Unlike some people, I feel using programming shorthand leads to increased maintenance.
Do you like seeing "public void setX()...public int getX().." a hundred thousand times to implicitly declare a bound property? Or would you rather see "published int x;" (to steal a line from C#) and be able to refer to x by field name rather than accessor method? I think simplifying code like this is a good idea. However, there is a dilemma created herein, as the example below will illustrate!
Thought Experiment #1 Assumption: Maintenance cost is directly correlated with program size. Therefore: The more terse the language grammar, the easier programs written in the language are to maintain. Thus: Perl.
Actually, most java compilers do exactly what you suggest. However, consider:
String foo = "Ripple in still water\n"; foo += "When there is no pebble tossed\n"; foo += "Or wind to blow.";
In this case, the compiler does the following steps:
1. Create new string "foo" with the initial value (this may already exist).
2. Turn foo into a StringBuffer and append "When..."
3. Turn foo back into a String.
4. Turn foo into a StringBuffer and append "Or..."
5. Turn foo back into a String.
So you can see this is not optimal. A human could easily rewrite the code as:
StringBuffer foo = new StringBuffer( "Ripple in still water\n" ); foo.append( "When there is no pebble tossed\n" ); foo.append( "Or wind to blow" ); String bar = foo.toString();
Here, we've saved one StringBuffer creation and one StringBuffer.toString() operation. Hooray us! But I do not believe any java compiler will make this level of optimization. Perhaps they are smarter now.
All the time, man. All the time. UNIX ruined my sentence comprehension.
"A herd of glib gnus gawk bashfully as they chomp their grub."
It's like the koan: "A monk asked Daigon, 'How does an enlightened one return to the normal world?' Daigon answered, 'A broken mirror never reflects again. Fallen leaves never return to old branches.'" I'll never read that the same way again.
That classic phrase is also the truth. At this moment I have 60 "priority 1" "bugs" in my queue, for our particular produkt. Each one would probably take on average 3 days to fix. At the same time I'm developing new features unrelated to those bugs. Last time I checked I was exactly *one* person.
Don't take it personally when your bugs are ignored. Fix them yourself if they're so tiny.
Is that it, or is it the opposite? I thought that if the universe is flat, then a big crunch puts us in a state where we become some kind of viscous black-hole fluid from which there is no escape, but if we're in a toroid universe then the big crunch is reversible, thus leading to another big bang--
--Wait!!..... AH!! Haha, it's a joke! It's just a silly joke..
"Why stare blankly at nature when you could be staring at Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman standing outside your bay window!!!"
Does this help poor children in repressed third-world countries soak in American culture instead of idling their minds with boring scenery? Will companies pay people for advertising space next to the dinner table? There are entire brave new worlds of revenue opening up! Prepare to surrender, America, 'cause translucent scenery value-addeds (or as we like to say, "window dressing"! ha ha!) is here to stay!
Doesn't that attitude negate all benefits from the "separation of tasks" principle that has served us so well for the last few million years ("You hunt, I'll gather")? If everyone has to be so nerdishly spam-aware, less effort is available for other more vital areas of society.
Unrelatedly, does anyone else find themselves reading Slashdot comments in the voice of the Comic Book Guy? It usually fits so well it could be mistaken for performance art.
or splendidezine.com. both have hideously gigantic hordes of mp3 or realaudio downloads. epitonic lists related bands, even in two different levels of... um, relatedness. for those who require a dialing wand to touch the keyboard:
XML Schema is actually one of the most user-friendly formats, ever. Well, not user-friendly so much as developer-friendly, which is the more important thing. It's much less confusing than DTD format, and far far easier to decipher than any binary format. I'm not sure why an XML "expert" would consider it confusing. Consider:
(Please forgive the formatting.) It's verbose, but hardly any different than a C struct definition. Of course this is just the basics, but it all follows fairly logically.
We may have lost the technology race, but America still has the junk-food edge! From high-fat/low-nutrient chocolate bars to high-carbohydrate corn-syrup carbonated beverages, America clearly leads the world in the production and consumption of unbelievably shitty pseudo-foods! We must not allow the Soviets to close the junk-food gap.
Unfortunately, one area in which there appears to be no gap is the right-wing rhetoric arms race.
I believe what you meant to say was "imagine the incredible total overhead wasted by hundreds or thousands of instances on a reference-implementation-quality JVM."
i think you're mostly right, but when it comes to designing icons for the web, gimp equals or exceeds photoshop. admittedly this is one of the simplest tasks (from a technical viewpoint) for a raster program.
on the other hand, if you want to take full advantage of your tablet, photoshop is it.
and speaking of that, two major improvements in the unstable 1.3.x gimp are redone XInput support and, finally, CMYK color space. what i'd really like to see is an improved bezier curve editor. raster and vector programs are evolving into single combined entities. be nice if gimp was there too...
i see a clock. instead of the twelve numbers, i see the twelve months. december is at 6, march at 9, june at 12, september at 9, etc.
and for the color part:
december is slate-gray with blue in the middle and white toward the end, january is december without the gray, february is a gray gradient, march is kind of a dull rose, redder toward the beginning, april is yellow-green, much like the word "neuron", may is red, june is yellow, july is a nice violet with flecks of pale yellow, august is light gray, mottled like clouds, especially the u's, september is a red-orange-yellow spectrum, with a sharp break between sep and tember, october is sort of like september, but darker and with more browns, and like it was put through an unsharp mask, and november is like a charcoal sketch of sleet in a strong wind.
also, in a morisette-ironic kind of way, "synaesthesia" is a blend of many primary and secondary colors arranged like blurry baloons.
i'm running dual (truple?) OS X, OS 9, yellowdog 2.0. install mac side first, then linux. the yaboot/ybin program is very much lilo, only difference is you'll go through a two-stage boot process for linux.
it's kind of a funambulist walk at times--for example, the imovie 2 install actually wiped all non-hfs partitions until it was fixed. but those are the same issues you'll face on any multiboot system.
i've only tried yellowdog. i had minor troubles configuring X until i found the xautoconfig script, which puts out a predefined XF86Config file based on the kind of mac. playing CDs wouldn't work because the audiocd xmms plugin for playing CD audio like a data CD didn't work correctly. i had to get the audiocd source and add some checks for endianness. some day i'll put the code up. i sent a patch to the audiocd guy but no response. i still don't have audio recording working at all.
but, usb mouse works, usb printer works, xmms works, touchpad works, etc. haven't tried the DVD player.
i've read most of his books in translation. i enjoy his treatment of duality as a main theme. this is most explicitly done in 'hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world', which is also my favorite of his books. close behind is 'the wind-up bird chronicles'.
it's the duality that intrigues me. not just duality, but the dark, shadowly nether-realm of duality. almost like a dream. the two halves of 'hard-boiled wonderland' are twisted about each other with the perfection of a double helix in repose.
and the solitary narrator--always solitary--who almost slips through life with a calm and tranquility only possible in dreams. chotto... hen desu ne.. but in a good way.
my only regret is never making it to the dunkin' donuts in sapporo.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you like seeing "public void setX()...public int getX().." a hundred thousand times to implicitly declare a bound property? Or would you rather see "published int x;" (to steal a line from C#) and be able to refer to x by field name rather than accessor method? I think simplifying code like this is a good idea. However, there is a dilemma created herein, as the example below will illustrate!
Thought Experiment #1
Assumption: Maintenance cost is directly correlated with program size.
Therefore: The more terse the language grammar, the easier programs written in the language are to maintain.
Thus: Perl.
At that moment, the programmer was enlightened.
You're fired.
1. Create new string "foo" with the initial value (this may already exist). ..."
2. Turn foo into a StringBuffer and append "When
3. Turn foo back into a String.
4. Turn foo into a StringBuffer and append "Or..."
5. Turn foo back into a String.
So you can see this is not optimal. A human could easily rewrite the code as:
Here, we've saved one StringBuffer creation and one StringBuffer.toString() operation. Hooray us! But I do not believe any java compiler will make this level of optimization. Perhaps they are smarter now."A herd of glib gnus gawk bashfully as they chomp their grub."
It's like the koan: "A monk asked Daigon, 'How does an enlightened one return to the normal world?' Daigon answered, 'A broken mirror never reflects again. Fallen leaves never return to old branches.'" I'll never read that the same way again.
Maybe the good ones elected not to work with someone whose smart-ass arrogance flashes like a neon sign.
Don't take it personally when your bugs are ignored. Fix them yourself if they're so tiny.
--Wait!! ..... AH!! Haha, it's a joke! It's just a silly joke..
Forgive me, I'm slow.
...or Apple+Shift+1, if you really, really want to eject it and Special | Eject is misbehaving.
Except for the hardware "interpreter" running those codes on your motherboard. Wheels within wheels, man.
You'd better alert Vint Cerf, then.
"Why stare blankly at nature when you could be staring at Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman standing outside your bay window!!!"
Does this help poor children in repressed third-world countries soak in American culture instead of idling their minds with boring scenery? Will companies pay people for advertising space next to the dinner table? There are entire brave new worlds of revenue opening up! Prepare to surrender, America, 'cause translucent scenery value-addeds (or as we like to say, "window dressing"! ha ha!) is here to stay!
Please keep my windows entertainment-free.
Unrelatedly, does anyone else find themselves reading Slashdot comments in the voice of the Comic Book Guy? It usually fits so well it could be mistaken for performance art.
epitonic
splendid
Unfortunately, one area in which there appears to be no gap is the right-wing rhetoric arms race.
Anyone suggest other similar books?
I believe what you meant to say was "imagine the incredible total overhead wasted by hundreds or thousands of instances on a reference-implementation-quality JVM."
i believe the national mascot is currently tama-chan the seal.
i think you're mostly right, but when it comes to designing icons for the web, gimp equals or exceeds photoshop. admittedly this is one of the simplest tasks (from a technical viewpoint) for a raster program.
on the other hand, if you want to take full advantage of your tablet, photoshop is it.
and speaking of that, two major improvements in the unstable 1.3.x gimp are redone XInput support and, finally, CMYK color space. what i'd really like to see is an improved bezier curve editor. raster and vector programs are evolving into single combined entities. be nice if gimp was there too...
and for the color part:
december is slate-gray with blue in the middle and white toward the end, january is december without the gray, february is a gray gradient, march is kind of a dull rose, redder toward the beginning, april is yellow-green, much like the word "neuron", may is red, june is yellow, july is a nice violet with flecks of pale yellow, august is light gray, mottled like clouds, especially the u's, september is a red-orange-yellow spectrum, with a sharp break between sep and tember, october is sort of like september, but darker and with more browns, and like it was put through an unsharp mask, and november is like a charcoal sketch of sleet in a strong wind.
also, in a morisette-ironic kind of way, "synaesthesia" is a blend of many primary and secondary colors arranged like blurry baloons.
Why are designers so ignorant about the actual experience of working?
(And no, you can't have my Aeron.)
it's kind of a funambulist walk at times--for example, the imovie 2 install actually wiped all non-hfs partitions until it was fixed. but those are the same issues you'll face on any multiboot system.
i've only tried yellowdog. i had minor troubles configuring X until i found the xautoconfig script, which puts out a predefined XF86Config file based on the kind of mac. playing CDs wouldn't work because the audiocd xmms plugin for playing CD audio like a data CD didn't work correctly. i had to get the audiocd source and add some checks for endianness. some day i'll put the code up. i sent a patch to the audiocd guy but no response. i still don't have audio recording working at all.
but, usb mouse works, usb printer works, xmms works, touchpad works, etc. haven't tried the DVD player.
sou ne.
it's the duality that intrigues me. not just duality, but the dark, shadowly nether-realm of duality. almost like a dream. the two halves of 'hard-boiled wonderland' are twisted about each other with the perfection of a double helix in repose.
and the solitary narrator--always solitary--who almost slips through life with a calm and tranquility only possible in dreams. chotto... hen desu ne.. but in a good way.
my only regret is never making it to the dunkin' donuts in sapporo.