When you are able to say "before" and "after" about a product - like the iPhone and the iPad - you can't avoid saying that the company behind those products has been innovative
What? A product release marks a date. I can look at things before that date and after that date. That has nothing at all to do with innovation.
That's a pretty standard set of apologetics:) We can look at each in turn.
The first, "You're doing it wrong", belies one of the biggest promises OOP failed to deliver: that OOP makes software development easier. Add to that that no one can agree on what constitutes OOP, and you can blame any failure of OOP to deliver on this or any of its other promises on the developer!
The second, the failures of OOP are most due to poor implementation in languages like Java, isn't much different from the "You're doing it wrong" argument save that it's applied to the language designers and no the end-users. So, why is OOP language support so poor? It could be because no one can agree on what constitutes OOP?!
Just look through this thread and you'll find all sorts of unusual claims like "if it's modular, it's OOP" (ridiculous!) or "if it's reusable, it must be OOP". Total nonsense, of course, but that's what happens when an ill-defined concept becomes a religion. (Just think: two "cornerstones" of OOP, inheritance and encapsulation, are fundamentally incompatible with one another! Only religious thinking could allow such a contradiction to stand.)
The truth is that OOP has failed to deliver on all of the promises made on its behalf. It's no wonder that Alan Kay (the guy who coined the term OOP) regrets it.
CMU has dropped it from their freshman curriculum calling OOP both anti-modular and anti-parallel by its very nature. Read that again: OOP is anti-modular by its very nature. It's hard to wrap your head around, isn't it? Isn't modularity one of the biggest advantages claimed by OOP?
Bringing this back to the subject of OOP apologetics, I found this gem in a discussion about the CMU decision: "All the mainstream programming languages do OO poorly, and yes, they are anti-modular."
Yes, they blame the language for the failures of OOP -- not just any language in particular, but all mainstream languages!
That same poster goes on to write "And many–perhaps even most–instances of OO programs are non-modular." Not just the languages now, but also the the developers are to blame for failures of OOP! (Weren't we supposed to get modularity and code-reuse as a side-effect of OOP? Yes, it's another broken promise.)
From the perspective of the OOP apologist, it looks like just about everyone is doing OOP wrong. If that's the case, why continue to promote this failed methodology as "the one true way"? Why tout its supposed advantages when they're rarely realized (usually in spite of OOP, rather than a consequence of it)?
I think it's pretty clear that he's a closet case who's into little boys. We've seen this kind of projection before in certain "anti"-gay elected officials...
That's part of the learning process, isn't it? After a few non-trivial projects and experiencing the difficultly in managing the resulting "spaghetti-code" the beginner should *on their own* start thinking and writing modularly. Functions become immediately obvious at that point.
As a bonus, you get to avoid making up stupid and useless rules about when a function is appropriate. (You may remember some rule like 'after 100 lines' or something equally ridiculous.)
Ultimately, beginners *should* make mistakes -- and they should make as many common mistakes early on as possible.
I don't know how you can say that with a straight face!
Functions simply mirror what good programmers already do. If you've ever written anything non-trivial in an assembly language, maybe you'd understand.
FWIW, those old unstructured BASIC's from the early 80's provided an outstanding foundation for assembly language programming. (When I tutored VAX Assembly a zillion years ago I'd often have struggling students do the assignment in BASIC before completing the same assignment in assembly.)
I've used that fetid abomination and I can find no circumstance where that would be (or should be) any ones first, second, or even last choice for implementing anything.
As a beginner language, it fails so miserably that I'm almost at a total loss to explain the attraction.
My best guess is that it has an immediate mode -- which anyone with two brain-cells to rub together can agree is great for beginners. Of course, once you've actually used Python, it should become abundantly clear to even minimally competent developers that it should never be used at all -- especially as a teaching language!
"Classical inheritance" (whatever that is supposed to mean) is bad and should be avoided (probably with the rest of failure that was OOP.) I could go on and on about why (like how inheritance is fundamentally incompatible with encapsulation) but I'll leave that to you.
Besides, the new hotness in that failed methodology is composition.
They're doing quite a bit with it now, as I mention above. It's also the OS that powers their BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and the OS (branded BB10) that will power their next line of smart phones.
I don't expect the OS to go free any time soon (it offers too much of a competitive advantage right now) but you can check out the Native SDK is out in beta (beta 3) if that interests you at all.
Apples a bit late to the automobile integration game.
It's no secret that RIMs QNX car application platform *actually* powers over 20 million vehicles on the road. They've already taken integration to a whole new level:
The QNX car app platform can power your vehicle’s in-car monitors, including the speedometer and the entertainment unit. [...] you can easily bring things like Pandora or even YouTube to you in-car entertainment unit as well as have realistic maps or song album covers overlaid next to your speedometer. [...] The BlackBerry PlayBook can then be used to control the climate in the car and you can also get the media from the device over to your car’s entertainment unit with just a few clicks. QNX also showed off how BlackBerry Traffic can be integrated into the in-car unit via Bluetooth and this provides live, turn-by-turn navigation with an emphasis on how long it will actually take you to get there
RIM's strong relationship with Porche is no secret either (see the Porche designed BlackBery 9981) Concept Porsche Shows Off RIM QNX
Our church is doing Dave Ramsey's stuff right now and I'm blown away by how crowded it is. Many people in the room don't have any idea how to budget or manage money at all.
Hard to squeeze that 10% tithe out of 'em when they can't properly manage their finances, eh?
CYOA books and IF are decidedly not hypertext literature. Heh, it many ways, they're superior as far as the goals of hypertext literature are concerned:)
It's not the "reader as a participator" generally so much as "reader as a co-author" that hypertext literature was aiming for. Unfortunately, the best it ever managed was "reader as as an editor" in deciding the order lexias ought be read, and it does an extraordinarily poor job of that!
Joyce's Afternoon made the best use of the medium, as far as I'm concerned. Even then, it didn't do much to enhance the rather thin story. Reading through it, I felt like a detective searching for the basic plot. (It worked, as far as suppressing the memory of the accident was concerned, and his participation in it.)
Still, to most readers, it's like they've been given a stack of note cards with bits of the story written on them, all tossed into a sack and jumbled up. Their participation ends at selecting a card from the sack, which they must put back in before randomly selecting another!
If that wasn't enough, the tools at the time were unimaginably poor. Eastgate's Story Space program was expensive and not terribly good. Readers who purchased hypertext works had to install each book they purchased on their computer just like an application! The terrible experience of actually reading a hypertext fiction after all that was just insulting.
As to the question "is hypertext literature dead?" -- It was dead 10 years ago, almost completely dead 15 years ago, and should have been killed 20 years ago. Hypertext literature was an over-hyped mistake that we all could have avoided had Aarseth and others decided to try and make their careers on something else!
Hell, even Aarseth has moved on -- like a rat escaping a sinking ship!
Blogs are not hypertext literature any more than an webpage or a heavily annotated eBook would be considered hypertext literature.
Hypertext literature is an entirely different beast. Aaraseth's Cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature discusses it at length. Unfortunately (or fortunately!) he's one of the few who took the medium seriously.
Janet Murray also writes briefly about it Hamlet on the holodeck and Nick Montfort (the average slashdotter should know who he is) mentions it briefly near the beginning of Twisty little passages.
For actual works of hypertext literature, you should check out Jackson's "Patchwork girl" and Joyce's "Afternoon". Of course, after you stumbled through those two, you'll see why hypertext literature never really took off
Slashdot Mirror
When you are able to say "before" and "after" about a product - like the iPhone and the iPad - you can't avoid saying that the company behind those products has been innovative
What? A product release marks a date. I can look at things before that date and after that date. That has nothing at all to do with innovation.
And you've cherry-picked your "before" examples.
I can point to a bunch of examples, but it doesn't matter. You'll refuse any example that differs even in a trivial way from the iPad.
Apple didn't invent the tablet. They didn't even invent iPad-style tablets. Get over it.
You do know that Apple wasn't the first with an iPad-style tablet, right?
That's a pretty standard set of apologetics :) We can look at each in turn.
The first, "You're doing it wrong", belies one of the biggest promises OOP failed to deliver: that OOP makes software development easier. Add to that that no one can agree on what constitutes OOP, and you can blame any failure of OOP to deliver on this or any of its other promises on the developer!
The second, the failures of OOP are most due to poor implementation in languages like Java, isn't much different from the "You're doing it wrong" argument save that it's applied to the language designers and no the end-users. So, why is OOP language support so poor? It could be because no one can agree on what constitutes OOP?!
Just look through this thread and you'll find all sorts of unusual claims like "if it's modular, it's OOP" (ridiculous!) or "if it's reusable, it must be OOP". Total nonsense, of course, but that's what happens when an ill-defined concept becomes a religion. (Just think: two "cornerstones" of OOP, inheritance and encapsulation, are fundamentally incompatible with one another! Only religious thinking could allow such a contradiction to stand.)
The truth is that OOP has failed to deliver on all of the promises made on its behalf. It's no wonder that Alan Kay (the guy who coined the term OOP) regrets it.
CMU has dropped it from their freshman curriculum calling OOP both anti-modular and anti-parallel by its very nature. Read that again: OOP is anti-modular by its very nature. It's hard to wrap your head around, isn't it? Isn't modularity one of the biggest advantages claimed by OOP?
Bringing this back to the subject of OOP apologetics, I found this gem in a discussion about the CMU decision: "All the mainstream programming languages do OO poorly, and yes, they are anti-modular."
Yes, they blame the language for the failures of OOP -- not just any language in particular, but all mainstream languages!
That same poster goes on to write "And many–perhaps even most–instances of OO programs are non-modular." Not just the languages now, but also the the developers are to blame for failures of OOP! (Weren't we supposed to get modularity and code-reuse as a side-effect of OOP? Yes, it's another broken promise.)
From the perspective of the OOP apologist, it looks like just about everyone is doing OOP wrong. If that's the case, why continue to promote this failed methodology as "the one true way"? Why tout its supposed advantages when they're rarely realized (usually in spite of OOP, rather than a consequence of it)?
I think it's pretty clear that he's a closet case who's into little boys. We've seen this kind of projection before in certain "anti"-gay elected officials...
*as a former cub-scout atheist, now a Christian at age 36*
I call shenanigans. What, pray tell, convinced you that 1) a God exists 2) there is exactly one, and 3) he's the one described in the Bible.
Also, it's well known that the BSA is a hate-group that is both anti-gay and anti-atheist.
You could try. Just don't think for a moment that OOP is going to actually help you get there. OOP tends to cause more harm than good.
This isn't a new claim. See: Do We Need Inheritance? [PDF], Evolution of Object Behavior using Context Relations, Selective Open Recursion: Modular Reasoning about Components and Inheritance [PDF], Encapsulation and inheritance in object-oriented programming languages and many other academic sources.
It's widely acknowledge that inheritance violates encapsulation. It's a fundamental problem with OOP.
If you prefer a less academic and more practical discussion, try a Google search for OOP criticism.
That's part of the learning process, isn't it? After a few non-trivial projects and experiencing the difficultly in managing the resulting "spaghetti-code" the beginner should *on their own* start thinking and writing modularly. Functions become immediately obvious at that point.
As a bonus, you get to avoid making up stupid and useless rules about when a function is appropriate. (You may remember some rule like 'after 100 lines' or something equally ridiculous.)
Ultimately, beginners *should* make mistakes -- and they should make as many common mistakes early on as possible.
Why pollute their young minds with the miserable failure that is OOP?
We want students to learn good programming practices, after all.
I don't know how you can say that with a straight face!
Functions simply mirror what good programmers already do. If you've ever written anything non-trivial in an assembly language, maybe you'd understand.
FWIW, those old unstructured BASIC's from the early 80's provided an outstanding foundation for assembly language programming. (When I tutored VAX Assembly a zillion years ago I'd often have struggling students do the assignment in BASIC before completing the same assignment in assembly.)
Python? Disgusting!
I've used that fetid abomination and I can find no circumstance where that would be (or should be) any ones first, second, or even last choice for implementing anything.
As a beginner language, it fails so miserably that I'm almost at a total loss to explain the attraction.
My best guess is that it has an immediate mode -- which anyone with two brain-cells to rub together can agree is great for beginners. Of course, once you've actually used Python, it should become abundantly clear to even minimally competent developers that it should never be used at all -- especially as a teaching language!
"Classical inheritance" (whatever that is supposed to mean) is bad and should be avoided (probably with the rest of failure that was OOP.) I could go on and on about why (like how inheritance is fundamentally incompatible with encapsulation) but I'll leave that to you.
Besides, the new hotness in that failed methodology is composition.
The #1 thing that sucks about the ribbon? Answering "how do I" questions.
The ribbon has probably caused billions of dollars in lost productivity...
Windows seems to go through a pattern of "Good Windows, Bad Windows".
What?
Looking at this list: 3.1, NT, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 I don't see the pattern.
Looks like yet another oft-repeated, yet totally baseless, meme.
Whatever you do, don't ever make the mistake of taking what you posted seriously. I fear that some people actually believe bullshit like that.
A good number of the expenses you mention would only be saved if the addition of rear-cameras actually had a measurable impact on safety.
To my knowledge, it hasn't been studied.
They're doing quite a bit with it now, as I mention above. It's also the OS that powers their BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and the OS (branded BB10) that will power their next line of smart phones.
I don't expect the OS to go free any time soon (it offers too much of a competitive advantage right now) but you can check out the Native SDK is out in beta (beta 3) if that interests you at all.
You should try some of the alternatives to Siri that could do those sorts of things long before the iP4s.
Siri feels like a poor beta because 1) it's poor and 2) it actually IS still in beta.
And in both instances they released a second-rate product lacking features/specs of other competing products. What's your point?
Apples a bit late to the automobile integration game.
It's no secret that RIMs QNX car application platform *actually* powers over 20 million vehicles on the road. They've already taken integration to a whole new level:
QNX lets BlackBerry PlayBook become in-car controller
The QNX car app platform can power your vehicle’s in-car monitors, including the speedometer and the entertainment unit. [...] you can easily bring things like Pandora or even YouTube to you in-car entertainment unit as well as have realistic maps or song album covers overlaid next to your speedometer.
[...] The BlackBerry PlayBook can then be used to control the climate in the car and you can also get the media from the device over to your car’s entertainment unit with just a few clicks.
QNX also showed off how BlackBerry Traffic can be integrated into the in-car unit via Bluetooth and this provides live, turn-by-turn navigation with an emphasis on how long it will actually take you to get there
RIM's strong relationship with Porche is no secret either (see the Porche designed BlackBery 9981) Concept Porsche Shows Off RIM QNX
QNX shows off its versatility, powers OnStar accessories
Police are also starting to use RIM's in-vehicle technologies: Cop Conference Features BlackBerry PlayBook As Law Enforcement Tool Some details: Serving and Protectingwith a BlackBerry PlayBook
It keeps getting better New QNX Platform to Transform the Automotive Experience
You could say that less than impressed with Siri in the Mercedes after seeing what RIM is doing in the same arena with their technology.
Our church is doing Dave Ramsey's stuff right now and I'm blown away by how crowded it is. Many people in the room don't have any idea how to budget or manage money at all.
Hard to squeeze that 10% tithe out of 'em when they can't properly manage their finances, eh?
CYOA books and IF are decidedly not hypertext literature. Heh, it many ways, they're superior as far as the goals of hypertext literature are concerned :)
It's not the "reader as a participator" generally so much as "reader as a co-author" that hypertext literature was aiming for. Unfortunately, the best it ever managed was "reader as as an editor" in deciding the order lexias ought be read, and it does an extraordinarily poor job of that!
Joyce's Afternoon made the best use of the medium, as far as I'm concerned. Even then, it didn't do much to enhance the rather thin story. Reading through it, I felt like a detective searching for the basic plot. (It worked, as far as suppressing the memory of the accident was concerned, and his participation in it.)
Still, to most readers, it's like they've been given a stack of note cards with bits of the story written on them, all tossed into a sack and jumbled up. Their participation ends at selecting a card from the sack, which they must put back in before randomly selecting another!
If that wasn't enough, the tools at the time were unimaginably poor. Eastgate's Story Space program was expensive and not terribly good. Readers who purchased hypertext works had to install each book they purchased on their computer just like an application! The terrible experience of actually reading a hypertext fiction after all that was just insulting.
As to the question "is hypertext literature dead?" -- It was dead 10 years ago, almost completely dead 15 years ago, and should have been killed 20 years ago. Hypertext literature was an over-hyped mistake that we all could have avoided had Aarseth and others decided to try and make their careers on something else!
Hell, even Aarseth has moved on -- like a rat escaping a sinking ship!
Blogs are not hypertext literature any more than an webpage or a heavily annotated eBook would be considered hypertext literature.
Hypertext literature is an entirely different beast. Aaraseth's Cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature discusses it at length. Unfortunately (or fortunately!) he's one of the few who took the medium seriously.
Janet Murray also writes briefly about it Hamlet on the holodeck and Nick Montfort (the average slashdotter should know who he is) mentions it briefly near the beginning of Twisty little passages.
For actual works of hypertext literature, you should check out Jackson's "Patchwork girl" and Joyce's "Afternoon". Of course, after you stumbled through those two, you'll see why hypertext literature never really took off
They will also have a 3G or 4G data connection and a number of sensors including [...] GPS.
Why wouldn't this just interface with the users smartphone to access data and GPS?
particularly the app and multi-window management
The BlackBerry PlayBook does this, and does it well.