I am interested in language design and once did a fair amount of programming in Perl. So although I don't like it right now, I am interested in where it's going (and frankly, right now I'm having trouble figuring that out). Part of that interest is expressed as what I believe are valid criticisms (such as the parent) which I'd like Perl advocates to respond to. And some of it is an attempt to be funny -- I'm sorry if my attempts were so bad as to offend you, perhaps you should moderate them appropriately?
I am also in the process of praying for protection of those poor souls who post to let us know that they are considering learning Perl.
Restrict seems like a questionable attempt to graft bits of an effect system onto C's already tenuous type system. I'm not convinced that it's a great idea, but to tell you the truth, I haven't looked into it enough to be sure. Some people have, though.
But yeah, you're right: if it works it certainly is a significant development.
I've learned enough to know how difficult it would be to be fluent. Why do they teach Chinese children pinyin? Why do the Japanese use hiragana, katakana, and romaji if kanji is so superior?
I believe that once mastered, non-phonetic alphabets allow for faster and more accurate transfer of information.
Faster, I might give you, but given the redundancy, interoperability, and modularity in phonetic alphabets I think that accuracy is not on your side. Europe took over the world because of their language, not in spite of it.
To me there has always been a clear distinction to me between speakers that are constantly converting languages in their heads and speakers that are actually using the second language to think.
Unfortunately, the history of Psychology and AI has shown that introspection and observation teaches you jack-all about what's actually going on inside someone's head. Yes, languages that are fluent are implemented in a different part of the brain than for those that are conscious symbol-manipulation, but that doesn't tell you anything about what format is being used underneath. By analogy, I challenge you to demonstrate whether your computer uses ones-complement or twos-complement arithmetic without opening the case.
Again, you might want to give a little more information than "so and so said so."
There's this thing called Google, please try and learn how to use it. Vocabulary does not limit thought, ideas limit thought -- otherwise how can you think something when you have the word "on the tip of your tongue"?
I approve of your cultural-gap interpretation of Matsumoto's claim. And my local Wittgenstein guru did not sign off on that part of my argument.
What the hell are you talking about? Objects don't have functions, they have methods. And you don't execute methods (or functions, for that matter), you pass messages to the object. A saucepan is an object because it has a state. And just because you can't design a bean object, doesn't say jack all about any particular paradigm.
You think it's advanced that Perl handles function parameters like assembler? Funny, I prefer my languages with some of the advances discovered in type systems in, oh, the last 50 years. Perl doesn't turn to gibberish, it starts out that way.
(Yes, that's the smart-match operator from Perl 6.)
It's about time someone made it explicit: the reason that Perl 5 is not being retired is because Perl 6 is just something for the developers to do. It's going to be too essoteric to be useful for anything that LISP isn't used for already. So if you're actually working for a living, don't waste your time reading about Perl 6, go contribute to the Perl 5 codebase instead: it's too important to be abandoned while the lead developers go jerk off.
As far as I can tell from what I've read, Perl 6 is an attempt to make the world's most unreadable language. The purpose of the "mutability" is to allow programmers to change the language on the fly, right? So when you sit down to read a piece of Perl 6 code, first you'll have to figure out what changes were made to the language. It'll be just like LISP macros, except instead of having brackets all over the place you'll have every punctuation symbol in Unicode.
Sharks and some other life forms haven't evolved* much in the last little while (although I assume with the presence of humans as predators, they are now). This is because they fit their niche perfectly. Most of the languages you mention, either do not fit their niche perfectly (as in the case of C++), have a rapidly changing niche (PHP), or don't really have a niche at all (Python). C, on the other hand, is nearly perfect for its purposes.
If you look at a list of the C99 features, they are either minor syntactic sugar (I know '//' comments will change my life) or issues with the standard library or preprocessor (both of which are far from perfect). Now contrast that with C++0x. The C language itself, as a form of portable assembler, cannot be significantly approved upon. Someday, maybe the rest of those languages will achieve such greatness, but I doubt it.
* By "evolved" I mean "experienced genus-wide change due to natural selection".
I grew up in BC, so I have no problem with Engrish. Instead I'd like to take a moment to flame his content:
"Japanese has so many characters...great invention" - There is significant evidence suggesting that phonetic alphabets (such as Hiragana) are easier to learn and extend.
"Every conversation is...stored in my brain in Japanese" - I could go into what Wittgenstein would say about that, but instead I'll just assert that conversations are not stored in plain-text, they're compressed. That's why you remember the gist long after the specific phrasing is gone.
"Language influence[s] human thought" - The Strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has been largely discredited.
"If you are a machine...you can talk to [machines] directly" - No, you need an interchange format. I assert that programming languages are a low-bandwidth method for communicating between brain-machines and computer-machines.
It's actually a pretty good talk. Of particular amusement is his explanation (on slide 55) of why Ruby prefixes global identifiers with dollar signs.
Hey man, do your part. Get out there and create instability in the global workplace!
You don't necessarily even need to leave your house. For example, you could hack military computers in India and leave a Pakistani calling card and visa versa. Or set up a website for Chinese dissidents. Hell, the last one seems so altruistic even your Mom would be proud.
Where am I supposed to find a 26 min movie made in Denmark in 1992? Can't just go down to the local Blockbuster, now can I? If you have a copy, could you please rip it and link to a.torrent in your next troll?
And are Canadians allowed to join the GNAA?
Ask Yourself: "Is It Good for the Company?"
on
How to Become a PHB?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
So basically: network within your org, and start thinking like a manager long before you need to. Figure out what kind of manager you're going to be in advance. Chose a place where you can enjoy doing all of that. And make sure you really want it.:)
Thanks, that's exactly the kind of advice I was hoping for!
In all seriousness: would management experience be easier to get overseas? I'm pretty unencumbered by responsibilities right now, and if travelling will increase my employability in North America in the future, I'm all for it.
Certainly there are some circumstances where it's easier to get team lead sooner rather than later. For example, I'm pretty sure I should avoid government or any other union jobs that make seniority a big deal. Do you have any advice for scoping out a company's heirarchical flexibility in advance?
And as for the MBA, is it possible to get it too soon? A lot of MBA programs require 5 years out of undergrad, and I suspect its for our own protection.
Most top management I know started in a small company or division that got very large. Being one of the first people there let the pyramid structure of management fill in beneath them.
Thanks, that's exactly the kind of concrete suggestions I was hoping to hear! Might be hard to apply right now, but at least it gives me an idea of what to look for.
I'm not sure I can handle the risk, but I figure it's best to try while I'm young and dependent-free. But all my CS friends who recently graduated are having a hell of a time finding entry-level programmer positions, so I got to wondering whether there's another path...
I can't even figure out how to put myself at risk.:)
I certainly started out in CS for passionate reasons, and took as theoretical material as possible in school while learning administration and programming in my spare time and summer jobs. Now I'm sitting here half-way through a Master's degree that isn't going that well wondering what I'm supposed to do with the rest of my life. Some of my friends have told me that I'm too well-adjusted to be a professor or a code monkey, and management seems like the next best thing. >:)
This is somewhat off-topic, but as someone who knows a fair bit about both T&T and Canada, what would you think of annexation? As you likely know, there have been a number of proposals over the years for British parts of the Caribbean to join the Dominion of Canada. These ideas have started to regain some momentum in the last few months.
The arrangement could be anywhere from protectorate status (as they have now with the UK, I understand) to provinces with special cultural protections like Quebec. Do you think this would be good for T&T? For Canada? Would people be open to the idea? Are there significant barriers?
lamontg, Foo Goo, and anybody else with an opinion:
What advice do you have for someone in the middle of a Master's in CS for getting into IT management? Work your way up through the ranks while there's still time? Is an MBA worth the cost? Or do all I need from here is a bit of networking?
The question is whether upper-level management makes up at least, say, 10% of the heirarchy? If so, then everything's gonna be alright. The First World will be composed of the managers, "professionals", scientists, and intellectuals plus the people who need to be geographically close to serve them (hairdressers, etc.). The Second World will be composed of mid-level managers, knowledge-workers, etc. And the Third World will be those extracting the raw materials the global economy exists to transform.
CEO salaries are raising so fast because the world is getting ready for this: we of the First World need to be doing important enough work to support approximately 10 subordinates or enough money to pay 10 servants.
Currently Windows.Forms* is supposedly 56% done, and yet it is completely usuable to everyone but the developers. Why? Because to use it you must install a two-month old version of Wine, patch it with an obscure third-party patch, and then get the configuration just right.
As someone who's interested in doing some.Net development on Linux, this kludge is completely unacceptable. The Mono team made a grave mistake by tying the success of their project to the notoriously unreliable and difficult to configure Wine libraries. If they had have done the GTK interface layer first, then Mono would already be useful for something more than Miguel's monkey spanking.
* The reason Windows.Forms is so important is that there are already plenty of ways to make trivial console apps cross-platform. In order for Linux to tap into the Windows app market, we need the GUI, godamnit!
That's because all the games on consoles are mindless drivel that requires about as many braincells as watching sports.
Unfortunately, playing more complex games currently requires significant computer skills as well as a level of interest sufficient to validate continual hardware spending. We won't see true casual gamers until consoles finally catch up to PC games in terms of complexity. I was a somewhat serious gamer for much of my time as an undergrad but since then I've lapsed because I'm no longer willing to blow money on largely useless hardware. I'd like to be a casual gamer, but I won't until I can play something like CounterStrike online, with a mouse and keyboard, for four years on a $300 console.
I assume the gaming industry doesn't give a fuck about people like me because they're too busy cat-fighting and circle-jerking but I suspect when one of them clues in casual gamers will be a major industry.
You hit the nail on the head: only serious players will get educational benefits from games, video or otherwise.
I developed language skills from reading source books and writing up my own RPG quests, but I know lots of players who were just looking for something to do. I learned probability and resource management from collectable trading-cards, but I know lots of players who played medicore without worrying about that (or even bought their way to the top). When I play RTS I worry about tactics and troop manuvers, but I know lots of players who just concentrate on building a couple big monsters and hope they catch their opponents defenses at a weak spot. When I play FPS I do a lot of the things you mention, but when my girlfriend plays against low-difficulty bots she runs randomly through the map, twitching a response to enemies or goodies as they appear on the screen.
Masting many games requires developing skills that have positive educational side-effects, but just playing them casually doesn't.
Slashdot Mirror
I am interested in language design and once did a fair amount of programming in Perl. So although I don't like it right now, I am interested in where it's going (and frankly, right now I'm having trouble figuring that out). Part of that interest is expressed as what I believe are valid criticisms (such as the parent) which I'd like Perl advocates to respond to. And some of it is an attempt to be funny -- I'm sorry if my attempts were so bad as to offend you, perhaps you should moderate them appropriately?
I am also in the process of praying for protection of those poor souls who post to let us know that they are considering learning Perl.
Restrict seems like a questionable attempt to graft bits of an effect system onto C's already tenuous type system. I'm not convinced that it's a great idea, but to tell you the truth, I haven't looked into it enough to be sure. Some people have, though.
But yeah, you're right: if it works it certainly is a significant development.
Have you learned a non-phonetic alphabet before?
I've learned enough to know how difficult it would be to be fluent. Why do they teach Chinese children pinyin? Why do the Japanese use hiragana, katakana, and romaji if kanji is so superior?
I believe that once mastered, non-phonetic alphabets allow for faster and more accurate transfer of information.
Faster, I might give you, but given the redundancy, interoperability, and modularity in phonetic alphabets I think that accuracy is not on your side. Europe took over the world because of their language, not in spite of it.
To me there has always been a clear distinction to me between speakers that are constantly converting languages in their heads and speakers that are actually using the second language to think.
Unfortunately, the history of Psychology and AI has shown that introspection and observation teaches you jack-all about what's actually going on inside someone's head. Yes, languages that are fluent are implemented in a different part of the brain than for those that are conscious symbol-manipulation, but that doesn't tell you anything about what format is being used underneath. By analogy, I challenge you to demonstrate whether your computer uses ones-complement or twos-complement arithmetic without opening the case.
Again, you might want to give a little more information than "so and so said so."
There's this thing called Google, please try and learn how to use it. Vocabulary does not limit thought, ideas limit thought -- otherwise how can you think something when you have the word "on the tip of your tongue"?
I approve of your cultural-gap interpretation of Matsumoto's claim. And my local Wittgenstein guru did not sign off on that part of my argument.
What the hell are you talking about? Objects don't have functions, they have methods. And you don't execute methods (or functions, for that matter), you pass messages to the object. A saucepan is an object because it has a state. And just because you can't design a bean object, doesn't say jack all about any particular paradigm.
You think it's advanced that Perl handles function parameters like assembler? Funny, I prefer my languages with some of the advances discovered in type systems in, oh, the last 50 years. Perl doesn't turn to gibberish, it starts out that way.
(Yes, that's the smart-match operator from Perl 6.)
It's about time someone made it explicit: the reason that Perl 5 is not being retired is because Perl 6 is just something for the developers to do. It's going to be too essoteric to be useful for anything that LISP isn't used for already. So if you're actually working for a living, don't waste your time reading about Perl 6, go contribute to the Perl 5 codebase instead: it's too important to be abandoned while the lead developers go jerk off.
As far as I can tell from what I've read, Perl 6 is an attempt to make the world's most unreadable language. The purpose of the "mutability" is to allow programmers to change the language on the fly, right? So when you sit down to read a piece of Perl 6 code, first you'll have to figure out what changes were made to the language. It'll be just like LISP macros, except instead of having brackets all over the place you'll have every punctuation symbol in Unicode.
Sharks and some other life forms haven't evolved* much in the last little while (although I assume with the presence of humans as predators, they are now). This is because they fit their niche perfectly. Most of the languages you mention, either do not fit their niche perfectly (as in the case of C++), have a rapidly changing niche (PHP), or don't really have a niche at all (Python). C, on the other hand, is nearly perfect for its purposes.
If you look at a list of the C99 features, they are either minor syntactic sugar (I know '//' comments will change my life) or issues with the standard library or preprocessor (both of which are far from perfect). Now contrast that with C++0x. The C language itself, as a form of portable assembler, cannot be significantly approved upon. Someday, maybe the rest of those languages will achieve such greatness, but I doubt it.
* By "evolved" I mean "experienced genus-wide change due to natural selection".
I grew up in BC, so I have no problem with Engrish. Instead I'd like to take a moment to flame his content:
It's actually a pretty good talk. Of particular amusement is his explanation (on slide 55) of why Ruby prefixes global identifiers with dollar signs.
Hey man, do your part. Get out there and create instability in the global workplace!
You don't necessarily even need to leave your house. For example, you could hack military computers in India and leave a Pakistani calling card and visa versa. Or set up a website for Chinese dissidents. Hell, the last one seems so altruistic even your Mom would be proud.
Where am I supposed to find a 26 min movie made in Denmark in 1992? Can't just go down to the local Blockbuster, now can I? If you have a copy, could you please rip it and link to a .torrent in your next troll?
And are Canadians allowed to join the GNAA?
So basically: network within your org, and start thinking like a manager long before you need to. Figure out what kind of manager you're going to be in advance. Chose a place where you can enjoy doing all of that. And make sure you really want it. :)
Thanks, that's exactly the kind of advice I was hoping for!
In all seriousness: would management experience be easier to get overseas? I'm pretty unencumbered by responsibilities right now, and if travelling will increase my employability in North America in the future, I'm all for it.
Certainly there are some circumstances where it's easier to get team lead sooner rather than later. For example, I'm pretty sure I should avoid government or any other union jobs that make seniority a big deal. Do you have any advice for scoping out a company's heirarchical flexibility in advance? And as for the MBA, is it possible to get it too soon? A lot of MBA programs require 5 years out of undergrad, and I suspect its for our own protection.
Actually I'm genetically predisposed to have prematurely white hair, so I'm desperately hoping it'll turn silver.
Most top management I know started in a small company or division that got very large. Being one of the first people there let the pyramid structure of management fill in beneath them.
Thanks, that's exactly the kind of concrete suggestions I was hoping to hear! Might be hard to apply right now, but at least it gives me an idea of what to look for.
I'm not sure I can handle the risk, but I figure it's best to try while I'm young and dependent-free. But all my CS friends who recently graduated are having a hell of a time finding entry-level programmer positions, so I got to wondering whether there's another path...
:)
I can't even figure out how to put myself at risk.
I certainly started out in CS for passionate reasons, and took as theoretical material as possible in school while learning administration and programming in my spare time and summer jobs. Now I'm sitting here half-way through a Master's degree that isn't going that well wondering what I'm supposed to do with the rest of my life. Some of my friends have told me that I'm too well-adjusted to be a professor or a code monkey, and management seems like the next best thing. >:)
So will we eventually all switch back to the vertical, paper-sized monitors like they had on the Apple Lisa?
If you rotate the list of emails and the preview pane so that they are on top of each other, how is that significantly different from how it is now?
Now (IIRC):
+---------+
|.toolbar.|
+-+-------+
|f|.folder|
|o|.cont-.|
|l|.ents..|
|d+-------+
|e|.item..|
|r|.pre-..|
|s|.view..|
+-+-------+
Outlook 2003:
+---------+
|.toolbar.|
+-+--+----+
|f|fc|....|
|o|oo|....|
|l|ln|item|
|d|dt|pre-|
|e|ee|view|
|r|rn|....|
|s|.t|....|
+-+-------+
(Isn't my ASCII art beautiful?)
This is somewhat off-topic, but as someone who knows a fair bit about both T&T and Canada, what would you think of annexation? As you likely know, there have been a number of proposals over the years for British parts of the Caribbean to join the Dominion of Canada. These ideas have started to regain some momentum in the last few months.
The arrangement could be anywhere from
protectorate status (as they have now with the UK, I understand) to provinces with special cultural protections like Quebec. Do you think this would be good for T&T? For Canada? Would people be open to the idea? Are there significant barriers?
lamontg, Foo Goo, and anybody else with an opinion:
What advice do you have for someone in the middle of a Master's in CS for getting into IT management? Work your way up through the ranks while there's still time? Is an MBA worth the cost? Or do all I need from here is a bit of networking?
The question is whether upper-level management makes up at least, say, 10% of the heirarchy? If so, then everything's gonna be alright. The First World will be composed of the managers, "professionals", scientists, and intellectuals plus the people who need to be geographically close to serve them (hairdressers, etc.). The Second World will be composed of mid-level managers, knowledge-workers, etc. And the Third World will be those extracting the raw materials the global economy exists to transform.
CEO salaries are raising so fast because the world is getting ready for this: we of the First World need to be doing important enough work to support approximately 10 subordinates or enough money to pay 10 servants.
Currently Windows.Forms* is supposedly 56% done, and yet it is completely usuable to everyone but the developers. Why? Because to use it you must install a two-month old version of Wine, patch it with an obscure third-party patch, and then get the configuration just right.
As someone who's interested in doing some .Net development on Linux, this kludge is completely unacceptable. The Mono team made a grave mistake by tying the success of their project to the notoriously unreliable and difficult to configure Wine libraries. If they had have done the GTK interface layer first, then Mono would already be useful for something more than Miguel's monkey spanking.
* The reason Windows.Forms is so important is that there are already plenty of ways to make trivial console apps cross-platform. In order for Linux to tap into the Windows app market, we need the GUI, godamnit!
That's because all the games on consoles are mindless drivel that requires about as many braincells as watching sports.
Unfortunately, playing more complex games currently requires significant computer skills as well as a level of interest sufficient to validate continual hardware spending. We won't see true casual gamers until consoles finally catch up to PC games in terms of complexity. I was a somewhat serious gamer for much of my time as an undergrad but since then I've lapsed because I'm no longer willing to blow money on largely useless hardware. I'd like to be a casual gamer, but I won't until I can play something like CounterStrike online, with a mouse and keyboard, for four years on a $300 console.
I assume the gaming industry doesn't give a fuck about people like me because they're too busy cat-fighting and circle-jerking but I suspect when one of them clues in casual gamers will be a major industry.
You hit the nail on the head: only serious players will get educational benefits from games, video or otherwise.
I developed language skills from reading source books and writing up my own RPG quests, but I know lots of players who were just looking for something to do. I learned probability and resource management from collectable trading-cards, but I know lots of players who played medicore without worrying about that (or even bought their way to the top). When I play RTS I worry about tactics and troop manuvers, but I know lots of players who just concentrate on building a couple big monsters and hope they catch their opponents defenses at a weak spot. When I play FPS I do a lot of the things you mention, but when my girlfriend plays against low-difficulty bots she runs randomly through the map, twitching a response to enemies or goodies as they appear on the screen.
Masting many games requires developing skills that have positive educational side-effects, but just playing them casually doesn't.