Don't come true folks. In the "look ma, no hands" days, people often imagined similar stuff. Now that some decades have elapsed, we have a better view of what is possible or will be so in the near future.
It's, unfortunately, the fact that attaining human level intelligence still needs some groundbreaking achievements that's hard to foresee how. The feature is a bit, a larger bit, naive. Intelligence, with all of its basic components that we think it has such as memory, learning, reasoning, etc. requires even more scrutinized philosophical treatment, scientific analysis and the kind of computer technology that is not available ANYWHERE. It is not a mere matter of computational power. If that were the case, you could have your favorite MPI intelligent agent proggy (say hal9000) on the ASCI RED super cluster.
Well, if what I said were not true our AI textbooks would be full of algorithms, and methods for raching that sort of intelligence, and we wouldn't have to delve into all works of philosophers, linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists. (By us, I meant computer scientists, you make your own version). All I wish to say is that be a little skeptic when such things are claimed. In the future, when some full-time Einsteins make their contributions I'm confident that we will finally construct the machines that will be like us, or those that will supersede us... The machines that we dream so sweetly of.
I hate to spell FUD, but this make me more than mildly paranoid.
What is common in the two articles is more dreadful than what differs. While creative and profound thinking is degraded to a disability that is far from desirable in the former article, the second one augments the former's elementary assumption with the straightforward implication that those disabled "worker bee"s (us) are useful for the society so they must be kept for the time being. In this claim, scientific skills and innovation is attributed to an obvious defect, the kind of imperfection that would render those people who suffer from it inferior if they were not useful for the advent of technology, hence for the provision of resources for the world order.
You admire the great minds, and follow them, years in a tough enterprise, and while you think you're getting somewhere you're spotted with a mark you couldn't like less. It is ironic, in a sense, that the people who lack the highly technical/scientific skills would discover this amazing fact, however that is not our primary concern. Although I suspect that these statements are overly complex driven, there is a side that should bother all of us "geeks". However, marked along you must be many distinguished minds whom you respected. By this, I refer to people such as Einstein who would call the practise of everyday life "trivialities of youth" for he had abandoned the ordinary for a life of contemplation. I refer to Carl Sagan who has always stressed the importance of scientific thinking. I refer also to people who have pioneered technology such as Alan Turing, von Neumann and Claude Shannon. Such people I should refer to, and many is their number.
I wonder, how many of the people who have dedicated a large portion of their lives to attain those skills in question will find this claim delightful. Is it their mere goal in life to work for the benefit of higher beings? In that case, the socially capable, fully functional human beings who are free of a nasty IQ load, which I understand to be a rather awkward thing to have from the point of view presented by these enlightened authors, are to administer these unfortunate souls and harvest the products the "geek" fields yield. Personally I don't find living under the rule of tasteless managers, malevolent lawyers, petty politicians and dry journalists attractive. I would like to propose a world in which those mediocre members of the society exist solely to supply the comfort the "geek"s require. "What a harsh suggestion", one would argue. "What a harsher thing to suppose the opposite" I would suggest in return. An earth inherited by "geek"s could be more entertaining, if we mean by that a society that is free from supersition and gives value to scientific thinking. A place where humane properties, first of which is thinking, are valuable...
To contribute more than a rebel-ish flavor, I'm afraid the study cited does not report "hard" scientific facts. They are biased, definitely based on personal opinion. Although it may be a tradition in the psychology field to make up everything and add a gram of science as glue, the data does not entail any of the results mentioned. Now, as the second article states, Edison, since he is a scientist, may be a safe bet for a geek. But what about Bill Gates? Is he a "geek"? Take the autistic computer programmer woman, how "geek" is she? It is difficult to reply affirmative. Now that I have demonstrated a flaw, let me pose another question. Is Edison autistic? Think of someone else, a contemporary, a leader of "geek"s: Richard Stallman. How can someone who talks so much can be autistic or mildly autistic? Take another public hacker figure, for instance Linus Torvalds. He may be arrogant, but he isn't autistic at all. For these are most renowned "geek"s, their being non-autistic allows us to refute the extremely naive claim that sophisticated technical skills are acquired only when a certain defect, known as a form of autism, exists. Indeed, the claim that some of the "geek"s have not developed sufficient social skills since they have had little chance to participate in the social life seems to be much more plausible. Otherwise, it would be a burden on the notion of "creativity", though I'm sure that these authors could utilize no ammunition from Hofstadter or Fodor, or other significant thinkers on the subject of "mind". (But practise really helps, 15 yeards of hard work and they can enjoy a fair IQ, around 70. Imagine some average journalist and psychologist trying to read a philosophy of mind paper, and looking real blank at it.)
I do protest the view that scientific skills are a deviation from the norm. That is an offense that leaps on the boundaries of insulting the whole scientific endeavour, and each single philosophical investigation. They seem to be on the side of the masses who would be better off thoughtless and mindless, from the point of view presented by the proponents of this claim. What if those "normal" people realized that intelligence is a thing to envy? Perhaps, we could have a civilization as it ought to be.
Go away lamer! I'm shocked that you've been able to install a Linux distribution.
That's why KDE/GNOME is likely to suck
on
KDE 1.1.2 is out
·
· Score: 1
I mean it. If you follow what that other OS has done in every way, you become it. I never wanted my Linux as a better Windows.
And as a coder, I'm sometimes suspicious about the crowd of ppl who rush things: what is the average talent of KDE / GNOME coders? When I code I always make sure the proggy is smoking and steaming, what about these people? Those object models are definitely under-rated.
Okay, as a prospective cognitive scientist, I am dazzled by the naive-ness of this article. How simple it is really. If you have superior mental capabilities, you gotta be mildly autistic. Great relief for the less clever people.
However, I was never very obsessed with mathematics (I remember only 10% of all theorems or so) and I believe I never experienced any difficulty understanding someone else's emotions. Even funnier, I didn't experience life as a series of freeze frames. Seriously, I had no trouble perceiving the whole; indeed the image of the whole always formed so easily. Though, I consider myself quite good at learning, and innovation.. whatever. I've been a hacker for about 10 yrs and I'm sure that I think, talk, feel and act 3 or 4 times faster than average ppl socially. Yep, I wrote billions of lines of assembly, coded every kind of program, read zillions of science books, got a CS Bsc, did research... But in the end I've found myself to be emotionally richer than virtually all the women and 90% of the men I've ever met. Why? It's because I also experienced the "triviality of youth" as Einstein put it, to some degree. Plus, I have had the joy of processing all the literature, movies, plays, etc. I consumed in more detail.;)
Now, intelligence is like a swiss-blade. It will adapt to any situation within a sufficient period. Those unlucky MIT hardcore nerds, study-maths-all-day-long ppl may of course lack social skills, because they didn't get the social training -- which I believe is a piece of cake compared to the whole complexity of knowledge a human embodies.
Learning the dynamics of the society, for a smart young man/woman takes at most 2-3 years, rather shorter than the lifetime required by the dork next door. The average man shall stall at quarrels with his lover/partner, remain enslaved by the codes and traditions of his society, bow down to every kind of authority and live in happiness through slavery. He shall dress as he ought to, he shall live as he ought to, he shall take little intellectual challenge throughout his life, he shall care so little about his freedom, he shall care little about others' freedom, he shall not endeavour to understand the great minds, he shall not acquire subtle aesthetic values, he shall not see a creation to light, he shall practise emotions as a sheep does, and still like his pen. You will do otherwise.
Hey, sorry for being naive but I'd just wanted to point out to DNA design becoming a reality. Blindly tinkering with nucleotids, disabling/*commenting out*/ a gene or two, patching genes up and observing is one thing. Designing novel organisms is another.
When you get to design things, the empirical approach needs to be supplemented by more rigorous methods. Being a CS person, I think one would wish to formalize the semantics contained in a DNA strand, even if this might mean that all kinds of bio-chemical interactions should be known. On top of this kind of a "virtual machine", a "soft" gene development environment could be fitted. One could imagine PL's and simulation engines, visualization / editing tools in this development environment. I have a sneaking suspicion that logic languages can be useful. (together with theorem-provers that will check semantics from a biochem KB)
Why is all that necessary? It's simply because the gene design would be such a task that it will exceed the cognitive abilities of a single human. A single chunk of data will dwarve the bandwidth of 1 researcher, so research groups won't help either;) (Stack Overflow) Biochemists will need to borrow all the techniques and tools from AI. Surely, this will mostly consist of software work. Even as of now, simple tools seem to exist. I think that more advanced gene analysis/design will benefit from software systems with better AI.
About the designs themselves, the cause for medicine is most interesting. The applications surely hold the capacity to cure diseases that resist the more traditional treatment. But the second application area, I speculate, is nano technology. The single cell organisms might lay the foundation for a variety of nano devices. Once the means to produce biological machinery is worked out, we can take the leap into a Drexlerian world.
BTW, it's great if the actuation of genes is a probability and function of chemical equilibrium (or the probabilistic fun. of;) since you can compute that. If the DNA is representable as a sequence of symbols, than I'd expect some order in the chemical reactions that govern its functioning, that's why we can reason about them; they're not totally uncomprehensible... Actually, I believe that developmental systems assume order over time.
In some previous/. discussion, it'd been expressed that genetic engineering is still unlike software engineering in which one designs systems from scratch or in most cases from some level above that.
That might change.
At the end of the article, Prof Magnus states that the next century is going to be about designing genes. Now taking micro-biology classes makes sense! Seems like the gene-designers will need a lot of the knowledge from the software area. After all, it's us coders who are gurus about things like editing, compiling, debugging, bootstrapping... Looking forward to first GPL-ed gene-libraries.
Seems like you're omitting the grand idea here and still collecting all the moderation points.
What I don't like is that a development environment is intended for non-coders. An IDE similar to DevStudio just gives me that feeling. The "here moron, you can make a window like this", "see moron, click here and some sucky message map code will be generated. totally ad-hoc!" wizards or "Our library allows you to write WinSock2.0 code so easily. Just stick to our lame object model." libraries make me sick. I do think that the libraries and DE's may govern the quality of software at least.
What's more, I condemn all those excellent programmers who stick with VC! Nothing compares to emacs+ddd.
And yes, there are many GTK proggies that are not useful. Still I stress that the KDE must be pronounced "windows-wanna-be".
Yeah, I've been there and done that. Try to code nice console programs and static libs not touching the horrible VC MFC libs and go STL and stdio instead. What happens? Lemme sort it out. You're not gonna compile half of your valid std C++ proggies. Templates will break, namespaces will blow, linkers will get confused..
I think you're overestimating the DevStudio environment.
Plus, if there are the (what - 4gl, 3gl) tools, you just want them fine and dandy. Not the lame DevStudio ones.
their mice. I think they'd have a better time doing that instead of coding VC++.
If a visual studio weanie can fire it up and run it it's the proof that the IDE sucks. Why do I hate "class wizard" term so much? Perhaps it's because I hate MS terminology: all those sucky idiot wizards in MS apps...
Why not wait for a port of MS DevStudio to Linux? I think it'd be the perfect way to fu** up the whole beauty of development on Linux. Oh no, I see the developers of KDevelop dreaming that QT is someday as big and ugly as MFC, and KDevelop performing as moronic as DevStudio. Yes, 13 year old mongoloid kids would be able to write KDE (pronounced "windows-wanna-be") applications that do incredibly useless things.
At least we had hoped that an IDE would supply that in some/. discussion. Hmmm, I'd really like an IDE that gives you full control over the tools it provides an interface to.
What's more 1) is the editor better than emacs/xemacs? 2) is the debugger better than ddd? questions remain open. You'd have to succeed in both areas to make me pay those bucks.
Anyway, this is the kind of thing where improvement is sure to happen. What do you say? Which features must be worked out?
True. The reasons make QT superior to MFC. At least I can do it on X11! But what about threads? In MFC threading is no big thing. you have both worker and ui thread models. Also, recognition of standard lib is important. The standard lib in g++ is vastly superior to anything that QT or MFC can supply.
It was not my intention to promote GTK at all. I'd like to get an answer to my question, because I don't know it. That's basically why I posted this as a question and not a criticism/review of various toolkits/frameworks.
It took me some years to realize that this question had to be asked, this is obviously not a newbie question and I already collected a lot of useful feedback. Please stay on topic.
I'm just trying to get people thinking over the subject. I did some brainstorming and wrote what popped up. I really want to sum it up better next time, because this is a question I'd like an answer to.
Yeah, I tried QT. And I don't like it much. Reasons I said. But I do think it makes some elementary use of C++, and helps code simple apps. Now you'll say the KOffice apps and many KDE apps are quite complex and "hip". But guess what? I don't think so. QT is only as great as MFC. I see some similarity in their designs. *grin*
And quite frankly, it's not because it's MS stuff. It's because it's gotten me much trouble. Not the same for QT, it runs great on my Debian system, and I wrote some small programs. But you can't push it too far with QT. Not very cheesy.
About C++ stuff: I love C++ and its standard lib. well I think it's great for the 80's! but still g++ isn't fully ANSI C++ and the standard's only recently been completed. I just have to say that none of the proggies I wrote for the last 2-3 years depend on libc. They just need the C++ libs.
I see that I've skipped OpenStep project entirely, and I know I should've mentioned it. Hmm, though I never got to run any OpenStep app in working order. Perhaps they must take better care of install/build scripts and manuals.
I also think that the obj-c makes a great OO environment, but from what I read at apple's web sites on Mac OS X I remember that the whole interface is going Java. They don't really stress obj-c. I wonder if that's going to drive the OpenStep project and mac os x stuff in different directions. Just what I recall...
1) C++ is the leading OO lang., but nothing lives forever. That's why I wrote Ada9x, I didn't want to be a C++ snob. Though, I prefer C++ over any other lang. currently.
2) About that exponential growth, I might say it's an upper bound (as a CS person;) Beside the fun part, I think you can provide the almost "linear" growth in source code size by utilizing any true OO language. Any lang. that gives you properties of an OO lang. (like abstraction, inheritance, etc.) and some extra (like genericity) would do. I don't, for instance, see why Ada9x is incapable. Personally, I dislike Java, but then swing is really praised by many coders.
Some prince would come up with this all new magnicient kiss to warp the whole GUI programming experience into a glorious age. Unfortunately, nothing like that.
Seems Java is armed and ready for a big bang of swing apps. On the other hand, ýnterpreted languages such as tcl/tk make a strong alternative.
The technical side of graphical programming is a huge problem space that is being constantly breached by the frameworks/toolkýts in question. For the free software developer, it is currently reasonable to tap into the CORBA'ed worlds of GNOME or KDE, while it is not clear which solution is better for the developer of non-free software. Besides, a better path may be that of abstraction more ambitious than even Java libs.
In addition to GNOME/KDE, there are many libs under development. Some day, one of the newer efforts mýght result ýn a framework richer and more efficient than we are used to. It may be the underlying components (object model, messaging, language bindings, ýmage processing, design patterns) that need to be revised.
Nevertheless, it's difficult to decide which GUI framework/toolkit to use on the X with the more traditional languages lýke C/C++. Perhaps, there lies an unsolved problem, a beauty that can't yet escape sleep.
At least, swing developers wrote so in Java World. I'm somehow subscribed to it;), though I'm not sure if the mag's called Java World.
Nevertheless, the swing developers wrote that Java Swing libraries manipulate the original design pattern so that you don't have a model, view and controller object but a model and UI delegate. Well, or something like that. I think they have a reason for that: this way you have many benefits of separating model and UI code but it's still pretty simple to write apps. Hope I approximated the main theme in that article.
I think you have a point in there. I also had to struggle with a framework: called MFC;) I remember that in the technical report I had claimed that isolation (thus abstraction) of MFC dependency was an advantage.
Now, what about an abstraction library? A framework that categorizes and abstracts every known kind of object might be done. It could abstract away the desktop, messaging, GUI, multithreading, IPC.
I think some of the multiplatform libraries already have similar design. But I don't recall that an abstraction library with no particular toolkit in mind has been programmed. (except Java to a degree)
When you're doing it straightforward, QT is handy. A variety of applications were written with QT. Plus, it undergoes massive coding. I cannot catch up with all the new stuff in QT releases. I haven't been able to code with QT2.x at all.
But it's a bit restrictive. And the moc ýs no good. I don't like a preprocessor that limits the host language. From the C++ perspective, it's insufficient. And QString is a good idea only for a language which doesn't have a string class in its standard lib.
I also think that tcl/tk helps us code decent GUI stuff. It seems that interpreted code is very suitable for GUI development. Gives you a quick dev. cycle.
Carl Sassenrath had said that interpreted languages for GUIs must be two-way: code->gui, gui->code. I suppose he meant it for the GUI libs of his language called rebol (and prononunced rebel)
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Don't come true folks. In the "look ma, no hands" days, people often imagined similar stuff. Now that some decades have elapsed, we have a better view of what is possible or will be so in the near future.
It's, unfortunately, the fact that attaining human level intelligence still needs some groundbreaking achievements that's hard to foresee how. The feature is a bit, a larger bit, naive. Intelligence, with all of its basic components that we think it has such as memory, learning, reasoning, etc. requires even more scrutinized philosophical treatment, scientific analysis and the kind of computer technology that is not available ANYWHERE. It is not a mere matter of computational power. If that were the case, you could have your favorite MPI intelligent agent proggy (say hal9000) on the ASCI RED super cluster.
Well, if what I said were not true our AI textbooks would be full of algorithms, and methods for raching that sort of intelligence, and we wouldn't have to delve into all works of philosophers, linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists. (By us, I meant computer scientists, you make your own version). All I wish to say is that be a little skeptic when such things are claimed. In the future, when some full-time Einsteins make their contributions I'm confident that we will finally construct the machines that will be like us, or those that will supersede us... The machines that we dream so sweetly of.
I hate to spell FUD, but this make me more than mildly paranoid.
What is common in the two articles is more dreadful than what differs. While creative and profound thinking is degraded to a disability that is far from desirable in the former article, the second one augments the former's elementary assumption with the straightforward implication that those disabled "worker bee"s (us) are useful for the society so they must be kept for the time being. In this claim, scientific skills and innovation is attributed to an obvious defect, the kind of imperfection that would render those people who suffer from it inferior if they were not useful for the advent of technology, hence for the provision of resources for the world order.
You admire the great minds, and follow them, years in a tough enterprise, and while you think you're getting somewhere you're spotted with a mark you couldn't like less. It is ironic, in a sense, that the people who lack the highly technical/scientific skills would discover this amazing fact, however that is not our primary concern. Although I suspect that these statements are overly complex driven, there is a side that should bother all of us "geeks". However, marked along you must be many distinguished minds whom you respected. By this, I refer to people such as Einstein who would call the practise of everyday life "trivialities of youth" for he had abandoned the ordinary for a life of contemplation. I refer to Carl Sagan who has always stressed the importance of scientific thinking. I refer also to people who have pioneered technology such as Alan Turing, von Neumann and Claude Shannon. Such people I should refer to, and many is their number.
I wonder, how many of the people who have dedicated a large portion of their lives to attain those skills in question will find this claim delightful. Is it their mere goal in life to work for the benefit of higher beings? In that case, the socially capable, fully functional human beings who are free of a nasty IQ load, which I understand to be a rather awkward thing to have from the point of view presented by these enlightened authors, are to administer these unfortunate souls and harvest the products the "geek" fields yield. Personally I don't find living under the rule of tasteless managers, malevolent lawyers, petty politicians and dry journalists attractive. I would like to propose a world in which those mediocre members of the society exist solely to supply the comfort the "geek"s require. "What a harsh suggestion", one would argue. "What a harsher thing to suppose the opposite" I would suggest in return. An earth inherited by "geek"s could be more entertaining, if we mean by that a society that is free from supersition and gives value to scientific thinking. A place where humane properties, first of which is thinking, are valuable...
To contribute more than a rebel-ish flavor, I'm afraid the study cited does not report "hard" scientific facts. They are biased, definitely based on personal opinion. Although it may be a tradition in the psychology field to make up everything and add a gram of science as glue, the data does not entail any of the results mentioned. Now, as the second article states, Edison, since he is a scientist, may be a safe bet for a geek. But what about Bill Gates? Is he a "geek"? Take the autistic computer programmer woman, how "geek" is she? It is difficult to reply affirmative. Now that I have demonstrated a flaw, let me pose another question. Is Edison autistic? Think of someone else, a contemporary, a leader of "geek"s: Richard Stallman. How can someone who talks so much can be autistic or mildly autistic? Take another public hacker figure, for instance Linus Torvalds. He may be arrogant, but he isn't autistic at all. For these are most renowned "geek"s, their being non-autistic allows us to refute the extremely naive claim that sophisticated technical skills are acquired only when a certain defect, known as a form of autism, exists. Indeed, the claim that some of the "geek"s have not developed sufficient social skills since they have had little chance to participate in the social life seems to be much more plausible. Otherwise, it would be a burden on the notion of "creativity", though I'm sure that these authors could utilize no ammunition from Hofstadter or Fodor, or other significant thinkers on the subject of "mind". (But practise really helps, 15 yeards of hard work and they can enjoy a fair IQ, around 70. Imagine some average journalist and psychologist trying to read a philosophy of mind paper, and looking real blank at it.)
I do protest the view that scientific skills are a deviation from the norm. That is an offense that leaps on the boundaries of insulting the whole scientific endeavour, and each single philosophical investigation. They seem to be on the side of the masses who would be better off thoughtless and mindless, from the point of view presented by the proponents of this claim. What if those "normal" people realized that intelligence is a thing to envy? Perhaps, we could have a civilization as it ought to be.
Go away lamer! I'm shocked that you've been able to install a Linux distribution.
I mean it. If you follow what that other OS has done in every way, you become it. I never wanted my Linux as a better Windows.
And as a coder, I'm sometimes suspicious about the crowd of ppl who rush things: what is the average talent of KDE / GNOME coders? When I code I always make sure the proggy is smoking and steaming, what about these people? Those object models are definitely under-rated.
Okay, as a prospective cognitive scientist, I am dazzled by the naive-ness of this article. How simple it is really. If you have superior mental capabilities, you gotta be mildly autistic. Great relief for the less clever people.
;)
However, I was never very obsessed with mathematics (I remember only 10% of all theorems or so) and I believe I never experienced any difficulty understanding someone else's emotions. Even funnier, I didn't experience life as a series of freeze frames. Seriously, I had no trouble perceiving the whole; indeed the image of the whole always formed so easily. Though, I consider myself quite good at learning, and innovation.. whatever. I've been a hacker for about 10 yrs and I'm sure that I think, talk, feel and act 3 or 4 times faster than average ppl socially. Yep, I wrote billions of lines of assembly, coded every kind of program, read zillions of science books, got a CS Bsc, did research... But in the end I've found myself to be emotionally richer than virtually all the women and 90% of the men I've ever met. Why? It's because I also experienced the "triviality of youth" as Einstein put it, to some degree. Plus, I have had the joy of processing all the literature, movies, plays, etc. I consumed in more detail.
Now, intelligence is like a swiss-blade. It will adapt to any situation within a sufficient period. Those unlucky MIT hardcore nerds, study-maths-all-day-long ppl may of course lack social skills, because they didn't get the social training -- which I believe is a piece of cake compared to the whole complexity of knowledge a human embodies.
Learning the dynamics of the society, for a smart young man/woman takes at most 2-3 years, rather shorter than the lifetime required by the dork next door. The average man shall stall at quarrels with his lover/partner, remain enslaved by the codes and traditions of his society, bow down to every kind of authority and live in happiness through slavery. He shall dress as he ought to, he shall live as he ought to, he shall take little intellectual challenge throughout his life, he shall care so little about his freedom, he shall care little about others' freedom, he shall not endeavour to understand the great minds, he shall not acquire subtle aesthetic values, he shall not see a creation to light, he shall practise emotions as a sheep does, and still like his pen. You will do otherwise.
Hey, sorry for being naive but I'd just wanted to point out to DNA design becoming a reality. Blindly tinkering with nucleotids, disabling /*commenting out*/ a gene or two, patching genes up and observing is one thing. Designing novel organisms is another.
;) (Stack Overflow) Biochemists will need to borrow all the techniques and tools from AI. Surely, this will mostly consist of software work. Even as of now, simple tools seem to exist. I think that more advanced gene analysis/design will benefit from software systems with better AI.
;) since you can compute that. If the DNA is representable as a sequence of symbols, than I'd expect some order in the chemical reactions that govern its functioning, that's why we can reason about them; they're not totally uncomprehensible... Actually, I believe that developmental systems assume order over time.
When you get to design things, the empirical approach needs to be supplemented by more rigorous methods. Being a CS person, I think one would wish to formalize the semantics contained in a DNA strand, even if this might mean that all kinds of bio-chemical interactions should be known. On top of this kind of a "virtual machine", a "soft" gene development environment could be fitted. One could imagine PL's and simulation engines, visualization / editing tools in this development environment. I have a sneaking suspicion that logic languages can be useful. (together with theorem-provers that will check semantics from a biochem KB)
Why is all that necessary? It's simply because the gene design would be such a task that it will exceed the cognitive abilities of a single human. A single chunk of data will dwarve the bandwidth of 1 researcher, so research groups won't help either
About the designs themselves, the cause for medicine is most interesting. The applications surely hold the capacity to cure diseases that resist the more traditional treatment. But the second application area, I speculate, is nano technology. The single cell organisms might lay the foundation for a variety of nano devices. Once the means to produce biological machinery is worked out, we can take the leap into a Drexlerian world.
BTW, it's great if the actuation of genes is a probability and function of chemical equilibrium (or the probabilistic fun. of
In some previous /. discussion, it'd been expressed that genetic engineering is still unlike software engineering in which one designs systems from scratch or in most cases from some level above that.
That might change.
At the end of the article, Prof Magnus states that the next century is going to be about designing genes. Now taking micro-biology classes makes sense! Seems like the gene-designers will need a lot of the knowledge from the software area. After all, it's us coders who are gurus about things like editing, compiling, debugging, bootstrapping... Looking forward to first GPL-ed gene-libraries.
Seems like you're omitting the grand idea here and still collecting all the moderation points.
What I don't like is that a development environment is intended for non-coders. An IDE similar to DevStudio just gives me that feeling. The "here moron, you can make a window like this", "see moron, click here and some sucky message map code will be generated. totally ad-hoc!" wizards or "Our library allows you to write WinSock2.0 code so easily. Just stick to our lame object model." libraries make me sick. I do think that the libraries and DE's may govern the quality of software at least.
What's more, I condemn all those excellent programmers who stick with VC! Nothing compares to emacs+ddd.
And yes, there are many GTK proggies that are not useful. Still I stress that the KDE must be pronounced "windows-wanna-be".
Yeah, I've been there and done that.
Try to code nice console programs and static libs not touching the horrible VC MFC libs and go STL and stdio instead. What happens? Lemme sort it out. You're not gonna compile half of your valid std C++ proggies. Templates will break, namespaces will blow, linkers will get confused..
I think you're overestimating the DevStudio environment.
Plus, if there are the (what - 4gl, 3gl) tools, you just want them fine and dandy. Not the lame DevStudio ones.
their mice. I think they'd have a better time doing that instead of coding VC++.
If a visual studio weanie can fire it up and run it it's the proof that the IDE sucks. Why do I hate "class wizard" term so much? Perhaps it's because I hate MS terminology: all those sucky idiot wizards in MS apps...
Why not wait for a port of MS DevStudio to Linux? I think it'd be the perfect way to fu** up the whole beauty of development on Linux. Oh no, I see the developers of KDevelop dreaming that QT is someday as big and ugly as MFC, and KDevelop performing as moronic as DevStudio. Yes, 13 year old mongoloid kids would be able to write KDE (pronounced "windows-wanna-be") applications that do incredibly useless things.
At least we had hoped that an IDE would supply that in some /. discussion. Hmmm, I'd really like an IDE that gives you full control over the tools it provides an interface to.
What's more 1) is the editor better than emacs/xemacs? 2) is the debugger better than ddd?
questions remain open. You'd have to succeed in both areas to make me pay those bucks.
Anyway, this is the kind of thing where improvement is sure to happen. What do you say?
Which features must be worked out?
But it's abandoned I guess. Whould we really take off where it's left. It used to be in the motif distributions but now it's gone.
hey, and it's motif!! hmmm. convert it so that it supports multiple platforms (gtk+qt+mfc) might be nice...
True. The reasons make QT superior to MFC. At least I can do it on X11! But what about threads? In MFC threading is no big thing. you have both worker and ui thread models. Also, recognition of standard lib is important. The standard lib in g++ is vastly superior to anything that QT or MFC can supply.
VisualAge on Linux? Anything like that? It'd be great if we had a "free" version. Gotta look into that.
It was not my intention to promote GTK at all. I'd like to get an answer to my question, because I don't know it. That's basically why I posted this as a question and not a criticism/review of various toolkits/frameworks.
It took me some years to realize that this question had to be asked, this is obviously not a newbie question and I already collected a lot of useful feedback. Please stay on topic.
I'm just trying to get people thinking over the subject. I did some brainstorming and wrote what popped up. I really want to sum it up better next time, because this is a question I'd like an answer to.
Yeah, I tried QT. And I don't like it much. Reasons I said. But I do think it makes some elementary use of C++, and helps code simple apps. Now you'll say the KOffice apps and many KDE apps are quite complex and "hip". But guess what? I don't think so. QT is only as great as MFC. I see some similarity in their designs. *grin*
And quite frankly, it's not because it's MS stuff. It's because it's gotten me much trouble. Not the same for QT, it runs great on my Debian system, and I wrote some small programs. But you can't push it too far with QT. Not very cheesy.
About C++ stuff: I love C++ and its standard lib. well I think it's great for the 80's! but still g++ isn't fully ANSI C++ and the standard's only recently been completed. I just have to say that none of the proggies I wrote for the last 2-3 years depend on libc. They just need the C++ libs.
I see that I've skipped OpenStep project entirely, and I know I should've mentioned it. Hmm, though I never got to run any OpenStep app in working order. Perhaps they must take better care of install/build scripts and manuals.
I also think that the obj-c makes a great OO environment, but from what I read at apple's web sites on Mac OS X I remember that the whole interface is going Java. They don't really stress obj-c. I wonder if that's going to drive the OpenStep project and mac os x stuff in different directions. Just what I recall...
Some points I think should be reconsidered:
;) Beside the fun part, I think you can provide the almost "linear" growth in source code size by utilizing any true OO language. Any lang. that gives you properties of an OO lang. (like abstraction, inheritance, etc.) and some extra (like genericity) would do. I don't, for instance, see why Ada9x is incapable. Personally, I dislike Java, but then swing is really praised by many coders.
1) C++ is the leading OO lang., but nothing lives forever. That's why I wrote Ada9x, I didn't want to be a C++ snob. Though, I prefer C++ over any other lang. currently.
2) About that exponential growth, I might say it's an upper bound (as a CS person
Some prince would come up with this all new magnicient kiss to warp the whole GUI programming experience into a glorious age. Unfortunately, nothing like that.
Seems Java is armed and ready for a big bang of swing apps. On the other hand, ýnterpreted languages such as tcl/tk make a strong alternative.
The technical side of graphical programming is a huge problem space that is being constantly breached by the frameworks/toolkýts in question. For the free software developer, it is currently reasonable to tap into the CORBA'ed worlds of GNOME or KDE, while it is not clear which solution is better for the developer of non-free software. Besides, a better path may be that of abstraction more ambitious than even Java libs.
In addition to GNOME/KDE, there are many libs under development. Some day, one of the newer efforts mýght result ýn a framework richer and more efficient than we are used to. It may be the underlying components (object model, messaging, language bindings, ýmage processing, design patterns) that need to be revised.
Nevertheless, it's difficult to decide which GUI framework/toolkit to use on the X with the more traditional languages lýke C/C++. Perhaps, there lies an unsolved problem, a beauty that can't yet escape sleep.
Nevertheless, the swing developers wrote that Java Swing libraries manipulate the original design pattern so that you don't have a model, view and controller object but a model and UI delegate. Well, or something like that. I think they have a reason for that: this way you have many benefits of separating model and UI code but it's still pretty simple to write apps. Hope I approximated the main theme in that article.
Here's an article at javaworld that will do the job.
I think you have a point in there. I also had to struggle with a framework: called MFC ;) I remember that in the technical report I had claimed that isolation (thus abstraction) of MFC dependency was an advantage.
Now, what about an abstraction library? A framework that categorizes and abstracts every known kind of object might be done. It could abstract away the desktop, messaging, GUI, multithreading, IPC.
I think some of the multiplatform libraries already have similar design. But I don't recall that an abstraction library with no particular toolkit in mind has been programmed. (except Java to a degree)
When you're doing it straightforward, QT is handy. A variety of applications were written with QT. Plus, it undergoes massive coding. I cannot catch up with all the new stuff in QT releases. I haven't been able to code with QT2.x at all.
But it's a bit restrictive. And the moc ýs no good. I don't like a preprocessor that limits the host language. From the C++ perspective, it's insufficient. And QString is a good idea only for a language which doesn't have a string class in its standard lib.
I also think that tcl/tk helps us code decent GUI stuff. It seems that interpreted code is very suitable for GUI development. Gives you a quick dev. cycle.
Carl Sassenrath had said that interpreted languages for GUIs must be two-way: code->gui, gui->code. I suppose he meant it for the GUI libs of his language called rebol (and prononunced rebel)