I am struggling with this. As far as I can say that you are saying you looked at a large code base *once* and you found that it was complicated and you didn't understand it.
Is this not true with most code bases? I mean, I can look back at my own code from a while back, and it takes me quite a while to work out what it is doing. And long-lived code bases can, ironically, be particularly problematic.
The ultimate problem here is the funding problem. Free software is much more adaptable because you don't have to tell anyone what you are going to do with it before you do. But someone still has to pay for it at some time. The strange thing is that people and companies have roads coming to their doors which are maintained by the public, but the same is not true of essential software like OpenSSH.
Yep, it's true there are times when prefix notation is painful. I got used to it years ago, though, so it doesn't really bother me any more. For maths, I agree, it confuses but it's easy to drop that, or use a threading operator for non mathematical code. And it largely absolves me from the hassle of having to think about syntax the rest of the time.
Pretty sure that kawa is compiled as it happens, so your distinction between haskell and dynamically typed scripting languages is false.
The parenthesis thing is a bonus for kawa, since it enables advanced syntax tree manipulation of source code both in the editing environment, and for meta programming. And once nice feature of lisp compared to haskell is that you can do basic I/O without spending three weeks understanding what the hell a monad is.
There are quite a few ways (too many, which is an Emacs flaw) of achieving Source Browsing. ECB is a nice example, if you like the full windows environment. Mostly, though, I use ido.el and projectile. It's very quick. Indeed, the ability to move between files with extreme rapidity is one of the things that keeps me on Emacs.
The core of Emacs is very stable, and you get used to do things in certain ways. At times, you need to shake things about a bit and investigate new packages. While this comes with a cost, the benefit of Emacs is that the old ways still work. You won't get forced into a new way of working with each new release, if you are happy with the old.
I do that often, as it happens. I often test my lisp in batch, so I run emacs inside a compilation window. I also use Emacs in batch for some builds of things other than Emacs software. For this, I run make which runs emacs inside a compilation window.
There is a widgetized branch of Emacs which lets you use Emacs as a widget and lets you put widgets into Emacs, so you could probably do it graphically if you really wanted.
Not totally convinced that we have a lawless security state, although there was a recent scandal when a police officer was armed during routine policing. Not the sort of thing we really want to see in this country.
This is a silly argument. Democracy is a mechanism for ensuring that a society runs with the consent of the majority. The whole point of society is to put restrictions on what you can and cannot do. This can mean forcing you to do things you do not want. Most of the time, though, it involves stopping a few people from doing things that they want: whether this is murder, or driving too fast.
By your definition of freedom, pretty much everyone in our society is free for the brief period between birth and weaning. After that, it's downhill all the way.
He is complaining that there is little room for independence, that everything is becoming owned by large corporations who control everything through a combination of their power in the marketplace, use of the law.
I am struggling to understand how this is an issue with software development. The same is happening everywhere. Once he's been writing for a while, he'll discover that this is mostly owned by a few large corporations. The same is true with music, science, education and so on.
We are sinking back into a "free market" feudal hierarchy. Software development is just following the rest of society.
"Scala also runs on the JVM, so it's fast as opposed to Python."
This is so wide of the mark that I had to comment. The JVM is a fast virtual machine, but that is a poor benchmark. Java and Python run at roughly equitable speeds, but where Python wins out is that it has a much stronger interface to C or Fortran. For hard core number crunching, python wins because you can either call existing scientific or numerical libraries, or use tools like numpy which do the stuff that needs to be fast in C.
Slower moving is good sometimes. I can still compile 20 year old documents that I wrote in Latex, but cannot open 20 year old documents that I wrote in word. "Innovation" is often used to mean "planned obsolescence" where the business model depends on software and hardware being replaced every three or four years.
A lot of the problems with recent desktop systems have also been about change, when it has been affecting things that people use all the time. I'm a scientist so I want to do innovative work on my computer; most of the time, I just need the desktop to get out of my way.
It's all a matter of degree. Stability is not the same thing as stability. Change is not the same thing as innovation.
So, the "with many eyes all bugs are shallow" notion fails. There were not enough eyes on the OpenSSL library, which is why nobody discovered the bug.
Except that someone did discover the bug, when they were looking at the code because it was open source. And they did report it. And it did get fixed. Later than anyone would want of course. But it happened. Maybe the similar errors would and are being missed in the Windows and Mac implementations.
2300 Chrome machines vs. 4300 XP machines, I wonder what the true saving are. Since the totals doesn't add up, what did they do eliminate 2000 workers and 2000 machines, or are they going to make 2000 workers use pen and paper or am I missing some here?
Probably the numbers are real. Since we spent lots of our money on bailing out banks and wars, and big business doesn't pay tax any more, many areas of the public sector have been cut. Most local councils have shed workers wholesale.
Shocking though it may be to you, these scientists who were publishing a letter in a British Newspaper are by and large resident in Britain. I would hazard a guess that the majority of their research funding does not come from NIH, but from the UK research councils.
Trust me, mavericks or not, I bet all the signatories could tell you the success rate for all the grants schemes they apply to.
There are lots of whats that speciation could occur -- one obvious one is that the population gets split into two which then evolves away from each other. If you had 100 different high related species then they would likely compete with each other or interbred. The end result of either is that you end up with fewer populations -- one wipes out the other, or the two interbred till they become one.
Pizza is not that healthy, I am afraid. The problem is that most Italian pizza's have really significant amounts of salt in both the base and the topping. Of course, Italians tend to use rather too much salt to my taste anyway, but Pizza is where it is the biggest issue, because it doesn't taste really salty. The only reason you know is that you have to pee a lot afterwards.
It's not quite that misinformed. Emacs lisp is a special purpose language. It's implemented in the Emacs core and is not implemented any where else. It's in the same family as the 1958 lisp, but is none-the-less as different language from all the others.
It's actually quite a nice language; it has some nice data types good for editors. And being a lisp, you can layer anything you want on top of it.
Why not mercurial? Two main reasons, I can think of. Firstly, some of Emacs (ELPA) is already hosted on git. And, secondly, because Emacs support for git (magit) is way ahead of that for mercurial.
ESR gives a third reason, which is that git has won and mercurial is not in great health, and may end up in the same position as bzr. Maybe, maybe not, but it's a factor.
This is demand lead. Students want Java. Many of them think it's good, or that it's a "real" language or something. Even though, it's not actually very good for teaching, it's what people want.
The bottom line is that there is no replacement for Make; it still does what it was designed for very well. I use it when ever I have lots of small files with unix commands to convert them; python normally shows up there as well.
But make sucks for Java, hence ant, and then maven. And I use leiningen for Clojure. I'm not sure having one build tool per language is a great situation, but there you have it. But make fills its niche and it will be there in quite a few years time.
"Is the peer review process at open-access journals acceptable?"
It's a perfectly scientific question; you can address most questions, including those about values and personal preference, with a scientific methodology.
But it's a poor question, because open access has no bearing on the question -- Is the peer-review process acceptable.
All he has done is sub-select a biased, non-randomised group in the first place. To justify this, he should be comparing open access to something else, otherwise, it has no role in the experiment.
Basically, he's taken a journalistic approach -- performed a test which gave him the answer he needed for the story -- and not a scientific approach. It does raise a lot of questions about peer-review. In particular, it raises the question of what sort of peer review did this paper go through?
Well, the editor is really good. It's fast and light. It's works with pretty much every language every invented and several that haven't yet. It integrates fantastically with all the different version control systems out there. You can plug it into any command line tool that you want. It's got find and grep support. You can connect to remote machines via ssh. You can use it entirely without a mouse. It has some incredible buffer and file switching facilities that mean you can open the right file instantly. It's got org-mode, which is a work of insane genius. If you do lisp it has paredit which has been widely copied.
You can configure it however you like. I configure it so that it does different things on different machines but feels that same to me; I've also got a custom colour scheme for use on my laptop, when it's sunny, It works over X, so I can use my desktop while plugged into the wall; you can also have two people editing the same file in different places this way. When it doesn't have a mode for what every you are editing, it's not that hard to write one. You can release these and people will help to improve them for you.
it's not as polished at editing Java as Eclipse that's true. It's a jack of all trades. If I worked on one project, in one language, I would use eclipse (or whatever was best for that one language). Because I switch a lot I use emacs. Actually, at the moment, I am doing a lot of clojure, so I'd use Emacs anyway. But that's a side issue.
The different factions do different things. ELPA is server based, but works with a raw Emacs. el-get gets files in a number of ways, but I suspect that git checkouts are the most common. But you need git installed.
I suspect it will come together a bit more eventually though.
Slashdot Mirror
I am struggling with this. As far as I can say that you are saying you looked at a large code base *once* and you found that it was complicated and you didn't understand it.
Is this not true with most code bases? I mean, I can look back at my own code from a while back, and it takes me quite a while to work out what it is doing. And long-lived code bases can, ironically, be particularly problematic.
The ultimate problem here is the funding problem. Free software is much more adaptable because you don't have to tell anyone what you are going to do with it before you do. But someone still has to pay for it at some time. The strange thing is that people and companies have roads coming to their doors which are maintained by the public, but the same is not true of essential software like OpenSSH.
Yep, it's true there are times when prefix notation is painful. I got used to it years ago, though, so it doesn't really bother me any more. For maths, I agree, it confuses but it's easy to drop that, or use a threading operator for non mathematical code. And it largely absolves me from the hassle of having to think about syntax the rest of the time.
Compromises in lisp as in all things.
Pretty sure that kawa is compiled as it happens, so your distinction between haskell and dynamically typed scripting languages is false.
The parenthesis thing is a bonus for kawa, since it enables advanced syntax tree manipulation of source code both in the editing
environment, and for meta programming. And once nice feature of lisp compared to haskell is that you can do basic I/O without spending
three weeks understanding what the hell a monad is.
Long division -- that is where the divisor is a big number. This is not the same as division in general.
There are quite a few ways (too many, which is an Emacs flaw) of achieving Source Browsing. ECB is a nice example, if you like the full windows environment. Mostly, though, I use ido.el and projectile. It's very quick. Indeed, the ability to move between files with extreme rapidity is one of the things that keeps me on Emacs.
The core of Emacs is very stable, and you get used to do things in certain ways. At times, you need to shake things about a bit and investigate new packages. While this comes with a cost, the benefit of Emacs is that the old ways still work. You won't get forced into a new way of working with each new release, if you are happy with the old.
I do that often, as it happens. I often test my lisp in batch, so I run emacs inside a compilation window. I also use Emacs in batch for some builds of things other than Emacs software. For this, I run make which runs emacs inside a compilation window.
There is a widgetized branch of Emacs which lets you use Emacs as a widget and lets you put widgets into Emacs, so you could probably do it graphically if you really wanted.
Not totally convinced that we have a lawless security state, although there was a recent scandal when a police officer was armed during routine policing. Not the sort of thing we really want to see in this country.
This is a silly argument. Democracy is a mechanism for ensuring that a society runs with the consent of the majority. The whole point of society is to put restrictions on what you can and cannot do. This can mean forcing you to do things you do not want. Most of the time, though, it involves stopping a few people from doing things that they want: whether this is murder, or driving too fast.
By your definition of freedom, pretty much everyone in our society is free for the brief period between birth and weaning. After that, it's downhill all the way.
So, patent examiners are employed by we the people, from who they could have nothing to fear. As a result their union is an evil vested interest.
On the other hand, taxes are collected by a vicious and cruel IRS, using the ever present threat of violence and death.
I'm glad that you cleared that up, because I thought it was the same organisation, the government, that both collect tax and employ patent examiners.
He is complaining that there is little room for independence, that everything is becoming owned by large corporations who control everything through a combination of their power in the marketplace, use of the law.
I am struggling to understand how this is an issue with software development. The same is happening everywhere. Once he's been writing for a while, he'll discover that this is mostly owned by a few large corporations. The same is true with music, science, education and so on.
We are sinking back into a "free market" feudal hierarchy. Software development is just following the rest of society.
"Scala also runs on the JVM, so it's fast as opposed to Python."
This is so wide of the mark that I had to comment. The JVM is a fast virtual machine, but that is a poor benchmark. Java and Python run at roughly equitable speeds, but where Python wins out is that it has a much stronger interface to C or Fortran. For hard core number crunching, python wins because you can either call existing scientific or numerical libraries, or use tools like numpy which do the stuff that needs to be fast in C.
Phil
Stability is not the same thing as stagnation! Obviously, it is the same thing as stability.
Slower moving is good sometimes. I can still compile 20 year old documents that I wrote in Latex, but cannot open 20 year old documents that I wrote in word.
"Innovation" is often used to mean "planned obsolescence" where the business model depends on software and hardware being replaced every three or four years.
A lot of the problems with recent desktop systems have also been about change, when it has been affecting things that people use all the time. I'm a scientist so I want to do innovative work on my computer; most of the time, I just need the desktop to get out of my way.
It's all a matter of degree. Stability is not the same thing as stability. Change is not the same thing as innovation.
So, the "with many eyes all bugs are shallow" notion fails. There were not enough eyes on the OpenSSL library, which is why nobody discovered the bug.
Except that someone did discover the bug, when they were looking at the code because it was open source. And they did report it. And it did get fixed. Later than anyone would want of course. But it happened. Maybe the similar errors would and are being missed in the Windows and Mac implementations.
2300 Chrome machines vs. 4300 XP machines, I wonder what the true saving are. Since the totals doesn't add up, what did they do eliminate 2000 workers and 2000 machines, or are they going to make 2000 workers use pen and paper or am I missing some here?
Probably the numbers are real. Since we spent lots of our money on bailing out banks and wars, and big business doesn't pay tax any more, many areas of the public sector have been cut. Most local councils have shed workers wholesale.
Shocking though it may be to you, these scientists who were publishing a letter in a British Newspaper are by and large resident in Britain. I would hazard a guess that the majority of their research funding does not come from NIH, but from the UK research councils.
Trust me, mavericks or not, I bet all the signatories could tell you the success rate for all the grants schemes they apply to.
There are lots of whats that speciation could occur -- one obvious one is that the population gets split into two which then evolves away from each other. If you had 100 different high related species then they would likely compete with each other or interbred. The end result of either is that you end up with fewer populations -- one wipes out the other, or the two interbred till they become one.
Pizza is not that healthy, I am afraid. The problem is that most Italian pizza's have really significant amounts of salt in both the base and the topping. Of course, Italians tend to use rather too much salt to my taste anyway, but Pizza is where it is the biggest issue, because it doesn't taste really salty. The only reason you know is that you have to pee a lot afterwards.
It's not quite that misinformed. Emacs lisp is a special purpose language. It's implemented in the Emacs core and is not implemented any where else. It's in the same family as the 1958 lisp, but is none-the-less as different language from all the others.
It's actually quite a nice language; it has some nice data types good for editors. And being a lisp, you can layer anything you want on top of it.
Why not mercurial? Two main reasons, I can think of. Firstly, some of Emacs (ELPA) is already hosted on git. And, secondly, because Emacs support for git (magit) is way ahead of that for mercurial.
ESR gives a third reason, which is that git has won and mercurial is not in great health, and may end up in the same position as bzr. Maybe, maybe not, but it's a factor.
This is demand lead. Students want Java. Many of them think it's good, or that it's a "real" language or something. Even though, it's not actually very good for teaching, it's what people want.
Ant? Seriously, you have to be kidding!
The bottom line is that there is no replacement for Make; it still does what it was designed for very well. I use it when ever I have lots of small files with unix commands to convert them; python normally shows up there as well.
But make sucks for Java, hence ant, and then maven. And I use leiningen for Clojure. I'm not sure having one build tool per language is a great situation, but there you have it. But make fills its niche and it will be there in quite a few years time.
"Is the peer review process at open-access journals acceptable?"
It's a perfectly scientific question; you can address most questions, including those about values and personal preference, with a scientific methodology.
But it's a poor question, because open access has no bearing on the question -- Is the peer-review process acceptable.
All he has done is sub-select a biased, non-randomised group in the first place. To justify this, he should be comparing open access
to something else, otherwise, it has no role in the experiment.
Basically, he's taken a journalistic approach -- performed a test which gave him the answer he needed for the story -- and not a scientific
approach. It does raise a lot of questions about peer-review. In particular, it raises the question of what sort of peer review did this paper go
through?
Well, the editor is really good. It's fast and light. It's works with pretty much every language every invented and several that haven't yet. It integrates fantastically with all the different version control systems out there. You can plug it into any command line tool that you want. It's got find and grep support. You can connect to remote machines via ssh. You can use it entirely without a mouse. It has some incredible buffer and file switching facilities that mean you can open the right file instantly. It's got org-mode, which is a work of insane genius. If you do lisp it has paredit which has been widely copied.
You can configure it however you like. I configure it so that it does different things on different machines but feels that same to me; I've also got a custom colour scheme for use on my laptop, when it's sunny, It works over X, so I can use my desktop while plugged into the wall; you can also have two people editing the same file in different places this way. When it doesn't have a mode for what every you are editing, it's not that hard to write one. You can release these and people will help to improve them for you.
it's not as polished at editing Java as Eclipse that's true. It's a jack of all trades. If I worked on one project, in one language, I would use eclipse (or whatever was best for that one language). Because I switch a lot I use emacs. Actually, at the moment, I am doing a lot of clojure, so I'd use Emacs anyway. But that's a side issue.
The different factions do different things. ELPA is server based, but works with a raw Emacs. el-get gets files in a number of ways, but I suspect that git checkouts are the most common. But you need git installed.
I suspect it will come together a bit more eventually though.
Phil