Re:Purpose of being verbose
on
Ruby Off the Rails
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Bullshit. Managers like Java because it helps their team achieve their business objectives better than the other languages you describe.
Hmmm, this attitude sounds somewhat familiar. Oh yeah, Paul Graham has written about it at length in this essay:
The pointy-haired boss miraculously combines two qualities that are common by themselves, but rarely seen together: (a) he knows nothing whatsoever about technology, and (b) he has very strong opinions about it.
Suppose, for example, you need to write a piece of software. The pointy-haired boss has no idea how this software has to work, and can't tell one programming language from another, and yet he knows what language you should write it in. Exactly. He thinks you should write it in Java.
Why does he think this? Let's take a look inside the brain of the pointy-haired boss. What he's thinking is something like this. Java is a standard. I know it must be, because I read about it in the press all the time. Since it is a standard, I won't get in trouble for using it. And that also means there will always be lots of Java programmers, so if the programmers working for me now quit, as programmers working for me mysteriously always do, I can easily replace them.
On your own dime, go jump in leaf piles, run through a field of flowers, play with Python, Ruby or whatever is good for your spiritual wellbeing, but when you're working to pull a paycheck, you don't get to put your own flights of fancy before things which make your team (not you as an individual performer, but your team as a whole) more effective in achieving business objectives.
Horseshit. Python and Ruby and Lisp are real-world workhorses that don't need tens of millions of dollars in hype to be successful. For instance I have tens of thousands of lines of Python code out on the field doing real work, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for really demanding clients, including governments and advertising agencies. In one case, I finished a project in a third of the time it took three Java programmers - and mine was smaller, faster and more maintainable for the guys who took it over. Time is money and succinctness is power in software development and Java doesn't make the cut on either. Oh sure, it's a great tool to allow development by the lowest common denominator (money quote from James Gosling) but the really smart teams I know despise it for the ugly hack it really is. When I expressed this opinion in a column for a local computing mag, I was assailed with all kinds of outraged squeals from the local Java gurus. But none of them could answer my points honestly.
If readers disagree, answer honestly with words rather than modpoints. I've tried Java. I really have. I found it ugly, slow, anal and seriously limiting to work with. And I don't seem to be allowed to fix flaws in it either. That's not good.
I went back to the article and changed it back to that the bombing is alleged to have been Botha's work when someone cut in again and added a link to the infamous "Truth and Reconcilation Council" that had somehow proven beyond doubt that Botha was guilty of doing that.
Now the problem is, whatever the "TRC" comes up with, it will always be the ANC's version of what happened, largely and mainly because the ANC is funding and staffing it, meaning the link to the "hard evidence" is worth crap. However someone who doesn't know any better will swallow the pitch, hook and sinker.
I would be a little more sympathetic to you Mr AC if you also declared your biases up front and provided some semblance of knowing the facts. For a start, the TRC stands for Truth and Reconciliation Commission, not Council, and it rightly became world-famous - not infamous - as a model of how to allow ordinary people to give their versions of what happened to them under apartheid.
Your accusations are just as crap since the ANC did not "fund and staff" the TRC, not did it escape censure for its own less than lily-white actions during its struggle against apartheid. The process was flawed in many ways certainly and I am no fan of the ANC, and I sympathise entirely with the constant "corrections" that someone has seen fit to apply to your edits on Wikipedia, but please don't try and pretend you have the high ground.
It's because a +1 Funny doesn't give you karma. Some mods use a +1 Insightful to say "yes I thought that was funny and I think you deserve karma as well."
Later in the interview he clarifies that it is indeed Dan Gardopee.
Aha - thanks. So they worked together. Makes sense.
But still, Basehead is not just some random guy on IRC, but was an influential person in the demo scene and later in the video game scene.
Indeed. But remember you and I have (probably) years spent hanging around on #trax, watching demos and listening to basehead's music to be able to draw that conclusion:)
I thought Basehead's real name - as in the demo scene and Five Musicians Basehead - was Dan Grandpre. I'm really confused now though because I found an album on Amazon which seems to be by both of them (Dan Gardopee is another alias he uses). Are they the same dude? I thought Alexander Brandon's nick was Siren. And I see they've worked on a lot of the same game soundtracks...
Can someone enlighten me please? Heh - The Zen Garden has finished and Shades of Night: Sea at Dawn has just come on - fairly appropriate.
Two is indeed plural in English as in most other languages (except maybe C if you use #define evilly). But the English idiom "I haven't done X for years" normally means quite a long time, certainly implying more than two years.
It's easier to understand when heard rather than read because the emphasis will fall on "years." Someone will say "I haven't done X for yeeeears" and the tone on the word will imply a long time - sometimes five, ten, or even twenty or more depending on context.
To summarise:
You are correct that two is plural in English. The GP was probably correct to remind the GGP of Windows 2003. English is sometimes more subtle when written than spoken because you lose emphasis. C can be evil in the wrong hands. I need to work on my French again because I am embarrassed by your command of English.
Ironically, the reason many people remember King Solomon is the eloquent treatise he wrote on the meaninglessness of wealth. And yes I think I've used "ironically" correctly here.
If you like weightless threads, you'll love greenlets (a standalone spinoff module of Stackless). Unlike generator-based coroutines, greenlets can be nested and switched to any other routine without the use of 'yield'. Also, any function can be turned into a greenlet - very little rewriting needed. There's hardly any overhead either since it's just an extension module written in C for the unmodified Python interpreter.
IBM's endorsement of Linux, the SCO law suit in response, and Red Hat's negative market stance as the Sun killing would be Microsoft of the Linux era combined to destroy the automatic assumption among key innovators in the United States that Linux was "the place to be" -eventually moving many of them to the BSD and Solaris camps where they're now driving the fastest installed base expansions in the history of computing
Murphy talks about an automatic assumption but he's hidden one of his own in this para: that the only key innovators in the US are vendors and venture capitalists. GPLed software lets just about anyone with half a brain and an itch to scratch be an innovator.
Jeff Raskin (he of Mac fame) also believed this. It is a complete fairy tale. Thoroughly debunked here. Among many other things, the Coanda effect simply cannot explain why there is upwash in front of a wing as well as downwash behind it.
How does an inverted aircraft remain both aerodynamically stable (relatively) and continue to maintain or increase altitude when the very airfoil shape that causes the Bernoulli effect is completely upside-down?
You're now doing what you accuse the gp of doing and misapplying Bernoulli as well. Ignoring boundary conditions, Bernoulli's principle does correctly predict a pressure drop on the upper surface of an airfoil but the reason is not because of some mythical property of fluids that disallow delay - it's because of circulation and the fact that a wing is very good at changing the speed of parcels of air. A wing is actually a very efficient pump that sets up circulation of the airflow by changing the speed of the air. Over the entire span of the wing (and the span is something normally ignored by Coanda fans), Bernoulli's principle says that there will be a suction force on the upper airfoil proportional to the pressure difference produced by the wing as it circulates the oncoming airflow. Upside down airfoils also circulate the air just fine, as long as the angle of attack is increased accordingly.
It's a sly reference to a construct in Common Lisp. 'car' is the operator which fetches the first item of a list in Lisp, originally named after the IBM machine code instruction that performed the operation on the original Lisp implementation (Contents of Address Register iirc). In ANSI Common Lisp, 'first' is a more intuitive alias for 'car' and both can be used interchangeably (although it's recommended in most texts to choose one or the other and stick with it when writing code).
Your argument is long, detailed - and wrong IMHO:) Jesus specifically uses the word "commandment" - as in the ten commandments - only to refer to his New Commandment. That's why he draws attention to the fact - "a new commandment I give unto you." Jewish speculation of the day was buzzing with what kind and how many new commandments would be in the new covenent. Some suspected it could be as many as 25! The disciples must have been initially a bit disappointed that it was only one.
If you read the whole passage - and not just a couple of verses from it - you'll see that Jesus is answering a question asked by a teacher of the law about the Law and the Prophets. "What is the greatest commandment in the law?" he says and Jesus replies as above. The ironic thing is that the New Commandment is not so very different to the spirit of the old ones. Not only that but "my neighbour" is not my friend in the tent next door but the scum-sucking, bottom feeding atheist Samaritan!
The new law has one commandment to Christians - to love one another as Christ has loved you. The _old_ law hung off the two commandments you mention. And I fail to see the problem: love God and do as you please (in that order) is the whole of the new law.
A good explanation of the relationship between the Torah and the Law to Christians can be found here.
And doubtless will be just as disputed in 15 years time as other Gates quotes from the past.
Tech dude 1: "Haha - remember that guy who broke the world record a few years ago for losing the most amount of wealth in a day when his company stock crashed? Bill Gate or something. He apparently said software was not set up for an environment where all computers were networked."
Tech dude 2 (looking away from his dual 80" monitors): "Urban legend dude - check Snopes for the real story."
Try this game. No two games are ever the same, it's fiendishly difficult yet incredibly rewarding, doesn't requre the reflexes of a 13-year old and the visuals beat anything you could ever see on a screen (mainly because they take place mostly in your mind).
I've been playing for 15 years or so and am still not tired of it.
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Bullshit. Managers like Java because it helps their team achieve their business objectives better than the other languages you describe.
Hmmm, this attitude sounds somewhat familiar. Oh yeah, Paul Graham has written about it at length in this essay:
The pointy-haired boss miraculously combines two qualities that are common by themselves, but rarely seen together: (a) he knows nothing whatsoever about technology, and (b) he has very strong opinions about it.
Suppose, for example, you need to write a piece of software. The pointy-haired boss has no idea how this software has to work, and can't tell one programming language from another, and yet he knows what language you should write it in. Exactly. He thinks you should write it in Java.
Why does he think this? Let's take a look inside the brain of the pointy-haired boss. What he's thinking is something like this. Java is a standard. I know it must be, because I read about it in the press all the time. Since it is a standard, I won't get in trouble for using it. And that also means there will always be lots of Java programmers, so if the programmers working for me now quit, as programmers working for me mysteriously always do, I can easily replace them.
On your own dime, go jump in leaf piles, run through a field of flowers, play with Python, Ruby or whatever is good for your spiritual wellbeing, but when you're working to pull a paycheck, you don't get to put your own flights of fancy before things which make your team (not you as an individual performer, but your team as a whole) more effective in achieving business objectives.
Horseshit. Python and Ruby and Lisp are real-world workhorses that don't need tens of millions of dollars in hype to be successful. For instance I have tens of thousands of lines of Python code out on the field doing real work, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for really demanding clients, including governments and advertising agencies. In one case, I finished a project in a third of the time it took three Java programmers - and mine was smaller, faster and more maintainable for the guys who took it over. Time is money and succinctness is power in software development and Java doesn't make the cut on either. Oh sure, it's a great tool to allow development by the lowest common denominator (money quote from James Gosling) but the really smart teams I know despise it for the ugly hack it really is. When I expressed this opinion in a column for a local computing mag, I was assailed with all kinds of outraged squeals from the local Java gurus. But none of them could answer my points honestly.
If readers disagree, answer honestly with words rather than modpoints. I've tried Java. I really have. I found it ugly, slow, anal and seriously limiting to work with. And I don't seem to be allowed to fix flaws in it either. That's not good.
I went back to the article and changed it back to that the bombing is alleged to have been Botha's work when someone cut in again and added a link to the infamous "Truth and Reconcilation Council" that had somehow proven beyond doubt that Botha was guilty of doing that.
Now the problem is, whatever the "TRC" comes up with, it will always be the ANC's version of what happened, largely and mainly because the ANC is funding and staffing it, meaning the link to the "hard evidence" is worth crap. However someone who doesn't know any better will swallow the pitch, hook and sinker.
I would be a little more sympathetic to you Mr AC if you also declared your biases up front and provided some semblance of knowing the facts. For a start, the TRC stands for Truth and Reconciliation Commission, not Council, and it rightly became world-famous - not infamous - as a model of how to allow ordinary people to give their versions of what happened to them under apartheid.
Your accusations are just as crap since the ANC did not "fund and staff" the TRC, not did it escape censure for its own less than lily-white actions during its struggle against apartheid. The process was flawed in many ways certainly and I am no fan of the ANC, and I sympathise entirely with the constant "corrections" that someone has seen fit to apply to your edits on Wikipedia, but please don't try and pretend you have the high ground.
How are you winning? You still don't get the content.
I think you've answered your own question here...
It's because a +1 Funny doesn't give you karma. Some mods use a +1 Insightful to say "yes I thought that was funny and I think you deserve karma as well."
So basically you're saying that in Soviet Russia, girls... ah forget it :)
Later in the interview he clarifies that it is indeed Dan Gardopee.
:)
Aha - thanks. So they worked together. Makes sense.
But still, Basehead is not just some random guy on IRC, but was an influential person in the demo scene and later in the video game scene.
Indeed. But remember you and I have (probably) years spent hanging around on #trax, watching demos and listening to basehead's music to be able to draw that conclusion
I thought Basehead's real name - as in the demo scene and Five Musicians Basehead - was Dan Grandpre. I'm really confused now though because I found an album on Amazon which seems to be by both of them (Dan Gardopee is another alias he uses). Are they the same dude? I thought Alexander Brandon's nick was Siren. And I see they've worked on a lot of the same game soundtracks...
Can someone enlighten me please? Heh - The Zen Garden has finished and Shades of Night: Sea at Dawn has just come on - fairly appropriate.
This isn't remotely funny - it's a belief that is responsible for untold numbers of child rapes each year, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
socialism/communism => the means of production should be not privatly owned but in the hand of the public
No, it was Wolverhampton Wanderers who beat Leicester 3-1.
The so-called AGB ("Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen", roughly meaning "general terms of doing business with us")
Geschafts seems like an appropriate description of doing business with Sony in English too.
Two is indeed plural in English as in most other languages (except maybe C if you use #define evilly). But the English idiom "I haven't done X for years" normally means quite a long time, certainly implying more than two years.
It's easier to understand when heard rather than read because the emphasis will fall on "years." Someone will say "I haven't done X for yeeeears" and the tone on the word will imply a long time - sometimes five, ten, or even twenty or more depending on context.
To summarise:
You are correct that two is plural in English. The GP was probably correct to remind the GGP of Windows 2003. English is sometimes more subtle when written than spoken because you lose emphasis. C can be evil in the wrong hands. I need to work on my French again because I am embarrassed by your command of English.
Ironically, the reason many people remember King Solomon is the eloquent treatise he wrote on the meaninglessness of wealth. And yes I think I've used "ironically" correctly here.
If you like weightless threads, you'll love greenlets (a standalone spinoff module of Stackless). Unlike generator-based coroutines, greenlets can be nested and switched to any other routine without the use of 'yield'. Also, any function can be turned into a greenlet - very little rewriting needed. There's hardly any overhead either since it's just an extension module written in C for the unmodified Python interpreter.
From the article:
IBM's endorsement of Linux, the SCO law suit in response, and Red Hat's negative market stance as the Sun killing would be Microsoft of the Linux era combined to destroy the automatic assumption among key innovators in the United States that Linux was "the place to be" -eventually moving many of them to the BSD and Solaris camps where they're now driving the fastest installed base expansions in the history of computing
Murphy talks about an automatic assumption but he's hidden one of his own in this para: that the only key innovators in the US are vendors and venture capitalists. GPLed software lets just about anyone with half a brain and an itch to scratch be an innovator.
The principal responsible is the Coanda effect
Jeff Raskin (he of Mac fame) also believed this. It is a complete fairy tale. Thoroughly debunked here. Among many other things, the Coanda effect simply cannot explain why there is upwash in front of a wing as well as downwash behind it.
How does an inverted aircraft remain both aerodynamically stable (relatively) and continue to maintain or increase altitude when the very airfoil shape that causes the Bernoulli effect is completely upside-down?
You're now doing what you accuse the gp of doing and misapplying Bernoulli as well. Ignoring boundary conditions, Bernoulli's principle does correctly predict a pressure drop on the upper surface of an airfoil but the reason is not because of some mythical property of fluids that disallow delay - it's because of circulation and the fact that a wing is very good at changing the speed of parcels of air. A wing is actually a very efficient pump that sets up circulation of the airflow by changing the speed of the air. Over the entire span of the wing (and the span is something normally ignored by Coanda fans), Bernoulli's principle says that there will be a suction force on the upper airfoil proportional to the pressure difference produced by the wing as it circulates the oncoming airflow. Upside down airfoils also circulate the air just fine, as long as the angle of attack is increased accordingly.
It's a sly reference to a construct in Common Lisp. 'car' is the operator which fetches the first item of a list in Lisp, originally named after the IBM machine code instruction that performed the operation on the original Lisp implementation (Contents of Address Register iirc). In ANSI Common Lisp, 'first' is a more intuitive alias for 'car' and both can be used interchangeably (although it's recommended in most texts to choose one or the other and stick with it when writing code).
Your argument is long, detailed - and wrong IMHO :) Jesus specifically uses the word "commandment" - as in the ten commandments - only to refer to his New Commandment. That's why he draws attention to the fact - "a new commandment I give unto you." Jewish speculation of the day was buzzing with what kind and how many new commandments would be in the new covenent. Some suspected it could be as many as 25! The disciples must have been initially a bit disappointed that it was only one.
If you read the whole passage - and not just a couple of verses from it - you'll see that Jesus is answering a question asked by a teacher of the law about the Law and the Prophets. "What is the greatest commandment in the law?" he says and Jesus replies as above. The ironic thing is that the New Commandment is not so very different to the spirit of the old ones. Not only that but "my neighbour" is not my friend in the tent next door but the scum-sucking, bottom feeding atheist Samaritan!
The new law has one commandment to Christians - to love one another as Christ has loved you. The _old_ law hung off the two commandments you mention. And I fail to see the problem: love God and do as you please (in that order) is the whole of the new law.
A good explanation of the relationship between the Torah and the Law to Christians can be found here.
And Grandpa's money came from, er, bootlegging. The circle is complete!
Insightful?? It's supposed to be a joke people! You know: quantum, shroedinger, cat...
Aren't quantum changes detected by cat?
And doubtless will be just as disputed in 15 years time as other Gates quotes from the past.
Tech dude 1: "Haha - remember that guy who broke the world record a few years ago for losing the most amount of wealth in a day when his company stock crashed? Bill Gate or something. He apparently said software was not set up for an environment where all computers were networked."
Tech dude 2 (looking away from his dual 80" monitors): "Urban legend dude - check Snopes for the real story."
Try this game. No two games are ever the same, it's fiendishly difficult yet incredibly rewarding, doesn't requre the reflexes of a 13-year old and the visuals beat anything you could ever see on a screen (mainly because they take place mostly in your mind).
I've been playing for 15 years or so and am still not tired of it.
Oh I see. Heh - agreed.