Nothing to do with "can't" - drop the superior bullshit, please. I wrote C apps for nearly ten years, for Windows (since 3.1 to Win 2000) and Unix (HP-UX, AIX) so it's not like I'm some bandwagon jumper.
Granted, in your extremely limited area, sure, some people are writing C desktop apps. I shouldn't have said "nobody", I guess:) But in the mainstream app world, it's just not getting used. Windows and Macs are the desktop. On Windows, it's C++. On the Mac, it's Objective-C. With KDE (the leading Linux desktop), it's C++.
But granted, there are exceptions.
Of course, C is everywhere in the systems world (my world, these days).
Yes, you're correct - I currently code in it for a living:)
Please settle down. My point was, it's not used for DESKTOP APPS. Period (well, except in the Linux world). Talk to Adobe, MS, IBM, etc. etc. They use C++. Adobe even uses Qt.
C is everywhere, for sure, and it's an excellent tool for certain jobs. My paycheques will attest to that. But it is not a universal tool, and there are way better ways of writing desktop stuff.
Take a peek at the KDE source code sometime, if you haven't already. It is really, really impressive stuff, probably the nicest, cleanest, most productive desktop programming environment I've seen. This is possible because of their hard committment to C++ and its many features.
Let's not forget other C++ niceties, which are so basic we take them for granted: const correctness and references.
Smartpointers are like localised garbage collectors.
I don't think C++ obviates the need for managed code (on the server, Java rules) but C++ has many things going for it on the client, at least for the time being.
Actually, the grandparent is correct. Just look to common industry practises for the evidence you need: no one writes desktop apps in C any more. C++ is the de facto standard, for many reasons. And it will be replaced by one (or several) of the managed code languages.
It all comes down to time: development time, and maintenance time. C is a costly language, and companies don't want to pay for it.
Re:Too funny.
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Those signs are fucking idiotic.
Newsflash to morons: you don't need trees to make paper. Lots and lots of cheap, easy-to-grow plants are loaded with cellulose.
And yes, I grew up in a logging town, in a logging family, and I'm quite familiar with the logging industry. Chopping down trees to make toilet paper and diaper fill is utterly, utterly tragic.
Well, the Republicans are pretty far to the right of the Liberals. The Conservatives are pretty close, I guess. Of course, they have no chance of ever getting elected, as some of their prominent members let it be known that they are religious, which is political death in Canada.
Anyway, personally I think the middle-of-the-road path is good, although I agree about the NDP. A leftist party like that makes for a good social conscience; they would be well suited as a powerful Official Opposition. Canadians haven't raised a huge stink about the financial scandals simply because the economy is good, the budget is balanced (there's a huge surplus, in fact), there's lots of job creation, and life is generally okay. So we need an opposition with teeth.
I'm not so sure I'd like to see the NDP in power. But certainly years of Liberal government have led to the inevitable corruption.
I agree. Snow Crash just doesn't deserve the hype. I was massively disappointed.
Not often mentioned are Gibson's other books in the Neuromancer series: Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. If I remember correctly, the linking character is the enigmatic Molly.
There's actually almost no debate on the issue, except amongst people who let ideology clobber their ability to view cold, hard, data.
For example, ice core sampling from Canada, Greenland, Antarctica, and so forth show abrupt greenhouse gas increases that coincide very strongly with human activity. Very few atmospheric scientists argue against data like this; as a previous poster said, it would be like arguing against evolution. The only basis for doing so would be that it somehow counters your personal belief system.
I find that most of those who bring up the "there's debate on the issue" or "it's junk science" arguments are arguing from belief, not fact, and as a bonus, they tend to have no scientific training whatsoever.
...but strangely, it never has. Try and find a single case where Greenpeace has hurt anybody with tree spiking.
The amount of misinformation about environmental groups is astounding. How, exactly, are Greenpeace terrorists? Hamas and the Sept. 11 guys are terrorists. Greenpeace is a lobby group, and, at most, promotes a bit of civil disobedience now and then. People waving signs and shouting are not terrorists.
Re:My favourite book is...
on
Practical C++
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"Modern C++ Design" is an absolute mind-bender. I don't know if I'll ever use some of that stuff - I find doing singletons the old-fashioned way works for me, quite frankly - but it sure has opened my mind. That typelist stuff - whew. And just when you thought you knew everything about smart pointers...
What I've taken away from that book is the incredible power and elegance of policy-based design. Every working C++ programmer should understand it, I think.
Because religion isn't on the same ground as science/technology. It's faith, and orthogonal to this discussion, or any discussion predicated upon logic and evidence.
Furthermore, it's verbal pollution. How about I keep talking about the family of aliens that lives in my closet? When I'm modded down, I'll just get mad and call everyone idiots for not wanting to foster "discussion".
You believe in something that few here share. It's as simple as that. Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, Jesus - it's all the same.
Re:Perdido Street Station
on
King Rat
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, Mieville had some cool ideas, but the guy simply can't write. His characters were cliched, the dialogue was clunky, and all that overwrought description just killed me. Honestly, good ideas can't overcome bad writing. And PSS is bad.
Of course, that's just my opinion - if you enjoyed it, then that's excellent, and money well spent.
It has compiled with icc (the Intel compiler) since 2.5.x, I believe. By the way, why were you "hoping" for this? What difference does it make to you?
Perdido Street Station
on
King Rat
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The only other Mieville book I've read, Perdido Street Station, didn't impress me at all. Underneath the hey-wow story setting - a city set amongst the ribs of a giant, dead beast - I found a pretty typical storyline, and some truly godawful writing. I mean, exposition and description are nice, but come on.
Right now, I'm reading a bunch of Elmore Leonard. Does anyone write better dialogue than this guy? No. His books are taut and practically impossible to put down - unlike Mieville's, which I struggled mightily to finish.
Then he shouldn't have called it "A New Kind of Science" if he was just ingenuously "writing a book". Right? If he wrote a book called, "Some Cool Thoughts on Cellular Automata", with the proper credits, then great. But the title he chose is flamebait, pure and simple, and his absolute refusal to let others review it or edit it and his insistence on self-publishing doom his work to becoming a historical curiosity. It's pretty clear he didn't simply regard this as any other book. His comments about the book - "revolutionary", "will change everything", etc. - make that obvious.
I absolutely agree that everyone should share the bounty of their thoughts. But if you do so, and you don't tolerate other's opinions or contributions after the fact, then it's not exactly sharing, is it? It's dictating. And that is anathema to most thinking people.
He gives the finger to those whose lives are based on this sort of work by his arrogance, and by not tolerating criticism or review. It's the sort of attitude the Church might take if you point out irregularities in the Bible.
Do you know what "peer review" means? There's a reason why he is widely mocked. You can't get taken seriously as an academic unless others get the chance to review your work. Period. Most of what's in the book is old news. See reviews of the book in the Physics Review, etc.
I guess it would seem pretty cool to you if you've never seen CA before. Sadly, others have, and are underwhelmed by Wolfram.
Give GEB another try. Those "wordgames" are an entertaining way to describe and demonstrate some very deep things - paradoxes, recursion, and Godel's theorems.
I agree with most of what you've said, but you are being idealistic. Globalisation is also supposed to result in a raised standard of living for those other countries - but unless corporations are held to Western standards of human rights, environmental laws, and so forth, it won't happen, except for a privileged few.
If the only arguments you've heard against globalisation are the "Agh, where's my job gone?" variety, you haven't been listening very hard. Remember the Seattle riot? Much of that was a protest against overseas corporate behaviour taking advantage of extremely lax/repressive human rights situations.
Once corporations have to be responsible internationally, just watch those foreign wages rise. Then it won't seem like such a great deal to outsource after all.
This is a weird attitude that I don't quite understand. Sure, they deserve jobs. But do they deserve Western jobs (outsourcing has hit Canada, Europe, etc. too)? It's like saying, "They deserve jobs! Let's give them ours, shall we?"
The corps doing the outsourcing are based in the West. They receive the benefits of being situated here - stable democracy, relatively little corruption, a more or less objective judiciary - while being able to avoid some of our more onerous requirements, like health insurance, environmental standards, and so forth, by outsourcing. True globalisation is supposed to provide those things for all the employees - but right now, it's very one-sided, with the corporations getting all the advantages. If companies want to seek cheap labour elsewhere, then they should be made to abide by the same human rights standards that they would in the West, don't you think?
The old "Indians deserve work too" argument is bogus and deceptive. It really boils down to "corporations should be able to find cheap labour wherever they want". They aren't doing this for the benefit of the foreign workers, as evidenced by the fact that they don't abide by Western standards of corporate behaviour. And Indians don't "deserve" our jobs; they deserve their own.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing to do with "can't" - drop the superior bullshit, please. I wrote C apps for nearly ten years, for Windows (since 3.1 to Win 2000) and Unix (HP-UX, AIX) so it's not like I'm some bandwagon jumper.
:) But in the mainstream app world, it's just not getting used. Windows and Macs are the desktop. On Windows, it's C++. On the Mac, it's Objective-C. With KDE (the leading Linux desktop), it's C++.
Granted, in your extremely limited area, sure, some people are writing C desktop apps. I shouldn't have said "nobody", I guess
But granted, there are exceptions.
Of course, C is everywhere in the systems world (my world, these days).
"everywhere i go, i see C projects."
:)
Yes, you're correct - I currently code in it for a living
Please settle down. My point was, it's not used for DESKTOP APPS. Period (well, except in the Linux world). Talk to Adobe, MS, IBM, etc. etc. They use C++. Adobe even uses Qt.
C is everywhere, for sure, and it's an excellent tool for certain jobs. My paycheques will attest to that. But it is not a universal tool, and there are way better ways of writing desktop stuff.
Take a peek at the KDE source code sometime, if you haven't already. It is really, really impressive stuff, probably the nicest, cleanest, most productive desktop programming environment I've seen. This is possible because of their hard committment to C++ and its many features.
Yes! Loki! What an amazing thing.
Let's not forget other C++ niceties, which are so basic we take them for granted: const correctness and references.
Smartpointers are like localised garbage collectors.
I don't think C++ obviates the need for managed code (on the server, Java rules) but C++ has many things going for it on the client, at least for the time being.
Hey, Prolog is awesome! I loved the Prolog course I took back in school...
Then again, writing a graphical app in it would be hell on earth, I'm sure.
Actually, the grandparent is correct. Just look to common industry practises for the evidence you need: no one writes desktop apps in C any more. C++ is the de facto standard, for many reasons. And it will be replaced by one (or several) of the managed code languages.
It all comes down to time: development time, and maintenance time. C is a costly language, and companies don't want to pay for it.
Those signs are fucking idiotic.
Newsflash to morons: you don't need trees to make paper. Lots and lots of cheap, easy-to-grow plants are loaded with cellulose.
And yes, I grew up in a logging town, in a logging family, and I'm quite familiar with the logging industry. Chopping down trees to make toilet paper and diaper fill is utterly, utterly tragic.
Well, the Republicans are pretty far to the right of the Liberals. The Conservatives are pretty close, I guess. Of course, they have no chance of ever getting elected, as some of their prominent members let it be known that they are religious, which is political death in Canada.
Anyway, personally I think the middle-of-the-road path is good, although I agree about the NDP. A leftist party like that makes for a good social conscience; they would be well suited as a powerful Official Opposition. Canadians haven't raised a huge stink about the financial scandals simply because the economy is good, the budget is balanced (there's a huge surplus, in fact), there's lots of job creation, and life is generally okay. So we need an opposition with teeth.
I'm not so sure I'd like to see the NDP in power. But certainly years of Liberal government have led to the inevitable corruption.
I agree. Snow Crash just doesn't deserve the hype. I was massively disappointed.
Not often mentioned are Gibson's other books in the Neuromancer series: Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. If I remember correctly, the linking character is the enigmatic Molly.
Hmm. So you're using evidence from one wingnut group to discredit what you consider to be another. Nice logic there.
"Junk science" from Nobel laureates...heh heh.
There's actually almost no debate on the issue, except amongst people who let ideology clobber their ability to view cold, hard, data.
For example, ice core sampling from Canada, Greenland, Antarctica, and so forth show abrupt greenhouse gas increases that coincide very strongly with human activity. Very few atmospheric scientists argue against data like this; as a previous poster said, it would be like arguing against evolution. The only basis for doing so would be that it somehow counters your personal belief system.
I find that most of those who bring up the "there's debate on the issue" or "it's junk science" arguments are arguing from belief, not fact, and as a bonus, they tend to have no scientific training whatsoever.
...but strangely, it never has. Try and find a single case where Greenpeace has hurt anybody with tree spiking.
The amount of misinformation about environmental groups is astounding. How, exactly, are Greenpeace terrorists? Hamas and the Sept. 11 guys are terrorists. Greenpeace is a lobby group, and, at most, promotes a bit of civil disobedience now and then. People waving signs and shouting are not terrorists.
"Modern C++ Design" is an absolute mind-bender. I don't know if I'll ever use some of that stuff - I find doing singletons the old-fashioned way works for me, quite frankly - but it sure has opened my mind. That typelist stuff - whew. And just when you thought you knew everything about smart pointers...
What I've taken away from that book is the incredible power and elegance of policy-based design. Every working C++ programmer should understand it, I think.
Because religion isn't on the same ground as science/technology. It's faith, and orthogonal to this discussion, or any discussion predicated upon logic and evidence.
Furthermore, it's verbal pollution. How about I keep talking about the family of aliens that lives in my closet? When I'm modded down, I'll just get mad and call everyone idiots for not wanting to foster "discussion".
You believe in something that few here share. It's as simple as that. Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, Jesus - it's all the same.
Yeah, Mieville had some cool ideas, but the guy simply can't write. His characters were cliched, the dialogue was clunky, and all that overwrought description just killed me. Honestly, good ideas can't overcome bad writing. And PSS is bad.
Of course, that's just my opinion - if you enjoyed it, then that's excellent, and money well spent.
It has compiled with icc (the Intel compiler) since 2.5.x, I believe. By the way, why were you "hoping" for this? What difference does it make to you?
The only other Mieville book I've read, Perdido Street Station, didn't impress me at all. Underneath the hey-wow story setting - a city set amongst the ribs of a giant, dead beast - I found a pretty typical storyline, and some truly godawful writing. I mean, exposition and description are nice, but come on.
Right now, I'm reading a bunch of Elmore Leonard. Does anyone write better dialogue than this guy? No. His books are taut and practically impossible to put down - unlike Mieville's, which I struggled mightily to finish.
Then he shouldn't have called it "A New Kind of Science" if he was just ingenuously "writing a book". Right? If he wrote a book called, "Some Cool Thoughts on Cellular Automata", with the proper credits, then great. But the title he chose is flamebait, pure and simple, and his absolute refusal to let others review it or edit it and his insistence on self-publishing doom his work to becoming a historical curiosity. It's pretty clear he didn't simply regard this as any other book. His comments about the book - "revolutionary", "will change everything", etc. - make that obvious.
I absolutely agree that everyone should share the bounty of their thoughts. But if you do so, and you don't tolerate other's opinions or contributions after the fact, then it's not exactly sharing, is it? It's dictating. And that is anathema to most thinking people.
He gives the finger to those whose lives are based on this sort of work by his arrogance, and by not tolerating criticism or review. It's the sort of attitude the Church might take if you point out irregularities in the Bible.
Heh - yes, I tend to look at his cleverness as enthusiasm for the subject, rather than an ego thing. But I see your point.
Remember, he was very young (in his 20s, I think) when he wrote it. His later stuff ("Metamagical Themas", for instance) is a bit more readable.
From their FAQ:
"Some parts, such as the gnome-vfs, and Bonobo wrappers are not yet mature."
Do you know what "peer review" means? There's a reason why he is widely mocked. You can't get taken seriously as an academic unless others get the chance to review your work. Period. Most of what's in the book is old news. See reviews of the book in the Physics Review, etc.
I guess it would seem pretty cool to you if you've never seen CA before. Sadly, others have, and are underwhelmed by Wolfram.
Give GEB another try. Those "wordgames" are an entertaining way to describe and demonstrate some very deep things - paradoxes, recursion, and Godel's theorems.
C is portable all right - assuming you love the preprocessor.
...
... ...and so on. Yuck.
#ifdef SPARC
#endif
#ifdef X86
#endif
Just out of pure interest, what do you use for your "low-volume" stuff?
I agree with most of what you've said, but you are being idealistic. Globalisation is also supposed to result in a raised standard of living for those other countries - but unless corporations are held to Western standards of human rights, environmental laws, and so forth, it won't happen, except for a privileged few.
If the only arguments you've heard against globalisation are the "Agh, where's my job gone?" variety, you haven't been listening very hard. Remember the Seattle riot? Much of that was a protest against overseas corporate behaviour taking advantage of extremely lax/repressive human rights situations.
Once corporations have to be responsible internationally, just watch those foreign wages rise. Then it won't seem like such a great deal to outsource after all.
This is a weird attitude that I don't quite understand. Sure, they deserve jobs. But do they deserve Western jobs (outsourcing has hit Canada, Europe, etc. too)? It's like saying, "They deserve jobs! Let's give them ours, shall we?"
The corps doing the outsourcing are based in the West. They receive the benefits of being situated here - stable democracy, relatively little corruption, a more or less objective judiciary - while being able to avoid some of our more onerous requirements, like health insurance, environmental standards, and so forth, by outsourcing. True globalisation is supposed to provide those things for all the employees - but right now, it's very one-sided, with the corporations getting all the advantages. If companies want to seek cheap labour elsewhere, then they should be made to abide by the same human rights standards that they would in the West, don't you think?
The old "Indians deserve work too" argument is bogus and deceptive. It really boils down to "corporations should be able to find cheap labour wherever they want". They aren't doing this for the benefit of the foreign workers, as evidenced by the fact that they don't abide by Western standards of corporate behaviour. And Indians don't "deserve" our jobs; they deserve their own.