But the Jar is the exploit and that has to be downloaded for the JVM to load it. You won't find the DLL but that's not really the exploit. Any jar that is designed to get out of the sand box without being signed should be locked up by the AntiVirus as a code exploit.
Doesn't mean that the JAR has to hit disk. Java can load code out of memory just fine, though it has to go via the verifier on its journey from bytes to a loaded class. The problem comes when something messes up and gives code loaded from an untrusted source permission to do too much. Wasting CPU is irritating; turning into part of a botnet is much worse.
Well I would, for one. Apparently you don't understand just how serious a felony is. No stupid broken egg is worth taking away years of someone's life, their right to vote, and their right to bear arms.
It's as well to bear in mind that as a UK citizen he won't lose the right to vote. Well, except possibly for the time he's a serving prisoner if he's convicted; I don't know how that works with someone in a foreign jail, but I believe that UK citizens have the right to vote provided they're not actually in jail at the time (and provided they're registered in a constituency). Prisoners on remand (i.e., prior to conviction) have full rights to vote, as does anyone who's completed their sentence.
The UK (specifically England, the most applicable part of the UK given that Brand is a Londoner) doesn't have "felony" as a concept in its legal system. It does have "summary only", "indictable only" and "either way" levels of severity — I know someone who's a magistrate — but "indictable only" is not the same as "felony"; there isn't this whole keying of rights off conviction or not. (Heck, there's been discussion on and off for years as to whether the suffrage should be extended to serving prisoners. Alas, WP is unusually opaque in this area and I'm not sure what the current situation is.)
Yes, or recklessness, i.e., lacking a reasonable amount of care. For example, killing someone because you can't be bothered to be careful is still wrong, even if there was no actual intent to harm.
It sounds like you're thinking about TCL rather than Python.
It's not especially accurate about Tcl in the past decade or so either, where values are dynamically tagged with an interpretation that makes repeated accesses efficient. It's a string the first time (well duh! you typed it or had it saved in a file!) but afterwards it's fast as the implementation code can check type-correctness with a single comparison. (Well, there's more to it than that when dealing with numbers or dynamically-recompilable code but the principle still holds.)
Personally my biggest complaint about python wasn’t on the list: A lot of the (common) libraries out there are poorly documented, inconsistent, buggy, or incomplete.
That's true of so many libraries, not just for Python but other languages too. The more popular a language, the more you'll come across libraries for it that just aren't written to a high standard. The problem is the nature of poor programmers: they tend to gravitate to whatever they think is winning some kind of buzzword contest at the moment and their output is a POS in any language.
The concept might not even make sense. OTOH, the dynamic languages are much better at supporting an interactive model of development: try some things out at an interactive prompt, and cut-n-paste the stuff that works into a script file. Dress it up a little and you're good to go. It's a fast way to make something that works.
True, the Republic of Ireland broke off from the UK in the 1920s. But the northeast tip of the island of Ireland is occupied by Northern Ireland, one of the four countries of the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland".
What's more, you can drive around in the UK permanently (well, stopping to sleep, eat, etc.) with a Northern Irish number plate, as it is a valid UK plate. It's just not issued by the DVLA. Quite a few people use NI plates (myself included) as they don't reveal the age of the car to a casual glance.
I know if I was heading to England and saw an exit for Hawaii, I'd make some quick travel changes.
Yeah, but you'd still have to wait until you got to the other end of the Chunnel. (It's a rail tunnel; long, black, goes under the sea but otherwise totally boring. Nothing to see at all. Your car would be loaded on a special railcar for the duration of the journey.)
There's more money to be made faster by having card readers at the pump since it frees "fuel only" customers from waiting for a clerk.
It's changing, but slowly. The fuel-sales industry isn't noted for wanting to replace equipment (or working practices) when not absolutely necessary...
Good luck with that DDOS, because the way it will be implemented is via private leased lines, not public networks like the Internet.
And that's going to scale up to a national fueling infrastructure without some Bright Spark deciding to send it over the internet? Don't make me laugh.
Not that that's either of the main problems with this scheme. More pertinent is the fact that there will be a need to fuel up vehicles not in the database (or were they planning to try to get all the other vehicle license plate issuing authorities in the world to cooperate? Ho ho ho.) and it will just encourage an up-tick in the rate of theft of number plates. The fact that the whole infrastructure is likely to be vulnerable to attack (though not as vulnerable as the GP seems to think; it's not that hard to build a resilient infrastructure if you really want to) just adds a cherry on top of this whole pile of fail.
2. Who's collecting these statistics? The judicial system? The judicial system has been proven prejudice by hundreds of studies over the years. They convict more minorities of crimes, they give them longer sentences, they charge them with more infractions. They pull over a white kid with a pocket knife and they call his parents, they get a black kid with the same knife and he's getting charged with a felony. Are blacks really twice as likely to commit a crime with a knife? Or are they just twice as likely to get convicted?
The core problem is that it appears that people who are black in the US are more likely to be in poverty than the national average. Worldwide, being poor is more strongly correlated with crime (whether as perp or victim) and that particularly holds true for violent crime. Just that, in itself, is sufficient to imply a higher likelihood of being a prisoner if you're black (in the US; I'd expect different race-based statistics in Russia, for example).
So any study that you conduct into conviction rates has got to first take into account the offending rate, but the problem is working out what that rate really is. It's perhaps most easily done with very serious crimes like murder, since it's presumably considered pretty heinous everywhere and by everyone; every modern society is pretty down on random private killings. Given that, the questions to ask would be what is the rate of accusation relative to the local population, what is the rate of conviction relative to the rate of accusation, and what is the distribution of sentencing given the conviction. Are these questions being asked? (I genuinely don't know.) We have an ideal of justice being blind, but in reality it is important to monitor whether the systems we have really are fair: to simply just assume it is clearly foolish, as it would be entirely possible for there to be systematic problems which we are unaware of if we don't look.
Now you have three choice for dealing with a fact like that. You can just allude to it without citations. You can cite an encyclopedia entry on Eliot Richardson. Or you can try to dig up original references in US government documents. Well, the search for original sources for a fact like this isn't really worth the trouble, and the encyclopedia citation is forbidden, so what people do in cases like this is simply go ahead and use the fact without citing a source.
It depends also on whether the fact you're talking about is the primary focus of the paper or not. If it is the primary focus, your only real choice is to do the work and look at the original sources (and much else besides). When it isn't the primary focus though, the best option is to cite some other peer-reviewed scholarly article (or book) for which it was the primary focus. You don't have to do all research from scratch (there's not enough time in the universe for that) but it is right to justify your arguments; if those are really the arguments of others (fair for a non-primary point of the work) then doing so by citation is entirely correct.
If there isn't such a paper out there, you've identified an opportunity to fill a "gap in the market". You might need to read things outside your comfort zone to do the job properly, but that's just how life is sometimes.
Since when Microsoft started counting those as bugs? Their usual policy is only to count remote exploits as "real" bugs worth being announced.
Why complain? It's exactly the right thing for Microsoft to be doing.
Their big problem is the massive overhang of software that's not been properly designed for security (e.g., too much is still default-allow) and which people continue to want to use. The various Unix-based OSes have an advantage here, even if it is one of happenstance: Unix apps have been designed for use in privilege-separated environments, and have been for many decades. Microsoft got with the program later, and that's always much harder. (Also, their commitment to supporting crufty older software, while generally pretty commendable, works against them a lot in this case.)
* update google.de site to return only the links and ads. Provide a banner stating why it is this way (or info bubble or something). Provide a means for site administrators to opt out (or would it be opt in?) to allow text blubs.
You can only do that if the law makes provision for it. If there's no legal way to do it, then it's time to deploy the old tactic of conspicuously complying with the law with the biggest amount of "fuck you" possible. Aiming the tactics to cause maximum harm to the corporate backers of the bill is of course the best approach. (Before you ask, Google's not going to be special in this; I can't see any other search engine wanting to put up with this sort of thing either.)
* Leave google.com alone. Tell Germany to block google.com if it wants to - that'd be their responsibility (I think).
That'd be a site operated by a foreign company outside German jurisdiction. Why would they pay a lot of attention to German law anyway? They have their own local laws to worry about.
I wonder. If there was an issue with a specific company, AND if Google was declared a monopoly, would not listing that company count as anticompetitive?
I truly can't see how that matters. Any law would have to apply to all search engines equally anyway, so the only safe thing for any of them to do would be to refuse to index German sites or provide search results to people and businesses in Germany. OK, depending on the detail of the law it might be possible to be a little less draconian than that (e.g., it might be possible to provide snippets of non-.de sites) but any search engine would still be in the same position as Google with respect to German law (or the law would be deemed to be totally unfair, and thus get struck out by courts). Somehow I suspect that those who propose/desire this law do not believe that that's what would happen, but despite being the largest economy in Europe, they're still not that large that it is impossible for a search engine to not serve them and still be viable. Consequences are pretty clear: "we're not paying anyone for snippets that are in effect advertising for your site; whatever you try, we still won't pay you" will be the unanimous response. I also bet that the organizations who think they'd gain from this would blink before the search engines did. About the only single countries that are truly important are the US (though no single state) and China. Europe's about as important as the US in terms of market size, but isn't a single country. (What's more, German legislation is definitely not going to be enforced anywhere else. The whole idea of that makes me giggle a bit.) Search engines do not need the German traffic, and could swallow the hit of not operating there if necessary; whether or not they could afford to also take the hit on paying for snippets is beside the point: it's so totally in opposition to their business model that they won't.
Mind you, this just appears to be an idea that's being floated by a politician-crony of Big Content, and an unusually ill-considered one at that. If it withers on the vine (most likely outcome by far, IMO) then it's no big deal. Let's worry about things that might actually be enacted for real, not the wilder reaches of the improbable; you can always find someone who'll say something outrageous, but if it's just talk then that's all it is.
Which is pretty much an internet death sentence. Smart.
So? Google is not under an actual legal obligation to index or describe any site hosted in Germany (or anywhere else). The enormous majority of people outside Germany wouldn't care if their sites vanished from the face of the earth. The simplest technical response to such a law would therefore be for search engines to not return any matches at all for German sites (and to not provide any results at all to people in Germany). Very simple to implement. Complies with the law.
Also totally not what the legislator had in mind, but who cares about what passes for thought in his or her neck of the woods?
Often I wonder why we bother changing clocks at all, or having time-zones, and why we don't just let businesses and people decide on a local level on hours appropriate to the region of the world they are in.
It's really useful to be able to schedule something at a time that everyone can agree on. That requires agreeing on a real time (whatever we call it) and it's a heck of a lot more convenient if everyone in a particular area uses the same timezone since most such interactions are local. That puts it in the domain of something controlled by government (even if we could debate endlessly what the correct level of government it is).
Which isn't to say that everywhere is using a sensible choice of timezone (both Maine and Spain are particularly daft, but for "opposite" reasons) or that people and businesses need to stick to exactly the same hours within that timezone as everyone else. We have DST solely because too many people don't understand the difference between time itself and the descriptions and measurements of time.
Agreed. I am getting a bit tired of things moving to video only. Videos are hard to skim or speed-read, you have to absorb things at the pace the speaker feels like moving at, which is usually pretty slow/inefficient.
Having just watched that video, I'd make the point that while in general I agree, it's not so true this time. The ideas involved are really rather deep, and all the neat tech demos in the first half aren't the real point (many of which serve just to act as indictments of how hard some of our tools really are). What he's really talking about is that some people should seek to find a cause to fight for in their programming, a way to totally transform the nature of the world through their creations.
Very interesting, will take time to digest. Perhaps not for me at all...
I use Java with an IDE with features that benefit from static typing, such as accurate code completion, finding definitions, references, and documentation with single keystrokes. It also features an interactive debugger that also lets me test snippets of code, as well as go back in the stack trace and examine data. This makes me 4 times more productive than Python, for example.
With all respect, you use Java with an IDE because the language is nearly unprogrammable without one. In particular, the libraries are colossal and have so many intricate features that an IDE is about the only way to do it. Scripting languages are much more manageable; it's practical to write them without an IDE precisely because they have a REPL instead. This means that instead of needing types to guide you through the API, you can instead interactively try stuff out and then copy into your script the bits that work. It's a different way of doing things, and if you've never worked that way you won't appreciate its power.
But it's not new. Programmers have been doing this for many decades. Heck, it predates the IDE and quite possibly the GUI too.
I think we might even be able to call this setting oriented programming. You change the settings in the program, and the settings become a part of the program. Carried out to the logical extreme, you load and run "nothing", and change the settings on it until it does what you want. Then you export your.conf,.INI, or registry from the session of "nothing" that you ran. The.conf file is the program.
Ssssh! I know people who have been using this technique for over a decade to sell scripting to their overly-conservative management. "It's all a compiled program, it just loads a few settings from a text file so that we can customize a few bits at the last minute." (Sure, those settings just happen to be an honest computer program, but that's strictly a matter for techies only...)
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But the Jar is the exploit and that has to be downloaded for the JVM to load it. You won't find the DLL but that's not really the exploit. Any jar that is designed to get out of the sand box without being signed should be locked up by the AntiVirus as a code exploit.
Doesn't mean that the JAR has to hit disk. Java can load code out of memory just fine, though it has to go via the verifier on its journey from bytes to a loaded class. The problem comes when something messes up and gives code loaded from an untrusted source permission to do too much. Wasting CPU is irritating; turning into part of a botnet is much worse.
Good to see London going for public infrastucture development during the recession.
It'd be even better if they weren't leeching money from the rest of the country to pay for it. Let Londoners pay for their own local infrastructure.
It needs to be first person, it needs to have blood, also needs to have dubstep music.
Oh, and don't forget DLC with new tennis balls and racket designs.
You can't deny it Atari, this is the only way to go.
Add in a pointless MMO element, and make the ball "angry" too!
More than the money value of the phone, a phone is a communication device. For that reason alone it should be a felony to snatch any phone.
Can we extend that to empty bean tins too? After all, as all good schoolchildren know you can use them to make a communications device.
Well I would, for one. Apparently you don't understand just how serious a felony is. No stupid broken egg is worth taking away years of someone's life, their right to vote, and their right to bear arms.
It's as well to bear in mind that as a UK citizen he won't lose the right to vote. Well, except possibly for the time he's a serving prisoner if he's convicted; I don't know how that works with someone in a foreign jail, but I believe that UK citizens have the right to vote provided they're not actually in jail at the time (and provided they're registered in a constituency). Prisoners on remand (i.e., prior to conviction) have full rights to vote, as does anyone who's completed their sentence.
The UK (specifically England, the most applicable part of the UK given that Brand is a Londoner) doesn't have "felony" as a concept in its legal system. It does have "summary only", "indictable only" and "either way" levels of severity — I know someone who's a magistrate — but "indictable only" is not the same as "felony"; there isn't this whole keying of rights off conviction or not. (Heck, there's been discussion on and off for years as to whether the suffrage should be extended to serving prisoners. Alas, WP is unusually opaque in this area and I'm not sure what the current situation is.)
Shouldn't a crime require intent?
Yes, or recklessness, i.e., lacking a reasonable amount of care. For example, killing someone because you can't be bothered to be careful is still wrong, even if there was no actual intent to harm.
Huh? Not even close.
It sounds like you're thinking about TCL rather than Python.
It's not especially accurate about Tcl in the past decade or so either, where values are dynamically tagged with an interpretation that makes repeated accesses efficient. It's a string the first time (well duh! you typed it or had it saved in a file!) but afterwards it's fast as the implementation code can check type-correctness with a single comparison. (Well, there's more to it than that when dealing with numbers or dynamically-recompilable code but the principle still holds.)
Personally my biggest complaint about python wasn’t on the list: A lot of the (common) libraries out there are poorly documented, inconsistent, buggy, or incomplete.
That's true of so many libraries, not just for Python but other languages too. The more popular a language, the more you'll come across libraries for it that just aren't written to a high standard. The problem is the nature of poor programmers: they tend to gravitate to whatever they think is winning some kind of buzzword contest at the moment and their output is a POS in any language.
No one has figured out how to make them.
The concept might not even make sense. OTOH, the dynamic languages are much better at supporting an interactive model of development: try some things out at an interactive prompt, and cut-n-paste the stuff that works into a script file. Dress it up a little and you're good to go. It's a fast way to make something that works.
so.. what's the rigorous background check? that you haven't been convicted of terrorism before?
They check whether you've ever been a suicide bomber before.
True, the Republic of Ireland broke off from the UK in the 1920s. But the northeast tip of the island of Ireland is occupied by Northern Ireland, one of the four countries of the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland".
What's more, you can drive around in the UK permanently (well, stopping to sleep, eat, etc.) with a Northern Irish number plate, as it is a valid UK plate. It's just not issued by the DVLA. Quite a few people use NI plates (myself included) as they don't reveal the age of the car to a casual glance.
I know if I was heading to England and saw an exit for Hawaii, I'd make some quick travel changes.
Yeah, but you'd still have to wait until you got to the other end of the Chunnel. (It's a rail tunnel; long, black, goes under the sea but otherwise totally boring. Nothing to see at all. Your car would be loaded on a special railcar for the duration of the journey.)
There's more money to be made faster by having card readers at the pump since it frees "fuel only" customers from waiting for a clerk.
It's changing, but slowly. The fuel-sales industry isn't noted for wanting to replace equipment (or working practices) when not absolutely necessary...
Good luck with that DDOS, because the way it will be implemented is via private leased lines, not public networks like the Internet.
And that's going to scale up to a national fueling infrastructure without some Bright Spark deciding to send it over the internet? Don't make me laugh.
Not that that's either of the main problems with this scheme. More pertinent is the fact that there will be a need to fuel up vehicles not in the database (or were they planning to try to get all the other vehicle license plate issuing authorities in the world to cooperate? Ho ho ho.) and it will just encourage an up-tick in the rate of theft of number plates. The fact that the whole infrastructure is likely to be vulnerable to attack (though not as vulnerable as the GP seems to think; it's not that hard to build a resilient infrastructure if you really want to) just adds a cherry on top of this whole pile of fail.
2. Who's collecting these statistics? The judicial system? The judicial system has been proven prejudice by hundreds of studies over the years. They convict more minorities of crimes, they give them longer sentences, they charge them with more infractions. They pull over a white kid with a pocket knife and they call his parents, they get a black kid with the same knife and he's getting charged with a felony. Are blacks really twice as likely to commit a crime with a knife? Or are they just twice as likely to get convicted?
The core problem is that it appears that people who are black in the US are more likely to be in poverty than the national average. Worldwide, being poor is more strongly correlated with crime (whether as perp or victim) and that particularly holds true for violent crime. Just that, in itself, is sufficient to imply a higher likelihood of being a prisoner if you're black (in the US; I'd expect different race-based statistics in Russia, for example).
So any study that you conduct into conviction rates has got to first take into account the offending rate, but the problem is working out what that rate really is. It's perhaps most easily done with very serious crimes like murder, since it's presumably considered pretty heinous everywhere and by everyone; every modern society is pretty down on random private killings. Given that, the questions to ask would be what is the rate of accusation relative to the local population, what is the rate of conviction relative to the rate of accusation, and what is the distribution of sentencing given the conviction. Are these questions being asked? (I genuinely don't know.) We have an ideal of justice being blind, but in reality it is important to monitor whether the systems we have really are fair: to simply just assume it is clearly foolish, as it would be entirely possible for there to be systematic problems which we are unaware of if we don't look.
Now you have three choice for dealing with a fact like that. You can just allude to it without citations. You can cite an encyclopedia entry on Eliot Richardson. Or you can try to dig up original references in US government documents. Well, the search for original sources for a fact like this isn't really worth the trouble, and the encyclopedia citation is forbidden, so what people do in cases like this is simply go ahead and use the fact without citing a source.
It depends also on whether the fact you're talking about is the primary focus of the paper or not. If it is the primary focus, your only real choice is to do the work and look at the original sources (and much else besides). When it isn't the primary focus though, the best option is to cite some other peer-reviewed scholarly article (or book) for which it was the primary focus. You don't have to do all research from scratch (there's not enough time in the universe for that) but it is right to justify your arguments; if those are really the arguments of others (fair for a non-primary point of the work) then doing so by citation is entirely correct.
If there isn't such a paper out there, you've identified an opportunity to fill a "gap in the market". You might need to read things outside your comfort zone to do the job properly, but that's just how life is sometimes.
Since when Microsoft started counting those as bugs? Their usual policy is only to count remote exploits as "real" bugs worth being announced.
Why complain? It's exactly the right thing for Microsoft to be doing.
Their big problem is the massive overhang of software that's not been properly designed for security (e.g., too much is still default-allow) and which people continue to want to use. The various Unix-based OSes have an advantage here, even if it is one of happenstance: Unix apps have been designed for use in privilege-separated environments, and have been for many decades. Microsoft got with the program later, and that's always much harder. (Also, their commitment to supporting crufty older software, while generally pretty commendable, works against them a lot in this case.)
* update google .de site to return only the links and ads. Provide a banner stating why it is this way (or info bubble or something). Provide a means for site administrators to opt out (or would it be opt in?) to allow text blubs.
You can only do that if the law makes provision for it. If there's no legal way to do it, then it's time to deploy the old tactic of conspicuously complying with the law with the biggest amount of "fuck you" possible. Aiming the tactics to cause maximum harm to the corporate backers of the bill is of course the best approach. (Before you ask, Google's not going to be special in this; I can't see any other search engine wanting to put up with this sort of thing either.)
* Leave google.com alone. Tell Germany to block google.com if it wants to - that'd be their responsibility (I think).
That'd be a site operated by a foreign company outside German jurisdiction. Why would they pay a lot of attention to German law anyway? They have their own local laws to worry about.
I wonder. If there was an issue with a specific company, AND if Google was declared a monopoly, would not listing that company count as anticompetitive?
I truly can't see how that matters. Any law would have to apply to all search engines equally anyway, so the only safe thing for any of them to do would be to refuse to index German sites or provide search results to people and businesses in Germany. OK, depending on the detail of the law it might be possible to be a little less draconian than that (e.g., it might be possible to provide snippets of non-.de sites) but any search engine would still be in the same position as Google with respect to German law (or the law would be deemed to be totally unfair, and thus get struck out by courts). Somehow I suspect that those who propose/desire this law do not believe that that's what would happen, but despite being the largest economy in Europe, they're still not that large that it is impossible for a search engine to not serve them and still be viable. Consequences are pretty clear: "we're not paying anyone for snippets that are in effect advertising for your site; whatever you try, we still won't pay you" will be the unanimous response. I also bet that the organizations who think they'd gain from this would blink before the search engines did. About the only single countries that are truly important are the US (though no single state) and China. Europe's about as important as the US in terms of market size, but isn't a single country. (What's more, German legislation is definitely not going to be enforced anywhere else. The whole idea of that makes me giggle a bit.) Search engines do not need the German traffic, and could swallow the hit of not operating there if necessary; whether or not they could afford to also take the hit on paying for snippets is beside the point: it's so totally in opposition to their business model that they won't.
Mind you, this just appears to be an idea that's being floated by a politician-crony of Big Content, and an unusually ill-considered one at that. If it withers on the vine (most likely outcome by far, IMO) then it's no big deal. Let's worry about things that might actually be enacted for real, not the wilder reaches of the improbable; you can always find someone who'll say something outrageous, but if it's just talk then that's all it is.
Which is pretty much an internet death sentence. Smart.
So? Google is not under an actual legal obligation to index or describe any site hosted in Germany (or anywhere else). The enormous majority of people outside Germany wouldn't care if their sites vanished from the face of the earth. The simplest technical response to such a law would therefore be for search engines to not return any matches at all for German sites (and to not provide any results at all to people in Germany). Very simple to implement. Complies with the law.
Also totally not what the legislator had in mind, but who cares about what passes for thought in his or her neck of the woods?
Often I wonder why we bother changing clocks at all, or having time-zones, and why we don't just let businesses and people decide on a local level on hours appropriate to the region of the world they are in.
It's really useful to be able to schedule something at a time that everyone can agree on. That requires agreeing on a real time (whatever we call it) and it's a heck of a lot more convenient if everyone in a particular area uses the same timezone since most such interactions are local. That puts it in the domain of something controlled by government (even if we could debate endlessly what the correct level of government it is).
Which isn't to say that everywhere is using a sensible choice of timezone (both Maine and Spain are particularly daft, but for "opposite" reasons) or that people and businesses need to stick to exactly the same hours within that timezone as everyone else. We have DST solely because too many people don't understand the difference between time itself and the descriptions and measurements of time.
Agreed. I am getting a bit tired of things moving to video only. Videos are hard to skim or speed-read, you have to absorb things at the pace the speaker feels like moving at, which is usually pretty slow/inefficient.
Having just watched that video, I'd make the point that while in general I agree, it's not so true this time. The ideas involved are really rather deep, and all the neat tech demos in the first half aren't the real point (many of which serve just to act as indictments of how hard some of our tools really are). What he's really talking about is that some people should seek to find a cause to fight for in their programming, a way to totally transform the nature of the world through their creations.
Very interesting, will take time to digest. Perhaps not for me at all...
Isn't that Delphi?
It's what Delphi evolved out of, so yes.
I use Java with an IDE with features that benefit from static typing, such as accurate code completion, finding definitions, references, and documentation with single keystrokes. It also features an interactive debugger that also lets me test snippets of code, as well as go back in the stack trace and examine data. This makes me 4 times more productive than Python, for example.
With all respect, you use Java with an IDE because the language is nearly unprogrammable without one. In particular, the libraries are colossal and have so many intricate features that an IDE is about the only way to do it. Scripting languages are much more manageable; it's practical to write them without an IDE precisely because they have a REPL instead. This means that instead of needing types to guide you through the API, you can instead interactively try stuff out and then copy into your script the bits that work. It's a different way of doing things, and if you've never worked that way you won't appreciate its power.
But it's not new. Programmers have been doing this for many decades. Heck, it predates the IDE and quite possibly the GUI too.
I think we might even be able to call this setting oriented programming. You change the settings in the program, and the settings become a part of the program. Carried out to the logical extreme, you load and run "nothing", and change the settings on it until it does what you want. Then you export your .conf, .INI, or registry from the session of "nothing" that you ran. The .conf file is the program.
Ssssh! I know people who have been using this technique for over a decade to sell scripting to their overly-conservative management. "It's all a compiled program, it just loads a few settings from a text file so that we can customize a few bits at the last minute." (Sure, those settings just happen to be an honest computer program, but that's strictly a matter for techies only...)