The first impression of many people (depending of course on their taste) of perl is "ick". This is a legitimate reaction, and is all you need to really have a preference.
The first reaction of many people to Python is: "whitespace is significant, ICK!", and they never look at the language again, claiming significant whitespace as the reason to hate Python. That's also a preference, but do you think that's justified? I don't.
How about fine-grained semantic stuff like context-dependencies. Not hairy?
Eh, no. Natural actually. Many natural languages are context sensitive. And since the majority of the programmers masters at least one natural language, I don't see what's so hairy about that.
I haven't read any of these books, but that's a stupid argument.
Really? If Python is so trivial, and Perl so hairy, then why are both the learning books and the reference books larger for Python, instead of being significant smaller?
So when one has an opinion that differs from your own, that's illegitimate? Can one simply not have a "preference"?
Of course you can have a preference. Have all the preference you want. But let me quote the posting I was replying to for you:
Does Perl have exceptions or try/finally blocks? How about operator overloading? Personally, I don't care much if Perl has them or not - but last time I checked it didn't. So that's a couple things. Perl is nice. Python is nice. I just happen to prefer Python.
That shows the poster doesn't know much about Perl. So, yes, he's entitled to a preference, but said preference is not based on actual knowledge of the language. In fact, it seems to be based on common myths, also known as FUD.
How about the fact that perl's syntax is HAIRY, *much* hairier than python's, and you don't need to know heaps of stupid niggly things to write programs more than a few lines long. That's a legitimate gripe, if you deny it, you're full of shit.
That's of course utter bullshit. You don't need to know heaps of "niggly things" to write programs. Not at all. Don't let the richness of the language confuse you. You don't have to use it.
She said that they concentrated to a certain critical mass needed for life through protein-rich water splashing against rocks and evaporating, or possibly tidal pools evaporating. the high concentration of proto-organic molecules acheived thus could rise to life much easier in such a high-density solution than in the relatively low density of the ocean.
Sure, but it takes an ocean to collect all those molecules and splash them against a rock, or concentrate them in a tidal pool.
Does Perl have exceptions or try/finally blocks? How about operator overloading?
Perl has had die and eval for longer than Python exists. It might be not just as nice as Pythons - as you can only throw a string - but that's being worked on. Perl has had operator overloading for many years now.
I just happen to prefer Python.
How can you be sure? Clearly from your questions you don't know Perl, and it seems like "preference" is based on FUD.
There are a lot of things in Perl that could have been done better, and some things are really awkward. But when you hear Python zealots (who always pop up as soon as Perl is mentioned - I wonder why? Doesn't Python ever get mentioned?), 99 out of 100 times, they hardly know anything about Perl. That isn't going to win them any friends in the Perl community. In fact, it works against them. I often try to explain to Perl people that Python is a nice language as well, but the Python zealotry puts them off, and they don't want anything to do with Python. Unfortunally, there are a lot of Perl zealots as well.
Actually, it has 3 forms of goto. Plain goto LABEL, computed goto (ala Fortran, IIRC), and deep voodoo magic goto, which can be very useful (in AUTOLOAD() for instance).
Doctors are bound to confidentiality with their patients, not by local laws, but by their professional code of honour.
Doctors are subject to the law. And the law even says doctors *have to* protect the privacy of the patients. However, that doesn't mean they can keep quiet when there's a court order. Only priests can refuse to talk without being penalized.
Many of us sysadmins feel this way, I think we have to be serious about it.
In that case, it's easy for you. Next time you get a court order to open your logfiles, refuse. If you think your code of honour superceedes the law, you shouldn't have a problem dealing with the consequences.
Here in Holland, you have privacy laws on snail-mail, and these days even on E-mail. Reading someone else's E-mail simply is a crime.
Yes, but that's not the point. Reading someones mail or email without their consent can be a crime, but that doesn't mean it's a crime after a court order. And that's what's being discussed here. Court orders.
E-mail can't be used to "prove" anything. It's disturbingly easy to forge.
Take a look at the example case, Netscape vs Microsoft. Should Netscape argue in front of the judge that the copies of the emails found on the disks of *Netscape* employees were forged by Microsoft? Of course, Microsoft also had to forge the logs in all the servers where the email passed through. And boy, they started early with this forgery, as the backup tapes have those emails as well!
Doesn't the Fifth Amendment of your constitution make provisions to allow a defendant to refuse to incriminate themselves?
Yes, but that's for criminal cases, and it covers only the defendant. You cannot use that for a civil case, nor can use "plead the fifth" if you are a witness. In the cited case, Netscape vs Microsoft, the fifth amendment didn't play a role.
What surprises me is that the poster says Mathematica and Maple are hardly a substitute for pen and paper (something I don't agree with, but then, I'm not a genius), yet he argues for an open source symbolic math package.
But then, what is the reliability gain over slightly bigger clusters of el-cheapo hardware?
Reliability is more than just having redundant hardware. For disks, it works to a certain extent, RAIDs are popular, but you pay a price. Bigger clusters of hardware might be cheaper when it comes to buying hardware, but building a realible system out of that is more complicated, and requires more maintenance. Besides, those systems aren't readily available.
Wish they weren't so secretive sometimes though. If you actually look at Sun's site, there's almost nothing about the US-3 technically.
In a way. On the other hand, I think it's kind of cool Sun doesn't make all kinds of promises and delivery dates, only to ship something with errors or getting scored at for not keeping their promises, but instead, they just work on it with an "it's ready when it's ready" attitude. And just as you wrote in your article that for Sun reliability is more important than performance, reliability is also more important then fanfare.
Makes you think there's still some hacker culture not taken over by marketing droids left.
IF the operating system natively supports upto 1000 processors (i'd assume 1024 would be logical), then that means you can run the same exact binary on a single CPU workstation all the way up to a supercomputer.
Yes, this has always been one of the good points of Sun. I used to work for a company where developers had single CPU workstations (from Ultra 5's down all the way to Sparc Classics), but production machines would be multi-processor machines (up to 32 processors at some clients). No recompilation needed. Sun hardware really scales well - of course, kudos should go as well to the kernel, because if the kernel doesn't support scaling to multi processors well, the hardware won't do you much good.
I was just wondering, what are the best resources for learning perl? Is there any books out there you guys/gals reccommend? thanks.
Lots of people will recommend 'Learning Perl', but I strongly recommend not buying that book. Unless you have problems falling asleep, then this book will be useful. I would recommend Nigel Chapmans "Perl: The Programmers Compagnion", a truely excellent book - specially if you already can program in another language. Half of the authors of Learning Perl prefer Nigel Chapmans book.
I've heard good things about Andrew Johnsons "Elements of Programming with Perl". I haven't read the book yet though, so I hesitate to recommend it. On the other hand, it mentions my name and discusses some code of me... (of course, that could be held against the book as well).
After learning Perl, it becomes more difficult. There are a lot of Perl books, but most of them are just a waste. I've more than 15 Perl and Perl related books in my bookcase, but there are two I've actually found useful: Mastering Regular Expressions, and The Perl Cookbook. The former is three years old, and hence doesn't discuss any of the new and advanced regular expression stuff though. But it gives a great insight on how to avoid writing inefficient regular expressions. But the best Perl book remains the Perl Cookbook. Despite it being an O'Reilly book.
Go is far more interesting than chess. To me, chess is just one big tree search problem.
Well, any game with complete information is just a big tree search problem. Be it chess, go, checkers, tic-tac-toe, reversi, connect-four or many other games. Both go and chess have rather large search trees - for both games, the search tree from the start position is too large to ever fully traverse, hence both games need to be played by evaluating positions.
What might be a nice idea would be to have some ongoing puzzles, of the 'classic' variety, like the knight's tour and such. These sorts of puzzles have been around forever and a day, and it's not so much a matter of solving them, as all the implications of the solution.
That sounds like a real bad idea. I know, many slashdotters are young, and they see slashdot as the only source of input, but if you just go to rtfm.mit.edu (that's an FTP site) and download the archive of the newsgroup rec.puzzles, you'll get thousands of classical puzzles, including the answers. It would be utterly pointless to use up more bandwidth. (Well, unless you sell banner ads of course - the puzzles archive are commercial free).
Perhaps there could even be a small karma reward (like 1 point) for each regular puzzle, and some random awards for contributions to the ongoing puzzles?
Just to proof you can cut-and-paste? Besides, who's going to judge? The utter nature of slashdot is "wrote once - forget forever". Its interface seriously obstructs meaningful discussion. Now, if only slashdot has an NNTP interface - but then, rec.puzzles has existed for over a decade, so you might as well join the existing group.
It is lighter than air and rises above most common ignition points
Well, yes, but if you want to use H2 as a fuel, you're not letting it freely rise...
The TAX PAYERS OWN the rights to that knowledge. The two researchers were paid for their work and will probably be awarded degrees in addition to their stipends. If they want to patent their discoveries they should have funded their own work. Ditto for the universities.
Eh, you don't want to go there. While this research might have been done on a grant paid for by taxpayers, it might also have been funded by external money. I've worked in the academia myself, and for two years I participated in a committe that gave recommendations on who to assign grants to. There's a lot of external money going on, and the reasoning "research foo was done on a grant by US taxpayers so US taxpayers own the right to that knowledge" also means "important discovery was made by a scientist on a Microsoft grant - Microsoft now holds the keys to the cure of cancer".
The scientist will publish papers about their work. At that moment, the information will be available. Don't forget, scientific results don't mean anything unless they can be reproduced independently.
Though the obvious next steps would be to first alter it genetically to stay constantly in "auxillary power" mode
Eh, no, it's far from obvious that the first step should be solving a non-problem in such a way that you have very low production rates.
Keeping the algea in "auxillary power mode" is trivial. No genetic engineering needed - just keep them deprived from sulpher. The problem is that if you keep them in "auxillary power mode" for too long - they die.
So, you do not want to keep them in "auxillary power mode" for too long.
Replacing oil with H would be a crushing blow to Texas, Alaska, Louisana and Oklahoma.
Don't get overexcited. We are talking about one announcement about one way of producing hydrogen, in an economical non-profitable way. With a production rate of a whopping 3 * 10^-3 litres of H2 per hour per litre of algea culture. Which can only be in production half of the time. It will be long long time (decades) before we see production plants producing mass quantities of H2. And it will even be longer before a significant number of cars use H2 instead of oil derived fuels. There are several major problems with introducing H2 as fuel:
The chicken and egg problem. Gas stations won't put H2 pumps up, unless there are enough cars using H2, but car owners won't buy H2 powered cars unless they can buy H2 everywhere. (This can be solved by goverment intervention though)
H2 is much harder to store. H2 is a gas, except for extremely low temperatures. You can bind H2 to metals, and use poreus metal tanks, but that makes cars heavier and bulkier. It also means that when you are out of gas, you can't just walk to the gas station with your plastic jerry can for some fuel.
Oil and oil based fuels burn easily, but compared to H2, they are childs play. To ignite oil and oil based fuels, you need some heat source (to evaporate the liquid), while H2 is already a gas. Remember the Hindenburg?
Furthermore, even if H2 will be used as a significant power source, it won't be the end of oil. Oil is still needed for producing many products, like plastics.
I am sorry if I suggested that NS and IE *can't* be used with such software, though in my limited experience, it is more common to use leaner browsers such as lynx with these tools.
I have several close friends that are blind. All of them use IE, and only one sometimes uses Lynx. IE's superior formatting compared to Lynx makes that the blind people I know prefer IE. Frames and forms are the biggest problem.
It's cheap to critize other people, but if you do, you should clean up your own act first. Sure, the HTML of Rev. Bob 'Bob' Crispen might validate, but a C program that only compiles doesn't make a good or correct program either.
Some serious problems with Rev. Bob HTML:
Lack of H? elements. Instead, misuse of the FONT element.
A BODY tag with only BGCOLOR as attribute. Since that is set to white, people who have their preference set to light text on a dark background won't see anything, or only with great difficulty.
Use of the I element when he should use the EM element.
Pointless use of the WIDTH attribute in his table; there's no reason to override the browsers algorithm. The browser knows the limitations of the display, Rev. Bob doesn't.
Use of CENTER instead of DIV.
Rev. Bob is a big hypocrite, and slashdot shouldn't have lowered itself to publishing a story about it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a maglev train. As the article said, this new train doesn't use magnets - it's a totally different way of levetating (using ground effect).
This train will ride between Berlin and another town, I think. It may eventually ride in other countries like the Netherlands too.
Didn't the project get cancelled recently as being to expensive, and not compatitive with the ICE - the German high speed train?
-- Abigail
The first reaction of many people to Python is: "whitespace is significant, ICK!", and they never look at the language again, claiming significant whitespace as the reason to hate Python. That's also a preference, but do you think that's justified? I don't.
How about fine-grained semantic stuff like context-dependencies. Not hairy?
Eh, no. Natural actually. Many natural languages are context sensitive. And since the majority of the programmers masters at least one natural language, I don't see what's so hairy about that.
I haven't read any of these books, but that's a stupid argument.
Really? If Python is so trivial, and Perl so hairy, then why are both the learning books and the reference books larger for Python, instead of being significant smaller?
Comparing religions by the size of their bibles
Guido and Larry are neither dieties, or prophets.
-- Abigail
Of course you can have a preference. Have all the preference you want. But let me quote the posting I was replying to for you:
Does Perl have exceptions or try/finally blocks? How about operator overloading? Personally, I don't care much if Perl has them or not - but last time I checked it didn't. So that's a couple things. Perl is nice. Python is nice. I just happen to prefer Python.
That shows the poster doesn't know much about Perl. So, yes, he's entitled to a preference, but said preference is not based on actual knowledge of the language. In fact, it seems to be based on common myths, also known as FUD.
How about the fact that perl's syntax is HAIRY, *much* hairier than python's, and you don't need to know heaps of stupid niggly things to write programs more than a few lines long. That's a legitimate gripe, if you deny it, you're full of shit.
That's of course utter bullshit. You don't need to know heaps of "niggly things" to write programs. Not at all. Don't let the richness of the language confuse you. You don't have to use it.
Programming Perl: 619 pages
Programming Python: 857 pages
Learning Perl: 256 pages
Learning Python: 356 pages
-- Abigail
Sure, but it takes an ocean to collect all those molecules and splash them against a rock, or concentrate them in a tidal pool.
-- Abigail
Perl has had die and eval for longer than Python exists. It might be not just as nice as Pythons - as you can only throw a string - but that's being worked on. Perl has had operator overloading for many years now.
I just happen to prefer Python.
How can you be sure? Clearly from your questions you don't know Perl, and it seems like "preference" is based on FUD.
There are a lot of things in Perl that could have been done better, and some things are really awkward. But when you hear Python zealots (who always pop up as soon as Perl is mentioned - I wonder why? Doesn't Python ever get mentioned?), 99 out of 100 times, they hardly know anything about Perl. That isn't going to win them any friends in the Perl community. In fact, it works against them. I often try to explain to Perl people that Python is a nice language as well, but the Python zealotry puts them off, and they don't want anything to do with Python. Unfortunally, there are a lot of Perl zealots as well.
-- Abigail
Actually, it has 3 forms of goto. Plain goto LABEL, computed goto (ala Fortran, IIRC), and deep voodoo magic goto, which can be very useful (in AUTOLOAD() for instance).
-- Abigail
perl-Mstrict-we'$_="gotoF.printchop;\n=rekca HlrePrehtonatsuJ";F1:eval'
So, you end up in jail and/or heavily fined, and your harddisks seized. What exactly did you gain?
-- Abigail
Doctors are subject to the law. And the law even says doctors *have to* protect the privacy of the patients. However, that doesn't mean they can keep quiet when there's a court order. Only priests can refuse to talk without being penalized.
Many of us sysadmins feel this way, I think we have to be serious about it.
In that case, it's easy for you. Next time you get a court order to open your logfiles, refuse. If you think your code of honour superceedes the law, you shouldn't have a problem dealing with the consequences.
-- Abigail
Yes, but that's not the point. Reading someones mail or email without their consent can be a crime, but that doesn't mean it's a crime after a court order. And that's what's being discussed here. Court orders.
-- Abigail
Take a look at the example case, Netscape vs Microsoft. Should Netscape argue in front of the judge that the copies of the emails found on the disks of *Netscape* employees were forged by Microsoft? Of course, Microsoft also had to forge the logs in all the servers where the email passed through. And boy, they started early with this forgery, as the backup tapes have those emails as well!
-- Abigail
Yes, but that's for criminal cases, and it covers only the defendant. You cannot use that for a civil case, nor can use "plead the fifth" if you are a witness. In the cited case, Netscape vs Microsoft, the fifth amendment didn't play a role.
-- Abigail
-- Abigail
Reliability is more than just having redundant hardware. For disks, it works to a certain extent, RAIDs are popular, but you pay a price. Bigger clusters of hardware might be cheaper when it comes to buying hardware, but building a realible system out of that is more complicated, and requires more maintenance. Besides, those systems aren't readily available.
-- Abigail
In a way. On the other hand, I think it's kind of cool Sun doesn't make all kinds of promises and delivery dates, only to ship something with errors or getting scored at for not keeping their promises, but instead, they just work on it with an "it's ready when it's ready" attitude. And just as you wrote in your article that for Sun reliability is more important than performance, reliability is also more important then fanfare.
Makes you think there's still some hacker culture not taken over by marketing droids left.
-- Abigail
Yes, this has always been one of the good points of Sun. I used to work for a company where developers had single CPU workstations (from Ultra 5's down all the way to Sparc Classics), but production machines would be multi-processor machines (up to 32 processors at some clients). No recompilation needed. Sun hardware really scales well - of course, kudos should go as well to the kernel, because if the kernel doesn't support scaling to multi processors well, the hardware won't do you much good.
-- Abigail
Lots of people will recommend 'Learning Perl', but I strongly recommend not buying that book. Unless you have problems falling asleep, then this book will be useful. I would recommend Nigel Chapmans "Perl: The Programmers Compagnion", a truely excellent book - specially if you already can program in another language. Half of the authors of Learning Perl prefer Nigel Chapmans book.
I've heard good things about Andrew Johnsons "Elements of Programming with Perl". I haven't read the book yet though, so I hesitate to recommend it. On the other hand, it mentions my name and discusses some code of me... (of course, that could be held against the book as well).
After learning Perl, it becomes more difficult. There are a lot of Perl books, but most of them are just a waste. I've more than 15 Perl and Perl related books in my bookcase, but there are two I've actually found useful: Mastering Regular Expressions, and The Perl Cookbook. The former is three years old, and hence doesn't discuss any of the new and advanced regular expression stuff though. But it gives a great insight on how to avoid writing inefficient regular expressions. But the best Perl book remains the Perl Cookbook. Despite it being an O'Reilly book.
-- Abigail
Well, any game with complete information is just a big tree search problem. Be it chess, go, checkers, tic-tac-toe, reversi, connect-four or many other games. Both go and chess have rather large search trees - for both games, the search tree from the start position is too large to ever fully traverse, hence both games need to be played by evaluating positions.
-- Abigail, who likes chess, but prefers bridge.
That sounds like a real bad idea. I know, many slashdotters are young, and they see slashdot as the only source of input, but if you just go to rtfm.mit.edu (that's an FTP site) and download the archive of the newsgroup rec.puzzles, you'll get thousands of classical puzzles, including the answers. It would be utterly pointless to use up more bandwidth. (Well, unless you sell banner ads of course - the puzzles archive are commercial free).
Perhaps there could even be a small karma reward (like 1 point) for each regular puzzle, and some random awards for contributions to the ongoing puzzles?
Just to proof you can cut-and-paste? Besides, who's going to judge? The utter nature of slashdot is "wrote once - forget forever". Its interface seriously obstructs meaningful discussion. Now, if only slashdot has an NNTP interface - but then, rec.puzzles has existed for over a decade, so you might as well join the existing group.
-- Abigail
-- Abigail
Well, yes, but if you want to use H2 as a fuel, you're not letting it freely rise...
The TAX PAYERS OWN the rights to that knowledge. The two researchers were paid for their work and will probably be awarded degrees in addition to their stipends. If they want to patent their discoveries they should have funded their own work. Ditto for the universities.
Eh, you don't want to go there. While this research might have been done on a grant paid for by taxpayers, it might also have been funded by external money. I've worked in the academia myself, and for two years I participated in a committe that gave recommendations on who to assign grants to. There's a lot of external money going on, and the reasoning "research foo was done on a grant by US taxpayers so US taxpayers own the right to that knowledge" also means "important discovery was made by a scientist on a Microsoft grant - Microsoft now holds the keys to the cure of cancer".
The scientist will publish papers about their work. At that moment, the information will be available. Don't forget, scientific results don't mean anything unless they can be reproduced independently.
-- Abigail
Eh, no, it's far from obvious that the first step should be solving a non-problem in such a way that you have very low production rates.
Keeping the algea in "auxillary power mode" is trivial. No genetic engineering needed - just keep them deprived from sulpher. The problem is that if you keep them in "auxillary power mode" for too long - they die.
So, you do not want to keep them in "auxillary power mode" for too long.
-- Abigail
Don't get overexcited. We are talking about one announcement about one way of producing hydrogen, in an economical non-profitable way. With a production rate of a whopping 3 * 10^-3 litres of H2 per hour per litre of algea culture. Which can only be in production half of the time. It will be long long time (decades) before we see production plants producing mass quantities of H2. And it will even be longer before a significant number of cars use H2 instead of oil derived fuels. There are several major problems with introducing H2 as fuel:
- The chicken and egg problem. Gas stations won't put H2 pumps up, unless there are enough cars using H2, but car owners won't buy H2 powered cars unless they can buy H2 everywhere. (This can be solved by goverment intervention though)
- H2 is much harder to store. H2 is a gas, except for extremely low temperatures. You can bind H2 to metals, and use poreus metal tanks, but that makes cars heavier and bulkier. It also means that when you are out of gas, you can't just walk to the gas station with your plastic jerry can for some fuel.
- Oil and oil based fuels burn easily, but compared to H2, they are childs play. To ignite oil and oil based fuels, you need some heat source (to evaporate the liquid), while H2 is already a gas. Remember the Hindenburg?
Furthermore, even if H2 will be used as a significant power source, it won't be the end of oil. Oil is still needed for producing many products, like plastics.-- Abigail
I have several close friends that are blind. All of them use IE, and only one sometimes uses Lynx. IE's superior formatting compared to Lynx makes that the blind people I know prefer IE. Frames and forms are the biggest problem.
-- Abigail
Some serious problems with Rev. Bob HTML:
Rev. Bob is a big hypocrite, and slashdot shouldn't have lowered itself to publishing a story about it.
-- Abigail
Which makes him a big hypocrite, as the web page has at the top:
META NAME="GENERATOR" Content="Visual Page 2.0 for Windows"
-- Abigail