For example, a string can be used in a numerical context for calculations without having to waste space translating the string to a number, then assigning it to a numerical type.
Sorry, that's a bug, not a feature. I know this is a hopelessly unfashionable attitude, but all data conversions need to be explicit. The language should make this as terse as appropriate, but no terser... but I don't *ever* want the language to do anything under the hood without my explicit approval.
Furthermore, for those 'one-off' administrative/glue type apps - you can ignore it entirely if the manipulation of the data is well defined
Sorry, I don't believe in the existence of such code. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing with some confidence of reliability.
1. Program "X" is poorly written 2. Program "X" is written in Language "Y" 3. Therefore, Language "Y" is incapable of producing anything but poorly written programs
Actually, Dodgson needs to be encoded in a seriously object oriented language. The various characters have methods and properties...it'll look better after I've slept on it.
Huh? How is ActionScript not "seriously object oriented"?
ActionScript 2 (which is nearly identical to ECMAScript 4) is a dynamically-typed object-oriented language that's really a joy to work in... much more pleasant, IMHO, than, say, Python, since it also allows for compile-time type checking without compromising the dynamic typing ability of the language. (See here for more info.)
It doesn't get as much attention around Slashdot, presumably because there is no robust FOSS development-and-playback environment (at least, none that I'm aware of), but if you like Python, Ruby, etc., you're doing yourself a disservice by ignoring AS2/ES4...
I totally agree. C++ is what I pretty much have to use for work, and it's pretty much the best of a bad lot.
Of all the stuff you mention, C# is most appealing to me from a language design standpoint... if only I could use it without installing a 23 megabyte runtime package first, that is...
A decent lint (pylint, pychecker) will catch those typos before you run the code.
Yeah, but I shouldn't have to use a separate tool. If it's a good idea to run such checks -- and, IMHO, it always is -- it should be built in to the standard language.
(Keep in mind that I'm the kind of coder that cranks the C++ warning level as high as it will go, and then set the flag to treat all warnings as errors...)
I think the main reason I write so much stuff in Python and pretty much nothing in Java is simple: Open source and comprehensive standard library.
Interestingly, I just started trying to learn Python recently, for just these reasons... but soon gave up in frustration.
My issue is that I live for static typing. Yes, yes, yes, I know it's (apparently) very unfashionable to want the compiler to check for trivial mistakes, but I'm funny that way.
Don't get me wrong: dynamic typing is great. It's a wonderful tool to have available. But more often than not, I know the type that I need, and can make my app more reliable by enforcing those constraints at compile time rather than at runtime.
But the final straw has to be the deliberate omission of variable-declaration statements -- this is like some nightmare out of circa-1982-BASIC. What, it's too hard to declare variables? C'mon, that's not flexibility -- that's laziness.
The idea of an interpreted, dynamically-typed language with a huge standard library is verrry appealing to me, but I refuse to switch unless I can have static type checking built in to the language.
(For that reason, ECMAScript 4, aka JavaScript 2.0, aka ActionScript 2.0, is looking more and more interesting to me: I get all of the dynamically-typed goodness I want, along with flexible compile-time type checking that is "on" by default, but trivially easy to work around. If only there was a way for me to use all the existing Python libraries from there...)
It's not the ads I bitch about, that's actually an appropriate application IMHO. It's lame ass sites like Ray-Ban's where Flash is used as a replacement for HTML. Especially when there's very little here that needed Flash, as in this case. Site-as-snazzy applet-thing should die a painful death.
Yep, I'll agree with you on this one... with allowance for a few sites that don't really make sense any other way (e.g., the aforementioned Homestar Runner), of course. But those are definitely the exception rather than the rule.
Yeah, it's a "trojan", but you say that like it's a bad thing.
Look, a lot of phone makers want SVG-Tiny support on their phone. Macromedia wants to put Flash Lite on a lot of phones. This is an obvious way to make that happen.
But geez, there's no big conspiracy to get proprietary stuff on phones just to Stick It To You Open Source guys... we just have a technical solution that we happen to think is pretty damn good, that will suit the mobile market well. So what if it's proprietary? I defy you to show be ONE SINGLE PHONE in existence that runs on Open Source software; phone makers seem to be pretty happy with using whatever will get the job done, without getting all religious about this.
Honestly, I read Slashdot daily, but I'll never understand the peculiar Flash-Is-Evil bias. Yes, there are annoying ads that use it. There are also annoying ads that use animated GIF, and even HTML. It's just a tool, folks, and like the song says, every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.
And for the expected flood of responses saying, "You can do this with SVG+DHTML+SMIL+etc,etc"... bollocks. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's practical.
Look: 98% of interesting interactive animated stuff on the Web is done using Flash rather than that something else. I submit to you that this is not a coincidence! Artists aren't stupid, and they sure as hell aren't going to spend hundreds of dollars on Flash if there really was a superior (or even comparable) solution available for free.
I'll tell you what: why don't you go off and write a nice, free authoring tool for SVG that is good enough for the Homestar guys to completely replace all those Strong Bad Emails with. (I will, of course, expect the final result needs to be just as bandwidth- and processor-efficient as Flash.) Until then, please, give it a rest.
(Disclaimer: I work for Macromedia (though not related to the Flash Lite effort in any way), so I expect to be ignored or dramatically modded down...)
Let me fill in the context, as I was the unfortunate recipient of this statement.
Our team was working on a project that was behind schedule and buggy besides. I was a fresh hire, just a few months out of college. In a status meeting, I attempted to be helpful, and suggested that if QA was finding more bugs, we'd be able to fix more bugs, thus rendering it less buggy. (Our QA department was in another city, so we had no day-to-day contact with them.)
At this point, the head of development gave me a stern look and said, "The purpose of QA is not to *find* bugs; the purpose of QA is to *verify* that *there are no bugs*."
I, of course, remained silent for the rest of the meeting...
But I learned a valuable lesson, namely that you don't code something, then "throw it over the wall" to QA to flush out the bugs; you code with the intent that there are no bugs, and when QA finds one, you take it seriously, and as a defect that you should strive to avoid by careful design and coding practices.
So I'll quote his other bit of wisdom that is impressed on my brain, aka "Crowder's Law of Optimization": "If the function result doesn't have to be correct, I can make the function as fast as you like."
In addition, a unified API akin to.NET or Cocoa, instead of these 20 or so different APIs which require that I install all of them since everybody likes to code for different ones instead of coding to a standard.
Hallelujah! I wish I could mod you higher than 5.
Yes, it is beautiful, but it is NOT "staggeringly well designed." Trust me on this; I was a former owner of a Sparrow, and found out -- the hard way -- that a three-wheeled, rear-driven layout is fundamentally unstable in the event of fishtail: flip, roll, totaled.
In addition, the quality of both design and construction was truly dismal. I wondered sometimes if the Corbins didn't bother to design anything ahead of time, but just sort of threw things together, bodged it around until it worked, kinda.
They had a cool concept, but absolutely no idea how to actually execute that in a reliable and profitable way, and so the Sparrows were MASSIVELY unreliable; mine was out of service for, literally, 2/3 or 3/4 of the time I owned it, and stalled -- twice! -- crossing the Bay Bridge. (Ever been stalled on the Bay Bridge? Now imagine doing so in a very small fiberglass container.)
No... there's no way this vehicle can be worthwhile without a ground-up redesign by folks who actually know what they are doing. I know nothing of Myers Motors, so maybe they are smart folks, but if they're starting with the existing design, they've already made a big mistake.
If, say, Honda, or Toyota, or even Piaggio, designed a vehicle like this, I might be interested....
(For more info on a Sparrow's crashworthiness, see: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/sparrow_ev/m essage/3680)
No, ActionScript is essentially ECMAScript, aka JavaScript.
ActionScript 1.x was the language for Flash Player 5 and 6, and corresponds to ECMAScript 3 / JavaScript 1.x, IIRC.
ActionScript 2.x was introduced for FlashPlayer 7 and mirrors ECMAScript 4, which is actually quite a nice language, IMHO.
ActionScript isn't 100% complete, as it omits or changes a few minor things (e.g., eval() isn't implemented in any useful way), but really, it's just trivial stuff.
I think there's some server-side version of ActionScript, but almost all the usage I'm aware of is for programming Flash movies.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, that's a bug, not a feature. I know this is a hopelessly unfashionable attitude, but all data conversions need to be explicit. The language should make this as terse as appropriate, but no terser... but I don't *ever* want the language to do anything under the hood without my explicit approval.
Furthermore, for those 'one-off' administrative/glue type apps - you can ignore it entirely if the manipulation of the data is well defined
Sorry, I don't believe in the existence of such code. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing with some confidence of reliability.
I wish I had mod points today (and that you weren't AC). You deserve karma for this.
Um, but how much does it COST?
Ah, logic:
1. Program "X" is poorly written
2. Program "X" is written in Language "Y"
3. Therefore, Language "Y" is incapable of producing anything but poorly written programs
Sigh...
Huh? How is ActionScript not "seriously object oriented"?
ActionScript 2 (which is nearly identical to ECMAScript 4) is a dynamically-typed object-oriented language that's really a joy to work in... much more pleasant, IMHO, than, say, Python, since it also allows for compile-time type checking without compromising the dynamic typing ability of the language. (See here for more info.)
It doesn't get as much attention around Slashdot, presumably because there is no robust FOSS development-and-playback environment (at least, none that I'm aware of), but if you like Python, Ruby, etc., you're doing yourself a disservice by ignoring AS2/ES4...
Depends. I always assumed that "mome" was an adjective describing "rath", presumably a noun, in which case
raths['mome'].outgrabe()
might be more appropriate...
Wow. You are my new friend.
I totally agree. C++ is what I pretty much have to use for work, and it's pretty much the best of a bad lot.
Of all the stuff you mention, C# is most appealing to me from a language design standpoint... if only I could use it without installing a 23 megabyte runtime package first, that is...
Wish I still had mod points. Give me compile-time type checking and I'll be all over Python.
Yeah, but I shouldn't have to use a separate tool. If it's a good idea to run such checks -- and, IMHO, it always is -- it should be built in to the standard language.
(Keep in mind that I'm the kind of coder that cranks the C++ warning level as high as it will go, and then set the flag to treat all warnings as errors...)
Interestingly, I just started trying to learn Python recently, for just these reasons... but soon gave up in frustration.
My issue is that I live for static typing. Yes, yes, yes, I know it's (apparently) very unfashionable to want the compiler to check for trivial mistakes, but I'm funny that way.
Don't get me wrong: dynamic typing is great. It's a wonderful tool to have available. But more often than not, I know the type that I need, and can make my app more reliable by enforcing those constraints at compile time rather than at runtime.
But the final straw has to be the deliberate omission of variable-declaration statements -- this is like some nightmare out of circa-1982-BASIC. What, it's too hard to declare variables? C'mon, that's not flexibility -- that's laziness.
The idea of an interpreted, dynamically-typed language with a huge standard library is verrry appealing to me, but I refuse to switch unless I can have static type checking built in to the language.
(For that reason, ECMAScript 4, aka JavaScript 2.0, aka ActionScript 2.0, is looking more and more interesting to me: I get all of the dynamically-typed goodness I want, along with flexible compile-time type checking that is "on" by default, but trivially easy to work around. If only there was a way for me to use all the existing Python libraries from there...)
A sucky Open-Source product is still sucky.
Don't let your philosophy blind you to the fundamentals of software quality.
Thanks for the link. I stand corrected.
Yep, I'll agree with you on this one... with allowance for a few sites that don't really make sense any other way (e.g., the aforementioned Homestar Runner), of course. But those are definitely the exception rather than the rule.
Yeah, it's a "trojan", but you say that like it's a bad thing.
Look, a lot of phone makers want SVG-Tiny support on their phone. Macromedia wants to put Flash Lite on a lot of phones. This is an obvious way to make that happen.
But geez, there's no big conspiracy to get proprietary stuff on phones just to Stick It To You Open Source guys... we just have a technical solution that we happen to think is pretty damn good, that will suit the mobile market well. So what if it's proprietary? I defy you to show be ONE SINGLE PHONE in existence that runs on Open Source software; phone makers seem to be pretty happy with using whatever will get the job done, without getting all religious about this.
Honestly, I read Slashdot daily, but I'll never understand the peculiar Flash-Is-Evil bias. Yes, there are annoying ads that use it. There are also annoying ads that use animated GIF, and even HTML. It's just a tool, folks, and like the song says, every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.
And for the expected flood of responses saying, "You can do this with SVG+DHTML+SMIL+etc,etc"... bollocks. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's practical.
Look: 98% of interesting interactive animated stuff on the Web is done using Flash rather than that something else. I submit to you that this is not a coincidence! Artists aren't stupid, and they sure as hell aren't going to spend hundreds of dollars on Flash if there really was a superior (or even comparable) solution available for free.
I'll tell you what: why don't you go off and write a nice, free authoring tool for SVG that is good enough for the Homestar guys to completely replace all those Strong Bad Emails with. (I will, of course, expect the final result needs to be just as bandwidth- and processor-efficient as Flash.) Until then, please, give it a rest.
(Disclaimer: I work for Macromedia (though not related to the Flash Lite effort in any way), so I expect to be ignored or dramatically modded down...)
You're missing the point.
Let me fill in the context, as I was the unfortunate recipient of this statement.
Our team was working on a project that was behind schedule and buggy besides. I was a fresh hire, just a few months out of college. In a status meeting, I attempted to be helpful, and suggested that if QA was finding more bugs, we'd be able to fix more bugs, thus rendering it less buggy. (Our QA department was in another city, so we had no day-to-day contact with them.)
At this point, the head of development gave me a stern look and said, "The purpose of QA is not to *find* bugs; the purpose of QA is to *verify* that *there are no bugs*."
I, of course, remained silent for the rest of the meeting...
But I learned a valuable lesson, namely that you don't code something, then "throw it over the wall" to QA to flush out the bugs; you code with the intent that there are no bugs, and when QA finds one, you take it seriously, and as a defect that you should strive to avoid by careful design and coding practices.
Dammit, you posted that before I could :-)
So I'll quote his other bit of wisdom that is impressed on my brain, aka "Crowder's Law of Optimization": "If the function result doesn't have to be correct, I can make the function as fast as you like."
http://www.transgaming.com/gamepage.php?gameid=115 6
Rating:
0 out of 5 [ Does not install and does not work. ]
Yes, but this is a good thing. It makes it easy to use Flash for simple webconferencing. The camera is disable by default, IIRC.
City of Heroes currently gets a "0 out of 5" (won't install) on the Wine compatibility list.
:-)
Since I'm running it every freaking day, I think I'm stuck with Windows for a while.
Get COH running, then we'll talk
In addition, a unified API akin to .NET or Cocoa, instead of these 20 or so different APIs which require that I install all of them since everybody likes to code for different ones instead of coding to a standard.
Hallelujah! I wish I could mod you higher than 5.
> VxVM, VxFS, VCS.
Damn... I feel totally out of the loop, because I have NO fucking idea what you are talking about...
I think I speak for most of /. when I say:
What, are you insane?
Oh, to have mod points today...
Yes, it is beautiful, but it is NOT "staggeringly well designed." Trust me on this; I was a former owner of a Sparrow, and found out -- the hard way -- that a three-wheeled, rear-driven layout is fundamentally unstable in the event of fishtail: flip, roll, totaled.
m essage/3680)
In addition, the quality of both design and construction was truly dismal. I wondered sometimes if the Corbins didn't bother to design anything ahead of time, but just sort of threw things together, bodged it around until it worked, kinda.
They had a cool concept, but absolutely no idea how to actually execute that in a reliable and profitable way, and so the Sparrows were MASSIVELY unreliable; mine was out of service for, literally, 2/3 or 3/4 of the time I owned it, and stalled -- twice! -- crossing the Bay Bridge. (Ever been stalled on the Bay Bridge? Now imagine doing so in a very small fiberglass container.)
No... there's no way this vehicle can be worthwhile without a ground-up redesign by folks who actually know what they are doing. I know nothing of Myers Motors, so maybe they are smart folks, but if they're starting with the existing design, they've already made a big mistake.
If, say, Honda, or Toyota, or even Piaggio, designed a vehicle like this, I might be interested....
(For more info on a Sparrow's crashworthiness, see: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/sparrow_ev/
No, ActionScript is essentially ECMAScript, aka JavaScript.
ActionScript 1.x was the language for Flash Player 5 and 6, and corresponds to ECMAScript 3 / JavaScript 1.x, IIRC.
ActionScript 2.x was introduced for FlashPlayer 7 and mirrors ECMAScript 4, which is actually quite a nice language, IMHO.
ActionScript isn't 100% complete, as it omits or changes a few minor things (e.g., eval() isn't implemented in any useful way), but really, it's just trivial stuff.
I think there's some server-side version of ActionScript, but almost all the usage I'm aware of is for programming Flash movies.