If you want to work in the real world, writing software, you're going to have to speak to other engineers about what you are doing at a level of abstraction higher than "for loop" or "switch statement". You'll want to talk about algorithms and even more commonly, patterns. You may already be familiar with "tree" and "linked list" so you're off to a good start. But, in the future, you'll find yourself saying: "This is a visitor", "this is a controller", "this is a command pattern", etc. The current "bible" of these patterns is known as the Gang of Four book: http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns/dp/0201633612
Two other routes you will want to go down is that of algorithms, like you already mentioned, and refactoring. Algorithms are the most common next step in College, so it might be wise to do that before patterns and refactoring, but I don't think either is a prerequisite for the other. But, knowing what "Big O notation" is, and understanding why a divide and conquer sort is so fast is helpful in your career.
Finally, refactoring seems to be the hidden art of writing good code. So few programmers really understand how to refactor bad into good. This advanced topic will be what sets you apart from the other engineers you compete with for a job. This one is a good "bible" http://www.amazon.com/refactoring/dp/0201485672
I don't understand why AOL is ripped on so much in the community. AOL mail supports unlimited IMAP/POP3/SMTP storage. REAL IMAP. REAL.
For those of us who prefer non-web-based mail readers such as Thunderbird or mutt (for their speed, configurability, or better offline-support), full and complete IMAP is a MUST. Gmail supports the IMAP protocol, but the mapping between tags and folders is so disparate that I find it completely useless.
PasswordMaker is a great way to hash a master password with the URL of the website you are visiting. You only need to remember one or a few master passwords and have access to PasswordMaker. Passwordmaker supports several different hashing algorithyms as well as lots of other options, so you can customize the security of your passwords.
There's an open source javascript passwordmaker for when you are on the road, it runs completely client side - and you can self-host it if you are paranoid: http://passwordmaker.org/passwordmaker.html
You'd be surprised. Touch-typing doesn't just teach "how to type fast and accurately", it also teaches "how to type with minimum strain on your hands/wrists".
If this hasn't affected you, you're lucky. If this has, you know exactly what I mean.
I'm not entirely sure that that's true. Shouldn't you use your pointer and middle finger more and your small and ring fingers less that what touch typing teaches to reduce strain? My understanding is that touch typing is for speed and accuracy, and may actually INCREASE strain because so much emphasis is placed on the smallest and weakest fingers to do the majority of the reaching.
Sure you can - at least while the paint is still wet. And, after that, there are techniques to re-wet paint to smear it around (I think). I'm reaching. Maybe you're right. I'm not a painter, but the analogy seemed apt at the time.
Sun's JDK 6 and later are all Open Source as is Eclipse. Those combined are the primary environment for Java developers. They are both free as in speech and free as in beer. There isn't anything proprietary or expensive about them.
Neither Sun's Java SDK (as of version 6) nor Eclipse, the most popular development environment for Java applications, are propritary or expensive. Both are free as in speech and beer.
Statically typed languages allow for some very aggressive refactoring tools. Modern software engineers that work all day in a programming environment can easily move code around as if it were paint on a canvas using good modern refactoring tools. Pushing methods in, out, and across interfaces, changing the type of a method return, or it's name, and altering the design of a complex inheritance hierarchy are all done with simple keyboard shortcuts in Eclipse when programming in Java. While I've not used it, I understand that C# developers have access to some similarly complex tools.
And, the compiler can act as a first line of defense, alerting the user of bugs before an executable is even created. All of these refactoring tools work to refactor the unit tests as well, so code written using TDD isn't harmed by all of these changes.
This kind of stuff I just haven't been able to replicate using Dynamic languages, which is why I choose them for my small personal project, and am glad I use a statically typed language that scales to hundreds of developers and millions of lines of code at work.
I wonder how much of this problem is negated by the fact that startups are increasingly turning to cloud computing as a way to manage the server infrastructure. Amazon and the like have servers in many locations making them relatively immune from these kind of demand shortages.
Even if that wasn't true, and like others have said, if the cost of storing your server is too high in San Fransisco, just drive it over to Sacramento (less than two hours drive) or down to Los Angeles (less 5 hours away if you take i5 like a proper Californian). Or heck, even Texas or NY. Who cares. Just have enough backups to handle the hardware failures properly.
Visual voicemail is considered a "value add" for the iPhone and is one of the selling points for the phone. Apple has an incentive to keep users away from the non-apple (and in my opinion, superior) visual voicemail service offered for free by Google.
But to your point. I think AT&T has a much stronger incentive to disallow Google Voice, (no more SMS, no more long distance fees, less of a reason to charge extra for a special iPhone package that includes Visual Voicemail, potential to have voice calls driven over the cheaper data network).
Microsoft claims that the creators of open source software are at risk of a lawsuit due to copyright violations, yet here they seem to be indicating that commercial software creators are at the same risk if they choose to violate those same copyright laws.
I think that Ubuntu contains a lot of Debian Testing and even some Debian Unstable packages. Perhaps Ubuntu is to Debian as Fedora is to RHEL? Or, maybe Ubuntu is to Ubuntu LTS as Fedora is to RHEL?
Either way, comparing Ubuntu and Fedora is a pretty good comparison to me. Both Fedora and Ubuntu claim to be stable and for mass consumption by the end user.
I don't think that this argument holds water. In 1999, I had to choose what image format to use, and I didn't have enough space to store two copies of all of my images. Sometimes I used PNG, and sometimes I used JPEG (depending on if I needed lossy or lossless) or if I needed transparent images. And, even then, I had to use a hack to get the transparent PNGs to work properly in IE. Today's cheap storage is...
That sounds a lot like what we are proposing now with this H.264 and Theora battle. And, just like ten years ago, everything was OK even though it wasn't as efficient as it could have been.
In 1999 storage cost was 3.2 cents/megabyte, now it's about 0.00953 cents/megabyte (1tb for $100). What is that, over 300x cheaper now. How much larger is a typical 20mb video clip vs a typical 0.3mb family photo? Only 66x?
Or, maybe we should compare a nice 2MB PNG and a 700MB streaming movie? About 350x difference. And storage space continues to drop, and our streaming movies will grow to 6GB HD mosters. But, the cost will remain about the same.
I have to agree with you, but for a different reason. There is more information about the study in the New York Times, but even accounting for smoking and other behaviors, there is a chance that what people are doing to get thin may be unhealthy in general. In this case, doing less of that and getting a little chubbier may be healthier than starving yourself instead of exercising little.
But, government has access to theoretically limitless funding. The government could literally give away 100mbit data connections and jack up taxes to pay for it. In that case, the consumer has no reason to choose the private service because he would then be paying for both services. That could drive the private organization away.
No matter how fat, how inefficient the government is, it still may create a situation where the consumer is getting shafted because the only logical choice us to use the government's service simply because the consumer is being forced to pay for it through taxes. This could have nothing to do with regulation, and could cost the consumer more because the consumers choice will have been taken from him and placed in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians.
In Java, we have the built in RuntimeException library that can re-throw any other Exception is completely implicit. We have the built in java.util.regex pattern matching library, Map can be used to pass named arguments, varargs are available to take arbitrary parameters to a function, and very little boilerplate when frameworks like Spring are used in conjunction with annotations.
That pretty much covers any complaint you might have had I guess, and these features have been around for the better part of a decade (except varargs which are a few years old).
Buzzwords? Nope, Just Software Engineering.
on
Twitter On Scala
·
· Score: 1
Words like "inversion of control" and "Actors" are not new buzzwords. They are part of the functional vocabulary of real software engineers, and they are easily over a decade old. Check out the book with the ISBN 0201633612, published in 1994 and is considered a classic containing what I believe is all of the "buzzwords" you are talking about.
It's the idea of abstracting specifics like "callback functions" to patterns such as IoC that separates "programmers", "hackers", and even "computer scientists" from "software engineers".
I have a degree in Computer Science and I am a professional Software Engineer, and let me tell you, Software Engineering is not the same as Computer Science. Both studies have their place, and both are important.
Interesting. Tell that to Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, Google, Nokia and YouTube. Or, how about Slashdot and Digg - capable of bringing down moderately sized web sites with the click of a million mice?
Just as a single example, what kind of scalability do most people need beyond Facebook and Wikipedia. I work for a very large internet company that has standardized on Oracle, and we have several well-paid DBAs who spend all day monitoring and tweaking our database servers. My previous job was a different large company that used MySQL as a back end for a very similar infrastructure (Java EE, Spring, Hibernate, Clustered in a similar way) with not a single full-time DBA (the helpdesk manager was the only real DBA other than the deployment engineers).
Now, I'm not a professional DBA. I'm just a programmer, but I was one of the maintainers of the MySQL server (I don't get to touch the Oracle servers here except on my local developers instance). I can tell you from personal experience that MySQL is easier to maintain and administer, faster to start up, and requires far fewer system resources to keep going. Judging by just the performance of Wikipedia and Facebook, it seems to perform quite well under heavy load. So, please tell me what basis you have to place MySQL out of the elite top-tier of database servers?
Not when you are talking SDKs - and especially Java SDKs. I haven't seen a study to prove it, but I am absolutely sure that the Linux adoption rate among JAVA DEVELOPERS is much higher than 5%. At my company (an all Java shop), Linux adoption among developers is about 80%.
As far as I know, the output of stuff created with the SDK work fine under Linux.
I agree with you, but what you are saying is a study of economics - software is expensive and hardware is cheap. People seem to want to only put their money into hardware to make their computers faster. Buy more RAM and forget paying extra for less bloat in software!
Free software is included here. Open source programmers scratch their own itches, and sometimes it's easier to add ram than to worry about a little extra bloat.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to work in the real world, writing software, you're going to have to speak to other engineers about what you are doing at a level of abstraction higher than "for loop" or "switch statement". You'll want to talk about algorithms and even more commonly, patterns. You may already be familiar with "tree" and "linked list" so you're off to a good start. But, in the future, you'll find yourself saying: "This is a visitor", "this is a controller", "this is a command pattern", etc. The current "bible" of these patterns is known as the Gang of Four book:
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns/dp/0201633612
That one is a hard read. I understand that a more digestible book is this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Holub/dp/159059388X/
Two other routes you will want to go down is that of algorithms, like you already mentioned, and refactoring. Algorithms are the most common next step in College, so it might be wise to do that before patterns and refactoring, but I don't think either is a prerequisite for the other. But, knowing what "Big O notation" is, and understanding why a divide and conquer sort is so fast is helpful in your career.
Finally, refactoring seems to be the hidden art of writing good code. So few programmers really understand how to refactor bad into good. This advanced topic will be what sets you apart from the other engineers you compete with for a job. This one is a good "bible"
http://www.amazon.com/refactoring/dp/0201485672
I've had this hardware running Linux with Firefox and Abiword for over a year now:
http://www.littlelinuxlaptop.com/
I don't understand why AOL is ripped on so much in the community. AOL mail supports unlimited IMAP/POP3/SMTP storage. REAL IMAP. REAL.
For those of us who prefer non-web-based mail readers such as Thunderbird or mutt (for their speed, configurability, or better offline-support), full and complete IMAP is a MUST. Gmail supports the IMAP protocol, but the mapping between tags and folders is so disparate that I find it completely useless.
(2^31) seconds = 68.0511039 years of uptime before the bug manifests? So this wasn't much of a problem for BSD?
PasswordMaker is a great way to hash a master password with the URL of the website you are visiting. You only need to remember one or a few master passwords and have access to PasswordMaker. Passwordmaker supports several different hashing algorithyms as well as lots of other options, so you can customize the security of your passwords.
There's a firefox extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/469
There's an open source javascript passwordmaker for when you are on the road, it runs completely client side - and you can self-host it if you are paranoid:
http://passwordmaker.org/passwordmaker.html
And, theres an Android app in the Market as well.
You'd be surprised. Touch-typing doesn't just teach "how to type fast and accurately", it also teaches "how to type with minimum strain on your hands/wrists".
If this hasn't affected you, you're lucky. If this has, you know exactly what I mean.
I'm not entirely sure that that's true. Shouldn't you use your pointer and middle finger more and your small and ring fingers less that what touch typing teaches to reduce strain? My understanding is that touch typing is for speed and accuracy, and may actually INCREASE strain because so much emphasis is placed on the smallest and weakest fingers to do the majority of the reaching.
Too late.
http://labs.mozilla.com/prism/
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/
http://silverlight.net/
http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop.html
http://desktop.google.com/plugins/
http://widgets.yahoo.com/
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/sidebar-gadgets.aspx
http://www.screenlets.org/index.php/Screenshots
Sure you can - at least while the paint is still wet. And, after that, there are techniques to re-wet paint to smear it around (I think). I'm reaching. Maybe you're right. I'm not a painter, but the analogy seemed apt at the time.
Sun's JDK 6 and later are all Open Source as is Eclipse. Those combined are the primary environment for Java developers. They are both free as in speech and free as in beer. There isn't anything proprietary or expensive about them.
Neither Sun's Java SDK (as of version 6) nor Eclipse, the most popular development environment for Java applications, are propritary or expensive. Both are free as in speech and beer.
Statically typed languages allow for some very aggressive refactoring tools. Modern software engineers that work all day in a programming environment can easily move code around as if it were paint on a canvas using good modern refactoring tools. Pushing methods in, out, and across interfaces, changing the type of a method return, or it's name, and altering the design of a complex inheritance hierarchy are all done with simple keyboard shortcuts in Eclipse when programming in Java. While I've not used it, I understand that C# developers have access to some similarly complex tools.
And, the compiler can act as a first line of defense, alerting the user of bugs before an executable is even created. All of these refactoring tools work to refactor the unit tests as well, so code written using TDD isn't harmed by all of these changes.
This kind of stuff I just haven't been able to replicate using Dynamic languages, which is why I choose them for my small personal project, and am glad I use a statically typed language that scales to hundreds of developers and millions of lines of code at work.
I wonder how much of this problem is negated by the fact that startups are increasingly turning to cloud computing as a way to manage the server infrastructure. Amazon and the like have servers in many locations making them relatively immune from these kind of demand shortages.
Even if that wasn't true, and like others have said, if the cost of storing your server is too high in San Fransisco, just drive it over to Sacramento (less than two hours drive) or down to Los Angeles (less 5 hours away if you take i5 like a proper Californian). Or heck, even Texas or NY. Who cares. Just have enough backups to handle the hardware failures properly.
Isn't it the case that Opera Mini is to Opera as the Android browser is to Chrome?
Visual voicemail is considered a "value add" for the iPhone and is one of the selling points for the phone. Apple has an incentive to keep users away from the non-apple (and in my opinion, superior) visual voicemail service offered for free by Google.
But to your point. I think AT&T has a much stronger incentive to disallow Google Voice, (no more SMS, no more long distance fees, less of a reason to charge extra for a special iPhone package that includes Visual Voicemail, potential to have voice calls driven over the cheaper data network).
Microsoft claims that the creators of open source software are at risk of a lawsuit due to copyright violations, yet here they seem to be indicating that commercial software creators are at the same risk if they choose to violate those same copyright laws.
I think that Ubuntu contains a lot of Debian Testing and even some Debian Unstable packages. Perhaps Ubuntu is to Debian as Fedora is to RHEL? Or, maybe Ubuntu is to Ubuntu LTS as Fedora is to RHEL?
Either way, comparing Ubuntu and Fedora is a pretty good comparison to me. Both Fedora and Ubuntu claim to be stable and for mass consumption by the end user.
I don't think that this argument holds water. In 1999, I had to choose what image format to use, and I didn't have enough space to store two copies of all of my images. Sometimes I used PNG, and sometimes I used JPEG (depending on if I needed lossy or lossless) or if I needed transparent images. And, even then, I had to use a hack to get the transparent PNGs to work properly in IE. Today's cheap storage is...
That sounds a lot like what we are proposing now with this H.264 and Theora battle. And, just like ten years ago, everything was OK even though it wasn't as efficient as it could have been.
In 1999 storage cost was 3.2 cents/megabyte, now it's about 0.00953 cents/megabyte (1tb for $100). What is that, over 300x cheaper now. How much larger is a typical 20mb video clip vs a typical 0.3mb family photo? Only 66x?
Or, maybe we should compare a nice 2MB PNG and a 700MB streaming movie? About 350x difference. And storage space continues to drop, and our streaming movies will grow to 6GB HD mosters. But, the cost will remain about the same.
I have to agree with you, but for a different reason. There is more information about the study in the New York Times, but even accounting for smoking and other behaviors, there is a chance that what people are doing to get thin may be unhealthy in general. In this case, doing less of that and getting a little chubbier may be healthier than starving yourself instead of exercising little.
But, government has access to theoretically limitless funding. The government could literally give away 100mbit data connections and jack up taxes to pay for it. In that case, the consumer has no reason to choose the private service because he would then be paying for both services. That could drive the private organization away.
No matter how fat, how inefficient the government is, it still may create a situation where the consumer is getting shafted because the only logical choice us to use the government's service simply because the consumer is being forced to pay for it through taxes. This could have nothing to do with regulation, and could cost the consumer more because the consumers choice will have been taken from him and placed in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians.
In Java, we have the built in RuntimeException library that can re-throw any other Exception is completely implicit. We have the built in java.util.regex pattern matching library, Map can be used to pass named arguments, varargs are available to take arbitrary parameters to a function, and very little boilerplate when frameworks like Spring are used in conjunction with annotations.
That pretty much covers any complaint you might have had I guess, and these features have been around for the better part of a decade (except varargs which are a few years old).
Words like "inversion of control" and "Actors" are not new buzzwords. They are part of the functional vocabulary of real software engineers, and they are easily over a decade old. Check out the book with the ISBN 0201633612, published in 1994 and is considered a classic containing what I believe is all of the "buzzwords" you are talking about.
It's the idea of abstracting specifics like "callback functions" to patterns such as IoC that separates "programmers", "hackers", and even "computer scientists" from "software engineers".
I have a degree in Computer Science and I am a professional Software Engineer, and let me tell you, Software Engineering is not the same as Computer Science. Both studies have their place, and both are important.
You just described democracy.
Interesting. Tell that to Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, Google, Nokia and YouTube. Or, how about Slashdot and Digg - capable of bringing down moderately sized web sites with the click of a million mice?
Check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL
http://www.mysql.com/customers/customer.php?id=281
http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/generate-article.php?type=ss&id=slashdot
Just as a single example, what kind of scalability do most people need beyond Facebook and Wikipedia. I work for a very large internet company that has standardized on Oracle, and we have several well-paid DBAs who spend all day monitoring and tweaking our database servers. My previous job was a different large company that used MySQL as a back end for a very similar infrastructure (Java EE, Spring, Hibernate, Clustered in a similar way) with not a single full-time DBA (the helpdesk manager was the only real DBA other than the deployment engineers).
Now, I'm not a professional DBA. I'm just a programmer, but I was one of the maintainers of the MySQL server (I don't get to touch the Oracle servers here except on my local developers instance). I can tell you from personal experience that MySQL is easier to maintain and administer, faster to start up, and requires far fewer system resources to keep going. Judging by just the performance of Wikipedia and Facebook, it seems to perform quite well under heavy load. So, please tell me what basis you have to place MySQL out of the elite top-tier of database servers?
Not when you are talking SDKs - and especially Java SDKs. I haven't seen a study to prove it, but I am absolutely sure that the Linux adoption rate among JAVA DEVELOPERS is much higher than 5%. At my company (an all Java shop), Linux adoption among developers is about 80%. As far as I know, the output of stuff created with the SDK work fine under Linux.
I agree with you, but what you are saying is a study of economics - software is expensive and hardware is cheap. People seem to want to only put their money into hardware to make their computers faster. Buy more RAM and forget paying extra for less bloat in software! Free software is included here. Open source programmers scratch their own itches, and sometimes it's easier to add ram than to worry about a little extra bloat.