jEdit is quite powerful. Also, you can pretty much just start using it, it's so easy. There are Emacs-style key commands, but there are also easy to use menus, configurable toolbar, and the keyboard can be remapped. Learning how to use new feautres involves looking in the online help and the options screens, and then immediately using the newly discovered feature without any problems.
>Eh. It finishes tags for you. There's an autocomplete plugin out there for Java...
The autocompletion does more than finishing a tag when you type a less than and a forward slash. There's a plugin that pops up an autocompletion window for you Java methods, which is not perfect, but is useful. And for regular autocompletion of words, just type part of a word and hit control-b. If the word has appeared before in the document, it will be autocompleted if there's no ambiguity, otherwise you'll get a popup that lets you choose. It's fast and accurate.
You can have a primary *and* an alternative key shortcut for any built-in command, any plugin, and any macro. Your key commands can be things like ctl-e, ctrl-a in succession, or even ctrl-shift-e, ctrl-i. Bring in the alt key also.
If you want to switch among buffers without taking your hands off the keyboard, remap the buffer commands and you're done.
Emacs does more, but right now Emacs doesn't do anything I need that jEdit does not do. And jEdit is easier to deal with. And does column selection and pasting. But, to repeat, unlike the hugely powerful Emacs and Vim, there's basically no learning curve.
I'd be interested if you reported back when you have found the perfect editor. Because then we'll all use it, because it will be perfect for everybody, and there will be no more discussion of editors on Slashdot.
Re:A (hopefully) unbiased opinion on Perl v. Pytho
on
Python in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That being said, Perl is at least useful for many things ("practical," I believe it's called).
Python is useful for many things as well, as evidenced by the number of people who use it, including Boeing, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, Industrial Light & Magic, Intel, JPL, Lawrence Livermore Labs, NASA, and Yahoo. Programmers at places like these are usually allowed to make their own decsions about their tools, and they chose Python. These guys are good. They don't use tools that they don't like. This is not to say that Python is their only scripting language. I know NASA makes good use of TCL, and probably uses Perl as well.
Peter Norvig says "Python has been an important part of Google since the beginning, and remains so as the system grows and evolves. Today dozens of Google engineers use Python, and we're looking for more people with skills in this language." Norvig is director of search quality at Google. Look at his home page (www.norvig.com/. When a guy who writes AI books talks up a language, it means something. I'm not saying it means everything. It's another piece of data to put on the scales.
I hide comments in Jedit with a sort of awkward use of the folding feature. I just indent the second through last lines of multi-line comments. That way I see only the first line of a comment, if I fold it up. Here's an unfolded sample:
if (document.URL.indexOf("_FT")!=-1) { /* Comment: Comment lines. This function saves the world. Comment lines. This function saves the world. Comment lines. This function saves the world. Comment lines. This function saves the world. Comment lines. This function saves the world. */ document.write('<img src="/images/shim.gif" width="13" border="0">') }
Note that Jedit puts the number of hidden lines in brackets at the end of the top of the folded section.
Other good things in Jedit are:
Hypersearch, which returns a clickable list of all the search hits in a file
Good auto-completion
Folding, with brace-based folding coming in the next release
Simple plug-in architecture
Basic project management
Very configurable
Integration with code management tools like CVS.
Faster to learn than Emacs. Didn't take any appreciable time to learn at all, actually. I just looked in the menus and was doing eighty percent of what I needed to do after twenty minutes. I had to look around longer for a few other things.
There are a lot of Emacs-style key commands, and they can be changed to your own preferences.
It does grab memory, but just click the memory command on the bottom right periodically and you can free up big chunks. (Insert your own joke about vomiting here.)
It is not the snappiest editor I've ever used, but it's plenty fast enough.
Finally, it is actively being worked on. What you see now is less than what will be available in a few months.
The article states that the platypus is the only venom-producing mammal. There are actually a few others.
The European water shrew and the North American short-tailed shrew are venomous. They use their poisonous bite to kill frogs, mice, and whatever other little creatures they eat. The bite of the solenodon (Solenodon paradoxus) of Haiti is poisonous as well.
Exactly. I give money to projects that I use and that deserve support. Opera and Jedit are two of them. Jedit is totally free, without any ads or nag screens, as it's an open source project. I'm not good enough yet to contribute to the project by programming (although I can report bugs and suggest features) but I can help out with a bit of money. And I want Opera development to continue, so I bought it.
I do. It was put out by the Harvard Lampoon. It was full of cheap bathroom humor, brand names, and cravenness, and it was hysterical. The wizard was Goodgulf, the old Boggie (Hobbit) was Dildo Bugger, who lived in the Sty. His nephew was Frito. Frito was accompanied by his servant Spam, and Legolam, Gimlet son of Groin, Stomper (dressed as the Lone Ranger), boggies Moxie & Pepsi Dingleberry, and Bromosel. The sought to destroy Sorehed's ring, which had been borne by Goddam for many years. They fought Narcs and the evil wizard Serutan. The elven land of Lornadoon was an amusement park. There were song and poem parodies, and the authors recreated the various languages. (Gimli the dwarf's war cry: Kodak khaki no-doz!). It was damn funny, and sleazy as hell. I'm not really doing it justice, but then it doesn't deserve justice. Read it and then wash your hands.
In Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy, the professor builds a life-sized dragon fly that is flown by remote control. It had eyes and ears, and he thought of using it for exploring. Danny Dunn ends up destroying it, and the professor's notes, when the government develops an interest in using it for spying on people.
Did anybody else on Slashdot read the Danny Dunn books when they were children? His mother is the housekeeper for Professor Bullfinch, and they have all sorts of adventures that are, for the most part, scientifically possible, at least sort of. Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine featured a computer called MINIAC.
I tend to think of the Danny Dunn books as being the geek's version of the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, except that they're good.
Gelernter is one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time. - Bill Joy
David Gelernter is one of the pioneers in getting many computers to work together and cooperate on solving a single problem, which is the future of computing. - Danny Hillis
Gelernter prophesied the rise of the World Wide Web. He understood the idea half a decade before it happened. - John Markoff
David Gelernteris a treasure in the world of computer science...a unique and profoundly important presence in the information technology community. He is the most articulate and thoughtful of the great living practitioners, and his writings examine a surprising breadth of topics with humanity, moral seriousness and aesthetic passion.... He's a full-out visionary, able to present ideas as wild and on the edge as anyone. - Jaron Lanier
There are lots of clever computer scientists; David Gelernter is one of the few who is wise. - Cliff Stoll
Still, Einstein was wise in many ways, but he also had some ideas (outside of physics) that, to be generous, weren't all that well thought out. The ideas have to stand or fall on their own merit, not on anybody's opinions of the man who has the ideas.
"At the high levels of your application, you're no longer coding in Forth, but in the language you've designed to solve the problem."
That sounds similar to what Paul Graham says Lisp allows you to do. Is it, or do I not understand what you're describing?. (I've never looked at Forth, so the latter is likely.)
I like this idea. I think of general literacy as not so much a state you achieve but a way of life. You're never done. And I think knowing something about a field is better than knowing nothing, as long as you maintain skepticism about your own knowledge and abilities. I wouldn't want, as Tbonium warned, "...an influx of people who think they know something about computers. These people get a government job, and start telling their contractors what to do and how to do it."
As computers are now a huge part of our culture, people ought to know something about them. Demystifying is good, and if somebody has an "Aha" experience, that's great. Somebody might get interested enough to make a contribution to the field. Not everybody who has made contributions majored in computer science or engineering. Here's Eric Raymond's description of his computer education:
"Undergraduate studies (including some graduate-level courses) in mathematics and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. I have never taken any courses in computer science or software engineering."
He must have had an "aha" experience somewhere along the line.
And Kernighan's course will have practical applications for some of these students. I did part of a PhD program in psychology. My knowledge of simple programming, networks, and databases helped me a lot. The other students were highly intelligent, but ignorant about computers. They couldn't use the tools to make their lives easier, and their data safer. Even a bit of experience with text editors and simple programming can help you when you start SAS programming. There were people who were quite good with statistics who needed a lot of help with the computer. "Where are my files?" "Is a text file an ASCII file?" "How do I telenet [sic] to a server. And what does that mean?"
And lots of people, once they're shown, like to use a folding programmer's editor for prose writing.
Interesting quotes from Kernighan in an interview:
When I have a choice I still do all my programming in Unix. I use Rob Pike's sam editor, I don't use Emacs. When I can't use sam I use vi for historical reasons, and I am still quite comfortable with ed.
I don't use fancy debuggers, I use print statements and I don't use a debugger for anything more than getting a stack trace when the program dies unexpectedly. When I write code on Windows I use typically the Microsoft development environment: they know where all the files are, and how to get all the include files and the like, and I use them, even though in many respects they don't match the way I want do business.
The only computer science book I read more than once, that I actually pick up every few years and read parts of again, is The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks, a great book.
There are other books that I reread that are relevant in computing. Books on how to write, write English in my particular case, like "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White. I go back and I reread that every few years as well, because I think the ability to communicate is probably just as important for most people as the ability to sit down and write code. The ability to convey what it is that you're doing is very important.
Sometimes I do write C++ instead of C. C++ I think is basically too big a language, although there's a reason for almost everything that's in it. When I write a C program of any size, I probably will wind-up using 75, 80, 90% of the language features. In other words, most of the language is useful in almost any kind of program. By contrast, if I write in C++ I probably don't use even 10% of the language, and in fact the other 90% I don't think I understand.
Yes, EditPlus. I'm always surprised when people tell me they regularly work with Notepad. Notepad has no features even a beginner programmer like me would want. It shows text on screen and it searches, and that's about it.
I use EditPlus for C, Javascript, HTML, Python (also use IDLE for Python), and Perl. NoteTab (not Notepad, the free thing that comes with Windows) probably has more features, but I find EditPlus more accessible. That was subjective and vague, but that's as far as I can explain it now.
EditPlus has customizable syntax highlighting, user definable cliptexts, line numbering, goto line, bookmarks, auto-completion, column selection, customizable keyboard shortcuts, brace matching, function listing (definable with regular expressions), recordable but not editable macros, column markers, choice of Unix, PC, and Mac line endings, line commenting/uncommenting, spell check, automatic indenting (defined or disabled by user) and more. You can remap the keyboard. And the thing is, you can use almost any feature and perform almost any customization without reading the help. You load it and use it.
True, it has no scripting language (yet) but you can hook other tools into its menu or toolbars, including Perl scripts, if you want more than simple macros. HTML Tidy is in my tools menu, and it runs on the current file. I run the Borland C compiler from EditPlus and it outputs errors into a separate window, and takes me to the offending line if I double-click an error. That's not revolutionary, but it's better than Notepad.
EditPlus is not an IDE and it's not for giant projects and large teams. It's not Emacs either. And it's not trying to be Emacs, or any other legendary giant. But it loads in three seconds, costs thirty dollars after an unlimited try-before-you-buy period, and it fits on a floppy. I paid for mine, but when I'm on an alien Windows machine, I download it in a minute, install it in another minute, and use it. The uninstall is fast and very clean, or I leave it for the Windows user if he wants it.
1. You have now made your employer aware that you are unhappy. From this day on, your loyalty will always be in question.
Possibly true. But in a company run by grown-ups, you're supposed to let management know that you're unhappy. You are not supposed to whine about it, but you can state, in a reasonable way, that you are dissatisfied. That's what you do when you ask for a raise. And only foolish, childish managers will be shocked (Shocked!) to learn that some employees don't love the company. Of course, not everybody's a grown up.
2. When promotion time comes around, your employer will remember who is loyal and who is not.
See above. And, they will also remember who was good enough to receive an offer of a fifty percent raise, and who was considered valuable enough to be retained with a similar raise.
3. When times get tough, your employer will begin the cutbacks with you.
Perhaps. There are no guarantees in life.
4. Accepting a counteroffer is an insult to your intelligence and a blow to your personal pride; you were bought.
This is ridiculous. We are bought with our salaries. It is how the system works, and it's a reasonable and honorable exchange: work for pay. If you do something unethical because you've been offered lots of money, that's different. Volunteering is great if you are independently wealthy. Most are not. I've allowed myself to be bought away from the life of leisure I prefer: The company told me that if I write programs they'll give me money.
5. Where is the money for the counteroffer coming from? All companies have wage and salary guidelines which must be followed. Is it your next raise early?
Could be. One of the wage and salary guidelines most companies follow is to get and retain the people they need for the least amount of money. That's why you negotiate salaries and push a bit.
6. Your company will immediately start looking for a new person at a cheaper price.
Doubtful. If I were going to do that I would probably just let the person take the new job and then start looking. If the position was so vital that I couldn't do that, I would consider making a counter-offer to retain somebody who already knew the company and the job.
7. The same circumstances that now cause you to consider a change will repeat themselves in the future, even if you accept a counteroffer.
True in some cases. But in the post we're discussing, the only difference between the jobs was money.
8. Statistics show that if you accept a counteroffer, the probability of voluntarily leaving in six months or being let go in one year is extremely high.
As others have noted, I want to know the details on these statistics.
9. Once the word gets out, the relationship that you now enjoy with your co-workers will never be the same. You will lose the personal satisfaction of peer group acceptance.
Word does not always get out. And I personally still respect one of our sysadmins who stayed with our company on the basis of a counter offer. He's been here for five years since then, and everything is fine. I'm not an idiot and neither are my co-workers. The guy is good, he has a family to feed and parents to take care of, another company offered him money, and our company offered more to keep him. They made a good move. Management and staff knew why he was going to leave, because they also use money to purchase goods and services for themselves and their families.
10. What type of company do you work for if you have to threaten to resign before they will give you what you are worth?
A normal one. Not that the person who posted this couldn't have asked for more money sooner, obviously, but he didn't. It does not sound as though he was asking and asking and then finally, after many months of trying to get what he was worth, had to threaten to leave. He didn't know what he was worth to the company and only found out when he tried to leave.
Management may feel strong-armed in this situation, and they may resent him. Maybe it is better to leave. Also, variety and change are good. But that top ten list was weak.
The good thing about Wawa is that their ATM machines (imagine a Beowulf cluster of them) don't charge a fee, no matter what bank you use. At least they don't in Philadelphia. And as my bank does not charge a fee for using Wawa ATMs, they function for me as convenient and plentiful ATM lobbies, which happen to have decent coffee. Not a bad deal. The parking lot of the one off of 34th and Market, up in University City, is the hangout of some rather aggressive panhandlers.
I know Slashdot is news for nerds, but nerds like free ATMs, too. And they're also frequently approached by aggressive panhandlers after class.
In "Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood," Oliver Sacks describes a giant periodic table at the British Museum, or perhaps it was the Natural Science Museum, in London. It was built onto a large wall (quite large, by his description, perhaps thirty feet wide) and there were cubbyholes containing samples of each element that could easily or safely be stored. Sacks, in his childhood, was a chemistry hacker, and his description of the table, and of his feelings for chemistry, especially metals, is beautiful. The first chapter of Uncle Tungsten is available on the New York Times site.
Your story, and the Paul Graham article, are fascinating. But what does it mean when a Slashdot reader says: "I was never a serious programmer before I was introduced to Lisp..."
Were you low level like me, in that you know a bit of C and spend most of your time with Perl and Javascript? Or are you like a professor of mine, who said he was not much of a programmer, really, but who turned out to have a Master's from the University of Pennsylvania in computer language development, and a PhD from Georgia Tech in computer science (with an emphasis on databases, so maybe that's why he said he's not much of a programmer and more of a theorist.)
I'm going to start experimenting with Lisp, but I would like to know what kind of education and experience you had that helped you pick it up so quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
jEdit is quite powerful. Also, you can pretty much just start using it, it's so easy. There are Emacs-style key commands, but there are also easy to use menus, configurable toolbar, and the keyboard can be remapped. Learning how to use new feautres involves looking in the online help and the options screens, and then immediately using the newly discovered feature without any problems.
>Eh. It finishes tags for you. There's an autocomplete plugin out there for Java...
The autocompletion does more than finishing a tag when you type a less than and a forward slash. There's a plugin that pops up an autocompletion window for you Java methods, which is not perfect, but is useful. And for regular autocompletion of words, just type part of a word and hit control-b. If the word has appeared before in the document, it will be autocompleted if there's no ambiguity, otherwise you'll get a popup that lets you choose. It's fast and accurate.
You can have a primary *and* an alternative key shortcut for any built-in command, any plugin, and any macro. Your key commands can be things like ctl-e, ctrl-a in succession, or even ctrl-shift-e, ctrl-i. Bring in the alt key also.
If you want to switch among buffers without taking your hands off the keyboard, remap the buffer commands and you're done.
Emacs does more, but right now Emacs doesn't do anything I need that jEdit does not do. And jEdit is easier to deal with. And does column selection and pasting. But, to repeat, unlike the hugely powerful Emacs and Vim, there's basically no learning curve.
I'd be interested if you reported back when you have found the perfect editor. Because then we'll all use it, because it will be perfect for everybody, and there will be no more discussion of editors on Slashdot.
That being said, Perl is at least useful for many things ("practical," I believe it's called).
Python is useful for many things as well, as evidenced by the number of people who use it, including Boeing, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, Industrial Light & Magic, Intel, JPL, Lawrence Livermore Labs, NASA, and Yahoo. Programmers at places like these are usually allowed to make their own decsions about their tools, and they chose Python. These guys are good. They don't use tools that they don't like. This is not to say that Python is their only scripting language. I know NASA makes good use of TCL, and probably uses Perl as well.
Peter Norvig says "Python has been an important part of Google since the beginning, and remains so as the system grows and evolves. Today dozens of Google engineers use Python, and we're looking for more people with skills in this language." Norvig is director of search quality at Google. Look at his home page (www.norvig.com/. When a guy who writes AI books talks up a language, it means something. I'm not saying it means everything. It's another piece of data to put on the scales.
More details on use of Python:www.python-in-business.org/success/
http://www.python.org/Quotes.html
Finally, I note that the Google jobs page mentions Perl 11 times and Python 15 times, for what it's worth. I didn't read the job descriptions.
A discussion of question begging from the Christian Science Monitor.
I hide comments in Jedit with a sort of awkward use of the folding feature. I just indent the second through last lines of multi-line comments. That way I see only the first line of a comment, if I fold it up. Here's an unfolded sample:
/* Comment:
/* Comment: [6 lines]
if (document.URL.indexOf("_FT")!=-1) {
Comment lines. This function saves the world.
Comment lines. This function saves the world.
Comment lines. This function saves the world.
Comment lines. This function saves the world.
Comment lines. This function saves the world.
*/
document.write('<img src="/images/shim.gif" width="13" border="0">')
}
When folded, it looks like this:
if (document.URL.indexOf("_FT")!=-1) {
document.write('<img src="/images/shim.gif" width="13" border="0">')
}
Note that Jedit puts the number of hidden lines in brackets at the end of the top of the folded section.
Other good things in Jedit are:
Hypersearch, which returns a clickable list of all the search hits in a file
Good auto-completion
Folding, with brace-based folding coming in the next release
Simple plug-in architecture
Basic project management
Very configurable
Integration with code management tools like CVS.
Faster to learn than Emacs. Didn't take any appreciable time to learn at all, actually. I just looked in the menus and was doing eighty percent of what I needed to do after twenty minutes. I had to look around longer for a few other things.
There are a lot of Emacs-style key commands, and they can be changed to your own preferences.
It does grab memory, but just click the memory command on the bottom right periodically and you can free up big chunks. (Insert your own joke about vomiting here.)
It is not the snappiest editor I've ever used, but it's plenty fast enough.
Finally, it is actively being worked on. What you see now is less than what will be available in a few months.
The article states that the platypus is the only venom-producing mammal. There are actually a few others.
The European water shrew and the North American short-tailed shrew are venomous. They use their poisonous bite to kill frogs, mice, and whatever other little creatures they eat. The bite of the solenodon (Solenodon paradoxus) of Haiti is poisonous as well.
Erlang is a dynamically typed concurrent functional programming language for large industrial real-time systems. Features of Erlang include...
Exactly. I give money to projects that I use and that deserve support. Opera and Jedit are two of them. Jedit is totally free, without any ads or nag screens, as it's an open source project. I'm not good enough yet to contribute to the project by programming (although I can report bugs and suggest features) but I can help out with a bit of money. And I want Opera development to continue, so I bought it.
I do. It was put out by the Harvard Lampoon. It was full of cheap bathroom humor, brand names, and cravenness, and it was hysterical. The wizard was Goodgulf, the old Boggie (Hobbit) was Dildo Bugger, who lived in the Sty. His nephew was Frito. Frito was accompanied by his servant Spam, and Legolam, Gimlet son of Groin, Stomper (dressed as the Lone Ranger), boggies Moxie & Pepsi Dingleberry, and Bromosel. The sought to destroy Sorehed's ring, which had been borne by Goddam for many years. They fought Narcs and the evil wizard Serutan. The elven land of Lornadoon was an amusement park. There were song and poem parodies, and the authors recreated the various languages. (Gimli the dwarf's war cry: Kodak khaki no-doz!). It was damn funny, and sleazy as hell. I'm not really doing it justice, but then it doesn't deserve justice. Read it and then wash your hands.
In Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy, the professor builds a life-sized dragon fly that is flown by remote control. It had eyes and ears, and he thought of using it for exploring. Danny Dunn ends up destroying it, and the professor's notes, when the government develops an interest in using it for spying on people.
Did anybody else on Slashdot read the Danny Dunn books when they were children? His mother is the housekeeper for Professor Bullfinch, and they have all sorts of adventures that are, for the most part, scientifically possible, at least sort of. Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine featured a computer called MINIAC.
I tend to think of the Danny Dunn books as being the geek's version of the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, except that they're good.
He is well thought of by some:
From Edge:
Gelernter is one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time. - Bill Joy
David Gelernter is one of the pioneers in getting many computers to work together and cooperate on solving a single problem, which is the future of computing. - Danny Hillis
Gelernter prophesied the rise of the World Wide Web. He understood the idea half a decade before it happened. - John Markoff
David Gelernteris a treasure in the world of computer science...a unique and profoundly important presence in the information technology community. He is the most articulate and thoughtful of the great living practitioners, and his writings examine a surprising breadth of topics with humanity, moral seriousness and aesthetic passion.... He's a full-out visionary, able to present ideas as wild and on the edge as anyone. - Jaron Lanier
There are lots of clever computer scientists; David Gelernter is one of the few who is wise. - Cliff Stoll
Still, Einstein was wise in many ways, but he also had some ideas (outside of physics) that, to be generous, weren't all that well thought out. The ideas have to stand or fall on their own merit, not on anybody's opinions of the man who has the ideas.
"At the high levels of your application, you're no longer coding in Forth, but in the language you've designed to solve the problem."
That sounds similar to what Paul Graham says Lisp allows you to do. Is it, or do I not understand what you're describing?. (I've never looked at Forth, so the latter is likely.)
I like this idea. I think of general literacy as not so much a state you achieve but a way of life. You're never done. And I think knowing something about a field is better than knowing nothing, as long as you maintain skepticism about your own knowledge and abilities. I wouldn't want, as Tbonium warned, "...an influx of people who think they know something about computers. These people get a government job, and start telling their contractors what to do and how to do it."
As computers are now a huge part of our culture, people ought to know something about them. Demystifying is good, and if somebody has an "Aha" experience, that's great. Somebody might get interested enough to make a contribution to the field. Not everybody who has made contributions majored in computer science or engineering. Here's Eric Raymond's description of his computer education:
"Undergraduate studies (including some graduate-level courses) in mathematics and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. I have never taken any courses in computer science or software engineering."
He must have had an "aha" experience somewhere along the line.
And Kernighan's course will have practical applications for some of these students. I did part of a PhD program in psychology. My knowledge of simple programming, networks, and databases helped me a lot. The other students were highly intelligent, but ignorant about computers. They couldn't use the tools to make their lives easier, and their data safer. Even a bit of experience with text editors and simple programming can help you when you start SAS programming. There were people who were quite good with statistics who needed a lot of help with the computer. "Where are my files?" "Is a text file an ASCII file?" "How do I telenet [sic] to a server. And what does that mean?"
And lots of people, once they're shown, like to use a folding programmer's editor for prose writing.
Interesting quotes from Kernighan in an interview:
When I have a choice I still do all my programming in Unix. I use Rob Pike's sam editor, I don't use Emacs. When I can't use sam I use vi for historical reasons, and I am still quite comfortable with ed.
I don't use fancy debuggers, I use print statements and I don't use a debugger for anything more than getting a stack trace when the program dies unexpectedly. When I write code on Windows I use typically the Microsoft development environment: they know where all the files are, and how to get all the include files and the like, and I use them, even though in many respects they don't match the way I want do business.
The only computer science book I read more than once, that I actually pick up every few years and read parts of again, is The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks, a great book.
There are other books that I reread that are relevant in computing. Books on how to write, write English in my particular case, like "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White. I go back and I reread that every few years as well, because I think the ability to communicate is probably just as important for most people as the ability to sit down and write code. The ability to convey what it is that you're doing is very important.
Sometimes I do write C++ instead of C. C++ I think is basically too big a language, although there's a reason for almost everything that's in it. When I write a C program of any size, I probably will wind-up using 75, 80, 90% of the language features. In other words, most of the language is useful in almost any kind of program. By contrast, if I write in C++ I probably don't use even 10% of the language, and in fact the other 90% I don't think I understand.
Yes, EditPlus. I'm always surprised when people tell me they regularly work with Notepad. Notepad has no features even a beginner programmer like me would want. It shows text on screen and it searches, and that's about it.
I use EditPlus for C, Javascript, HTML, Python (also use IDLE for Python), and Perl. NoteTab (not Notepad, the free thing that comes with Windows) probably has more features, but I find EditPlus more accessible. That was subjective and vague, but that's as far as I can explain it now.
EditPlus has customizable syntax highlighting, user definable cliptexts, line numbering, goto line, bookmarks, auto-completion, column selection, customizable keyboard shortcuts, brace matching, function listing (definable with regular expressions), recordable but not editable macros, column markers, choice of Unix, PC, and Mac line endings, line commenting/uncommenting, spell check, automatic indenting (defined or disabled by user) and more. You can remap the keyboard. And the thing is, you can use almost any feature and perform almost any customization without reading the help. You load it and use it.
True, it has no scripting language (yet) but you can hook other tools into its menu or toolbars, including Perl scripts, if you want more than simple macros. HTML Tidy is in my tools menu, and it runs on the current file. I run the Borland C compiler from EditPlus and it outputs errors into a separate window, and takes me to the offending line if I double-click an error. That's not revolutionary, but it's better than Notepad.
EditPlus is not an IDE and it's not for giant projects and large teams. It's not Emacs either. And it's not trying to be Emacs, or any other legendary giant. But it loads in three seconds, costs thirty dollars after an unlimited try-before-you-buy period, and it fits on a floppy. I paid for mine, but when I'm on an alien Windows machine, I download it in a minute, install it in another minute, and use it. The uninstall is fast and very clean, or I leave it for the Windows user if he wants it.
1. You have now made your employer aware that you are unhappy. From this day on, your loyalty will always be in question.
Possibly true. But in a company run by grown-ups, you're supposed to let management know that you're unhappy. You are not supposed to whine about it, but you can state, in a reasonable way, that you are dissatisfied. That's what you do when you ask for a raise. And only foolish, childish managers will be shocked (Shocked!) to learn that some employees don't love the company. Of course, not everybody's a grown up.
2. When promotion time comes around, your employer will remember who is loyal and who is not.
See above. And, they will also remember who was good enough to receive an offer of a fifty percent raise, and who was considered valuable enough to be retained with a similar raise.
3. When times get tough, your employer will begin the cutbacks with you.
Perhaps. There are no guarantees in life.
4. Accepting a counteroffer is an insult to your intelligence and a blow to your personal pride; you were bought.
This is ridiculous. We are bought with our salaries. It is how the system works, and it's a reasonable and honorable exchange: work for pay. If you do something unethical because you've been offered lots of money, that's different. Volunteering is great if you are independently wealthy. Most are not. I've allowed myself to be bought away from the life of leisure I prefer: The company told me that if I write programs they'll give me money.
5. Where is the money for the counteroffer coming from? All companies have wage and salary guidelines which must be followed. Is it your next raise early?
Could be. One of the wage and salary guidelines most companies follow is to get and retain the people they need for the least amount of money. That's why you negotiate salaries and push a bit.
6. Your company will immediately start looking for a new person at a cheaper price.
Doubtful. If I were going to do that I would probably just let the person take the new job and then start looking. If the position was so vital that I couldn't do that, I would consider making a counter-offer to retain somebody who already knew the company and the job.
7. The same circumstances that now cause you to consider a change will repeat themselves in the future, even if you accept a counteroffer.
True in some cases. But in the post we're discussing, the only difference between the jobs was money.
8. Statistics show that if you accept a counteroffer, the probability of voluntarily leaving in six months or being let go in one year is extremely high.
As others have noted, I want to know the details on these statistics.
9. Once the word gets out, the relationship that you now enjoy with your co-workers will never be the same. You will lose the personal satisfaction of peer group acceptance.
Word does not always get out. And I personally still respect one of our sysadmins who stayed with our company on the basis of a counter offer. He's been here for five years since then, and everything is fine. I'm not an idiot and neither are my co-workers. The guy is good, he has a family to feed and parents to take care of, another company offered him money, and our company offered more to keep him. They made a good move. Management and staff knew why he was going to leave, because they also use money to purchase goods and services for themselves and their families.
10. What type of company do you work for if you have to threaten to resign before they will give you what you are worth?
A normal one. Not that the person who posted this couldn't have asked for more money sooner, obviously, but he didn't. It does not sound as though he was asking and asking and then finally, after many months of trying to get what he was worth, had to threaten to leave. He didn't know what he was worth to the company and only found out when he tried to leave.
Management may feel strong-armed in this situation, and they may resent him. Maybe it is better to leave. Also, variety and change are good. But that top ten list was weak.
The good thing about Wawa is that their ATM machines (imagine a Beowulf cluster of them) don't charge a fee, no matter what bank you use. At least they don't in Philadelphia. And as my bank does not charge a fee for using Wawa ATMs, they function for me as convenient and plentiful ATM lobbies, which happen to have decent coffee. Not a bad deal. The parking lot of the one off of 34th and Market, up in University City, is the hangout of some rather aggressive panhandlers.
I know Slashdot is news for nerds, but nerds like free ATMs, too. And they're also frequently approached by aggressive panhandlers after class.
In "Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood," Oliver Sacks describes a giant periodic table at the British Museum, or perhaps it was the Natural Science Museum, in London. It was built onto a large wall (quite large, by his description, perhaps thirty feet wide) and there were cubbyholes containing samples of each element that could easily or safely be stored. Sacks, in his childhood, was a chemistry hacker, and his description of the table, and of his feelings for chemistry, especially metals, is beautiful. The first chapter of Uncle Tungsten is available on the New York Times site.
Your story, and the Paul Graham article, are fascinating. But what does it mean when a Slashdot reader says: "I was never a serious programmer before I was introduced to Lisp..."
Were you low level like me, in that you know a bit of C and spend most of your time with Perl and Javascript? Or are you like a professor of mine, who said he was not much of a programmer, really, but who turned out to have a Master's from the University of Pennsylvania in computer language development, and a PhD from Georgia Tech in computer science (with an emphasis on databases, so maybe that's why he said he's not much of a programmer and more of a theorist.)
I'm going to start experimenting with Lisp, but I would like to know what kind of education and experience you had that helped you pick it up so quickly.