Beer should be served at room temperature (not warm).
The piece of info I think a lot of folks are probably missing here is that Brits keep their rooms very cold. They've found that it not only saves them money on their heating bills, but it makes their beer taste much better.
He's not talking about incremental "improvements" to existing languages, he's pointing out that the common attitude of "we'll make this language easy to learn by making it look like C" is a poor way to achieve any substantial progress.
Perhaps, but writing a language that nobody uses doesn't really achieve much progress either.
I honestly think I got his point, but I think he misses the fundamental point of Worse Is Better. Having something that's 80% of what you want and being improved is always going to be better than that 100% perfect system that should be ready any day now. If his argument ventures much outside of those parameters, he's arguing over something else, not Worse Is Better.
And that compatibility still is important today. For one thing, APIs can be written in C (starting with the POSIX API) and be used by programs written in either C or C++ or in language X, or language Y, or language Z.
Sort of. You do (generally) have to write an interface specification in languages X, Y, and Z. In Ada, we call these "bindings". The thing about C and C++ is that the API vendor can typically write themselves one reference specification (".h file") that works for both of those languages. By writing C++ with this level of compatibility, they instantly gave themselves access to all the C-interfaced APIs in existence. The rest of us using languages X, Y, and Z have a lot of drudge work (and debugging. Forgot to pass a parameter somewhere by reference? Kablowie!) ahead of us to get ourselves access to those same APIs.
The implication is that this tool is written for use by whomever manages the network. Most networks would have a "no bittorrent" rule,
Most games these days use bittorrent, or some similar peer-to-peer system, to perform updates and patches. Any network that has a hard "no bittorrent" rule IMHO is not a usable consumer network.
an educated population is one of the best defenses against mindless wars.
Precisely. For instance, my own country (the USA) is in the top 12% in the world in education. When was the last time you saw us start some mindless war?
For some reason, it's culturally acceptable for men to learn how to defend themselves from sociopaths (who, like all predators prefer soft targets to hard targets).
This has nothing to do with self-defence. Believe me, no respectable troll will ever attack you in any manner that you can fairly fight back. I got the full package once. Personal details published, implied threats to my family (nothing over the line to prosecutable of course), calling up my company and my company's customers in an attempt to get me fired, etc. Until you've had one come after you, you really have no idea.
Trolls of this nature are unusual and they don't just target women. They target everyone.
In a pinch, yes a troll will go after your default WASP male. I once saw a troll reduced to attacking someone for being Canadian. (!)
However, what they target is a perceived weakness. If they find out you've posted in nudist or drug forums, they'll go after that. But if you are a woman or a minority, they don't even have to do research to find your weak points. They can paint you as driven by your sexual urges and/or overly sensitive and emotional, and a large amount of the audience will be receptive to that message because that is the preexisting prejudice for those groups. So if you are female or a minority (or God help you, both) you will always be their first target of choice.
Well, there are actually multiple levels of human language death.
Extinct - No living speakers.
Dead - Perhaps still known, but no longer used in general conversation
Pseudoextinct - No living speakers, but there are speakers of a child language
Moribund - Speakers are shifting to other languages. Nobody new is learning it.
IMHO, most supposed "dead" computer languages are in actuality barely even moribund by the above definitions. There are some pseudoextinct languages though. K&R C would probably be a good example.
I share your scoffing at the supposed importance of "looking like C" in a language. Not looking like C is generally a selling point in my book. However, the prevalence of brace blocks and 0-indexed arrays in other languages makes his point for him.
Besides which, is there any language that is completely dead? Honest question.
CMS-2. It was the US Navy's first attempt at a "standardized" language, before they joined with the other armed forces and sponsored the creation of Ada. I know back around the turn of the millennium there were still some ships around using the "AN/AYK" (affectionately pronounced "Anne Yuck") 16-bit CPUs that ran it, and occasionally they'd want a tweak. But I highly suspect that's all been upgraded by now. The last person I know of who actually knew the language retired in 1998.
Complete agreement on this. I think a lot of folks are just wearing rose-colored goggles where the 80's are concerned. You have to remember that when these things were designed, the point of comparison for the designers was typewriters. Let's hit your three points yet again:
Key activation force. The newest IBM Selectrics (the popular state of the art at the time) required far less force to activate a key. They were almost comparable to a more modern keyboard, although the keys had much greater travel. However, that was the pinnacle of development. Old mechanical typewriters actually required you to physically push the buttons hard enough to activate the mechanical lever arms in the typewriter. There were still a great deal of these in circulation. So the Model M was sort of a compromised middle ground here.
Keyboard shape. There were actually a lot of curved typewriters out there, but most were rectangular. Personally, I believe this was probably because it allowed them to be shipped easier, which saved a few pennies in an incredibly competitive market. That's probably a fair driver behind cheap keyboards being rectangular today.
Noise. A typical typewriter made much more noise than a Model M. So for the day, it probably sounded quiet. Making it much quieter could really have unnerved an office worker used to typewriters.
Of course all of these design elements which made perfect sense in 1980 are pretty much obsolete now, at least in the upper mid to high end market.
The problem with suing people who have lots of money is that they can afford good lawyers - and it shouldn't take a very good lawyer to get something this stupid thrown out of court.
You I might think so. However, Google has been losing cases very much like this one in Europe. Over there they now have to, on demand, remove search results involving any person who asks them to do so.
One thing we have to realize is that while your typical non-tech "muggle" might have a laughably wrong view of how the Internet works, in the real world they are the ones who decide what the laws are.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that dating stopped after the arranged marriage occurred. Back when attraction and love weren't an important component in marriage partner selection, both parties were expected to find those things elsewhere (and typically did).
There's the Google Calendar app. Both of the Android manufacturers I've had phones from delivered their own calendar apps. The one on my Note II looks nicer than Google's (at least on the Note II it does), and has some good widgets, so I can easily see why a manufacturer would want the ability to make their own versions of these basic apps.
However, my Note II calendar app has issues with viewing shared calendars that I didn't create myself. The one on my old HTC phone was gawdaful. So I can see where Google is coming from, that vendors really need to make base functional versions of critical apps available. If a vendor wants to make competing aps, I should be using them because I like them better, not because I can't find the standard ones.
Whatever the cost, it just got over a billion people excited about space again.
I used to live about 15 miles from where the Space Shuttle lifted off in Florida, back when that program was active. Every shuttle launch I could, I'd go down to the beach to watch. (Greatest free show on earth, btw.)
What I noticed was that probably the majority of the folks down there watching with me every time were not my fellow Floridians, or even Americans. It was people from all over the earth. Asians, Middle Easterners, Africans, South Americans, Europeans. Everyone was there watching.
So I think it would be a mistake to say that people aren't excited about it when it isn't their country doing it. Even here, notice how interested Americans are about this little Indian mission? I mentioned it to my High Schooler yesterday, and she'd already heard about it. Perhaps there's some cachet with it being your country doing the work, but most people realize this is ultimately an effort to advance all of mankind.
The article spells out the differences - the India probe took longer, weighed less, has fewer experiments, and probably won't last long
If it makes it significantly cheaper, I'm not convinced any of that are bad things. With the time and resources NASA would take to make one Mars mission, India can make *several*, each building on the results of the last. Its sort of the Worse is Better approach applied to space missions. Or for you whippersnappers, consider it an iterative (aka: "Agile") approach to space missions, as opposed to NASA stuck using Waterfall.
Okay, but I can still choose to read only the scifi that deals explicitly with science and imaginative technology and speculations about the physical nature of the universe
Most supposed pure Sci-Fi is really no better than supposed fantasy in the regard. They all propose completely impossible things like super-liminal travel, finding a way to survive falling through black holes, traveling backward in time, "psionics", etc. Its all made up. The interesting thing is always exploring how society structures itself around such things, not the things themselves. If you are the odd duck who is only interested in the things, you should probably be reading tech sheets, not novels.
All i care about is performance. If i want performance, i will learn how to use C++,
Actually, if all you care about is performance, generally Fortran is the language for you. Its when you start caring about something like toolchain support and your own established codebase that C++ starts looking like a much better choice to most folks. But if you "don't care" about those things, here's your compiler.
especially if it makes the code unreadable. Give me the verbose, easy to read code any time.
Interesting. When I first hit the Internet in the 80's back in the Usenet era, there were lots of folks using this exact argument to promote using platform native assembers over high-level programming languages. I didn't think any of you guys were still around...
Here's an illustrative example: Anne McCaffrey's Pern series.
This is a series where people have roughly Medieval-era tech, a feudal society and ride on fire-breathing dragons. Clearly Fantasy, right?
However, as the series wore on, slowly everything is logically explained. It turns out they are survivors from a planetary colonization effort that slowly lost their tech due to some unexpected features of the planet they picked.
So now you have two choices here: Either its possible for a novel to have its entire genre changed from Fantasy to Sci-Fi retroactively by another novel without changing a word in it, or there's no real difference, and they are the same thing.
Booksellers put both supposed "genres" in the same section in their stores, so they seem to have made their decision.
The price fluctuates with rain and season, but $.12 is about as high as it gets. I've seen as low as $.05
You got me curious, so I checked. Here in Oklahoma, my rates(PDF) are $0.0564, although it can go as high as $0.097 under extreme circumstances. This is also a private company too, which means they are profiting at this rate.
One thing to note is that Oklahoma is an energy-rich state. We have coal, oil, natural gas, rivers, lots of sun, lots of wind, pretty much every energy resource you can imagine short of Uranium. Surprisingly (at least to me), we have some of the cleanest power in USA too though. My north-eastern part of the state has a lot of hydro power from all the dams on the rivers traversing this area, and make up a lot of the balance with natural gas rather than coal. (Yes, its still burning a fossil fuel, but Natural Gas is so much cleaner than Coal in both CO2 and other gasses it isn't funny).
I think that's just a smidge simplistic. After all, in the USA the Fed has control over a currency with roughly equivalent coverage as the Euro, and it managed to weather the same economic shock much better. Not perfectly, but really the Fed has probably been the single brightest spot of competence in the USA's recession response. (At least if you're a monetarist, and thus likely to think this argument important at all).
The problem the EU has with the Euro is that its trying to have it both ways: A single unified currency, but no single unified authority over it. Its like a ship with 100 little rudders instead of one big one. That might work OK during good times, but during a crisis you can't steer the ship around the icebergs by consensus.
The USA actually had this exact problem with its first crack at a union: The Articles of Confederation. It took us about the same amount of time to realize we needed more centralized control, and out of that the US Constitution was born.
Slashdot Mirror
... or it may have been a foreign actor engaging in terrorism against the Canadian state.
What kind of loser terrorist attacks Canada?
Seriously, was the puppy room at the Petsmart too heavily guarded or something?
Beer should be served at room temperature (not warm).
The piece of info I think a lot of folks are probably missing here is that Brits keep their rooms very cold. They've found that it not only saves them money on their heating bills, but it makes their beer taste much better.
He's not talking about incremental "improvements" to existing languages, he's pointing out that the common attitude of "we'll make this language easy to learn by making it look like C" is a poor way to achieve any substantial progress.
Perhaps, but writing a language that nobody uses doesn't really achieve much progress either.
I honestly think I got his point, but I think he misses the fundamental point of Worse Is Better. Having something that's 80% of what you want and being improved is always going to be better than that 100% perfect system that should be ready any day now. If his argument ventures much outside of those parameters, he's arguing over something else, not Worse Is Better.
And that compatibility still is important today. For one thing, APIs can be written in C (starting with the POSIX API) and be used by programs written in either C or C++ or in language X, or language Y, or language Z.
Sort of. You do (generally) have to write an interface specification in languages X, Y, and Z. In Ada, we call these "bindings". The thing about C and C++ is that the API vendor can typically write themselves one reference specification (".h file") that works for both of those languages. By writing C++ with this level of compatibility, they instantly gave themselves access to all the C-interfaced APIs in existence. The rest of us using languages X, Y, and Z have a lot of drudge work (and debugging. Forgot to pass a parameter somewhere by reference? Kablowie!) ahead of us to get ourselves access to those same APIs.
"And now, Radio Four will explode."
The implication is that this tool is written for use by whomever manages the network. Most networks would have a "no bittorrent" rule,
Most games these days use bittorrent, or some similar peer-to-peer system, to perform updates and patches. Any network that has a hard "no bittorrent" rule IMHO is not a usable consumer network.
an educated population is one of the best defenses against mindless wars.
Precisely. For instance, my own country (the USA) is in the top 12% in the world in education. When was the last time you saw us start some mindless war?
For some reason, it's culturally acceptable for men to learn how to defend themselves from sociopaths (who, like all predators prefer soft targets to hard targets).
This has nothing to do with self-defence. Believe me, no respectable troll will ever attack you in any manner that you can fairly fight back. I got the full package once. Personal details published, implied threats to my family (nothing over the line to prosecutable of course), calling up my company and my company's customers in an attempt to get me fired, etc. Until you've had one come after you, you really have no idea.
Trolls of this nature are unusual and they don't just target women. They target everyone.
In a pinch, yes a troll will go after your default WASP male. I once saw a troll reduced to attacking someone for being Canadian. (!)
However, what they target is a perceived weakness. If they find out you've posted in nudist or drug forums, they'll go after that. But if you are a woman or a minority, they don't even have to do research to find your weak points. They can paint you as driven by your sexual urges and/or overly sensitive and emotional, and a large amount of the audience will be receptive to that message because that is the preexisting prejudice for those groups. So if you are female or a minority (or God help you, both) you will always be their first target of choice.
IMHO, most supposed "dead" computer languages are in actuality barely even moribund by the above definitions. There are some pseudoextinct languages though. K&R C would probably be a good example.
I share your scoffing at the supposed importance of "looking like C" in a language. Not looking like C is generally a selling point in my book. However, the prevalence of brace blocks and 0-indexed arrays in other languages makes his point for him.
Besides which, is there any language that is completely dead? Honest question.
CMS-2. It was the US Navy's first attempt at a "standardized" language, before they joined with the other armed forces and sponsored the creation of Ada. I know back around the turn of the millennium there were still some ships around using the "AN/AYK" (affectionately pronounced "Anne Yuck") 16-bit CPUs that ran it, and occasionally they'd want a tweak. But I highly suspect that's all been upgraded by now. The last person I know of who actually knew the language retired in 1998.
Of course all of these design elements which made perfect sense in 1980 are pretty much obsolete now, at least in the upper mid to high end market.
The problem with suing people who have lots of money is that they can afford good lawyers - and it shouldn't take a very good lawyer to get something this stupid thrown out of court.
You I might think so. However, Google has been losing cases very much like this one in Europe. Over there they now have to, on demand, remove search results involving any person who asks them to do so.
One thing we have to realize is that while your typical non-tech "muggle" might have a laughably wrong view of how the Internet works, in the real world they are the ones who decide what the laws are.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that dating stopped after the arranged marriage occurred. Back when attraction and love weren't an important component in marriage partner selection, both parties were expected to find those things elsewhere (and typically did).
That's just not a good disaster recovery plan at all. Everybody knows you don't keep your offsite backups in the same neighborhood.
There's the Google Calendar app. Both of the Android manufacturers I've had phones from delivered their own calendar apps. The one on my Note II looks nicer than Google's (at least on the Note II it does), and has some good widgets, so I can easily see why a manufacturer would want the ability to make their own versions of these basic apps.
However, my Note II calendar app has issues with viewing shared calendars that I didn't create myself. The one on my old HTC phone was gawdaful. So I can see where Google is coming from, that vendors really need to make base functional versions of critical apps available. If a vendor wants to make competing aps, I should be using them because I like them better, not because I can't find the standard ones.
Whatever the cost, it just got over a billion people excited about space again.
I used to live about 15 miles from where the Space Shuttle lifted off in Florida, back when that program was active. Every shuttle launch I could, I'd go down to the beach to watch. (Greatest free show on earth, btw.)
What I noticed was that probably the majority of the folks down there watching with me every time were not my fellow Floridians, or even Americans. It was people from all over the earth. Asians, Middle Easterners, Africans, South Americans, Europeans. Everyone was there watching.
So I think it would be a mistake to say that people aren't excited about it when it isn't their country doing it. Even here, notice how interested Americans are about this little Indian mission? I mentioned it to my High Schooler yesterday, and she'd already heard about it. Perhaps there's some cachet with it being your country doing the work, but most people realize this is ultimately an effort to advance all of mankind.
The article spells out the differences - the India probe took longer, weighed less, has fewer experiments, and probably won't last long
If it makes it significantly cheaper, I'm not convinced any of that are bad things. With the time and resources NASA would take to make one Mars mission, India can make *several*, each building on the results of the last. Its sort of the Worse is Better approach applied to space missions. Or for you whippersnappers, consider it an iterative (aka: "Agile") approach to space missions, as opposed to NASA stuck using Waterfall.
Okay, but I can still choose to read only the scifi that deals explicitly with science and imaginative technology and speculations about the physical nature of the universe
Most supposed pure Sci-Fi is really no better than supposed fantasy in the regard. They all propose completely impossible things like super-liminal travel, finding a way to survive falling through black holes, traveling backward in time, "psionics", etc. Its all made up. The interesting thing is always exploring how society structures itself around such things, not the things themselves. If you are the odd duck who is only interested in the things, you should probably be reading tech sheets, not novels.
All i care about is performance. If i want performance, i will learn how to use C++,
Actually, if all you care about is performance, generally Fortran is the language for you. Its when you start caring about something like toolchain support and your own established codebase that C++ starts looking like a much better choice to most folks. But if you "don't care" about those things, here's your compiler.
especially if it makes the code unreadable. Give me the verbose, easy to read code any time.
Interesting. When I first hit the Internet in the 80's back in the Usenet era, there were lots of folks using this exact argument to promote using platform native assembers over high-level programming languages. I didn't think any of you guys were still around...
Here's an illustrative example: Anne McCaffrey's Pern series.
This is a series where people have roughly Medieval-era tech, a feudal society and ride on fire-breathing dragons. Clearly Fantasy, right?
However, as the series wore on, slowly everything is logically explained. It turns out they are survivors from a planetary colonization effort that slowly lost their tech due to some unexpected features of the planet they picked.
So now you have two choices here: Either its possible for a novel to have its entire genre changed from Fantasy to Sci-Fi retroactively by another novel without changing a word in it, or there's no real difference, and they are the same thing.
Booksellers put both supposed "genres" in the same section in their stores, so they seem to have made their decision.
The price fluctuates with rain and season, but $.12 is about as high as it gets. I've seen as low as $.05
You got me curious, so I checked. Here in Oklahoma, my rates(PDF) are $0.0564, although it can go as high as $0.097 under extreme circumstances. This is also a private company too, which means they are profiting at this rate.
One thing to note is that Oklahoma is an energy-rich state. We have coal, oil, natural gas, rivers, lots of sun, lots of wind, pretty much every energy resource you can imagine short of Uranium. Surprisingly (at least to me), we have some of the cleanest power in USA too though. My north-eastern part of the state has a lot of hydro power from all the dams on the rivers traversing this area, and make up a lot of the balance with natural gas rather than coal. (Yes, its still burning a fossil fuel, but Natural Gas is so much cleaner than Coal in both CO2 and other gasses it isn't funny).
I think that's just a smidge simplistic. After all, in the USA the Fed has control over a currency with roughly equivalent coverage as the Euro, and it managed to weather the same economic shock much better. Not perfectly, but really the Fed has probably been the single brightest spot of competence in the USA's recession response. (At least if you're a monetarist, and thus likely to think this argument important at all).
The problem the EU has with the Euro is that its trying to have it both ways: A single unified currency, but no single unified authority over it. Its like a ship with 100 little rudders instead of one big one. That might work OK during good times, but during a crisis you can't steer the ship around the icebergs by consensus.
The USA actually had this exact problem with its first crack at a union: The Articles of Confederation. It took us about the same amount of time to realize we needed more centralized control, and out of that the US Constitution was born.