>> Sure, it makes it a little easier for the dev, but in the end, you are just learning 5 times the amount of Opa when you could learn each thing.
I see it the other way round. When you are dealing with all the languages and formats we have now there is a huge amount of wasted duplication. Look at how you concatenate strings in Javascript versus PHP. Or calculate a random number. Or iterate an array. obj->method() or obj.method() or obj->val or obj.val ? How about encode a non-ascii character in a URI, or in XML, or in HTML? Which characters are reserved in HTML or XML or JSON or a URI or SQL or a regular expression? How do you walk a DOM in Javascript versus PHP (versus Ruby/JSP/NET/etc.) ? Frankly, I have better things to do with my limited time on this planet that memorize all these little conventions over and over again slightly differently each time.
If I can learn and use Opa and not have to meddle with the others, then it's a win. But if I have to use Opa to perform string concatenation to construct javascript or SQL. then it's a loss. I can live with having to concatenate HTML and CSS (but I'd rather not).
Wt is cool, but compare the listings for the Wt chat application versus that of Opa. How many orders of magnitude are there between the lengths of the two listings? 1? 2? The Opa listing would fit on a t-shirt.
So I think that is at least a partial answer to your question of "why a new programming language required".
Personally, I also find that most new language announcements are unnecessary. There are already many great languages available, could not a tool or library accomplish the same thing? However, in this particular space I'm less opposed to the introduction of a new language. The whole web app thing is already a rotten stinking soup of languages, protocols and formats (SQL, PHP/JSP/NET/Ruby/Python, HTML, CSS, XML, Javascript etc etc etc) and I am very sympathetic to any one-language-to-rule-them-all solution. If I can worry about one instead of legion I'll be better off.
However, though I have not yet used Opa or Wt yet, looking through their example code listings I see HTML strings being constructed in the Opa listing, and Javascript code being concatenated in Wt. And for both CSS files seem to also be BYO. That isn't necessarily unreasonable, but you can see the slope we are on. So now I'm using Opa/Wt to write HTML (or Javascript) and I have to provide the CSS myself. Am I really ahead of the curve, or wearing mittens? How is this different than (gulp) PHP? What about the database? Does my Opa/Wt code need to construct SQL query strings? If I, or my designer, wants to add some new jQuery plugin that will be announced tomorrow, how is that approached?
I've been fairly impressed with Opa from what I've read on its site. I'm hoping to get some time to actually play with it and maybe get to the bottom of some of these questions.
I think that dreamweaver will essentially become a photoshop add-on. This way, very smart graphic designers will make a beautiful graphic, click on the "Dream-Weave-it" button, and presto: A complete web page with rollovers from layers.
There seems to be an implicit assumption in this topic and some of the follow up postings that if your email address is receiving pornographic email then you must have been visiting pornographic sites or partaking of pornographic services. Thus the embarassment of taking the issue to the boss.
But who believes that anymore?
I'm sure this was true for the primitive Internet inhabitants of the 90's, but this is the noughts (00s). I thought by now that everyone knew that if your email is public at all, then you will start receiving spam, and a high percentage of that spam will be porn related because a high percentage of all spam is porn related. And second that the only difference between a public and private email address is time. The longer an email address has existed, then (usually) the more exposure it has had, and thus, the more spam you receive.
So, in short, there's no issue. If you think your boss should know about or do something about your spam, tell him/her.
The "get out and do something" advice is probably the best. I've been working from home since 1996, and _by far_ the most rewarding social interaction has been taking up dancing (tango, in my case).
Walks in parks and dogs are great, but they are no substitute for people. Girlfriends/boyfriends also great, but a lot of people who work regular jobs come home and want to relax, watch TV, and do nothing.
Not me, after working all day alone at home at the computer, I want to get out and be with people. So I took up dancing. It's not just mingling and conversation, when you are dancing you are actually touching other people. It is like human contact in a concentrated form. So if you have little to no contact with people all day, going out and dancing for a few hours will make you right as rain.
Sometimes my girlfriend comes out with me (we dance with everyone who is there, not just each other), and sometimes she doesn't.
Not surprisingly, at the dances and classes I've been to there are lots of women and they come from all walks of life. But a majority of the men are engineers and computer people.
Anyway, it may sound silly, but it's worth trying.
(P.S. most cities have vibrant salsa, tango, and swing dance venues. Be careful of the ballroom dances (foxtrot, waltz, etc.) which have all but been taken over by the high pressure Arthur Murray-like dance studios.)
Forget it - You won't be suing anyone.
on
Who Is An ISP?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you are an ISP and want to sue, you can only sue violating spammers. But this bill defines what "spam" and "spammers" are, and it's probably not the definition you or I would use.
According to this new bill, so long as the email has an "opt out" link and is not sent to anyone on the Do Not Spam list, then that email message is not, according to the proposed law, spam.
In other words, nothing will change. And, if you live in California or Virginia, this new bill has less protection than state laws, and will override and _decrease_ your legal protections from spam.
So, the question of whether you fit the definition of an ISP is somewhat moot. Sadly, the law specifically prevents consumers and businesses from suing.
IANAL, but it seems more like a "Pro-Spam" bill than an "Anti Spam" bill to me.
Hopefully the "Do Not Spam" list part of the bill has some teeth.
I sort of like the pay-to-mail system, but I don't like sending the money to a big company/government.
You know who should get the 1 cent? The recipient!
If I send you a mail, I pay a penny, you get one. If you reply, you spend a penny, and I'm up. So most "conversations" will cost at most one penny total.
And, if you do something noteworthy in the world, like the Star Wars Kid, and people send you thousands of emails to "congratulate" you, guess what: windfall!
When my youngest brother was about 4 years old, every day he'd wake up and watch at least one of the Star Wars trilogy in the morning which one of my other brothers had gotten on VHS.
Soon, he had them each memorized, and would speak the lines along with the characters and jump around like he was in the movie.
But this took a lot of time, and being a busy four year old, he, like our OP, started watching them in play-fastforward. And he'd jump around yelling out the every line in the movie at double speed.
To entertain guests me or my brothers would feed him a couple lines from those movies and he'd take off and start performing - double speed theater.
He rarely missed a line, and even had much of the Jabba-the-Hut sounds memorized correctly.
He's a teenager now, and when I last asked him about this, he says he's forgotten and can't remember any of the lines. But I'm pretty sure he's lying...
A lot of the posts here have posited answers to why computers crash (people, complexity, unsafe languages, etc.), but most everyone seems resigned to it.
It should not be acceptable that they crash.
Personally, I'm shocked every time I use a computer as to how primitive they are and how little has changed. Is it, or is it not the year 2003?
All of these posited problems are solvable.
Unsafe Languages? Stop using them. Someone please design hardware and an OS that disallows their use and disallows unsafe behavior. There are safe languages that compile and provide performance today (Lisp comes to mind, perhaps C#, Java's getting faster everyday, and there are safe subsets of C++). Start using those. And then someone go write something better.
I earnestly believe that if the hardware/OS had good protection at the lowest level then performance would not necessarily have to suffer. If the OS is written in a language where the API is solidly contracted, then _true_ safety can be enforced at compile time, and not slow down the system at runtime.
People? Users should _never_ be able to crash their machine. The person riding the elevator should have _no_ way, no matter how contrived, of making the elevator crash. And if the problem is programmers, then kick them out of the loop by forcing them to use safe languages, libraries and tools.
Complexity? Well, this is the kicker isn't it? "you can't foresee all the possible conclusions". But we don't need to see all possible conclusions to stop crashes. And if we lay a foundation of solid transactions on solid APIs with solid languages, then complexity will be reduced, there will be less dark "unknown" spaces. Maybe it'll even be easier to write software with fewer bugs.
As long as day to day coding is made up of tasks like preventing one-off errors and null pointer references, then the really big and great programs like an artificial intelligence or a _full_ natural language interface, will never be written.
Computers are virtual machines - their ability to model anything is their amazing strength - so, why as coders, have we chosen to make the development of code so brittle?
Perhaps we didn't "choose" this, perhaps we just failed to choose something else, but we code in the fashion that we do because we made it that way, and as Jaron Lanier points out, it doesn't have to be that way.
Coding is the rendering of ideas into machine executable form. The process of coding is ours to construct. Fast proceessors, cheap memory and storage and ubiquitous network connectivity are around the corner, if not here today. These have traditionally been the shackles that held coding back. But they are gone now (or will be soon), we can change the way things are done.
I think what is needed is a new language that will put compile-time and run-time code on equal footing. It would be great if they had the same syntax.
Lisp has the same syntax for macros as it has for any of its code.
If your project depends upon the genericity and data collection that STL provides then you probably would be better served my Lisp (IMHO).
Obviously, if you are at a business where C++ is required then Lisp may not be an option for you. But if you have the freedom to make language choices, check it out.
http://www.alu.org
Personally, I don't mind the ads. I am subscribing today - but only to help out slashdot, not to avoid ads.
Is there no decent system for micropayments yet? What if there was a 2 cent charge to post a reply or opinion? I wouldn't mind that. Just so long as the transaction is effortless (paypal is NOT effortless)
You're confusing with Arlen Specter, who served on the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination. Arlen Specter developed the "magic bullet" theory.
He is now Senator Arlen Specter, republican senator for Pennsylvania.
Slashdot Mirror
>> Sure, it makes it a little easier for the dev, but in the end, you are just learning 5 times the amount of Opa when you could learn each thing.
I see it the other way round. When you are dealing with all the languages and formats we have now there is a huge amount of wasted duplication. Look at how you concatenate strings in Javascript versus PHP. Or calculate a random number. Or iterate an array. obj->method() or obj.method() or obj->val or obj.val ? How about encode a non-ascii character in a URI, or in XML, or in HTML? Which characters are reserved in HTML or XML or JSON or a URI or SQL or a regular expression? How do you walk a DOM in Javascript versus PHP (versus Ruby/JSP/NET/etc.) ? Frankly, I have better things to do with my limited time on this planet that memorize all these little conventions over and over again slightly differently each time.
If I can learn and use Opa and not have to meddle with the others, then it's a win. But if I have to use Opa to perform string concatenation to construct javascript or SQL. then it's a loss. I can live with having to concatenate HTML and CSS (but I'd rather not).
Wt is cool, but compare the listings for the Wt chat application versus that of Opa. How many orders of magnitude are there between the lengths of the two listings? 1? 2? The Opa listing would fit on a t-shirt. So I think that is at least a partial answer to your question of "why a new programming language required". Personally, I also find that most new language announcements are unnecessary. There are already many great languages available, could not a tool or library accomplish the same thing? However, in this particular space I'm less opposed to the introduction of a new language. The whole web app thing is already a rotten stinking soup of languages, protocols and formats (SQL, PHP/JSP/NET/Ruby/Python, HTML, CSS, XML, Javascript etc etc etc) and I am very sympathetic to any one-language-to-rule-them-all solution. If I can worry about one instead of legion I'll be better off. However, though I have not yet used Opa or Wt yet, looking through their example code listings I see HTML strings being constructed in the Opa listing, and Javascript code being concatenated in Wt. And for both CSS files seem to also be BYO. That isn't necessarily unreasonable, but you can see the slope we are on. So now I'm using Opa/Wt to write HTML (or Javascript) and I have to provide the CSS myself. Am I really ahead of the curve, or wearing mittens? How is this different than (gulp) PHP? What about the database? Does my Opa/Wt code need to construct SQL query strings? If I, or my designer, wants to add some new jQuery plugin that will be announced tomorrow, how is that approached? I've been fairly impressed with Opa from what I've read on its site. I'm hoping to get some time to actually play with it and maybe get to the bottom of some of these questions.
I think that dreamweaver will essentially become a photoshop add-on. This way, very smart graphic designers will make a beautiful graphic, click on the "Dream-Weave-it" button, and presto: A complete web page with rollovers from layers.
That plug-in already exists:
http://www.medialab.com/sitegrinder/
There seems to be an implicit assumption in this topic and some of the follow up postings that if your email address is receiving pornographic email then you must have been visiting pornographic sites or partaking of pornographic services. Thus the embarassment of taking the issue to the boss.
But who believes that anymore?
I'm sure this was true for the primitive Internet inhabitants of the 90's, but this is the noughts (00s). I thought by now that everyone knew that if your email is public at all, then you will start receiving spam, and a high percentage of that spam will be porn related because a high percentage of all spam is porn related. And second that the only difference between a public and private email address is time. The longer an email address has existed, then (usually) the more exposure it has had, and thus, the more spam you receive.
So, in short, there's no issue. If you think your boss should know about or do something about your spam, tell him/her.
The "get out and do something" advice is probably the best. I've been working from home since 1996, and _by far_ the most rewarding social interaction has been taking up dancing (tango, in my case). Walks in parks and dogs are great, but they are no substitute for people. Girlfriends/boyfriends also great, but a lot of people who work regular jobs come home and want to relax, watch TV, and do nothing. Not me, after working all day alone at home at the computer, I want to get out and be with people. So I took up dancing. It's not just mingling and conversation, when you are dancing you are actually touching other people. It is like human contact in a concentrated form. So if you have little to no contact with people all day, going out and dancing for a few hours will make you right as rain. Sometimes my girlfriend comes out with me (we dance with everyone who is there, not just each other), and sometimes she doesn't. Not surprisingly, at the dances and classes I've been to there are lots of women and they come from all walks of life. But a majority of the men are engineers and computer people. Anyway, it may sound silly, but it's worth trying. (P.S. most cities have vibrant salsa, tango, and swing dance venues. Be careful of the ballroom dances (foxtrot, waltz, etc.) which have all but been taken over by the high pressure Arthur Murray-like dance studios.)
If you are an ISP and want to sue, you can only sue violating spammers. But this bill defines what "spam" and "spammers" are, and it's probably not the definition you or I would use.
According to this new bill, so long as the email has an "opt out" link and is not sent to anyone on the Do Not Spam list, then that email message is not, according to the proposed law, spam.
In other words, nothing will change. And, if you live in California or Virginia, this new bill has less protection than state laws, and will override and _decrease_ your legal protections from spam.
So, the question of whether you fit the definition of an ISP is somewhat moot. Sadly, the law specifically prevents consumers and businesses from suing.
IANAL, but it seems more like a "Pro-Spam" bill than an "Anti Spam" bill to me.
Hopefully the "Do Not Spam" list part of the bill has some teeth.
I sort of like the pay-to-mail system, but I don't like sending the money to a big company/government.
You know who should get the 1 cent? The recipient!
If I send you a mail, I pay a penny, you get one. If you reply, you spend a penny, and I'm up. So most "conversations" will cost at most one penny total.
And, if you do something noteworthy in the world, like the Star Wars Kid, and people send you thousands of emails to "congratulate" you, guess what: windfall!
When my youngest brother was about 4 years old, every day he'd wake up and watch at least one of the Star Wars trilogy in the morning which one of my other brothers had gotten on VHS.
Soon, he had them each memorized, and would speak the lines along with the characters and jump around like he was in the movie.
But this took a lot of time, and being a busy four year old, he, like our OP, started watching them in play-fastforward. And he'd jump around yelling out the every line in the movie at double speed.
To entertain guests me or my brothers would feed him a couple lines from those movies and he'd take off and start performing - double speed theater.
He rarely missed a line, and even had much of the Jabba-the-Hut sounds memorized correctly.
He's a teenager now, and when I last asked him about this, he says he's forgotten and can't remember any of the lines.
But I'm pretty sure he's lying...
A lot of the posts here have posited answers to why computers crash (people, complexity, unsafe languages, etc.), but most everyone seems resigned to it.
It should not be acceptable that they crash.
Personally, I'm shocked every time I use a computer as to how primitive they are and how little has changed. Is it, or is it not the year 2003?
All of these posited problems are solvable.
Unsafe Languages? Stop using them. Someone please design hardware and an OS that disallows their use and disallows unsafe behavior.
There are safe languages that compile and provide performance today (Lisp comes to mind, perhaps C#, Java's getting faster everyday, and there are safe subsets of C++). Start using those. And then someone go write something better.
I earnestly believe that if the hardware/OS had good protection at the lowest level then performance would not necessarily have to suffer. If the OS is written in a language where the API is solidly contracted, then _true_ safety can be enforced at compile time, and not slow down the system at runtime.
People? Users should _never_ be able to crash their machine. The person riding the elevator should have _no_ way, no matter how contrived, of making the elevator crash. And if the problem is programmers, then kick them out of the loop by forcing them to use safe languages, libraries and tools.
Complexity? Well, this is the kicker isn't it? "you can't foresee all the possible conclusions". But we don't need to see all possible conclusions to stop crashes. And if we lay a foundation of solid transactions on solid APIs with solid languages, then complexity will be reduced, there will be less dark "unknown" spaces. Maybe it'll even be easier to write software with fewer bugs.
As long as day to day coding is made up of tasks like preventing one-off errors and null pointer references, then the really big and great programs like an artificial intelligence or a _full_ natural language interface, will never be written. Computers are virtual machines - their ability to model anything is their amazing strength - so, why as coders, have we chosen to make the development of code so brittle? Perhaps we didn't "choose" this, perhaps we just failed to choose something else, but we code in the fashion that we do because we made it that way, and as Jaron Lanier points out, it doesn't have to be that way. Coding is the rendering of ideas into machine executable form. The process of coding is ours to construct. Fast proceessors, cheap memory and storage and ubiquitous network connectivity are around the corner, if not here today. These have traditionally been the shackles that held coding back. But they are gone now (or will be soon), we can change the way things are done.
I think what is needed is a new language that will put compile-time and run-time code on equal footing. It would be great if they had the same syntax. Lisp has the same syntax for macros as it has for any of its code. If your project depends upon the genericity and data collection that STL provides then you probably would be better served my Lisp (IMHO). Obviously, if you are at a business where C++ is required then Lisp may not be an option for you. But if you have the freedom to make language choices, check it out. http://www.alu.org
Personally, I don't mind the ads. I am subscribing today - but only to help out slashdot, not to avoid ads. Is there no decent system for micropayments yet? What if there was a 2 cent charge to post a reply or opinion? I wouldn't mind that. Just so long as the transaction is effortless (paypal is NOT effortless)
You're confusing with Arlen Specter, who served on the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination. Arlen Specter developed the "magic bullet" theory. He is now Senator Arlen Specter, republican senator for Pennsylvania.
all programming languages for timing multiple projector slide shows. I'd warrant there are people still using these, though, I don't know any