But now they are optimizing for another, even less standard database (Cassandra), tying themselves down to it with non-standard query syntax.
Er, that the "worse is better" AKA simpler solution will win? That near-linear scalability with additional hardware is more valuable than backwards compatibility with 40-year old technology? That you are not considering the practical side but just arguing technical merit, which gets us back to Gabriel's "Worse Is Better"?
So you are right about the NoSQL fashion trend. Looks like for some companies it's easier to throw a pile of cheap commodity hardware driven by some NoSQL BigTable-wannabie at the problem instead of carefully optimizing queries and indexes for the best performance.
Companies do whatever is cheapest. Today, it's cheaper to scale with hardware than with optimizing queries and indices. This is just what Richard Gabriel's described in his classic essays, see http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
Do you know the cost (salary or consulting) of a MySQL expert? How about the cost of optimizing for that one database, tying yourself down to it with non-standard SQL? How about MySQL's historical baggage, piles upon piles of backwards compatibility?
It's not as simple as it seems, the business of data.
"If a car analogy is mentioned in any online discussion, you must bring a Volkswagen into the analogy and then explain how Hitler invented the Beetle."
Let's think for a moment. Does the open-source community need tax breaks? Has it produced less code, recently, or perhaps fewer people are in it? Is there a problem that a law needs to address? I would say not. Show me a study that says the open-source community needs tax breaks.
I've written a *lot* of open-source code, and profited very little from it. This tax break may benefit me, but more importantly to me, it will benefit every Tom, Dick, and Harry that comes by and writes a program no one will ever use. This has two effects: first, it dilutes the quality of open-source software and may create ill-will against the open-source community. Second, it sends money badly needed by all taxpayers to a small group that doesn't need that money based on their particular merit. Let the criteria for tax breaks be actual need for them - low incomes, number of children, elderly parents who can't take care of themselves... Better yet, lower taxes across the board.
Don't forget that deductions can be taken for many expenses. Talk to someone who knows the tax law, you'll be better off than voting for this boondoggle.
Let's not kid ourselves. This would address a non-existent problem with money this country does not have (just check the national deficit), and cause many more problems down the road.
CPAN is nice, but it should not be the starting point for a beginner, unless they don't care about the language.
CPAN modules are sometimes written badly.
CPAN modules are "one size fits all" which can be slow or even unusable for specific purposes.
CPAN modules don't teach.
Installing CPAN modules requires at least a little understanding of Perl. Otherwise you get cargo cult programmers who only know "perl -MCPAN -eshell" and can't think for themselves.
Ted
p.s. this applies to every other language with a public source code repository.
/o was not used because it was not necessary. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. This regex will be run what, 10 times? 100 times? Let's be realistic.
I may write it some day - patches welcome if you feel the urge.
From the sidebar "A Word About MP3 Tags," which also mentions Ogg Vorbis:
I have tried very hard to abstract tags as content from the actual ID3 tags. It will be easy, when the time comes, to modify autotag.pl so it will handle other tagging formats besides ID3.
The reason why I didn't explain my choice of modules in detail is that a) I don't have a lot of room, b) most readers won't care, and c) the article is already in two parts.
It came down to ease of usage and size and correctness of the CD database (for the lookup modules). Rest assured I tried all the modules I list and more, and it was painful experience that made me choose the modules I did.
Have you looked at autotag.pl? It is text-based whereas EasyTag isn't. Some people, myself included, don't find GUIs with "tree based browsers" all that useful. EasyTag looks nice, but it has the typical GUI kludges such as "process selected files of the selected directory" - as if that was a feature!
Anyhow, 90% is a little ambitious. I'd say EasyTag overlaps with autotag.pl in 50% of the functionality, and the other 50% of each application is completely different. GUIs have their uses, and I'm sure that those who like them will prefer EasyTag or other similar applications.
The "reinventing the wheel" argument is valid, though. You should look at autotag.pl. Most of the complexity is in the user interface and command-line options. I would argue that those *should* be reinvented, otherwise applications would all be the same and quite boring.
The editors applied an HTML filter to the Perl source and took out parts of numbers.pl and words.pl. I got several reports of this. I reported the problem to the developerWorks editors a while ago, but I guess it's not fixed yet. So you can find the scripts at
All the examples are meant for beginner programmers. I hope experts will forgive the simplicity, but I can't go into high-level constructs in a beginner article.
The particular one you mention (listing 2) compared a foreach() loop with a map() that behaved identically. The point was to demonstrate, to a novice, how to use map() in a familiar context.
I think you are right, I should have done
print map { "$_ => $ENV{$_}\n" } sort keys %ENV;
that would be a "pure" FP approach. I'll make sure to make the change in future versions, but I don't think it's major enough to warrant modifying the current version on the developerWorks site.
If you have suggestions, you can always contact me and let me know. I value reader opinion very highly.
This is chapter 4 in a book. The book is (partly) about introductory Perl programming. The chapter is on Functional Programming.
listing 3 illustrates how map() aliases $_ to each element of the list passed to it. The point is that without anything extra done, just calling map() in a void context, you are making changes to the original list. Sorry if that was unclear.
The Nokia 9000 and 9110 phones (the 9000i is the only one that works witht he US GSM 1900 technology, but the 9110i for GSM 1900 is coming out eventually) are really nice. I used a 9000i for two years, and couldn't be happier. There's a lot of applications for them, too.
Try http://www.communicator.org/ and http://www.nokia.com/phones/9110/.
Slashdot Mirror
But now they are optimizing for another, even less standard database (Cassandra), tying themselves down to it with non-standard query syntax.
Er, that the "worse is better" AKA simpler solution will win? That near-linear scalability with additional hardware is more valuable than backwards compatibility with 40-year old technology? That you are not considering the practical side but just arguing technical merit, which gets us back to Gabriel's "Worse Is Better"?
What was your point again?
Heh, newbies.
So you are right about the NoSQL fashion trend. Looks like for some companies it's easier to throw a pile of cheap commodity hardware driven by some NoSQL BigTable-wannabie at the problem instead of carefully optimizing queries and indexes for the best performance.
Companies do whatever is cheapest. Today, it's cheaper to scale with hardware than with optimizing queries and indices. This is just what Richard Gabriel's described in his classic essays, see http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
Do you know the cost (salary or consulting) of a MySQL expert? How about the cost of optimizing for that one database, tying yourself down to it with non-standard SQL? How about MySQL's historical baggage, piles upon piles of backwards compatibility?
It's not as simple as it seems, the business of data.
Ted
Let's think for a moment. Does the open-source community need tax breaks? Has it produced less code, recently, or perhaps fewer people are in it? Is there a problem that a law needs to address? I would say not. Show me a study that says the open-source community needs tax breaks.
I've written a *lot* of open-source code, and profited very little from it. This tax break may benefit me, but more importantly to me, it will benefit every Tom, Dick, and Harry that comes by and writes a program no one will ever use. This has two effects: first, it dilutes the quality of open-source software and may create ill-will against the open-source community. Second, it sends money badly needed by all taxpayers to a small group that doesn't need that money based on their particular merit. Let the criteria for tax breaks be actual need for them - low incomes, number of children, elderly parents who can't take care of themselves... Better yet, lower taxes across the board.
Don't forget that deductions can be taken for many expenses. Talk to someone who knows the tax law, you'll be better off than voting for this boondoggle.
Let's not kid ourselves. This would address a non-existent problem with money this country does not have (just check the national deficit), and cause many more problems down the road.
Ted
CPAN is nice, but it should not be the starting point for a beginner, unless they don't care about the language.
CPAN modules are sometimes written badly.
CPAN modules are "one size fits all" which can be slow or even unusable for specific purposes.
CPAN modules don't teach.
Installing CPAN modules requires at least a little understanding of Perl. Otherwise you get cargo cult programmers who only know "perl -MCPAN -eshell" and can't think for themselves.
Ted
p.s. this applies to every other language with a public source code repository.
Please read the comments for the first article. And/or the article itself.
I tried MusicBrainz and didn't like the interface to it, or its capabilities. FreeDB was much better for my purpose.
Ted (article author)
/o was not used because it was not necessary. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. This regex will be run what, 10 times? 100 times? Let's be realistic.
Ted Zlatanov
I may write it some day - patches welcome if you feel the urge.
From the sidebar "A Word About MP3 Tags," which also mentions Ogg Vorbis:
I have tried very hard to abstract tags as content from the actual ID3 tags. It will be easy, when the time comes, to modify autotag.pl so it will handle other tagging formats besides ID3.
Ted Zlatanov
The reason why I didn't explain my choice of modules in detail is that a) I don't have a lot of room, b) most readers won't care, and c) the article is already in two parts.
It came down to ease of usage and size and correctness of the CD database (for the lookup modules). Rest assured I tried all the modules I list and more, and it was painful experience that made me choose the modules I did.
Ted Zlatanov
Have you looked at autotag.pl? It is text-based whereas EasyTag isn't. Some people, myself included, don't find GUIs with "tree based browsers" all that useful. EasyTag looks nice, but it has the typical GUI kludges such as "process selected files of the selected directory" - as if that was a feature!
Anyhow, 90% is a little ambitious. I'd say EasyTag overlaps with autotag.pl in 50% of the functionality, and the other 50% of each application is completely different. GUIs have their uses, and I'm sure that those who like them will prefer EasyTag or other similar applications.
The "reinventing the wheel" argument is valid, though. You should look at autotag.pl. Most of the complexity is in the user interface and command-line options. I would argue that those *should* be reinvented, otherwise applications would all be the same and quite boring.
Ted Zlatanov
The 'f' in fMRI stands for 'functional.'
Ted
You're right, GA is best implemented in machine language. I don't know what I was thinking.
Thanks!
Ted
Heh, I typed too quickly... The '<' and '>' characters were filtered out, is what I meant to say.
Ted
The editors applied an HTML filter to the Perl source and took out parts of numbers.pl and words.pl. I got several reports of this. I reported the problem to the developerWorks editors a while ago, but I guess it's not fixed yet. So you can find the scripts at
f elogs.com/source/numbers.txt
http://lifelogs.com/source/words.txt
http://li
Basically the '' characters were filtered out. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Ted
(disclaimer: I'm the author of the article)
All the examples are meant for beginner programmers. I hope experts will forgive the simplicity, but I can't go into high-level constructs in a beginner article.
The particular one you mention (listing 2) compared a foreach() loop with a map() that behaved identically. The point was to demonstrate, to a novice, how to use map() in a familiar context.
I think you are right, I should have done
print map { "$_ => $ENV{$_}\n" } sort keys %ENV;
that would be a "pure" FP approach. I'll make sure to make the change in future versions, but I don't think it's major enough to warrant modifying the current version on the developerWorks site.
If you have suggestions, you can always contact me and let me know. I value reader opinion very highly.
Thanks
Ted Zlatanov
(disclaimer: I'm the author)
This is chapter 4 in a book. The book is (partly) about introductory Perl programming. The chapter is on Functional Programming.
listing 3 illustrates how map() aliases $_ to each element of the list passed to it. The point is that without anything extra done, just calling map() in a void context, you are making changes to the original list. Sorry if that was unclear.
Thanks
Ted Zlatanov
The Nokia 9000 and 9110 phones (the 9000i is the only one that works witht he US GSM 1900 technology, but the 9110i for GSM 1900 is coming out eventually) are really nice. I used a 9000i for two years, and couldn't be happier. There's a lot of applications for them, too. Try http://www.communicator.org/ and http://www.nokia.com/phones/9110/.