I learned early on as a junior developer to be paranoid when it came time to code the design. There are a few rules that I learned to keep in mind that have allowed me to pass more unit and system tests.
One, don't trust the data that comes into your method/function/subroutine.
Two, don't trust the data that comes back from methods/functions/subroutines that you call.
Three, assume that other users will not trust the data that you modify and/or return from the function/method/subroutine that you're writing, and therefore accurately report to them anything that goes wrong.
I've noticed a trend in the past few years in younger developers, that they tend to develop with the best case scenarios in mind, believe that users will always enter valid data, that functions are always correctly documented and always require and return exactly what their documentation states, and that therefore the developers' code will never break unexpectedly. There is the idea that error checking isn't needed anymore because it's a waste of effort and time, that Java will always throw exceptions when something really bad happens, and rebooting/restarting the software will fix everything. I have to tell them that Java can't report failures caused by violating the business rules behind the design, that it's important to check for valid data and valid execution.
Of course, since I'm old and "unable to keep up" I'm now working maintenance on a big system, but I've found several show-stopper bugs that would not have shown up had the developers been just a bit more paranoid in the design stage. It would also have been cheaper to find the bugs before deployment, but the testing staff is overworked and understaffed, and stuff gets through, and so we have to get the trouble tickets from senior management in the customer's organization (USGov) when critical things break. People who when they are unhappy enough, take contracts away from the developers who make them unhappy.
Not to mention self-repairing as well, and even able to create multiple replacement copies. Well, given certain parts were not removed beforehand, of course.
It's not "moving the code from C to python", it's "solving the users' problem" that matters. I've used FORTRAN in satellite data analysis, Smalltalk in an AI support application, C in dozens of large and small commercial and DARPA projects, C++ in document management and in network allocation apps, Perl in a photo database app, Cold Fusion in an online timecard app (in-house), currently AJAX in a large system for ICE/DHS. The few times that a language was chosen before design work began were less than successful. I know how to learn and use languages to their fullest, taking advantage of each ones' strengths while working around their weaknesses. I did object-oriented programming in C back when C++ was just a glorified pre-processor, which led me to realize that there was nothing special about C++, since it could be reduced to C and then to Assembly and finally opcodes. All languages at the human level are still reduced to the same thing at the computer's level.
I will grant that there will be some types of syntax that will allow, say, object-oriented designs to be implemented easier than others, but nothing in the languages themselves is inherently more appropriate to solving the users' problems.
If you can't solve the problem, it doesn't matter how "pythonic" your solution is. That's the bottom line.
Good lord, talk about deja vu. I literally (not figuratively) have heard this same song with different lyrics for over 25 years. I first heard it from a Smalltalker who was denigrating the ability of a FORTRAN programmer to write "good" Smalltalk code. The perception is that there is some magical ability of a hip, new language to do things that the "outdated" language doesn't have, despite both being based on the same Von Neumann architecture underneath. Syntaxes change, some language may make a particular design easier, but all languages can implement the same patterns, they just require different levels of effort.
The main issue which is outside of any language is, "can I solve the user's problem in software?" Ease of development, ease of maintenance, and ease of re-design are important, but they are orthogonal to the decision of which language to implement a system in. Choosing Ruby instead of C, for example, shouldn't be made based on the age of the language, but on whether the software that comes out first meets the users' needs. If you can't solve the problem that they need software for, it doesn't matter how "pure" the Ruby code you write ends up being.
Are you working in a position in a company as an MBA? Have you worked in companies and seen what the typical business-school manager does? You sound too young to have experienced the downside of your profession, but just wait. And yes, that's unapologetically "ageist" of me to say.
Exactly. We're dealing with Von Neumann architecture, which means that (unless you're using Haskell or one of the other "weird" languages) you're going to be doing the exact same things at the lower level, regardless of the semantic sugar you spin over it all. Understanding how the architecture works means that you can ramp up in far less time than someone coming in fresh, even if they were stellar students in college. You don't really have an appreciation or understanding of a system unless you've been spending all your time on it, found all the ways to break it, and then spending the hours and effort to fix it.
Insightful indeed. I was a kid in the early 60's and saw the build-up of hateful feelings on all sides back then. We definitely don't have it to the same level as back then, when people like Bill Ayers were planting bombs and killing people. The main reason we still have anything close to it now is because demographically we have enough young people of college age who have free time and energy and desire. Back in the 60's most of the developed nations were undergoing upheavals. In the US, the main issues were related, the military draft which affected men from age 18 up, and voting rights for those men which didn't start until 21. There was a valid anger at the dichotomy, where men were told to go fight and die by a government they weren't allowed to affect by voting against.
Nowadays the issues are hardly in the same league as actual life or death, given the right to vote at 18 and no military draft. The big issues now are polarizing people who have fairly incompatible ideas. One side wants to be able to live with a minimum of interference by governments and a maximum of self-reliance, and another side that wants government to use its power and authority to help everyone who needs or wants more than they have, regardless of the reason for their lack, including making poor life choices. There are other arguments and sides, of course, and they are mostly variations on the same theme.
It's an old dichotomy, maximizing rights versus maximizing responsibilities. It's basic human nature to want the most rights to act, without facing the responsibilities for the actions. It takes a certain level of maturity to recognize that the two are related and the US system put in place was intended to make it easy for individuals to make personal decisions, while expecting the individuals to accept the responsibility for their actions, and not push that responsibility onto the group or onto government. It was understood for a long time that sometimes bad things happen that are out of control of individuals, and that only by acting in a large group pooling abilities would the people harmed by these bad things be helped. The problem has been (since the Depression at least) that once the large group is given some of the responsibility to fix things, the people making up the group keep ratcheting downward (and thus broadening the scope of) the severity of "bad things" that need to be "fixed." Unfortunately by giving more and more power to "do something" to the government, by definition this restricts what each individual can do, since more and more things that an individual could do are determined to have "bad" results and therefore the individual must be prevented from acting.
I'm not sure there is a critical mass of people who want their rights back, since they were taken away so slowly, and the basic nature of people is to want someone else to be responsible for them. I personally believe we've gone too far and need to swing the pendulum back the other way, but there are a lot of vocal people here who will take that belief as a personal affront, and call me callous and hateful for it.nted by the power of government.
He didn't say "phones" he said "iOS devices" which the iPod an iPad both certainly are. If you want the "apples to apples" you need to count everything that uses Android as an "Android device".
It's called "plastic grocery bags". Nearly indestructible, break down extremely slowly in landfills, and can be manufactured cheaply. Just make them, use them, and bury them. In a few millennia you'll have your oil back.
Just impose a 95% income tax on anyone who leaves government (elected or otherwise) and becomes a lobbyist within 2 Senate election cycles. If they've been out that long they won't know anyone with power anyway.
Don't forget the unelected bureaucracy that makes all these regulations that have the force of law. And don't think of the bureaucrats as mere paper-pushers, just research the weapons budgets of Departments like Education, and some of the militarization that is going on in the "enforcement" wings of government agencies. Talk about an Imperial Presidency.
Well, actually USA is actively attacking Iran with all the sanctions, because economic sanctions are an act of war.
Attacking and seizing another nation's embassy and holding its diplomatic personnel hostage is an act of war. Unprovoked, in this case, since the ones who attacked the embassy were also the ones who had previously removed their "dictator", and who were now free of our "influence" and thus had no excuse to take our embassy. Responding to an act of war is not in itself an act of war.
Unless you're frying your nuclear fuel ^_^, I believe the word you mean is "breed", not "bread". You've written that several times, which is why I'm pointing it out. Not intending to be mean, it just makes your intended message more amusing that you probably wanted...
But you're talking about standard uranium/plutonium reactors. From what I recall thorium reactors don't make the containment radioactive, and the decay byproducts aren't necessarily, either. Molten salt thorium reactors are so unradioactive (sp) that they can be "scrammed" by dumping the molten salt into separate containers, which won't have enough reaction to even remain liquid.
I could be mis-remembering and therefore wrong, of course.
So, you basically have the equivalent of "States' rights" without the nasty post-slavery implications we have in the US. I wish our States could stand up to the Feds like that. I wish someone would stand up to the unelected bureaucracy that really runs this place.
Are you saying that the atmospheric models take into account per capita CO2 generation? And that higher per capita production will generate more warming (sorry, change) than lower per capita?
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I learned early on as a junior developer to be paranoid when it came time to code the design. There are a few rules that I learned to keep in mind that have allowed me to pass more unit and system tests.
One, don't trust the data that comes into your method/function/subroutine.
Two, don't trust the data that comes back from methods/functions/subroutines that you call.
Three, assume that other users will not trust the data that you modify and/or return from the function/method/subroutine that you're writing, and therefore accurately report to them anything that goes wrong.
I've noticed a trend in the past few years in younger developers, that they tend to develop with the best case scenarios in mind, believe that users will always enter valid data, that functions are always correctly documented and always require and return exactly what their documentation states, and that therefore the developers' code will never break unexpectedly. There is the idea that error checking isn't needed anymore because it's a waste of effort and time, that Java will always throw exceptions when something really bad happens, and rebooting/restarting the software will fix everything. I have to tell them that Java can't report failures caused by violating the business rules behind the design, that it's important to check for valid data and valid execution.
Of course, since I'm old and "unable to keep up" I'm now working maintenance on a big system, but I've found several show-stopper bugs that would not have shown up had the developers been just a bit more paranoid in the design stage. It would also have been cheaper to find the bugs before deployment, but the testing staff is overworked and understaffed, and stuff gets through, and so we have to get the trouble tickets from senior management in the customer's organization (USGov) when critical things break. People who when they are unhappy enough, take contracts away from the developers who make them unhappy.
Not to mention self-repairing as well, and even able to create multiple replacement copies. Well, given certain parts were not removed beforehand, of course.
It's not "moving the code from C to python", it's "solving the users' problem" that matters. I've used FORTRAN in satellite data analysis, Smalltalk in an AI support application, C in dozens of large and small commercial and DARPA projects, C++ in document management and in network allocation apps, Perl in a photo database app, Cold Fusion in an online timecard app (in-house), currently AJAX in a large system for ICE/DHS. The few times that a language was chosen before design work began were less than successful. I know how to learn and use languages to their fullest, taking advantage of each ones' strengths while working around their weaknesses. I did object-oriented programming in C back when C++ was just a glorified pre-processor, which led me to realize that there was nothing special about C++, since it could be reduced to C and then to Assembly and finally opcodes. All languages at the human level are still reduced to the same thing at the computer's level.
I will grant that there will be some types of syntax that will allow, say, object-oriented designs to be implemented easier than others, but nothing in the languages themselves is inherently more appropriate to solving the users' problems.
If you can't solve the problem, it doesn't matter how "pythonic" your solution is. That's the bottom line.
Good lord, talk about deja vu. I literally (not figuratively) have heard this same song with different lyrics for over 25 years. I first heard it from a Smalltalker who was denigrating the ability of a FORTRAN programmer to write "good" Smalltalk code. The perception is that there is some magical ability of a hip, new language to do things that the "outdated" language doesn't have, despite both being based on the same Von Neumann architecture underneath. Syntaxes change, some language may make a particular design easier, but all languages can implement the same patterns, they just require different levels of effort.
The main issue which is outside of any language is, "can I solve the user's problem in software?" Ease of development, ease of maintenance, and ease of re-design are important, but they are orthogonal to the decision of which language to implement a system in. Choosing Ruby instead of C, for example, shouldn't be made based on the age of the language, but on whether the software that comes out first meets the users' needs. If you can't solve the problem that they need software for, it doesn't matter how "pure" the Ruby code you write ends up being.
Are you working in a position in a company as an MBA? Have you worked in companies and seen what the typical business-school manager does? You sound too young to have experienced the downside of your profession, but just wait. And yes, that's unapologetically "ageist" of me to say.
Exactly. We're dealing with Von Neumann architecture, which means that (unless you're using Haskell or one of the other "weird" languages) you're going to be doing the exact same things at the lower level, regardless of the semantic sugar you spin over it all. Understanding how the architecture works means that you can ramp up in far less time than someone coming in fresh, even if they were stellar students in college. You don't really have an appreciation or understanding of a system unless you've been spending all your time on it, found all the ways to break it, and then spending the hours and effort to fix it.
The problem is when they won't even hire you at the lower pay rate. Been there.
Insightful indeed. I was a kid in the early 60's and saw the build-up of hateful feelings on all sides back then. We definitely don't have it to the same level as back then, when people like Bill Ayers were planting bombs and killing people. The main reason we still have anything close to it now is because demographically we have enough young people of college age who have free time and energy and desire. Back in the 60's most of the developed nations were undergoing upheavals. In the US, the main issues were related, the military draft which affected men from age 18 up, and voting rights for those men which didn't start until 21. There was a valid anger at the dichotomy, where men were told to go fight and die by a government they weren't allowed to affect by voting against.
Nowadays the issues are hardly in the same league as actual life or death, given the right to vote at 18 and no military draft. The big issues now are polarizing people who have fairly incompatible ideas. One side wants to be able to live with a minimum of interference by governments and a maximum of self-reliance, and another side that wants government to use its power and authority to help everyone who needs or wants more than they have, regardless of the reason for their lack, including making poor life choices. There are other arguments and sides, of course, and they are mostly variations on the same theme.
It's an old dichotomy, maximizing rights versus maximizing responsibilities. It's basic human nature to want the most rights to act, without facing the responsibilities for the actions. It takes a certain level of maturity to recognize that the two are related and the US system put in place was intended to make it easy for individuals to make personal decisions, while expecting the individuals to accept the responsibility for their actions, and not push that responsibility onto the group or onto government. It was understood for a long time that sometimes bad things happen that are out of control of individuals, and that only by acting in a large group pooling abilities would the people harmed by these bad things be helped. The problem has been (since the Depression at least) that once the large group is given some of the responsibility to fix things, the people making up the group keep ratcheting downward (and thus broadening the scope of) the severity of "bad things" that need to be "fixed." Unfortunately by giving more and more power to "do something" to the government, by definition this restricts what each individual can do, since more and more things that an individual could do are determined to have "bad" results and therefore the individual must be prevented from acting.
I'm not sure there is a critical mass of people who want their rights back, since they were taken away so slowly, and the basic nature of people is to want someone else to be responsible for them. I personally believe we've gone too far and need to swing the pendulum back the other way, but there are a lot of vocal people here who will take that belief as a personal affront, and call me callous and hateful for it.nted by the power of government.
25m? Now, THAT'S a big screen!
(yes, I know already)
And if I remember correctly about Westlaw, even reading the law books may be illegal in some instances.
He didn't say "phones" he said "iOS devices" which the iPod an iPad both certainly are. If you want the "apples to apples" you need to count everything that uses Android as an "Android device".
"You make it up in volume" is the standard joke...
It's called "plastic grocery bags". Nearly indestructible, break down extremely slowly in landfills, and can be manufactured cheaply. Just make them, use them, and bury them. In a few millennia you'll have your oil back.
Just show them how much money they could raise and they'll knock each other down trying to be the first to sponsor it.
I'm being facetious of course.
Just impose a 95% income tax on anyone who leaves government (elected or otherwise) and becomes a lobbyist within 2 Senate election cycles. If they've been out that long they won't know anyone with power anyway.
Don't forget the unelected bureaucracy that makes all these regulations that have the force of law. And don't think of the bureaucrats as mere paper-pushers, just research the weapons budgets of Departments like Education, and some of the militarization that is going on in the "enforcement" wings of government agencies. Talk about an Imperial Presidency.
It did when I was a boy and even into young adulthood. Been gone since the Drug War started, though.
To paraphrase Orwell: "Imagine a blue uniform fondling your genitals forever."
Attacking and seizing another nation's embassy and holding its diplomatic personnel hostage is an act of war. Unprovoked, in this case, since the ones who attacked the embassy were also the ones who had previously removed their "dictator", and who were now free of our "influence" and thus had no excuse to take our embassy. Responding to an act of war is not in itself an act of war.
Unless you're frying your nuclear fuel ^_^, I believe the word you mean is "breed", not "bread". You've written that several times, which is why I'm pointing it out. Not intending to be mean, it just makes your intended message more amusing that you probably wanted...
I thought Germany was "reconsidering" their reliance on nuclear energy.
But you're talking about standard uranium/plutonium reactors. From what I recall thorium reactors don't make the containment radioactive, and the decay byproducts aren't necessarily, either. Molten salt thorium reactors are so unradioactive (sp) that they can be "scrammed" by dumping the molten salt into separate containers, which won't have enough reaction to even remain liquid.
I could be mis-remembering and therefore wrong, of course.
So, you basically have the equivalent of "States' rights" without the nasty post-slavery implications we have in the US. I wish our States could stand up to the Feds like that. I wish someone would stand up to the unelected bureaucracy that really runs this place.
Are you saying that the atmospheric models take into account per capita CO2 generation? And that higher per capita production will generate more warming (sorry, change) than lower per capita?
ICWYDT, LOL.