Sure there is, but the question is what is luck...
One type of luck is "preparation meets opportunity", i.e. "earned luck", but there is also just plain lucky "thin end of the bell curve luck"...
Consider if a million people spend all day putting quarters into slot machines.. the winnings distribution will be a bell curve, and some lucky buggers will have come out ahead of everyone else.
The same thing happens over the course of a lifetime. Some peope (by statistical happenstance) just happen to be lucky all the time. I remember the british actor Derek Nimo describing himself as being lucky this way.
Nah... It's really to messages what Google Voice (formerly Grand Central) is for voice. It lets people contact YOU rather than contacting some device/account.
With Google Voice people call your number and you choose on-the-fly where it's going to ring (at work, on your cell phone, at the hotel or friends house your currently at, etc). With Facebook it seems your various messaging accounts now become ways of reaching you as a person, or put another way your messages find you rather than you having to find them.
If things could not get any better, "Fglrx and nvidia drivers can also be supported by writing a Gallium driver that talks to them using OpenGL, which is a relatively easy task. Thanks to the great design of Direct3D 10/11 and closeness to Gallium, this approach should not result in detectable overhead, and is the most maintainable way to do it, providing a path to switch to the open Gallium drivers once they are on par with the proprietary ones."
Google became popular not only because of their quality search results (which Bing has now, for most practical uses, caught up with), but also because of their minimalist uncluttered search page. Ditto Google mail which not only works well but has a clean UI.
It seems to be the way of most major software applications that they end up adding feature bloat to the point they are no longer unusable for their core purpose, and Google seems intent on going that way too. I guess the Wave fiasco wasn't enough - they *really* want to get "in" on social networks, and since people don't seem to want to "opt in", they are going to ram it down your throat by integrating it everywhere you don't want it.
But think of the benefits. Seconds after posting a drunken photo to facebook, you'll be getting Jack Daniels avertizements with your Google search results!
The developer should unit test, and the test group should system test. The two are complementary.
The test group will hopefully test the software in ways you never thought it would be used, but you'll hopefully have tested every code path and end case that only you are aware of from having written it.
Of course the developer can system test do, or at least contribute test cases.
Yep, and even if all the current news providers went the same way, it would just clear the way for a new news provider to step in and claim the internet news market for themself. CNN came out of nowhere to a dominant position, and no doubt other news organization will appear in the future as opportunities arise. In the meantime the BBC and CNN are good enough... I already deleted my UK times bookmarks a few weeks ago.
Someone will make "free" (i.e advertisement based) internet news work, just as someone (Google) made "free" internet search work.
So, if Murdoch doesn't want to try to be the Google of online news, too bad for him. He's like king Canute or the RIAA trying to prevent the inevitable.
We need to switch to a system with lots of cores, all with their own local memory, and able to send each other messages.
You're describing the Immos Transputer - way ahead of it's time when it was released c. 1980.
Each Transputer core was an interconnected computing mesh node, with it's own memory, with specialized hardware-based communication channels connecting it to other nodes. It was designed hand-in-hand with a specialized language "Occam" (as in Occam's razor) that directly mapped onto the parallelism and communication/message-passing abilities of the hardware.
If you said a section of Occam code could run in parallel then at run-time it would be distributed across nodes if available. If you defined a piece of code to read from an input channel, that could/would be mapped onto one of the hardward communication channels where it would be connected to another "process" writing to a channel somewhere else on the Transputer mesh it was deployed on.
One nice thing about Occam was that the language parallelism and communication constructs, although designed to map directly onto the hardware, didn't have to, so you could run any Occam program on any sized Transputer network, and the run-time deployment would map it onto the available hardware. They had nice demos showing things like Mandlebrot generation or 3-D scene fly-thru just getting faster as it was run on bigger networks.
Of course you could do the same today with, say, pthreads - a heavily multithread app will just get faster as it is run on hardware with more cores, but the nice thing about the Transputer and Occam was that it was scalable. If you wanted 100 cores you could build it, while today you're limited to the processors Intel/etc build, and unlike Occam your programming model totally changes (pthreads -> network based) if you need more cores than fit on a single chip or on a single board.
So.. let's hope the future of computing is as advanced and well designed as it's past was!
I used to drive a '78 Ford LTD that had previously been beefed up for use as a cop car.
It did 7 mpg!
On the plus side it was built like a tank... I once wanted to make a sharp turn in a parking lot, and found my way impeded by a telephone pole... I just put my foot down and (from being at rest, in contact with the pole) gouged an inch deep groove in the side of the pole to make my way, and the car's fender was entirely unscathed. I was also rear-ended by a pickup truck at a stop light with similar complete lack of damage.
1) A necessary step on one path to creating more interesting types of designer life (from oil producing microbes all the way up to whatever your imagination can conjure up - chickens turned back into dinosaurs, etc)
2) Certainly significant to those who do think that life is something magical and not merely a systems property.
Incidently, what Craig Venter is really working is a minimal organism whose DNA started out as that of some simple bacteria (from a venereal disease if I remember correctly!), and which he's much more extensively modified by cutting out large swathes of it that hhe's discovered are not essential for life. He's created this DNA via traditional gene splicing techniques, with the next step being to synthesize it from scratch as he's done here.
So, while the DNA in this current experiment is merely a (synthesized) cpoy with a few markers inserted into it, it's really just a step on the way to inserting the synthesized version of his real (much more heavily modified - new species) DNA into a cell.
I'd say it may well be creating life. It's not exactly designing life (and not exactly NOT designing life either...).
Consider:
1) The cell they injected the new DNA into had the old DNA removed first - hence it has dead.
2) The new DNA started out as chemicals in a bottle - certainly dead too.
3) The new DNA put into the cell "rebooted" / reanimated it so that it started dividing again. Certainly back alive now!
This experiment may not LOOK that impressive, but consider that the exact same technique can be used to computer modify any type of life you want in any way. Want a hen with teeth - no problem. Replace the feathers with scales... just a matter of computer programming, then "print" the DNA and animate it.
Note also that while it's "only" the DNA that's being created, not the INITIAL cell, that the copies the cell it makes of itself as it divides are of course made under control of this synthetic DNA, so the 2nd, 3rd, etc generation cells could be considered themselves synthetic.
There's no other platform in the world that can boast this level of flexibility -- not even close
Qt will let you run a single code base on OS/X, Windows 7/etc, Linux and any platform that Qt/Embedded has been ported to. Not just trivial apps like Reversi, but also ones using multithreading, networking, etc. There's also a fair degree of cross-platform multimedia support too, although that's a work in progress. Personally I choose to use PortAudio for cross-platform audio aupport together with Qt.
To be honest, every single C compiler out there defines its own incompatible implementation of C.
No they don't. They may implement extensions which you are free to use or ignore, but that's a different matter.
If you read the C language specification there are some things that are defined as being implementation defined (e.g. order of function argument evaluation), but if your program relies on such things it's your own fault.
First class functions are primarily the realm of functional programming languages, not procedural ones. Lambda's, combined with ways to refer to them (C++ std::function, templates, auto) are a type of first class function. Closures provide an interesting alternative way to code some things, but seriously who really misses them in C/C++?
* comprehensions
Use a libary.
* coroutines
Use a library.
* proper generics/templates (no, macros are _not_ a replacement)
Agreed. Templates are very useful.
* painless string handling
Use a library.
* module system
To do what? You've listed namespaces and classes separately, so what's left that you can't do in C?
Most C programmerss use paired.h/.c module definition/implementation pairs, and #ifndef/#define to allow module definitions to be blindly included.
* namespaces
Agreed. Namespaces are useful, although not a show stopper.
* reflection
C's a low level language. There is nothing to inspect. Feel free to build layers on top of it.
* support for common oop patterns and tools, like class definitions, dynamic dispatch etc.
Agreed. Classes are enormously useful.
Of course C has evolved into C++ which has the useful items on your list, and is aquiring others (lambdas in c++0x).
The trouble with what you did is that the the guy with 12yrs experience and glowing reviews was surely not looking for an entry level position... he only applied and accepted because he needed a paycheck and had obviously not found a job at his real experience/salary level. I'd be AMAZED if he doesn't keep looking and quit your job as soon as he has found a better one.
If you'd hired a fresh grad or someone with a year or two's experience they could have grown with the position and maybe ended up making a long term career at your company.
So what? If memory is an issue then pick another - there are plenty of small/fast XML libraries out there as well as the better known ones. More to the point if you can't find one that meets your needs, then write one.
I certainly wouldn't recommend using a low level DOM API directly to read/write C data or you'll be end up writing hundreds/thousands of lines of code at the application level to read/write complex XML formats. With the *right* XML API one line of code (plus some mapping tables) can read/write anything.
Not much apparently. If a five year old girl can do it, maybe you can too?!;-)
Just a quick note to say the DIY kits from our distributor will be available towards the end of Q2. We will be announcing with them prior to distrbution. Thanks for your patience.
One of the reasons I'm personally committed to doing this goes back to my One Laptop per Child experience and girls in a poor rural part of Nigeria who helped us test the early beta-laptop builds. In their school they had slanted desks bolted to benches with 4-5 kids per desk/bench combo. When any kid fidgeted or bumped all the laptops would fall on the concrete floors. The laptops were designed to be rugged and didn't break usually, but in this early build one of the cables to the touchpad/keyboard was 1mm too short and could become "unseated". This meant the keyboard and the touchpad would no longer work unless something was done.
Luckily: An 11 year old girl decided to open a laptop hospital. Unfortunately the boys really missed out here, because in this part of Nigeria "everyone knows" only girls work at hospitals, she eventually recruited girls as young as 5 to help out in the hospital. This group of girls armed with screwdrivers starting taking apart the laptops and reseating the cables. Sometimes they'd change out a screen, or a speaker. They learned about the hardware of their laptops. They got to see what was inside. They got better and better at fixing things by learning as they went.
Ministers of Education had a tough time believing that these girls could fix the hardware, so they would visit - to see it with their own eyes - and start thinking differently about maintenance of hardware. We kept preaching that ownership was the best way to assure maintenance.
Yet, most people are scared to change their laptop screen. It's only slightly more difficult than changing a lightbuld: it's basically 6 screws, pulling off a bezel, unconnecting the old screen and plugging this one in. That's it. It's a 5 minute operation.
This isn't a generic LCD display - that's not their market.
The big deals with the Pixel Qi display is that:
- It's totally usable in full sunlight - It's full color and fast (OK for video) - It has a reflective e-ink mode - It's low power
It's really geared towards:
1) eBook readers that want color and video support 2) Laptops/netbooks intended to be used outside (which tends to mean smaller form factor)
They use the same production line as traditional LCDs though (there's lots of articles / videos on them if you Google), so they'll certainly be able to produce larger sizes if they want to.
Nah - it's full color and fast (good for video). If you use it as a drop in replacement for your existing display then what you're getting is the ability to use your laptop in full sunlight where your current screen would be all washed out.
Far too many people just automatically use XML where CSV file or tab-delimited text file would do the same job with tens of thousands of lines less code.....
That would depend on your XML library, wouldn't it?
I wrote my own XML library that let's you define mappings between arbitrary XML and C/C++ data structures, and then convert to/from XML with as single API call (the mappings are data - initialized arrays). With the right tools you can't beat XML for productivity, which is one of the reasons people use it - never write a parser again, even a simple CSV one.
There's some truth to that - as time goes on tools become higher level, libraries more advanced, etc.
However, we are far from the point where everything one might ask for has been written. Look for example at the current state of parallel programming; in the real world, programming in Java, C++ or C#, you're still going to find yourself using low level threading libraries (e.g. Unix pthreads) and synchronization primitives most of the time, because better tools for mainstream languages for the most part just don't exist (notwithstanding things like OpenMP, design patterns like map-reduce). Plenty of scope here for creating your own parallel frameworks, libraries, etc.
Or how about something as simple and ubiquitous as XML... you could just use the standardized DOM/SAX API's and bemoan that you're having to use someone else's work rather than have the fun of designing it yourself, or you could realize that the productivity of these general-purpose APIs is dismal for any specific task and write your own higher level application libraries (e.g. I wrote one to convert arbitraty XML to/from C/C++ data structures).
Or what about fun stuff like implementing languages... sure you're unlikely to find justification in creating a new language to write a whole project in, but what about scriptability, testing and configuration... there's plenty of scope for implementing your own mini embedded languages for this sort of thing. Sure you can use languages like Python and Lua for C++ embedding, but wouldn't it be more productive for C++ programmers to use a C-like language instead...
I just used these three examples as they're things I've implemented myself in recent years, but there must be dozens of areas were customized tools are useful and appropriate.
I remember back in the early 80's a piece of much-hyped application generator called "The Last One" causing alarmist headlines about "The end of programming?", but the fact is that we're really no closer to that now than we were back then. Sure there are certain rote type of programming jobs that can be accomplished with off the shelf tools and little creativity, but the ever-increasing power of computers is creating ever increasing opportunities, and somehow the tools just never catch up.
Google translate has for the last couple of years been based on what is essentially database lookup rather than traditional grammatical/semantic analysis used by other translators such as Bablefish. When they made the switch the quality noticeably improved.
Basically they've got a huge database of snippets of language and their corresponding translations if different languages that was originally build from hand translated sources such as publically available United Nations documents, etc. When they translate a document for you using this approach they're basically just looking for the longest snippet of source document for which they've got an existing translation, then moving onto the next etc. Obviously there's quite a bit more to it than that, but this gives the gist of it. What's great about this approach is that you get chunks of hand translated document and it can handle idiom.
I just tried the example you gave, and it left the movie title "Airplane" as-is in the Norwegian translation. Maybe you tried it a while back using the old version?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure there is, but the question is what is luck...
One type of luck is "preparation meets opportunity", i.e. "earned luck", but there is also just plain lucky "thin end of the bell curve luck"...
Consider if a million people spend all day putting quarters into slot machines.. the winnings distribution will be a bell curve, and some lucky buggers will have come out ahead of everyone else.
The same thing happens over the course of a lifetime. Some peope (by statistical happenstance) just happen to be lucky all the time. I remember the british actor Derek Nimo describing himself as being lucky this way.
Nah... It's really to messages what Google Voice (formerly Grand Central) is for voice. It lets people contact YOU rather than contacting some device/account.
With Google Voice people call your number and you choose on-the-fly where it's going to ring (at work, on your cell phone, at the hotel or friends house your currently at, etc). With Facebook it seems your various messaging accounts now become ways of reaching you as a person, or put another way your messages find you rather than you having to find them.
Seems not a bad idea in theory.
In a sentence: receive your messages according to where you are, not according to how the message was sent (e-mail vs IM, etc)
I've never used facebook, nor ever plan to, but it does sound a useful feature.
From TFA:
If things could not get any better, "Fglrx and nvidia drivers can also be supported by writing a Gallium driver that talks to them using OpenGL, which is a relatively easy task. Thanks to the great design of Direct3D 10/11 and closeness to Gallium, this approach should not result in detectable overhead, and is the most maintainable way to do it, providing a path to switch to the open Gallium drivers once they are on par with the proprietary ones."
Google became popular not only because of their quality search results (which Bing has now, for most practical uses, caught up with), but also because of their minimalist uncluttered search page. Ditto Google mail which not only works well but has a clean UI.
It seems to be the way of most major software applications that they end up adding feature bloat to the point they are no longer unusable for their core purpose, and Google seems intent on going that way too. I guess the Wave fiasco wasn't enough - they *really* want to get "in" on social networks, and since people don't seem to want to "opt in", they are going to ram it down your throat by integrating it everywhere you don't want it.
But think of the benefits. Seconds after posting a drunken photo to facebook, you'll be getting Jack Daniels avertizements with your Google search results!
Specifically, the complains have been that Canonical ...
Is this usage meant to be cute, or just plain illiterate?
The verb is complain (3rd person singular present = complains), the noun is complaint.
The developer should unit test, and the test group should system test. The two are complementary.
The test group will hopefully test the software in ways you never thought it would be used, but you'll hopefully have tested every code path and end case that only you are aware of from having written it.
Of course the developer can system test do, or at least contribute test cases.
Yep, and even if all the current news providers went the same way, it would just clear the way for a new news provider to step in and claim the internet news market for themself. CNN came out of nowhere to a dominant position, and no doubt other news organization will appear in the future as opportunities arise. In the meantime the BBC and CNN are good enough... I already deleted my UK times bookmarks a few weeks ago.
Someone will make "free" (i.e advertisement based) internet news work, just as someone (Google) made "free" internet search work.
So, if Murdoch doesn't want to try to be the Google of online news, too bad for him. He's like king Canute or the RIAA trying to prevent the inevitable.
We need to switch to a system with lots of cores, all with their own local memory, and able to send each other messages.
You're describing the Immos Transputer - way ahead of it's time when it was released c. 1980.
Each Transputer core was an interconnected computing mesh node, with it's own memory, with specialized hardware-based communication channels connecting it to other nodes. It was designed hand-in-hand with a specialized language "Occam" (as in Occam's razor) that directly mapped onto the parallelism and communication/message-passing abilities of the hardware.
If you said a section of Occam code could run in parallel then at run-time it would be distributed across nodes if available. If you defined a piece of code to read from an input channel, that could/would be mapped onto one of the hardward communication channels where it would be connected to another "process" writing to a channel somewhere else on the Transputer mesh it was deployed on.
One nice thing about Occam was that the language parallelism and communication constructs, although designed to map directly onto the hardware, didn't have to, so you could run any Occam program on any sized Transputer network, and the run-time deployment would map it onto the available hardware. They had nice demos showing things like Mandlebrot generation or 3-D scene fly-thru just getting faster as it was run on bigger networks.
Of course you could do the same today with, say, pthreads - a heavily multithread app will just get faster as it is run on hardware with more cores, but the nice thing about the Transputer and Occam was that it was scalable. If you wanted 100 cores you could build it, while today you're limited to the processors Intel/etc build, and unlike Occam your programming model totally changes (pthreads -> network based) if you need more cores than fit on a single chip or on a single board.
So.. let's hope the future of computing is as advanced and well designed as it's past was!
I used to drive a '78 Ford LTD that had previously been beefed up for use as a cop car.
It did 7 mpg!
On the plus side it was built like a tank... I once wanted to make a sharp turn in a parking lot, and found my way impeded by a telephone pole... I just put my foot down and (from being at rest, in contact with the pole) gouged an inch deep groove in the side of the pole to make my way, and the car's fender was entirely unscathed. I was also rear-ended by a pickup truck at a stop light with similar complete lack of damage.
I'm not surprised by it either, but it's :
1) A necessary step on one path to creating more interesting types of designer life (from oil producing microbes all the way up to whatever your imagination can conjure up - chickens turned back into dinosaurs, etc)
2) Certainly significant to those who do think that life is something magical and not merely a systems property.
Incidently, what Craig Venter is really working is a minimal organism whose DNA started out as that of some simple bacteria (from a venereal disease if I remember correctly!), and which he's much more extensively modified by cutting out large swathes of it that hhe's discovered are not essential for life. He's created this DNA via traditional gene splicing techniques, with the next step being to synthesize it from scratch as he's done here.
So, while the DNA in this current experiment is merely a (synthesized) cpoy with a few markers inserted into it, it's really just a step on the way to inserting the synthesized version of his real (much more heavily modified - new species) DNA into a cell.
I'd say it may well be creating life. It's not exactly designing life (and not exactly NOT designing life either...).
Consider:
1) The cell they injected the new DNA into had the old DNA removed first - hence it has dead.
2) The new DNA started out as chemicals in a bottle - certainly dead too.
3) The new DNA put into the cell "rebooted" / reanimated it so that it started dividing again. Certainly back alive now!
This experiment may not LOOK that impressive, but consider that the exact same technique can be used to computer modify any type of life you want in any way. Want a hen with teeth - no problem. Replace the feathers with scales ... just a matter of computer programming, then "print" the DNA and animate it.
Note also that while it's "only" the DNA that's being created, not the INITIAL cell, that the copies the cell it makes of itself as it divides are of course made under control of this synthetic DNA, so the 2nd, 3rd, etc generation cells could be considered themselves synthetic.
FYI... It's "codec", not codes. It's an abbreviation of (en)coder-decoder.
There's no other platform in the world that can boast this level of flexibility -- not even close
Qt will let you run a single code base on OS/X, Windows 7/etc, Linux and any platform that Qt/Embedded has been ported to. Not just trivial apps like Reversi, but also ones using multithreading, networking, etc. There's also a fair degree of cross-platform multimedia support too, although that's a work in progress. Personally I choose to use PortAudio for cross-platform audio aupport together with Qt.
To be honest, every single C compiler out there defines its own incompatible implementation of C.
No they don't. They may implement extensions which you are free to use or ignore, but that's a different matter.
If you read the C language specification there are some things that are defined as being implementation defined (e.g. order of function argument evaluation), but if your program relies on such things it's your own fault.
Sure it lacks those, but:
* first class functions, lambda, closures
First class functions are primarily the realm of functional programming languages, not procedural ones.
Lambda's, combined with ways to refer to them (C++ std::function, templates, auto) are a type of first class function.
Closures provide an interesting alternative way to code some things, but seriously who really misses them in C/C++?
* comprehensions
Use a libary.
* coroutines
Use a library.
* proper generics/templates (no, macros are _not_ a replacement)
Agreed. Templates are very useful.
* painless string handling
Use a library.
* module system
To do what? You've listed namespaces and classes separately, so what's left that you can't do in C?
Most C programmerss use paired .h/.c module definition/implementation pairs, and #ifndef/#define to allow module definitions to be blindly included.
* namespaces
Agreed. Namespaces are useful, although not a show stopper.
* reflection
C's a low level language. There is nothing to inspect. Feel free to build layers on top of it.
* support for common oop patterns and tools, like class definitions, dynamic dispatch etc.
Agreed. Classes are enormously useful.
Of course C has evolved into C++ which has the useful items on your list, and is aquiring others (lambdas in c++0x).
The trouble with what you did is that the the guy with 12yrs experience and glowing reviews was surely not looking for an entry level position... he only applied and accepted because he needed a paycheck and had obviously not found a job at his real experience/salary level. I'd be AMAZED if he doesn't keep looking and quit your job as soon as he has found a better one.
If you'd hired a fresh grad or someone with a year or two's experience they could have grown with the position and maybe ended up making a long term career at your company.
So what? If memory is an issue then pick another - there are plenty of small/fast XML libraries out there as well as the better known ones. More to the point if you can't find one that meets your needs, then write one.
I certainly wouldn't recommend using a low level DOM API directly to read/write C data or you'll be end up writing hundreds/thousands of lines of code at the application level to read/write complex XML formats. With the *right* XML API one line of code (plus some mapping tables) can read/write anything.
Not much apparently. If a five year old girl can do it, maybe you can too?! ;-)
This isn't a generic LCD display - that's not their market.
The big deals with the Pixel Qi display is that:
- It's totally usable in full sunlight
- It's full color and fast (OK for video)
- It has a reflective e-ink mode
- It's low power
It's really geared towards:
1) eBook readers that want color and video support
2) Laptops/netbooks intended to be used outside (which tends to mean smaller form factor)
They use the same production line as traditional LCDs though (there's lots of articles / videos on them if you Google), so they'll certainly be able to produce larger sizes if they want to.
Nah - it's full color and fast (good for video). If you use it as a drop in replacement for your existing display then what you're getting is the ability to use your laptop in full sunlight where your current screen would be all washed out.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/the-pixel-qi-display/
You're forgetting about the nose!
Far too many people just automatically use XML where CSV file or tab-delimited text file would do the same job with tens of thousands of lines less code.....
That would depend on your XML library, wouldn't it?
I wrote my own XML library that let's you define mappings between arbitrary XML and C/C++ data structures, and then convert to/from XML with as single API call (the mappings are data - initialized arrays). With the right tools you can't beat XML for productivity, which is one of the reasons people use it - never write a parser again, even a simple CSV one.
There's some truth to that - as time goes on tools become higher level, libraries more advanced, etc.
However, we are far from the point where everything one might ask for has been written. Look for example at the current state of parallel programming; in the real world, programming in Java, C++ or C#, you're still going to find yourself using low level threading libraries (e.g. Unix pthreads) and synchronization primitives most of the time, because better tools for mainstream languages for the most part just don't exist (notwithstanding things like OpenMP, design patterns like map-reduce). Plenty of scope here for creating your own parallel frameworks, libraries, etc.
Or how about something as simple and ubiquitous as XML... you could just use the standardized DOM/SAX API's and bemoan that you're having to use someone else's work rather than have the fun of designing it yourself, or you could realize that the productivity of these general-purpose APIs is dismal for any specific task and write your own higher level application libraries (e.g. I wrote one to convert arbitraty XML to/from C/C++ data structures).
Or what about fun stuff like implementing languages... sure you're unlikely to find justification in creating a new language to write a whole project in, but what about scriptability, testing and configuration... there's plenty of scope for implementing your own mini embedded languages for this sort of thing. Sure you can use languages like Python and Lua for C++ embedding, but wouldn't it be more productive for C++ programmers to use a C-like language instead...
I just used these three examples as they're things I've implemented myself in recent years, but there must be dozens of areas were customized tools are useful and appropriate.
I remember back in the early 80's a piece of much-hyped application generator called "The Last One" causing alarmist headlines about "The end of programming?", but the fact is that we're really no closer to that now than we were back then. Sure there are certain rote type of programming jobs that can be accomplished with off the shelf tools and little creativity, but the ever-increasing power of computers is creating ever increasing opportunities, and somehow the tools just never catch up.
Google translate has for the last couple of years been based on what is essentially database lookup rather than traditional grammatical/semantic analysis used by other translators such as Bablefish. When they made the switch the quality noticeably improved.
Basically they've got a huge database of snippets of language and their corresponding translations if different languages that was originally build from hand translated sources such as publically available United Nations documents, etc. When they translate a document for you using this approach they're basically just looking for the longest snippet of source document for which they've got an existing translation, then moving onto the next etc. Obviously there's quite a bit more to it than that, but this gives the gist of it. What's great about this approach is that you get chunks of hand translated document and it can handle idiom.
I just tried the example you gave, and it left the movie title "Airplane" as-is in the Norwegian translation. Maybe you tried it a while back using the old version?