The rise of collaboration over the internet has made it harder to find recruits? Am I missing something, or are these guys somehow opposed to working over the internet? Would seem funny, considering the contributions those 10-yr grad students of yore made to the project in the first place.
Well if you look around, it seems that we will glorify just about anything. Actors are adored for being fake, and the real people whom the actors often portray are peripheral. Rock musicians who suck are praised for their talents when in fact they have none, they just look good in the video. So why should we exclude criminals from our list of golden idols? I tell you, the only thing you can do is move to the ozarks and form a militia, occasionally coming down from the firing range in the hills to vote republican and maybe recruit some teenage nazis.
The problem with Java is that by sticking with
C and C++ concepts in order to cater to the bulk of the programming community, it basically took on the same clunkiness of the syntax and semantics of those languages. Don't get me wrong, I am a C lover to the max (C++ is okay i suppose), but if Java really wanted to be immortal it would have readily supported variatic functions, closures, macros, and a uniformity of syntax similar to a language like, say, LISP. I believe in object oriented programming, but it is important to note that this is one of many styles of program writing, and is not necessarily suited to all applications. By including the above features, Java could have been a bit more flexible for the developer, though less user friendly perhaps. After all, control is what makes programming fun, and most Linux users like to have control. That's why they like linux. Java takes away some control, both by being more high level than C, and by enforcing one style of programming.
I agree with the positive outlook on this. There are too many programs these days that are sooo frickin huge that all quality is just lost. Take IBM's WebSmear for example. It's footprint is, well, however much memory you have!! What the hell kind of design principle is that? I work at a very old government contractor and the higher-ups here can very easily be mislead by clever marketing by Big Blue et. al. But it is important to have reliable software when you are developing for the DoD, and not all of the stuff cranked out by these large companies is good, to say the least! Hence I think that all of us in the development business should take a two hour break every year and read Mike Gancarz's book, the UNIX Philosophy. It's not about UNIX, it's about good software engineering.
Reusable? Oh, Microsoft's code is reusable alright. In fact, you don't have a choice. The beauty of the UNIX design lies in its modularity. The fact that you can unplug compontents and plug in others. This is what is known as flexibility through modularity, as we all know. Microsoft has included the code for its GUI in the kernel. That is bad design- now you don't have a choice about your GUI, unless you want to muck with the kernel. And another thing.. just because Microsoft Operating Systems have had fancy graphical interfaces doesn't say a damn thing about their functionality. Where are our priorities?
Well said, but you are wrong. There are plenty of people who get paid to produce open source software. Ever hear of Red Hat? Also, universities with research funding. And government contractors such as the one I work for. Please don't fall into the trap of believing that open source software is always free. You can sell it, you just have to include the source. Closed source software is like buying a car with the hood welded shut. I don't care if you don't know anything about engines, you can still pop the hood and verify that there are indeed four cylinders. You don't have to take it on faith.
Instead of trading stocks over the web, do it over the phone. Instead of booking flights with an operator, book them with a computer, over the phone. Buy lottery tickets over the phone, and get a phone call announcing the results of the lottery. The telephone is where this technology will be useful.
Well, I see a lot of people talking about VUIs being good for people with disabilities, etc. This however is NOT the breadth of the voice interface application possibilities. The fact is, there are approximately 1000 times as many phones in this world as there are personal computers. THAT is where the speech recognition comes in. If you have not, go to tellmeor to Carnegie Mellon's site and try out the applications there. The potential is incredible when you think about it. Nuance software is capable, for instance, of voice verification with less than 2% false accept rates, and.02% false reject. That is adjustable, and these numbers only represent the accept/reject rates where in the actual caller is unauthorized or authorized respectively.
My experience with LISP and it's MIT dialect, Scheme, where at the University, where I would imagine 95% of all other programmers have their initial and perhaps only encounter the languages, unfortunate as that may be. I was very impressed with the flexibility that LISP gives the programmer in terms of angles at which to attack a given problem. Whereas with procedural or imperative languages one might be a bit corralled by the semantics and structure of the language, LISP can mimic any language paradigm, and so allows the programmer to use the thought process best suited to the task. Paul Graham gives an implementation of an object oriented language in LISP in his handbook, ANSI Common LISP, to illustrate this point. I work now for federally funded company whose primary interests, one would think, are not in the commercial viability of their tools but in their effectiveness. However it seems that we end up using a lot of commercial off the shelf products simply because of the hype that inevitably precedes them in this day and age. I am fully convinced that everybody here would be programming happily in LISP if it were the case that LISP was marketed by SUN as unflaggingly as Java has been over the past few years. I think this is true despite the fact that Java was tailored to the programmer's familiarity with C, because LISP syntax is SO easy to learn. Sometimes I wish LISP were picked up by some huge company. A company with the resources to fill those massive bookshelves at your local megastore with vapid texts touting the grandeur of their new LISP virtual machine. Then the fun of programming could really begin!
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The rise of collaboration over the internet has made it harder to find recruits? Am I missing something, or are these guys somehow opposed to working over the internet? Would seem funny, considering the contributions those 10-yr grad students of yore made to the project in the first place.
Well if you look around, it seems that we will glorify just about anything. Actors are adored for being fake, and the real people whom the actors often portray are peripheral. Rock musicians who suck are praised for their talents when in fact they have none, they just look good in the video. So why should we exclude criminals from our list of golden idols? I tell you, the only thing you can do is move to the ozarks and form a militia, occasionally coming down from the firing range in the hills to vote republican and maybe recruit some teenage nazis.
The problem with Java is that by sticking with C and C++ concepts in order to cater to the bulk of the programming community, it basically took on the same clunkiness of the syntax and semantics of those languages. Don't get me wrong, I am a C lover to the max (C++ is okay i suppose), but if Java really wanted to be immortal it would have readily supported variatic functions, closures, macros, and a uniformity of syntax similar to a language like, say, LISP. I believe in object oriented programming, but it is important to note that this is one of many styles of program writing, and is not necessarily suited to all applications. By including the above features, Java could have been a bit more flexible for the developer, though less user friendly perhaps. After all, control is what makes programming fun, and most Linux users like to have control. That's why they like linux. Java takes away some control, both by being more high level than C, and by enforcing one style of programming.
I agree with the positive outlook on this. There are too many programs these days that are sooo frickin huge that all quality is just lost. Take IBM's WebSmear for example. It's footprint is, well, however much memory you have!! What the hell kind of design principle is that? I work at a very old government contractor and the higher-ups here can very easily be mislead by clever marketing by Big Blue et. al. But it is important to have reliable software when you are developing for the DoD, and not all of the stuff cranked out by these large companies is good, to say the least! Hence I think that all of us in the development business should take a two hour break every year and read Mike Gancarz's book, the UNIX Philosophy. It's not about UNIX, it's about good software engineering.
Reusable? Oh, Microsoft's code is reusable alright. In fact, you don't have a choice. The beauty of the UNIX design lies in its modularity. The fact that you can unplug compontents and plug in others. This is what is known as flexibility through modularity, as we all know. Microsoft has included the code for its GUI in the kernel. That is bad design- now you don't have a choice about your GUI, unless you want to muck with the kernel. And another thing.. just because Microsoft Operating Systems have had fancy graphical interfaces doesn't say a damn thing about their functionality. Where are our priorities?
Well said, but you are wrong. There are plenty of people who get paid to produce open source software. Ever hear of Red Hat? Also, universities with research funding. And government contractors such as the one I work for. Please don't fall into the trap of believing that open source software is always free. You can sell it, you just have to include the source. Closed source software is like buying a car with the hood welded shut. I don't care if you don't know anything about engines, you can still pop the hood and verify that there are indeed four cylinders. You don't have to take it on faith.
Instead of trading stocks over the web, do it over the phone. Instead of booking flights with an operator, book them with a computer, over the phone. Buy lottery tickets over the phone, and get a phone call announcing the results of the lottery. The telephone is where this technology will be useful.
Well, I see a lot of people talking about VUIs being good for people with disabilities, etc. This however is NOT the breadth of the voice interface application possibilities. The fact is, there are approximately 1000 times as many phones in this world as there are personal computers. THAT is where the speech recognition comes in. If you have not, go to tellmeor to Carnegie Mellon's site and try out the applications there. The potential is incredible when you think about it. Nuance software is capable, for instance, of voice verification with less than 2% false accept rates, and .02% false reject. That is adjustable, and these numbers only represent the accept/reject rates where in the actual caller is unauthorized or authorized respectively.
My experience with LISP and it's MIT dialect, Scheme, where at the University, where I would imagine 95% of all other programmers have their initial and perhaps only encounter the languages, unfortunate as that may be. I was very impressed with the flexibility that LISP gives the programmer in terms of angles at which to attack a given problem. Whereas with procedural or imperative languages one might be a bit corralled by the semantics and structure of the language, LISP can mimic any language paradigm, and so allows the programmer to use the thought process best suited to the task. Paul Graham gives an implementation of an object oriented language in LISP in his handbook, ANSI Common LISP, to illustrate this point. I work now for federally funded company whose primary interests, one would think, are not in the commercial viability of their tools but in their effectiveness. However it seems that we end up using a lot of commercial off the shelf products simply because of the hype that inevitably precedes them in this day and age. I am fully convinced that everybody here would be programming happily in LISP if it were the case that LISP was marketed by SUN as unflaggingly as Java has been over the past few years. I think this is true despite the fact that Java was tailored to the programmer's familiarity with C, because LISP syntax is SO easy to learn. Sometimes I wish LISP were picked up by some huge company. A company with the resources to fill those massive bookshelves at your local megastore with vapid texts touting the grandeur of their new LISP virtual machine. Then the fun of programming could really begin!