That's why you use RetroGuard or some other such product on your application before giving out your JARs anywhere, if you really think that a source leak of this kind would have any real effect.
Expecting people to act sensibly can frequently come into conflict with expecting people to follow the written rules. If you don't want this to happen, it's best to avoid official rules, or you WILL* end up with management figures that requires that the rule be followed exactly.
Surely you will end up with people who demand compliance of rules without understanding what compliance and non-compliance look like, and then you have to find a senior IT professional with people skills to educate them.
Even so, your company, your project and your family, should you have one, will be in a better shape when all of these reap the benefits of standardization, which include better measurability which tends to lead to shorter workdays.
If you've done a lot of non-threaded stuff and a lot of threaded stuff and the threading didn't cause you noticeably more grief, then you may definitely count yourself lucky.
Are you familiar with modern threading tools? These allow you to create, gather and hold your frequently accessed model data in RAM where it belongs, as VM objects without copy/parse requirements, and serve your user state machine changes while using the whole CPU capacity of your servers.
So you want to substitute java for, say, HTML? Perhaps you need to consider things a bit more closely.
Did I somehow convey the impression that I'd recommend directing humans as if they were computers, that I'd expect them to try to substitute Java for HTML instead of producing HTML with Java? Surely a development company couldn't be entirely populated by workers suffering of a total lack of contextual reasoning ability?
If I'm doing OO development, I'd probably chose Digital Mars D, unless I would need libraries that it doesn't have implemented yet. For a dynamically changing hunk of code, I'd prefer Ruby, but speed requirements or need for particular libraries might cause me to choose Python.
Do you see any difference on how language choices affect your personal productivity and how they affect group productivity? If not, I don't think we have a lot to discuss.
You'd tell them not to hurt your business by acting in a way which would surely make the backhoe operator happy for a while, but end up costing everyone a lot of money, am I right?
That's what your manager is doing as well. He's telling you that you can't act in a way that will cost your company a lot of money with little profit. If letting the developers form a consensus on which language to standardize on would be a real possibility (I've certainly seen many workplaces where it is possible) then the managers would just tell you guys to pick one, but like this Slashdot thread has amply shown, the age structure of the average IT workplace means that a lot of immature people will be unable to compromise and the only way to ever get a decision is to take a reasonable pick, such as Java, and then make adjustments as time goes by.
In my experience, though, most choices to multithread programs are ill-advised, and seem to be made because that's the decider's familiar hammer. The costs associated with multithreading are huge, and should not be chosen without long contemplation.
Funny, I've never noticed this, and I've been using threads succesfully for decades to handle applications which need to serve concurrent users while sharing data. Perhaps I've just been lucky? What do you think?
If you don't use threading, how do you get concurrent service processes to share native object data on 4 to 32-way multiprocessor machines? Surely you must have some programs which serve more than one person at a time and surely some of your apps really need to take advantage of the native performance features of the hardware they are running on?
Let me guess... the guy advocating using one programming language for everything wears a suit and has never written a single line of code in his life?
I bet you've never driven a backhoe professionally, but still you have strong opinions, based on good business sense, on whether people should accidentally cut off your company's Internet connection with one?
... I don't think you will find anything that has the security capabilities that zope does...
I have to say, I've never seen another system which would send the user's username and password in a MIME64-obfuscated cookie for every request, either. Or contain a NIH self-built object database with no transactional rollback capabilities. Or freeze the whole application when one LDAP authentication connection thread takes a while to complete.
Getting to the point where manufacturing or trading will make you millions takes between 2 weeks and a month, depending on your strategy for making money.
This presents no problem at all, after all in SWG to become a Master Chef you had to bake millions of cakes and acquire hundreds of tons of all kinds of raw materials from energy to water to wheat, just to grind on. We had an outfit called Intergalactic Outfitters on the Tempest server, specializing on the most advanced crafting available on the game from weaponsmithing to armorsmithing to cooking and tailoring. Fun times.
When you develop, like the great-grandparent, networked game servers, you need to detect clock error conditions. To develop software to detect the error condition, you have to have some way to simulate the error condition. Just how complicated is this?
I'll give you that you need root to set the date and time, but your system should do that for you with NTP, so it's not that you don't need root for that, but that you shouldn't have to do it...
Pray tell, you think it's practical to simulate clock error detection with NTP?
The pointy-haired boss miraculously combines two qualities that are common by themselves, but rarely seen together: (a) he knows nothing whatsoever about technology, and (b) he has very strong opinions about it.
Well, fuck you too, buddy. Merry Christmas to your ignorant ass.
I'm sure it's easy to copypaste some strawman argument containing hilarious phrases such as "pointy-haired boss" which the children will find irresistible, since they know nothing about the actual merits of the arguments, having never managed anyone, let alone a group of people who work together to achieve objectives such as saving people's lives, or even less noble objectives such as creating a software platform to aid the collective research efforts of thousands of researchers.
For instance I have tens of thousands of lines of Python code out on the field doing real work, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for really demanding clients, including governments and advertising agencies. In one case, I finished a project in a third of the time it took three Java programmers - and mine was smaller, faster and more maintainable for the guys who took it over.
I have used hundreds of thousands of dollars on Python code which the author believed to be really maintainable and work really well, but in the reality-based world turned to be such crap that the whole team, including me, had to work a breakneck pace to rewrite it in Java, which has such incredible features as working threading support, no Global Interpreter Lock, actual Oracle and LDAP support that doesn't leak memory like anything, and isn't 20 times slower than the Oracle and LDAP support in other languages, no monkey patches (oh yeah, Python coders seem to think that it's SUCH a good idea to monkeypatch others' code, since after all, SMART people should know without any documentation what's going on, and documentating code is useless anyway, people should just go in and read all of those millions of lines of code if they want to know what's going on) and, you know, clear and accurate documentation and HORDES of pre-existing components which make your life so much easier, if only you're not infected with the dreaded Python community NIH disease.
Java does have an additional useful feature: because of its mandatory coding practises and standards it's pretty easy to spot when an amateur has written something really broken, and contain the problem to those components which the amateur has touched. Perhaps this is what has happened to you?
I've used, in production, Python, Perl, C, C++, Pascal, Java, x86 assembly, a little AutoLisp, and so on. Hundreds of thousands of lines. (The C code I have out there is pretty crappy, for which I apologise, but I was an amateur and thought of my work much as you seem to think now.) Since I'm now a professional, I don't fucking connect programming language tools to my personal or professional identity. It's a real bad idea to do so, if you want to remain, or become, a professional.
Working in teams means that you can't just think what's right for you right now, you have to think of what's good for the team on the long run. Sometimes managers are wrong in their decisions about which path to take, but after you've tried the Python path, it quickly shows itself to be one of the paths that's pretty easy to just rule out because of its obvious defects. Like Pascal is, for different reasons.
Perhaps it's time for you to grow up too, buddy, and understand that the world doesn't revolve around you and what you want. Wishing things don't make them true. Different things are true to different people with different backgrounds.
KISS doesn't just mean "least code" or "least rows" or "least symbols."
If it doens't support distributed transactions, it's not simple, because it just can't be an integral part of so many applications. Which means that the investment you make in this piece of software is mostly wasted, while a larger investment in a piece of software which DOES support XA is muc
Managers like Java because Java was a language designed to be impressive to managers.
Bullshit. Managers like Java because it helps their team achieve their business objectives better than the other languages you describe.
On your own dime, go jump in leaf piles, run through a field of flowers, play with Python, Ruby or whatever is good for your spiritual wellbeing, but when you're working to pull a paycheck, you don't get to put your own flights of fancy before things which make your team (not you as an individual performer, but your team as a whole) more effective in achieving business objectives.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would any franchise holder trust this company is something I don't understand.
The age-old reason: the decisionmakers have zero personal contact, experience and understanding with the subject matter.
You can run a commodity business like that, but not an pure entertainment business.
That's why you use RetroGuard or some other such product on your application before giving out your JARs anywhere, if you really think that a source leak of this kind would have any real effect.
Know any good developer pickup lines?
Is your resume padded, or are you just happy to see me?
Expecting people to act sensibly can frequently come into conflict with expecting people to follow the written rules. If you don't want this to happen, it's best to avoid official rules, or you WILL* end up with management figures that requires that the rule be followed exactly.
Surely you will end up with people who demand compliance of rules without understanding what compliance and non-compliance look like, and then you have to find a senior IT professional with people skills to educate them.
Even so, your company, your project and your family, should you have one, will be in a better shape when all of these reap the benefits of standardization, which include better measurability which tends to lead to shorter workdays.
Excellent use of valuable astroturf. I applaud the PR company which posted this.
Maybe so...
Actually, I see I lied to you. Where I wrote "for decades" I meant to write "a decade."
If you've done a lot of non-threaded stuff and a lot of threaded stuff and the threading didn't cause you noticeably more grief, then you may definitely count yourself lucky.
Are you familiar with modern threading tools? These allow you to create, gather and hold your frequently accessed model data in RAM where it belongs, as VM objects without copy/parse requirements, and serve your user state machine changes while using the whole CPU capacity of your servers.
So you want to substitute java for, say, HTML? Perhaps you need to consider things a bit more closely.
Did I somehow convey the impression that I'd recommend directing humans as if they were computers, that I'd expect them to try to substitute Java for HTML instead of producing HTML with Java? Surely a development company couldn't be entirely populated by workers suffering of a total lack of contextual reasoning ability?
If I'm doing OO development, I'd probably chose Digital Mars D, unless I would need libraries that it doesn't have implemented yet. For a dynamically changing hunk of code, I'd prefer Ruby, but speed requirements or need for particular libraries might cause me to choose Python.
Do you see any difference on how language choices affect your personal productivity and how they affect group productivity? If not, I don't think we have a lot to discuss.
You'd tell them not to hurt your business by acting in a way which would surely make the backhoe operator happy for a while, but end up costing everyone a lot of money, am I right?
That's what your manager is doing as well. He's telling you that you can't act in a way that will cost your company a lot of money with little profit. If letting the developers form a consensus on which language to standardize on would be a real possibility (I've certainly seen many workplaces where it is possible) then the managers would just tell you guys to pick one, but like this Slashdot thread has amply shown, the age structure of the average IT workplace means that a lot of immature people will be unable to compromise and the only way to ever get a decision is to take a reasonable pick, such as Java, and then make adjustments as time goes by.
In my experience, though, most choices to multithread programs are ill-advised, and seem to be made because that's the decider's familiar hammer. The costs associated with multithreading are huge, and should not be chosen without long contemplation.
Funny, I've never noticed this, and I've been using threads succesfully for decades to handle applications which need to serve concurrent users while sharing data. Perhaps I've just been lucky? What do you think?
If you don't use threading, how do you get concurrent service processes to share native object data on 4 to 32-way multiprocessor machines? Surely you must have some programs which serve more than one person at a time and surely some of your apps really need to take advantage of the native performance features of the hardware they are running on?
Let me guess... the guy advocating using one programming language for everything wears a suit and has never written a single line of code in his life?
I bet you've never driven a backhoe professionally, but still you have strong opinions, based on good business sense, on whether people should accidentally cut off your company's Internet connection with one?
Mod up the parent post by greg_barton, please.
We settled on python at the pharma company I work at.
Does your company ever create multithreaded programs? If so, how did you overcome the threading problems imposed by the GIL?
Hire me for my MAD technical skills, and then override my decisions based on other criteria.
Since you don't seem to understand the grandparent's point, your technical skills seem to be pretty far from mad. Mildly vexed at most.
... I don't think you will find anything that has the security capabilities that zope does ...
I have to say, I've never seen another system which would send the user's username and password in a MIME64-obfuscated cookie for every request, either. Or contain a NIH self-built object database with no transactional rollback capabilities. Or freeze the whole application when one LDAP authentication connection thread takes a while to complete.
Oops, pressed submit a bit early...
Getting to the point where manufacturing or trading will make you millions takes between 2 weeks and a month, depending on your strategy for making money.
This presents no problem at all, after all in SWG to become a Master Chef you had to bake millions of cakes and acquire hundreds of tons of all kinds of raw materials from energy to water to wheat, just to grind on. We had an outfit called Intergalactic Outfitters on the Tempest server, specializing on the most advanced crafting available on the game from weaponsmithing to armorsmithing to cooking and tailoring. Fun times.
... blueprint originals (BPOs) and blueprint copies (BPCs) ...
Interesting... and can players affect the quality and characteristics of the items they craft?
... I've been 100% carebear (miner/refiner) ...
How is the player to player market in EVE? I really enjoyed playing a Master Chef in SWG, is there a comparable experience in EVE?
A well-designed system doesn't use a garbage collector.
A True Scotsman doesn't use an umbrella.
Results-oriented or reality-based people, however, might disagree...
The East German judge awards 9.9 strawman troll points to this astroturfer.
When you develop, like the great-grandparent, networked game servers, you need to detect clock error conditions. To develop software to detect the error condition, you have to have some way to simulate the error condition. Just how complicated is this?
I'll give you that you need root to set the date and time, but your system should do that for you with NTP, so it's not that you don't need root for that, but that you shouldn't have to do it...
Pray tell, you think it's practical to simulate clock error detection with NTP?
The pointy-haired boss miraculously combines two qualities that are common by themselves, but rarely seen together: (a) he knows nothing whatsoever about technology, and (b) he has very strong opinions about it.
Well, fuck you too, buddy. Merry Christmas to your ignorant ass.
I'm sure it's easy to copypaste some strawman argument containing hilarious phrases such as "pointy-haired boss" which the children will find irresistible, since they know nothing about the actual merits of the arguments, having never managed anyone, let alone a group of people who work together to achieve objectives such as saving people's lives, or even less noble objectives such as creating a software platform to aid the collective research efforts of thousands of researchers.
For instance I have tens of thousands of lines of Python code out on the field doing real work, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for really demanding clients, including governments and advertising agencies. In one case, I finished a project in a third of the time it took three Java programmers - and mine was smaller, faster and more maintainable for the guys who took it over.
I have used hundreds of thousands of dollars on Python code which the author believed to be really maintainable and work really well, but in the reality-based world turned to be such crap that the whole team, including me, had to work a breakneck pace to rewrite it in Java, which has such incredible features as working threading support, no Global Interpreter Lock, actual Oracle and LDAP support that doesn't leak memory like anything, and isn't 20 times slower than the Oracle and LDAP support in other languages, no monkey patches (oh yeah, Python coders seem to think that it's SUCH a good idea to monkeypatch others' code, since after all, SMART people should know without any documentation what's going on, and documentating code is useless anyway, people should just go in and read all of those millions of lines of code if they want to know what's going on) and, you know, clear and accurate documentation and HORDES of pre-existing components which make your life so much easier, if only you're not infected with the dreaded Python community NIH disease.
Java does have an additional useful feature: because of its mandatory coding practises and standards it's pretty easy to spot when an amateur has written something really broken, and contain the problem to those components which the amateur has touched. Perhaps this is what has happened to you?
I've used, in production, Python, Perl, C, C++, Pascal, Java, x86 assembly, a little AutoLisp, and so on. Hundreds of thousands of lines. (The C code I have out there is pretty crappy, for which I apologise, but I was an amateur and thought of my work much as you seem to think now.) Since I'm now a professional, I don't fucking connect programming language tools to my personal or professional identity. It's a real bad idea to do so, if you want to remain, or become, a professional.
Working in teams means that you can't just think what's right for you right now, you have to think of what's good for the team on the long run. Sometimes managers are wrong in their decisions about which path to take, but after you've tried the Python path, it quickly shows itself to be one of the paths that's pretty easy to just rule out because of its obvious defects. Like Pascal is, for different reasons.
Perhaps it's time for you to grow up too, buddy, and understand that the world doesn't revolve around you and what you want. Wishing things don't make them true. Different things are true to different people with different backgrounds.
KISS doesn't just mean "least code" or "least rows" or "least symbols."
If it doens't support distributed transactions, it's not simple, because it just can't be an integral part of so many applications. Which means that the investment you make in this piece of software is mostly wasted, while a larger investment in a piece of software which DOES support XA is muc
Managers like Java because Java was a language designed to be impressive to managers.
Bullshit. Managers like Java because it helps their team achieve their business objectives better than the other languages you describe.
On your own dime, go jump in leaf piles, run through a field of flowers, play with Python, Ruby or whatever is good for your spiritual wellbeing, but when you're working to pull a paycheck, you don't get to put your own flights of fancy before things which make your team (not you as an individual performer, but your team as a whole) more effective in achieving business objectives.