Tcl does have a very short set of syntax rules. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the resulting syntax is really optimal. I think that these should be comments:
set abc 123 # set the value
set xyz {
item1 # this is the first one
item2
}
etc. They aren't because IMHO the syntax rules of Tcl are designed more for simplicity than for producing a language that works like other languages.
The error reports could probably be done in such a way that if you got the procedure from sourcing a file it would give you a line number but if it was redefined at run time that would work the same way as it does now. That's probably not a big deal.
My other historical gripe with Tcl is that unlike python it doesn't come with "batteries included". There are a lot of packages such as Expect, Incr Tcl, BLT, bwidgets, etc that should have been bundled with the core distributions early on. (Of course you would be able to build without them.) But in the past the Tcl group suffered from a bad case of not-invented-here syndrome and that made life tougher for users who had to download packages from different places, patch the core, etc etc. Also I wonder how long it took to reimplement the grid geometry manager when blt::table was already available and worked fine, but for some reason was never pulled into the core Tk.
Well, I don't want to rehash all the Tcl vs XXX discussions from the last 10 years...
Tcl is an okay language - I have been using it for more than 10 years in some big applications. But I've been using Python for about a year now and I feel that it's much better for real programming. The data structures are much richer - not everything is a string, it's faster, more readable, and makes good programming more natural.
John was a great software guy but he wasn't a language designer and (no offense) it kind of shows up in Tcl. The way comments work, and the fact that error messages don't tell you a line number from a source file, are both side effects of Tcl's hacky implemention.
The one huge advantage that Tcl has is Tk and even though other languages have Tk bindings they all seem awkward and second-class. But is that a strong enough advantage? I guess it depends on the application.
I agree that it's pointless to have a phone that can do scientific calculations, keep your calendar, etc. Those are PDA functions and not communications functions. A phone is a communication device. But pictures are a form of communication. I'm talking to somebody, and I say, "I'm standing here, looking at this huge, purple,... wait, let me send you a picture", point, click, and send... That's exactly what a phone is for! Sending data in real time to another person. Voice or pictures, same thing!
Re:I'd like to be a fly on the wall...
on
Server In A Fly
·
· Score: 1
If it runs a unix-like OS you can run "wall" on the fly...
Check out what SGI is doing with the Itanium - http://www.sgi.com/servers/altix/index.html - with 64 bits and a very fast communication backplane (which they have) you can run huge multi-threaded computations using shared memory. On a 32-bit machine you have to use message passing and that's harder and less natural for some of these applications.
I know, you're saying "that's a tiny segment of the market compared to PS2's". But wait 5 years and the cool new gaming machine will be doing the same thing. A flight simulator that does a high-resolution compressible flow CFD calculation in real time - I'm sure that will sell a few copies.
Why is it that every Windows release gets less tuned for computer people and more tuned for some mythical computer-phobe who feels better if there is a little dog wagging its tail while you search for things? They have to change everything around all the time (Network neighborhood -> Computers near me, etc) and come up with defaults that I don't like. I wish there was a way to tell stupid XP to use all the same terms and UI elements that Win2K used... On the other hand, linux was designed by and for hackers and is not so bad. I just wish somebody would put the right stuff in the right places in the Start menu and improve the current situation where there are too many menu items for stuff like system administration and none of them do what you want...
Good point. MS lets you run Linux on the Xbox, then Nasa goes out and buys a million of them to run simulations on (what would you call that, a Beodog cluster?) and how much does MS lose on the deal? Not a good move...
I saw some comments on earlier discussions about this that MS was just trying to work around a bug in an earlier version of Opera, and that there's no way in the world that they would intentionally break Opera's rendering. But the press release denies this. Why doesn't somebody at Microsoft who was involved with this feature come forward and explain the situation? If we don't hear from them, the only conclusion is that they are too embarrassed at being caught at this kind of cheap trick to show their faces.
It's as simple as that. If I find a wrapper on the ground that says "Big Mac", and I take a big bite out of what's in it, and it's dog poop, who do I have to blame? It's all a big game to the P2P people, trying to get free music, but as soon as somebody else tries to play and change the rules a bit they cry like big babies.
> why can't Microsoft develop a nice GUI to go on top of Linux and just call it Windows
Because there is no technical reason to do it, and it would cost a huge amount of $$$?
Re:Where I have heard this before?
on
Kiln People
·
· Score: 1
Several years ago I had an idea for a story where you could download your mind into an electronic box that could be fitted onto another person, and would use their body in a sort of "puppet" mode. Then later you could upload your experiences again, just like in Kiln People. Things would get interesting when one of the puppet people (who are usually destitute and are doing this for the $$$) goes missing, and the original person has to track him down. Of course I never wrote the story but I was pleasantly surprised to see a similar idea in Kiln People. Good ideas can show up independently in different places so I don't think it's fair to say he lifted the idea from anywhere.
A similar story is "The Terminal Experiment", by Robert J. Sawyer. Somebody creates 3 AI versions of himself, and modifies 2 of them in ways that might alter their sanity, and then they all escape into "the net". I really liked that story.
I heard a radio interview with a petroleum engineer a while back who was claiming that in fact oil didn't come from biological matter, but rather from geological processes. Obviously this is not the mainstream view... Does anybody know if there's any credibility to this idea?
I have a Octane on my desk. Nice design with a curved top, so that you can't stack anything like an external drive on top of it. It wouldn't do for such a nice machine to look *functional*, God forbid... In fact I do have an external drive sitting on top of it and I am always afraid it will slide off...
If you go with some sort of card-key or other locking system, then there's the possibility that he would wait until one of the other kids opened the door, and just push past them and run out. He's bigger and stronger than the younger one, I assume. What that means is that you can't control him, you can only monitor him post-facto. You'd need some kind of house-arrest bracelet that he couldn't remove that would signal when he left the house. But would he get obsessed with it and try very hard to get it off, possibly hurting himself in the process? Maybe a very responsible watchdog is the right answer...
I remember looking at a magazine or something and seeing that it was 1970 (when I was 6). I can remember stuff from 3 or so but that's the first date that I can remember registering as such.
Obligatory nerdy answer: 8K RAM in my PET computer... That was a fun machine to hack on.
Instead of everybody saying "GHz doesn't matter, dummy" why doesn't somebody quote some real benchmarks? I poked around on the web a bit and all the benchmarks I can find either (1) are out of date, or (2) show Alpha, Intel and AMD blowing everybody else out of the water.
In my experience SGI's are slow but are extremely scalable. With IA32-based machines you'd be lucky to get 4 CPU's sharing memory, unlike the 64+ you get from SGI. Very good for scientific codes but not so hot for applications that are either not parallelizable at all, or embarassingly parallelizable such as Seti@Home or ray-tracing a feature film.
It's actually building the model (using some kind of CAD package like Pro/E or Catia) and then creating the computational grid. That may not use up the most CPU time but it definitely takes most of the human time. I don't know of any good free grid generators. (Disclaimer - I work for a grid generation company.)
Check out http://www.icemcfd.com/cfd/CFD_codes.html - I maintain a list of CFD codes (free and otherwise) that people send me. It's not really comprehensive but should provide some starting points.
There isn't that much out there that's free, though - in the engineering community the people who need to run simulations usually have plenty of money and pay for support, and the people who don't have money (i.e. universities) either get free copies from the commercial vendors or write their own codes (still an interesting project for a student, I guess)
If anybody has entries that should be on the CFD codes list but aren't, please send them to me. Thanks!
What's going to happen when people start using this service to block popup-blockers from their sites? Their hit count is going to go down by 30%, 50%, whatever. This has two effects: (1) fewer people see their stuff, which in general isn't what people with web sites want, and (2) the "click-through" that their advertisers see (or whatever you call it) won't change, because obviously people who block popups weren't going to follow the link in the first place. They won't make any more revenue and might make less because they have fewer viewers, and those viewers won't see the banner ads that they also probably have, which they might have clicked on even if they hate popups. This anti-leech service is going to be a flop.
I would say that AIX definitely does distinguish IBM from its competitors, just like showing up naked for a job interview would distinguish me from my competitors... What's their catchphrase? "It will vaguely remind you of UNIX?"
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow I have a feeling that this mountain house showed up in a D&D campaign somewhere and that's why you have it so well thought out...
Tcl does have a very short set of syntax rules. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the resulting syntax is really optimal. I think that these should be comments:
set abc 123 # set the value
set xyz {
item1 # this is the first one
item2
}
etc. They aren't because IMHO the syntax rules of Tcl are designed more for simplicity than for producing a language that works like other languages.
The error reports could probably be done in such a way that if you got the procedure from sourcing a file it would give you a line number but if it was redefined at run time that would work the same way as it does now. That's probably not a big deal.
My other historical gripe with Tcl is that unlike python it doesn't come with "batteries included". There are a lot of packages such as Expect, Incr Tcl, BLT, bwidgets, etc that should have been bundled with the core distributions early on. (Of course you would be able to build without them.) But in the past the Tcl group suffered from a bad case of not-invented-here syndrome and that made life tougher for users who had to download packages from different places, patch the core, etc etc. Also I wonder how long it took to reimplement the grid geometry manager when blt::table was already available and worked fine, but for some reason was never pulled into the core Tk.
Well, I don't want to rehash all the Tcl vs XXX discussions from the last 10 years...
Tcl is an okay language - I have been using it for more than 10 years in some big applications. But I've been using Python for about a year now and I feel that it's much better for real programming. The data structures are much richer - not everything is a string, it's faster, more readable, and makes good programming more natural.
John was a great software guy but he wasn't a language designer and (no offense) it kind of shows up in Tcl. The way comments work, and the fact that error messages don't tell you a line number from a source file, are both side effects of Tcl's hacky implemention.
The one huge advantage that Tcl has is Tk and even though other languages have Tk bindings they all seem awkward and second-class. But is that a strong enough advantage? I guess it depends on the application.
I agree that it's pointless to have a phone that can do scientific calculations, keep your calendar, etc. Those are PDA functions and not communications functions. A phone is a communication device. But pictures are a form of communication. I'm talking to somebody, and I say, "I'm standing here, looking at this huge, purple, ... wait, let me send you a picture", point, click, and send ... That's exactly what a phone is for! Sending data in real time to another person. Voice or pictures, same thing!
If it runs a unix-like OS you can run "wall" on the fly ...
Check out what SGI is doing with the Itanium - http://www.sgi.com/servers/altix/index.html - with 64 bits and a very fast communication backplane (which they have) you can run huge multi-threaded computations using shared memory. On a 32-bit machine you have to use message passing and that's harder and less natural for some of these applications.
I know, you're saying "that's a tiny segment of the market compared to PS2's". But wait 5 years and the cool new gaming machine will be doing the same thing. A flight simulator that does a high-resolution compressible flow CFD calculation in real time - I'm sure that will sell a few copies.
I used to play a lot and I had a girlfriend. She was a half-elf chaotic good mage ... And definitely not a virgin!
Why is it that every Windows release gets less tuned for computer people and more tuned for some mythical computer-phobe who feels better if there is a little dog wagging its tail while you search for things? They have to change everything around all the time (Network neighborhood -> Computers near me, etc) and come up with defaults that I don't like. I wish there was a way to tell stupid XP to use all the same terms and UI elements that Win2K used... On the other hand, linux was designed by and for hackers and is not so bad. I just wish somebody would put the right stuff in the right places in the Start menu and improve the current situation where there are too many menu items for stuff like system administration and none of them do what you want...
Can you say HDTV? If the Xbox can talk digital to an HDTV monitor, there you go ...
Good point. MS lets you run Linux on the Xbox, then Nasa goes out and buys a million of them to run simulations on (what would you call that, a Beodog cluster?) and how much does MS lose on the deal? Not a good move...
I saw some comments on earlier discussions about this that MS was just trying to work around a bug in an earlier version of Opera, and that there's no way in the world that they would intentionally break Opera's rendering. But the press release denies this. Why doesn't somebody at Microsoft who was involved with this feature come forward and explain the situation? If we don't hear from them, the only conclusion is that they are too embarrassed at being caught at this kind of cheap trick to show their faces.
It's as simple as that. If I find a wrapper on the ground that says "Big Mac", and I take a big bite out of what's in it, and it's dog poop, who do I have to blame? It's all a big game to the P2P people, trying to get free music, but as soon as somebody else tries to play and change the rules a bit they cry like big babies.
> why can't Microsoft develop a nice GUI to go on top of Linux and just call it Windows
Because there is no technical reason to do it, and it would cost a huge amount of $$$?
Several years ago I had an idea for a story where you could download your mind into an electronic box that could be fitted onto another person, and would use their body in a sort of "puppet" mode. Then later you could upload your experiences again, just like in Kiln People. Things would get interesting when one of the puppet people (who are usually destitute and are doing this for the $$$) goes missing, and the original person has to track him down. Of course I never wrote the story but I was pleasantly surprised to see a similar idea in Kiln People. Good ideas can show up independently in different places so I don't think it's fair to say he lifted the idea from anywhere.
A similar story is "The Terminal Experiment", by Robert J. Sawyer. Somebody creates 3 AI versions of himself, and modifies 2 of them in ways that might alter their sanity, and then they all escape into "the net". I really liked that story.
I heard a radio interview with a petroleum engineer a while back who was claiming that in fact oil didn't come from biological matter, but rather from geological processes. Obviously this is not the mainstream view... Does anybody know if there's any credibility to this idea?
I have a Octane on my desk. Nice design with a curved top, so that you can't stack anything like an external drive on top of it. It wouldn't do for such a nice machine to look *functional*, God forbid... In fact I do have an external drive sitting on top of it and I am always afraid it will slide off...
As far as I know, the CAD companies release on lots of platforms, and #1 is Windows these days. At least if you're thinking of Catia, ProE, UG, etc...
If you go with some sort of card-key or other locking system, then there's the possibility that he would wait until one of the other kids opened the door, and just push past them and run out. He's bigger and stronger than the younger one, I assume. What that means is that you can't control him, you can only monitor him post-facto. You'd need some kind of house-arrest bracelet that he couldn't remove that would signal when he left the house. But would he get obsessed with it and try very hard to get it off, possibly hurting himself in the process? Maybe a very responsible watchdog is the right answer...
That's about the worst suggestion I can imagine.
I remember looking at a magazine or something and seeing that it was 1970 (when I was 6). I can remember stuff from 3 or so but that's the first date that I can remember registering as such.
Obligatory nerdy answer: 8K RAM in my PET computer... That was a fun machine to hack on.
Instead of everybody saying "GHz doesn't matter, dummy" why doesn't somebody quote some real benchmarks? I poked around on the web a bit and all the benchmarks I can find either (1) are out of date, or (2) show Alpha, Intel and AMD blowing everybody else out of the water.
In my experience SGI's are slow but are extremely scalable. With IA32-based machines you'd be lucky to get 4 CPU's sharing memory, unlike the 64+ you get from SGI. Very good for scientific codes but not so hot for applications that are either not parallelizable at all, or embarassingly parallelizable such as Seti@Home or ray-tracing a feature film.
It's actually building the model (using some kind of CAD package like Pro/E or Catia) and then creating the computational grid. That may not use up the most CPU time but it definitely takes most of the human time. I don't know of any good free grid generators. (Disclaimer - I work for a grid generation company.)
Check out http://www.icemcfd.com/cfd/CFD_codes.html - I maintain a list of CFD codes (free and otherwise) that people send me. It's not really comprehensive but should provide some starting points.
There isn't that much out there that's free, though - in the engineering community the people who need to run simulations usually have plenty of money and pay for support, and the people who don't have money (i.e. universities) either get free copies from the commercial vendors or write their own codes (still an interesting project for a student, I guess)
If anybody has entries that should be on the CFD codes list but aren't, please send them to me. Thanks!
What's going to happen when people start using this service to block popup-blockers from their sites? Their hit count is going to go down by 30%, 50%, whatever. This has two effects: (1) fewer people see their stuff, which in general isn't what people with web sites want, and (2) the "click-through" that their advertisers see (or whatever you call it) won't change, because obviously people who block popups weren't going to follow the link in the first place. They won't make any more revenue and might make less because they have fewer viewers, and those viewers won't see the banner ads that they also probably have, which they might have clicked on even if they hate popups. This anti-leech service is going to be a flop.
I would say that AIX definitely does distinguish IBM from its competitors, just like showing up naked for a job interview would distinguish me from my competitors... What's their catchphrase? "It will vaguely remind you of UNIX?"