I'm just positively amazed that Slashdot, in theory home of programmer geeks anywhere, should have such a violent dislike of C++.
There are at least two ways to interpret that:
"There is an overwhelmingly bad reaction to this, and everyone seems to prefer this other thing instead. Perhaps I should find out why."
There is an overwhelmingly bad reaction to this, and everyone seems to prefer this other thing instead. Everyone but me seems to be clueless."
Now, "most popular" isn't automatically the same as "best", or else McDonald's make the most delicious hamburgers. Still, if a huge crowd of people who at least hypothetically have experience with the subject matter tend to have the same opinion, perhaps there's something to it.
Not that there is nothing to criticize about it, but it is still an amazingly powerful, versatile tool that programmers anywhere would do well to learn.
It could be that we learned it, cringed in horror, and went back to our more expressive dynamic languages. I have no fear of programming to the metal, but I bought a computer so that I don't have to deal with all the low-level gruntwork on a daily basis. There's nothing more powerful or versatile than raw machine code, but there's a reason why most of us use something else.
Anyone else wonder why they don't complete the experiment. The bird could simply be trying to establish if it has a sticker, like the other bird that it sees.
That sounds like even more complex behavior than "simply" self-recognition. It means that the bird would realize that if another bird could have a sticker, then it might also have one itself. Furthermore, it would have to be curious enough to test that hypothesis.
But still, dynamically typed so we get type errors at customer sites, slow, and memory hogging. (Also 'features' of Perl too). OO-paradigm, so clumsy to use.
Sounds like you're trying to write C in Python. Surprise, surprise: that doesn't work.
A recent ex-coworker made that same mistake time and again. He'd write pages of code that we could literally replace with three or four lines of idiomatic Python, dropping runtimes from 2 hours with a gig of RAM to 8 seconds with 5 MB. No, that is not an exaggeration.
The point was that he never learned to quit fighting the language, and it showed. Sounds like some of your programmers are hitting the same wall.
OK. It's just that I've worked with people who got irritated at my use of things like map() and Python's list comprehensions because they do a whole lot in a small amount of code. Maybe the key distinction is that you and I like intelligent code that works as documented, but dislike clever code that depends on side effects. Is that a fair summary?
You do know the difference between imperative, declarative, and functional languages, right?
Yep!
You don't tell SQL what to do because SQL is about telling the computer what you want.
Yep! And in the much the same way, there are constructs in many imperative languages that operate similarly, such as the example of an enhanced map() function. Rather than specifically telling the program how to do its job, you tell it what you want to accomplish and let it figure out the details. The point I wanted to make is that such things aren't inherently "clever" or "hackish", but genuinely better in a lot of measurable ways.
I think a main reason homeschooling is so attractive to many people is because this gives them the ability to do exactly this: raise their kids with a restricted information set so the kids will be much less likely to make choices the parents don't like.
I don't know enough about homeschooling to be able to address that on a national level, but among the homeschoolers I know that wouldn't be true. Most of them sincerely believe that they can give their kids a better education than the school system could, and given that several of them are doctor families, I don't for a second doubt that they have the intellect at least to do so.
Now, I don't know if they're right or not. My kids go to a public school (Montessori for the win!) and I'm happy with the education they're getting. Still, I'm pretty sure I could give them a better science basis than they're likely to get in school. I choose to address that by teaching my kids extra stuff when they're at home. My homeschooling friends have decided to skip the middle man and take over those responsibilities directly.
Again, I'm not involved in homeschooling organizations or movements or anything of the sort, so I don't know if there's a "typical" reason for teaching your kids yourself. Maybe my friends are the only ones in America doing it for what I would consider to be the right reasons. I just thought I'd mention that the "books are teh evil!" crowd aren't the only ones doing this.
I know a lot of people who were getting very nervous about even *visiting* the USA.
As an American, things like that make me sad. By and large, I think we're nice people who want friendly visitors to come and feel welcome. It sucks that the perception is otherwise, whether justified or hyped up. I know we must come across as a bunch of paranoid xenophobics, but I truly believe we're not like that as a whole. Yeah, we have our share of vocal jackasses, but they don't represent the general population any more than football hooligans represent England.
And by analogy, I'd be terrified at the idea of having to attend a football game. After all, we always hear about those horrific riots where half the fans are killed. See how that works? It doesn't matter if that's true or not; that's how it's portrayed in the news.
I have never once heard those listed as "Perl mantras"... where is this coming from?
"We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris." -- Larry Wall, Programming Perl (1st edition), O'Reilly And Associates
It neither encourages nor discourages.
He misspoke. Perl itself neither encourages nor discourages. Perl's community, however, is largely centered around those three exact things.
When Perl is promoted by impatient, sloppy bodgers, it's no mystery why it would attractd similarly minded developers. It doesn't have to be that way, but that does seem to be the de facto situation.
Oh, you nailed that one. When I was hacking Perl in the late 90s, it was fun and exciting and elite. The Perl culture was that we were special and cool and not like the corporate drones writing RPG in their cubicles. The problem was that it actively pushed you to do stuff as un-drone-like as possible as an ends to itself. If you did stuff in a clear, maintainable manner then you were just like one of "them", and that would have been missing the whole point of Perl.
I'm sure if you wrote code that walked through the steps in what you are trying to achieve, all the following would be quicker
While I agree in general principle, there are very real reasons why one-liners may be (possibly much) faster. For instance, suppose you want to execute an idempotent function, foo(), on every value in a list. The order of execution isn't important. Real world example: image manipulation where each pixel can be processed independently.
Writing it out longhand would give you something like:
for item in values: foo(item)
That's certainly clear enough! But suppose instead you do something like:
map(foo, values)
A naive implementation of map() will work similarly to the longhand version. A parallelized version of map(), though, could potentially process many values simultaneously, possibly even via a cluster of remote machines.
Another example: SQL. You don't say "loop across every row in table 'foo' and try to find a corresponding row in table 'bar'. Then, loop across that relation and give me the first and third values from 'foo' and the fourth value from 'bar'." Instead, you say "select foo.a, foo.c, bar.d from foo, bar where foo.id = bar.id". The database engine knows the best way to generate that set of tuples, so you ask it to do so and don't usually care what happens behind the scenes.
What I'm saying in a roundabout way is that sometimes there are huge wins from letting the language do as much of your work as possible. This isn't "cleverness" or "premature optimization" as much as asking the machine to do its job in the most efficient manner.
And if you are a super prodigy, save yourself the heartache and just write your own OS. It's better than slowing yourself down to the same speed as the rest of the retards writing patches.
The thing is that the Linux kernel (and in fact most other major FOSS projects) is packed with super prodigies. Each and every one of them has had to prove their chops before being handed the keys to the kingdom.
There's an optimum level of ego in programmers. For example, if I didn't think I was one of the best, I wouldn't be able to do my job as brilliantly as I do. Still, once you pass that level you turn into someone like Hans Reiser. His personal problems aside, he was clearly an excellent programmer who failed to recognize that his peers were equally gifted. This caused him to time and again branch off with his own world-changing codebases. Unfortunately, they were so huge in scope that they were routinely rejected - and justly so. He never seemed to grasp the concept of making small, useful, standalone changes that stood a chance of being accepted by the community whose approval he wanted.
Don't switch. Instead, get an IPv6 tunnel and run both protocols in parallel. It's relatively easy and costs nothing, and you'll have access to everything in both address spaces.
It just feels so natural to place my network on private, publiclly unprofitable address that I feel it is insane not to. It is so damn intuitive to me, and probably alot of other people--it feels like a violation of our core being when we let our personal computers sit out on the big bad internet.
Here's some patchouli and a campfire songbook. News flash: your computer doesn't feel jack. Network admins who know about this stuff and tell you that you're wrong don't feel that they might be right. All the warm fuzzies in the world won't make NAT more secure than a stateful firewall, and the sooner you apply thinking and reasoning to the idea, the sooner you'll understand why.
If I, senior tech guy at a large bandwidth customer couldn't get it done, why do we think every home user, T1 user, and average Joe Slashdot User could get it done.
I got it done perhaps because I'm not running a giant network. I set up tunnels from Hurricane Electric at home and at work, let our {Free,Open}BSD firewalls announce routes, and started using it. See my home page next to my name? There's no dancing turtle, but you can get to it over either protocol.
One of the huge wins for me as netadmin is that I can stop screwing around with port forwarding just to be able to SSH or make VOIP calls from home to work or vice versa. I'm loving me some end-to-end connectivity again.
While I could start beating my own chest about how most of your traffic right now probably goes through something designed by me, that would be beside the point (and noone knows you are a dog on the Internet:) ).
I don't know if you're a dog, but I do know that you haven't designed recent hardware, or you'd know that:
There are opcodes for doing 128-bit operations on modern CPUs, just like there were 80-bit FLOPs on 32-bit CPUs.
One of the core design goals of IPv6 was to simplify routing, and they've succeeded. Route entries may use more bytes but there will be a whole lot less of them by design.
You can represent IPv4 addresses with structs, but not an IPv4 header since they have variable lengths. IPv6 has fixed-length headers, significantly lessening processing and making hardware routing much easier to implement.
If you like simplicity and elegance and performance, you'd love IPv6.
Gullible: It's my birthday, can you point out my sign?
Me: (points at the ground)
Could it be, possibly, that some of them are just interested out of curiosity even if they don't believe in it? A local Chinese restaurant has a menu with the zodiac years. Even though I don't follow Chinese astrology, it's fun to read what people born in my year are supposed to act like, and whether I'm supposed to be compatible with various family members. If I asked you to point out my sign, it'd be in that same sense.
Sure looking back Windows 95 and 98 and even XP, aren't all that sexy, but compared to what was available at the time, their interfaces were cutting edge, sleek and sexy looking.
You've got to be kidding me. They were better than, say, Win3.11, but ugly as sin compared to their Amiga and Mac counterparts.
I want a camera that can upload to my laptop, via Bluetooth, in realtime. That plus a Wi-Fi AP gives a camera that transmits directly to your home server. Let an overly-aggressive guard try to delete that.
But "reality television" as it is defined today is NOT something I think any intelligent person should see as "entertainment". And I am highly suspect of anyone who claims otherwise. If anything, they are likely to be faux intellectuals who would rather put on a show of intelligence than actually make an effort to *be* intelligent.
It isn't enough that I've been working through the math textbooks my old college professor recommended to me just for the fun of it, or that I've released Free Software database conversion utilities based off a side project at work? You know, sometimes I just want to kick back and do something mindless - even stupid - to give my poor noggin a break. It could be that you're exactly wrong: some of us would rather do intelligent things than make an effort to convince others of our intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just positively amazed that Slashdot, in theory home of programmer geeks anywhere, should have such a violent dislike of C++.
There are at least two ways to interpret that:
Now, "most popular" isn't automatically the same as "best", or else McDonald's make the most delicious hamburgers. Still, if a huge crowd of people who at least hypothetically have experience with the subject matter tend to have the same opinion, perhaps there's something to it.
Not that there is nothing to criticize about it, but it is still an amazingly powerful, versatile tool that programmers anywhere would do well to learn.
It could be that we learned it, cringed in horror, and went back to our more expressive dynamic languages. I have no fear of programming to the metal, but I bought a computer so that I don't have to deal with all the low-level gruntwork on a daily basis. There's nothing more powerful or versatile than raw machine code, but there's a reason why most of us use something else.
Unions. I sure wish I belonged to one.
Why? Lose a job by posting about cats on a popular blog?
Anyone else wonder why they don't complete the experiment. The bird could simply be trying to establish if it has a sticker, like the other bird that it sees.
That sounds like even more complex behavior than "simply" self-recognition. It means that the bird would realize that if another bird could have a sticker, then it might also have one itself. Furthermore, it would have to be curious enough to test that hypothesis.
But still, dynamically typed so we get type errors at customer sites, slow, and memory hogging. (Also 'features' of Perl too). OO-paradigm, so clumsy to use.
Sounds like you're trying to write C in Python. Surprise, surprise: that doesn't work.
A recent ex-coworker made that same mistake time and again. He'd write pages of code that we could literally replace with three or four lines of idiomatic Python, dropping runtimes from 2 hours with a gig of RAM to 8 seconds with 5 MB. No, that is not an exaggeration.
The point was that he never learned to quit fighting the language, and it showed. Sounds like some of your programmers are hitting the same wall.
OK. It's just that I've worked with people who got irritated at my use of things like map() and Python's list comprehensions because they do a whole lot in a small amount of code. Maybe the key distinction is that you and I like intelligent code that works as documented, but dislike clever code that depends on side effects. Is that a fair summary?
You do know the difference between imperative, declarative, and functional languages, right?
Yep!
You don't tell SQL what to do because SQL is about telling the computer what you want.
Yep! And in the much the same way, there are constructs in many imperative languages that operate similarly, such as the example of an enhanced map() function. Rather than specifically telling the program how to do its job, you tell it what you want to accomplish and let it figure out the details. The point I wanted to make is that such things aren't inherently "clever" or "hackish", but genuinely better in a lot of measurable ways.
No, but she knows how to read his Slashdot comments.
I think a main reason homeschooling is so attractive to many people is because this gives them the ability to do exactly this: raise their kids with a restricted information set so the kids will be much less likely to make choices the parents don't like.
I don't know enough about homeschooling to be able to address that on a national level, but among the homeschoolers I know that wouldn't be true. Most of them sincerely believe that they can give their kids a better education than the school system could, and given that several of them are doctor families, I don't for a second doubt that they have the intellect at least to do so.
Now, I don't know if they're right or not. My kids go to a public school (Montessori for the win!) and I'm happy with the education they're getting. Still, I'm pretty sure I could give them a better science basis than they're likely to get in school. I choose to address that by teaching my kids extra stuff when they're at home. My homeschooling friends have decided to skip the middle man and take over those responsibilities directly.
Again, I'm not involved in homeschooling organizations or movements or anything of the sort, so I don't know if there's a "typical" reason for teaching your kids yourself. Maybe my friends are the only ones in America doing it for what I would consider to be the right reasons. I just thought I'd mention that the "books are teh evil!" crowd aren't the only ones doing this.
I know a lot of people who were getting very nervous about even *visiting* the USA.
As an American, things like that make me sad. By and large, I think we're nice people who want friendly visitors to come and feel welcome. It sucks that the perception is otherwise, whether justified or hyped up. I know we must come across as a bunch of paranoid xenophobics, but I truly believe we're not like that as a whole. Yeah, we have our share of vocal jackasses, but they don't represent the general population any more than football hooligans represent England.
And by analogy, I'd be terrified at the idea of having to attend a football game. After all, we always hear about those horrific riots where half the fans are killed. See how that works? It doesn't matter if that's true or not; that's how it's portrayed in the news.
I have never once heard those listed as "Perl mantras"... where is this coming from?
"We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris." -- Larry Wall, Programming Perl (1st edition), O'Reilly And Associates
It neither encourages nor discourages.
He misspoke. Perl itself neither encourages nor discourages. Perl's community, however, is largely centered around those three exact things.
When Perl is promoted by impatient, sloppy bodgers, it's no mystery why it would attractd similarly minded developers. It doesn't have to be that way, but that does seem to be the de facto situation.
Oh, you nailed that one. When I was hacking Perl in the late 90s, it was fun and exciting and elite. The Perl culture was that we were special and cool and not like the corporate drones writing RPG in their cubicles. The problem was that it actively pushed you to do stuff as un-drone-like as possible as an ends to itself. If you did stuff in a clear, maintainable manner then you were just like one of "them", and that would have been missing the whole point of Perl.
I'm sure if you wrote code that walked through the steps in what you are trying to achieve, all the following would be quicker
While I agree in general principle, there are very real reasons why one-liners may be (possibly much) faster. For instance, suppose you want to execute an idempotent function, foo(), on every value in a list. The order of execution isn't important. Real world example: image manipulation where each pixel can be processed independently.
Writing it out longhand would give you something like:
That's certainly clear enough! But suppose instead you do something like:
A naive implementation of map() will work similarly to the longhand version. A parallelized version of map(), though, could potentially process many values simultaneously, possibly even via a cluster of remote machines.
Another example: SQL. You don't say "loop across every row in table 'foo' and try to find a corresponding row in table 'bar'. Then, loop across that relation and give me the first and third values from 'foo' and the fourth value from 'bar'." Instead, you say "select foo.a, foo.c, bar.d from foo, bar where foo.id = bar.id". The database engine knows the best way to generate that set of tuples, so you ask it to do so and don't usually care what happens behind the scenes.
What I'm saying in a roundabout way is that sometimes there are huge wins from letting the language do as much of your work as possible. This isn't "cleverness" or "premature optimization" as much as asking the machine to do its job in the most efficient manner.
How long would it take you to debug that problem?
About 2 seconds. Honestly, haven't you people ever heard of programming editors?
And if you are a super prodigy, save yourself the heartache and just write your own OS. It's better than slowing yourself down to the same speed as the rest of the retards writing patches.
The thing is that the Linux kernel (and in fact most other major FOSS projects) is packed with super prodigies. Each and every one of them has had to prove their chops before being handed the keys to the kingdom.
There's an optimum level of ego in programmers. For example, if I didn't think I was one of the best, I wouldn't be able to do my job as brilliantly as I do. Still, once you pass that level you turn into someone like Hans Reiser. His personal problems aside, he was clearly an excellent programmer who failed to recognize that his peers were equally gifted. This caused him to time and again branch off with his own world-changing codebases. Unfortunately, they were so huge in scope that they were routinely rejected - and justly so. He never seemed to grasp the concept of making small, useful, standalone changes that stood a chance of being accepted by the community whose approval he wanted.
Don't switch. Instead, get an IPv6 tunnel and run both protocols in parallel. It's relatively easy and costs nothing, and you'll have access to everything in both address spaces.
It just feels so natural to place my network on private, publiclly unprofitable address that I feel it is insane not to. It is so damn intuitive to me, and probably alot of other people--it feels like a violation of our core being when we let our personal computers sit out on the big bad internet.
Here's some patchouli and a campfire songbook. News flash: your computer doesn't feel jack. Network admins who know about this stuff and tell you that you're wrong don't feel that they might be right. All the warm fuzzies in the world won't make NAT more secure than a stateful firewall, and the sooner you apply thinking and reasoning to the idea, the sooner you'll understand why.
If I, senior tech guy at a large bandwidth customer couldn't get it done, why do we think every home user, T1 user, and average Joe Slashdot User could get it done.
I got it done perhaps because I'm not running a giant network. I set up tunnels from Hurricane Electric at home and at work, let our {Free,Open}BSD firewalls announce routes, and started using it. See my home page next to my name? There's no dancing turtle, but you can get to it over either protocol.
One of the huge wins for me as netadmin is that I can stop screwing around with port forwarding just to be able to SSH or make VOIP calls from home to work or vice versa. I'm loving me some end-to-end connectivity again.
While I could start beating my own chest about how most of your traffic right now probably goes through something designed by me, that would be beside the point (and noone knows you are a dog on the Internet :) ).
I don't know if you're a dog, but I do know that you haven't designed recent hardware, or you'd know that:
If you like simplicity and elegance and performance, you'd love IPv6.
Gullible: It's my birthday, can you point out my sign?
Me: (points at the ground)
Could it be, possibly, that some of them are just interested out of curiosity even if they don't believe in it? A local Chinese restaurant has a menu with the zodiac years. Even though I don't follow Chinese astrology, it's fun to read what people born in my year are supposed to act like, and whether I'm supposed to be compatible with various family members. If I asked you to point out my sign, it'd be in that same sense.
Sure looking back Windows 95 and 98 and even XP, aren't all that sexy, but compared to what was available at the time, their interfaces were cutting edge, sleek and sexy looking.
You've got to be kidding me. They were better than, say, Win3.11, but ugly as sin compared to their Amiga and Mac counterparts.
I want a camera that can upload to my laptop, via Bluetooth, in realtime. That plus a Wi-Fi AP gives a camera that transmits directly to your home server. Let an overly-aggressive guard try to delete that.
Did someone miss the memo about analog broadcasts ending at the end of this year?
Was someone under the impression that had anything to do with cable?
Right. It's kind of like, "you have no idea which socks I wore today." While true, it doesn't really convey a lot of information.
If I want actual Intellectual articles with in-depth discussions, I come to slashdot.
How long have you been smoking crack? Has it caused other impairments?
But "reality television" as it is defined today is NOT something I think any intelligent person should see as "entertainment". And I am highly suspect of anyone who claims otherwise. If anything, they are likely to be faux intellectuals who would rather put on a show of intelligence than actually make an effort to *be* intelligent.
It isn't enough that I've been working through the math textbooks my old college professor recommended to me just for the fun of it, or that I've released Free Software database conversion utilities based off a side project at work? You know, sometimes I just want to kick back and do something mindless - even stupid - to give my poor noggin a break. It could be that you're exactly wrong: some of us would rather do intelligent things than make an effort to convince others of our intelligence.