I speak fluently arabic (native speaker), french (nearly native) and english, I can say for sure that english has absolutly no influence on programming languages. The structures used in programming languages are in rather primitives (while, repeat until, if then else, etc) and I guess might be universal. Well according to Turing and Church, Goedel and consors, "all universal, which include human languages are equal:)" what might be different is the way they express thing.
But I believe that the "pragmatic" nature of english has really influenced the way people think and solve computer problems. Eglish is really efficien compared to Arabic and French which tend to be much more "constipated" languages, as they feel attaqued by english, they don't tend to evolve very quickly and tend to be conservative, they don't adapt naturally to technologic evolution, as the pramatic and conquerant english:). The difference might rather sociologic tha intrinsec in my opinion.
Deja is maybe the ONLY Internet service I will not hesitate to pay for. It has become my prefered since 1995. I can't imagine leaving without it. Alas the Deja management has not clue, the service has been declining on a regular basis, every new version is worse than the older. I can't imagine how things can be made as badly. Fo instance I used to LOVE the old interest finder, untill somone imagined that will be nicer to have the results threaded, you lose all the necessary information. They have also managed to clutter the nice and clean old look with graphic crap. Also their technical support has been less and less responsive, it seems to me that tey leave in a kind of black box, that I have stoped sending them feedback; they also do weired changes to their engine without even getting the time to infom you about them.
What's a pitty for maybe the most usefull tool on the net along with (Google and Slashdot:)
If this is your source ! it awfully looks like an April fool, the Zdnet article is from Sat, 01 Apr 2000 15:38:47 GMT, too bad:( it would have been really nice if it were true !!
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2000/13/ns-14524.htm l
>French foreign policy since WWII has mostly been >based on repeated iterations of the >question "Will it piss off the English-speakers?" >I'll admit that this approach is probably as >valid as anything else, and they have certainly >been consistent and fair in its application, but >basing relations with the rest of the world on a >grudge over holding a losing ticket in the >dominant culture sweepstakes is not terribly >praiseworthy. Sorry
Well ! what some (not all) Americans fail to understand (in fact mostly those who still believe that the earth is flat) is that there are many cultures around the world and many many other ways to view the world ! not necesserly the way America view it.
What France is trying to do, is to simply protect it's language and culture in a world perceived as more and more English-speaking and Ensglis dominated, can you understand that ? I hope so, as you are hanging in a minority (open source)forum. America has it's own minorities and it tring to respect them, "some" americans must learn how to respect other minorities in the world and be less arrogant and imperialistic!.
Note : I am not even French, but as myself a member of minority I pefectly understand the way the french act.
No ! fortunatly this amendement didn't make in the law, it has faced huge opposition. In fact it was not applicable, as it would have probably resulted in huge migration of France based sites and home pages to more friendly locations.
>I don't think that documentation lends itself >well the bazaar mode of development
Not sure ! you just need to have the right tool.
There is actually an excellent tool for writing documentation in a "Bazar way", it's called FAQ-O-MATIC; the Java Apache project has implemented an excellent instance at :
http://locus.apache.org/jyve-faq/Turbine.
In fact we often hear that developers are reluctant to write documentation; this is true for everybody else. People are often shy from writing a big document from scrach, as they often don't know where to begin ! what to put in it ! this is what writers call "The white page anguish". But as soon as you come with something to begin with, or a draft, people are often willing to contribute small chuncks of information, to correct or complete things. This why the Net, and especially forums are so great to achieve complete information about a particular subject. This is in fact what Open Source is all about.
Everybody agree that what Open Source so badly needs is "Documentation", I really believe that tools like FAQ-O-MATIC can be great to achieve this in a Bazar way.
Open Avenue is now the official CVS maintainer ! they have recently bought Cyclic and promised to integrate many patchs floating around and develop CVS activly. They have even hired someone didacted entirely to this job.
Have a look at the new CVS home at www.cvshome.org
They don't seem to have done that the traditional Sourceforge way !
I didn't find any trace of the Sourceforge Home page, or the Bug Tracking or the forums ! too bad, as those nices features will for sure make the development more open
Troll Tech have just announced Embeded Qt which use the framebuffer instead of X. They say that the memory footprint can be reduced to as much as 700k. With this version of Qt, it's become conceivable to have an embeded version of KDE, as not much of KDE depend directly on X.
The anoucement is here : http://www.trolltech.com/company/announce/eqt-be ta.html.
What all those people are missing is that Napster, Gnutella, Freenet et al are here to stay. Whether they like it or not. The music industry need to adpat, to find another business model. They have sufficiently ripped of the artists like that. It has became really too easy to exchange music this way ! and people will never ever back from it. As they say in french, it's like trying to stop the sea with it's hands.
Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come "tout le reste is litterature" or in plain english "Everyting else is litterature, or just cheap talk"
This is more about using Mozilla as a platform to build a standalone application (in this case the IDE) than to use Perl and Python for Web scripting. Indeed, they say are going to add Perl and Python bindings to Mozilla, but this merely to make posible Perl and Python scripting possible to write (off line) applications.
FAQ-O-MATIC is an excellent way to gather "users wisdom and problems". More, by enabling user feed back, it helps making FAQ stay more up to date. Everybody knows that hackers absolutly "HATE" writing documentation. FAQ-O-MATIC is an excellent way to make everybody bring a small contribution to the hole thing. The Apache Jakarta-Tomcat project have a very nice FAQ-O-MATIC way.
I second this, I am managing an egroup mailing list, works pretty well so far, quick delivery, no spamming problems. You have even further services as Chat and archives access.
Well this certainly out of the scope of this thread, but sorry couldn't resist:)
As it has been said, it means that every algorithm could be expressed in it. Sometimes it's also called "Universal language". If my memory servers well, the Church Thesis sum this up this way : Turing complete = Partially recursive functions = Post productions = Markov Productions = Universal Language = Calculable functions = Hilbert' dyofontians (sp ??) problems = Every language wich contains an "If" and "Goto" or function call = C = C++ = Java = etc etc etc.
Basically they all can express the same thing, and you will never ever ! (Goedel Lemma) find something "more powerfull"
The good ol' University days
Re:Senga search engine can create Dmoz like direct
on
Who Owns Dmoz?
·
· Score: 1
Well ! I know that english has borrowed many french words, because of the normands invasion ! but www.senga.org seems to be definitly more in english than french;)
Senga search engine can create Dmoz like directory
on
Who Owns Dmoz?
·
· Score: 1
Have a look at www.senga.org. You can create with Domz like directory, it can even now load the Dmoz database. Senga is derived from www.ecila.com a french directory.
I admire the ability of english to create new concepts and new words, it makes it much more evolutionary. English speaking people don't have the same relationship with Englis as the one the French have (I am not speaking about Quebec, Switzerland, Belgium, and French speaking African countries wich are less "cool" about the language). I have the feeling that the French feel that their language is somhow "sacred", their approch is : hey don't that touch it, don't bring new words especially if they are englis it will bastardise our so beautiful language !! Many french people think also that it's the best language in the world (because their are often laguage impaired, and speak only their native language, so they don't know what an other language might be).
I tend to use english for my work, I prefer to use english version of software even when a french version is available, because it's much easier for me to search for a problem in the the Web or Dejanews; thanks to the ability of english to create new words. This is really important, new words and concepts gather people around new "emergent" ideas. When you "feel" (this is kind of emotion) that a new concept is emerging, you give a new "name" (this is somethin rational), adn english is really good at this. That's why this language is much more powerfull, because it accepts evolution in a much naturel way.
PS : My native language is arabic, and in many way it has the same problems as French, arabic sepeakin people "sacralise" their language they think it's the language of the Coran, so it must stay the way it's in the Coran, this mean don't evolve for 15 centuries.
In conclusion the language reflects what a community thinks and act about it's evolution, it's just the tool it uses.
This is a good move from Sun, I hope they will release StarOffice under the same licence. I believe they also intend to port NFS V4 to linux, and make it Open Source.
The last big question of course will be what will happen for Java
>Jack Carroll at IBM in the 1980s proved that a >"training wheels" approach to computers makes > people better at understanding the expert > features once they get to them. The reason being > that users learn the conceptual structure of the > system better when they are presented with the > smaller set of features first. Not seeing > something during initial use of the system > would result in better use of the hidden > features later.
This is one of the most important things in the Interview. This is so true and has been proved by different people using different approach.
For instance Piaget the father of "Genetic Epistemology" showed how the "language learning" process for a kid, is build around layers of simpler concepts. Imagine this like concentric circles of knowledge. He furthermore compare this to the process of discovering a new a theory by experimenting it hence the "Epistemological" aspect.
Tony Buzan, who has a different background and who has done a lot of research about learning, and mnemonic methods showed that you better learn small "recall" words which you can use "to hang" (like in knowledge tree) your new learning.
This can be compared to a kind of "boot process", you use a small version of the "language" to load "learn" of more complex one. This is why the "getting started" is very important in every serious documentation.
This is consistent with Mathematical Logic theories like "partial recursive functions" when a "Computable" function are in the same time a "partially recursive ones" i.e. these which can express themselves in simpler form of themselves for example : f(n) = n*f(n-1) and f(0) = 1 (this last one initiate the boot process).
Last but not least this what a principle like KISS = Kake It Simple and Stupid is for.
Einstein also said important : Things need to be as simple as possible but not simpler.
In an interview, Fuller Inprise CEO said they intend to Open Source Inerbase (already done under MPL) and also their compilers, but tey are not sure about VCL.
Can't find the link for the interview, but it was last Week in a major Linux magazine.
Slashdot Mirror
I speak fluently arabic (native speaker), french (nearly native) and english, I can say for sure that english has absolutly no influence on programming languages. The structures used in programming languages are in rather primitives (while, repeat until, if then else, etc) and I guess might be universal. Well according to Turing and Church, Goedel and consors, "all universal, which include human languages are equal :)" what might be different is the way they express thing.
:). The difference might rather sociologic tha intrinsec in my opinion.
But I believe that the "pragmatic" nature of english has really influenced the way people think and solve computer problems. Eglish is really efficien compared to Arabic and French which tend to be much more "constipated" languages, as they feel attaqued by english, they don't tend to evolve very quickly and tend to be conservative, they don't adapt naturally to technologic evolution, as the pramatic and conquerant english
Deja is maybe the ONLY Internet service I will not hesitate to pay for. It has become my prefered since 1995. I can't imagine leaving without it. Alas the Deja management has not clue, the service has been declining on a regular basis, every new version is worse than the older. I can't imagine how things can be made as badly. Fo instance I used to LOVE the old interest finder, untill somone imagined that will be nicer to have the results threaded, you lose all the necessary information. They have also managed to clutter the nice and clean old look with graphic crap. Also their technical support has been less and less responsive, it seems to me that tey leave in a kind of black box, that I have stoped sending them feedback; they also do weired changes to their engine without even getting the time to infom you about them.
:)
What's a pitty for maybe the most usefull tool on the net along with (Google and Slashdot
I wonder what their relationship with the Linux Consortium, which has been recently created, will be ? See http://www.embedded-linux.org/ !
I am afraid we will end up with many embeded Linux, what about Mobile Linux from Transmeta too ? There are too many interests in stack now !?
you said fragmention ? even with source provided.
If this is your source ! it awfully looks like an April fool, the Zdnet article is from Sat, 01 Apr 2000 15:38:47 GMT, too bad :( it would have been really nice if it were true !!
m l
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2000/13/ns-14524.ht
>French foreign policy since WWII has mostly been
>based on repeated iterations of the
>question "Will it piss off the English-speakers?"
>I'll admit that this approach is probably as
>valid as anything else, and they have certainly
>been consistent and fair in its application, but
>basing relations with the rest of the world on a
>grudge over holding a losing ticket in the
>dominant culture sweepstakes is not terribly
>praiseworthy. Sorry
Well ! what some (not all) Americans fail to understand (in fact mostly those who still believe that the earth is flat) is that there are many cultures around the world and many many other ways to view the world ! not necesserly the way America view it.
What France is trying to do, is to simply protect it's language and culture in a world perceived as more and more English-speaking and Ensglis dominated, can you understand that ? I hope so, as you are hanging in a minority (open source)forum. America has it's own minorities and it tring to respect them, "some" americans must learn how to respect other minorities in the world and be less arrogant and imperialistic!.
Note : I am not even French, but as myself a member of minority I pefectly understand the way the french act.
No ! fortunatly this amendement didn't make in the law, it has faced huge opposition. In fact it was not applicable, as it would have probably resulted in huge migration of France based sites and home pages to more friendly locations.
>I don't think that documentation lends itself
>well the bazaar mode of development
Not sure ! you just need to have the right tool.
There is actually an excellent tool for writing documentation in a "Bazar way", it's called FAQ-O-MATIC; the Java Apache project has implemented an excellent instance at :
http://locus.apache.org/jyve-faq/Turbine.
In fact we often hear that developers are reluctant to write documentation; this is true for everybody else. People are often shy from writing a big document from scrach, as they often don't know where to begin ! what to put in it ! this is what writers call "The white page anguish". But as soon as you come with something to begin with, or a draft, people are often willing to contribute small chuncks of information, to correct or complete things. This why the Net, and especially forums are so great to achieve complete information about a particular subject. This is in fact what Open Source is all about.
Everybody agree that what Open Source so badly needs is "Documentation", I really believe that tools like FAQ-O-MATIC can be great to achieve this in a Bazar way.
Wiki tools are great too.
Open Avenue is now the official CVS maintainer ! they have recently bought Cyclic and promised to integrate many patchs floating around and develop CVS activly. They have even hired someone didacted entirely to this job.
Have a look at the new CVS home at www.cvshome.org
They don't seem to have done that the traditional Sourceforge way !
I didn't find any trace of the Sourceforge Home page, or the Bug Tracking or the forums ! too bad, as those nices features will for sure make the development more open
Troll Tech have just announced Embeded Qt which use the framebuffer instead of X. They say that the memory footprint can be reduced to as much as 700k. With this version of Qt, it's become conceivable to have an embeded version of KDE, as not much of KDE depend directly on X.
e ta.html.
The anoucement is here :
http://www.trolltech.com/company/announce/eqt-b
>Was it Knuth who said, "Programs equal
>algorithms plus data structures"?
No, that was "Nicklaus Wirth" the guy who created Pascal. He was writen the book : Programs equal
algorithms plus data structures?
> A good data structure can mean the difference
> between an algorithm that zips along at O(n)
>and one that crawls at O(n**2) or worse.
Indeed, but this is theory, in practice when your "n" is small, you'd rather choose the simpler algorithm.
What all those people are missing is that Napster, Gnutella, Freenet et al are here to stay. Whether they like it or not. The music industry need to adpat, to find another business model. They have sufficiently ripped of the artists like that. It has became really too easy to exchange music this way ! and people will never ever back from it. As they say in french, it's like trying to stop the sea with it's hands.
Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come "tout le reste is litterature" or in plain english "Everyting else is litterature, or just cheap talk"
>Right now there's probably .1% users who
;)
>participate in development and 99.9% users who
>don't
There is three kind of people, those who can count, and those who can't
This is more about using Mozilla as a platform to build a standalone application (in this case the IDE) than to use Perl and Python for Web scripting. Indeed, they say are going to add Perl and Python bindings to Mozilla, but this merely to make posible Perl and Python scripting possible to write (off line) applications.
FAQ-O-MATIC is an excellent way to gather "users wisdom and problems". More, by enabling user feed back, it helps making FAQ stay more up to date. Everybody knows that hackers absolutly "HATE" writing documentation. FAQ-O-MATIC is an excellent way to make everybody bring a small contribution to the hole thing. The Apache Jakarta-Tomcat project have a very nice FAQ-O-MATIC way.
/ DisplayTopics/action/SetAll/project_id/2/f aq_id/12
The Jakarta FAQ-O-MATIC
http://locus.apache.org/jyve-faq/Turbine/screen
I second this, I am managing an egroup mailing list, works pretty well so far, quick delivery, no spamming problems. You have even further services as Chat and archives access.
Well this certainly out of the scope of this thread, but sorry couldn't resist :)
As it has been said, it means that every algorithm could be expressed in it. Sometimes it's also called "Universal language". If my memory servers well, the Church Thesis sum this up this way : Turing complete = Partially recursive functions = Post productions = Markov Productions = Universal Language = Calculable functions = Hilbert' dyofontians (sp ??) problems = Every language wich contains an "If" and "Goto" or function call = C = C++ = Java = etc etc etc.
Basically they all can express the same thing, and you will never ever ! (Goedel Lemma) find something "more powerfull"
The good ol' University days
Well ! I know that english has borrowed many french words, because of the normands invasion ! but www.senga.org seems to be definitly more in english than french ;)
Have a look at www.senga.org. You can create with Domz like directory, it can even now load the Dmoz database. Senga is derived from www.ecila.com a french directory.
I completly agree with your point of vue.
I admire the ability of english to create new concepts and new words, it makes it much more evolutionary. English speaking people don't have the same relationship with Englis as the one the French have (I am not speaking about Quebec, Switzerland, Belgium, and French speaking African countries wich are less "cool" about the language). I have the feeling that the French feel that their language is somhow "sacred", their approch is : hey don't that touch it, don't bring new words especially if they are englis it will bastardise our so beautiful language !! Many french people think also that it's the best language in the world (because their are often laguage impaired, and speak only their native language, so they don't know what an other language might be).
I tend to use english for my work, I prefer to use english version of software even when a french version is available, because it's much easier for me to search for a problem in the the Web or Dejanews; thanks to the ability of english to create new words. This is really important, new words and concepts gather people around new "emergent" ideas. When you "feel" (this is kind of emotion) that a new concept is emerging, you give a new "name" (this is somethin rational), adn english is really good at this. That's why this language is much more powerfull, because it accepts evolution in a much naturel way.
PS : My native language is arabic, and in many way it has the same problems as French, arabic sepeakin people "sacralise" their language they think it's the language of the Coran, so it must stay the way it's in the Coran, this mean don't evolve for 15 centuries.
In conclusion the language reflects what a community thinks and act about it's evolution, it's just the tool it uses.
This is a good move from Sun, I hope they will release StarOffice under the same licence. I believe they also intend to port NFS V4 to linux, and make it Open Source.
The last big question of course will be what will happen for Java
Ooops !
KISS = Keap It Simple and Stupid is for.
>Jack Carroll at IBM in the 1980s proved that a
>"training wheels" approach to computers makes
> people better at understanding the expert
> features once they get to them. The reason being
> that users learn the conceptual structure of the
> system better when they are presented with the
> smaller set of features first. Not seeing
> something during initial use of the system
> would result in better use of the hidden
> features later.
This is one of the most important things in the Interview. This is so true and has been proved by different people using different approach.
For instance Piaget the father of "Genetic Epistemology" showed how the "language learning" process for a kid, is build around layers of simpler concepts. Imagine this like concentric circles of knowledge. He furthermore compare this to the process of discovering a new a theory by experimenting it hence the "Epistemological" aspect.
Tony Buzan, who has a different background and who has done a lot of research about learning, and mnemonic methods showed that you better learn small "recall" words which you can use "to hang" (like in knowledge tree) your new learning.
This can be compared to a kind of "boot process", you use a small version of the "language" to load "learn" of more complex one. This is why the "getting started" is very important in every serious documentation.
This is consistent with Mathematical Logic theories like "partial recursive functions" when a "Computable" function are in the same time a "partially recursive ones" i.e. these which can express themselves in simpler form of themselves
for example : f(n) = n*f(n-1) and f(0) = 1 (this last one initiate the boot process).
Last but not least this what a principle like KISS = Kake It Simple and Stupid is for.
Einstein also said important : Things need to be as simple as possible but not simpler.
http://ceps.sourceforge.net/index.shtml
In an interview, Fuller Inprise CEO said they intend to Open Source Inerbase (already done under MPL) and also their compilers, but tey are not sure about VCL.
Can't find the link for the interview, but it was last Week in a major Linux magazine.