Python is designed with readability and maintainability as a goal. It was also meant to be useable as a teaching language. Perl was designed to encompass the functionality of several terse scripting languages and tools that came before it -- awk, sed, and shell scripting with a healty dose of C thrown in.
It's a matter of priority and it shows. In Perl, the design philosophy is "There's More Than One Way To Do It." This makes Perl very flexible and capable of doing a lot of powerful things in a very short space. Python comes from basically the opposite philosophy -- that there should be very few commonly used tools to go about the same task. It is far easier to learn how to do just one simple thing in Perl because there are numerous techniques that you can stumble on to do something. However, it's far easier to gain a grasp of Python sufficient to understand 90% of all Python scripts out there than it is to understand 90% of all the Perl scripts out there due to excess of ways to go about a task in Perl.
Furthermore, Python eschews the "modem line-noise" philosophy of syntax that Perl learned from the scripting languages it inherited from. It is clear, legible, and it's very easy to understand what a piece of unfamiliar code is doing. The number one complaint anyone who loves Perl has about Python is the fact that Python uses whitespace to determine whether code is part of the same block or not. Code that's part of the same block is all indented to the same position. It clearly visually lays out what code is part of the same block of execution. I find that most people who object to this the loudest are the people who love to write the horrid, unstructured, obfuscated code that gives Perl its bad reputation. Python doesn't let you get away with packing 10 lines of normal code into a single line of unspaced puncuation and single letters.
If my bias isn't clear by now, I prefer Python for exactly this reason. Not only can I read my own code months later, but I can read the code of people other than myself having never seen it before. Other people's Perl code for me always involves a thick language reference and a note pad and pencil to decypher.
Caveat: While Python's just about as close to executable pseudo-code as you're going to get, it's not a magical English-to-Software translation tool. Your problem with reading your own Perl was probably mostly because you learned the language just enough to do the problem you wanted and didn't touch it for months afterwards. Python is much easier to read, but any language can allow you to produce code that you can't read months later if you don't really learn the language the first time and just let yourself forget it afterwards. The first time I learned Python was for a small bit of bug fixing I had to do at work. I didn't touch it for six months afterwards, and I had a hard time understanding it at first when I looked back at it later. Of course, it was much, much easier to relearn than Perl was, and I was able to understand the pre-existing code I had to fix very rapidly the first time, but it wasn't just like riding a bicycle. YMMV.
1) Agreed the UI is inconsistent. However, hitting the escape button usually works to back up one step in its generally stack-based flow. The lack of tooltips is bad.
2) That's the whole point of the game. It's a macromanagement, not micromanagement game. The whole point is to make you step back and think of things at a strategic level instead of constantly monkeying around with numbers. It's a welcome change after the last few games I played started to get to be an hour per turn.
3) Yeah, I expected better of the art. That hasn't ruined my enjoyment of the game, since the core mechanic is what I play games for. Art's never been a biggie for me unless it's just offensively bad.
I enjoy the game a lot, but as you say YMMV. I was really hoping that your objections were just going to be things you might be missing, but it looks like most of what you don't like is a matter of taste, and you bring up a good number of solid problems that just aren't as big of a deal for me. It's all subjective.
It seems that they didn't do a good job of getting across what kind of game they wanted it to be -- in terms of design or interface. I think that if they'd kept on Alan Emrich and given the game another year, it would've knocked everyone's socks off. As is, it's still fun, but not quite what it could've been.
Actually, the problem with the AI overbuilding troop transports is a simple one to get around. The problem is that while a planet may have the shipyard capacity to build humongous ships, the cost of doing so can be ridiculous. So, the AI instead builds what it can afford. If you've done nothing but design huge ships, it will build the only small ships left that it can afford -- troop transports.
There are three ways to handle this: 1) Obsolete the design for troop transports so that it can't build any more. 2) Design some cheaper combat ships. 3) Improve the industrial & economic capacity of planets in your empire.
You can find out more about the numbers behind why the AI chooses transports here. Of course, it would be nice if the documentation for the game went over these points better or if you could get the AI to build the bigger ships, but just do so at a slower, more economical pace.
What didn't you like about it? I've put about that much time into the game, and I'm loving it. It's not everything that I hoped for, but it's definitely revolutionary.
Actually, this is a zero-point energy device. You can find a lot about it by looking into various free energy sites. It supposedly pulls energy out of the virtual particle interactions that, according to quantum mechanics, are happening all around us constantly.
Of course, my problem with the idea is that even if it works, it may not necessarily be violating the laws of thermodynamics. That energy might still be pulled from somewhere, and I don't like the idea of bleeding space itself for power if it did manage to work.
This is exactly why they should've never deregulated DSL in the first place. They're just holding broadband hostage until they can get back full monopoly power over an area. Even if they are granted total monopoly power, it won't have an effect on increasing broadband service. All it'll do is make everything more expensive.
I just signed up with Earthlink because BellSouth's ISP's TOS are far too irritating and limiting and because their customer support is far, far more knowledgeable. (Just ask people who work for BellSouth's DSLAM; they'll tell you. Bellsouth's Broadband Support doesn't do any diagnostic work first.) It's bad enough that they'll probably be driven out of business, forcing me to have to deal with inferior service, but we'll probably see jacked up prices at no noticeable benefit. Based on the way they currently treat their customers, I sure as heck don't see an end to bandwidth caps and increased service coming down the pipe.
This childish behavior is nothing but extortion. I hope that another administration can get into office before the FCC runs the consumer Internet into the ground.
No, actually, I quit the Master of Orion III forums a long time ago after the second major feature cut. From what I've read, Xentax is still pretty active. While the game is still going to be good, I can't conceive of how it could be as good as it would've been if all the features, especially Ethos, had been implemented. Some of the cut features were the ones that had me rabidly following the game in the first place.
In my parting message, I wrote down the one bit of wisdom I learned from the experience. Much like the old axiom about those who love sausage and the law, people who love video games should never watch them being made.
Let me guess, you were the arsehole who had the porche parked in the school lot. Did you see the old beat up Ford Escort with a different color fender, no muffler, and a broken windshield? The guy that owned the Escort (and I know him well) would have sold his self-respect for a tuna-freakin-fish sandwich. That guy had LESS than $20/mo for food, toiletries, and beer. You wouldn't survive a week in that guys shoes. $20/mo means another case of mac-n-cheese.
Well, gee, that excuses everything! I see the light now! After that guy broke into my friend's apartment last year and stole all his electronics, I should've excused him too because he was jobless and living in government housing! After all, I "wouldn't have survived a week in that guy's shoes," now would I?
You know what I did in college when I needed money? I got a freaking job; that's what I did. I spent my days sitting at a desk in a computer lab checking student IDs for $5/hour. I didn't throw in with parasites to get by.
Those students did sell themselves cheap. They could've gotten a real job, but instead they decided to let the bottom-feeders of the Internet take advantage of university resources so that they could get a small token sum of money without having to do a damn thing. They whored themselves out probably because they were too damn lazy to actually try to hold down a part time job while in school. As someone who worked for my food, I have absolutely no sympathy for them. They should be kicked out of housing and maybe even expelled for abusing the university network at the expense of others.
That reminds me of one that I posted recently along the same lines.
The 3 great questions Heisenberg taught physics students to ask: 1. Where are you? 2. How fast are you going? 3. Now, where did you say you were again?
Well, he is just being ignorant about the use of the word, but there are numerous martial arts like judo that turn an attacker's force to the defender's advantage. Jujitsu (the non-philosophical forefather of judo), aikido, hapkido, and even tai chi use significant numbers redirection techniques and are known as "soft" martial arts. "Hard" martial arts like karate, tae kwon do, wu shu, and most forms of "kung fu" focus more on strikes and blocks.
Further, "kung fu" by itself is a slight misnomer. Roughly speaking, "kung fu" means something like "style of." Praying Mantis Kung Fu, Shaolin Kung Fu, Crane Kung Fu and others are basically entirely different martial arts styles that are based on the same hard martial art root. As far as I'm aware, few "kung fu" martial arts spend much emphasis on redirection techniques, instead focusing mainly on strikes, blocks, and holds.
Disclaimer: I'm not a martial artist. I just read a lot about martial arts in the hopes of one day getting off my duff and learning one or more.
Actually, this is a field that is quickly being considered a new Turing test for the computer vision field. It is actually very easy to make pictures that humans can read and that machines currently can't. Look up more info on it here.
Also, some of the Nomad Jukebox series can record MP3s and AIFFs. This feature alone made me not go with an iPod even though I really wanted one. I actually ended up with an Archos unit. I feel a little gyped, though, because getting a Firewire connection for it costs an additional $70.
Heisenberg provided us with three essential questions in partical physics: 1) Where are you? 2) How fast are you going? 3) Now, where did you say you were, again?
Good! Maybe those of us who've been following the game's development can finally find out what exactly the Harvesters are. The Harvesters have been kept under complete wraps throughout the development process, and no one outside Quicksilver and Infogrames knows anything about what they are. All we know is that they like cold planets, that they have "the Need" as one of their traits, that they can't join the Orion Senate, that they don't strongly cling to belief systems, that they can't have a representative government, and that they communicate "wetly" according to a cryptic reply by the art designer on the message boards.
I'm going to be hitting the message boards for the next few weeks occasionally to see if they finally give in and let people know what they are.
There's only so much going on in the computing world on any day. Personally, the science stories are a major part of what makes me read Slashdot every day.
We could potentially develop proteins and enzymes not found in nature. That's a bit of a complex task right now, but it might be of use in 20-50 years once we have a better understanding of proteonics.
Even so, what ever happened to appreciation of scientific experimentation for its own sake? Why is the first post in almost any Slashdot article about pure science a question like, "Just what good is it anyway?" It's not like every scientific endeavor must produce marketable results immediately to be worth trying.
It's because most of the people who buy from a telemarketer would still claim that they weren't interested in any telemarketed products or in so few as to outweigh the benefits of the ones they do like. By making a unilateral decision to block the ones they dislike, they also block the ones they might actually buy from.
That's the legit reason telemarkers are opposed to this.
The other reason is that most of them are scum who don't care that they make their living off of annoying people. They live for that small fraction that will answer the sales pitch and to hell with anyone who doesn't want to be a customer.
I honestly don't know where you got the idea that Lovecraft thought that science would bring us rational explanations for things occurring around us that we don't understand. Maybe you need to go back and reread some of his stories more. Whenever science comes up in a Lovecraft stories, it is always in the role of the plot device that reveals the horrible truth behind reality that shatters the mind of the protagonist.
Two of Lovecraft's most famous quotes are:
"The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
"We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
The latter one is straight out of "The Call of Cthulhu" itself! For more HPL science horror, read the classic mad scientist stories "From Beyond" and "Herbert West: Reanimator." You can read them and many others here.
Slashdot Mirror
Python is designed with readability and maintainability as a goal. It was also meant to be useable as a teaching language. Perl was designed to encompass the functionality of several terse scripting languages and tools that came before it -- awk, sed, and shell scripting with a healty dose of C thrown in.
It's a matter of priority and it shows. In Perl, the design philosophy is "There's More Than One Way To Do It." This makes Perl very flexible and capable of doing a lot of powerful things in a very short space. Python comes from basically the opposite philosophy -- that there should be very few commonly used tools to go about the same task. It is far easier to learn how to do just one simple thing in Perl because there are numerous techniques that you can stumble on to do something. However, it's far easier to gain a grasp of Python sufficient to understand 90% of all Python scripts out there than it is to understand 90% of all the Perl scripts out there due to excess of ways to go about a task in Perl.
Furthermore, Python eschews the "modem line-noise" philosophy of syntax that Perl learned from the scripting languages it inherited from. It is clear, legible, and it's very easy to understand what a piece of unfamiliar code is doing. The number one complaint anyone who loves Perl has about Python is the fact that Python uses whitespace to determine whether code is part of the same block or not. Code that's part of the same block is all indented to the same position. It clearly visually lays out what code is part of the same block of execution. I find that most people who object to this the loudest are the people who love to write the horrid, unstructured, obfuscated code that gives Perl its bad reputation. Python doesn't let you get away with packing 10 lines of normal code into a single line of unspaced puncuation and single letters.
If my bias isn't clear by now, I prefer Python for exactly this reason. Not only can I read my own code months later, but I can read the code of people other than myself having never seen it before. Other people's Perl code for me always involves a thick language reference and a note pad and pencil to decypher.
Caveat:
While Python's just about as close to executable pseudo-code as you're going to get, it's not a magical English-to-Software translation tool. Your problem with reading your own Perl was probably mostly because you learned the language just enough to do the problem you wanted and didn't touch it for months afterwards. Python is much easier to read, but any language can allow you to produce code that you can't read months later if you don't really learn the language the first time and just let yourself forget it afterwards. The first time I learned Python was for a small bit of bug fixing I had to do at work. I didn't touch it for six months afterwards, and I had a hard time understanding it at first when I looked back at it later. Of course, it was much, much easier to relearn than Perl was, and I was able to understand the pre-existing code I had to fix very rapidly the first time, but it wasn't just like riding a bicycle. YMMV.
1) Agreed the UI is inconsistent. However, hitting the escape button usually works to back up one step in its generally stack-based flow. The lack of tooltips is bad.
2) That's the whole point of the game. It's a macromanagement, not micromanagement game. The whole point is to make you step back and think of things at a strategic level instead of constantly monkeying around with numbers. It's a welcome change after the last few games I played started to get to be an hour per turn.
3) Yeah, I expected better of the art. That hasn't ruined my enjoyment of the game, since the core mechanic is what I play games for. Art's never been a biggie for me unless it's just offensively bad.
I enjoy the game a lot, but as you say YMMV. I was really hoping that your objections were just going to be things you might be missing, but it looks like most of what you don't like is a matter of taste, and you bring up a good number of solid problems that just aren't as big of a deal for me. It's all subjective.
It seems that they didn't do a good job of getting across what kind of game they wanted it to be -- in terms of design or interface. I think that if they'd kept on Alan Emrich and given the game another year, it would've knocked everyone's socks off. As is, it's still fun, but not quite what it could've been.
Actually, the problem with the AI overbuilding troop transports is a simple one to get around. The problem is that while a planet may have the shipyard capacity to build humongous ships, the cost of doing so can be ridiculous. So, the AI instead builds what it can afford. If you've done nothing but design huge ships, it will build the only small ships left that it can afford -- troop transports.
There are three ways to handle this:
1) Obsolete the design for troop transports so that it can't build any more.
2) Design some cheaper combat ships.
3) Improve the industrial & economic capacity of planets in your empire.
You can find out more about the numbers behind why the AI chooses transports here. Of course, it would be nice if the documentation for the game went over these points better or if you could get the AI to build the bigger ships, but just do so at a slower, more economical pace.
What didn't you like about it? I've put about that much time into the game, and I'm loving it. It's not everything that I hoped for, but it's definitely revolutionary.
Actually, this is a zero-point energy device. You can find a lot about it by looking into various free energy sites. It supposedly pulls energy out of the virtual particle interactions that, according to quantum mechanics, are happening all around us constantly.
Of course, my problem with the idea is that even if it works, it may not necessarily be violating the laws of thermodynamics. That energy might still be pulled from somewhere, and I don't like the idea of bleeding space itself for power if it did manage to work.
Good lord, most people can't handle driving in two dimensions. Give them a third and there will be anarchy. ;p
Especially when on a cell phone in their brand new heavy-lift sports utility helicopters! Oh, the humanity!
Right over there on the shelf, next to the copy of Duke Nukem Forever that it's included with.
This is exactly why they should've never deregulated DSL in the first place. They're just holding broadband hostage until they can get back full monopoly power over an area. Even if they are granted total monopoly power, it won't have an effect on increasing broadband service. All it'll do is make everything more expensive.
I just signed up with Earthlink because BellSouth's ISP's TOS are far too irritating and limiting and because their customer support is far, far more knowledgeable. (Just ask people who work for BellSouth's DSLAM; they'll tell you. Bellsouth's Broadband Support doesn't do any diagnostic work first.) It's bad enough that they'll probably be driven out of business, forcing me to have to deal with inferior service, but we'll probably see jacked up prices at no noticeable benefit. Based on the way they currently treat their customers, I sure as heck don't see an end to bandwidth caps and increased service coming down the pipe.
This childish behavior is nothing but extortion. I hope that another administration can get into office before the FCC runs the consumer Internet into the ground.
No, actually, I quit the Master of Orion III forums a long time ago after the second major feature cut. From what I've read, Xentax is still pretty active. While the game is still going to be good, I can't conceive of how it could be as good as it would've been if all the features, especially Ethos, had been implemented. Some of the cut features were the ones that had me rabidly following the game in the first place.
In my parting message, I wrote down the one bit of wisdom I learned from the experience. Much like the old axiom about those who love sausage and the law, people who love video games should never watch them being made.
Xentax.. long time no see. I have just one question. How do you think the game stacks up to what we were told it was going to be a year ago?
Let me guess, you were the arsehole who had the porche parked in the school lot. Did you see the old beat up Ford Escort with a different color fender, no muffler, and a broken windshield? The guy that owned the Escort (and I know him well) would have sold his self-respect for a tuna-freakin-fish sandwich. That guy had LESS than $20/mo for food, toiletries, and beer. You wouldn't survive a week in that guys shoes. $20/mo means another case of mac-n-cheese.
Well, gee, that excuses everything! I see the light now! After that guy broke into my friend's apartment last year and stole all his electronics, I should've excused him too because he was jobless and living in government housing! After all, I "wouldn't have survived a week in that guy's shoes," now would I?
You know what I did in college when I needed money? I got a freaking job; that's what I did. I spent my days sitting at a desk in a computer lab checking student IDs for $5/hour. I didn't throw in with parasites to get by.
Those students did sell themselves cheap. They could've gotten a real job, but instead they decided to let the bottom-feeders of the Internet take advantage of university resources so that they could get a small token sum of money without having to do a damn thing. They whored themselves out probably because they were too damn lazy to actually try to hold down a part time job while in school. As someone who worked for my food, I have absolutely no sympathy for them. They should be kicked out of housing and maybe even expelled for abusing the university network at the expense of others.
As the previous poster said, VMware and VirtualPC for Mac don't share the same role. What you want is the "bochs" project.
That reminds me of one that I posted recently along the same lines.
The 3 great questions Heisenberg taught physics students to ask:
1. Where are you?
2. How fast are you going?
3. Now, where did you say you were again?
Properly done:
-1: - ( 0 + 0 + 0 - 1 )
0: 0 ( 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 )
1: + ( 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 )
2: +- ( 0 + 0 + 3 - 1 )
3: +0 ( 0 + 0 + 3 + 0 )
4: ++ ( 0 + 0 + 3 + 1 )
5: +-- ( 0 + 9 - 3 - 1 )
6: +-0 ( 0 + 9 - 3 - 0 )
7: +-+ ( 0 + 9 - 3 + 1 )
8: +0- ( 0 + 9 - 0 - 1 )
9: +00 ( 0 + 9 - 0 - 0 )
10: +0+ ( 0 + 9 - 0 + 1 )
11: ++- ( 0 + 9 + 3 - 1 )
12: ++0 ( 0 + 9 + 3 + 0 )
13: +++ ( 0 + 9 + 3 + 1 )
14: +--- ( 27 - 9 - 3 - 1 )
(Can you see the emerging pattern?)
The number sequence you gave out would be in decimal:
1, 3, 2, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 31, 30.
Note that if you wish to multiple a number by negative one (or '-'), you flip all the bits. Very convenient, no?
Well, he is just being ignorant about the use of the word, but there are numerous martial arts like judo that turn an attacker's force to the defender's advantage. Jujitsu (the non-philosophical forefather of judo), aikido, hapkido, and even tai chi use significant numbers redirection techniques and are known as "soft" martial arts. "Hard" martial arts like karate, tae kwon do, wu shu, and most forms of "kung fu" focus more on strikes and blocks.
Further, "kung fu" by itself is a slight misnomer. Roughly speaking, "kung fu" means something like "style of." Praying Mantis Kung Fu, Shaolin Kung Fu, Crane Kung Fu and others are basically entirely different martial arts styles that are based on the same hard martial art root. As far as I'm aware, few "kung fu" martial arts spend much emphasis on redirection techniques, instead focusing mainly on strikes, blocks, and holds.
Disclaimer: I'm not a martial artist. I just read a lot about martial arts in the hopes of one day getting off my duff and learning one or more.
Actually, this is a field that is quickly being considered a new Turing test for the computer vision field. It is actually very easy to make pictures that humans can read and that machines currently can't. Look up more info on it here.
Also, some of the Nomad Jukebox series can record MP3s and AIFFs. This feature alone made me not go with an iPod even though I really wanted one. I actually ended up with an Archos unit. I feel a little gyped, though, because getting a Firewire connection for it costs an additional $70.
Personally, I like:
Heisenberg provided us with three essential questions in partical physics:
1) Where are you?
2) How fast are you going?
3) Now, where did you say you were, again?
Iraq *is* chairing the UN conference on disarmament. Seriously.
Their co-chair for February is Iran too. As much as Iran dislikes the U.S. right now, the chance to screw over Iraq is just too good for them.
Heh. Once again, alphabetical seating order puts you right next to people you hate for the rest of your career. It reminds me of high school.
Aw, man. I was totally dissed by someone who spends his free time flaming on Slashdot. I mean... *sizzle* Ouch!
Good! Maybe those of us who've been following the game's development can finally find out what exactly the Harvesters are. The Harvesters have been kept under complete wraps throughout the development process, and no one outside Quicksilver and Infogrames knows anything about what they are. All we know is that they like cold planets, that they have "the Need" as one of their traits, that they can't join the Orion Senate, that they don't strongly cling to belief systems, that they can't have a representative government, and that they communicate "wetly" according to a cryptic reply by the art designer on the message boards.
I'm going to be hitting the message boards for the next few weeks occasionally to see if they finally give in and let people know what they are.
There's only so much going on in the computing world on any day. Personally, the science stories are a major part of what makes me read Slashdot every day.
We could potentially develop proteins and enzymes not found in nature. That's a bit of a complex task right now, but it might be of use in 20-50 years once we have a better understanding of proteonics.
Even so, what ever happened to appreciation of scientific experimentation for its own sake? Why is the first post in almost any Slashdot article about pure science a question like, "Just what good is it anyway?" It's not like every scientific endeavor must produce marketable results immediately to be worth trying.
It's because most of the people who buy from a telemarketer would still claim that they weren't interested in any telemarketed products or in so few as to outweigh the benefits of the ones they do like. By making a unilateral decision to block the ones they dislike, they also block the ones they might actually buy from.
That's the legit reason telemarkers are opposed to this.
The other reason is that most of them are scum who don't care that they make their living off of annoying people. They live for that small fraction that will answer the sales pitch and to hell with anyone who doesn't want to be a customer.
I honestly don't know where you got the idea that Lovecraft thought that science would bring us rational explanations for things occurring around us that we don't understand. Maybe you need to go back and reread some of his stories more. Whenever science comes up in a Lovecraft stories, it is always in the role of the plot device that reveals the horrible truth behind reality that shatters the mind of the protagonist.
Two of Lovecraft's most famous quotes are:
The latter one is straight out of "The Call of Cthulhu" itself! For more HPL science horror, read the classic mad scientist stories "From Beyond" and "Herbert West: Reanimator." You can read them and many others here.