So my default answer to questions such as the one I got at last May's Ajax Experience, "When will you add threads to JavaScript?" is: "over your dead body!"
I bet 10 bucks that Mr. Eckel's 3D card drivers are out of date or not installed....in which case Java should fail gracefully and warn the user of this fact. Just failing without any further info is inexcusable, regardless of the configuration issues.
The easy way of debugging the app is...
Bzzzt, sorry, this scenario has already failed the Mom Test. Mom doesn't want to debug an app... she doesn't even know what "debug" means.
Look, tell you what: as soon as you conceive of and write a bit of code that is installed on a few hundred million machines around the world, and ends up producing a multibillion dollar corporate merger, let us know, OK?
You may find Flash's success to be annoying to your ideology, but the monstrous technical success it's had, and failure of competing technologies, leaves no room for argument here.
today Gay still guides Adobe's Flash's development
No he doesn't. He hasn't been at Adobe for a long while now, and in fact, he and Robert Tatsumi have formed a new startup with other notable ex-Flash engineers.
Regardless of the actual security issues, asking "Should Flash be used for(fill in blank here)?" on Slashdot is a question that I think we all know the probable responses to already...
The mental image of Gates pegging Nintendo is one I didn't need...
Re:So let the flame wars begin!
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 1
First off, you're quoting an article from 1989
Wow... 1989! That practically back when Dinosaurs roamed the earth!
It's not possible that anything that old could possibly be relevantto computing thesedays!
total lack of command-line
That was a feature, not a bug. If you weren't around at the time to appreciate just how revolutionary a concept that was in computers, go study the history of your field.
Re:So let the flame wars begin!
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 1
Not as a rebuttal per se, but rather as an interesting counterpoint from an authority on UI who I actually respect. I actually pretty much agree: keyboard shortcuts are definitely an essential part of an efficient UI, but it's not the case that the keyboard is intrinsically faster than the mouse (in the Big Picture).
Yes, actually. Disabling overtype mode (if possible) is one of the first things I do in any new editor.
Re:So let the flame wars begin!
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Because they're faster. Just like it's faster to use Control+S to save a document than it is to use the mouse to open the file menu, position the pointer over the save entry and press the button.
Add methods to a class, even if it's part of the standard library and I don't have the source code
This is a clever trick, and sounds like nice syntactic sugar... but in practice, is it anything MORE than sugar? I can't imagine this being a make-or-break language design feature (and actually sounds a little scary)
Disregarding assembler or SSE/AltiVec differences, there's a huge reason not to: the QA cost. Supporting PPC would effectively double the time/manpower required. If you assume most of the target audience will be using the highest of high-end machines, there's no point in supporting a dead architecture.
"Waxing eloquent about the implementation, licensing, or development model is like touting the benefits of dual overhead cams with a manual transmission. If grandmother ever has to pop the hood, she has the wrong car."
Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates claims Vista will "wow" its users. As in, "Wow, does this suck" or "Wow, WTF happened to all my data?"
An interesting take on it from Brendan Eich:
0 07/02/threads_suck.html
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2
So my default answer to questions such as the one I got at last May's Ajax Experience, "When will you add threads to JavaScript?" is: "over your dead body!"
I bet 10 bucks that Mr. Eckel's 3D card drivers are out of date or not installed. ...in which case Java should fail gracefully and warn the user of this fact. Just failing without any further info is inexcusable, regardless of the configuration issues.
...
The easy way of debugging the app is
Bzzzt, sorry, this scenario has already failed the Mom Test. Mom doesn't want to debug an app... she doesn't even know what "debug" means.
Sigh... If only there was a "Mod: -1, Dumbass"...
Look, tell you what: as soon as you conceive of and write a bit of code that is installed on a few hundred million machines around the world, and ends up producing a multibillion dollar corporate merger, let us know, OK?
You may find Flash's success to be annoying to your ideology, but the monstrous technical success it's had, and failure of competing technologies, leaves no room for argument here.
today Gay still guides Adobe's Flash's development
No he doesn't. He hasn't been at Adobe for a long while now, and in fact, he and Robert Tatsumi have formed a new startup with other notable ex-Flash engineers.
No need for research, this already exists. I'm sure some of my early home berr brewing experiments were partly diesel, judging from the taste...
Given that a substantial percentage of game developers and testers are under 30, this would definitely put the kibosh on game development there...
Regardless of the actual security issues, asking "Should Flash be used for(fill in blank here)?" on Slashdot is a question that I think we all know the probable responses to already...
The mental image of Gates pegging Nintendo is one I didn't need...
First off, you're quoting an article from 1989
Wow... 1989! That practically back when Dinosaurs roamed the earth!
It's not possible that anything that old could possibly be relevant to computing these days!
total lack of command-line
That was a feature, not a bug. If you weren't around at the time to appreciate just how revolutionary a concept that was in computers, go study the history of your field.
Not as a rebuttal per se, but rather as an interesting counterpoint from an authority on UI who I actually respect. I actually pretty much agree: keyboard shortcuts are definitely an essential part of an efficient UI, but it's not the case that the keyboard is intrinsically faster than the mouse (in the Big Picture).
Readability is in the eye of the beholder. So, to me, the answer is definitely "yes".
Arguments by name is great, but why can't I have both? e.g.,
array.addObject(object:foo, atIndex:bar);
Or better yet, Moore & Gibbon's Watchmen , rated as one of the top 100 novels of the 20th century by Time Magazine.
l )
(Shameless self-promotion: if you like Watchmen, check out my site: http://www.crinklink.com/blackfreighter/index.htm
Yes, actually. Disabling overtype mode (if possible) is one of the first things I do in any new editor.
Because they're faster. Just like it's faster to use Control+S to save a document than it is to use the mouse to open the file menu, position the pointer over the save entry and press the button.
m l
http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.ht
We've done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:
* Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
* The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers' belief that the keyboard is faster.
Add methods to a class, even if it's part of the standard library and I don't have the source code
This is a clever trick, and sounds like nice syntactic sugar... but in practice, is it anything MORE than sugar? I can't imagine this being a make-or-break language design feature (and actually sounds a little scary)
Objective-C has many nice features, but I just can't get past the syntax, which I *loathe*.
If they could adopt an Java (or JavaScript/ECMAScript) style syntax as an alternative, maybe I'd be interested.
Disregarding assembler or SSE/AltiVec differences, there's a huge reason not to: the QA cost. Supporting PPC would effectively double the time/manpower required. If you assume most of the target audience will be using the highest of high-end machines, there's no point in supporting a dead architecture.
What's safe for work varies across the world.
I'm guessing that NSFW in my San Francisco office is different from NSFW in rural Alabama, or Germany, or Saudi Arabia, or China...
The germ of a good idea, but completely unworkable.
"Waxing eloquent about the implementation, licensing, or development model is like touting the benefits of dual overhead cams with a manual transmission. If grandmother ever has to pop the hood, she has the wrong car."
Lord knows I'm no fan of Vista, but ESR is plain wrong on this one.
I have a machine running Vista 64 in my cubicle.
It has weird, funky compatibility issues, yes, but is definitely faster than running Vista-32 on the same hardware.
Why did Adobe use H.264 for Flash's codec,
It doesn't.
Flash 6 introduced the Sorenson Spark codec that was essentially a variant of H.263 (not H.264).
Flash 8 added support for On2 VP6, a proprietary codec.
H.264 is not presently supported by Flash.
It is not possible to have two methods with the same name and different parameters
That's not a bug -- it's a feature.
(Did we charge you for the deluxe version?)
Namespaces will be present in ECMAScript 4, along with lots of other goodies.
n amespaces.html
You can track the ECMAScript 4 standards proposals here: http://developer.mozilla.org/es4/
And Namespaces specifically: http://developer.mozilla.org/es4/spec/chapter_12_
You can try out namespaces right now in ActionScript 3, which was modeled after earlier (incomplete) ECMA4 proposals.