The fact that the average user can do nothing safely useful in C++ w/o STL further indicates to me that C++ is a wizard's tool. Fine. And it's a great tool for wizards who invested the time needed to truly use C++ properly.
What I don't buy is propaganda stating that C++ can be a productive tool for non-experts if only you avoid pointers and use the STL. That's the Microsoft mentality: everything's ok if you stay on the beaten path.
Agreed. The fact that you have to go outside the language proper to do something as basic as a 'vector' indicates dysfunctionality. It sounds more like a crutch or excuse than the way things should be.
I think my point here didn't come across to some of you.
Microsoft is doing the minimum, and expecting us to believe that's the best that can be done, and we need to live with that and handle the gaps ourselves.
I mean, we used to all think that adjusting and rebuilding carburetors was an unchangeable way of life. With billions in reseach dollars, I think Microsoft can figure out how to give users fuel injection.
Yes, having exposed ports is a problem users/admins should deal with.
Or is it? I mean, when I install Linux, I'm at least asked if I want some basic firewall protection. Nothing mentioned in Windows.
Come on, Redmond. With your beautiful GUI apps, why not have use one of your world-famous, patented 'wizards' to walk a user through something as basic as blocking network ports. Or a gui version of netstat -vat. No, of course that sort of thing doesn't belong integrated in the OS the way IE does.
Or, while Microsoft Office can annoy me to no end as it (wrongly) guesses I'm sending a letter by my first 3 keystrokes, why can't we have the same feature to detect suspicious network traffic patterns?
Ok, yes you do have to stay patched. But this is like blaming people with flawed cars for not going to the car dealer each week to check for recalls. Microsoft's abundance of patches indicates poor design and methodology, period.
- Locking down desktops so users cannot make changes and viruses and worms can't install themselves and run.
Ok, so rather than design the apps safely out of the box, we need to handcuff the users and do the dirty work ourselves. I guess all those Outlook viruses were our fault.
- Restricting ports, such as port 135, which effectively stopped the latest virus attack.
Wow! What a concept! I never thought of this! Now I know where all my problems are coming from! It's not from the software, it's my fault for actually allowing connectivity!
- maintaining "hot sites," or duplicates of key elements of the IT infrastructure, so if the main infrastructure is compromised, users can quickly switch to backup systems.
Sounds like a way to sell licenses. Ok, since we can't make our product stable, buy 2 copies and hope one works.
- Developing the capability to rapidly restore compromised software and data from backups.
Right. Key word is, develop. Why does an end user, paying hundreds of dollars per seat need to 'develop' something as common as this.
- Adding security staff or outsourced services.
Right. Keep sending us your licensing fees, and then spend more money to make up for the gaps in our software. Don't trust any of that 'free software' crap you read on the internet - those Linux guys are a bunch of hacks. Hire an MSCE. Preferably from another country.
If IE had won the browser war even a year earlier, the web would be a very ugly place. The standards we have now, ugly as they are, would have been muddied with Microsoft-proprietary junk had IE taken off. Remember Java vs. ActiveX? Lucky for us, both lost.
Though I guess given enough time, the MS-specific stuff might creep back in as the competitors disappear into the noise.
I totally agree, except a bit on why IE won the browser wars. Indeed, MS leveraged their 'in your face, preinstalled' advantage, BUT as time went on, Netscape got worse and IE got better. Sure, in versions 3.0 and early versions of 4.0, Netscape was king. But things seemed to fall apart around versin 4.6, and they never recovered.
I think that if Netscape could have continued their superiority gap, less folks would have succombed to IE's pull.
Re:.NET Wins Hands Down !!!
on
Java vs .NET
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· Score: 1
This was meant to be funny right? Or maybe I've been wrong all these years that NO ONE actually used those wizards and form editors for more than their first app.
Pain either way, it's just different pain
on
Java vs .NET
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· Score: 1
For server-side stuff, fine, you've got a point. The parent post said he abandoned Java after Swing (Java's advanced UI). I mostly agree. Java works on the server because it's easy to 'Least Common Denominator' things like sockets and files across OS's. It is NOT easy to do the same with a UI. I wrote several commercial Java UI apps, one with Swing and one with (gasp) the plain AWT. If I were to do it all over again today I'd never use Java.
As an aside, this is an idea that just about every nerd has when they learn about databases and retrieval.
You have shattered my programming dreams forever. I once thought I was special. Here I find out everyone else has had the idea too.
Seriously, though, I have more confidence in this idea.
It's been tried various times since the 1960's. There are probably good reasons why interfaces don't use them.
In the 60's, you didn't have the resource headroom you do today. And you didn't have users who owned personal computers at all, much less those with thousands of music, video and text files all suffering under a 1-dimensional hierarchy plus the find command.
Perhaps most importantly, keep in mind that the vast majority of files on your system are not user files, they are bits and pieces of the operating system.
Speak for yourself! But I do entirely agree with you that the kernel is not the right place for a relational DB.
And for the files that actually are used by users (mail, PIM info, images, text, etc.), they usually already have special-purpose database interfaces available to them as part of the applications that users use to access them.
Ok, but there's a breakthrough waiting to happen here. Today, there's no way to automate interactions between these apps with their own db's. Microsoft's OLE, COM, DCOM, et. al have never quite gotten it right. Think of the power of plain text and unix tools. That gets shut out when you use a special purpose database. This DB filesystem opens that back up, letting me see relationships between my emails, documents, songs, etc.
How generous. Rather than making 90,000% profit on $0.02 worth of plastic, they're taking it in the shorts with a measly 65,000% profit.
Give me a break. Like $12.98 is going to make me get excited about driving my car to a Brick and Mortar to purchase $0.02 of plastic. This is like Microsoft's strategy of settling lawsuits by selling software at a discount to schools.
And I'd argue 1% of the programming population gets 99% of the programming work done.
Ok, great, but if you're running a s/w engineering team, you end up spending a lot of time and heartache corralling the other 99%, or even say 20% if you screened most of the 99% out. It (even now) is impossible to only hire people from the 99% group. Yes, I admire and respect the skill that Ferrari mechanics have, and am sure they can keep a Ferrari running great, but I'd much run Toyotas and have some decent, more ordinary mechanics.
Where I work, a number of mostly-comfortable-with-HTML folks use a dirt-simple scripting language which for anything significant calls code written by a couple of well-trained, experienced (are those different?) C++ programmers. As a team, we do indeed work wonders
Exactly. You have isolated the 'dangerous scary stuff' to the surgeons, and left the grunt work to the lower skill workers. You have, in a sense written your own mini programming language interpreter. The only difference between your interpreter and Java/Python/... is that the latter are general purpose, and your is custom tailored.
Your smart pointer is precisely what I was talking about with C++ tradeoffs. Having self-deleting objects built cleanly into the language would have been a big win, but was not included for performance reasons (I recall reading this in Stroustrup's book, need to look up the reference). If it's part of the language, you could (as Java does) provide an interface to let debuggers track it. And it would indeed be part of STL, albeit with, as I said, some performance impact that some small fraction of users would ever care about.
Please understand me, I respect the C++ tool, and know it is indeed mighty in the right hands. *BUT* I do think it is a big mistake to consider it the de-facto end-all OO language, and the only 'real' productivity tool for 'real' programmers. CPUs are simply too fast, RAM is too cheap, and other languages are just too much more productive.
I agree that C++ nightmares come when people misuse its features. And vice versa; triumphs occur when people use the features well.
But that's the thing - it's too easy to misuse C++'s features. YES, a well-trained, experienced C++ programmer can work wonders, BUT that's like 1% or less of the programming population!
C++ made a lot of design tradeoffs (e.g. it does not automatically handle allocated space well without extreme programmer care) connected to computer technology EONs ago. It's a really weird, funky balance - it tries to be high level, but also tries not to do anything for you else risk wasting CPU cycles for some corner-case performance hungry situation.
Like a lot of people, I find myself either using plain old C for things that need it (kernel drivers) and Python/Java for anything complicated.
I mean, if you're going the 'don't need to understand 'C', pointer-free, high-level only route, use something interesting and easy to use like Perl, (heaven forbid) VB, Java, or Python.
To me, the STL was like putting lipstick on a garbage can. It may look prettier now but I'm still never going to kiss it. It's still something you have to wrangle, bang around and not look at when you don't have to.
Re:Personally, I always preferred...
on
Masters of Doom
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· Score: 1
ROTT had one problem, IMO. The characters were too skinny. This was kind of a design revelation to me. The Doom characters were just the perfect proportion. When characters are too skinny, it's too hard to aim or see them far away.
Contrary to popular belief, hell is not the place where people go if they failed to earn enough points on Earth. Compared to God, we suck, not just in our power but in our disobeyance of God.
God (by definition) is the greatest being imaginable, and lives in the greatest place imaginable. In fact, it's beyond imagination.
When you break God's laws, it bothers Him as much as it would if, say, I robbed your house. You may not see Him, but he certainly sees you. Now, how would a burglar reconcile with me? By giving my stuff back? That's nice, but I'd never want to see this guy again. I'd need to have proof that he'd changed, recognized what he did and would hate to do it again. And I'd need to make a personal relationship with him. This is more or less what we burlgars do with Jesus to reconcile with Him as to enter into heaven. Recognizing that His death was needed to pay our bill is the key.
Now I believe this life exists to allow you the chance to respond to God in an authentic and loving way.
How authentic would your respect and love be if He stood with you face to face? It'd be a letdown, ultimately just as it is when you're working a puzzle, and someone shows you the answer before you solve it. You've permanently lost your chance to prove you could do it.
It makes sense to me, and hope it does to you, but honestly, God needs neither of us to be comfortable with our sense of fairness.
America's corporate culture has always driven things this way.
Our culture is, out innovate/stylize and then milk that cow for all it's worth until it dies. It is not until the cow dies that we panic and decide to do it again.
The Japanese take the best of everything, combine it, and perfect it, and nurture the cow.
The Germans have a culture of engineering pride that results in qualities that give them a lasting reputation. They have very refined cows.
Well, the software cow is not getting any younger, and we certainly have not been nurturing it. Have you used Microsoft products lately? Have you written Microsoft-compatible software lately? Does it strike anyone as strange how many people take a step BACKWARDS to Unix derrivatives because a multi-multi-billion dollar company can't do anything better? This would be like a resurgence in home made Model-T based clones because new cars, while prettier and more featured, are clunky, unusable, unmodifyable and unrepairable.
Anyway, my point is, just as we had to move up a rung in the latter from farming, to mechanical design & mfg, to electronics, to computers, to software, it's time we move up a rung again. Last time we were chased off of our rung by Japan, this time it's India. There needs to be some new thing that creates a bunch of new jobs to which we stylish, creative, and aggressive Americans are uniquely suited to.
Maybe tech will remain in the US short term, but not long term. Indians are far from stupid. They are starting from the bottom and aiming for the top. Those outsourced engineers are learning about the software business. Eventually someone will create an Indian software company and sell in the US.
I bet the people at RCA thought the same thing about their TV set business.
Uh, yeah, those people in low-skill jobs made *sure* their kids went to college, and that they took up high-skill jobs like electronics and computer science.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that the average user can do nothing safely useful in C++ w/o STL further indicates to me that C++ is a wizard's tool. Fine. And it's a great tool for wizards who invested the time needed to truly use C++ properly.
What I don't buy is propaganda stating that C++ can be a productive tool for non-experts if only you avoid pointers and use the STL. That's the Microsoft mentality: everything's ok if you stay on the beaten path.
Agreed. The fact that you have to go outside the language proper to do something as basic as a 'vector' indicates dysfunctionality. It sounds more like a crutch or excuse than the way things should be.
I think my point here didn't come across to some of you.
Microsoft is doing the minimum, and expecting us to believe that's the best that can be done, and we need to live with that and handle the gaps ourselves.
I mean, we used to all think that adjusting and rebuilding carburetors was an unchangeable way of life. With billions in reseach dollars, I think Microsoft can figure out how to give users fuel injection.
Yes, having exposed ports is a problem users/admins should deal with.
Or is it? I mean, when I install Linux, I'm at least asked if I want some basic firewall protection. Nothing mentioned in Windows.
Come on, Redmond. With your beautiful GUI apps, why not have use one of your world-famous, patented 'wizards' to walk a user through something as basic as blocking network ports. Or a gui version of netstat -vat. No, of course that sort of thing doesn't belong integrated in the OS the way IE does.
Or, while Microsoft Office can annoy me to no end as it (wrongly) guesses I'm sending a letter by my first 3 keystrokes, why can't we have the same feature to detect suspicious network traffic patterns?
Let's look at some of these...
- Accelerated adoption of patches.
Ok, yes you do have to stay patched. But this is like blaming people with flawed cars for not going to the car dealer each week to check for recalls. Microsoft's abundance of patches indicates poor design and methodology, period.
- Locking down desktops so users cannot make changes and viruses and worms can't install themselves and run.
Ok, so rather than design the apps safely out of the box, we need to handcuff the users and do the dirty work ourselves. I guess all those Outlook viruses were our fault.
- Restricting ports, such as port 135, which effectively stopped the latest virus attack.
Wow! What a concept! I never thought of this! Now I know where all my problems are coming from! It's not from the software, it's my fault for actually allowing connectivity!
- maintaining "hot sites," or duplicates of key elements of the IT infrastructure, so if the main infrastructure is compromised, users can quickly switch to backup systems.
Sounds like a way to sell licenses. Ok, since we can't make our product stable, buy 2 copies and hope one works.
- Developing the capability to rapidly restore compromised software and data from backups.
Right. Key word is, develop. Why does an end user, paying hundreds of dollars per seat need to 'develop' something as common as this.
- Adding security staff or outsourced services.
Right. Keep sending us your licensing fees, and then spend more money to make up for the gaps in our software. Don't trust any of that 'free software' crap you read on the internet - those Linux guys are a bunch of hacks. Hire an MSCE. Preferably from another country.
If IE had won the browser war even a year earlier, the web would be a very ugly place. The standards we have now, ugly as they are, would have been muddied with Microsoft-proprietary junk had IE taken off. Remember Java vs. ActiveX? Lucky for us, both lost.
Though I guess given enough time, the MS-specific stuff might creep back in as the competitors disappear into the noise.
I totally agree, except a bit on why IE won the browser wars. Indeed, MS leveraged their 'in your face, preinstalled' advantage, BUT as time went on, Netscape got worse and IE got better. Sure, in versions 3.0 and early versions of 4.0, Netscape was king. But things seemed to fall apart around versin 4.6, and they never recovered.
I think that if Netscape could have continued their superiority gap, less folks would have succombed to IE's pull.
Finally a bit on sanity. Except I'd add that you gotta use vim, and that recently awk changed my life.
I for one would welcome our AMD overlords.
This was meant to be funny right? Or maybe I've been wrong all these years that NO ONE actually used those wizards and form editors for more than their first app.
For server-side stuff, fine, you've got a point. The parent post said he abandoned Java after Swing (Java's advanced UI). I mostly agree. Java works on the server because it's easy to 'Least Common Denominator' things like sockets and files across OS's. It is NOT easy to do the same with a UI. I wrote several commercial Java UI apps, one with Swing and one with (gasp) the plain AWT. If I were to do it all over again today I'd never use Java.
As an aside, this is an idea that just about every nerd has when they learn about databases and retrieval.
You have shattered my programming dreams forever. I once thought I was special. Here I find out everyone else has had the idea too.
Seriously, though, I have more confidence in this idea.
It's been tried various times since the 1960's. There are probably good reasons why interfaces don't use them.
In the 60's, you didn't have the resource headroom you do today. And you didn't have users who owned personal computers at all, much less those with thousands of music, video and text files all suffering under a 1-dimensional hierarchy plus the find command.
Perhaps most importantly, keep in mind that the vast majority of files on your system are not user files, they are bits and pieces of the operating system.
Speak for yourself! But I do entirely agree with you that the kernel is not the right place for a relational DB.
And for the files that actually are used by users (mail, PIM info, images, text, etc.), they usually already have special-purpose database interfaces available to them as part of the applications that users use to access them.
Ok, but there's a breakthrough waiting to happen here. Today, there's no way to automate interactions between these apps with their own db's. Microsoft's OLE, COM, DCOM, et. al have never quite gotten it right. Think of the power of plain text and unix tools. That gets shut out when you use a special purpose database. This DB filesystem opens that back up, letting me see relationships between my emails, documents, songs, etc.
How generous. Rather than making 90,000% profit on $0.02 worth of plastic, they're
taking it in the shorts with a measly 65,000% profit.
Give me a break. Like $12.98 is going to make me get excited about driving my car to a Brick and Mortar to purchase $0.02 of plastic. This is like Microsoft's strategy of settling lawsuits by selling software at a discount to schools.
And I'd argue 1% of the programming population gets 99% of the programming work done.
Ok, great, but if you're running a s/w engineering team, you end up spending a lot of time and heartache corralling the other 99%, or even say 20% if you screened most of the 99% out. It (even now) is impossible to only hire people from the 99% group. Yes, I admire and respect the skill that Ferrari mechanics have, and am sure they can keep a Ferrari running great, but I'd much run Toyotas and have some decent, more ordinary mechanics.
Where I work, a number of mostly-comfortable-with-HTML folks use a dirt-simple scripting language which for anything significant calls code written by a couple of well-trained, experienced (are those different?) C++ programmers. As a team, we do indeed work wonders
Exactly. You have isolated the 'dangerous scary stuff' to the surgeons, and left the grunt work to the lower skill workers. You have, in a sense written your own mini programming language interpreter. The only difference between your interpreter and Java/Python/... is that the latter are general purpose, and your is custom tailored.
Your smart pointer is precisely what I was talking about with C++ tradeoffs. Having self-deleting objects built cleanly into the language would have been a big win, but was not included for performance reasons (I recall reading this in Stroustrup's book, need to look up the reference). If it's part of the language, you could (as Java does) provide an interface to let debuggers track it. And it would indeed be part of STL, albeit with, as I said, some performance impact that some small fraction of users would ever care about.
Please understand me, I respect the C++ tool, and know it is indeed mighty in the right hands. *BUT* I do think it is a big mistake to consider it the de-facto end-all OO language, and the only 'real' productivity tool for 'real' programmers. CPUs are simply too fast, RAM is too cheap, and other languages are just too much more productive.
I agree that C++ nightmares come when people misuse its features. And vice versa; triumphs occur when people use the features well.
But that's the thing - it's too easy to misuse C++'s features. YES, a well-trained, experienced C++ programmer can work wonders, BUT that's like 1% or less of the programming population!
C++ made a lot of design tradeoffs (e.g. it does not automatically handle allocated space well without extreme programmer care) connected to computer technology EONs ago. It's a really weird, funky balance - it tries to be high level, but also tries not to do anything for you else risk wasting CPU cycles for some corner-case performance hungry situation.
Like a lot of people, I find myself either using plain old C for things that need it (kernel drivers) and Python/Java for anything complicated.
I mean, if you're going the 'don't need to understand 'C', pointer-free, high-level only route, use something interesting and easy to use like Perl, (heaven forbid) VB, Java, or Python.
To me, the STL was like putting lipstick on a garbage can. It may look prettier now but I'm still never going to kiss it. It's still something you have to wrangle, bang around and not look at when you don't have to.
...Chipmunk voices never get old.
Truer words were never spoken.
ROTT had one problem, IMO. The characters were too skinny. This was kind of a design revelation to me. The Doom characters were just the perfect proportion. When characters are too skinny, it's too hard to aim or see them far away.
You can't haul the A-Team around in a Pinto.
...isn't 'Cray' today about as 'Cray' as the company that now owns 'Atari'? What's left besides the name of the original company?
Image you caused to appear in my head: Martin's "Wang Computers" T-Shirt seen while riding on the school bus. (Simpsons)
Contrary to popular belief, hell is not the place where people go if they failed to earn enough points on Earth. Compared to God, we suck, not just in our power but in our disobeyance of God.
God (by definition) is the greatest being imaginable, and lives in the greatest place imaginable. In fact, it's beyond imagination.
When you break God's laws, it bothers Him as much as it would if, say, I robbed your house. You may not see Him, but he certainly sees you. Now, how would a burglar reconcile with me? By giving my stuff back? That's nice, but I'd never want to see this guy again. I'd need to have proof that he'd changed, recognized what he did and would hate to do it again. And I'd need to make a personal relationship with him. This is more or less what we burlgars do with Jesus to reconcile with Him as to enter into heaven. Recognizing that His death was needed to pay our bill is the key.
Now I believe this life exists to allow you the chance to respond to God in an authentic and loving way.
How authentic would your respect and love be if He stood with you face to face? It'd be a letdown, ultimately just as it is when you're working a puzzle, and someone shows you the answer before you solve it. You've permanently lost your chance to prove you could do it.
It makes sense to me, and hope it does to you, but honestly, God needs neither of us to be comfortable with our sense of fairness.
What makes you think Lucifer is going to be free in hell? The Bible tells us he is dying from Jesus' victory, and when the world ends he's done.
America's corporate culture has always driven things this way.
Our culture is, out innovate/stylize and then milk that cow for all it's worth until it dies. It is not until the cow dies that we panic and decide to do it again.
The Japanese take the best of everything, combine it, and perfect it, and nurture the cow.
The Germans have a culture of engineering pride that results in qualities that give them a lasting reputation. They have very refined cows.
Well, the software cow is not getting any younger, and we certainly have not been nurturing it. Have you used Microsoft products lately? Have you written Microsoft-compatible software lately? Does it strike anyone as strange how many people take a step BACKWARDS to Unix derrivatives because a multi-multi-billion dollar company can't do anything better? This would be like a resurgence in home made Model-T based clones because new cars, while prettier and more featured, are clunky, unusable, unmodifyable and unrepairable.
Anyway, my point is, just as we had to move up a rung in the latter from farming, to mechanical design & mfg, to electronics, to computers, to software, it's time we move up a rung again. Last time we were chased off of our rung by Japan, this time it's India. There needs to be some new thing that creates a bunch of new jobs to which we stylish, creative, and aggressive Americans are uniquely suited to.
Maybe tech will remain in the US short term, but not long term. Indians are far from stupid. They are starting from the bottom and aiming for the top. Those outsourced engineers are learning about the software business. Eventually someone will create an Indian software company and sell in the US.
I bet the people at RCA thought the same thing about their TV set business.
Uh, yeah, those people in low-skill jobs made *sure* their kids went to college, and that they took up high-skill jobs like electronics and computer science.