Yeah, my primary complaint is that because Python has no marker to indicate block closure, no editor can actually auto-indent Python properly, which leaves the programmer stuck with idiotic highlight-and-shift operations to get things at the right level. This makes refactoring a royal pain in the ass, IME.
Of course, this problem could be easily fixed if python introduced one, single, optional keyword: end. Hell, keep the significant whitespace! Be my guest! But ffs, is it so very difficult to add an 'end' keyword, so that our editors can actually help us manage our code?
Hmm, I suppose I was too terse, and thus I phrased my counter-post poorly.
My contention is that Go *isn't* high-level, at least not in the traditional sense. At it's core, it's really dressed up C. What it *does* contain is a few high-level concepts, among them a more abstract concurrency model. As such, Go is probably best thought of as a hybrid language (mid-level? *shrug*).
I can't speak for AC above, but I read his/her point to be that whitespace is always significant.
Correct, and it was a non-point, since it's blatantly obvious to anyone versed in this issue that, when one complains about "signficant whitespace", what they're referring to is semantically relevant indentation.
Put another way, the reasoning that significant indentation is fine because we need whitespace to separate tokens is idiotic. By that logic it's perfectly reasonable to have languages treat "x+y", "x + y", and "x____+____y" differently (I tried to insert a bunch of extra spaces there, but alas, in HTML, multiple inter-word whitespace isn't significant when formatting... how ironic).
The whitespace fallacy is one of 'I learned about "{" and not " ", and I can't change.'
It's not a "fallacy". But nice use of weasel words, there.
The "significant whitespace" issue is that semantically significant indentation is annoying at best, and can actually introduce errors in certain conditions at worst, as the lexical scope of a piece of code is now determined by a bunch of invisible characters.
People who don't understand this issue are the same idiots who write this:
if (condition)
action
Instead of this:
if (condition) {
action }
As they don't seem to fully comprehend that explicit lexical scoping is important for eliminating certain classes of errors during software maintenance.
And anyone who's programmed in a functional style understands how nice it is to have proper, lexical closures at one's disposal, as opposed to hacking it with inner classes and hoping for the best.
Quick being an obnoxious, pedantic jackass (though, kudos for once again demonstrating the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory).
It's clear the OP meant "significant indentation", and it disappeared back in the days of Fortran until Python popped up on the scene and everyone suddenly decided it was a good idea again.
We can't convince them of the dangers of asteroid collisions so how the FSCK are they going to believe about this.
Well, there is one major difference: Montreal proved that this kind of thing can happen, and will happen again, whereas we've yet to see a major city devastated by a meteor impact.
Do you honestly believe power companies don't protect their multi billion dollar investments?
Probably not well, no. See, what you describe is long-term disaster planning, and it's the kind of thing the corporations that own that infrastructure aren't terribly good at. Unless they can see this disaster coming in the next quarter, frankly, the won't do much about it.
Really, one need to only look back at the NYC blackout, or the rolling brownouts in California, to see how effective corporate thinking is in the realm of long-term infrastructure maintenance and upkeep.
If you're omniscient, it doesn't mean you've forced anyone's hand.
Of course not, it's far more subtle than that.
If you're omniscient and the creator of the universe, you are responsible for establishing the very preconditions which lead to the current state of the universe. And you did so knowing full well what the outcome would be. As such, I, as a mere denizen of that universe, am merely a puppet, acting based on the choices you made went you invented the universe in the first place.
Of course, the counterargument is, well, quantum mechanics means that the universe isn't deterministic. ie, randomness at a fundamental level introduces variability in any given outcome. But if that's the case, then omniscience makes no real sense, as there may be an *infinite* number of futures, and it's impossible to determine which one will take place.
So I would contend either this "god" is omniscient and knows the future, or we have free will. It can't be both.
The Islamic view of time and the universe in general is that what has happened, is happening and will happen has already been determined ("it is written").
So much for god endowing us with free will. Meh, who needs it anyway, right? Well, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go murder my neighbour now... I'd feel bad about it, but if he dies, well, it was god's will, right?
As an aside, I've always felt that an omniscient god, by definition, obviates free will. Looks like Muslim scholars just had the balls to come out and admit it.
All PBIs are a delta snapshot of a specific PC-BSD release, and then whatever that app needs to run.
Ah, interesting, I see. So if someone built Amarok against a newer version of KDE, then it'd be shipped with KDE in the package. Otherwise it'll just use the base version, because that was what it was built against.
So you still have to build packages against a given release, just like you do in any other distro. It just gives the package builder freedom to build against a newer version of a given library if they want, or against libraries not included in the base. But those libraries would then be shipped as part of the PBI.
It's not just disk inefficient, it's memory inefficient, too. In fact, this is really the definition of bloat. Every application that uses Gnome, Gtk, KDE, Qt, or some other large package might have to be shipped with a full set of libraries, all of which would have to be loaded into memory at runtime (no code sharing, since the libraries aren't actually shared). That's a *very* silly thing to do for, I would contend, a relatively small gain in user convenience.
Now multiply those sizes by the number of processes you're currently running, as the lack of shared libraries means no shared code pages. Suddenly RAM usage spikes, your disk cache is wasted, and performance drops as a consequence. Yeah... great idea!
But the BSDs do provide superior performance, which is very evident in the server market share.
And you have modern, meaningful benchmarks demonstrating this to be the case, I presume? I mean, this isn't just nonsense rooted in your personal biases, right?
Wait wait... downloading and installing a deb from a third party requires knowledge and bravery (apparently it's very scary to click the download link, then 2x click the package in Nautilus and say "yes" when it asks if you want to install it), but using a PBI is all beauty and light?
Seriously, anyone who thinks people are going to continue to pay $50-$150/month for *TV* in this economy is leaving on their parent's salary. I make six figures, and I'd be damned if I'm going to shell out anywhere near $50/month for hundreds of junk channels when I only watch 5-6 shows.
Look you're *not normal*. And you're browsing a website full of people who aren't normal just like you. You have the knowledge and the technical expertise to set up an alternative that works for you, but that makes you *atypical*.
Honestly, look outside your little box for a second. Do you honestly think your mother or grandmother is gonna break out a PC and stream TV from Hulu? No. Hell, your average PC owner probably doesn't even realize they *can* hook their computer up to their TV.
I disagree. MythTV takes about a day to get to the point of doing "something useful". But I am a Tivo fan and I wanted MythTV to be as much like Tivo as possible. That part, getting MythTV to be like TiVo, took me a about a month.
Then buy a TiVo.
This is like people bitching that Ubuntu isn't enough like Windows. If you want a given product, *use that product* rather than wasting time trying to mold another solution to work kinda sorta but not really like your preferred solution.
BTW, I'm very glad you found a solution that works for you. Myth is obviously not for everyone, and there are a lot of excellent competing products out there. But it's simply not true that Myth takes a month to get working. As you said, it takes a day or two, tops, to get a working system up and running.
You missed the point. Broadcast/multicast will *always* be cheaper on the backhaul network than having users download content on demand, as you send the data out once at broadcast time, rather than once for every viewer.
Who needs a DVR when you can stream your content on your schedule?
And I'm telling you most people don't do that. Hell, most people don't even have their computer hooked up to their TV.
Seriously, anyone who thinks that streaming will replace regular broadcast TV any time soon are either dreaming or are just deeply confused about the way the world works outside their mom's basement.
Maybe I should have put/snark at the end of the post or something.
You could've, but it's early, I haven't had any coffee yet, and I'm a bit of a dumbass at the best of times, so there's no guarantee that would've made any difference at all.
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But when you take over a company, aren't you still bound by some of those obligations?
I would expect so, yes.
Couldn't the permission given by the previous bunch be taken as a verbal contract?
Indeed, and this sounds an awful lot like laches could be invoked. Pity these guys almost certainly don't have the money for a defence.
I'm somewhat reluctant to consider a language which mandates tracing garbage collection, and only has checked pointers and no pointer arithmetic
Buh? I must be misremembering... I *thought* Go actually had native pointers (along with the rest of its unboxed types).
Alright, nevermind then. :)
Yeah, my primary complaint is that because Python has no marker to indicate block closure, no editor can actually auto-indent Python properly, which leaves the programmer stuck with idiotic highlight-and-shift operations to get things at the right level. This makes refactoring a royal pain in the ass, IME.
Of course, this problem could be easily fixed if python introduced one, single, optional keyword: end. Hell, keep the significant whitespace! Be my guest! But ffs, is it so very difficult to add an 'end' keyword, so that our editors can actually help us manage our code?
Hmm, I suppose I was too terse, and thus I phrased my counter-post poorly.
My contention is that Go *isn't* high-level, at least not in the traditional sense. At it's core, it's really dressed up C. What it *does* contain is a few high-level concepts, among them a more abstract concurrency model. As such, Go is probably best thought of as a hybrid language (mid-level? *shrug*).
I can't speak for AC above, but I read his/her point to be that whitespace is always significant.
Correct, and it was a non-point, since it's blatantly obvious to anyone versed in this issue that, when one complains about "signficant whitespace", what they're referring to is semantically relevant indentation.
Put another way, the reasoning that significant indentation is fine because we need whitespace to separate tokens is idiotic. By that logic it's perfectly reasonable to have languages treat "x+y", "x + y", and "x____+____y" differently (I tried to insert a bunch of extra spaces there, but alas, in HTML, multiple inter-word whitespace isn't significant when formatting... how ironic).
The whitespace fallacy is one of 'I learned about "{" and not " ", and I can't change.'
It's not a "fallacy". But nice use of weasel words, there.
The "significant whitespace" issue is that semantically significant indentation is annoying at best, and can actually introduce errors in certain conditions at worst, as the lexical scope of a piece of code is now determined by a bunch of invisible characters.
People who don't understand this issue are the same idiots who write this:
if (condition)
action
Instead of this:
if (condition) {
action
}
As they don't seem to fully comprehend that explicit lexical scoping is important for eliminating certain classes of errors during software maintenance.
Those are mutually exclusive concepts? Huh. You might want to tell Google...
And anyone who's programmed in a functional style understands how nice it is to have proper, lexical closures at one's disposal, as opposed to hacking it with inner classes and hoping for the best.
Quick being an obnoxious, pedantic jackass (though, kudos for once again demonstrating the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory).
It's clear the OP meant "significant indentation", and it disappeared back in the days of Fortran until Python popped up on the scene and everyone suddenly decided it was a good idea again.
We can't convince them of the dangers of asteroid collisions so how the FSCK are they going to believe about this.
Well, there is one major difference: Montreal proved that this kind of thing can happen, and will happen again, whereas we've yet to see a major city devastated by a meteor impact.
Do you honestly believe power companies don't protect their multi billion dollar investments?
Probably not well, no. See, what you describe is long-term disaster planning, and it's the kind of thing the corporations that own that infrastructure aren't terribly good at. Unless they can see this disaster coming in the next quarter, frankly, the won't do much about it.
Really, one need to only look back at the NYC blackout, or the rolling brownouts in California, to see how effective corporate thinking is in the realm of long-term infrastructure maintenance and upkeep.
But... but... government bad! Regulation bad! Insurers good! Private industry good!
Why can't you understand this???
If you're omniscient, it doesn't mean you've forced anyone's hand.
Of course not, it's far more subtle than that.
If you're omniscient and the creator of the universe, you are responsible for establishing the very preconditions which lead to the current state of the universe. And you did so knowing full well what the outcome would be. As such, I, as a mere denizen of that universe, am merely a puppet, acting based on the choices you made went you invented the universe in the first place.
Of course, the counterargument is, well, quantum mechanics means that the universe isn't deterministic. ie, randomness at a fundamental level introduces variability in any given outcome. But if that's the case, then omniscience makes no real sense, as there may be an *infinite* number of futures, and it's impossible to determine which one will take place.
So I would contend either this "god" is omniscient and knows the future, or we have free will. It can't be both.
The Islamic view of time and the universe in general is that what has happened, is happening and will happen has already been determined ("it is written").
So much for god endowing us with free will. Meh, who needs it anyway, right? Well, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go murder my neighbour now... I'd feel bad about it, but if he dies, well, it was god's will, right?
As an aside, I've always felt that an omniscient god, by definition, obviates free will. Looks like Muslim scholars just had the balls to come out and admit it.
Ok, I think you missed something.
All PBIs are a delta snapshot of a specific PC-BSD release, and then whatever that app needs to run.
Ah, interesting, I see. So if someone built Amarok against a newer version of KDE, then it'd be shipped with KDE in the package. Otherwise it'll just use the base version, because that was what it was built against.
So you still have to build packages against a given release, just like you do in any other distro. It just gives the package builder freedom to build against a newer version of a given library if they want, or against libraries not included in the base. But those libraries would then be shipped as part of the PBI.
Yup, interesting. Thanks for the info!
So, wait, the entire KDE stack *isn't* shipped with KDE apps? So if a PBI is built against a newer version of KDE, it won't work...
How is it that PBIs are better, again?
It's not just disk inefficient, it's memory inefficient, too. In fact, this is really the definition of bloat. Every application that uses Gnome, Gtk, KDE, Qt, or some other large package might have to be shipped with a full set of libraries, all of which would have to be loaded into memory at runtime (no code sharing, since the libraries aren't actually shared). That's a *very* silly thing to do for, I would contend, a relatively small gain in user convenience.
And a big library is, what 100k? Maybe?
Uhuh. Try again buddy:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1027760 2010-01-10 09:52 libstdc++.so.6.0.13
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4231296 2010-01-24 13:54 libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.1800.3
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8932320 2009-10-07 12:17 libqt-mt.so.3.3.8
Now multiply those sizes by the number of processes you're currently running, as the lack of shared libraries means no shared code pages. Suddenly RAM usage spikes, your disk cache is wasted, and performance drops as a consequence. Yeah... great idea!
ROFL
I think the point is that PBIs are internally consistent, whereas a deb or rpm can make system-wide changes.
If I install a deb that upgrades something in /usr/lib without intending to, other apps may have issues.
So a PBI ships with *all* it's dependencies? Isn't that, you know, horribly inefficient? What about system libraries like glibc, libstdc++, etc?
But the BSDs do provide superior performance, which is very evident in the server market share.
And you have modern, meaningful benchmarks demonstrating this to be the case, I presume? I mean, this isn't just nonsense rooted in your personal biases, right?
Wait wait... downloading and installing a deb from a third party requires knowledge and bravery (apparently it's very scary to click the download link, then 2x click the package in Nautilus and say "yes" when it asks if you want to install it), but using a PBI is all beauty and light?
Interesting.
Seriously, anyone who thinks people are going to continue to pay $50-$150/month for *TV* in this economy is leaving on their parent's salary. I make six figures, and I'd be damned if I'm going to shell out anywhere near $50/month for hundreds of junk channels when I only watch 5-6 shows.
Look you're *not normal*. And you're browsing a website full of people who aren't normal just like you. You have the knowledge and the technical expertise to set up an alternative that works for you, but that makes you *atypical*.
Honestly, look outside your little box for a second. Do you honestly think your mother or grandmother is gonna break out a PC and stream TV from Hulu? No. Hell, your average PC owner probably doesn't even realize they *can* hook their computer up to their TV.
I disagree. MythTV takes about a day to get to the point of doing "something useful". But I am a Tivo fan and I wanted MythTV to be as much like Tivo as possible. That part, getting MythTV to be like TiVo, took me a about a month.
Then buy a TiVo.
This is like people bitching that Ubuntu isn't enough like Windows. If you want a given product, *use that product* rather than wasting time trying to mold another solution to work kinda sorta but not really like your preferred solution.
BTW, I'm very glad you found a solution that works for you. Myth is obviously not for everyone, and there are a lot of excellent competing products out there. But it's simply not true that Myth takes a month to get working. As you said, it takes a day or two, tops, to get a working system up and running.
You missed the point. Broadcast/multicast will *always* be cheaper on the backhaul network than having users download content on demand, as you send the data out once at broadcast time, rather than once for every viewer.
Who needs a DVR when you can stream your content on your schedule?
And I'm telling you most people don't do that. Hell, most people don't even have their computer hooked up to their TV.
Seriously, anyone who thinks that streaming will replace regular broadcast TV any time soon are either dreaming or are just deeply confused about the way the world works outside their mom's basement.
Maybe I should have put /snark at the end of the post or something.
You could've, but it's early, I haven't had any coffee yet, and I'm a bit of a dumbass at the best of times, so there's no guarantee that would've made any difference at all.