Test have some say in how the product is implemented, in order to ensure there are the hooks and services so they can do their jobs well? Absolutely. But QA/Test definitely shouldn't be involved in design, any more than your average entry-level code monkey should be.
That said, QA/Test folks are a very special breed, and finding good ones is exceedingly hard. No only do they need to have software development experience (in order to build test infrastructure, and to understand how to test software effectively), they also have to possess a very specific mindset (test is a *far* different job from software dev), and they also need to truly enjoy what they're doing. This would be why individuals who are really doing a stint in QA in order to move into dev are *not* the kind of guys you want running your QA team (they may make good bulk labour, but that's about it). A good QA person *wants* to be in that job because they like it and want to make it their career. There should be no need to let them have "a hand in design", because they don't want it in the first place, as they're too busy breaking the product.
The question is, why isn't it that easy? We have protocols for when a person is declared dead. It's pretty simple, really. Lack of electrical activity in the brain. Voila, no activity, person is dead, take 'em off life support and prepare for the funeral.
So why isn't the same standard applied to determine when life begins?
And by that, you mean the sample time based on the data you're willing to accept (we've got ice cores, among other things, that go back a long long way, but I can only assume you reject that data).
You *do* realize that private monopolies and government-operated monopolies are not the same thing, right? And that the latter behaves very differently as compared to the former?
Anyone who says "expressive and concise" is more important than "debug and maintain" needs to be run out of the industry on a rail, then tarred, feathered, and finally shot.
understand your point, really, you lose that part of editor functionality.
Ah, but it's more than that. The real point is that, if the editor can't figure out what code belongs where, that means *I'm* far more likely to mess it up. After all, missing a single tab can completely change the semantics of a block of code. IOW, Python increases the chances I'll mess up, and makes my job as a programmer *far* more tedious and irritating, just so it can force a particular formatting style on me. Thanks, but no thanks.
But you also gain the added insight in your code that you can see very quickly and with 100% confidence at what level of indentation a piece of code is.
Or you could let the editor indent the code properly and get the *exact* same benefits without fear that you accidentally mess up the semantics of your code because you misread something.
Heck, even if Python had both significant whitespace *and* a block terminator, I'd at least be satisfied. Why they omitted this, I have no idea, but it really strikes me as a glaring, pointless defect that just increases the odds that you can screw things up.
As for the rest, I couldn't agree more. But the significant whitespace thing really does actively keep me away from the language... it's just not worth all the trouble it creates for me.
Personally, given my choice, I'd go with a language similar to Ruby if I needed an "OO Perl"... though, my Smalltalk bias means Ruby annoys me in countless other ways (not to mention it's more glaring defects, such as it's dismal speed).:)
You didn't follow my example. I said before the print statement, not after. And the result, using your emacs command, is as follows:
if (true):
for i in range(1,10):
print i
print i + 1
print "Hello World"
Which is surprisingly terrible. I had expected to at least do this:
if (true):
for i in range(1,10):
print i
print i + 1
print "Hello World"
Do you get it now? In a case like this, the editor simply cannot know that the last print statement doesn't belong in the for loop. So now, not only is my code improperly indented, it's actually *wrong*.
And your continued attempt to bring up the need to wrap code in curly braces entirely misses the point. See, in C, as long as I know where the beginning and ending of the block is, I can place the braces in the right place, and I know that my code is semantically correct. Get the editor to indent it for me, and it's still semantically correct.
But in the above example, not only did the editor indent the code wrong, the *semantics* are wrong. That means that, every time I move a block and reindent with the editor, I have to check every damn line of code, just to make sure it didn't get confused because, as I've said over and over, Python doesn't provide sufficient hints to the editor regarding where blocks start and end, and so it *can't* know how to do the right thing.
Umm, you didn't wrap the if contents in curlies. That's your own fault for not indicating to the editor what you meant. Had you done that, the editor would have done the right thing, and everything would've been fine. And, luckily, C gives you the choice. Python doesn't even give you that much. Which is my entire point, which you so clearly missed.
It's the same amount of equally complicated maneuvers.
You didn't even run through my example, did you? Here, I'll do it for you, and the results are as follows (this is with emacs22... I'm typically a Vim guy, and it does even worse):
if (true):
for i in range(1,10):
print i
print i + 1
print "Hello World"
ie, it's *wrong* (I ran indent-rigidly, which another poster suggested). Why? Because, after pasting the for loop in, the editor simply *can not* know how to properly indent the block of code. Let me repeat that, it *can't know*. Why? Because the syntax doesn't provide the necessary information to understand the structure of the code. The best it could do (and this is what I expected... yeah, it did *worse* than I'd hoped) is:
if (true):
for i in range(1,10):
print i
print i + 1
print "Hello World"
Which is still wrong. So now I have to go and manually reindent everything, and worse, I have to make sure I get the indentation levels right, otherwise, the *semantics* of my code are wrong. Of course, in this example, that's pretty easy, but the minute you're dealing with more than a few lines of code, and more then a single lexical level, things get awfully hairy awfully fast.
BTW, I keep harping on this because I've developed my share of Python code, and this is exactly what turned me away from the language (I tend to develop iteratively, constantly refactoring my design as new requirements come to light, and guess what... Python is not easy code to refactor, for precisely this reason).
Slashdot Mirror
That isn't science. It's philosophy. The fact that you can't tell the difference proves you need to take a remedial science class (and possibly a philosophy course, as well).
Not that I doubt you (though I don't believe you, either), but the least you could do is provide citations. An admonishment to "wake up!" isn't terribly compelling if you don't provide proof that people are deluded in the first place.
You think? Take BigTable. Wikipedia describes it as: '"a sparse, distributed multi-dimensional sorted map", sharing characteristics of both row-oriented and column-oriented databases'. Sounds, to me, like a specialized solution to a very specialized problem, a problem that, I presume, didn't fit with any existing solution. Same goes with GFS. After all, do you really think they didn't evaluate existing solutions before embarking on building an entirely new distributed filesystem? Do you really think they're that stupid?
As for Protocol Buffers, given the existing solutions out there (such as ASN.1 and CORBA) are generally ugly and/or over-engineered, it sounds to me like they're simply addressing a gap in the industry... after all, XML and SOAP aren't the end-all and be-all of generic object-passing protocols.
Umm... what? XML and this protocol differ in only one way: one is plain text, the other is binary. Period. In both cases, you have to emit the data in a structured format, and you have to encode it (in one case, it's a binary encoding, in the other, it's a plain-text encoding, but it's still encoded).
Moron, he didn't say it didn't have an economic effect at all. He said it wasn't responsible for the currently nose-diving US economy. And on that score, he's correct, as last I checked, no one in their right mind was attempting to link 9/11 to the current, ongoing American economic implosion.
For that you paid like $20k more than me, and you have an enclosed case with A/C, and heat, and all those other niceties.
Well, that and a significantly reduced risk of being turned into hamburger the moment a retarded driver clips you while unexpectedly switching lanes without shoulder checking.
That doesn't mean testers should be part of the design process. It means those designing the code should be taking testing and test results into account. But testers are not designers, and designers are not testers. Anyone making that claim misunderstands both roles, deeply.
In my opinion
Right. *Your* opinion. In my opinion, a web interface means I don't have to install software on any random computer from which I'd like to access my email, and as a plus I get a consistent interface across the board.
so I'm probably not Web 2.0 enough to understand how a hypertext rendering program is the best possible application framework.
That probably stems from your inability to see that a web browser is something more than a "hypertext rendering program". The very existence of javascript demonstrates that that's not true, and hasn't been for an exceedingly long time (not to mention Flash, the Canvas tag, SVG, XUL, etc, etc).
by coaching that agenda in terms that speak to more than just the Democratic base.
The term is couching: to phrase or express in a specified manner
I want to know why the GP seems to associate a CS degree with IT... last I checked, I didn't take advanced algorithms so I could learn who to admin the local Cisco switch.
Let's promote him to management! He'll fit right in!
Clearly, you still possess the charmingly naive notion that good programmers should be promoted to management. Fortunately, anyone who's been in the industry for a while understands why that's an incredibly stupid idea.
Personally, I'd gladly take an incompetent coder as a manager, as long as they do a good job handling employee development, customer interactions, project management, etc, etc... you know, the stuff most programmers are incredibly *bad* at.
I have recently realized that I may be at the limit of my potential career growth because I don't want to get into management.
Just find a company that values senior designers or architects. Those jobs are typically the logical path for technically-minded developers who aren't interested in management (such as myself).
Of course, that's not software dev, in that you aren't writing code. But IMHO, design and architecture *are* the interesting parts of software development... coding is just a necessary evil (that's not to say I don't enjoy coding, but if my job had me designing solutions but not implementing them, I'd still be a happy camper).
That said, many companies don't understand the difference between an architect and a project manager... but, I'm not sure I'd want to work for a company like that.
If QA people regularly had a hand in design,
Huh? Quality Assurance/Test is a *completely* difference discipline from software design and architecture. Should QA/Test have some say in how the product is implemented, in order to ensure there are the hooks and services so they can do their jobs well? Absolutely. But QA/Test definitely shouldn't be involved in design, any more than your average entry-level code monkey should be.
That said, QA/Test folks are a very special breed, and finding good ones is exceedingly hard. No only do they need to have software development experience (in order to build test infrastructure, and to understand how to test software effectively), they also have to possess a very specific mindset (test is a *far* different job from software dev), and they also need to truly enjoy what they're doing. This would be why individuals who are really doing a stint in QA in order to move into dev are *not* the kind of guys you want running your QA team (they may make good bulk labour, but that's about it). A good QA person *wants* to be in that job because they like it and want to make it their career. There should be no need to let them have "a hand in design", because they don't want it in the first place, as they're too busy breaking the product.
Well, count yourself among the minority. Anyone who uses gmail, and there seems to be quite a few, already disagrees with you.
The question is, why isn't it that easy? We have protocols for when a person is declared dead. It's pretty simple, really. Lack of electrical activity in the brain. Voila, no activity, person is dead, take 'em off life support and prepare for the funeral.
So why isn't the same standard applied to determine when life begins?
And by that, you mean the sample time based on the data you're willing to accept (we've got ice cores, among other things, that go back a long long way, but I can only assume you reject that data).
You *do* realize that private monopolies and government-operated monopolies are not the same thing, right? And that the latter behaves very differently as compared to the former?
As opposed to no regulating at all, it which point they can happily do whatever the hell they want, wiretapping included.
Yes. That's *so* much better.
It shows he's willing to break from the expected stance
"Expected" only because it was his own, previously expressed stance.
Would you rather have a centralized, Soviet Union style setup
Just FYI, it's not the 50s anymore. People aren't buying into the red scare bullshit anymore.
Anyone who says "expressive and concise" is more important than "debug and maintain" needs to be run out of the industry on a rail, then tarred, feathered, and finally shot.
understand your point, really, you lose that part of editor functionality.
Ah, but it's more than that. The real point is that, if the editor can't figure out what code belongs where, that means *I'm* far more likely to mess it up. After all, missing a single tab can completely change the semantics of a block of code. IOW, Python increases the chances I'll mess up, and makes my job as a programmer *far* more tedious and irritating, just so it can force a particular formatting style on me. Thanks, but no thanks.
But you also gain the added insight in your code that you can see very quickly and with 100% confidence at what level of indentation a piece of code is.
Or you could let the editor indent the code properly and get the *exact* same benefits without fear that you accidentally mess up the semantics of your code because you misread something.
Heck, even if Python had both significant whitespace *and* a block terminator, I'd at least be satisfied. Why they omitted this, I have no idea, but it really strikes me as a glaring, pointless defect that just increases the odds that you can screw things up.
As for the rest, I couldn't agree more. But the significant whitespace thing really does actively keep me away from the language... it's just not worth all the trouble it creates for me.
Personally, given my choice, I'd go with a language similar to Ruby if I needed an "OO Perl"... though, my Smalltalk bias means Ruby annoys me in countless other ways (not to mention it's more glaring defects, such as it's dismal speed). :)
You didn't follow my example. I said before the print statement, not after. And the result, using your emacs command, is as follows:
if (true):
for i in range(1,10):
print i
print i + 1
print "Hello World"
Which is surprisingly terrible. I had expected to at least do this:
if (true):
for i in range(1,10):
print i
print i + 1
print "Hello World"
Do you get it now? In a case like this, the editor simply cannot know that the last print statement doesn't belong in the for loop. So now, not only is my code improperly indented, it's actually *wrong*.
And your continued attempt to bring up the need to wrap code in curly braces entirely misses the point. See, in C, as long as I know where the beginning and ending of the block is, I can place the braces in the right place, and I know that my code is semantically correct. Get the editor to indent it for me, and it's still semantically correct.
But in the above example, not only did the editor indent the code wrong, the *semantics* are wrong. That means that, every time I move a block and reindent with the editor, I have to check every damn line of code, just to make sure it didn't get confused because, as I've said over and over, Python doesn't provide sufficient hints to the editor regarding where blocks start and end, and so it *can't* know how to do the right thing.
Umm, you didn't wrap the if contents in curlies. That's your own fault for not indicating to the editor what you meant. Had you done that, the editor would have done the right thing, and everything would've been fine. And, luckily, C gives you the choice. Python doesn't even give you that much. Which is my entire point, which you so clearly missed.
It's the same amount of equally complicated maneuvers.
You didn't even run through my example, did you? Here, I'll do it for you, and the results are as follows (this is with emacs22... I'm typically a Vim guy, and it does even worse):
if (true):
for i in range(1,10):
print i
print i + 1
print "Hello World"
ie, it's *wrong* (I ran indent-rigidly, which another poster suggested). Why? Because, after pasting the for loop in, the editor simply *can not* know how to properly indent the block of code. Let me repeat that, it *can't know*. Why? Because the syntax doesn't provide the necessary information to understand the structure of the code. The best it could do (and this is what I expected... yeah, it did *worse* than I'd hoped) is:
if (true):
for i in range(1,10):
print i
print i + 1
print "Hello World"
Which is still wrong. So now I have to go and manually reindent everything, and worse, I have to make sure I get the indentation levels right, otherwise, the *semantics* of my code are wrong. Of course, in this example, that's pretty easy, but the minute you're dealing with more than a few lines of code, and more then a single lexical level, things get awfully hairy awfully fast.
BTW, I keep harping on this because I've developed my share of Python code, and this is exactly what turned me away from the language (I tend to develop iteratively, constantly refactoring my design as new requirements come to light, and guess what... Python is not easy code to refactor, for precisely this reason).