I, on the other hand, have always had quite pleasant relationships with other people, including at present my wife, daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren, parents, siblings, other relatives, in-laws, friends, and colleagues. (Sometimes I don't get along with random idiots on the Internet.) But I've also had cats most of my life - we have three right now. I also get along well with dogs and horses.
My guess is drinkypoo's thesis is simply wrong, and there's no significant correlation either way.
Ridiculous. My sperm count decreased by 100% in the past 40 years. In fact, it decreased by 100% over a few days in 2001, and it's stayed at zero since.
Since this is Slashdot, I'm assuming my anecdotal experience counts as compelling evidence for the general case.
Diets like 5:2 uses the 2 days of not eating to cleanse the blood from extra sugar
If your sugar needs to be cleansed of blood, then 1) you have bigger problems than weight gain (possibly your pantry is cursed? or you have a vampire infestation?), and 2) I'm not eating anything you bake.
But Firefox's market share is dropping. It was only a few percent, last I saw
If only you had access to some sort of repository of information where you could check this sort of thing, rather relying on something you think you saw at some point in time.
According to StatCounter's most recent report, Firefox is the #2 browser with a 15.6% market share. "Few" is a vague term, but I don't think most people would have it include 15.
Personally, if I were a fan of Rust, I wouldn't worry about Mozilla's fortunes. There are plenty of people who could maintain the Rust standard and implementation, should that be necessary.
I think we should replace c with COBOL, no pointers, no dynamic memory allocation, rounding errors with floats rare and all strings fixed length.
COBOL has pointers, dynamic memory allocation, native floats, and variable-length strings. That's true of all the predominant COBOL dialects today.
True, it also has non-native numeric types with different roundoff behavior; and traditional COBOL code generally uses fixed-length strings; and you're free to write COBOL code without pointers and dynamic memory allocation.
But then you can do all of those things in C, too.
Plenty of people who aren't anonymous idiots on/. have tried the Geely Volvos, and discovered they're quite good. I have a Geely Volvo (2015 XC70 T6, purchased in mid-2014) and it's been great so far. Pretty much ideal for my purposes, comfortable for the 1300-mile drives I do a few times a year, and has hardly required any maintenance. It was relatively cheap, too (under $40K).
We'll see how it's doing when it's more than a decade old and into the six digits - our old V70 went 18 years and around 200K miles before we got rid of it - but so far I'm cautiously optimistic.
Sure. Like pretty much any other achievement, some will repeat it many times over the course of a successful career, while others never will. Those in the latter group may not be suited for work outside the academic environment (particularly if they're easily distracted); they may rest on their laurels; they may grossly overestimate their capabilities; they may decide not to do the work.
And, of course, some are simply frauds. I personally know one or two PhDs who plagiarized a significant portion of their dissertation work. Generally the victims don't want to launch a long, unpleasant battle, with backlash from some quarters almost certain, just to get someone's degree revoked (if that), so they get away with it.
Also, standards for a PhD or other doctoral degree vary quite a lot among countries. And there are fake doctoral degrees from unaccredited diploma mills.
Of course, many PhD holders do have both the intellectual focus and work ethic that the degree is meant to demonstrate. Of the dozens of PhDs I've known well, and the hundreds I've met more briefly, only a handful were bad apples.
The real error here is the appeal to "considered proper form".
None of these conventions of mechanics, usage, or typography are "proper" in any real sense. They are at best the highly subjective dictates of house style sheets and style guides for writers, generally no more than a reflection of the whims and prejudices of some senior editor or author.
In some cases, they're supported by the requirements of typographers - that's the source of the "punctuation inside closing quotation mark" convention - but such rules are now mostly or entirely atavistic. Others claim to derive from various authorities that, on cursory inspection, have no authority at all; the Augustan invention and vilification of the "split infinitive" is the classic example. ("You can't do it in Latin, so you shouldn't be allowed to do it in English.")
Ultimately none of these rules are anything more than codified, contested personal preferences, and their only claim to be "proper form" is what little support they can gain through popularity. And that propriety is fickle.
My church recommends starting an open-source project together before even getting engaged, you learn so much about a person just settling on which license to use.
Reasonable. What's their position on premarital pair programming?
Yes, sometimes a system is sufficiently better that it's worth the cognitive load, opportunity cost, and psychological cost of switching tools. But it's a high bar. "Switch tools" requires very strong justification.
Brackets as scope delimiters also have the advantage that they're easy for tools to match. Textual delimiters are easy to read, and avoid the mass-of-terminators problem often seen with LISP, for example; but they can be difficult to pair when reading code.
That's particularly true with ALGOL- and Pascal-style begin/end pairs. The form-specific scope delimiters in languages like Fortran ('90 et seq) and COBOL (85 et seq) are more helpful; in modern COBOL, the reader knows that an end-if will terminate the innermost if, an end-evaluate the innermost evaluate, an end method[1] the method.
And of course these form-specific delimiters also help the compiler identify errors. Too many closing brackets in C and you have code outside a function, and the parser will complain, but it doesn't know which closing bracket was wrong. But a COBOL compiler can say "you have an end-if here, but your innermost control structure is an evaluate, so this line is clearly wrong".
But on the other hand it's trivial for an editor to provide the "highlight matching punctuation mark" feature, and easy to implement bracket-counting when you're writing an ad hoc script to do some sort of source-code analysis.
Either beats whitespace for block-scope definition, for anything that's too long to fit on screen. While I appreciate the argument that code structure should be apparent to human readers, trying to enforce that in the language causes more trouble than it saves.
[1] It's a bit unfortunate that some of COBOL's scope keywords are hyphenated and others are phrases, but in practice it's easy enough to learn, especially with syntax-coloring editors.
Precious few programming languages don't make whitespace significant in some contexts.
intmain(void){return0;} is not valid C. classFoo{staticvoidMain(){return;}} is not valid Java. programfooendprogramfoo is not valid Fortran 90.
I don't think whitespace is syntactically significant in APL, but it's been a long time. In any case, most (textual) programming languages use whitespace at least as a delimiting lexical construct in some contexts, because most of them employ character sequences that are not self-delimiting, and whitespace is the obvious delimiter.
Languages like Lisp or Forth can sustain themselves because of their "all-level" nature. COBOL is is the obvious opposite.
"all-level"? What the holy fuck is that supposed to mean?
I suspect you have no idea how COBOL has developed since the 1985 standard, but your vague handwaving is incomprehensible, so I can't be sure.
This is one of the many problems with programming-language wars, of course: not only do most participants lack a good argument, they're not even capable of articulating their poor arguments.
A compelling argument. Really, it's a wonder any of us survive without IoT appliances.
I mean, I have helped care for my younger siblings and relatives, helped raise a child of my own, taken care of grandchildren, and done a great deal of household work, all without them. But I don't hold everyone to my standard. I'm exceptionally wonderful.
A slide out keyboard along the phone's length would be perfect
Exactly why I bought a grey-market Samsung Captivate Glide a couple of years ago. Cost about $130 for a new, unlocked, rooted phone with a slide-out qwerty keyboard, removable battery, standard micro-SIM, SD card slot, and headphone jack. USB charging so I don't worry about forgetting to bring a charger somewhere.
It's not a great phone by any means, but it does what I want. I use it on an AT&T-hosted MVNO that costs like $40/month for more time and data than I ever come close to using.
Now that I've disabled most of the optional Google and Samsung packages from it, the battery lasts for days with my normal use. F-Droid supplies all the apps I have any use for. And that physical keyboard makes it a lot easier to navigate in a Terminal Emulator + Busybox shell session. (Who wants a phone with no CLI? How weak.)
Or you could just disable it, and you'll never even notice that it is there unless you go way deep into the settings menu.
I had to completely disable a number of auto-restarting services with the package manager to get decent battery life when I'm in areas with marginal signal strength (which is often). None of the app-manager apps could prevent them from restarting.
Since I de-Googled my phone, it rarely uses more than 15% of battery charge a day. No more spontaneous CPU spinning. And an order of magnitude fewer crashes.
Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, there's no point in having a non-rooted smartphone. It's my device; I should have complete control over it.
Rooting means you have to manually intervene every month in order for your phone to be able to take updates
Ha. I've never yet seen an OTA update offered for any Android phone I've had.
Perhaps. I won't buy a phone that doesn't have a physical keyboard. A physical qwerty keyboard, to be precise.
And, yes, it has to have a serial port. USB is a serial protocol.
Some people have different preferences and requirements for phones (and other things). So, like Opportunist above, I am no more interested in this than in Apple's products.
Slashdot Mirror
I, on the other hand, have always had quite pleasant relationships with other people, including at present my wife, daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren, parents, siblings, other relatives, in-laws, friends, and colleagues. (Sometimes I don't get along with random idiots on the Internet.) But I've also had cats most of my life - we have three right now. I also get along well with dogs and horses.
My guess is drinkypoo's thesis is simply wrong, and there's no significant correlation either way.
When have the initial versions of a product not been hard to produce, expensive and limited?
Pet Rock.
Ridiculous. My sperm count decreased by 100% in the past 40 years. In fact, it decreased by 100% over a few days in 2001, and it's stayed at zero since.
Since this is Slashdot, I'm assuming my anecdotal experience counts as compelling evidence for the general case.
Diets like 5:2 uses the 2 days of not eating to cleanse the blood from extra sugar
If your sugar needs to be cleansed of blood, then 1) you have bigger problems than weight gain (possibly your pantry is cursed? or you have a vampire infestation?), and 2) I'm not eating anything you bake.
But Firefox's market share is dropping. It was only a few percent, last I saw
If only you had access to some sort of repository of information where you could check this sort of thing, rather relying on something you think you saw at some point in time.
According to StatCounter's most recent report, Firefox is the #2 browser with a 15.6% market share. "Few" is a vague term, but I don't think most people would have it include 15.
Personally, if I were a fan of Rust, I wouldn't worry about Mozilla's fortunes. There are plenty of people who could maintain the Rust standard and implementation, should that be necessary.
I think we should replace c with COBOL, no pointers, no dynamic memory allocation, rounding errors with floats rare and all strings fixed length.
COBOL has pointers, dynamic memory allocation, native floats, and variable-length strings. That's true of all the predominant COBOL dialects today.
True, it also has non-native numeric types with different roundoff behavior; and traditional COBOL code generally uses fixed-length strings; and you're free to write COBOL code without pointers and dynamic memory allocation.
But then you can do all of those things in C, too.
"an dollar expletive"? How about respecting how we read code, you insensitive clod?
If fraud is a business, a whole bunch of con artists will show you that capital alone suffices.
If, on the other hand, fraud isn't a business, the stock markets are funding an awful lot of amateurs.
Plenty of people who aren't anonymous idiots on /. have tried the Geely Volvos, and discovered they're quite good. I have a Geely Volvo (2015 XC70 T6, purchased in mid-2014) and it's been great so far. Pretty much ideal for my purposes, comfortable for the 1300-mile drives I do a few times a year, and has hardly required any maintenance. It was relatively cheap, too (under $40K).
We'll see how it's doing when it's more than a decade old and into the six digits - our old V70 went 18 years and around 200K miles before we got rid of it - but so far I'm cautiously optimistic.
You'll be able to recruit Perl developers long after your death
Oh, shit, now we have to worry about zombie recruiters too?
Though I'm not surprised Perl is to blame for this somehow.
Sure. Like pretty much any other achievement, some will repeat it many times over the course of a successful career, while others never will. Those in the latter group may not be suited for work outside the academic environment (particularly if they're easily distracted); they may rest on their laurels; they may grossly overestimate their capabilities; they may decide not to do the work.
And, of course, some are simply frauds. I personally know one or two PhDs who plagiarized a significant portion of their dissertation work. Generally the victims don't want to launch a long, unpleasant battle, with backlash from some quarters almost certain, just to get someone's degree revoked (if that), so they get away with it.
Also, standards for a PhD or other doctoral degree vary quite a lot among countries. And there are fake doctoral degrees from unaccredited diploma mills.
Of course, many PhD holders do have both the intellectual focus and work ethic that the degree is meant to demonstrate. Of the dozens of PhDs I've known well, and the hundreds I've met more briefly, only a handful were bad apples.
The real error here is the appeal to "considered proper form".
None of these conventions of mechanics, usage, or typography are "proper" in any real sense. They are at best the highly subjective dictates of house style sheets and style guides for writers, generally no more than a reflection of the whims and prejudices of some senior editor or author.
In some cases, they're supported by the requirements of typographers - that's the source of the "punctuation inside closing quotation mark" convention - but such rules are now mostly or entirely atavistic. Others claim to derive from various authorities that, on cursory inspection, have no authority at all; the Augustan invention and vilification of the "split infinitive" is the classic example. ("You can't do it in Latin, so you shouldn't be allowed to do it in English.")
Ultimately none of these rules are anything more than codified, contested personal preferences, and their only claim to be "proper form" is what little support they can gain through popularity. And that propriety is fickle.
My church recommends starting an open-source project together before even getting engaged, you learn so much about a person just settling on which license to use.
Reasonable. What's their position on premarital pair programming?
You're using the wrong editor.
You're fixing the wrong problem.
Yes, sometimes a system is sufficiently better that it's worth the cognitive load, opportunity cost, and psychological cost of switching tools. But it's a high bar. "Switch tools" requires very strong justification.
Brackets as scope delimiters also have the advantage that they're easy for tools to match. Textual delimiters are easy to read, and avoid the mass-of-terminators problem often seen with LISP, for example; but they can be difficult to pair when reading code.
That's particularly true with ALGOL- and Pascal-style begin/end pairs. The form-specific scope delimiters in languages like Fortran ('90 et seq) and COBOL (85 et seq) are more helpful; in modern COBOL, the reader knows that an end-if will terminate the innermost if, an end-evaluate the innermost evaluate, an end method[1] the method.
And of course these form-specific delimiters also help the compiler identify errors. Too many closing brackets in C and you have code outside a function, and the parser will complain, but it doesn't know which closing bracket was wrong. But a COBOL compiler can say "you have an end-if here, but your innermost control structure is an evaluate, so this line is clearly wrong".
But on the other hand it's trivial for an editor to provide the "highlight matching punctuation mark" feature, and easy to implement bracket-counting when you're writing an ad hoc script to do some sort of source-code analysis.
Either beats whitespace for block-scope definition, for anything that's too long to fit on screen. While I appreciate the argument that code structure should be apparent to human readers, trying to enforce that in the language causes more trouble than it saves.
[1] It's a bit unfortunate that some of COBOL's scope keywords are hyphenated and others are phrases, but in practice it's easy enough to learn, especially with syntax-coloring editors.
Precious few programming languages don't make whitespace significant in some contexts.
intmain(void){return0;} is not valid C.
classFoo{staticvoidMain(){return;}} is not valid Java.
programfooendprogramfoo is not valid Fortran 90.
I don't think whitespace is syntactically significant in APL, but it's been a long time. In any case, most (textual) programming languages use whitespace at least as a delimiting lexical construct in some contexts, because most of them employ character sequences that are not self-delimiting, and whitespace is the obvious delimiter.
Oh, look. A child who thinks history is irrelevant.
Languages like Lisp or Forth can sustain themselves because of their "all-level" nature. COBOL is is the obvious opposite.
"all-level"? What the holy fuck is that supposed to mean?
I suspect you have no idea how COBOL has developed since the 1985 standard, but your vague handwaving is incomprehensible, so I can't be sure.
This is one of the many problems with programming-language wars, of course: not only do most participants lack a good argument, they're not even capable of articulating their poor arguments.
Really hoping /. runs a story with the headline "Is Betteridge's Law Reliable?".
Or for that matter, "Are Posts that Just Cite Betteridge's Law Worth Making?".
A compelling argument. Really, it's a wonder any of us survive without IoT appliances.
I mean, I have helped care for my younger siblings and relatives, helped raise a child of my own, taken care of grandchildren, and done a great deal of household work, all without them. But I don't hold everyone to my standard. I'm exceptionally wonderful.
A slide out keyboard along the phone's length would be perfect
Exactly why I bought a grey-market Samsung Captivate Glide a couple of years ago. Cost about $130 for a new, unlocked, rooted phone with a slide-out qwerty keyboard, removable battery, standard micro-SIM, SD card slot, and headphone jack. USB charging so I don't worry about forgetting to bring a charger somewhere.
It's not a great phone by any means, but it does what I want. I use it on an AT&T-hosted MVNO that costs like $40/month for more time and data than I ever come close to using.
Now that I've disabled most of the optional Google and Samsung packages from it, the battery lasts for days with my normal use. F-Droid supplies all the apps I have any use for. And that physical keyboard makes it a lot easier to navigate in a Terminal Emulator + Busybox shell session. (Who wants a phone with no CLI? How weak.)
Or you could just disable it, and you'll never even notice that it is there unless you go way deep into the settings menu.
I had to completely disable a number of auto-restarting services with the package manager to get decent battery life when I'm in areas with marginal signal strength (which is often). None of the app-manager apps could prevent them from restarting.
Since I de-Googled my phone, it rarely uses more than 15% of battery charge a day. No more spontaneous CPU spinning. And an order of magnitude fewer crashes.
Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, there's no point in having a non-rooted smartphone. It's my device; I should have complete control over it.
Rooting means you have to manually intervene every month in order for your phone to be able to take updates
Ha. I've never yet seen an OTA update offered for any Android phone I've had.
Perhaps. I won't buy a phone that doesn't have a physical keyboard. A physical qwerty keyboard, to be precise.
And, yes, it has to have a serial port. USB is a serial protocol.
Some people have different preferences and requirements for phones (and other things). So, like Opportunist above, I am no more interested in this than in Apple's products.
we're nearing the point where none of this will matter
Oh, I think we passed that point long ago - well before His Holiness Steve Jobs blessed the masses with the sacrament of "retina displays".
People can see the individual pixels on the displays of their pocket supercomputers? How can they live like that? Is there no God?
Referring to your penis as "Thunder God Vine" may well help prevent pregnancy, at least among potential partners with self-respect.