No, it's not about translations (Source: I'm a NetHack fork developer who's somewhat involved in this DevTeam revival thing).
Translations of games like NetHack are inherently hard. You can't use the standard approaches as the program assembles the sentences out of several parts and usually, e.g. with gettext, you translate whole sentences. But here, we have dynamic sentences where this approach can't work.
For my German translation NetHack-De, I used internally latin-1 (so I could continue to use the char* strings) and for the output transformed the text into ASCII, latin-1, or utf-8 (depending on configuration).
First off, UTF-32 is least likely to cause bugs, since all chars are the same length and thus possible to determine memory usage simply by multiplying char count by 4.
The memory usage of UTF-8 is also at most char count multiplied by 4. The 5- and 6-byte sequences were declared invalid when Unicode was restricted to have no character above U+10FFFF.
Please, don't use the Wikia NetHack Wiki. It is outdated, ad-ridden, and has been abandoned by the community, but Wikia doesn't allow a wiki to be deleted.
I'm not asking for a flame war as much as trying to shame the dev team out of hiding!
Others have tried and failed (e.g. SporkHack was partly forked from Vanilla for this effect and this year several fork developer posted an April Fools' joke on RGRN about considering their fork the successor to NetHack and changing its name to "NetHack").
No reaction by the DevTeam. It's highly unlikely that the DevTeam will ever release another version (the development has already slowed down before 3.4.3), so you are stuck with the old version or forks or other roguelikes.
Vanilla NetHack hasn't had a release since 2003 but there have been several forks of it, one I did myself (look at my sig).
Considering the "far better roguelikes" that's something just asking for a flame war but I guess he thinks about ToME4 or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
ToME4's root go back a long time, originally an Angband variant but the 4th version separated completely from that heritage and created vast amounts of original content that makes Skyrim look like a coffee-break activity.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is sort of an Anti-NetHack, trying to avoid many of the design mistake NetHack had. Like the needs for spoilers, that different races play the same in the long run, grinding, or that the game doesn't stay challenging after a certain point.
DCSS and ToME4 are big games but in the last years there has been a trend to develop smaller roguelikes. Like DoomRL which is exactly what its title says or roguelikes for mobile devices like 100Rogues and POWDER.
I don't have high hopes that Braben can repeat the success of Elite. He's been talking about it for years, with small hints here and there but nothing has come from it.
So I'm mildly anxious that this time it will be for real.
But OTOH I don't expect it to be a big succes. In the best case it will be something along the lines of the recent XCOM remake and I would be quite content with such a game.
What you are saying, then, is that beginners should use a language that supports a REPL? Great! Now if we would just stop teaching Java to CS101 students...
REPL can be simulated on any language. I hope you're teaching your CS101 students more than just things that make sense in a REPL.
I don't think our philosophies differ that much. You didn't you would code and then immediately jump into debugger. You said "as soon as I feel like I understand what the code is supposed" so you already have thought about the code.
I've seen programmers trying to debug code by randomly and unsystematically putting breakpoints, hoping to getting a clue what the code does wrong, without even trying to think first. Shotgun debugging at its worst. If they don't have a clear model in their mind of what the code is supposed to do how can they deduce valid conclusions that can be proven or disproven?
Also: Memory protection leads to sloppy programmers. Bad habits should be punished.
Because of this sentence I'm not sure if your whole post is ironic or not. I'll treat it as non ironic.
Part of the learning process is not only in solving the exact thing you want to do. When you do the research needed to solve your problem you tend to get a lot of information that isn't related to the problem at hand but helps you understand the language and how to avoid related problems.
Yes, you tend to get a lot of information that is not related to the problem you're having but if you are a beginner but that doesn't mean that you also understand that information and keep it in mind for later reference. Because you just don't know the language and its problems yet!
If you're starting out in a new language (even if you already know programming in other languages) it is certainly not always obvious what code leads to unmaintainable code. Learning a language is always exploring unknown territory and exploring is much easier if you can do it in small steps and for that instant feedback is way better. You will always be using some sort of reference and tutorial for exploring it and if those tutorials recommend bad languages features or habits (and let's be honest, every language has these) then it's the fault of that learning material.
That may be, but tools made "for beginners" are bad tools. Not what you want when you're no longer a beginner. Then you want the beginner-stuff out of your way, so it doesn't waste your time.
I didn't say Eclipse is made "for beginners". IMO Eclipse works well enough OOTB even for advanced programmers, it stays out of your way most of the time.
But yes, if you want to become a really good programmer, you should expand your view beyond one single IDE. At least switching between Eclipse and Vim.:-)
No, it's always been one. Certainly for Emacs Lisp, with additional code (that is included nowadays) also for other programming languages. Surprisingly even Wikipedia agrees with that.
Syntax highlighting and parens matching doesn't really help the beginners. Instant feedback for programming errors is great, you immediately learn about the syntax on the go. Then the debugger is also a great tool (even though I think you should first think, then code, then think again and only as a last resort start the debugger).
These are not Eclipse-unique features, you can get such features with many setups but an easy to install IDE that satisfies your needs and is easily extendable with plugins that integrate seamlessly with your IDE (for example Findbugs).
It's almost like Emacs done right for Java. Well, as right as an IDE can be done.
I don't buy the argument that 1 class means 1 file is a problem (btw, this only applies to public classes anyway). If your project is large enough, you still get navigational problems even if you'd crammed 10000 lines into files (please, don't do this).
Yeah, so I just won't BUY ANY BOOKS. That will tell them "I don't read books", since that's all the signal they'll get out of me NOT BUYING ANY BOOKS.
You are suggesting that there are no DRM-free commercial ebooks available. That's just not true.
You get lots of commercial books from a lot of publishers. For example Tor, Baen, and Fictionwise. You might be out of luck if you want to read 50 shades of grey or twilight books. But hey, at least Harry Potter is DRM-free now.
Or just buy them, rip off the DRM with a simple script, and send them a letter saying "please stop using DRM, it's ineffective".
You think common sense and reasoning is the right strategy with people who just don't get it?
Either don't buy their books or buy the cheap paper book and tell them that they could have made more money from you if they'd cut out the middle man if you would have bought the ebook directly from them.
"Money" is the only argument that they'll understand.
I'm jailbreaking my Paperwhite so I can read ePubs!
And what program are you using for that?
I started the HackedUpReader project (based on the Coolreader code) for reading epubs on the Kindle Touch.
We know now the Kindle Paperwhite is quite similar to the Kindle Touch (also shown by the internal firmware version 5.1.2 for the Touch and 5.2.0 for the PW) and the latest release of HackedUpReader has possible support for the PW but I don't have heard any report so far.
The hacker spirit is not for "utility" but for "hacking".:-)
Having said that IMO there is utility in a jailbreak of Kindle devices even if you "only" want to use it for reading. Without a jailbreak you can't directly read specifc formats (e.g. epubs or some comic and manga formats).
You still need to get rid of either Adobe's or Amazon's DRM, the Jailbreak and software you'll later install will only display free eBooks in the other format.
Just say no to DRM. Buying DRM-"protected" ebooks sends the wrong message to publishers.
Or just convert ePubs in a minute or so using Calibre
But it's much easier to just copy your epubs onto the device than having everything going through Calibre.
Of course it depends on how you manage your ebooks but any conversion can go wrong and Amazon's reader software on the hardware Kindles is quite limited anyway (no kerning and no hyphenation)
I'm also quite sceptical about Calibre's code. But its UI is ugly and considering some security issues in the past by its main programmer I'm constantly surprised that it works fine most of the time.
But in all honestly, the world will go without all the crap I'm collecting. It'll go on without Hollywood, Bollywood, Elvis and Beatles and anything else that's fiction if it has to.
Yes, the world will go on and human development will go on if it has to. It did go on when the Roman empire collapsed (not more than 10% of the classical literature has survived) or when nearly all of the Mayan written was deliberately destroyed.
Of course, Sturgeon's law applies here, too. I don't care if generations to come won't be able to read Dan Brown but if they don't even have the possibility to enjoy Shakespeare or Kafka, this would be a loss to them. A loss they might not even know about.
Be assured that I know quite well that my statement was rather generalizing, that there are even more reasons to dislike Flash than only that it is non-free software and that not everybody using"GNU/Linux" is a RMS fanboy.
Still, I think it is much more likely that somebody who explicitly put a "GNU/" in front of "Linux" when TFA only refers to "Linux" is an passionate free software advocate and then it's rather unusual to be running flash at all. Especially considering that nowadays there is almost no need for running flash anymore.
BTW, linking to a complete book instead of a paragraph or at least a chapter within it would make it much more probable that somebody would get the info you've been trying to convey.
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No, it's not about translations (Source: I'm a NetHack fork developer who's somewhat involved in this DevTeam revival thing).
Translations of games like NetHack are inherently hard. You can't use the standard approaches as the program assembles the sentences out of several parts and usually, e.g. with gettext, you translate whole sentences. But here, we have dynamic sentences where this approach can't work.
For my German translation NetHack-De, I used internally latin-1 (so I could continue to use the char* strings) and for the output transformed the text into ASCII, latin-1, or utf-8 (depending on configuration).
First off, UTF-32 is least likely to cause bugs, since all chars are the same length and thus possible to determine memory usage simply by multiplying char count by 4.
The memory usage of UTF-8 is also at most char count multiplied by 4. The 5- and 6-byte sequences were declared invalid when Unicode was restricted to have no character above U+10FFFF.
Please, don't use the Wikia NetHack Wiki. It is outdated, ad-ridden, and has been abandoned by the community, but Wikia doesn't allow a wiki to be deleted.
The current NetHack wiki is at http://nethackwiki.com/ .
Pff, your loss.
UnNetHack: NetHack Improved!
Others have tried and failed (e.g. SporkHack was partly forked from Vanilla for this effect and this year several fork developer posted an April Fools' joke on RGRN about considering their fork the successor to NetHack and changing its name to "NetHack").
No reaction by the DevTeam. It's highly unlikely that the DevTeam will ever release another version (the development has already slowed down before 3.4.3), so you are stuck with the old version or forks or other roguelikes.
Vanilla NetHack hasn't had a release since 2003 but there have been several forks of it, one I did myself (look at my sig).
Considering the "far better roguelikes" that's something just asking for a flame war but I guess he thinks about ToME4 or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
ToME4's root go back a long time, originally an Angband variant but the 4th version separated completely from that heritage and created vast amounts of original content that makes Skyrim look like a coffee-break activity.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is sort of an Anti-NetHack, trying to avoid many of the design mistake NetHack had. Like the needs for spoilers, that different races play the same in the long run, grinding, or that the game doesn't stay challenging after a certain point.
DCSS and ToME4 are big games but in the last years there has been a trend to develop smaller roguelikes. Like DoomRL which is exactly what its title says or roguelikes for mobile devices like 100Rogues and POWDER.
I don't have high hopes that Braben can repeat the success of Elite. He's been talking about it for years, with small hints here and there but nothing has come from it.
So I'm mildly anxious that this time it will be for real.
But OTOH I don't expect it to be a big succes. In the best case it will be something along the lines of the recent XCOM remake and I would be quite content with such a game.
REPL can be simulated on any language. I hope you're teaching your CS101 students more than just things that make sense in a REPL.
I don't think our philosophies differ that much. You didn't you would code and then immediately jump into debugger. You said "as soon as I feel like I understand what the code is supposed" so you already have thought about the code.
I've seen programmers trying to debug code by randomly and unsystematically putting breakpoints, hoping to getting a clue what the code does wrong, without even trying to think first. Shotgun debugging at its worst. If they don't have a clear model in their mind of what the code is supposed to do how can they deduce valid conclusions that can be proven or disproven?
Because of this sentence I'm not sure if your whole post is ironic or not. I'll treat it as non ironic.
Yes, you tend to get a lot of information that is not related to the problem you're having but if you are a beginner but that doesn't mean that you also understand that information and keep it in mind for later reference. Because you just don't know the language and its problems yet!
If you're starting out in a new language (even if you already know programming in other languages) it is certainly not always obvious what code leads to unmaintainable code. Learning a language is always exploring unknown territory and exploring is much easier if you can do it in small steps and for that instant feedback is way better. You will always be using some sort of reference and tutorial for exploring it and if those tutorials recommend bad languages features or habits (and let's be honest, every language has these) then it's the fault of that learning material.
I didn't say Eclipse is made "for beginners". IMO Eclipse works well enough OOTB even for advanced programmers, it stays out of your way most of the time.
But yes, if you want to become a really good programmer, you should expand your view beyond one single IDE. At least switching between Eclipse and Vim. :-)
Maybe I it's a bit of a rambling. But apparently the rest of my post is good enough to straighten out the weak intro. ;-)
No, it's always been one. Certainly for Emacs Lisp, with additional code (that is included nowadays) also for other programming languages. Surprisingly even Wikipedia agrees with that.
Syntax highlighting and parens matching doesn't really help the beginners. Instant feedback for programming errors is great, you immediately learn about the syntax on the go. Then the debugger is also a great tool (even though I think you should first think, then code, then think again and only as a last resort start the debugger).
These are not Eclipse-unique features, you can get such features with many setups but an easy to install IDE that satisfies your needs and is easily extendable with plugins that integrate seamlessly with your IDE (for example Findbugs).
It's almost like Emacs done right for Java. Well, as right as an IDE can be done.
I don't buy the argument that 1 class means 1 file is a problem (btw, this only applies to public classes anyway). If your project is large enough, you still get navigational problems even if you'd crammed 10000 lines into files (please, don't do this).
You are suggesting that there are no DRM-free commercial ebooks available. That's just not true.
You get lots of commercial books from a lot of publishers. For example Tor, Baen, and Fictionwise. You might be out of luck if you want to read 50 shades of grey or twilight books. But hey, at least Harry Potter is DRM-free now.
You think common sense and reasoning is the right strategy with people who just don't get it?
Either don't buy their books or buy the cheap paper book and tell them that they could have made more money from you if they'd cut out the middle man if you would have bought the ebook directly from them.
"Money" is the only argument that they'll understand.
Most of the custom framework the Kindle Touch and Kindle Paperwhite are using is based on a Java framework that is quite extendible.
For example a popular jailbreak patch called JBPatch adds lots of stuff to the standard Kindle reading software, like hyphenation
Theoretically it would be possible to add code that decodes epubs and thus lets you read the content.
Practically so far there have been standalone programs developped that let you read them.
And what program are you using for that?
I started the HackedUpReader project (based on the Coolreader code) for reading epubs on the Kindle Touch.
We know now the Kindle Paperwhite is quite similar to the Kindle Touch (also shown by the internal firmware version 5.1.2 for the Touch and 5.2.0 for the PW) and the latest release of HackedUpReader has possible support for the PW but I don't have heard any report so far.
The hacker spirit is not for "utility" but for "hacking". :-)
Having said that IMO there is utility in a jailbreak of Kindle devices even if you "only" want to use it for reading. Without a jailbreak you can't directly read specifc formats (e.g. epubs or some comic and manga formats).
Just say no to DRM. Buying DRM-"protected" ebooks sends the wrong message to publishers.
But it's much easier to just copy your epubs onto the device than having everything going through Calibre.
Of course it depends on how you manage your ebooks but any conversion can go wrong and Amazon's reader software on the hardware Kindles is quite limited anyway (no kerning and no hyphenation)
I'm also quite sceptical about Calibre's code. But its UI is ugly and considering some security issues in the past by its main programmer I'm constantly surprised that it works fine most of the time.
... but will it be as good as NetHack?
But in all honestly, the world will go without all the crap I'm collecting. It'll go on without Hollywood, Bollywood, Elvis and Beatles and anything else that's fiction if it has to.
Yes, the world will go on and human development will go on if it has to. It did go on when the Roman empire collapsed (not more than 10% of the classical literature has survived) or when nearly all of the Mayan written was deliberately destroyed. Of course, Sturgeon's law applies here, too. I don't care if generations to come won't be able to read Dan Brown but if they don't even have the possibility to enjoy Shakespeare or Kafka, this would be a loss to them. A loss they might not even know about.
Be assured that I know quite well that my statement was rather generalizing, that there are even more reasons to dislike Flash than only that it is non-free software and that not everybody using"GNU/Linux" is a RMS fanboy.
Still, I think it is much more likely that somebody who explicitly put a "GNU/" in front of "Linux" when TFA only refers to "Linux" is an passionate free software advocate and then it's rather unusual to be running flash at all. Especially considering that nowadays there is almost no need for running flash anymore.
BTW, linking to a complete book instead of a paragraph or at least a chapter within it would make it much more probable that somebody would get the info you've been trying to convey.
Hey, that gnu is not dead ... yet. Don't flog it until it is. :-)
It's been a pleasure giving you something to smile about in the morning. :)
If you care enough and agree with RMS about the "GNU/Linux" naming issue, you shouldn't have been running Flash in the first place.