Really, you start with "Those days are long gone", then talk about "letter-sized printouts at 10 characters per inch"?
Well, actually, I still do a lot of my listing prints on letter-sized paper, although more often these days it's at 17.5 characters per inch.
I also do a lot editing of files on non-GUI (server) machines and until recently, the text-mode consoles tended to run at 24x80 characters or some variant thereof.
Plus even on GUI displays, I'll often want something like multiple small edit windows or a multi-paned console with character-mode text edit/display in it, so having the source text tab its way out to the next county isn't something I appreciate.
As a fairly experienced and slightly wrinkly and grey developer, can anyone tell me why spaces over tabs?
Tabs allow the developer to customise their IDE to display the amount of indentation they desire... and use fewer bytes... spaces seem to have no benefits whatsoever in my book.
Once upon a time, tabs were wonderful. Because disks held 80 kilobytes and ANYTHING that could put more code/data on a disk was wonderful, as long as you had the RAM/CPU to deal with it.
Those days are long gone, however.
The nominal expansion of tabs is to advance to the next column which is a multiple of 8. That's presupposing "absolute" horizontal tabs, as opposed to the less-common relative horizontal tab (RHT).
But 8 columns is a really awkward amount to indent things, especially if you're dealing with letter-sized printouts at 10 characters per inch. A much more pleasant value is usually to tab in increments of 3 or 4 columns.
And, as others have pointed out, the 8-character convention is really just a convention. There's always someone who sets their hardware tabs or tab displays differently.
And then there's Python, which gets its magic from careful indentation. Meaning that a listing that looks fine on-screen or on paper may bewilderingly not run. Because although the alignment of the characters on successive lines may match up, the actual number of spacing characters on those lines might not. And conversely, the alignment can get scrambled just because someone picked a different tab expansion value.
And that is why it's the experienced people who are least fond of tab characters. Once burnt...
Repeating an untruth doesn't make it true, even if Fox News may give that impression.
Some day when you're grown up, you, too may decide to incorporate, and you'll have to opportunity to see what corporations really are forbidden to do by law.
Personal experience. Your Mileage May Vary, and you are invited to do a formal analysis if you like, but I've worked with a lot of products from a lot of vendors and for me, these characteristics hold true more often than not. I've paid $45 for a C compiler that I only found 1 bug in and $450 for a compiler I found 5 bugs in within the first week of use.
I've spent periods of up to a month doing low-level tracing only to discover that a major database vendor's idea of "cache" didn't adhere to the basic CompSci definition of cache. And I've spent a lot of time cursing IBM for not having the basic interchange and import/export functionality in DB2 that come free-out-of-the-box in the free MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.
I've dealt with support people who were prompt and helpful in fractured English on open-source application servers and nearly burst blood vessels on expensive commercial products where after 30 minutes on hold I was still being told how "VERY important" my call was to them.
But open-source or commercial, big company or small, it's always been true for me that if the documents and source code are full of little jokes and games, I'm probably going to be able to depend on the product doing what it's supposed to be doing, and if it doesn't, I'm probably not going to end up at the other end of the support process swearing I'd never buy the product for anything if it was my choice to do the buying. Which it often is.
I once got a ticket for a tag 7 days past expiration. The officer had to go onto semi-private property and look under the bumper overhang to see the expiration date sticker. And obviously did.
If I had removed the plate, the officer would have gone around to the front of the vehicle and read out the VIN from the display window on the windshield. And if the VIN number had been obscured, AND the plate was missing... I'd like to think being met by a SWAT team would be overkill, but in my town, I'm not 100% sure, based on some of the other things they've done.
Put yourself in a project manager's shoes. What would you say if one of your programmers was working on a cool Easter Egg instead of being productive and working on the actual product? I wouldn't want to be the project manager who had to tell higher management that the product will be late but have some cool Easter Eggs.
I put myself in the customer's shoes.
Over the years I've learned certain characteristics of software products.
One is that the more expensive the product is, the more likely it's crawling with bugs and the less likely I'll get good support on it.
Another is that the software that's full of "fun things" tends to be higher quality than the software that's "serious business". That's even been my experience with stodgy old IBM's product line. Yes, even IBM has had occasional breakouts of humanity and some of their most useful - and critical - products were actually fun for someone, based on the code and/or documentation.
Granted, that was before they shipped it all offshore.
Based on what I've seen, very few companies of any size worry about doing the right thing. I do mostly appreciate the ones that do, although in some cases, their "right thing" is based on religion, not ethics.
Corporation is... forbidden by law to have any motivation except profit motive.
B. S.
Corporations are chartered organizations and their motivations are whatever their charters mandate them to be. That's why there are things like "not-for-profit" corporations. NPR. The American Red Cross. The AFL-CIO. The American Medical Association. Thousands of neighborhood homeowners associations. And so forth. That's not even counting the for-profits who worry as much about doing the Right Thing as they do about profits. For example, Costco.
For-profit corporations spend a lot of time an money lobbying the government for favors, it's true. But I think you'll agree that some of the above corporations do also.
The "religious hatred" for goto came from a very real problem: so-called "spaghetti code".
The older programming languages favored having all (or most) of the logic in one big source module. Use of goto to navigate around in a large module often resulted in a veritable maze of logic that was virtually impossible to make sense of or apply automated analysis to. It could get especially bad in languages that supported an assignable goto target.
Structured Programming was conceived as a solution to that. By limiting logic paths, the number of possible logic paths was reduced to more manageable proportions.
The problem with pure structured programming was that for exceptional cases, the nests of loops and conditions could themselves become unwieldy. This lead to such constructs as throw/catch where a sequence could be aborted and control transferred to a well-defined outer location. A thrown object is effectively a goto without the free-for-all that the old-fashioned vanilla gotos caused.
A related trouble source was in methods that had multiple entry and exit points. Again, it made possible logic flows difficult to predict. Most modern languages do not permit multiple entry points, and as long as there are ONLY multiple entry points or ONLY multiple exit points, the code becomes much easier to follow.
Personally, I favor a style where most of the early-exit logic is at the beginning of the function, thus filtering whether the main processing will be done. Anything that requires exit after normal processing has commenced usually rates a thrown exception.
DTRT isn't universal at all. If it seems universal, then you are not considering a broad enough array of cultures.
True. After all, most of the abuses and attacks on the American concepts of liberty and freedom over the last few decades have been done by people "Doing the Right Thing" - as they saw it.
Certification is all very well and good when most people in the profession are doing the same thing and the state of the art is advancing relatively slowiy.
One the other hand, one of the IT professional organizations of the 1970s attempted to create the concept of a "Certified Data Processor" (CDP).
I have a copy of a CDP exam prep guide. Not many things in it are even possible any more. Reading punch cards by eye, knowledge of COBOL program organization, mainframe JCL - the stuff that isn't flat-out obsolete is really niche these days. Few RoR programmers know JCL. People who Java well aren't usually also top-tier.Net experts. Some people work intensively with Struts, but more don't. And that's not counting system expertise like how to endure the Windows Registry or run dtrace on Linux.
Sure we have dozens of domain-specific certs in IT. Most of them carry little or no weight. There's no general cert that defines your overall competence or lack thereof.
The only hope for professional certification would be if someone could devise an exam sufficiently abstract to work in all major variants of an IT discipline, regardless of OS, language or platform. So far, no one has done that.
"Democrat Party" is what conservatives call it because the idea of a "democratic party" offends them. You don't hear too much mention of the "Republic Party".
So, nitpicking if you will. Refusal to accept a slur, if you won't.
The American economy is predicated on the idea that your home, your food, and your clothing should be made of cheap garbage so that you can spend all your available income on fuel-guzzling oversized vehicles and glamour electronics.
All of which become obsolete and/or wear out fairly quickly, as traditional wealth measures go.
But your solution is where the $500 hammers come from.
There really IS no way to win.
Although making an application dependent on any facet of Internet Explorer probably violates some standard of human decency, contract requirements or not.
From the sound of it, I'd be more likely to bet that the government put out bids to private contractors and the low-bid (winning) contractor saved money by using the cheapest/easiest solution available to them at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
People love cheap shit, until it breaks, then they look for someone to blame.
People love cheap shit, until it breaks, then they look for someone other than themselves to blame.
FTFY
Really, you start with "Those days are long gone", then talk about "letter-sized printouts at 10 characters per inch"?
Well, actually, I still do a lot of my listing prints on letter-sized paper, although more often these days it's at 17.5 characters per inch.
I also do a lot editing of files on non-GUI (server) machines and until recently, the text-mode consoles tended to run at 24x80 characters or some variant thereof.
Plus even on GUI displays, I'll often want something like multiple small edit windows or a multi-paned console with character-mode text edit/display in it, so having the source text tab its way out to the next county isn't something I appreciate.
As a fairly experienced and slightly wrinkly and grey developer, can anyone tell me why spaces over tabs?
Tabs allow the developer to customise their IDE to display the amount of indentation they desire... and use fewer bytes... spaces seem to have no benefits whatsoever in my book.
Once upon a time, tabs were wonderful. Because disks held 80 kilobytes and ANYTHING that could put more code/data on a disk was wonderful, as long as you had the RAM/CPU to deal with it.
Those days are long gone, however.
The nominal expansion of tabs is to advance to the next column which is a multiple of 8. That's presupposing "absolute" horizontal tabs, as opposed to the less-common relative horizontal tab (RHT).
But 8 columns is a really awkward amount to indent things, especially if you're dealing with letter-sized printouts at 10 characters per inch. A much more pleasant value is usually to tab in increments of 3 or 4 columns.
And, as others have pointed out, the 8-character convention is really just a convention. There's always someone who sets their hardware tabs or tab displays differently.
And then there's Python, which gets its magic from careful indentation. Meaning that a listing that looks fine on-screen or on paper may bewilderingly not run. Because although the alignment of the characters on successive lines may match up, the actual number of spacing characters on those lines might not. And conversely, the alignment can get scrambled just because someone picked a different tab expansion value.
And that is why it's the experienced people who are least fond of tab characters. Once burnt...
java ie write once, compile... once. big failure on cross platform.
For you maybe. I spent 3 years developing Solaris apps in Java on Windows XP machines.
Repeating an untruth doesn't make it true, even if Fox News may give that impression.
Some day when you're grown up, you, too may decide to incorporate, and you'll have to opportunity to see what corporations really are forbidden to do by law.
Personal experience. Your Mileage May Vary, and you are invited to do a formal analysis if you like, but I've worked with a lot of products from a lot of vendors and for me, these characteristics hold true more often than not. I've paid $45 for a C compiler that I only found 1 bug in and $450 for a compiler I found 5 bugs in within the first week of use.
I've spent periods of up to a month doing low-level tracing only to discover that a major database vendor's idea of "cache" didn't adhere to the basic CompSci definition of cache. And I've spent a lot of time cursing IBM for not having the basic interchange and import/export functionality in DB2 that come free-out-of-the-box in the free MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.
I've dealt with support people who were prompt and helpful in fractured English on open-source application servers and nearly burst blood vessels on expensive commercial products where after 30 minutes on hold I was still being told how "VERY important" my call was to them.
But open-source or commercial, big company or small, it's always been true for me that if the documents and source code are full of little jokes and games, I'm probably going to be able to depend on the product doing what it's supposed to be doing, and if it doesn't, I'm probably not going to end up at the other end of the support process swearing I'd never buy the product for anything if it was my choice to do the buying. Which it often is.
I once got a ticket for a tag 7 days past expiration. The officer had to go onto semi-private property and look under the bumper overhang to see the expiration date sticker. And obviously did.
If I had removed the plate, the officer would have gone around to the front of the vehicle and read out the VIN from the display window on the windshield. And if the VIN number had been obscured, AND the plate was missing... I'd like to think being met by a SWAT team would be overkill, but in my town, I'm not 100% sure, based on some of the other things they've done.
Put yourself in a project manager's shoes. What would you say if one of your programmers was working on a cool Easter Egg instead of being productive and working on the actual product? I wouldn't want to be the project manager who had to tell higher management that the product will be late but have some cool Easter Eggs.
I put myself in the customer's shoes.
Over the years I've learned certain characteristics of software products.
One is that the more expensive the product is, the more likely it's crawling with bugs and the less likely I'll get good support on it.
Another is that the software that's full of "fun things" tends to be higher quality than the software that's "serious business". That's even been my experience with stodgy old IBM's product line. Yes, even IBM has had occasional breakouts of humanity and some of their most useful - and critical - products were actually fun for someone, based on the code and/or documentation.
Granted, that was before they shipped it all offshore.
Based on what I've seen, very few companies of any size worry about doing the right thing. I do mostly appreciate the ones that do, although in some cases, their "right thing" is based on religion, not ethics.
There is one small catch . . . if you happen to copy the license plate of a criminal, things could get complicated . . .
Well, in the Brave New Land of the Free, of COURSE the license plate will belong to a criminal. Just like yours will.
Corporation is ... forbidden by law to have any motivation except profit motive.
B. S.
Corporations are chartered organizations and their motivations are whatever their charters mandate them to be. That's why there are things like "not-for-profit" corporations. NPR. The American Red Cross. The AFL-CIO. The American Medical Association. Thousands of neighborhood homeowners associations. And so forth. That's not even counting the for-profits who worry as much about doing the Right Thing as they do about profits. For example, Costco.
For-profit corporations spend a lot of time an money lobbying the government for favors, it's true. But I think you'll agree that some of the above corporations do also.
Precisely. My definition of "unbundling" doesn't extend to "turn off". If it's TRULY unbundled, the application isn't installed AT ALL.
Last time I looked, IE was still "an integral part of Windows".
The "religious hatred" for goto came from a very real problem: so-called "spaghetti code".
The older programming languages favored having all (or most) of the logic in one big source module. Use of goto to navigate around in a large module often resulted in a veritable maze of logic that was virtually impossible to make sense of or apply automated analysis to. It could get especially bad in languages that supported an assignable goto target.
Structured Programming was conceived as a solution to that. By limiting logic paths, the number of possible logic paths was reduced to more manageable proportions.
The problem with pure structured programming was that for exceptional cases, the nests of loops and conditions could themselves become unwieldy. This lead to such constructs as throw/catch where a sequence could be aborted and control transferred to a well-defined outer location. A thrown object is effectively a goto without the free-for-all that the old-fashioned vanilla gotos caused.
A related trouble source was in methods that had multiple entry and exit points. Again, it made possible logic flows difficult to predict. Most modern languages do not permit multiple entry points, and as long as there are ONLY multiple entry points or ONLY multiple exit points, the code becomes much easier to follow.
Personally, I favor a style where most of the early-exit logic is at the beginning of the function, thus filtering whether the main processing will be done. Anything that requires exit after normal processing has commenced usually rates a thrown exception.
DTRT isn't universal at all. If it seems universal, then you are not considering a broad enough array of cultures.
True. After all, most of the abuses and attacks on the American concepts of liberty and freedom over the last few decades have been done by people "Doing the Right Thing" - as they saw it.
We'll win the malware arms race somewhere about the time we win the wars on drugs, crime, and proverty.
The only time you can "win" an arms race is if the other side becomes exhausted. Such wins are often pyhrric.
These days, we are more likely to call your train "engineers" developers, designers, or inventors. Or at the very least design engineers.
We use the general term "engineer" for a persons who runs an engine, whether it be a railroad engine or a Warp Drive.
Similarly, a "computer" used to be a person. Now it's hardware.
The English language isn't as regular as some would like it to be.
Certification is all very well and good when most people in the profession are doing the same thing and the state of the art is advancing relatively slowiy.
One the other hand, one of the IT professional organizations of the 1970s attempted to create the concept of a "Certified Data Processor" (CDP).
I have a copy of a CDP exam prep guide. Not many things in it are even possible any more. Reading punch cards by eye, knowledge of COBOL program organization, mainframe JCL - the stuff that isn't flat-out obsolete is really niche these days. Few RoR programmers know JCL. People who Java well aren't usually also top-tier .Net experts. Some people work intensively with Struts, but more don't. And that's not counting system expertise like how to endure the Windows Registry or run dtrace on Linux.
Sure we have dozens of domain-specific certs in IT. Most of them carry little or no weight. There's no general cert that defines your overall competence or lack thereof.
The only hope for professional certification would be if someone could devise an exam sufficiently abstract to work in all major variants of an IT discipline, regardless of OS, language or platform. So far, no one has done that.
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, manage.
Those who can't manage, administrate.
Well, if they have done nothing wrong they have nothing to hide. Right?
Isn't that what they tell us?
I think that the only thing that was ever really "secret" about it was that its agents didn't wear uniforms.
The US Secret Service historically has carried 2 primary mandates. To protect heads of state and to protect the reputation of US currency.
Tells you where priorities lie.
Nitpicking, or complete lack of imagination?
"Democrat Party" is what conservatives call it because the idea of a "democratic party" offends them. You don't hear too much mention of the "Republic Party".
So, nitpicking if you will. Refusal to accept a slur, if you won't.
The American economy is predicated on the idea that your home, your food, and your clothing should be made of cheap garbage so that you can spend all your available income on fuel-guzzling oversized vehicles and glamour electronics.
All of which become obsolete and/or wear out fairly quickly, as traditional wealth measures go.
Yes, it is.
But your solution is where the $500 hammers come from.
There really IS no way to win.
Although making an application dependent on any facet of Internet Explorer probably violates some standard of human decency, contract requirements or not.
From the sound of it, I'd be more likely to bet that the government put out bids to private contractors and the low-bid (winning) contractor saved money by using the cheapest/easiest solution available to them at the time.