Haskell has overloading and type inference. The way it achieves this results in a weird not-your-mother's-OO type system, which is nevertheless very elegant.
Haskell is a truly amazing language. I'm very surprised its not more popular than it is.
Given his list of requirements, C++ (with the Boost libraries) looks like the language to choose. Love it though I do, it must be admitted it can be real pig-dog tricky - but with patience and a little understanding it will get you there.
This article,
Open Source for the Enterprise, gives a really good review of how to use C/C++ effectively, alongside other open-source technologies like mySQL, PHP, Perl, Python.
I'm still trying to work out exactly why his boss would specify multiple inheritance if he hadn't already decided that C++ was the answer
Well, alot of women (including myself) get into these games because the men they know in real life are playing them. Of the three women in my guild, two have husbands - you know, real ones they sleep with - who play the game.
When I was doing alot of IRC, the stay at home moms were a big proportion of the people in the chat-room I opped. Not surprising, really: the computer provides a lifeline to adult conversation. These games provide a 3D interactive environment in which to chat and meet people - what's not to like?
Re:Best RTS ever in my not so humble opinion...
on
HIstory of RTS Games
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· Score: 1
I can't believe they didn't even mention Age of Empires/Age of Kings
They gave them a whole page, in part II of the article.
Definitely the possibility of a defensive posture in TA set the game apart, especially since airpower gives you the chance to suddenly switch (hence the Rapier Rush, hooray!). And, hey, the names of the units are cool. Let's face it, even if you don't know what a Doomsday Machine does, it definitely sounds bad!
The truth is that computing languages are far from unified. This is partly because the best of breed languages are often very good at what they specialise in. It's hard to beat Perl for scripting, or C for imperative programming or Haskell for functional programming.
For object orientation, there are loads of choices, with C++, Java and Visual Basic duking it out at the popular end, with Smalltalk apparently alive and well in its niche.
Meanwhile languages which really could change the world, like Python or LISP or Objective Caml, are generally under-appreciated, as they are never going to be as "good" or as "fast" as Perl or C.
The semantics issue lies elsewhere. Both Java and.Net call themselves "open standards" but scratch the surface and you find trademarks, patents and restrictive licensing. They are proprietary standards for which reference implementations are given away free: so, free beer rather than free speech.
This doesn't make them bad, of course. You just have to think what the agenda is for the people issuing them. For Sun, Java came about to sell more Sun hardware. For Microsoft,.Net is how they plan extend their operating systems presence (which they make no money anyway) by moving up a layer, and so support their market for middleware and desktop apps (where they coin it in). There's nothing wrong with commerce, and.Net is probably going to make alot of commercial sense, just as J2EE does now.
As for open source / free software development, if people want to give their spare time furthering the corporate objectives of Sun and Microsoft, hey, good luck to them. But lets be clear about that this is what they are doing.
Depending on the business needs, another solution which uses OpenPGP (the standard on which GPG is based) is the Hushmail service. This service works much like Hotmail (web access) but encrypts the mail using OpenPGP, and provides a PKI service.
The great thing about Hushmail to Hushmail messages is end-to-end security: not only are you using encryption to protect the files, the messages stay on the providers servers in another country. So, for baddies, even getting access to the files to attempt to decrypt them is tricky.
It's a commercial service which also provides an encrypted storage service, for a small charge.
He makes the point that computing (and life) is a "very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own".
There are several reasons to think about switching.
The first is trust: while people often talk about access to source code being essential for security (and then nobody looks at the code), with popular encryption software everyone looks at the source code. You can trust open source encryption software more than closed source. Nevertheless, there is no evidence to suggest that NAI's commercial PGP has a deliberate back door (whatever people might have heard or believe).
Another reason is licensing: the NAI PGP license is quite prescriptive, in terms of what it permits you to do with the product (or say about it). In big companies, you may have people travelling to countries controlled by nasty regimes. You don't want them to have to uninstall their encryption software before they go to a country because the license says so (being arrested at the airport is a different matter...). GPG is covered by the German export regime, which is much more friendly than that of the US.
A third is commercial: NAI have have scaled back development effort on PGP software, and may well sell PGP desktop. You could certainly end up paying for software which is not effectively supported.
All of this is a shame, because PGP had every chance of flourishing under NAI, and it was shaping up to be a really good little product. Even as it is, it has definitely raised the bar for the usability of encryption software. Technically, I still think its pretty good (even with the above issues) but commercially, its position is questionable.
When you are buying security software, you have to both trust the software and trust the people who make the software.
Sucessful families with 1.2 children (below the replacement level, their genes are effectively selected against). Poverty level people having 3.6 children (geneticaly sucessfull).
This was noticed by scientists in the 19th century, who postulated that in time, the world would be taken over by morons. My belief is that this actually happened, but we are now too stupid to realise.
Heh, picture the scene. Just as the Robot Commander walks up Capitol Hill to mark the final victory of the Windows Machines, the whole army blue-screens.
I must admit, I'd never heard of ramen noodles until the Unix worm of the same name did the rounds. A delicious discovery. Let's hope other viruses have tasty gastronomic origins..I think.
various bits of unix software (deceptively close to the man page system) could be used to not only format the cookbook, but also to glom it together, build a permuted index, and drop the lot to your printer
Try setting up something like that now and see how hard it is: I often think all this new technology is taking us backwards. In Windows, a little animated paperclip would appear halfway through saying, "You are trying to write a letter. Shall I start Word for you?".
They were invited. In fact the Web development team spent a lot of time and effort getting Microsoft to support the Web and deploy a browser.
Ah, that explains alot. When you invite a vampire into your home, you are powerless against him. Oh well, next time we come up with a global standards-based network, we'll know who to leave off the guest-list.
quite to the contrary, there is no better time to experiement than the present, with your current level of knowledge. You should be messaing around, trying things, seeing what works.
Oh definitely. I found playing around with Hugs (the Haskell interpreter/compiler) way cool. Of course, it helps to get an education in numerical methods (at the least so you know how the tools work in the background), but getting a feel for things in real time helps alot
Haskell and Hugs would be good choices: the wonderful thing about functional languages is you can create a very high level of abstraction, which is great for solving maths and engineering problems. Go to:
http://www.haskell.org
Slashdot Mirror
My C++ compiler uses that rule. When I try to compile code at 2am, the compiler will often be like, "yeah, right, as if".
Haskell is a truly amazing language. I'm very surprised its not more popular than it is.
Given his list of requirements, C++ (with the Boost libraries) looks like the language to choose. Love it though I do, it must be admitted it can be real pig-dog tricky - but with patience and a little understanding it will get you there.
This article, Open Source for the Enterprise, gives a really good review of how to use C/C++ effectively, alongside other open-source technologies like mySQL, PHP, Perl, Python.
I'm still trying to work out exactly why his boss would specify multiple inheritance if he hadn't already decided that C++ was the answer
Well, alot of women (including myself) get into these games because the men they know in real life are playing them. Of the three women in my guild, two have husbands - you know, real ones they sleep with - who play the game.
When I was doing alot of IRC, the stay at home moms were a big proportion of the people in the chat-room I opped. Not surprising, really: the computer provides a lifeline to adult conversation. These games provide a 3D interactive environment in which to chat and meet people - what's not to like?
They gave them a whole page, in part II of the article.
Definitely the possibility of a defensive posture in TA set the game apart, especially since airpower gives you the chance to suddenly switch (hence the Rapier Rush, hooray!). And, hey, the names of the units are cool. Let's face it, even if you don't know what a Doomsday Machine does, it definitely sounds bad!
The truth is that computing languages are far from unified. This is partly because the best of breed languages are often very good at what they specialise in. It's hard to beat Perl for scripting, or C for imperative programming or Haskell for functional programming.
For object orientation, there are loads of choices, with C++, Java and Visual Basic duking it out at the popular end, with Smalltalk apparently alive and well in its niche.
Meanwhile languages which really could change the world, like Python or LISP or Objective Caml, are generally under-appreciated, as they are never going to be as "good" or as "fast" as Perl or C.
It's a shame, but hey, its kind of democratic.
The semantics issue lies elsewhere. Both Java and .Net call themselves "open standards" but scratch the surface and you find trademarks, patents and restrictive licensing. They are proprietary standards for which reference implementations are given away free: so, free beer rather than free speech.
This doesn't make them bad, of course. You just have to think what the agenda is for the people issuing them. For Sun, Java came about to sell more Sun hardware. For Microsoft, .Net is how they plan extend their operating systems presence (which they make no money anyway) by moving up a layer, and so support their market for middleware and desktop apps (where they coin it in). There's nothing wrong with commerce, and .Net is probably going to make alot of commercial sense, just as J2EE does now.
As for open source / free software development, if people want to give their spare time furthering the corporate objectives of Sun and Microsoft, hey, good luck to them. But lets be clear about that this is what they are doing.
Depending on the business needs, another solution which uses OpenPGP (the standard on which GPG is based) is the Hushmail service. This service works much like Hotmail (web access) but encrypts the mail using OpenPGP, and provides a PKI service.
The great thing about Hushmail to Hushmail messages is end-to-end security: not only are you using encryption to protect the files, the messages stay on the providers servers in another country. So, for baddies, even getting access to the files to attempt to decrypt them is tricky.
It's a commercial service which also provides an encrypted storage service, for a small charge.
Seeing this, I felt I had to post a link to the wonderful "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson.
He makes the point that computing (and life) is a "very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own".
Heh, I still dream of one day being able to reach the Battlezone volcano and see what's inside...
Yes! And a Linux box to control the temperature of your heating: throw away your silly thermostats!/P?
There are several reasons to think about switching.
The first is trust: while people often talk about access to source code being essential for security (and then nobody looks at the code), with popular encryption software everyone looks at the source code. You can trust open source encryption software more than closed source. Nevertheless, there is no evidence to suggest that NAI's commercial PGP has a deliberate back door (whatever people might have heard or believe).
Another reason is licensing: the NAI PGP license is quite prescriptive, in terms of what it permits you to do with the product (or say about it). In big companies, you may have people travelling to countries controlled by nasty regimes. You don't want them to have to uninstall their encryption software before they go to a country because the license says so (being arrested at the airport is a different matter...). GPG is covered by the German export regime, which is much more friendly than that of the US.
A third is commercial: NAI have have scaled back development effort on PGP software, and may well sell PGP desktop. You could certainly end up paying for software which is not effectively supported.
All of this is a shame, because PGP had every chance of flourishing under NAI, and it was shaping up to be a really good little product. Even as it is, it has definitely raised the bar for the usability of encryption software. Technically, I still think its pretty good (even with the above issues) but commercially, its position is questionable.
When you are buying security software, you have to both trust the software and trust the people who make the software.
Interesting that Massey university are among the leading lights behind Mondrian .Net, according to this page. Make sure you get your royalties, dude.
We lived in a cardboard box in the middle of t' road, and every morning we had to lick t' road clean wi' t' tongue.
The heart of the net is now and always has been Monty Python. I bet Jon Katz wasn't expecting the Spanish inquisition.
This was noticed by scientists in the 19th century, who postulated that in time, the world would be taken over by morons. My belief is that this actually happened, but we are now too stupid to realise.
Heh, picture the scene. Just as the Robot Commander walks up Capitol Hill to mark the final victory of the Windows Machines, the whole army blue-screens.
It's like we're in some parallel universe, isn't it? I'm half expecting a Buffy or a Picard to show up and restore the timeline.
I must admit, I'd never heard of ramen noodles until the Unix worm of the same name did the rounds. A delicious discovery. Let's hope other viruses have tasty gastronomic origins..I think.
Try setting up something like that now and see how hard it is: I often think all this new technology is taking us backwards. In Windows, a little animated paperclip would appear halfway through saying, "You are trying to write a letter. Shall I start Word for you?".
Ken Thompson was indeed C's inventor, as this article by, um, Dennis Ritchie describes: The Development of the C: Language
You do burgers, I'll do fries.
Ah, that explains alot. When you invite a vampire into your home, you are powerless against him. Oh well, next time we come up with a global standards-based network, we'll know who to leave off the guest-list.
Oh definitely. I found playing around with Hugs (the Haskell interpreter/compiler) way cool. Of course, it helps to get an education in numerical methods (at the least so you know how the tools work in the background), but getting a feel for things in real time helps alot
Haskell and Hugs would be good choices: the wonderful thing about functional languages is you can create a very high level of abstraction, which is great for solving maths and engineering problems. Go to: http://www.haskell.org
Lisp/Scheme and ML would also be good choices.