"Honestly, every day I wonder about the lazy people surrounding me."...says the guy without a kid and family and house to take care of.
If you're young, free, and have time to spare, then sure, desk-based cardio is a lazy choice. If, however, you have a life full to the brim with responsibilities, you can't just "Run a few blocks in the morning or evening".
Enjoy the luxury that is free time, and don't talk down to those of us who don't have it.
Fair enough. I've certainly known a few coders like you describe, and it's annoying.
Anyway, I think the real comparison for good coding practice is that of coders versus lawyers. In both cases, crafting a document is the goal, but the whole thing has to work as an entity. Single words and careful punctuation matter. Reuse is common. Each document is, in a sense, a work of art. Each one is guided by functional needs.
Building bridges is too easy. Coding (and legal work!) is a way harder problem to solve.:-)
And I think that's exactly what's missing in most of "software engineering" today. People start from what's the latest buzzword, and then work backwards to try to find some problem (even imaginary) to apply it to. They'll build a bridge in the middle of nowhere, in the style of 19'th century follies, just because they want a cantilever truss bridge, everything else be damned.
The main reason I use the same set of tools for each project I do, to the limit of my ability to do so, is not because it's flashy, but because the code I've written and used before is far more trustworthy, and faster to apply, than a new from-scratch solution.
You'd see an awful lot more of the kinds of behavior you're attacking if engineers building bridges could, freely and quickly, clone an actual bridge. Code re-use is a very good idea, and so the fact that I use fancy widgets a lot has more to do with my having fancy widget libraries that I trust than that I love fancy widgets per se.
I guess I'm just frustrated by the inevitable comparison between software design and other real-world engineering design. The domains have very, very little to do with one another. Analogies between the two realms rarely add value to the discussion, IMHO.
Linux has always had "safe mode". You boot single user from the command line.
A command line driven OS is, to 99.999% of humanity, not an operating system. The OS is the metaphor. Dropping into a text-based mode might as well be powering down. In fact it's almost certainly worse, from a user's perspective - more confronting, confusing and frustrating.
It does no good to tell my Mom or my non-tech friend "Don't worry, your operating system is fine, it's just the GUI." They likely blew something up using the GUI. Trying to find which text file to edit, and how to edit text files, and how to navigate directories, all with a CLI, is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. If I break it in GUI, I need to be able to fix it in GUI, or it won't get fixed.
Stop being a part of the problem here. If X doesn't work, the OS is broken. This is a major improvement in Ubuntu overall, not just some minor fix to X.
In regards to your skepticism regarding the singularity, I'd like to point out that it doesn't require super-smart machines to happen.
The requirement for the singularity is simply that we reach a point where we can achieve, in some manner, an intelligence of 1.01 times the human norm, and that that intelligence can repeat the trick. Certainly, machine intelligences should allow this, but it is also possible we will devise ways to improve our own mental functioning, or a way to aggregate normal human intelligence such that the total is greater than any one mind could comprehend.
There are, in short, a number of paths to exponentiating intelligence. To argue that such is impossible is not supportable - we have only one example of a human-caliber mind, and all indications are that we are not in any way an end point of evolution. If mother nature can get to homo sapiens through genetic darts and dice, it seems decidedly improbable that we won't be able to do better with a guided approach, once we master the required genetics and so forth.
Now, I have major doubts about the *pace* of this change, and of when it will kick in, but it seems unlikely that anything short of a planet-wide catastrophe could stop it from happening *eventually*.
It comes down to how we transition off fossil fuels.
With internal-combustion-only cars, there is no migration path. Whatever method of energy generation you use, it all has to end up as gasoline (or similar fuel). This is, currently, enormously wasteful for energy sources that aren't fossil-fuel based.
With electric engines, you're right that *today*, we mostly use fossil fuels to generate it, and so it isn't a great solution.
But *soon*, we will be using more wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, you-name-it energy sources, and as that happens, we start to eliminate the need for fossile fuels.
My father in law lives in L.A., and has enough spare energy from solar to power a car, but there's no option on the market that will let him do this. Right now, he just sells it back to the grid. But with this type of hybrid vehicle, he could be almost completely self sufficient.
Electricity is fungible - you can turn anything into it, and turn it into just about anything. Fossil fuels are only good for burning.
I'm amazed at all the negative comments on this. The idea is a clever one, it's directly innovative, and for the right occasion, a very good product.
Think about weddings, anniversaries and the like. What a cool gift for that special someone?
This is another step down the road to the infinitely personalized marketplace, which is a BIG trend with vast potential impact. In this particular case, it doesn't scale particularly well, but just like customized Nikes, this is a way for you as a "consumer" to be more involved, more creative, and more attached to something you normally get cranked out *at* you.
Look at the reasons why public support for the war in Iraq has flagged: primarily, it's because of the loss of U.S. troops. Yeah, occasionally you hear about Iraqi civilian deaths, but it's usually only from people who are already against the war. It's not changing any minds.
I think that, while some may be swayed by the 3,000 deaths to date, most are in fact against the war because it is a failure. Destroying US and Iraqi lives *can* be a supportable proposition. All war is not futile. The problem is, most people now see those lives lost as a waste, ie not bringing any benefit to the US or (for the more enlightened) the Iraqis.
If we were achieving a stable democracy in the Middle East, if we were securing the region from a slide into terrorism and extremism (rather than causing that slide), I believe the loss of life would be viewed with less revulsion.
You're falling victim to the same fallacy you're trying to point out in others. Yes, the cold-war style fighting is out of fashion *now*. Today, suicide bombers are our adversaries. But tomorrow's war might well be with China, or a resurgent Russia, or who knows who else?
Terrorism can affect policies and shape the context of conflicts, but it has a piss-poor record for achieving results that last. At best, it's a reactive force. Conventional wars, on the other hand, are a threat to our country's very existence.
We spend so much energy on WMD equipped terrorists, right? Why? Because they could take out one of our cities. China or similar powers could take them *all* out, save for our overwhelming conventional arms. It's a bit early to throw them out, IMHO. The total death toll from terrorism has yet to equal a single night day's cost during WWII. Don't miss the forest for the trees.
A Faraday cage won't stop particle radiation, nor will it protect against short wavelength radiation like gamma rays (unless you build a Faraday cage from massive lead plates, without any holes in it).
It also won't protect you against radioactive radon gas seeping out off the ground.
I've also heard rumors that Faraday cages won't stop panda attacks, syphilis, or Jack Thompson.
Ok, so Second Life is cool. It's waaaay trendy. It has the sexy.
But it is chat. Only chat. Chat that you can't archive, that is done with word bubbles, and without a moderation system. What on earth would make you think that this would be a good platform for instruction?
Additionally: - It's a beast on the requirements side, you need a ton of 3D horsepower and a fat network pipe to use it effectively - Large groups of avatars clustered together hammer the client, turning things into a 4fps slideshow - Server uptime has historically not been stellar, though that may have changed since I was involved - It's distracting as all hell - your students will spend all their time customizing/scoping out each others' avatars
Please, for the love of pete, get over the hype on Second Life.
I wasn't arguing that digital data storage is dead, simply that paper copies have their place.
- No way to lose the software/format that the file is stored in
- Easy to verify the data is retained - can you look at a DVD/tape and tell instantly if you can read the data?
- Shelf life of centuries
The biggest reason, though, is the one highlighted by this story. It takes effort to destroy paper copies of things. You have to really work at it. With digital, it's just a few keypresses/drops of water/cosmic rays away from the bit bucket at any point, and you may not even know it until you go to get the data. Oops!
I'm not saying that policies and training and whatnot can't make digital nearly perfect, simply that plain old hardcopy has its place in that policy.
My wife, son, mother, father, and half my friends disagree with you. We play bowling and tennis constantly, have been for 3 months now. My father loves playing golf.
It's a pick-up game, for blowing 30 minutes doing something engaging and somewhat physical. It can be team-based and cooperative, something that's very hard to come by in "normal" games.
I can't think of any other game that fits those criteria. We used to play scrabble or cards, but those take time, are competitive, and just don't have the sense of fun that Wii Sports has. It's revolutionized how my wife and I spend our free time.
I can't believe this is getting the ranking it is. Ok, where to start...
Currently with computers we are trying to abstract problems such as banking and business into simple logic puzzles. I think that's too much of a simplification. I think we need to create a virtual world full of basic human-percieved concepts, such as time, weather, humans, animals, etc. and create programs by manipulating those basic ideas and objects.
What you are describing is a domain specific language for the entire world. It would be the work of generations to construct such a language - a language that correctly modeled the human intuition about how the world works. How do we model gravity, friction, refraction, fluid dynamics, etc, etc to such a degree of fidelity that we can use that model to do work? We don't. We can't. This is the kind of wonky pipe-dream that infests the management levels of businesses and the ivory towers of academia. It's a great example of why software development is hard - people like you think you understand the problem, and convince people in power to do stupid things.
You, sir, are no software developer.
Computers *are* simple logical machines. We must render down complex human needs into "simple logic puzzles" because that is all computers do. That's it. At its heart, every computer made is a simple logic machine. EVERYTHING ends up ground down into the same fine paste of boolean logic and simple math. That is the tool, full stop.
Now imagine, instead of dealing with animals and where they live, it has a bunch of assertions about generally accepting accounting principles. One day, you might be able to just sit down and talk with an ontological system via email or IM, and say, "We got a check from client A for $575, another check for $440." and then the computer balances the books with all the other accounting principles it 'knows'.
This is just another variation in the strong AI pipe-dream. "Generally accept[ed] accounting principles"? What a laugh! Even in domains as staid and static as accounting, there are thousands of nuances to every decision. When and how to file expenses. How to categorize items. Which depreciation method to use, given dozens of unique conditions, to maximize tax benefits. Do you really think we can come up with a system that gets these choices right 99.999% of the time?
Basically, you're waving your hands, and saying "given the proper libraries and world simulation software, development is easy." You're missing the point that developing those items would be a dozen orders of magnitude harder than just writing the software the way we do it today, with your much derided "logic puzzles".
A Master's degree is next to worthless in CS. What impresses me when hiring is actual experience. Unless you're doing something algorithmically interesting (in which case, go math, but anyway...) most CS work is about a mindset and experience solving real problems. Theory beyond the undergrad level is superfluous.
If you have to choose, go with the game-centric one, but I'd spend two years writing games instead.
Um. I'm hardly a cultist, and Landmark is hardly a cult. I've done 3 seminars with them over the years, for a net of about $1500 for 10 days of group work. It was by far the best money I've spent in my life. It's not for everyone, and there are unsavory aspects to the viral propagation that Landmark (and virtually all seminar-type self-help and training programs) use, but none of it is mandatory or dangerous.
I took my classes, got what I got out of it, and stopped. No one hassled me about it. No one calls, no social pressure, no ostracism.
And for my money, I told my dad I loved him for the first time, revolutionized the romantic relationship I was in at the time, and got a grip of my social self in a way I hadn't even known possible. People I was in class with got married, got divorced, quit their jobs, started new careers - all out of a couple of 3-4 day classes. Very powerful stuff, but for most people who do it, very freeing.
I watched the videos you linked to. They used out-of-context clips to dramatize what goes on in the classes. It's mostly bogus. They also broke a legal agreement not to video or audio record the class, then broadcast that recording. Hardly kosher, whatever your views on copyright etc. That being said, sounds like the DMCA requests are bogus, from what I read on EFF's site.
Also, for the record, Landmark grew out of EST, neither of which has the slightest thing to do with Scientology. There is no religion, in fact no *spirituality* in Landmark's work.
Pros: - It's pretty quick, about 20-30min per game - Gameplay is fun - Art is great - $25 buys all the cards you need to be competitive and have fun - Good community, helpful mods - Try before you buy with 8 free decks (with good cards, tho not upgraded) - Nice trading system
Cons: - Game is server-hosted, so server bugs cause outages. - In general, while the game is now very stable, it has occasional bugs - Balance issues are still being sorted out (Octopi is doing a good job of this, IMHO, but it's never-ending) - First-turn advantage is annoying (going first gives a big advantage)
I haven't bought another game since this came out. I've spent $75, and have 3 championship level decks, and lots of fun if slightly less competitive ones. Money doesn't matter as much in PoxNora as it did in Magic, IMHO, due to randomness factors, gameplay adaptability, and the card xp/leveling system. It's very addictive, and very satisfying.
Also, while the basic set has 200 cards, the next release is due out on Oct 25th, with 70 more (including 2 new factions).
I've played a ton of games, both card and video, and this is one of the most fun I've played in years.
PS: My PoxNora handle is 'zaphnod', say Hi and I'll be happy to walk you through your first game.:-)
Haha! The joke is on you! I have oodles of anti-Roland energy, and would normally ignore one of his submissions completely!
But this "pigpile" tag... what could it mean? I was intrigued. I admit it! And now here I am, only to discover that yet another Slashdotter has become besotted with cleverness and witicized himself to inscrutability.
It's not the language or the tools that lead to maintainable code. It is entirely the quality of the people who architect and implement it in the first place. An experienced, well educated developer will always write with the future in mind, with commenting and clear abstractions. In converse, no language can prevent sloppy coding - and sloppy coding is the only cause of unmaintainable applications. Full stop.
What language and toolset benchmarks do is show how easy it is to express ideas, which is a pretty useful benchmark (as in approximation) for how well a good developer can use that language.
Slashdot Mirror
"Honestly, every day I wonder about the lazy people surrounding me." ...says the guy without a kid and family and house to take care of.
If you're young, free, and have time to spare, then sure, desk-based cardio is a lazy choice. If, however, you have a life full to the brim with responsibilities, you can't just "Run a few blocks in the morning or evening".
Enjoy the luxury that is free time, and don't talk down to those of us who don't have it.
Fair enough. I've certainly known a few coders like you describe, and it's annoying.
Anyway, I think the real comparison for good coding practice is that of coders versus lawyers. In both cases, crafting a document is the goal, but the whole thing has to work as an entity. Single words and careful punctuation matter. Reuse is common. Each document is, in a sense, a work of art. Each one is guided by functional needs.
Building bridges is too easy. Coding (and legal work!) is a way harder problem to solve. :-)
Did Australia become part of the US when Bush was down there last week?
What, you didn't get the memo?
The main reason I use the same set of tools for each project I do, to the limit of my ability to do so, is not because it's flashy, but because the code I've written and used before is far more trustworthy, and faster to apply, than a new from-scratch solution.
You'd see an awful lot more of the kinds of behavior you're attacking if engineers building bridges could, freely and quickly, clone an actual bridge. Code re-use is a very good idea, and so the fact that I use fancy widgets a lot has more to do with my having fancy widget libraries that I trust than that I love fancy widgets per se.
I guess I'm just frustrated by the inevitable comparison between software design and other real-world engineering design. The domains have very, very little to do with one another. Analogies between the two realms rarely add value to the discussion, IMHO.
A command line driven OS is, to 99.999% of humanity, not an operating system. The OS is the metaphor. Dropping into a text-based mode might as well be powering down. In fact it's almost certainly worse, from a user's perspective - more confronting, confusing and frustrating.
It does no good to tell my Mom or my non-tech friend "Don't worry, your operating system is fine, it's just the GUI." They likely blew something up using the GUI. Trying to find which text file to edit, and how to edit text files, and how to navigate directories, all with a CLI, is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. If I break it in GUI, I need to be able to fix it in GUI, or it won't get fixed.
Stop being a part of the problem here. If X doesn't work, the OS is broken. This is a major improvement in Ubuntu overall, not just some minor fix to X.
For those who haven't heard it...
Re: Your Brains by Jonathan Coulton.
Truly, an anthem for the modern age.
In regards to your skepticism regarding the singularity, I'd like to point out that it doesn't require super-smart machines to happen.
The requirement for the singularity is simply that we reach a point where we can achieve, in some manner, an intelligence of 1.01 times the human norm, and that that intelligence can repeat the trick. Certainly, machine intelligences should allow this, but it is also possible we will devise ways to improve our own mental functioning, or a way to aggregate normal human intelligence such that the total is greater than any one mind could comprehend.
There are, in short, a number of paths to exponentiating intelligence. To argue that such is impossible is not supportable - we have only one example of a human-caliber mind, and all indications are that we are not in any way an end point of evolution. If mother nature can get to homo sapiens through genetic darts and dice, it seems decidedly improbable that we won't be able to do better with a guided approach, once we master the required genetics and so forth.
Now, I have major doubts about the *pace* of this change, and of when it will kick in, but it seems unlikely that anything short of a planet-wide catastrophe could stop it from happening *eventually*.
It comes down to how we transition off fossil fuels.
With internal-combustion-only cars, there is no migration path. Whatever method of energy generation you use, it all has to end up as gasoline (or similar fuel). This is, currently, enormously wasteful for energy sources that aren't fossil-fuel based.
With electric engines, you're right that *today*, we mostly use fossil fuels to generate it, and so it isn't a great solution.
But *soon*, we will be using more wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, you-name-it energy sources, and as that happens, we start to eliminate the need for fossile fuels.
My father in law lives in L.A., and has enough spare energy from solar to power a car, but there's no option on the market that will let him do this. Right now, he just sells it back to the grid. But with this type of hybrid vehicle, he could be almost completely self sufficient.
Electricity is fungible - you can turn anything into it, and turn it into just about anything. Fossil fuels are only good for burning.
I'm amazed at all the negative comments on this. The idea is a clever one, it's directly innovative, and for the right occasion, a very good product.
Think about weddings, anniversaries and the like. What a cool gift for that special someone?
This is another step down the road to the infinitely personalized marketplace, which is a BIG trend with vast potential impact. In this particular case, it doesn't scale particularly well, but just like customized Nikes, this is a way for you as a "consumer" to be more involved, more creative, and more attached to something you normally get cranked out *at* you.
I give this one two thumbs up.
I think that, while some may be swayed by the 3,000 deaths to date, most are in fact against the war because it is a failure. Destroying US and Iraqi lives *can* be a supportable proposition. All war is not futile. The problem is, most people now see those lives lost as a waste, ie not bringing any benefit to the US or (for the more enlightened) the Iraqis.
If we were achieving a stable democracy in the Middle East, if we were securing the region from a slide into terrorism and extremism (rather than causing that slide), I believe the loss of life would be viewed with less revulsion.
You're falling victim to the same fallacy you're trying to point out in others. Yes, the cold-war style fighting is out of fashion *now*. Today, suicide bombers are our adversaries. But tomorrow's war might well be with China, or a resurgent Russia, or who knows who else?
Terrorism can affect policies and shape the context of conflicts, but it has a piss-poor record for achieving results that last. At best, it's a reactive force. Conventional wars, on the other hand, are a threat to our country's very existence.
We spend so much energy on WMD equipped terrorists, right? Why? Because they could take out one of our cities. China or similar powers could take them *all* out, save for our overwhelming conventional arms. It's a bit early to throw them out, IMHO. The total death toll from terrorism has yet to equal a single night day's cost during WWII. Don't miss the forest for the trees.
I've also heard rumors that Faraday cages won't stop panda attacks, syphilis, or Jack Thompson.
Makes you wonder what they're good for.
This news thrills me. I cannot contain my joy. Tears of sincerity drop, one by one, onto my overflowing keyboard.
When I think about important, relevant web sites, Yahoo is not on the tip of my brain pan.
Ok, so Second Life is cool. It's waaaay trendy. It has the sexy.
But it is chat. Only chat. Chat that you can't archive, that is done with word bubbles, and without a moderation system. What on earth would make you think that this would be a good platform for instruction?
Additionally:
- It's a beast on the requirements side, you need a ton of 3D horsepower and a fat network pipe to use it effectively
- Large groups of avatars clustered together hammer the client, turning things into a 4fps slideshow
- Server uptime has historically not been stellar, though that may have changed since I was involved
- It's distracting as all hell - your students will spend all their time customizing/scoping out each others' avatars
Please, for the love of pete, get over the hype on Second Life.
I wasn't arguing that digital data storage is dead, simply that paper copies have their place.
- No way to lose the software/format that the file is stored in
- Easy to verify the data is retained - can you look at a DVD/tape and tell instantly if you can read the data?
- Shelf life of centuries
The biggest reason, though, is the one highlighted by this story. It takes effort to destroy paper copies of things. You have to really work at it. With digital, it's just a few keypresses/drops of water/cosmic rays away from the bit bucket at any point, and you may not even know it until you go to get the data. Oops!
I'm not saying that policies and training and whatnot can't make digital nearly perfect, simply that plain old hardcopy has its place in that policy.
Think about voting paper trails, for example.
...print will never be dead.
My wife, son, mother, father, and half my friends disagree with you. We play bowling and tennis constantly, have been for 3 months now. My father loves playing golf.
It's a pick-up game, for blowing 30 minutes doing something engaging and somewhat physical. It can be team-based and cooperative, something that's very hard to come by in "normal" games.
I can't think of any other game that fits those criteria. We used to play scrabble or cards, but those take time, are competitive, and just don't have the sense of fun that Wii Sports has. It's revolutionized how my wife and I spend our free time.
Two cents, and all that.
What you are describing is a domain specific language for the entire world. It would be the work of generations to construct such a language - a language that correctly modeled the human intuition about how the world works. How do we model gravity, friction, refraction, fluid dynamics, etc, etc to such a degree of fidelity that we can use that model to do work? We don't. We can't. This is the kind of wonky pipe-dream that infests the management levels of businesses and the ivory towers of academia. It's a great example of why software development is hard - people like you think you understand the problem, and convince people in power to do stupid things.
You, sir, are no software developer.
Computers *are* simple logical machines. We must render down complex human needs into "simple logic puzzles" because that is all computers do. That's it. At its heart, every computer made is a simple logic machine. EVERYTHING ends up ground down into the same fine paste of boolean logic and simple math. That is the tool, full stop.
This is just another variation in the strong AI pipe-dream. "Generally accept[ed] accounting principles"? What a laugh! Even in domains as staid and static as accounting, there are thousands of nuances to every decision. When and how to file expenses. How to categorize items. Which depreciation method to use, given dozens of unique conditions, to maximize tax benefits. Do you really think we can come up with a system that gets these choices right 99.999% of the time? Basically, you're waving your hands, and saying "given the proper libraries and world simulation software, development is easy." You're missing the point that developing those items would be a dozen orders of magnitude harder than just writing the software the way we do it today, with your much derided "logic puzzles".
A Master's degree is next to worthless in CS. What impresses me when hiring is actual experience. Unless you're doing something algorithmically interesting (in which case, go math, but anyway...) most CS work is about a mindset and experience solving real problems. Theory beyond the undergrad level is superfluous.
If you have to choose, go with the game-centric one, but I'd spend two years writing games instead.
My two cents.
Um. I'm hardly a cultist, and Landmark is hardly a cult. I've done 3 seminars with them over the years, for a net of about $1500 for 10 days of group work. It was by far the best money I've spent in my life. It's not for everyone, and there are unsavory aspects to the viral propagation that Landmark (and virtually all seminar-type self-help and training programs) use, but none of it is mandatory or dangerous.
I took my classes, got what I got out of it, and stopped. No one hassled me about it. No one calls, no social pressure, no ostracism.
And for my money, I told my dad I loved him for the first time, revolutionized the romantic relationship I was in at the time, and got a grip of my social self in a way I hadn't even known possible. People I was in class with got married, got divorced, quit their jobs, started new careers - all out of a couple of 3-4 day classes. Very powerful stuff, but for most people who do it, very freeing.
I watched the videos you linked to. They used out-of-context clips to dramatize what goes on in the classes. It's mostly bogus. They also broke a legal agreement not to video or audio record the class, then broadcast that recording. Hardly kosher, whatever your views on copyright etc. That being said, sounds like the DMCA requests are bogus, from what I read on EFF's site.
Also, for the record, Landmark grew out of EST, neither of which has the slightest thing to do with Scientology. There is no religion, in fact no *spirituality* in Landmark's work.
Pros:
:-)
- It's pretty quick, about 20-30min per game
- Gameplay is fun
- Art is great
- $25 buys all the cards you need to be competitive and have fun
- Good community, helpful mods
- Try before you buy with 8 free decks (with good cards, tho not upgraded)
- Nice trading system
Cons:
- Game is server-hosted, so server bugs cause outages.
- In general, while the game is now very stable, it has occasional bugs
- Balance issues are still being sorted out (Octopi is doing a good job of this, IMHO, but it's never-ending)
- First-turn advantage is annoying (going first gives a big advantage)
I haven't bought another game since this came out. I've spent $75, and have 3 championship level decks, and lots of fun if slightly less competitive ones. Money doesn't matter as much in PoxNora as it did in Magic, IMHO, due to randomness factors, gameplay adaptability, and the card xp/leveling system. It's very addictive, and very satisfying.
Also, while the basic set has 200 cards, the next release is due out on Oct 25th, with 70 more (including 2 new factions).
I've played a ton of games, both card and video, and this is one of the most fun I've played in years.
PS: My PoxNora handle is 'zaphnod', say Hi and I'll be happy to walk you through your first game.
Haha! The joke is on you! I have oodles of anti-Roland energy, and would normally ignore one of his submissions completely!
But this "pigpile" tag... what could it mean? I was intrigued. I admit it! And now here I am, only to discover that yet another Slashdotter has become besotted with cleverness and witicized himself to inscrutability.
Avast! =D
Much as I love Neal, Larry Niven was way ahead of him on this idea. Check out: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=942
I loved the idea in the Ringworld books. Very clever technology that subtly changed the rules of combat. Larry Niven is the man.
It's not the language or the tools that lead to maintainable code. It is entirely the quality of the people who architect and implement it in the first place. An experienced, well educated developer will always write with the future in mind, with commenting and clear abstractions. In converse, no language can prevent sloppy coding - and sloppy coding is the only cause of unmaintainable applications. Full stop.
What language and toolset benchmarks do is show how easy it is to express ideas, which is a pretty useful benchmark (as in approximation) for how well a good developer can use that language.