Climate change and evolution bring out the right wingers and the religious cranks. Their arguments typically amount to "this is junk science!" or making completely false assertions, as the original poster did. Rational argument is impossible, and I guess I just snapped. It was satisfying to descend to their level, I must say.
Anyway, thanks for listening. I'm off to burn down some churches and abort a few fetuses.
No, I don't think they looked at it. It does look interesting, but they've gone down another path, and Flash/Flex is working for them, so that's the route they're taking.
Actually, Java would have been a great pick were it not for the massive download of the JRE, which doesn't work for our clients. The Flash download is much smaller, and it often comes preinstalled.
This stuff isn't for simple animations. It's for creating rich web apps - imagine something with the interactivity of a normal desktop app, but it runs in the browser. Our UI team is using it, and I have to say, it's impressive.
So it's a combination of ActionScript (i.e. ECMAScript), plus a bunch of widgets, plus an event loop, etc. It's really the only game in town if you want to write desktop-style apps that live in the browser - a big advantage, for example, is that you can open a socket to the server and receive asynchronous events, unlike an AJAX-based app, which must poll.
That's not to say it's without problems. The UI guys report a buggy ide to be the most maddening thing. Plus, of course, it's proprietary, which may be a problem for some.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was jointly established by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1988.
It's very good for making rich web clients, kind of like what XMLHttpRequest allows you to do, but better. Currently, nothing else competes. Java could have, but applets never succeeded.
"an inability to interact with the operating system"
Okay, now I know who I'm dealing with here - someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.
Well, in Vancouver, I know of certain companies that mostly only hire Asian, because it's Asians doing the hiring. If you're white, you'll need good luck to get hired, and if you're black, forget it - for some reason, many Asians hate blacks (a Chinese guy once translated the slang for "black person" for me: "black shit". I am not making this up).
On the other hand, our small company is nearly all white, except for two Asian women. They are both programmers. Our main criteria are English skills, which can be tough to find in this city, and of course technical prowess.
Yeah, about as interesting as wondering whether the Pink Rabbit of Estarcion placed all the ice crystals on the slopes of Mount Waddington by hand, or whether they formed as the result of well-established natural processes.
In other words, for logical people, it's not interesting at all.
Homeopaths are not "natural foods freaks". What they advocate has absolutely nothing to do with food. Homeopathy is a crackpot theory involving extreme dilution of harmful materials in the belief that ingesting them can cure illness. Sadly, the dilution is performed to such a degree that most "remedies" are just plain water.
Well, I stick by my comment about a great deal of Slashdot posters. Many are poorly informed about programming. Most don't work as programmers. I wasn't really referring to just "script kiddies" by that. Basically, "hard" things that deviate from the Unix norm (C and Perl, basically) are denigrated. C++ has a difficult syntax, exploits some of the more nether regions of object oriented design, and does not have a Unix-friendly history. Therefore, it is "bad", even to people whose total C knowledge amounts to "Hello World".
I agree about Ruby being Yet Another Language that tries to occupy a niche already filled by Python. That said, there is a great deal to be said for virtual machine-based languages. Python is just awesome. It boils down to requirements, and balancing the demands of rapid deployment with application speed. A VM language with a nifty, list-based syntax (I've heard it said that Python is Lisp with conventional syntax) is just the ticket if app speed is not the highest priority, but time to market is. Then you can profile what you've done and touch up the hot spots with custom modules written in C or C++, if you need to. It works quite well.
I too regard C++ as a beautiful and deep language whose possibilities are only just being explored.
All that said, I work in a startup with nine programmers. What we're doing with Python may allow us to succeed. If we were using a more time-costly language like C++, we would fail. So everything has its place;)
Well, I thought some patent-encumbrance thing might have held it back, but apparently not. No more heinous mppe patches for me just so I can vpn into work. Excellent news!
You have to remember who you're dealing with here. Many of Slashdot's commenters are kids who have dabbled in scripting or perhaps learned a bit of C in school. Then there are the people who are tangentially involved with IT, read gossip news sites, and believe they are tech authorities. Finally, there are hobby programmers who have no idea what the demands of the industry are, and believe that C is a perfectly fine language for everything, despite the fact that no one uses C except in the few specialised circumstances for which it is well suited (embedded, for example). There are good reasons for this.
C++ runs most of the world's desktop applications. In the open source world, it's used by KDE, Firefox, and many applications. It forms the bulk of the backend to huge enterprises like Google. It will be with us for a long time to come, because it offers structure, speed, and immense flexibility unmatched by most declarative languages (Andrei's Alexandresu's "Modern C++ Design" demonstrates these features well - that book is just mind boggling).
And of course C++'s syntax is not perfect, and of course it is dangerous when used improperly by C programmers who are averse to the STL, smart pointers, and so forth.
About the only thing I can see forcing it out of the application space is Microsoft convincing everyone to develop and rewrite with.Net and Windows.Forms. But that won't happen for ages, if at all.
Anyway, this is why most working programmers I know don't contribute comments to Slashdot. As you observed, it is just too tiresome fighting with people who have absolutely no idea.
It's CmdrTaco's news site. He, and the guys he hires, can write whatever the hell they want in the summaries. People who cry about it ("But they aren't objective! *sniff* *sob*") can go elsewhere.
You can type check at compile time with a utility called pychecker. It works very well. So, you can have the advantages of dynamic typing with the safety of static typing by taking this step. The best thing is to automate it, so it runs with your unit tests.
Huh? I use KDE every day at my job for development (C, C++, and Python), and I make a very good living at it. KDE absolutely rules, particularly Kate, Konsole, and of course Konqueror (I love being able to drag and drop files to remote computers over ssh). Gnome is just impossible, and the fact that it has such a broken architecture makes me squirm.
Podcast: Someone had the revolutionary idea of taking a compressed audio file and putting it online. Yeah, doesn't sound so sexy when I describe it for what it is, does it you morons? It would have been a great idea if streaming audio wasn't already around for over a decade before the word "podcast" entered the lexicon. Man, I can't stand the word "lexicon." Talking about all these shitty words has made me start using shitty words. I'm so pissed, I just slammed the door shut on some kid's nuts.
Podcasting: It's snob for "streaming audio."
Podcatcher: Any idiot with an iPod, web browser, or ears.
He's referring to Microsoft's tendency to snuff out open standards by adding proprietary extensions to them, not whatever you seem to think he's talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, I'll keep that in mind for next time.
Climate change and evolution bring out the right wingers and the religious cranks. Their arguments typically amount to "this is junk science!" or making completely false assertions, as the original poster did. Rational argument is impossible, and I guess I just snapped. It was satisfying to descend to their level, I must say.
Anyway, thanks for listening. I'm off to burn down some churches and abort a few fetuses.
You're wrong. Please read the article before trying to sound all educated and scientific, because you're neither.
No, I don't think they looked at it. It does look interesting, but they've gone down another path, and Flash/Flex is working for them, so that's the route they're taking.
Actually, Java would have been a great pick were it not for the massive download of the JRE, which doesn't work for our clients. The Flash download is much smaller, and it often comes preinstalled.
This stuff isn't for simple animations. It's for creating rich web apps - imagine something with the interactivity of a normal desktop app, but it runs in the browser. Our UI team is using it, and I have to say, it's impressive.
So it's a combination of ActionScript (i.e. ECMAScript), plus a bunch of widgets, plus an event loop, etc. It's really the only game in town if you want to write desktop-style apps that live in the browser - a big advantage, for example, is that you can open a socket to the server and receive asynchronous events, unlike an AJAX-based app, which must poll.
That's not to say it's without problems. The UI guys report a buggy ide to be the most maddening thing. Plus, of course, it's proprietary, which may be a problem for some.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was jointly established by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1988.
m
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.ht
It's very good for making rich web clients, kind of like what XMLHttpRequest allows you to do, but better. Currently, nothing else competes. Java could have, but applets never succeeded.
"an inability to interact with the operating system"
Okay, now I know who I'm dealing with here - someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.
Well, in Vancouver, I know of certain companies that mostly only hire Asian, because it's Asians doing the hiring. If you're white, you'll need good luck to get hired, and if you're black, forget it - for some reason, many Asians hate blacks (a Chinese guy once translated the slang for "black person" for me: "black shit". I am not making this up).
On the other hand, our small company is nearly all white, except for two Asian women. They are both programmers. Our main criteria are English skills, which can be tough to find in this city, and of course technical prowess.
Yeah, about as interesting as wondering whether the Pink Rabbit of Estarcion placed all the ice crystals on the slopes of Mount Waddington by hand, or whether they formed as the result of well-established natural processes.
In other words, for logical people, it's not interesting at all.
Homeopaths are not "natural foods freaks". What they advocate has absolutely nothing to do with food. Homeopathy is a crackpot theory involving extreme dilution of harmful materials in the belief that ingesting them can cure illness. Sadly, the dilution is performed to such a degree that most "remedies" are just plain water.
Well, I stick by my comment about a great deal of Slashdot posters. Many are poorly informed about programming. Most don't work as programmers. I wasn't really referring to just "script kiddies" by that. Basically, "hard" things that deviate from the Unix norm (C and Perl, basically) are denigrated. C++ has a difficult syntax, exploits some of the more nether regions of object oriented design, and does not have a Unix-friendly history. Therefore, it is "bad", even to people whose total C knowledge amounts to "Hello World".
;)
I agree about Ruby being Yet Another Language that tries to occupy a niche already filled by Python. That said, there is a great deal to be said for virtual machine-based languages. Python is just awesome. It boils down to requirements, and balancing the demands of rapid deployment with application speed. A VM language with a nifty, list-based syntax (I've heard it said that Python is Lisp with conventional syntax) is just the ticket if app speed is not the highest priority, but time to market is. Then you can profile what you've done and touch up the hot spots with custom modules written in C or C++, if you need to. It works quite well.
I too regard C++ as a beautiful and deep language whose possibilities are only just being explored.
All that said, I work in a startup with nine programmers. What we're doing with Python may allow us to succeed. If we were using a more time-costly language like C++, we would fail. So everything has its place
Well, I thought some patent-encumbrance thing might have held it back, but apparently not. No more heinous mppe patches for me just so I can vpn into work. Excellent news!
I know, and it's too bad. I would dump Firefox the slow memory hog in a second if Opera supported easy to use ad-blocking.
You have to remember who you're dealing with here. Many of Slashdot's commenters are kids who have dabbled in scripting or perhaps learned a bit of C in school. Then there are the people who are tangentially involved with IT, read gossip news sites, and believe they are tech authorities. Finally, there are hobby programmers who have no idea what the demands of the industry are, and believe that C is a perfectly fine language for everything, despite the fact that no one uses C except in the few specialised circumstances for which it is well suited (embedded, for example). There are good reasons for this.
.Net and Windows.Forms. But that won't happen for ages, if at all.
C++ runs most of the world's desktop applications. In the open source world, it's used by KDE, Firefox, and many applications. It forms the bulk of the backend to huge enterprises like Google. It will be with us for a long time to come, because it offers structure, speed, and immense flexibility unmatched by most declarative languages (Andrei's Alexandresu's "Modern C++ Design" demonstrates these features well - that book is just mind boggling).
And of course C++'s syntax is not perfect, and of course it is dangerous when used improperly by C programmers who are averse to the STL, smart pointers, and so forth.
About the only thing I can see forcing it out of the application space is Microsoft convincing everyone to develop and rewrite with
Anyway, this is why most working programmers I know don't contribute comments to Slashdot. As you observed, it is just too tiresome fighting with people who have absolutely no idea.
NAFTA is a free trade agreement between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. I thought libertarians were all in favour of free trade?
Personally, I am most curious about the liger.
It's CmdrTaco's news site. He, and the guys he hires, can write whatever the hell they want in the summaries. People who cry about it ("But they aren't objective! *sniff* *sob*") can go elsewhere.
Probably, although pychecker certainly mitigates some of the risk. We are using it, with great success, along with rigorous unit testing.
You can type check at compile time with a utility called pychecker. It works very well. So, you can have the advantages of dynamic typing with the safety of static typing by taking this step. The best thing is to automate it, so it runs with your unit tests.
http://secunia.com/advisories/14792/
PHP 4.3.10 is still used all over the place.
Huh? I use KDE every day at my job for development (C, C++, and Python), and I make a very good living at it. KDE absolutely rules, particularly Kate, Konsole, and of course Konqueror (I love being able to drag and drop files to remote computers over ssh). Gnome is just impossible, and the fact that it has such a broken architecture makes me squirm.
Hahaha great post.
On the other hand, this is a mildly-retarded "hey, great post" post, so mod me overrated.
From your link:
Podcast: Someone had the revolutionary idea of taking a compressed audio file and putting it online. Yeah, doesn't sound so sexy when I describe it for what it is, does it you morons? It would have been a great idea if streaming audio wasn't already around for over a decade before the word "podcast" entered the lexicon. Man, I can't stand the word "lexicon." Talking about all these shitty words has made me start using shitty words. I'm so pissed, I just slammed the door shut on some kid's nuts.
Podcasting: It's snob for "streaming audio."
Podcatcher: Any idiot with an iPod, web browser, or ears.
hahahaha
He's referring to Microsoft's tendency to snuff out open standards by adding proprietary extensions to them, not whatever you seem to think he's talking about.
Hahaha, great post.
"Hinduism: Overwhelming the Cowed Masses"
"Wicca, and other beliefs held by frizzy-haired women with too many cats"