OK, the point that you're replying to wasn't expressed very well. There is a substantial difference between a language being used to write software in using weak data types, and a language being used to "software engineer" a product that has weak data types.
I think the point was, Perl is difficult to engineer and do all the maths with around pre- and post-conditions as opposed to something like C, because there are lots of things going on that might not be immediately obvious and so it's hard to write the formal specification for.
The question is, does an accounting package need to be software engineered - if you look at the Changelog for SQL-Ledger (I've never heard of it before, but just took a look), you'll notice some interesting changes - e.g. "added code for debit and credit balance check to get rid of out of balance error where there is none. Apparently computers don't always know that 14.05 plus 1.96 is 16.01 and not 16.0000000000997" - now that sort of thing should just plain not happen in any accounting system.
Perl is a beautiful language, but if you need to be certain without any doubt that it will behave 'correctly' and 'completely' with any input data that might be put in, then Perl might not be the best language to get that kind of proof for. C however (ignore OO for this discussion, or we'll be going all over the place), does allow you to be a little bit more mathematical about the whole process though.
I was at BSDCon Europe last month where Jordan Hubbard (now working at Apple) gave a presentation on all that was brilliant about Mac OS X for the BSD Unix crowd. At the end, in the Q&As, somebody did ask about the porting of Quicktime to other OS.
From the answer, which was pretty neutral and he didn't seem to want to rock the boat - Jordan rated the chances of it being ported as smaller than slim. Because of all the low-lovel codec code that needs to be ported and optimised for the OS, porting QT is apparently an Evil Job, and they wouldn't have ported to Windows if it wasn't for the fact Windows had such a huge market share.
In short, don't hold your breath. If it does start making it's way out as a port, expect it for the BSD Unixes first, as they are likely to be the easiest to port to from OS X/Darwin (i.e. nothing more than a recompile on another machine)
QT seems to rule
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've recently got my Sharp SL-5000D which comes with a cute embedded version of QT. I'm starting to play with it some more, and I have to say I'm impressed. I've not done much GUI dev. under 'nix before, but I've followed many threads in the past elsewhere that suggests GTK is a hodge-podge and is getting out of control, with no coherent design.
I'm not experienced, but as a lay-man, I'd have to say go for QT.
I've always wanted to get time to sit down and play with languages like Haskell, but never seem to get around to it. I think part of my hesitance (i.e. finding other things to do), is that I'm not confident that it's a commercially useful language.
The same goes for Erlang as well, which just seems to be an Ericsson R&D effort. In fact the only application I've seen written in the outside world in Erlang was Eddie and even that was an in-house Ericsson creation.
But then, the increase in languages has always confused me. When I was browsing through a bookstore one day I was amazed to see a book entitled 'REBOL for Dummies' - who, in their right mind, uses REBOL????
And when you actually can detect one technique, new and better techniques will crop up and take its place.
That's like saying 'if somebody can break 56-bit keys, you can just increase the key length'. In other words, it's really not that simple. Firstly, you're assuming that there will always be new techniques. Secondly, you're suggesting that these new techniques will always be harder to detect than previous techniques. Thirdly, you're assuming the licensing model of such techniques will allow them to take the place of existing techniques.
In short, until you know what you're talking about, or are able to engage your brain, please shut up with your opinion, and just deliver articles and facts. Thanks.
Re:This has already happened...
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
One thing I noticed is that the whole "homogeny" thing is based around the fact that Windows is the only operating system.
Isn't that pretty much true right now (and for the past 5 years)?
In short, no. If you take all the computers in the world and worked out what percentage are Intel based you get a figure less than 0.2% - of those, maybe 80% are running Windows.
The problem is what you identify as a computer and as an OS. The article discusses traffic lights, shavers, etc. and these are examples of embedded systems. An electric shaver may have a very simple embedded system in there, bordering on an OS. A traffic light system has something a bit more complicated. Your video recorder or DVD doesn't need anything particularly fancy, but still has something bordering on an OS in there. Same goes with your car's engine management, your burglar alarm, your microwave, etc... Just because almost every desktop you see has Windows running on it, doesn't mean every computer in the world runs it - far from it in fact...
This article is talking about the day when all those things are running some version of Windows. As somebody who studied Software Engineering and therefore embedded systems at Uni (although now I work in ISP as it's more interesting), I suspect that day will take some time to get here, and Linux is already in the lead - how many embedded Linux systems are there out there in comparison to Windows?
Somewhere in the company is a G3 case with a PIII motherboard running Win98 - I know because I've used it, and was rather suprised when asking for a windows box I was pointed to the blue case.
These mods are easy. The hacking to the case conducted here just shows he was a complete muppet who didn't understand what the hell he was doing. The G3->PIII conversion (mboard, drive, etc.) took about 15 minutes, and the G4 cases aren't that different. There was no way he needed to cut the case up the way he did if he had made a sensible choice of mboard.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, the point that you're replying to wasn't expressed very well. There is a substantial difference between a language being used to write software in using weak data types, and a language being used to "software engineer" a product that has weak data types.
I think the point was, Perl is difficult to engineer and do all the maths with around pre- and post-conditions as opposed to something like C, because there are lots of things going on that might not be immediately obvious and so it's hard to write the formal specification for.
The question is, does an accounting package need to be software engineered - if you look at the Changelog for SQL-Ledger (I've never heard of it before, but just took a look), you'll notice some interesting changes - e.g. "added code for debit and credit balance check to get rid of out of balance error where there is none. Apparently computers don't always know that 14.05 plus 1.96 is 16.01 and not 16.0000000000997" - now that sort of thing should just plain not happen in any accounting system.
Perl is a beautiful language, but if you need to be certain without any doubt that it will behave 'correctly' and 'completely' with any input data that might be put in, then Perl might not be the best language to get that kind of proof for. C however (ignore OO for this discussion, or we'll be going all over the place), does allow you to be a little bit more mathematical about the whole process though.
I was at BSDCon Europe last month where Jordan Hubbard (now working at Apple) gave a presentation on all that was brilliant about Mac OS X for the BSD Unix crowd. At the end, in the Q&As, somebody did ask about the porting of Quicktime to other OS.
From the answer, which was pretty neutral and he didn't seem to want to rock the boat - Jordan rated the chances of it being ported as smaller than slim. Because of all the low-lovel codec code that needs to be ported and optimised for the OS, porting QT is apparently an Evil Job, and they wouldn't have ported to Windows if it wasn't for the fact Windows had such a huge market share.
In short, don't hold your breath. If it does start making it's way out as a port, expect it for the BSD Unixes first, as they are likely to be the easiest to port to from OS X/Darwin (i.e. nothing more than a recompile on another machine)
I've recently got my Sharp SL-5000D which comes with a cute embedded version of QT. I'm starting to play with it some more, and I have to say I'm impressed. I've not done much GUI dev. under 'nix before, but I've followed many threads in the past elsewhere that suggests GTK is a hodge-podge and is getting out of control, with no coherent design.
I'm not experienced, but as a lay-man, I'd have to say go for QT.
I've always wanted to get time to sit down and play with languages like Haskell, but never seem to get around to it. I think part of my hesitance (i.e. finding other things to do), is that I'm not confident that it's a commercially useful language.
The same goes for Erlang as well, which just seems to be an Ericsson R&D effort. In fact the only application I've seen written in the outside world in Erlang was Eddie and even that was an in-house Ericsson creation.
But then, the increase in languages has always confused me. When I was browsing through a bookstore one day I was amazed to see a book entitled 'REBOL for Dummies' - who, in their right mind, uses REBOL????
And when you actually can detect one technique, new and better techniques will crop up and take its place.
That's like saying 'if somebody can break 56-bit keys, you can just increase the key length'. In other words, it's really not that simple. Firstly, you're assuming that there will always be new techniques. Secondly, you're suggesting that these new techniques will always be harder to detect than previous techniques. Thirdly, you're assuming the licensing model of such techniques will allow them to take the place of existing techniques.
In short, until you know what you're talking about, or are able to engage your brain, please shut up with your opinion, and just deliver articles and facts. Thanks.
One thing I noticed is that the whole "homogeny" thing is based around the fact that Windows is the only operating system.
Isn't that pretty much true right now (and for the past 5 years)?
In short, no. If you take all the computers in the world and worked out what percentage are Intel based you get a figure less than 0.2% - of those, maybe 80% are running Windows.
The problem is what you identify as a computer and as an OS. The article discusses traffic lights, shavers, etc. and these are examples of embedded systems. An electric shaver may have a very simple embedded system in there, bordering on an OS. A traffic light system has something a bit more complicated. Your video recorder or DVD doesn't need anything particularly fancy, but still has something bordering on an OS in there. Same goes with your car's engine management, your burglar alarm, your microwave, etc... Just because almost every desktop you see has Windows running on it, doesn't mean every computer in the world runs it - far from it in fact...
This article is talking about the day when all those things are running some version of Windows. As somebody who studied Software Engineering and therefore embedded systems at Uni (although now I work in ISP as it's more interesting), I suspect that day will take some time to get here, and Linux is already in the lead - how many embedded Linux systems are there out there in comparison to Windows?
Somewhere in the company is a G3 case with a PIII motherboard running Win98 - I know because I've used it, and was rather suprised when asking for a windows box I was pointed to the blue case.
These mods are easy. The hacking to the case conducted here just shows he was a complete muppet who didn't understand what the hell he was doing. The G3->PIII conversion (mboard, drive, etc.) took about 15 minutes, and the G4 cases aren't that different. There was no way he needed to cut the case up the way he did if he had made a sensible choice of mboard.