Yet, no Lisp flavor has a feature that comes close to CPAN in saving time and money, and ensuring reusability of code and knowledge.;-) The power of the language lies in the pragmatics, more than the semantics. That's why semantically deprived languages such as VB can still thrive.
I find "(+ a b c d e)" shorter and clearer than "a + b + c + d + e", myself.
That, of course, simply proves the point of the original post. People generally know infix notation, and would find the above unintelligible.
Of course, as a CTO, I was the one arguing for the long-term investment in design, and against the quick fixes, with just the arguments you use now. you have to do that. But you also have to understand something about the general dynamics, and that things don't happen the way they do because people are dumb.
Also, in case someone thinks I'm opposed to academia in general, I am currently studying for a degree in philosophy, and it doesn't get more academic than that (especially considering the etymology of the word).;-)
Yes, of course there are different ways of balancing long-term and short-term costs, whether it's of education, design, equipment, etc. But the bottom line is still the cash flow. Not in some highly abstract and theoretical sense, but simply in a day-to-day operations sense. I'm not saying that short-term benefit is always better, I'm saying that this is what the equation looks like--and that is basically never acknowledged by those who have dedicated their lives to inventing new algorithms. I love the work they do, but I resent their misconceptions about the "unsophisticated people" that are based on ignorance about how businesses need to do things. Even though they quite often sound as if they believe themselves to be experts at that as well.
*sigh* I'm sick of listeing to these old academics whine about the real world.
I mean, doesn't this say it all:
Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, youre always going to get a pop culture.
Oh yeah, because pop culture is bad. We don't want something to expand so fast we lose our academic control over it. Oh, looky here! ---> . That's the world's tiniest violine playing...
Or:
One could actually argue--as I sometimes do--that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? So it would have been better if all these lusers (those not in academia) had never got their hands on computers? Or was U.C.L.A. supposed to supply them to us?
I dont spend time complaining about this stuff, because...
Uh, right.
I have worked in the computer business as system technician, programmer, CTO, and product manager for about 15 years--have even been on some panels in academic seminars in connection with RDF and the Semantic Web. The reason these guys (and I do believe generalizations are in order) disagree with how things are done in the industry is simply because they don't understand it. It's really that simple. They are different areas of expertise.
Computer science research has its own goals. Scalability, design-for-change, open interfaces, those kinds of things are what it's all about. In the private sector on the other hand, one thing rules: cash flow. Cash flow makes the world go 'round, and it will take precedence over scalability, modular design, and documented interfaces eleven days per week. It's not stupidity, it's really very rational. Cash flow is not about economy in the simplest sense: it would be cheaper for me to buy a one-year public transport ticket instead of buying one every month, but I don't have that ammount of cash lying around, so it's still better (in a completely rational sense) for me to get the more expensive monthly solution rather than take a loan or whatnot. That is the reason why quick fixes are sometimes the smartest way of doing things. Something else is almost always smarter than the "best" design. (Insert "cost of last 10%" rant here.)
This is especially true about all small and medium-sized Internet companies that--recently burst bubbles notwithstanding--have created a huge new economy. They are employing millions of people around the world (directly or indirectly) and have introduced computer usage to pretty much every individual in the developed world.
This did not happen because everyone was stupid and did everything backwards, and it's not "unfortunate."
It also didn't happen because the academic institutions made it happen. Academia did not turn HTML into a de facto standard. In fact, if HTML had been as complex as RDF, and treated as strictly, there's a good chance the Web had never happened. The sloppyness of implementation that is a headache to most Web developers today may very well have been one reason why the Web grew so quickly. And there is still a good chance that RDF will never make it into the mainstream, it depends on how anal the developers of it plan to be. (Although even if it doesn't, it will probably still be used at 10 huge corporations around the world that are big enough to have their own in-house academic institutions.)
Keep teaching us about scalability, and if you want to listen we will explain something about what makes mainstream businesses able to pay for systems development at all.
What you just wrote was the most ignorant thing ever expressed by a carbon-based biped, and I can support that with peer-reviewed, empirical evidence. There have been many things written down by man that are more stupid than that comment. Even whole books. On average 3.14 things more stupid than that comment are written down by humans on a single day (naturally excluding bank holidays).
[I]Where I'm from, professionals use professional equipments - from cameras to lens to light detectors to scanners to color-management gadgets to printers and so on.[/I]
Where I'm from, professionals use amateur equipment, and amateurs use professional equipment. It's completely backwards, but that's how it is here. Pro photographers usually have old instamatic cameras, and old retired people on bus trips all have Hasselblads or Rolleiflexes. It's very odd.
...for friends and family ten years ago. Now watch my stepdad, he's more handy with his 'puter than I am with mine (and I've been a sysadmin and programmer for 15 years). Don't help them, it's only making things worse. They need to learn from their own mistakes.:-)
Another thing: I honestly don't know how the kids today are ever going to learn how computers actually work. I mean, when I was 14, the ALU and CPU were distinct components, visible on the "mother board." (Well, the board.) 6502 assembler was so limited you had a reasonable chance of actually understanding what was going on in the computer. Hell, you could figure out some things about data transfer from LISTENING to your data tapes as the files loaded. With the online, content-streamed, specularly-shaded games of today, where to even begin? Then, who needs to know what an ALU does? *shrug* Maybe we're the first old farts of the personal computer era.
It's perfectly possible to learn critical thinking in college or later. In fact, critical thinking isn't something magical that needs to be embedded in your subconscious, nor is it a personality trait. It's simply knowledge about how to evaluate claims and how to argument effectively and productively. To claim that a "hick" couldn't learn that is just prejudicial and narrowminded.
I would imagine that Plato's Academy provided a good general education. It gave the students a fundamental tool-kit for critical thinking, the ability to distinguish a bogus claim from a meaningful one, and to argument in an efficent and productive manner. These things are helpful, whatever job you eventually will occupy (or indeed if you don't work at all). Then, few carpenters took classes at the Old Academy.
If MS were serious about this feature, they could create a meta-tag where the web page author could specify that Smart Tags should be used, and what Smart Tag library to use, e.g.
[smart lib="slashdot"]
(page)
[/smart]
Then it would be under the control of the page author, as it should be.
I have a MUDShell too (mdsh)
on
MUD Shell
·
· Score: 2
My implementation philosophy is slightly different however. I had as an original demand that it shouldn't change your prefered working environment except by adding things, i.e., it shouldn't break any of the things in your shell that work now. It's written in perl and primarily uses bash shell functions. It currently has:
go [north/n/dir]
take/drop [object/regexp]
inventory
examine [file/dir/person]
use [object]
It supports local and global "skins" for your filesystem (that is, room description files) as well as.room_description files in the actual directories. "Use" uses the file command to deduce file type from header and mdsh has its own simple-to-modify magic file that associates file types with application (can have several console and X alternatives for each file type).
When you enter a directory it diplays a room description if there is one, the number of files in the directory and the "exits" (directories)avilable, and also any other users in this directory. "Examine" works for all displayed objects (using the passwd file for users in your dir).
Problems with my current version is that it is bash specific and mutli-user functionality is limited to seeing who else is in you cwd. I'm working on a new version that will take care of these issues and make command line chat etc possible.
This application must be classified as a Bad Idea(tm) along the lines of Doom for sysadmins. It also has several predecessors, like ash and one adventure shell written originally for the VAX in the early 80's. If there is any interest I could probably put my code up somewhere. Email me at henning@roxen.com.
In general, I think many "idealistic" software engineers miss out on this simple fact: A majority of software engineering tasks today are more akin to plumbing than science. You don't have the performance optimization demands that justifies using a lower level language and dwell on algorithms for ages. A language with auto-vivifying variables and dynamic list types may use 20% more memory space and 50% more clock cycles than needed, but it's usually not a problem. To a purist, yes, but that won't convince your company to assign more resources to the task. So you take some high level stuff and throw it together to shuffle some data from A to B, mangle it a bit, and you're done. It may not be pretty, but it's economy.
I agree completelly. That's why I write all my CGI programs in assembler these days. After all, C has some redeeming features, like manual memory management, that certainly will keep you bug shooting for months, which is a good thing because it keeps you on your mental toes, but anyone who understands what a generic computing device is understands that to write even a half decent program you need obviously be intimately familiar with every machine instruction and its implications with regards to processor microcode, IO operations etc. I recently got sacked from my company because my boss can't understand the principles of quality software enginering and demanded that I produce an HTML form handler in a few days. Idiot...
In closing, I'd just like to remind you that, generally, C applications are also shit, and when they are shit, they misbehave in a lot nastier ways than "poorly designed" programs in high level languages (with garbage collect and memory management).
Re:Printing Press Did Not Bring About Renaissance
on
The Renaissance
·
· Score: 1
Also on a critical note (about the conjecture in general): How many technical inovations appeared during the rule of the Roman empire? We all know what the Romans contributed intellectually, compared to the Greeks for example (i.e. nothing). I read someone (in a foreword to a math textbook) who recently compared our times, with respect to educational ideals and the decline of the status of the libral arts, with that of the Romans. That is, only "bankable" skills count. A person in power, politically or in the private sector, is not expected to have more general knowledge about the arts, literature, science, etc, that at least I associate with the renaissance.
Just a comment re: that this movie isn't much like the book. It's true, and I have a hard time imagine any PKD book that would make a good movie straight off. The guy who wrote Bladerunner is nevertheless one of Hollywood's most interesting screenwriters (check out his credits). His work, although less scizophrenic than PKD's, is still thematically related as they continually question the nature of human identity (no big mystery he would eventually write a script for Terry Gilliam who has a similar interest). Anyway, the movie is different from the book for good reasons and Peoples is a very gifted screenwriter.
As for whether Deckard is a replicant or not, I think you better ask Peoples. His work is usually 'open-ended' in a similar fasion to PKD's, and the whole point is that we don't know. For that reason I thought that the director's cut was actually a disapointment (except for the exclusion of the talk-over, which was a big improvement) because it suddenly becomes obvious that Deckard is a replicant (i.e. the uncertainty is gone). This also could break the over-all moral and theme of the movie (and the book), as being about the difference between the human and non-human, the validity of artificial life and the despair of the opressed. If Deckard is a replicant, then what happens to that conflict?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in the case above, it's actually cataphoric. (Appears before its referent.) :-D
lol I should have run the spell checker. My universal defense is that English is my second language. ;-)
:-D
Or maybe I meant:
Main Entry: violine
: a moderate to strong violet
Btw, '$_' is perl's anaphoric pronoun. ;-)
$sum += $_ foreach @list_of_numbers;
@sorted_list = sort @unsorted_list;
I'm not saying prefix isn't useful, just that the point in the first post was that it is not, to a vast majority of would-be users, clearer.
Hell ya... What holy stone have you been living under... Users suck!
The coolest thing is: tools that don't have users don't need to have uses either. They can just be theoretically impressive. It's teh w1n!
Yet, no Lisp flavor has a feature that comes close to CPAN in saving time and money, and ensuring reusability of code and knowledge. ;-) The power of the language lies in the pragmatics, more than the semantics. That's why semantically deprived languages such as VB can still thrive.
I find "(+ a b c d e)" shorter and clearer than "a + b + c + d + e", myself.
That, of course, simply proves the point of the original post. People generally know infix notation, and would find the above unintelligible.
Of course, as a CTO, I was the one arguing for the long-term investment in design, and against the quick fixes, with just the arguments you use now. you have to do that. But you also have to understand something about the general dynamics, and that things don't happen the way they do because people are dumb.
;-)
Also, in case someone thinks I'm opposed to academia in general, I am currently studying for a degree in philosophy, and it doesn't get more academic than that (especially considering the etymology of the word).
Yes, of course there are different ways of balancing long-term and short-term costs, whether it's of education, design, equipment, etc. But the bottom line is still the cash flow. Not in some highly abstract and theoretical sense, but simply in a day-to-day operations sense. I'm not saying that short-term benefit is always better, I'm saying that this is what the equation looks like--and that is basically never acknowledged by those who have dedicated their lives to inventing new algorithms. I love the work they do, but I resent their misconceptions about the "unsophisticated people" that are based on ignorance about how businesses need to do things. Even though they quite often sound as if they believe themselves to be experts at that as well.
*sigh* I'm sick of listeing to these old academics whine about the real world.
I mean, doesn't this say it all:
Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, youre always going to get a pop culture.
Oh yeah, because pop culture is bad. We don't want something to expand so fast we lose our academic control over it.
Oh, looky here! ---> . That's the world's tiniest violine playing...
Or:
One could actually argue--as I sometimes do--that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? So it would have been better if all these lusers (those not in academia) had never got their hands on computers? Or was U.C.L.A. supposed to supply them to us?
I dont spend time complaining about this stuff, because...
Uh, right.
I have worked in the computer business as system technician, programmer, CTO, and product manager for about 15 years--have even been on some panels in academic seminars in connection with RDF and the Semantic Web. The reason these guys (and I do believe generalizations are in order) disagree with how things are done in the industry is simply because they don't understand it. It's really that simple. They are different areas of expertise.
Computer science research has its own goals. Scalability, design-for-change, open interfaces, those kinds of things are what it's all about. In the private sector on the other hand, one thing rules: cash flow. Cash flow makes the world go 'round, and it will take precedence over scalability, modular design, and documented interfaces eleven days per week. It's not stupidity, it's really very rational. Cash flow is not about economy in the simplest sense: it would be cheaper for me to buy a one-year public transport ticket instead of buying one every month, but I don't have that ammount of cash lying around, so it's still better (in a completely rational sense) for me to get the more expensive monthly solution rather than take a loan or whatnot. That is the reason why quick fixes are sometimes the smartest way of doing things. Something else is almost always smarter than the "best" design. (Insert "cost of last 10%" rant here.)
This is especially true about all small and medium-sized Internet companies that--recently burst bubbles notwithstanding--have created a huge new economy. They are employing millions of people around the world (directly or indirectly) and have introduced computer usage to pretty much every individual in the developed world.
This did not happen because everyone was stupid and did everything backwards, and it's not "unfortunate."
It also didn't happen because the academic institutions made it happen. Academia did not turn HTML into a de facto standard. In fact, if HTML had been as complex as RDF, and treated as strictly, there's a good chance the Web had never happened. The sloppyness of implementation that is a headache to most Web developers today may very well have been one reason why the Web grew so quickly. And there is still a good chance that RDF will never make it into the mainstream, it depends on how anal the developers of it plan to be. (Although even if it doesn't, it will probably still be used at 10 huge corporations around the world that are big enough to have their own in-house academic institutions.)
Keep teaching us about scalability, and if you want to listen we will explain something about what makes mainstream businesses able to pay for systems development at all.
What you just wrote was the most ignorant thing ever expressed by a carbon-based biped, and I can support that with peer-reviewed, empirical evidence. There have been many things written down by man that are more stupid than that comment. Even whole books. On average 3.14 things more stupid than that comment are written down by humans on a single day (naturally excluding bank holidays).
[I]Where I'm from, professionals use professional equipments - from cameras to lens to light detectors to scanners to color-management gadgets to printers and so on.[/I]
Where I'm from, professionals use amateur equipment, and amateurs use professional equipment. It's completely backwards, but that's how it is here. Pro photographers usually have old instamatic cameras, and old retired people on bus trips all have Hasselblads or Rolleiflexes. It's very odd.
(This might have been said above, and in that case I apologize. In a bit of a hurry.)
However, he admits that future sequels may feature a younger actor, similar to the James Bond series post-Connery."
Anyway, if I don't misremember, Roger Moore was (and still is, I suppose) older than Connery when he took over the Bond part.
...for friends and family ten years ago. Now watch my stepdad, he's more handy with his 'puter than I am with mine (and I've been a sysadmin and programmer for 15 years). Don't help them, it's only making things worse. They need to learn from their own mistakes. :-)
Another thing: I honestly don't know how the kids today are ever going to learn how computers actually work. I mean, when I was 14, the ALU and CPU were distinct components, visible on the "mother board." (Well, the board.) 6502 assembler was so limited you had a reasonable chance of actually understanding what was going on in the computer. Hell, you could figure out some things about data transfer from LISTENING to your data tapes as the files loaded. With the online, content-streamed, specularly-shaded games of today, where to even begin? Then, who needs to know what an ALU does? *shrug* Maybe we're the first old farts of the personal computer era.
It's perfectly possible to learn critical thinking in college or later. In fact, critical thinking isn't something magical that needs to be embedded in your subconscious, nor is it a personality trait. It's simply knowledge about how to evaluate claims and how to argument effectively and productively. To claim that a "hick" couldn't learn that is just prejudicial and narrowminded.
I would imagine that Plato's Academy provided a good general education. It gave the students a fundamental tool-kit for critical thinking, the ability to distinguish a bogus claim from a meaningful one, and to argument in an efficent and productive manner. These things are helpful, whatever job you eventually will occupy (or indeed if you don't work at all). Then, few carpenters took classes at the Old Academy.
If MS were serious about this feature, they could create a meta-tag where the web page author could specify that Smart Tags should be used, and what Smart Tag library to use, e.g.
[smart lib="slashdot"]
(page)
[/smart]
Then it would be under the control of the page author, as it should be.
My implementation philosophy is slightly different however. I had as an original demand that it shouldn't change your prefered working environment except by adding things, i.e., it shouldn't break any of the things in your shell that work now. It's written in perl and primarily uses bash shell functions. It currently has: .room_description files in the actual directories. "Use" uses the file command to deduce file type from header and mdsh has its own simple-to-modify magic file that associates file types with application (can have several console and X alternatives for each file type).
go [north/n/dir]
take/drop [object/regexp]
inventory
examine [file/dir/person]
use [object]
It supports local and global "skins" for your filesystem (that is, room description files) as well as
When you enter a directory it diplays a room description if there is one, the number of files in the directory and the "exits" (directories)avilable, and also any other users in this directory. "Examine" works for all displayed objects (using the passwd file for users in your dir).
Problems with my current version is that it is bash specific and mutli-user functionality is limited to seeing who else is in you cwd. I'm working on a new version that will take care of these issues and make command line chat etc possible.
This application must be classified as a Bad Idea(tm) along the lines of Doom for sysadmins. It also has several predecessors, like ash and one adventure shell written originally for the VAX in the early 80's. If there is any interest I could probably put my code up somewhere. Email me at henning@roxen.com.
In general, I think many "idealistic" software engineers miss out on this simple fact: A majority of software engineering tasks today are more akin to plumbing than science. You don't have the performance optimization demands that justifies using a lower level language and dwell on algorithms for ages. A language with auto-vivifying variables and dynamic list types may use 20% more memory space and 50% more clock cycles than needed, but it's usually not a problem. To a purist, yes, but that won't convince your company to assign more resources to the task. So you take some high level stuff and throw it together to shuffle some data from A to B, mangle it a bit, and you're done. It may not be pretty, but it's economy.
/Digital plumber
I agree completelly. That's why I write all my CGI programs in assembler these days. After all, C has some redeeming features, like manual memory management, that certainly will keep you bug shooting for months, which is a good thing because it keeps you on your mental toes, but anyone who understands what a generic computing device is understands that to write even a half decent program you need obviously be intimately familiar with every machine instruction and its implications with regards to processor microcode, IO operations etc. I recently got sacked from my company because my boss can't understand the principles of quality software enginering and demanded that I produce an HTML form handler in a few days. Idiot...
In closing, I'd just like to remind you that, generally, C applications are also shit, and when they are shit, they misbehave in a lot nastier ways than "poorly designed" programs in high level languages (with garbage collect and memory management).
Also on a critical note (about the conjecture in general): How many technical inovations appeared during the rule of the Roman empire? We all know what the Romans contributed intellectually, compared to the Greeks for example (i.e. nothing). I read someone (in a foreword to a math textbook) who recently compared our times, with respect to educational ideals and the decline of the status of the libral arts, with that of the Romans. That is, only "bankable" skills count. A person in power, politically or in the private sector, is not expected to have more general knowledge about the arts, literature, science, etc, that at least I associate with the renaissance.
Just a comment re: that this movie isn't much like the book. It's true, and I have a hard time imagine any PKD book that would make a good movie straight off. The guy who wrote Bladerunner is nevertheless one of Hollywood's most interesting screenwriters (check out his credits). His work, although less scizophrenic than PKD's, is still thematically related as they continually question the nature of human identity (no big mystery he would eventually write a script for Terry Gilliam who has a similar interest). Anyway, the movie is different from the book for good reasons and Peoples is a very gifted screenwriter.
As for whether Deckard is a replicant or not, I think you better ask Peoples. His work is usually 'open-ended' in a similar fasion to PKD's, and the whole point is that we don't know. For that reason I thought that the director's cut was actually a disapointment (except for the exclusion of the talk-over, which was a big improvement) because it suddenly becomes obvious that Deckard is a replicant (i.e. the uncertainty is gone). This also could break the over-all moral and theme of the movie (and the book), as being about the difference between the human and non-human, the validity of artificial life and the despair of the opressed. If Deckard is a replicant, then what happens to that conflict?