Well, if I read it correctly, it'll actually prove him right. Even though at one point he claimed his cosmological constant was his biggest mistake ever, this seems to prove it does exist so.....he's right:)
> Want to find a list of needed patches for a Microsoft product? Hope you have a few days for searching the endless volumes of technet or msdn-- hope you find everything.
I usually just go here rather than searching endless volumes....
Yes, server side does rule....if you need a server side solution:) Perl can be used as a server side solution as can really any other scripting language if you think about it.
Maybe we should not waste time on silly experiments such as this one which doesn't seem to be an expirement at all and almost seems like a joke by the authors. Experiments are great except when the headline goes like this: "Experiment proves exercise beneficial to males" and then in a closing remark "It is expected this is true for females as well". I'm not shitting you, I read that story and laughed my ass off:)
I used to read PC Magazine all the time and didn't actually mind Dvoraks columns as they were a bit edgy. This article is so edgy that I think it was almost done as a parody of his other articles. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry about this article:) He makes one or two points that make you think "Ok, he's kind of got a point" but in the end I was left thinking the guy has lost his mind lately. And I'm not even a big Linux zealot!
So if you look at your design and it has something similar to a Singleton pattern you should abstract that a little better? How do you better abstract that you need one and only one instance of an object created and used by any other object? I think that's about as deep down you can go. What this does is encourage overthinking during design. You can't have the designers sitting around mulling over whether they aren't abstract enough. Too much abstraction can kill things too. Pablo Picasso anyone?;)
Patters are a great tool but they can be misused. I think this Paul Graham guy took too hard of a look at the misuse of them. Sure, you don't go looking for where you can insert a pattern but if you're designing an interface and you want a nice structure to your design you'll want to have a proxy between the interface and the backend to filter things through nicely so that the interface worries about itself and knows that if it wants to update some data, it just makes a call to retrieve updated data and doesn't need to remember to pass in a database object or some other sort of state object that the interface shouldn't have to worry about.
Anyways, longer post than I wanted it to be so I'm done now.
"which is used mostly in environments that emphasize reliability and dependability"
So true. I hear that a major stock trading application was made using Eiffel as it was the best tool for their needs. Kind of tells you something when a stock trading system uses this pretty much unknown language b/c of it's reliability. Design by contract anyone??:)
Definitely one of, if not the, best part of the langauge. Others have tried to tack it on as an afterthought but it just didn't pan out well enough.
> Multiple Interitance
Is a great help but used incorrectly it can be a major downfall. I've even seen the libraries that my former university developed using multiple inheritance when it should have been single inheritance and then an instance within the class of the other type. Also, things get tricky when ambiguous situations arise although Eiffel provides all you need to disambiguate them.
> Static typing
There is somewhat of casting with the =? syntax (or is it ?=) though again, it does improve on the idea of casting. If you get a null back, the cast was unsuccessful and you carry on your merry way doing what your program should do after a failed assignment attempt. It's nice to know that your attempt failed right away than having to do a check other than object != Void
> Dynamic binding
Most OO languages do this so it's not really a benefit of the language so much as it is that if they hadn't included it, it would be the worst OO language ever;)
The point of all these languages is, yes, to give choice to programmers on what to use. Eiffel doesn't do low level so you wouldn't want to code up a device driver in it. C doesn't do high level so mapping a design to C *could* be more work than mapping it to Eiffel. This is like asking why new cars? Lets just improve on the old ones we have. You want to be driving in a model T? A 300 ZX is a lot better:) I know the analogy isn't perfect but it's a starting point;)
Sorry about the lame formatting:( Hit Submit accidently instead of Preview
Ok, the other guy was pretty harsh but here goes:
> The C programming language does everything I need it to do.
But you've gotta do a buttload of extra work to get it to do some of the things that C# can accomplish more easily. Remember, I'm not saying you *can't* do it. Just that it's easier with C#. Remoting, GUI apps (b/c of layout managers), making apps portable.
> Writing a new operating system? I choose C. For now. Sooner or later....C# OS:)
> Coding up your own desktop environment? I choose C. Um, sure......;)
> Desire to write the next award-winning PC game? I choose C.
C# may not have the libraries to deal with low-level graphics stuff right now (I could be wrong) but if it ever gets support for something like OpenGL, totally portable games. How does it get any better than that:)
>I'm not sure why so many man months were spent trying to hook into.NET. Couldn't we have spent more time refining the applications, utilities, and system code that we already have rather than wasting time extending the Microsoft monopoly?
What I heard was "blah, blah, Microsoft monopoly sucks, blah, blah". No, but seriously. This seems to be a legitimate attempt on their part to interconnect software systems. Hey, maybe they'll pull some fast trick....but what if they don't?
> Sorry, but you people really confuse me sometimes. I write a few sentences of praise for Microsoft's latest operating systems just a few hours ago and I get marked as a troll. Now I see an article praising those who work hard to let Microsoft's.NET succeed.
No objections on that one here. It happens all the time:) What's karma anyways?;)
> People: Make up your mind, or find a new hobby. people.
Might be that they are praising this even though it's associated with Microsoft b/c they see the potential in it....... Just a thought.
Ok, the other guy was pretty harsh but here goes:
> The C programming language does everything I need it to do.
But you've gotta do a buttload of extra work to get it to do some of the things that C# can accomplish more easily. Remember, I'm not saying you *can't* do it. Just that it's easier with C#. Remoting, GUI apps (b/c of layout managers), making apps portable.
> Writing a new operating system? I choose C.
For now. Sooner or later....C# OS:)
> Coding up your own desktop environment? I choose C.
Um, sure......;)
> Desire to write the next award-winning PC game? I choose C.
C# may not have the libraries to deal with low-level graphics stuff right now (I could be wrong) but if it ever gets support for something like OpenGL, totally portable games. How does it get any better than that:)
>I'm not sure why so many man months were spent trying to hook into.NET. Couldn't we have spent more time refining the applications, utilities, and system code that we already have rather than wasting time extending the Microsoft monopoly?
What I heard was "blah, blah, Microsoft monopoly sucks, blah, blah". No, but seriously. This seems to be a legitimate attempt on their part to interconnect software systems. Hey, maybe they'll pull some fast trick....but what if they don't?
> Sorry, but you people really confuse me sometimes. I write a few sentences of praise for Microsoft's latest operating systems just a few hours ago and I get marked as a troll. Now I see an article praising those who work hard to let Microsoft's.NET succeed.
No objections on that one here. It happens all the time:) What's karma anyways?;)
> People: Make up your mind, or find a new hobby. people.
Might be that they are praising this even though it's associated with Microsoft b/c they see the potential in it....... Just a thought.
I run XP on a PII-266, 352 MB Ram and a Voodoo 4 card and it runs fine. Not lightning fast. Menus tend to come up a bit slow but that's my only complaint so far. Moving windows is blazing fast, minimizing/maximizing is fast and so on and so forth:-) I was actually pleasantly surprised as I was expecting it to run slow on my 4+ year old computer!
I think it was the Microsoft line of operating systems being referred to and not just one specific version. When people ask me what Linux OS I run, I say Mandrake and that's that.
I came across basically the same problem. The university I went to had courses where you would be much more productive with Windows tools. Of course, our OS courses were Unix and Linux friendly and it was enjoyable to mess around with the inner workings of those systems but for the majority of my work there, it was on an NT 4 machine. Thankfully we had StarNet so I didn't have to truck across campus when I wanted to use our Linux lab;-)
I recently installed a CD burner and Windows detected it just fun but I've been a little apprehensive to boot into Linux b/c I'm not sure if it'll detect it and be usable right away as it was with Windows. When I use an OS I don't want to have that apprehensive feeling of "Will this piece of hardware work?". I've never had that with Windows.
In short, I'm in agreement with suprax. I use Windows 80% of the time and mess around with Linux the other 20% basically as something to do when there is nothing else to do.
I recently used a Mac (OS 9.2 I believe) while filling in for a friend at his job for a few days. I found it to be a nice OS to use. That menu bar at the top being used for every program took a little while to get used to. My only problem with Mac (other than not being able to afford more than one computer:-), is that it just doesn't have the support for as much games as I would like it to. I'm not a huge gamer but I love playing FFVII and FFVII, EA Sports NHL series, The Sims and a few more. As far as I know, Mac doesn't have these. I seem to recall seeing The Sims for Mac but I'm not sure. If not for that, I probably would buy a Mac just to have some more variety around the house:-)
I did get the Mac to crash at one point but I can't remember how I did it;-)
I wouldn't pick an OS that had poor fonts on it. My eyes are already strained enough from staring at a screen 24/7. I don't need lousy fonts to make me squint harder:-)
But one thing I would like to point out is that it wouldn't be a good thing if Linux was, in 10 years, what Microsoft is today. That would mean they are just catching up while Microsoft will likely have made some further strides in development therefore causing Linux to try to catch up again....
I should hope that in six years it will surpass what Windows is today! It's pretty likely that Windows itself will, in six years, surpass what it is today.:-)
I haven't read the specs for this language yet but after reading most of the posts I've got a bit of an idea about it.
But now that this discussion is down to mainly language vs other language, I was wondering why nobody had mentioned Eiffel.
In terms of a pure object-oriented language, Eiffel is right up there. It supports polymorphism(while still being strongly typed), multiple inheritance(through a very thorough mechanism which can even allow you to undefine a feature if you don't want to inherit it), all types are objects(even primitive such as INTEGER and REAL), garbage collection(I know it isn't necessarily an object-oriented concept) and the list could go on.
It also provides operator overloading in the form of infix or prefix feature definitions.
Now I realize that there are other languages that support feature A or feature B that I listed but what other ones support all of them?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if I read it correctly, it'll actually prove him right. Even though at one point he claimed his cosmological constant was his biggest mistake ever, this seems to prove it does exist so.....he's right :)
> Want to find a list of needed patches for a Microsoft product? Hope you have a few days for searching the endless volumes of technet or msdn-- hope you find everything.
. asp?url=/technet/security/current.asp
I usually just go here rather than searching endless volumes....
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default
Yes, server side does rule....if you need a server side solution :) Perl can be used as a server side solution as can really any other scripting language if you think about it.
it's still news when it happens though regardless of expectation of "new". At least in my eyes :)
Isn't capitalism that thing where everything is supposed to be free???? ;)
and then you set your browser variable to msie for the rest of that thread....... ;)
Maybe we should not waste time on silly experiments such as this one which doesn't seem to be an expirement at all and almost seems like a joke by the authors. Experiments are great except when the headline goes like this: "Experiment proves exercise beneficial to males" and then in a closing remark "It is expected this is true for females as well". I'm not shitting you, I read that story and laughed my ass off :)
I used to read PC Magazine all the time and didn't actually mind Dvoraks columns as they were a bit edgy. This article is so edgy that I think it was almost done as a parody of his other articles. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry about this article :) He makes one or two points that make you think "Ok, he's kind of got a point" but in the end I was left thinking the guy has lost his mind lately. And I'm not even a big Linux zealot!
Patters are a great tool but they can be misused. I think this Paul Graham guy took too hard of a look at the misuse of them. Sure, you don't go looking for where you can insert a pattern but if you're designing an interface and you want a nice structure to your design you'll want to have a proxy between the interface and the backend to filter things through nicely so that the interface worries about itself and knows that if it wants to update some data, it just makes a call to retrieve updated data and doesn't need to remember to pass in a database object or some other sort of state object that the interface shouldn't have to worry about.
Anyways, longer post than I wanted it to be so I'm done now.
So true. I hear that a major stock trading application was made using Eiffel as it was the best tool for their needs. Kind of tells you something when a stock trading system uses this pretty much unknown language b/c of it's reliability. Design by contract anyone?? :)
Definitely one of, if not the, best part of the langauge. Others have tried to tack it on as an afterthought but it just didn't pan out well enough.
> Multiple Interitance
Is a great help but used incorrectly it can be a major downfall. I've even seen the libraries that my former university developed using multiple inheritance when it should have been single inheritance and then an instance within the class of the other type. Also, things get tricky when ambiguous situations arise although Eiffel provides all you need to disambiguate them.
> Static typing
There is somewhat of casting with the =? syntax (or is it ?=) though again, it does improve on the idea of casting. If you get a null back, the cast was unsuccessful and you carry on your merry way doing what your program should do after a failed assignment attempt. It's nice to know that your attempt failed right away than having to do a check other than object != Void
> Dynamic binding
Most OO languages do this so it's not really a benefit of the language so much as it is that if they hadn't included it, it would be the worst OO language ever ;)
The point of all these languages is, yes, to give choice to programmers on what to use. Eiffel doesn't do low level so you wouldn't want to code up a device driver in it. C doesn't do high level so mapping a design to C *could* be more work than mapping it to Eiffel. This is like asking why new cars? Lets just improve on the old ones we have. You want to be driving in a model T? A 300 ZX is a lot better :) I know the analogy isn't perfect but it's a starting point ;)
Yup, that's exactly the point as I understand it. I think in all the furious posting, people forgot C# != .NET ;)
Sorry about the lame formatting :( Hit Submit accidently instead of Preview
:)
;)
:)
.NET. Couldn't we have spent more time refining the applications, utilities, and system code that we already have rather than wasting time extending the Microsoft monopoly?
.NET succeed.
:) What's karma anyways? ;)
Ok, the other guy was pretty harsh but here goes:
> The C programming language does everything I need it to do.
But you've gotta do a buttload of extra work to get it to do some of the things that C# can accomplish more easily. Remember, I'm not saying you *can't* do it. Just that it's easier with C#. Remoting, GUI apps (b/c of layout managers), making apps portable.
> Writing a new operating system? I choose C. For now. Sooner or later....C# OS
> Coding up your own desktop environment? I choose C. Um, sure......
> Desire to write the next award-winning PC game? I choose C.
C# may not have the libraries to deal with low-level graphics stuff right now (I could be wrong) but if it ever gets support for something like OpenGL, totally portable games. How does it get any better than that
>I'm not sure why so many man months were spent trying to hook into
What I heard was "blah, blah, Microsoft monopoly sucks, blah, blah". No, but seriously. This seems to be a legitimate attempt on their part to interconnect software systems. Hey, maybe they'll pull some fast trick....but what if they don't?
> Sorry, but you people really confuse me sometimes. I write a few sentences of praise for Microsoft's latest operating systems just a few hours ago and I get marked as a troll. Now I see an article praising those who work hard to let Microsoft's
No objections on that one here. It happens all the time
> People: Make up your mind, or find a new hobby. people.
Might be that they are praising this even though it's associated with Microsoft b/c they see the potential in it....... Just a thought.
Ok, the other guy was pretty harsh but here goes: > The C programming language does everything I need it to do. But you've gotta do a buttload of extra work to get it to do some of the things that C# can accomplish more easily. Remember, I'm not saying you *can't* do it. Just that it's easier with C#. Remoting, GUI apps (b/c of layout managers), making apps portable. > Writing a new operating system? I choose C. For now. Sooner or later....C# OS :)
> Coding up your own desktop environment? I choose C.
Um, sure...... ;)
> Desire to write the next award-winning PC game? I choose C.
C# may not have the libraries to deal with low-level graphics stuff right now (I could be wrong) but if it ever gets support for something like OpenGL, totally portable games. How does it get any better than that :)
>I'm not sure why so many man months were spent trying to hook into .NET. Couldn't we have spent more time refining the applications, utilities, and system code that we already have rather than wasting time extending the Microsoft monopoly?
What I heard was "blah, blah, Microsoft monopoly sucks, blah, blah". No, but seriously. This seems to be a legitimate attempt on their part to interconnect software systems. Hey, maybe they'll pull some fast trick....but what if they don't?
> Sorry, but you people really confuse me sometimes. I write a few sentences of praise for Microsoft's latest operating systems just a few hours ago and I get marked as a troll. Now I see an article praising those who work hard to let Microsoft's .NET succeed.
No objections on that one here. It happens all the time :) What's karma anyways? ;)
> People: Make up your mind, or find a new hobby. people.
Might be that they are praising this even though it's associated with Microsoft b/c they see the potential in it....... Just a thought.
The article said that doctors can talk over should something go wrong. I'm thinking that would cover things like you described
I run XP on a PII-266, 352 MB Ram and a Voodoo 4 card and it runs fine. Not lightning fast. Menus tend to come up a bit slow but that's my only complaint so far. Moving windows is blazing fast, minimizing/maximizing is fast and so on and so forth :-) I was actually pleasantly surprised as I was expecting it to run slow on my 4+ year old computer!
I think it was the Microsoft line of operating systems being referred to and not just one specific version. When people ask me what Linux OS I run, I say Mandrake and that's that.
I recently installed a CD burner and Windows detected it just fun but I've been a little apprehensive to boot into Linux b/c I'm not sure if it'll detect it and be usable right away as it was with Windows. When I use an OS I don't want to have that apprehensive feeling of "Will this piece of hardware work?". I've never had that with Windows.
In short, I'm in agreement with suprax. I use Windows 80% of the time and mess around with Linux the other 20% basically as something to do when there is nothing else to do.
I did get the Mac to crash at one point but I can't remember how I did it ;-)
I wouldn't pick an OS that had poor fonts on it. My eyes are already strained enough from staring at a screen 24/7. I don't need lousy fonts to make me squint harder :-)
Did you ever think of putting certain sites in your Trusted Sites list and enabling Active Scripting for just certain sites???
But one thing I would like to point out is that it wouldn't be a good thing if Linux was, in 10 years, what Microsoft is today. That would mean they are just catching up while Microsoft will likely have made some further strides in development therefore causing Linux to try to catch up again....
I should hope that in six years it will surpass what Windows is today! It's pretty likely that Windows itself will, in six years, surpass what it is today. :-)
But now that this discussion is down to mainly language vs other language, I was wondering why nobody had mentioned Eiffel.
In terms of a pure object-oriented language, Eiffel is right up there. It supports polymorphism(while still being strongly typed), multiple inheritance(through a very thorough mechanism which can even allow you to undefine a feature if you don't want to inherit it), all types are objects(even primitive such as INTEGER and REAL), garbage collection(I know it isn't necessarily an object-oriented concept) and the list could go on.
It also provides operator overloading in the form of infix or prefix feature definitions.
Now I realize that there are other languages that support feature A or feature B that I listed but what other ones support all of them?