I can follow what you wrote, I typed most of the code in Conrad Barski's enjoyable Land of Lisp text into the REPL myself and watched it all run. But for better or for ill if you lay out the requirements for a medium size application and toss it in front of me, I can pretty quickly architect it in my mind. I'm not at that point with Lisp or Clojure, not yet... and I'd rather be there with Lisp or Clojure than with Java.:)
I wrote basically the same response to this above - I'm thinking in terms of my kids. The television already does streaming video and DVDs, adding a gaming console will just increase the intensity of the fights over who gets to pick the current show. A tablet will cause a temporary increase in fights just because it's the newest toy when we first get it, but after the novelty wears off the kids will just take turns between the television and tablet.
And there's also the long drives we take once a month or so. I can't hook up the PS4 in the minivan, but I can bring a tablet.
I'm mostly thinking in terms of having a family. If I get a gaming console, that just increases the fighting for use of the television. It's also a tremendous help for when we go on long drives to visit family members.
I don't type much on the tablet touch-screen except for searches through Netflix movie lists and lists of books I own. If I want to get any serious work done with one, I would use an external monitor and bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
I don't think the prevalence of C-like syntax means anything good or bad for the value of C-like syntax. I think it's pure momentum. It's easier to sell lazy programmers and the Pointy-Headed-Boss on moving from C to C++ when you can show them similar syntax. That doesn't mean C++ is the best tool for what they're trying to accomplish - it may be the best tool, but the familiar syntax is a factor that sells the change. Likewise, it's easier to sell lazy programmers and the Pointy-Headed-Boss on moving from C++ to Java or C++ to C# when you can show them similar syntax.
Likewise, functional programming has a lot of hype these days, but it's still not taking the industry by storm. Whether it's a waste of time, or decent but absurdly over-hyped is beside the point. Adoption of it is moving slowly in part because going from C-like syntax to Haskell, Scheme, Clojure, Ocaml, or Erlang is difficult.
I'm in the process of learning Lisp, especially - but not limited to - the dialect Clojure. But I have a long way to go before I'm writing non-trivial applications.
Even with excellent developers, it's better to restrict your use of harder tools to where their use is necessary. All other things being equal, smaller codebases are easier to maintain and easier to audit for security flaws.
But further, we're in an incredible Javascript performance war. Ten years ago well-written Javascript was routinely over a hundred times slower and a hundred times less memory efficient than well-written C or C++. Today, the difference in speed or memory is rarely a factor of twenty and is often less than ten, and that's not even counting Mozilla's asm.js project. For an awful lot of applications, that performance hit is worthwhile.
C++ is incredibly powerful and incredibly necessary, but it's so much harder to use well than Java, Javascript, Python, etc.... that the smart thing to do is restrict your C++ to the smallest possible subset of your application you need it to manage.
That's how Firefox works - the core engine is C++, and that of course includes the Javascript interpreter, but the UI is then done with Javascript and XML, to keep the C++ as small as possible. Likewise the EmacsLisp in Emacs does all of the heavy lifting, but the EmacsLisp interpreter itself is written in C. They could write the whole editor in C and leave EmacsLisp strictly for user scripting, but it made more sense to restrict the C code because it's harder to get it to work properly than EmacsLisp.
Well, in theory the smart TV gives you the advantage that you have fewer cables to manage. And if you have a lot of electronic equipment, that's a big deal. My room with computers has three desktops, one laptop and docking station, four monitors, five speakers, one wireless router, one home VOIP phone, one business VOIP phone, one USB webcam, one microphone, one cable modem, USB keyboards, USB mice, bluetooth keyboards and mice, and probably a partridge in a pear tree. Even with liberal use of zip-ties, the multitude of cables looks awful and is a pain to manage. And it could be worse, the cell phone and tablet chargers are in another room. (I have a big family, only a fraction of this stuff is mine.)
But I agree with you. The problem with a Smart TV, or fifteen years ago the problem with a TV with builtin DVD and VCR, is that there's a good chance the television screen and speakers will work long after the add-on component is broken. It's the same reason I use desktops instead of laptops unless I absolutely need portability - replacing and upgrading components is so much cheaper and more convenient than moving to a newer, more expensive device.
You can't take your console into another room while your dad watches a football game. You can't take your console for a drive. And the interface for surfing the web or posting to Twitter on your console usually sucks.
I thought about getting a Playstation 4, but I think I'm going to save up and get a relatively high end Android hybrid tablet with attachable keyboard, like the next generation equivalent to the ASUS Transformer TF701T (or whatever the designation is). My kids and I can use it as a tablet when we're goofing off, and I can use it as a min-laptop when I want, and I can use bluetooth keyboard and mouse plus an external monitor when I want true productivity (plus remote desktop/VNC into my home desktop if I need more processing power and RAM than the tablet provides).
It shouldn't be a flame war. In order to make a meaningful comparison between two programming languages I think you need to have a high level of skill in each, and write two feature-equivalent non-trivial programs in each.
Most of the flame wars are between people who don't have good expertise in at least one of the languages under discussion, arguing about merits and drawbacks in simple programs.
I think what Charles Dawnson plans will be interesting, educational, and fun, but you can't become good enough in a language in a week to have a useful opinion on its effectiveness at creating the next social network, operating system kernel, C compiler, web browser, search engine or office suite.
I should have been more clear. I'll be voting independent or "None of the above" in national elections. I am in favor of abortion rights, gay marriage (or equivalently, a complete removal of government privileges and legal recognition of marriage in any form in favor of some sort of generic legal contract between adults), and better social services.
I realize that many people would call that a waste of the vote and bring up "lesser of two evil" arguments. I was one of them, until this year. Enough is enough, this is two parties that use several minor issues to pretend to be different while both destroying the middle class, lining the pockets of special interests, and now paving the way towards a totalitarian state with 100% surveillance. Both parties have to go.
Think in terms of negotiation. Employees negotiate their salary every few years as part of getting a raise or interviewing for a new job. Any company except for a very tiny one has staff dedicated full time to negotiating compensation for employees at the lowest possible level that will not negatively impact productivity and employee retention.
It's like trying to get the best deal out of a car salesman. You buy cars every few years, or even less often than that. He sells cars for a living. What percentage of the population gets a fair deal on a car purchase? 10%? 5%?
I left one job and discovered I was grossly underpaid for my skills while I was there. At another job after I left, I discussed compensation with a few other former employees and we discovered that although I was paid fairly, they were underpaid.
That kind of thing can have severe consequences for your career, long term. If your potential next employer asks for a salary history you have to lie, or refuse to discuss it - which gives the appearance that you were underpaid relative to your skill level because of incompetence, or tell the truth - which also gives the appearance you were underpaid relative to your skill level because of incompetence. Making 30% under market rate once can impact your career options for decades.
Last, and most important, public disclosure of salaries permits companies to continue discriminating pay scales based on the race, age, or sex of the employee. At the job where I was paid market wages and a number of former colleagues were not, the others were all older women. They were competent, professional, productive employees, but the company paid them far less than it paid me precisely because they could get away with it. That's good for the shareholders, but not fair.
There's also a lot of luck. I'm earning a six figure salary and I didn't stab anyone in the back or cut anyone's throat to get it. It was maybe 10% hard work and 90% luck. Most of my friends and family members bust their behinds harder than I ever have at their respective jobs for less money.
Nonsense. If I can live somewhere that affords me the ability to employ a maid service, a chef, a personal trainer, and a landscaping service, but the cost is that all of my neighbors have all of those things plus twenty vacation homes with a Ferrari in each of the twenty garages, I will still take it.
Now, if I already had sufficient savings for an early retirement, a fairly cushy lifestyle, etc... then your analogy would hold. Because I would already have the luxury of playing the grand game of "keeping up with the Joneses". But right now, literally more than 95% of the US population has concerns about the household long term financial solvency. If the price for any of us true middle-class folk to become someone with ten million dollars in assets was having Bill Gates living on my left, Larry Ellison on my right, and Larry Page across the street, I would pay it in a heartbeat.
Even before wikileaks and Snowden, most terrorist elements had to realize that their electronic communications were under surveillance.
Security through obscurity won't work for a company like Microsoft, or Google, or Apple, because they're a giant target that thousands of attackers will try to access. But for a terrorist group, they can circumvent these monitoring systems with simple obfuscating tricks because they have anonymity. Mail a paperback book full of one-time pads written in page margins to a friend in France, who mails it to a friend in Morocco, who mails it to wherever it's supposed to go. Then send messages using the pads. Encode messages in cat pictures and post them to Tumblr. Agree to use the basketball news items on Yahoo, and then send each other a string of numbers which are just the indices to the words in your message. Text what appears to be a wrong number, but in fact "sorry" means something specific and "oops" means something else specific. etc... Any of those are trivial for the NSA to defeat, but only if they know which people to watch and whole physical mail to intercept first. They can't put that kind of surveillance on everyone.
Seconded. I consider myself pretty firmly a political liberal... and I won't be voting for the Democrats in any national election. I still vote the person, not the party, at the state and local level.
I have to agree with yendor. You learn on your spare time because it's fun and because (anecdotally) most career advancement comes from changing jobs.
One out of my last five increases in compensation came from an employer unprompted, the other four came from a job change or from the threat of a job change with an offer from another employer in hand.
Most of my friends in the field have a similar experience, so either we all suck, or you're the one lucky enough to work for nicer employers than industry average.
Exactly. Individual, resource-intensive, and especially judicially approved (a warrant from a court that is not secret) surveillance and search is fine, that's a routine part of law enforcement.
What we have now, and what we need to stop, is having the government or any other organization know almost everything about everyone on a routine basis. That's the path towards dictatorship.
I don't know what point you're trying to make. I have no objection to law enforcement wiretaps and surveillance when they have law enforcements and public judicial oversight. That's been the way law enforcement operated for most of the previous century, and it's reasonable.
What we have now is mass surveillance, mass wiretaps, and no judicial oversight. That's what we're trying to halt.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/08/wired_opinion_patrick_ball/all/ This means that in practice, CryptoCat is no more secure than Yahoo chat,... Any host-based system that delivers the encryption engine to you each time you log in, and in which your keys reside on the server, you are never secure against the host (there’s new research on this called “host-proof hosting,” but it’s a long way from being ready to use in real applications). That means that if the host attacks you, or they fail to protect themselves, your encrypted data will be available to them. Remember that the host might attack you because someone evil has taken control of the host. If you are the hypothetical dissident in the Middle East, your government might contract a hacker to break into the CryptoCat server, Hushmail, or other host-based server, and thereby get access to all your data. Or they could bribe an employee at a host-based service. Again: in host-based security, all your security rests on your personal trust for the people at the host, and their ability to protect the server. There’s no real security in a technical sense.
There are reactor types that consume waste. That could mitigate the problem. There is also the Thorium nuclear reactors, which were researched in the 1950s or 1960s and proven feasible but abandoned by the US government because the Thorium nuclear reactors could not be made into weapons. Thorium reactor waste has a much shorter half-life. And of course, controlled fusion has been "20 years away" for fifty years. But sooner or later we'll get it right, and even if it takes 300 years of further investment, the payoff is immense.
Right, right. I'm just giving the other person the benefit of the doubt, to show that even under worse case conditions the scale of waste favors nuclear power immensely.
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I can follow what you wrote, I typed most of the code in Conrad Barski's enjoyable Land of Lisp text into the REPL myself and watched it all run. But for better or for ill if you lay out the requirements for a medium size application and toss it in front of me, I can pretty quickly architect it in my mind. I'm not at that point with Lisp or Clojure, not yet... and I'd rather be there with Lisp or Clojure than with Java. :)
I wrote basically the same response to this above - I'm thinking in terms of my kids. The television already does streaming video and DVDs, adding a gaming console will just increase the intensity of the fights over who gets to pick the current show. A tablet will cause a temporary increase in fights just because it's the newest toy when we first get it, but after the novelty wears off the kids will just take turns between the television and tablet.
And there's also the long drives we take once a month or so. I can't hook up the PS4 in the minivan, but I can bring a tablet.
I'm mostly thinking in terms of having a family. If I get a gaming console, that just increases the fighting for use of the television. It's also a tremendous help for when we go on long drives to visit family members.
I don't type much on the tablet touch-screen except for searches through Netflix movie lists and lists of books I own. If I want to get any serious work done with one, I would use an external monitor and bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
I don't think the prevalence of C-like syntax means anything good or bad for the value of C-like syntax. I think it's pure momentum. It's easier to sell lazy programmers and the Pointy-Headed-Boss on moving from C to C++ when you can show them similar syntax. That doesn't mean C++ is the best tool for what they're trying to accomplish - it may be the best tool, but the familiar syntax is a factor that sells the change. Likewise, it's easier to sell lazy programmers and the Pointy-Headed-Boss on moving from C++ to Java or C++ to C# when you can show them similar syntax.
Likewise, functional programming has a lot of hype these days, but it's still not taking the industry by storm. Whether it's a waste of time, or decent but absurdly over-hyped is beside the point. Adoption of it is moving slowly in part because going from C-like syntax to Haskell, Scheme, Clojure, Ocaml, or Erlang is difficult.
I'm in the process of learning Lisp, especially - but not limited to - the dialect Clojure. But I have a long way to go before I'm writing non-trivial applications.
Even with excellent developers, it's better to restrict your use of harder tools to where their use is necessary. All other things being equal, smaller codebases are easier to maintain and easier to audit for security flaws.
But further, we're in an incredible Javascript performance war. Ten years ago well-written Javascript was routinely over a hundred times slower and a hundred times less memory efficient than well-written C or C++. Today, the difference in speed or memory is rarely a factor of twenty and is often less than ten, and that's not even counting Mozilla's asm.js project. For an awful lot of applications, that performance hit is worthwhile.
C++ is incredibly powerful and incredibly necessary, but it's so much harder to use well than Java, Javascript, Python, etc.... that the smart thing to do is restrict your C++ to the smallest possible subset of your application you need it to manage.
That's how Firefox works - the core engine is C++, and that of course includes the Javascript interpreter, but the UI is then done with Javascript and XML, to keep the C++ as small as possible. Likewise the EmacsLisp in Emacs does all of the heavy lifting, but the EmacsLisp interpreter itself is written in C. They could write the whole editor in C and leave EmacsLisp strictly for user scripting, but it made more sense to restrict the C code because it's harder to get it to work properly than EmacsLisp.
Well, in theory the smart TV gives you the advantage that you have fewer cables to manage. And if you have a lot of electronic equipment, that's a big deal. My room with computers has three desktops, one laptop and docking station, four monitors, five speakers, one wireless router, one home VOIP phone, one business VOIP phone, one USB webcam, one microphone, one cable modem, USB keyboards, USB mice, bluetooth keyboards and mice, and probably a partridge in a pear tree. Even with liberal use of zip-ties, the multitude of cables looks awful and is a pain to manage. And it could be worse, the cell phone and tablet chargers are in another room. (I have a big family, only a fraction of this stuff is mine.)
But I agree with you. The problem with a Smart TV, or fifteen years ago the problem with a TV with builtin DVD and VCR, is that there's a good chance the television screen and speakers will work long after the add-on component is broken. It's the same reason I use desktops instead of laptops unless I absolutely need portability - replacing and upgrading components is so much cheaper and more convenient than moving to a newer, more expensive device.
If you can master Haskell, Lisp, Perl, and J in one week each, more power to you. I can't.
You can't take your console into another room while your dad watches a football game. You can't take your console for a drive. And the interface for surfing the web or posting to Twitter on your console usually sucks.
I thought about getting a Playstation 4, but I think I'm going to save up and get a relatively high end Android hybrid tablet with attachable keyboard, like the next generation equivalent to the ASUS Transformer TF701T (or whatever the designation is). My kids and I can use it as a tablet when we're goofing off, and I can use it as a min-laptop when I want, and I can use bluetooth keyboard and mouse plus an external monitor when I want true productivity (plus remote desktop/VNC into my home desktop if I need more processing power and RAM than the tablet provides).
It shouldn't be a flame war. In order to make a meaningful comparison between two programming languages I think you need to have a high level of skill in each, and write two feature-equivalent non-trivial programs in each.
Most of the flame wars are between people who don't have good expertise in at least one of the languages under discussion, arguing about merits and drawbacks in simple programs.
I think what Charles Dawnson plans will be interesting, educational, and fun, but you can't become good enough in a language in a week to have a useful opinion on its effectiveness at creating the next social network, operating system kernel, C compiler, web browser, search engine or office suite.
I should have been more clear. I'll be voting independent or "None of the above" in national elections. I am in favor of abortion rights, gay marriage (or equivalently, a complete removal of government privileges and legal recognition of marriage in any form in favor of some sort of generic legal contract between adults), and better social services.
I realize that many people would call that a waste of the vote and bring up "lesser of two evil" arguments. I was one of them, until this year. Enough is enough, this is two parties that use several minor issues to pretend to be different while both destroying the middle class, lining the pockets of special interests, and now paving the way towards a totalitarian state with 100% surveillance. Both parties have to go.
Think in terms of negotiation. Employees negotiate their salary every few years as part of getting a raise or interviewing for a new job. Any company except for a very tiny one has staff dedicated full time to negotiating compensation for employees at the lowest possible level that will not negatively impact productivity and employee retention. It's like trying to get the best deal out of a car salesman. You buy cars every few years, or even less often than that. He sells cars for a living. What percentage of the population gets a fair deal on a car purchase? 10%? 5%?
I left one job and discovered I was grossly underpaid for my skills while I was there. At another job after I left, I discussed compensation with a few other former employees and we discovered that although I was paid fairly, they were underpaid.
That kind of thing can have severe consequences for your career, long term. If your potential next employer asks for a salary history you have to lie, or refuse to discuss it - which gives the appearance that you were underpaid relative to your skill level because of incompetence, or tell the truth - which also gives the appearance you were underpaid relative to your skill level because of incompetence. Making 30% under market rate once can impact your career options for decades.
Last, and most important, public disclosure of salaries permits companies to continue discriminating pay scales based on the race, age, or sex of the employee. At the job where I was paid market wages and a number of former colleagues were not, the others were all older women. They were competent, professional, productive employees, but the company paid them far less than it paid me precisely because they could get away with it. That's good for the shareholders, but not fair.
There's also a lot of luck. I'm earning a six figure salary and I didn't stab anyone in the back or cut anyone's throat to get it. It was maybe 10% hard work and 90% luck. Most of my friends and family members bust their behinds harder than I ever have at their respective jobs for less money.
Nonsense. If I can live somewhere that affords me the ability to employ a maid service, a chef, a personal trainer, and a landscaping service, but the cost is that all of my neighbors have all of those things plus twenty vacation homes with a Ferrari in each of the twenty garages, I will still take it.
Now, if I already had sufficient savings for an early retirement, a fairly cushy lifestyle, etc... then your analogy would hold. Because I would already have the luxury of playing the grand game of "keeping up with the Joneses". But right now, literally more than 95% of the US population has concerns about the household long term financial solvency. If the price for any of us true middle-class folk to become someone with ten million dollars in assets was having Bill Gates living on my left, Larry Ellison on my right, and Larry Page across the street, I would pay it in a heartbeat.
Your post is genius, start to finish. Thanks.
Even before wikileaks and Snowden, most terrorist elements had to realize that their electronic communications were under surveillance.
Security through obscurity won't work for a company like Microsoft, or Google, or Apple, because they're a giant target that thousands of attackers will try to access. But for a terrorist group, they can circumvent these monitoring systems with simple obfuscating tricks because they have anonymity. Mail a paperback book full of one-time pads written in page margins to a friend in France, who mails it to a friend in Morocco, who mails it to wherever it's supposed to go. Then send messages using the pads. Encode messages in cat pictures and post them to Tumblr. Agree to use the basketball news items on Yahoo, and then send each other a string of numbers which are just the indices to the words in your message. Text what appears to be a wrong number, but in fact "sorry" means something specific and "oops" means something else specific. etc... Any of those are trivial for the NSA to defeat, but only if they know which people to watch and whole physical mail to intercept first. They can't put that kind of surveillance on everyone.
Seconded. I consider myself pretty firmly a political liberal... and I won't be voting for the Democrats in any national election. I still vote the person, not the party, at the state and local level.
I have to agree with yendor. You learn on your spare time because it's fun and because (anecdotally) most career advancement comes from changing jobs.
One out of my last five increases in compensation came from an employer unprompted, the other four came from a job change or from the threat of a job change with an offer from another employer in hand.
Most of my friends in the field have a similar experience, so either we all suck, or you're the one lucky enough to work for nicer employers than industry average.
Exactly. Individual, resource-intensive, and especially judicially approved (a warrant from a court that is not secret) surveillance and search is fine, that's a routine part of law enforcement.
What we have now, and what we need to stop, is having the government or any other organization know almost everything about everyone on a routine basis. That's the path towards dictatorship.
I don't know what point you're trying to make. I have no objection to law enforcement wiretaps and surveillance when they have law enforcements and public judicial oversight. That's been the way law enforcement operated for most of the previous century, and it's reasonable.
What we have now is mass surveillance, mass wiretaps, and no judicial oversight. That's what we're trying to halt.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/08/wired_opinion_patrick_ball/all/ ... Any host-based system that delivers the encryption engine to you each time you log in, and in which your keys reside on the server, you are never secure against the host (there’s new research on this called “host-proof hosting,” but it’s a long way from being ready to use in real applications). That means that if the host attacks you, or they fail to protect themselves, your encrypted data will be available to them. Remember that the host might attack you because someone evil has taken control of the host. If you are the hypothetical dissident in the Middle East, your government might contract a hacker to break into the CryptoCat server, Hushmail, or other host-based server, and thereby get access to all your data. Or they could bribe an employee at a host-based service. Again: in host-based security, all your security rests on your personal trust for the people at the host, and their ability to protect the server. There’s no real security in a technical sense.
This means that in practice, CryptoCat is no more secure than Yahoo chat,
There are reactor types that consume waste. That could mitigate the problem. There is also the Thorium nuclear reactors, which were researched in the 1950s or 1960s and proven feasible but abandoned by the US government because the Thorium nuclear reactors could not be made into weapons. Thorium reactor waste has a much shorter half-life. And of course, controlled fusion has been "20 years away" for fifty years. But sooner or later we'll get it right, and even if it takes 300 years of further investment, the payoff is immense.
Right, right. I'm just giving the other person the benefit of the doubt, to show that even under worse case conditions the scale of waste favors nuclear power immensely.
Do you really think nuclear technology will be static for 10.000 years?