The Java class library gets hyped a lot but it's not really any more functional than the standard Perl and Python libraries. If you're willing to extend "standard library" to mean "commonly used freely available libraries that happen to not ship with the offical package", then Java gets pretty much kicked to the curb.
I, for one, am not willing to extend the meaning of standard library in that way. Freely available libraries often do not work properly on all the platforms because they weren't tested extensively on all those platforms. Then there's the issue of making end users install 3rd-party libraries. As a developer, you are not allowed to provide libraries in some cases so that the task is burdened on the user. Depending on the programming language you'll have to provide all kinds of compiled library versions for different platforms. That is all non-trivial as I can tell from personal experience.
Personally, I can't imagine why anyone would write in Java. But I've never used J2EE, which is the other thing that gets brought up, and maybe it's really cool. Java may have it's strong points, and I'm sure there's really good Java programmers out there. But if you want to narrow it down to bullet points, Java doesn't offer anything unique.
True, but uniqueness isn't really the killer feature. Java has used a lot of mostly old concepts and never claimed otherwise. I've heard it all too often, but why does the fact that, as an example, garbage collection is an old idea make it a bad or at least inferior idea? I can't tell.
Naturally, at some level there's a personal preference, and maybe the specific combination of features (and lack thereof) in Java appeals to some people. In my case, C++ and Python are my languages of choice (I had a lot of trouble getting into python cause of the silly indentation issue, and I still thing it's a horrible design decision, but now that I've been using it I'm able to overcome that). Java doesn't offer me anything I'm missing.
And I certainly don't mind that you don't use it. I just opposed to the notion that one can tell that a person is not a great hacker because he's using Java. By the way, I'm quite sure that every 'great hacker' uses more than one language.
Having programmed in Java, Python, Perl, and a motley variety of other languages, I've got to say, if you are happy in Java, especially after having tasted Perl or Python (or Ruby or Ocaml or whatever)... no, you're not one of the great and yes, they will sound arrogant. But their claims, nonetheless, will be true.
Because you say so? That's ridiculous. Who the hell do you think that you are?
What makes Java the language of choice under some circumstances (I think the 'use the right tool' mantra has been reiterated enough in this discussion) isn't merely the language, it's the class library that comes bundled with it. It's so much more elegant to write clean code that does powerful things on many platforms.
An experienced hacker is very likely to appreciate this. The more experienced one gets, the more maintainability and readability is appreciated. Somehow getting stuff to run by fumbling around trial-and-error-wise may be nice for a beginner, but after a while, one starts to strive for more.
Features from other languages are always missed. Some things are nice in Python than in Ada, in Ruby than in Java, and so on. There is no ultimate single language.
I agree that the archive search feature is terrific.
However, Google Groups is far inferior to any decent newsreader when it comes to quickly browsing articles. GG still can't deal with a lot of character encodings outside of pure ASCII. Its beta Google Groups 2 service creates postings with screwed-up headers.
No actually Google Groups DOESNT allow you to post to old articles, unless they've just recently changed this. This has always annoyed me, I thought it would be cool to reply with a 'thank you' to a 2 year old solution someone posted.
I don't think "thank you" postings should be sent at all unless there is at least some additional information in the same article. Think about how much bandwidth, disk space and time that thank you note will cost. If everyone thanked for an article that interested them by sending an additional article NetNews would be absolutely useless. I'm all for politeness, but the quick thank you from normal conversations just does not translate well.
There's something in their terms of service to forbid that. Worse - people have tried to do that (there's even a Perl module, IIRC) and got banned automatically.
There's also a Slashdot story on someone trying to obtain older archives. Unfortunately, there's not much in the comment section. I'd like to know how successful the person asking was. Unfortunately, my request (about two months ago) to forward a message of mine to the author was never answered by the Slashdot staff.
I've only seen archives for a group or at most a hierarchy. Most of the time without search functionality. And it was only for smaller groups or hierarchies, nothing like comp.* or even alt.*. So I'd say: yes, GG is the only one. If someone knows about alternatives, please write a reply!
But I post to Usenet. I never agreed that they could publish my copyright material as their archived commercial property. The very nature of Usenet means that I agreed to distribution by posting, but I never agreed to any pay-per-view deal.
People pay for accessing Usenet all the time (mostly in combination with binaries). They pay for the service, not the actual postings. It would be the same thing once Google Groups went "premium".
Google's free archive is an amazingly useful service. I just hope that never changes under pressure from stockholders, and if it does, that other alternatives will spring up.
I worry about that, too. Obviously alternative services could be started. But where would they get the older articles? I tried to get my hands on older postings from some groups, and I didn't get very far.
I see your point, but to throw in a number - last month, the German language Usenet hierarchy de retrieved three percent of its articles from Google Groups users. I'm sure that a lot more people are reading Usenet with Google Groups, but it's a long way from Google taking over Usenet.
I like Philips Senseo in combination with Douwe Egberts coffee pads. A bit pricey, but I drink less of it and it tastes a lot better.
The water is pumped through the pads at a high speed, therefore there are less bitter constituents in the resulting coffee. At least that's what someone told when I wondered why I have less stomach problems with that coffee. Nice side effect.
You deduced from literacy rates of 60 and 86 percent that only a tiny fraction of people are educated enough to contribute (let's leave out the availability of computers for the moment).
60 and 86 percent aren't tiny fractions. So, what do you mean? If someone is literate, that person may not be able to automatically contribute well-written articles. But why assume the opposite, that there isn't a large enough base of people to participate?
It's counterproductive to ignore the facts about differences between countries and cultures for the sake of a simplistic "multiculturalism". Real multiculturalism means understanding and accepting those differences, not pretending they don't exist.
I don't say that there aren't differences. I just don't understand your conclusions from literacy percentages. And in the abbreviated form that you made statements in your first comment it's easy to feel offended.
The 'educated enough' part was certainly false. But it's true that only a small fraction of people in those countries have access to computers. In India or China that fraction is more in absolute numbers than elsewhere, still not that big. It's no wonder that their respective Wikipedias aren't as big as those in English or German. But they'll come along eventually.
Yes, I'm sure. Huffman and arithmetic coding are two different things. There is a patch for libjpeg to enable arithmetic coding, but all the software had to be recompiled to use that.
It is possible, however, to losslessly optimize quite a few Huffman JPEGs by running them through jpegtran(1) with the -optimze switch. Unless that sort of optimization had been used when creating the JPEGs it can save around five to ten percent.
If IBM would release this patent, we could change some #defines in the JPEG code and get 10% smaller pictures with no change in quality.
Yes, but almost no existing software (including browsers and image viewers) would read them because they don't contain a decoder for that sort of JPEG.
Most people use the latest JDK and that's it. No problem. A C program also requires the right compiler unless it's trivial or you want to descend into ifdef hell.
it doesn't have a #include to keep parameterizations in one file,
It has import.
it is actually write-once-debug-everywhere,
Actually, it's not. At least not everywhere. In my Java experience since 1996 I've yet to see that debug everywhere nightmare. And I've touched a lot of operating systems and Java software projects. Maybe I was lucky. But debug everywhere? Ridiculous. But it's a catchy phrase to spread around if you don't really use Java as you claim in your subject line.
too many things in Java are only available as precompiled packages (open source in Java is a very rare thing) and doing anything interesting in Java requires a native method anyway (hello, C!).
Tough. If people don't want to provide source code, that's their decision. I've used binary C and C++ libraries all the time. As long as they're documented, that's okay. And yes, some things requires native calls in Java. But very few, really. If you catch yourself using JNI all the time you may have picked the wrong language for the project in the first place. Java isn't right for anything.
(for those that claim that "multiple inheritance is obsolete and I should be using "implements", remember that "implements" really means is "here is a routine with the same name, that we gaurantee is _different_ source code and will therefore NOT be bug-for-bug equivalent to the code you thought you were getting. Have a nice day and thank you for using Java".)
I claim that multiple inheritance is overestimated by some because a thing is rarely two or more other things. You get other problems with MI like the diamond of death.
Java is not the best for command line programs mainly because VM initialization is expensive (in terms of time).
True, although this has improved over time.
I have written a number of command line utilities, and while the first call to one of them requires some patience (five to ten seconds), subsequent calls to any of them are just as quick as native programs because the JVM program and the runtime environment are in file system cache. I use those tools a lot and so I don't mind the first call being slow.
I should try some day to compile one of them using gcj. Haven't looked at that in a long time.
Why? Netscan isn't a Google Groups replacement or lookalike, it's some sort of research project on connections between groups and on authors. And even more of a privacy nightmare than Google (that profile feature). But I don't know US law, it's probably perfectly legal.
But not correct in this context. Ich hab es dir gesagt is better. Or to make sound more realistic: Ich hab's dir ja gleich gesagt. If a group (=Microsoft) is supposed to be behind it: Wir haben's euch ja gleich gesagt.
Politically active Christians in the USA would find the CDU/CSU's positions on many issues abhorrent; the Christian label is just an historical anachronism from what I could tell during my two years in Germany.
Actually, they take the C for Christian rather seriously. And there are quite a few overlaps between CDU/CSU and the Republican party.
Gerhardt Schroeder, the current Chancellor, is from the major "liberal" opposition party- I forget the name now.
SPD.
For what it is worth, West Germany only had one Chancellor in the postwar era from the opposition party. All the rest were CDU/CSU until the "wiedervereinigung".
There never was an "opposition chancellor", the opposition by definition does not provide the chancellor. And if you mean opposition = SPD: there were two SPD chancellors, Brandt and Schmidt. Combined they ruled for 13 years, that's not so bad. Add another three years when the SPD shared administration responsibilities with the CDU in the fundamentally flawed "big coalition" 1966 - 1969.
Slashdot is wonderfully American-centric. Imagine if this discussion was happening on say a Chinese tech site. "There's 1.3 billion of us, and only 290 million of them. The Internet should be all in English.":)
The Internet comes from an English background. Therefore, a lot of software comes with English comments and docs only. Most tech people have an understanding of it because of that, not because they like the language so much.
Any sort of admin will have to read certain mailing lists etc. They are in English only.
Let me repeat that I'm not a native speaker when it comes to English. I speak three languages. I can differentiate German from Dutch from Finnish. But it doesn't matter. Nobody can deal with all those languages in popular use unless he's some sort of miracle philologist.
The hosting provider I worked at years ago got *LOTS* of support emails in various languages. I'm really good at recognizing languages by various clues, which was very helpful to feed it to online translation services, but not everyone is good at that.
Did you have foreign customers, or why did people send in support requests in other languages? There should be some sort of form / contact page which states what languages are being understood.
And don't be so egotistical to say "they should all speak English", the universe or even the Internet doesn't revolve around America.
Well, they should. Not every customer, obviously, but those in charge of some network. They should have one person who can answer abuse reports in English. Most network people do at least have a rudimentary understanding of English anyway because docs are often English only. Besides there's automated translation which often gives at least a good impression of what a text is about.
I say that as someone whose native language isn't English. The Net needs some lingua franca, and English seems to be a good choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks a lot. Although I guess the 2 MB/s I got come from the fact that someone using the same proxy server downloaded it before me. ;-)
The Java class library gets hyped a lot but it's not really any more functional than the standard Perl and Python libraries. If you're willing to extend "standard library" to mean "commonly used freely available libraries that happen to not ship with the offical package", then Java gets pretty much kicked to the curb.
I, for one, am not willing to extend the meaning of standard library in that way. Freely available libraries often do not work properly on all the platforms because they weren't tested extensively on all those platforms. Then there's the issue of making end users install 3rd-party libraries. As a developer, you are not allowed to provide libraries in some cases so that the task is burdened on the user. Depending on the programming language you'll have to provide all kinds of compiled library versions for different platforms. That is all non-trivial as I can tell from personal experience.
Personally, I can't imagine why anyone would write in Java. But I've never used J2EE, which is the other thing that gets brought up, and maybe it's really cool. Java may have it's strong points, and I'm sure there's really good Java programmers out there. But if you want to narrow it down to bullet points, Java doesn't offer anything unique.
True, but uniqueness isn't really the killer feature. Java has used a lot of mostly old concepts and never claimed otherwise. I've heard it all too often, but why does the fact that, as an example, garbage collection is an old idea make it a bad or at least inferior idea? I can't tell.
Naturally, at some level there's a personal preference, and maybe the specific combination of features (and lack thereof) in Java appeals to some people. In my case, C++ and Python are my languages of choice (I had a lot of trouble getting into python cause of the silly indentation issue, and I still thing it's a horrible design decision, but now that I've been using it I'm able to overcome that). Java doesn't offer me anything I'm missing.
And I certainly don't mind that you don't use it. I just opposed to the notion that one can tell that a person is not a great hacker because he's using Java. By the way, I'm quite sure that every 'great hacker' uses more than one language.
Having programmed in Java, Python, Perl, and a motley variety of other languages, I've got to say, if you are happy in Java, especially after having tasted Perl or Python (or Ruby or Ocaml or whatever)... no, you're not one of the great and yes, they will sound arrogant. But their claims, nonetheless, will be true.
Because you say so? That's ridiculous. Who the hell do you think that you are?
What makes Java the language of choice under some circumstances (I think the 'use the right tool' mantra has been reiterated enough in this discussion) isn't merely the language, it's the class library that comes bundled with it. It's so much more elegant to write clean code that does powerful things on many platforms.
An experienced hacker is very likely to appreciate this. The more experienced one gets, the more maintainability and readability is appreciated. Somehow getting stuff to run by fumbling around trial-and-error-wise may be nice for a beginner, but after a while, one starts to strive for more.
Features from other languages are always missed. Some things are nice in Python than in Ada, in Ruby than in Java, and so on. There is no ultimate single language.
I agree that the archive search feature is terrific.
However, Google Groups is far inferior to any decent newsreader when it comes to quickly browsing articles. GG still can't deal with a lot of character encodings outside of pure ASCII. Its beta Google Groups 2 service creates postings with screwed-up headers.
...reminds me of that quote from the movie 'Legally Blonde': "Is orange the new pink?".
No actually Google Groups DOESNT allow you to post to old articles, unless they've just recently changed this. This has always annoyed me, I thought it would be cool to reply with a 'thank you' to a 2 year old solution someone posted.
I don't think "thank you" postings should be sent at all unless there is at least some additional information in the same article. Think about how much bandwidth, disk space and time that thank you note will cost. If everyone thanked for an article that interested them by sending an additional article NetNews would be absolutely useless. I'm all for politeness, but the quick thank you from normal conversations just does not translate well.
There's something in their terms of service to forbid that. Worse - people have tried to do that (there's even a Perl module, IIRC) and got banned automatically.
There's also a Slashdot story on someone trying to obtain older archives. Unfortunately, there's not much in the comment section. I'd like to know how successful the person asking was. Unfortunately, my request (about two months ago) to forward a message of mine to the author was never answered by the Slashdot staff.
I've only seen archives for a group or at most a hierarchy. Most of the time without search functionality. And it was only for smaller groups or hierarchies, nothing like comp.* or even alt.*. So I'd say: yes, GG is the only one. If someone knows about alternatives, please write a reply!
But I post to Usenet. I never agreed that they could publish my copyright material as their archived commercial property. The very nature of Usenet means that I agreed to distribution by posting, but I never agreed to any pay-per-view deal.
People pay for accessing Usenet all the time (mostly in combination with binaries). They pay for the service, not the actual postings. It would be the same thing once Google Groups went "premium".
Google's free archive is an amazingly useful service. I just hope that never changes under pressure from stockholders, and if it does, that other alternatives will spring up.
I worry about that, too. Obviously alternative services could be started. But where would they get the older articles? I tried to get my hands on older postings from some groups, and I didn't get very far.
I see your point, but to throw in a number - last month, the German language Usenet hierarchy de retrieved three percent of its articles from Google Groups users. I'm sure that a lot more people are reading Usenet with Google Groups, but it's a long way from Google taking over Usenet.
I like Philips Senseo in combination with Douwe Egberts coffee pads. A bit pricey, but I drink less of it and it tastes a lot better.
The water is pumped through the pads at a high speed, therefore there are less bitter constituents in the resulting coffee. At least that's what someone told when I wondered why I have less stomach problems with that coffee. Nice side effect.
You deduced from literacy rates of 60 and 86 percent that only a tiny fraction of people are educated enough to contribute (let's leave out the availability of computers for the moment).
60 and 86 percent aren't tiny fractions. So, what do you mean? If someone is literate, that person may not be able to automatically contribute well-written articles. But why assume the opposite, that there isn't a large enough base of people to participate?
It's counterproductive to ignore the facts about differences between countries and cultures for the sake of a simplistic "multiculturalism". Real multiculturalism means understanding and accepting those differences, not pretending they don't exist.
I don't say that there aren't differences. I just don't understand your conclusions from literacy percentages. And in the abbreviated form that you made statements in your first comment it's easy to feel offended.
The 'educated enough' part was certainly false. But it's true that only a small fraction of people in those countries have access to computers. In India or China that fraction is more in absolute numbers than elsewhere, still not that big. It's no wonder that their respective Wikipedias aren't as big as those in English or German. But they'll come along eventually.
Yes, I'm sure. Huffman and arithmetic coding are two different things. There is a patch for libjpeg to enable arithmetic coding, but all the software had to be recompiled to use that.
It is possible, however, to losslessly optimize quite a few Huffman JPEGs by running them through jpegtran(1) with the -optimze switch. Unless that sort of optimization had been used when creating the JPEGs it can save around five to ten percent.
If IBM would release this patent, we could change some #defines in the JPEG code and get 10% smaller pictures with no change in quality.
Yes, but almost no existing software (including browsers and image viewers) would read them because they don't contain a decoder for that sort of JPEG.
it requires the right JVM
Most people use the latest JDK and that's it. No problem. A C program also requires the right compiler unless it's trivial or you want to descend into ifdef hell.
it doesn't have a #include to keep parameterizations in one file,
It has import.
it is actually write-once-debug-everywhere,
Actually, it's not. At least not everywhere. In my Java experience since 1996 I've yet to see that debug everywhere nightmare. And I've touched a lot of operating systems and Java software projects. Maybe I was lucky. But debug everywhere? Ridiculous. But it's a catchy phrase to spread around if you don't really use Java as you claim in your subject line.
too many things in Java are only available as precompiled packages (open source in Java is a very rare thing)
and doing anything interesting in Java requires a native method anyway (hello, C!).
Tough. If people don't want to provide source code, that's their decision. I've used binary C and C++ libraries all the time. As long as they're documented, that's okay. And yes, some things requires native calls in Java. But very few, really. If you catch yourself using JNI all the time you may have picked the wrong language for the project in the first place. Java isn't right for anything.
(for those that claim that "multiple inheritance is obsolete and I should be using "implements", remember that "implements" really means is "here is a routine with the same name, that we gaurantee is _different_ source code and will therefore NOT be bug-for-bug equivalent to the code you thought you were getting. Have a nice day and thank you for using Java".)
I claim that multiple inheritance is overestimated by some because a thing is rarely two or more other things. You get other problems with MI like the diamond of death.
Java is not the best for command line programs mainly because VM initialization is expensive (in terms of time).
True, although this has improved over time.
I have written a number of command line utilities, and while the first call to one of them requires some patience (five to ten seconds), subsequent calls to any of them are just as quick as native programs because the JVM program and the runtime environment are in file system cache. I use those tools a lot and so I don't mind the first call being slow.
I should try some day to compile one of them using gcj. Haven't looked at that in a long time.
Kind of suprsising
Why? Netscan isn't a Google Groups replacement or lookalike, it's some sort of research project on connections between groups and on authors. And even more of a privacy nightmare than Google (that profile feature). But I don't know US law, it's probably perfectly legal.
For those of you wondering where the pictures on the cinema displays...
:(
Where are those pictures? I can't seem to find the links...
But not correct in this context. Ich hab es dir gesagt is better. Or to make sound more realistic: Ich hab's dir ja gleich gesagt. If a group (=Microsoft) is supposed to be behind it: Wir haben's euch ja gleich gesagt.
Politically active Christians in the USA would find the CDU/CSU's positions on many issues abhorrent; the Christian label is just an historical anachronism from what I could tell during my two years in Germany.
Actually, they take the C for Christian rather seriously. And there are quite a few overlaps between CDU/CSU and the Republican party.
Gerhardt Schroeder, the current Chancellor, is from the major "liberal" opposition party- I forget the name now.
SPD.
For what it is worth, West Germany only had one Chancellor in the postwar era from the opposition party. All the rest were CDU/CSU until the "wiedervereinigung".
There never was an "opposition chancellor", the opposition by definition does not provide the chancellor. And if you mean opposition = SPD: there were two SPD chancellors, Brandt and Schmidt. Combined they ruled for 13 years, that's not so bad. Add another three years when the SPD shared administration responsibilities with the CDU in the fundamentally flawed "big coalition" 1966 - 1969.
Slashdot is wonderfully American-centric. Imagine if this discussion was happening on say a Chinese tech site. "There's 1.3 billion of us, and only 290 million of them. The Internet should be all in English." :)
The Internet comes from an English background. Therefore, a lot of software comes with English comments and docs only. Most tech people have an understanding of it because of that, not because they like the language so much.
Any sort of admin will have to read certain mailing lists etc. They are in English only.
Let me repeat that I'm not a native speaker when it comes to English. I speak three languages. I can differentiate German from Dutch from Finnish. But it doesn't matter. Nobody can deal with all those languages in popular use unless he's some sort of miracle philologist.
The hosting provider I worked at years ago got *LOTS* of support emails in various languages. I'm really good at recognizing languages by various clues, which was very helpful to feed it to online translation services, but not everyone is good at that.
Did you have foreign customers, or why did people send in support requests in other languages? There should be some sort of form / contact page which states what languages are being understood.
If you do want to put in the effort of trying to identify languages, try TextCat and its fellow language id programs.
And don't be so egotistical to say "they should all speak English", the universe or even the Internet doesn't revolve around America.
Well, they should. Not every customer, obviously, but those in charge of some network. They should have one person who can answer abuse reports in English. Most network people do at least have a rudimentary understanding of English anyway because docs are often English only. Besides there's automated translation which often gives at least a good impression of what a text is about.
I say that as someone whose native language isn't English. The Net needs some lingua franca, and English seems to be a good choice.
Surfen auf Trümmern (in German).