My Company got bought by a shop with more money but less product then us. Three years went by and they were unable to assimilate us or even produce one their much anticipated new line of.NET based products. I found out why when one of their young programmers came to our location and spoke proudly of his steady improvement as a programmer, "I am up to 20% comments in my source code, when I first started I was really bad at about 5%" Good thing there were people here to hold me back, I really wanted to smack some sense into him.
Here it is real simple: machine code is for machines, programming languages are for programmers, comments are for managers. The product of a programmers work is code that compiles and runs. Time spend producing comments and documentation is not time spend producing product. There is only one place to look and see what a program does and it is not the comments. If your programmers can't read the programming language, the comments will not help.
For code readablity, a better metric than comment percentage would be symbol length. If you see a program with function and variable names that average 4 characters and another with a 15 character average you know which will be easier to read.
Perhaps for the same reason they are the only Linux mag that accepts ads from Microsoft.
When an open source program is patched you know why, by whom, and how to back it out. When a closed source program is patched all you know is to keep your fingers crossed.
The arguments defending these trade secret leaking journalists all seem to start with "What if an evil corporation...", and then say nothing about Apple or the specifics of this case. Be careful, this kind of argument cuts both ways.
What if an evil journalist was getting paid by the competition? What if an evil journalist had a vendetta and wanted to inflict damage? What if an evil journalist solicited someone under an NDA to reveal trade secrets.
Corporations and journalists are equally likely to be crooks, and neither is entitled to a free pass. There is a reason that the balance scale is an icon for justice.
One journalist reveals the confidential sources of another journalist? If journalists have a right to keep secrets is it a rights violation to reveal a journaists secrets? Do only journalist have right to keep secrets? It's no secret, this confuses me.
Delphi is fast. Fast development, fast compile, fast execution, most people even learn it fast. Object pascal is a powerful, real programming language. Real programming language means you are programming a machine, not an interpreter in a sandbox. If a PC can do it, pascal can tell it to do it. And Delphi has the VCL, the only way I know of to write a complex program for the Win32 api and maintain your sanity. If Delphi 2005 does for WinFX what Delphi did for Win32 Borland will have another winner.
Near Orlando, FL I get 12 free broadcast HDTV channels. If you like TV so much you are willing to pay for it there are lots more available on satellite.
Amazon is not the bad guy. Bezos knows that software patents are out of control. He has asked for changes to this system because he knows the way it is going only companies with huge patent portfolios will be able to produce and use software. He can either play the evil game or watch his company be eaten alive by software patent holders. If you want to run a big successful company you are either filing software patents or you are failing in your responsibities. Don't blame Amazon, blame our bought and paid for congress.
It costs a lot of money to launch a new game console that only has handful of games available. If it is really powerfull and if they sell the hardware at a loss they can get the hard-core gamers onboard and build from there.
My questions is how do they explain why they are doing this twice? Is all they money they have lost on the original just a write off, a trial run for the console they really wanted to build?
I've been tempted to buy an XBox, but now I am glad I didn't. There is not enough room left in the closet where I keep my Sega Dreamcast.
These header files have nothing to do with the IBM lawsuit, but in less than a month they have to show code to the judge. Then when the case is dismissed they are going to need these claims to keep themselves out of jail on stock manipulation charges.
I know I have been trolled but I can't stop myself.
The no-copy bit has nothing to do with "copyright rules". The US constitution and copyright law says consumers own the content they buy and have the right to make backup copies of that content. It doesn't matter if that content is from GNU or a big media corporation.
According to SCO The GPL is benign compared the virus of their proprietary software. As near as I can tell they claim that any program written by IBM to run on AIX is derivative and now under the control of their license.
SCO is counting on plenty of companies adding it all up and deciding that a few thousand for extortion is cheaper than being sued or moving to Windows Server 2003.
I hope they can get their money back when someone with principles and enough money for good lawyers finally slaps SCO down.
It absolutely does not take more time to write good code than it does to write "quick and dirty" code. What it takes is professionalism and pride in your work.
What does it take to refactor instead of copy and paste? You have to be confident in your abilities; you have to be determined to be proud of the work you produce; you have to be fearless; you need to test your work; and maybe you need to spend 10 minutes and some brain power that will save some maintenance programmer hours down the road.
If you need inspiration read Martin Folwer "Refactoring".
If you write in Perl just ignore this post, there is no hope for you.
C is a great language for writing operating systems, device drivers, any program that has to be lean and fast. If the code is going to be excuted billions of times a day all over the world C is the obvious choice. It is so close to the target machine that I think of it as a portable macro assembler.
It is such a great language that people began to worship it and came to belive it was the best language for every program that they needed to write. But better languages for application programming were developed. They had object orientation, could use design patterns, and could actually reuse code that had been written for other applications.
The C worshipers could not be satisifed if C was only best for low level programming so they piled on a ton of crap and called it C++.
It's like the hot chick that went to work in a dognut shop. A few years go by and not so hot anymore. C++ can still be used but the thrill is not there anymore. Bloated, messy, and covered with powdered sugar C++ just doesn't do for me.
The first time I saw a perl listing I had to check the printer cables. I was sure there were some bad wires or a flakey connector.
Sure there are people who claim to be able to read the stuff, but why would you want to spend your life staring a an ugly wad of nonsense. Real programming languages are designed for people to read. Sure perl is dense but I have a $120-80 gig drive; lines of code are cheap, my time is not. Spend lines of code and make time for yourself.
Some languages have niche applications where nothing else does quite as well. Perl is not one of them. Anything written in perl from a complete web site to one line utility would run faster and be easier to read and maintain if it was written in something else.
Young people are quick. Smart people understand what they learn. For a while quick can look like smart but only a few are quick and smart. I've seen the quick slow down and I've seen the quick and smart become deliberate.
Slashdot Mirror
means higher costs. Better renew your domains now before GoDaddy has to raise it's prices.
My Company got bought by a shop with more money but less product then us. Three years went by and they were unable to assimilate us or even produce one their much anticipated new line of .NET based products. I found out why when one of their young programmers came to our location and spoke proudly of his steady improvement as a programmer, "I am up to 20% comments in my source code, when I first started I was really bad at about 5%" Good thing there were people here to hold me back, I really wanted to smack some sense into him.
Here it is real simple: machine code is for machines, programming languages are for programmers, comments are for managers. The product of a programmers work is code that compiles and runs. Time spend producing comments and documentation is not time spend producing product. There is only one place to look and see what a program does and it is not the comments. If your programmers can't read the programming language, the comments will not help.
For code readablity, a better metric than comment percentage would be symbol length. If you see a program with function and variable names that average 4 characters and another with a 15 character average you know which will be easier to read.
Perhaps for the same reason they are the only Linux mag that accepts ads from Microsoft.
When an open source program is patched you know why, by whom, and how to back it out. When a closed source program is patched all you know is to keep your fingers crossed.
The arguments defending these trade secret leaking journalists all seem to start with "What if an evil corporation ...", and then say nothing about Apple or the specifics of this case. Be careful, this kind of argument cuts both ways.
What if an evil journalist was getting paid by the competition? What if an evil journalist had a vendetta and wanted to inflict damage? What if an evil journalist solicited someone under an NDA to reveal trade secrets.
Corporations and journalists are equally likely to be crooks, and neither is entitled to a free pass. There is a reason that the balance scale is an icon for justice.
I saw this site http://www.charitywatch.org/ on ABC news. They review the tax returns of charities and rank them by how efficiently they are run.
One journalist reveals the confidential sources of another journalist? If journalists have a right to keep secrets is it a rights violation to reveal a journaists secrets? Do only journalist have right to keep secrets? It's no secret, this confuses me.
Delphi is fast. Fast development, fast compile, fast execution, most people even learn it fast. Object pascal is a powerful, real programming language. Real programming language means you are programming a machine, not an interpreter in a sandbox. If a PC can do it, pascal can tell it to do it. And Delphi has the VCL, the only way I know of to write a complex program for the Win32 api and maintain your sanity. If Delphi 2005 does for WinFX what Delphi did for Win32 Borland will have another winner.
Near Orlando, FL I get 12 free broadcast HDTV channels. If you like TV so much you are willing to pay for it there are lots more available on satellite.
Amazon is not the bad guy. Bezos knows that software patents are out of control. He has asked for changes to this system because he knows the way it is going only companies with huge patent portfolios will be able to produce and use software. He can either play the evil game or watch his company be eaten alive by software patent holders. If you want to run a big successful company you are either filing software patents or you are failing in your responsibities. Don't blame Amazon, blame our bought and paid for congress.
It costs a lot of money to launch a new game console that only has handful of games available. If it is really powerfull and if they sell the hardware at a loss they can get the hard-core gamers onboard and build from there.
My questions is how do they explain why they are doing this twice? Is all they money they have lost on the original just a write off, a trial run for the console they really wanted to build?
I've been tempted to buy an XBox, but now I am glad I didn't. There is not enough room left in the closet where I keep my Sega Dreamcast.
You got politics in my science.
If I lived in a foul spider hole I might want to spend all my free time at home too.
These header files have nothing to do with the IBM lawsuit, but in less than a month they have to show code to the judge. Then when the case is dismissed they are going to need these claims to keep themselves out of jail on stock manipulation charges.
I know I have been trolled but I can't stop myself.
The no-copy bit has nothing to do with "copyright rules". The US constitution and copyright law says consumers own the content they buy and have the right to make backup copies of that content. It doesn't matter if that content is from GNU or a big media corporation.
Considering the damage done and the time and money spent fighting these virus and worms 250K is piddling amount.
According to SCO The GPL is benign compared the virus of their proprietary software. As near as I can tell they claim that any program written by IBM to run on AIX is derivative and now under the control of their license.
Ooh yes, every one should mail SCO at least a handful of pennys.
SCO is counting on plenty of companies adding it all up and deciding that a few thousand for extortion is cheaper than being sued or moving to Windows Server 2003.
I hope they can get their money back when someone with principles and enough money for good lawyers finally slaps SCO down.
It absolutely does not take more time to write good code than it does to write "quick and dirty" code. What it takes is professionalism and pride in your work.
What does it take to refactor instead of copy and paste? You have to be confident in your abilities; you have to be determined to be proud of the work you produce; you have to be fearless; you need to test your work; and maybe you need to spend 10 minutes and some brain power that will save some maintenance programmer hours down the road.
If you need inspiration read Martin Folwer "Refactoring".
If you write in Perl just ignore this post, there is no hope for you.
Programs personified, it's been done, But never as well.
This movie achived everything it set out to accomplish and a few hundred million dollars more.
C is a great language for writing operating systems, device drivers, any program that has to be lean and fast. If the code is going to be excuted billions of times a day all over the world C is the obvious choice. It is so close to the target machine that I think of it as a portable macro assembler.
It is such a great language that people began to worship it and came to belive it was the best language for every program that they needed to write. But better languages for application programming were developed. They had object orientation, could use design patterns, and could actually reuse code that had been written for other applications.
The C worshipers could not be satisifed if C was only best for low level programming so they piled on a ton of crap and called it C++.
It's like the hot chick that went to work in a dognut shop. A few years go by and not so hot anymore. C++ can still be used but the thrill is not there anymore. Bloated, messy, and covered with powdered sugar C++ just doesn't do for me.
The first time I saw a perl listing I had to check the printer cables. I was sure there were some bad wires or a flakey connector.
Sure there are people who claim to be able to read the stuff, but why would you want to spend your life staring a an ugly wad of nonsense. Real programming languages are designed for people to read. Sure perl is dense but I have a $120-80 gig drive; lines of code are cheap, my time is not. Spend lines of code and make time for yourself.
Some languages have niche applications where nothing else does quite as well. Perl is not one of them. Anything written in perl from a complete web site to one line utility would run faster and be easier to read and maintain if it was written in something else.
Young people are quick. Smart people understand what they learn. For a while quick can look like smart but only a few are quick and smart. I've seen the quick slow down and I've seen the quick and smart become deliberate.