This is Montreal (I've lived there). They already have an excellent subway system, as does Washington, DC (where I now live). There is *no* need to drive in either of those two cities (I don't).
They were probably worried about IP-issues -- after all, if they admit that they are products of *your* imagination, ownership issues are pretty murky...
If you have magical hacking tools that let you visualize hacking as manipulating a physical object, then you're wasting time with an interface that spends time interpreting data in a human-recognizable way that could've been spent just handling the intrusion. It's a waste of cycles that could be used to do something useful.
In the early 1990s, that's what they said about object-oriented programming -- that it was a cute idea, but any real world problem would be better solved using efficient C (not C++) programming. And even that was an advance from the 1980s, when even C was seen as a waste and programs were often written in assembly language. The point is, as computers get more powerful, it's okay to waste some cycles on the human.
It's not just about "shrink wrapped" products. For example, I used to work in industry. writing internal code for analyzing mass-spec protein data. Now that company has been purchased by another and that code has been lost forever. If the code was open source, it could have lived on and helped people working on similar problems. This sort of thing goes on in *every* merger and acquisition -- thousands of them each year.
After the awful 2600 game, they deserve it! And track down Steve Perry in his retirement, little ducks! No fair escaping punishment by getting replaced by a sound-alike!
Matz used (and still uses AFAIK) Unix only. If it's part of unix (eg fork()) it's in Ruby. If it's not (eg proper threading) it's not in Ruby.
So, basically you want to make the core of a portable language non-portable? Why *should* the core of Ruby contain non-Unix cruft?
Documentation is hobbyist-grade. I admit that while writing this post I googled a bit to check if my memories were still valid. I found that there is a project devoted to deducing the Ruby standard by experimenting with the Ruby implementation. If you can't see the problem with that...:)
A lot of Ruby documentation sucks, that's true. But that's pretty much true for scripting languages in general, which are generally creations of individuals -- Larry, Matz, Guido. There isn't an IEEE or ANSI standard for Perl or Python either.
People already have online access to 'the sum total of human knowledge,' provided you are able to pay for it (usually through your university or R&D company account). Those who need it (scientists, doctors, students, researchers, etc.), already have access.
Wrong. I'm a scientist (check my link) at a research institution and we can only subscribe to a small fraction of the journals out there. Practically daily I come across an article I can't read because of this. The whole thing is nuts. The government pays scientists like me to do research, and yet the results are published in private journals published by parasitic companies like Springer-Verlag and Elsevier which do nothing but sell the taxpayer-funded science created by scientists to other scientists.
"Intelligent Design" groups have been running tours through legitimate museums, providing their own narrative in order to dispute the information provided by the museum displays. Maybe after this museum opens some atheist tour group so do the same thing...take tours through Ken's "museum" and provide scientific narrative to dispute his biblical nonsense.
Cute, but it wouldn't work because typically real museums are public and have to allow everyone in, including the creationist groups (assuming they don't harass the other visitors), but Ham's creationist museum is private and probably simply would ban entry to any group that they perceived as "hostile".
I can assure you that "average" people *do* give out accurate information; when I tell my relatives that I generally just give random info, they tend to be shocked and say "But, but, that would be LYING".
Communists may in fact be legal in the US, but that doesn't stop the question from being asked by immigration officials. I have several friends from the former Eastern block who remember the question well, as they *were* members of communist parties, not because of any love of Marx, but because it was basically required to join to have any chance of university tenure under Communist rule.
Re:Genuine question about perl vs ruby
on
Lisp and Ruby
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· Score: 1
I notice that a most of the languages you mention are descendants/dialects of C. While I don't know off hand how they treat the logical status of 0, I'd understand if the quixotic behavior of C is likely to be preserved in them for backwards compatibility. When you look at truly different languages without the baggage of C -- LISP-based, Smalltalk-based, ML-based -- either the question "is 0 false?" doesn't make any sense and yields an error (because 0 is not a boolean value and the question makes as little sense as "is 0 strawberry-flavored?") or it is true (because 0 is a defined object/atom).
But certainly I wouldn't *expect* 0 to be false (or even true) in any language. But in any language with boolean values (which even most C-clones have) there is no reason to write code that even cares.
And here I thought that SED stood for "Smoke Emitting Diode." And I thought it was the old East German Communist Party (Socialist Unity Party of Germany, or Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) and wondered why Canon and Toshiba would be interested in that...
Re:Genuine question about perl vs ruby
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
And 0 being true is the least surprising behaviour, now?
Because 0 is defined. It exists. In most programming languages either 0 is true or the notion of considering a number to be true or false is not allowed. It's basically C that decided to declare 0 to be false instead of defining a boolean datatype.
Re:Genuine question about perl vs ruby
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 5, Informative
1) Object Orientation is consistent throughout the language. Perl provides ways to make objects, but none of the built in functions or datatypes are objects, making your code a schizophrenic mess of objects and non-objects.
2) Consistency -- In Perl it is needlessly difficult to do ever simple tasks like making arrays of arrays or arrays of hashes -- you have use a weird syntax to get at references. I never could remember it and always had to look it up whenever I needed an array of arrays in Perl. In Ruby, everything is a reference to an object so you don't have to worry about it -- a[0] = [1, 2] does exactly what you want -- puts an array [1, 2] in the first element of array a.
I used to be a big Perl fanboy -- I did most of my programming in Perl from 1992-1999. But when I discovered Ruby I went for it and never looked back. What's cool about it is that its syntax is so clean that it is basically a version of the pseudocode I have in my head. In the Ruby community there's a phrase for it -- "the principle of least surprise" -- things just work.
Obviously, if you really like Perl, nothing is going to make you change. But if you are just keeping with Perl because of inertia, then you ought to look around at other scripting languages. Ruby is my favorite, but most modern scripting languages are cleaner than Perl.
911TS does sound awful. But considering the same set of 1985 reviews trashed Archon, generally considered one of the best games of all time, I have to wonder.
But they accept PDF right? so just run it through pdfTex
You'd think so, and while they actually do accept PDF for the review process, when it was actually accepted, they wanted text they could edit. I tried sending them my actual LaTeX and BibTeX source, but they freaked out and wanted Word. So I used a latex to html converter and loaded it into Word. It worked okay, more or less, but still they were somewhat annoyed that the references weren't in EndNote.
Let's say you have a five-hundred-fold bibliography: how are you going to port it between publishable papers if not in BibTeX
Endnote? It's basically the Windows/Mac GUI version of BibTeX. Granted it's not open source, but Word + Endnote is pretty much the standard among all journals except those in CS/Math/Physics. Most journals outside those fields won't even accept LaTeX/BibTex (and yes, I've tried submitting LaTeX to such places like Journal of Bacteriology)
Yeah, but the orderly at the hospital was just learning English -- he thought L-A-Y was pronounced "dead" for some reason. His co-workers corrected him though.
In addition, biologists have traditionally been Mac users even before OS X -- many programs essential to biologists, such as PAUP were originally Mac-only (although many were ported to other systems in the mid-90s, when Apple's future looked dim). And most people would consider biologists nerdy/geeky, right?
I guarentee you that history will look at him as one of the greatest men of the late 20th century, and the impact of the Gate's philanthropy will be felt by billions of people on Earth for years to come.
Doubtful. Look at the historical examples. John Rockefeller pulled the same stunt of devoting himself to charitable causes in his later years, but despite the Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller University, etc., etc., he is mostly rememembered as a "robber baron" who abused his oil monopoly.
Bubo! Bubo! Bubo is Latin for owl. Don't ask me why a bunch of Greeks decided to name their mechanical owl in a language that hadn't been invented yet, but according to "Clash of the Titans" they did.
Slashdot Mirror
This is Montreal (I've lived there). They already have an excellent subway system, as does Washington, DC (where I now live). There is *no* need to drive in either of those two cities (I don't).
They were probably worried about IP-issues -- after all, if they admit that they are products of *your* imagination, ownership issues are pretty murky...
If you have magical hacking tools that let you visualize hacking as manipulating a physical object, then you're wasting time with an interface that spends time interpreting data in a human-recognizable way that could've been spent just handling the intrusion. It's a waste of cycles that could be used to do something useful.
In the early 1990s, that's what they said about object-oriented programming -- that it was a cute idea, but any real world problem would be better solved using efficient C (not C++) programming. And even that was an advance from the 1980s, when even C was seen as a waste and programs were often written in assembly language. The point is, as computers get more powerful, it's okay to waste some cycles on the human.
It's not just about "shrink wrapped" products. For example, I used to work in industry. writing internal code for analyzing mass-spec protein data. Now that company has been purchased by another and that code has been lost forever. If the code was open source, it could have lived on and helped people working on similar problems. This sort of thing goes on in *every* merger and acquisition -- thousands of them each year.
Chlamydia is a bacterium
After the awful 2600 game, they deserve it! And track down Steve Perry in his retirement, little ducks! No fair escaping punishment by getting replaced by a sound-alike!
Parts of Russia (Siberia, for example) are in Asia. Additionally, Russia is not politically European -- it is not part of the EU.
Matz used (and still uses AFAIK) Unix only. If it's part of unix (eg fork()) it's in Ruby. If it's not (eg proper threading) it's not in Ruby.
:)
So, basically you want to make the core of a portable language non-portable? Why *should* the core of Ruby contain non-Unix cruft?
Documentation is hobbyist-grade. I admit that while writing this post I googled a bit to check if my memories were still valid. I found that there is a project devoted to deducing the Ruby standard by experimenting with the Ruby implementation. If you can't see the problem with that...
A lot of Ruby documentation sucks, that's true. But that's pretty much true for scripting languages in general, which are generally creations of individuals -- Larry, Matz, Guido. There isn't an IEEE or ANSI standard for Perl or Python either.
People already have online access to 'the sum total of human knowledge,' provided you are able to pay for it (usually through your university or R&D company account). Those who need it (scientists, doctors, students, researchers, etc.), already have access.
Wrong. I'm a scientist (check my link) at a research institution and we can only subscribe to a small fraction of the journals out there. Practically daily I come across an article I can't read because of this. The whole thing is nuts. The government pays scientists like me to do research, and yet the results are published in private journals published by parasitic companies like Springer-Verlag and Elsevier which do nothing but sell the taxpayer-funded science created by scientists to other scientists.
Cute, but it wouldn't work because typically real museums are public and have to allow everyone in, including the creationist groups (assuming they don't harass the other visitors), but Ham's creationist museum is private and probably simply would ban entry to any group that they perceived as "hostile".
I can assure you that "average" people *do* give out accurate information; when I tell my relatives that I generally just give random info, they tend to be shocked and say "But, but, that would be LYING".
Communists may in fact be legal in the US, but that doesn't stop the question from being asked by immigration officials. I have several friends from the former Eastern block who remember the question well, as they *were* members of communist parties, not because of any love of Marx, but because it was basically required to join to have any chance of university tenure under Communist rule.
I know what a Dyson sphere is. But Project Orion was a real project that Dyson was involved in, one that he thought was actually feasible.
Or a vacuum plowered by nuclear explosions?
I notice that a most of the languages you mention are descendants/dialects of C. While I don't know off hand how they treat the logical status of 0, I'd understand if the quixotic behavior of C is likely to be preserved in them for backwards compatibility. When you look at truly different languages without the baggage of C -- LISP-based, Smalltalk-based, ML-based -- either the question "is 0 false?" doesn't make any sense and yields an error (because 0 is not a boolean value and the question makes as little sense as "is 0 strawberry-flavored?") or it is true (because 0 is a defined object/atom).
But certainly I wouldn't *expect* 0 to be false (or even true) in any language. But in any language with boolean values (which even most C-clones have) there is no reason to write code that even cares.
And here I thought that SED stood for "Smoke Emitting Diode."
And I thought it was the old East German Communist Party (Socialist Unity Party of Germany, or Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) and wondered why Canon and Toshiba would be interested in that...
And 0 being true is the least surprising behaviour, now?
Because 0 is defined. It exists. In most programming languages either 0 is true or the notion of considering a number to be true or false is not allowed. It's basically C that decided to declare 0 to be false instead of defining a boolean datatype.
1) Object Orientation is consistent throughout the language. Perl provides ways to make objects, but none of the built in functions or datatypes are objects, making your code a schizophrenic mess of objects and non-objects.
2) Consistency -- In Perl it is needlessly difficult to do ever simple tasks like making arrays of arrays or arrays of hashes -- you have use a weird syntax to get at references. I never could remember it and always had to look it up whenever I needed an array of arrays in Perl. In Ruby, everything is a reference to an object so you don't have to worry about it -- a[0] = [1, 2] does exactly what you want -- puts an array [1, 2] in the first element of array a.
I used to be a big Perl fanboy -- I did most of my programming in Perl from 1992-1999. But when I discovered Ruby I went for it and never looked back. What's cool about it is that its syntax is so clean that it is basically a version of the pseudocode I have in my head. In the Ruby community there's a phrase for it -- "the principle of least surprise" -- things just work.
Obviously, if you really like Perl, nothing is going to make you change. But if you are just keeping with Perl because of inertia, then you ought to look around at other scripting languages. Ruby is my favorite, but most modern scripting languages are cleaner than Perl.
911TS does sound awful. But considering the same set of 1985 reviews trashed Archon, generally considered one of the best games of all time, I have to wonder.
But they accept PDF right? so just run it through pdfTex
You'd think so, and while they actually do accept PDF for the review process, when it was actually accepted, they wanted text they could edit. I tried sending them my actual LaTeX and BibTeX source, but they freaked out and wanted Word. So I used a latex to html converter and loaded it into Word. It worked okay, more or less, but still they were somewhat annoyed that the references weren't in EndNote.
Let's say you have a five-hundred-fold bibliography: how are you going to port it between publishable papers if not in BibTeX
Endnote? It's basically the Windows/Mac GUI version of BibTeX. Granted it's not open source, but Word + Endnote is pretty much the standard among all journals except those in CS/Math/Physics. Most journals outside those fields won't even accept LaTeX/BibTex (and yes, I've tried submitting LaTeX to such places like Journal of Bacteriology)
He was pronounced dead at a hospital.
Yeah, but the orderly at the hospital was just learning English -- he thought L-A-Y was pronounced "dead" for some reason. His co-workers corrected him though.
In addition, biologists have traditionally been Mac users even before OS X -- many programs essential to biologists, such as PAUP were originally Mac-only (although many were ported to other systems in the mid-90s, when Apple's future looked dim). And most people would consider biologists nerdy/geeky, right?
I guarentee you that history will look at him as one of the greatest men of the late 20th century, and the impact of the Gate's philanthropy will be felt by billions of people on Earth for years to come.
Doubtful. Look at the historical examples. John Rockefeller pulled the same stunt of devoting himself to charitable causes in his later years, but despite the Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller University, etc., etc., he is mostly rememembered as a "robber baron" who abused his oil monopoly.
Bubo! Bubo! Bubo is Latin for owl. Don't ask me why a bunch of Greeks decided to name their mechanical owl in a language that hadn't been invented yet, but according to "Clash of the Titans" they did.