Pascal compilers usually use recursive decent parsers which are known for being pretty damn fast when implemented properly. The language as a whole was designed by Wirth to be compiled quickly. I think maybe the difference in speed between Borland Pascal and early C++ compilers is just the age of the languages in general. Pascal is an old ass language, right up there with FORTRAN and both of those call C "little bro". C++ was relativly new at the time, hell, object oriented languages were still young, so I'm sure Pascal was easier to generate code for because it's a less complex language and we've been doing it for so damn long at the time all the kinks were pretty much worked out.
What was even the point of comparing these 4 vastly different languages? Java and Scala both run in virtual machines so it's obvious a native compiled language is going to beat them out. C++ is a very mature and popular language with a heritage going back to an even more mature language, so obviously it'll beat out just about anything. I think the Go language is pointless to being with, but this would have been much more interesting if they did some benchmarks comparing it to some other compiled languages like Pascal, BASIC, FORTRAN, C/C++, or D just to see where it stands in the group. This just reeks of someone coming up with some busy work to make it look like they have something to do at Google.
While I understand the view that the energy wasted on high school and college level sports could be spent much better on academic pursuits, sports are a huge income source for a lot of schools, and with out them a lot of other more worthwhile programs would disappear as well.
I doubt it even matters that the login screen looks like the iPhone's anyway. The type of person who is probably using 1234 as his passcode is probably the same kind of person who uses the same passcode/password for everything. I bet if they did a study like this on peoples debit car PIN numbers the results would be pretty similar.
By your logic gym class should be an optional college course only for students who want to become professional athletes, shop class only for those who want to become carpenters, and Home Economics only for those who choose to become stay at home moms. The point of high school is to expose a student to a wide range of studies so maybe they can find their niche in life. How is a student going to know whether he's interested in computer programming as a career unless he's been exposed to it sometime previously. A kid who's family doesn't own a computer might become fascinated by the subject after being exposed to it in school and maybe he'll actually learn a useful skill other than how to take a bong rip and shotgun a beer.
Funny story, I actually clicked one of those "Adult Friend Finder" type ads once because I wanted to see just who these "local" girls were, and I actually found my girlfriend at the time advertising herself as "ready to play" on the website. Needless to say, she got kicked to the curb, and I began to doubt my manhood for awhile. Why-o-why did I have to come across the one ad actually offering real local girls.
You're right, and I'm not trying to say JavaScript is just so damn blazing fast people should rewrite all their FORTRAN code in JS. I'm just saying that a lot of progress has been made making the language somewhat capable. It's come along way in the last 10 years. I guess I went off topic a bit, as I wasn't specifically referring to JavaScript with that comment; I was talking more about why people do fun, but somewhat pointless projects like this in a language like JavaScript. It's good fun do things with languages and platforms that they aren't expected to be capable of doing. It's like the QuickBASIC community people making 3D games and stuff with QB4.5. Take what we've heard so far about Windows 8, or all of the work Qt is doing integrating JavaScript in to their framework. Given my own prejudices about JavaScript I would have never even considered giving it a major role in as desktop OS's UI framework. We use native code for that goddamnit. We'll see how it works out I guess...
But I definitely agree with you about all these layers of abstraction slowing things down these days. So much stuff is an emulator running in an interperter that compiled to byte-code that runs in a virtual machine that runs on native code that calls a huge framework that it's starting to become a bit ridiculous. These things all have their place, but I'm beginning to think that the x86 platform in general has had such a long run that all of our software is starting to become such a pile of cruft on top of cruft that I look forward to some new fangled architecture to take the world by storm just so we can start anew.
Remember back when JavaScript was good for little more than web forms and maybe some silly sparkling rainbow ponies? It's amazing how far this little language has come. I think a lot of these developers start projects like this just to show they can. Preconceptions die hard with developers. There's a lot of developers out there still afraid to use anything other than C++ for a basic desktop application because, "those other languages are slow". In think in the open source and *nix communities attitudes like this are the reason we end up with a lot of unmaintainable messes of C, because anything else is a "toy language". Sure, size and speed are still important considerations, we're all familiar with a few modern day programs that can eat a gig of memory and bring a dual core to a crawl, but it is all too common for people to blame this on the language and not the implementation.
So I think projects like this are awesome because they can help shatter these perceptions. Now I don't do any web programming these days, so I'm pretty unfamiliar with what enhancements have been implemented in the language and what tools and frameworks have been developed, but from looking at the code for a lot of these large JavaScript and HTML 5 projects, I still think the language has a long way to go before it can become a preferred tool for major software development. Large projects in most dynamic languages seems to still be a messy undertaking, after all, these languages were designed for ease of use and speed of development and I doubt they were built with an eye towards building large applications. So it will be interesting too see what the future holds, as "the cloud" seems to be the way of the future (like it or not) and we'll be seeing things like JavaScript being used in ways we never thought possible. It will be especially interesting to see what Microsoft has up their sleeve with the recent reports that Windows 8 will put HTML 5/JavaScript interfaces to the forefront. Love or hate Microsoft, I could see some interesting development tools for web based programming coming from them in the near future.
I found Gnome Shell in the repos for Ubuntu 10.04 so I'm pretty sure you'll be able to find it for whatever version you're running. You probably will have to enable Unsupported Updates or something in Software Sources but it's there surprisingly. It was fun to mess around with for awhile and see what all the fuss was about, but I think I'll wait until I have time to upgrade to an actual distro that supports Gnome 3 out of the box hoping it's configured a little bit better. I really doubt there's a ton of effort being put in to making sure Gnome Shell runs well on 10.04.
This made me laugh so hard. At this job I used to work at, the assistant manager's girlfriend was on the crew, and he had some weird ass growths on the side of his face, and she would pick at them while they were on break. That is REAL love.
Although god has graced me with luscious golden locks, I do have a few friends in my age range (mid-20s) experiencing premature baldness and this is the number one tip they give to anyone who is experiencing the same. SHAVE YOUR HEAD, YOU'LL LOOK COOL. I don't get why people put so much value on their hair that they cling on to every last little bit, despite the fact that once your hairline recedes to the back of your head it looks absolutely terrible. I guarantee that any woman would rather have a man with a rockin' shaved head, that a man with a skullet. What is with this obsession with hair in our culture? People should be allowed to age with dignity. In some more advanced cultures they value their elders wisdom and experience. In America we cling to every last bit of youth and spend billions each year on snake oil penis pills and fraud baldness remedies because pop culture tells us being old is something to be ashamed of.
I'd have to imagine straight male porn starts are actually paid quite well. Everyone thinks it would be so great to be a porn star, and spend your entire day having sex with beautiful women, but there's quite a bit more to it than that. Have you ever wondered why so many of the males in your porn videos are hairy, flabby, pale, old men? It really take a special kind of man to able to do 15 takes of the blowjob and still be able to blow a huge load at the end. I'm sure these guys pop a shit load of Viagra/Cialis, but by the end of the first few weeks, you probably spend the first couple hours of your day just trying to pop a stiffy.
So sure, the women get all the glory, and probably most of the money, but it ain't all fun and games for the men either.
In working at a grocery store I noticed that having your information tracked by a discount card and having a computer give you coupons for stuff you like is advertised as a feature and the masses don't even consider the implications. Most people reading this hear about people getting their information stolen all the time, and at least care somewhat about privacy, but what about the hoards of other people who are too caught up in whatever they are doing to even consider something like this to NOT be a GREAT deal.
Can't we just put a video game in the cars so the people can drive in a virtual world? Maybe they can have Second Life lives and never get out of their vehicle? Maybe we'll all just become mobile bags of fat?
Honestly, after reading my comment back to myself, I feel I must apologize as I probably should have found a better way to express how I feel on the subject. I pretty much typed that stream of conscious, and we all do have those "*#&%$!!!" moments in our head from time to time. Allow me to clarify my feelings on this, as I'm sure there probably are other who have similar feelings on the subject. Lately, I've been warming up to Microsoft just a teeny little bit, it seemed to me that their attitudes and tactics towards the Free Software and OSS movements were beginning to change. It seemed logical to me as many of the people who contribute to open source projects are the same type of people who might have a great idea for a phone app kicking around in their head that they just might want to release on WP7. Maybe if Microsoft was kind to the community, their attitudes towards their company would change as well. Now I'm sure there's a very large chunk of Free Software advocates who will have nothing to do with Microsoft no matter what, but I also believe that there are others like me who respects most of their software, but just wish they would respect our culture more. I tried to remain optimistic while many other called bullshit on the news of Microsoft hiring an OSS advisor, articles about them supporting hacking of the Kinect, and a few other things they have done as of late. It made me feel kind of fuzzy inside, the idea of big evil Microsoft reaching out to the same hacker culture that their founders and I'm sure most of their employees grew up in.
I honestly feel hurt. It's kind of like going to high school with a girl, and you positively can't stand each other, but five years after graduation you run in to her at a party and you find that you both are mutually attracted to each other, and maybe even agree on a date. The day of the date comes along and she shows up and punches you in the face and tells you what a loser you are and how she always hated you anyway. I know if I got out of my basement and experienced the real world and maybe talked to a real girl I probably wouldn't feel so strongly about software companies, but with my deranged mind that's probably not going to happen.
TL;DR I know, so I'll summarize: I am angry to see Microsoft trying to enforce these absolutely ridiculous patents simply because their product isn't doing as well as they'd like, especially after they seem to have been trying to present a friendlier image to the Developers! Developers! Developers! as of late. If they felt so strongly about their ownership of these concepts, why didn't they enforce them years ago when a billion other pieces of software were "infringing" on their inventions? Because they didn't feel threated in any major way by them, that's why. And as computing paradigms begin to change paving the way for new faces to rise, you can be assured that you'll be seeing a lot more of this garbage in the future.
Now that I got my explanation of my ignorantly written rant, I would like to ask why a CEO or President or respected scientist or commentator such as yourself (probably all of them combined!) would even give my hotheaded vociferation the time of day and even become upset enough to stoop to the level of insults? You have a perfectly valid point, yet you needed to insult someone you know nothing about, which is just as useless a contribution as mine was. After all, if a person as intelligent as yourself is for some reason offended by certain combinations of letters, surely you would know that there are several ways you can filter them out of every web page you view ensuring that your eyes are never again subjected to the sheer ignorance of a basement dwelling idiots foul mouth!
Slashdot Mirror
Pascal compilers usually use recursive decent parsers which are known for being pretty damn fast when implemented properly. The language as a whole was designed by Wirth to be compiled quickly. I think maybe the difference in speed between Borland Pascal and early C++ compilers is just the age of the languages in general. Pascal is an old ass language, right up there with FORTRAN and both of those call C "little bro". C++ was relativly new at the time, hell, object oriented languages were still young, so I'm sure Pascal was easier to generate code for because it's a less complex language and we've been doing it for so damn long at the time all the kinks were pretty much worked out.
Sure you can! You just have to write a C compiler in the higher level language!
What was even the point of comparing these 4 vastly different languages? Java and Scala both run in virtual machines so it's obvious a native compiled language is going to beat them out. C++ is a very mature and popular language with a heritage going back to an even more mature language, so obviously it'll beat out just about anything. I think the Go language is pointless to being with, but this would have been much more interesting if they did some benchmarks comparing it to some other compiled languages like Pascal, BASIC, FORTRAN, C/C++, or D just to see where it stands in the group. This just reeks of someone coming up with some busy work to make it look like they have something to do at Google.
While I understand the view that the energy wasted on high school and college level sports could be spent much better on academic pursuits, sports are a huge income source for a lot of schools, and with out them a lot of other more worthwhile programs would disappear as well.
I doubt it even matters that the login screen looks like the iPhone's anyway. The type of person who is probably using 1234 as his passcode is probably the same kind of person who uses the same passcode/password for everything. I bet if they did a study like this on peoples debit car PIN numbers the results would be pretty similar.
By your logic gym class should be an optional college course only for students who want to become professional athletes, shop class only for those who want to become carpenters, and Home Economics only for those who choose to become stay at home moms. The point of high school is to expose a student to a wide range of studies so maybe they can find their niche in life. How is a student going to know whether he's interested in computer programming as a career unless he's been exposed to it sometime previously. A kid who's family doesn't own a computer might become fascinated by the subject after being exposed to it in school and maybe he'll actually learn a useful skill other than how to take a bong rip and shotgun a beer.
Funny story, I actually clicked one of those "Adult Friend Finder" type ads once because I wanted to see just who these "local" girls were, and I actually found my girlfriend at the time advertising herself as "ready to play" on the website. Needless to say, she got kicked to the curb, and I began to doubt my manhood for awhile. Why-o-why did I have to come across the one ad actually offering real local girls.
You're right, and I'm not trying to say JavaScript is just so damn blazing fast people should rewrite all their FORTRAN code in JS. I'm just saying that a lot of progress has been made making the language somewhat capable. It's come along way in the last 10 years. I guess I went off topic a bit, as I wasn't specifically referring to JavaScript with that comment; I was talking more about why people do fun, but somewhat pointless projects like this in a language like JavaScript. It's good fun do things with languages and platforms that they aren't expected to be capable of doing. It's like the QuickBASIC community people making 3D games and stuff with QB4.5. Take what we've heard so far about Windows 8, or all of the work Qt is doing integrating JavaScript in to their framework. Given my own prejudices about JavaScript I would have never even considered giving it a major role in as desktop OS's UI framework. We use native code for that goddamnit. We'll see how it works out I guess...
But I definitely agree with you about all these layers of abstraction slowing things down these days. So much stuff is an emulator running in an interperter that compiled to byte-code that runs in a virtual machine that runs on native code that calls a huge framework that it's starting to become a bit ridiculous. These things all have their place, but I'm beginning to think that the x86 platform in general has had such a long run that all of our software is starting to become such a pile of cruft on top of cruft that I look forward to some new fangled architecture to take the world by storm just so we can start anew.
Remember back when JavaScript was good for little more than web forms and maybe some silly sparkling rainbow ponies? It's amazing how far this little language has come. I think a lot of these developers start projects like this just to show they can. Preconceptions die hard with developers. There's a lot of developers out there still afraid to use anything other than C++ for a basic desktop application because, "those other languages are slow". In think in the open source and *nix communities attitudes like this are the reason we end up with a lot of unmaintainable messes of C, because anything else is a "toy language". Sure, size and speed are still important considerations, we're all familiar with a few modern day programs that can eat a gig of memory and bring a dual core to a crawl, but it is all too common for people to blame this on the language and not the implementation.
So I think projects like this are awesome because they can help shatter these perceptions. Now I don't do any web programming these days, so I'm pretty unfamiliar with what enhancements have been implemented in the language and what tools and frameworks have been developed, but from looking at the code for a lot of these large JavaScript and HTML 5 projects, I still think the language has a long way to go before it can become a preferred tool for major software development. Large projects in most dynamic languages seems to still be a messy undertaking, after all, these languages were designed for ease of use and speed of development and I doubt they were built with an eye towards building large applications. So it will be interesting too see what the future holds, as "the cloud" seems to be the way of the future (like it or not) and we'll be seeing things like JavaScript being used in ways we never thought possible. It will be especially interesting to see what Microsoft has up their sleeve with the recent reports that Windows 8 will put HTML 5/JavaScript interfaces to the forefront. Love or hate Microsoft, I could see some interesting development tools for web based programming coming from them in the near future.
I found Gnome Shell in the repos for Ubuntu 10.04 so I'm pretty sure you'll be able to find it for whatever version you're running. You probably will have to enable Unsupported Updates or something in Software Sources but it's there surprisingly. It was fun to mess around with for awhile and see what all the fuss was about, but I think I'll wait until I have time to upgrade to an actual distro that supports Gnome 3 out of the box hoping it's configured a little bit better. I really doubt there's a ton of effort being put in to making sure Gnome Shell runs well on 10.04.
take a seat over there...
This made me laugh so hard. At this job I used to work at, the assistant manager's girlfriend was on the crew, and he had some weird ass growths on the side of his face, and she would pick at them while they were on break. That is REAL love.
Although god has graced me with luscious golden locks, I do have a few friends in my age range (mid-20s) experiencing premature baldness and this is the number one tip they give to anyone who is experiencing the same. SHAVE YOUR HEAD, YOU'LL LOOK COOL. I don't get why people put so much value on their hair that they cling on to every last little bit, despite the fact that once your hairline recedes to the back of your head it looks absolutely terrible. I guarantee that any woman would rather have a man with a rockin' shaved head, that a man with a skullet. What is with this obsession with hair in our culture? People should be allowed to age with dignity. In some more advanced cultures they value their elders wisdom and experience. In America we cling to every last bit of youth and spend billions each year on snake oil penis pills and fraud baldness remedies because pop culture tells us being old is something to be ashamed of.
What a way to test a game! It's gotta be a pain developing a game with such a huge pool of testers!
Goddamnit, I would have got it too if I had both hands on the keyboard.
Did I just win something
I'd have to imagine straight male porn starts are actually paid quite well. Everyone thinks it would be so great to be a porn star, and spend your entire day having sex with beautiful women, but there's quite a bit more to it than that. Have you ever wondered why so many of the males in your porn videos are hairy, flabby, pale, old men? It really take a special kind of man to able to do 15 takes of the blowjob and still be able to blow a huge load at the end. I'm sure these guys pop a shit load of Viagra/Cialis, but by the end of the first few weeks, you probably spend the first couple hours of your day just trying to pop a stiffy.
So sure, the women get all the glory, and probably most of the money, but it ain't all fun and games for the men either.
...and what is this.
Most people probably buy it because of the pretty commercials.
AC/DC's new album was actually pretty good!
In working at a grocery store I noticed that having your information tracked by a discount card and having a computer give you coupons for stuff you like is advertised as a feature and the masses don't even consider the implications. Most people reading this hear about people getting their information stolen all the time, and at least care somewhat about privacy, but what about the hoards of other people who are too caught up in whatever they are doing to even consider something like this to NOT be a GREAT deal.
Can't we just put a video game in the cars so the people can drive in a virtual world? Maybe they can have Second Life lives and never get out of their vehicle? Maybe we'll all just become mobile bags of fat?
Wow, you really must be much smarter than me, because you managed to get spaces in between your paragraphs, and mine disappeared when I made my post!
Honestly, after reading my comment back to myself, I feel I must apologize as I probably should have found a better way to express how I feel on the subject. I pretty much typed that stream of conscious, and we all do have those "*#&%$!!!" moments in our head from time to time. Allow me to clarify my feelings on this, as I'm sure there probably are other who have similar feelings on the subject. Lately, I've been warming up to Microsoft just a teeny little bit, it seemed to me that their attitudes and tactics towards the Free Software and OSS movements were beginning to change. It seemed logical to me as many of the people who contribute to open source projects are the same type of people who might have a great idea for a phone app kicking around in their head that they just might want to release on WP7. Maybe if Microsoft was kind to the community, their attitudes towards their company would change as well. Now I'm sure there's a very large chunk of Free Software advocates who will have nothing to do with Microsoft no matter what, but I also believe that there are others like me who respects most of their software, but just wish they would respect our culture more. I tried to remain optimistic while many other called bullshit on the news of Microsoft hiring an OSS advisor, articles about them supporting hacking of the Kinect, and a few other things they have done as of late. It made me feel kind of fuzzy inside, the idea of big evil Microsoft reaching out to the same hacker culture that their founders and I'm sure most of their employees grew up in. I honestly feel hurt. It's kind of like going to high school with a girl, and you positively can't stand each other, but five years after graduation you run in to her at a party and you find that you both are mutually attracted to each other, and maybe even agree on a date. The day of the date comes along and she shows up and punches you in the face and tells you what a loser you are and how she always hated you anyway. I know if I got out of my basement and experienced the real world and maybe talked to a real girl I probably wouldn't feel so strongly about software companies, but with my deranged mind that's probably not going to happen. TL;DR I know, so I'll summarize: I am angry to see Microsoft trying to enforce these absolutely ridiculous patents simply because their product isn't doing as well as they'd like, especially after they seem to have been trying to present a friendlier image to the Developers! Developers! Developers! as of late. If they felt so strongly about their ownership of these concepts, why didn't they enforce them years ago when a billion other pieces of software were "infringing" on their inventions? Because they didn't feel threated in any major way by them, that's why. And as computing paradigms begin to change paving the way for new faces to rise, you can be assured that you'll be seeing a lot more of this garbage in the future. Now that I got my explanation of my ignorantly written rant, I would like to ask why a CEO or President or respected scientist or commentator such as yourself (probably all of them combined!) would even give my hotheaded vociferation the time of day and even become upset enough to stoop to the level of insults? You have a perfectly valid point, yet you needed to insult someone you know nothing about, which is just as useless a contribution as mine was. After all, if a person as intelligent as yourself is for some reason offended by certain combinations of letters, surely you would know that there are several ways you can filter them out of every web page you view ensuring that your eyes are never again subjected to the sheer ignorance of a basement dwelling idiots foul mouth!
The only reason a rape analogy isn't appropriate in this case is the fact that it isn't an analogy at all. What Microsoft is doing is rape.