Hmm. Let's see. I started writing code in, oh, 1970. I don't know about a file - but there's bound to be some punched cards left over in, let me think, FORTRAN I suppose. There must be a copy of my chess playing program from then (it was rubbish, but it DID work - and heck, I was only 15). Maybe in the back of a cupboard somewhere.
But to heck with files - what about actual running programs? The other day I visited an old customer of mine. And he was still running - all the time - a program written in Clipper to handle his auctioneer business. Yes, from 1985.
I reckon he got good value!
But I think the folk who wrote the programs for Voyager 1, launched in 1977, ought to claim that prize! Hats off to you, wherever you are.
This technique is widely used here, in sunny Australia. Virgin, for example, Australia Post, and the Commonwealth Bank, etc.
The downside is the time takes for the person at the front to realise they are actually next, and where to go - they have dings and lights, but people are surprisingly dopey, I have observed.
>> It's the kind of shit that makes the USA look like a bunch of unreasonable prudes before the rest of the world.
Er, yup. Though, to be fair (unusual for me to be fair when talking of Americans, given my English/Australian background, but let's give it a try) it seems to be a common theme in English speaking nations. They seem astonishingly prudish about skin. And sex. And unreasonably keen on blood and violence. (Even Australia is nowhere near as relaxed as its public image would lead people to believe).
Pick other European nations, say France, or Germany, and they seem much less worried about it all - skin, sex, etc. Whether they are more or less worried about violence, I do not know, though I do know that Nordic nations seem much more worried about their kids seeing violence, and much less concerned about sex - and skin, come to that. Which seems more sensible, frankly.
As to other nations, perhaps someone else could comment. If we believe anything in the media (hard, I know) the Middle East seems deeply upset by anything to do with sex or skin - at least if it's female - and fairly keen on violence. As to Africa, who knows? Big place. Asia seems quite varied. China is run by people who seem pretty prudish. And south America is fairly overrun by Catholics, who seem prudish in general, but the there's the carnival in Rio - gosh.
So this means that if you have a one night stand with someone, it might be worth having a bit of a go with their sister - or mother - or daughter? [Change to our preferred genders as appropriate]
Of course, if you really want to look at high charges, have a look at charges for messaging (texting, SMS). Here (Oz) carriers charge up to 20 cents (US dollar is about the same these days) for a message.
It's, what, 140 bytes. Hmm, that works out at $1,428,571 per megabyte.
Clearly you have never worked with anybody else's code - had you dealt with the pages and pages of rubbish churned out by underskilled, underpaid workers (not programmers), you might start to agree with me...
"Set the variable directly"... which part of object oriented programming classes did you miss?
>> It's not the editor's fault you are using a shit language.
Hmm. The single most popular computer language on earth. Yup. Clearly shit. A bit like criticising English for the same reason. Get over yourself - of course there are new languages with more succinct syntax - but really, can we not progress what we have? It's clearly possible to have editors aid considerably in the development of programs. Handling getters and setters would be but one tiny step. How about using colour coding better - and holding a decent display of the current object. Allowing that model to be editable? Allowing some halfway decent object relationship modelling. The list is long. (Maybe UML could finally deliver on its promise - but I confess I doubt it).
Saying "it's the language, stupid" is a waste of time. Yes, there are briefer languages - APL was unquestionably one of them. But it hasn't been very popular, has it? Indeed, the most popular language of all time, which was surely COBOL wasn't exactly brief, now was it? So instead of trying to change the language (Esperanto, anyone?(), let's make the tools better.
Incredibly, I worked for a major investment company who had, indeed, done something useful in APL. In fact they had written their entire set of analysis routine in it, and deeply interwoven it with SQL. I had to untangle it all. (Would you beleive they had 6 page SQL stored procedures? No, nor did I - but they did). APL is great sometimes - especially if you happen to be a maths whizz and good at weird scripts. Not exactly easy to debug, though. Sort of a write-only language.
For the last ten plus years, we have been steadily moving in the direction of more human readable data - the move to XML was supposed to be a huge improvement. It meant you could - sort of - read what was going on at ever level. It also meant we had a common interchange between multiple platforms.
So you want to chuck all that away to get better symbols for programming? No, I don't think so. I must point out that the entire canon of English Literature is written in - surprise - English, and that's definitely ascii text. I don't think it has suffered due to lack of expressive capability.
What does supriose me, though, is how fundementally weak our editors are. Programs, to me, are a collection of parts - objects, methods, etc, all with internal structure. We seem very poor at further abstracting that - why, oh tell me why, when I write a simple - trivial - bit of Java code, do I need to write funtions for getters and setters all over the place - dammit, just declare them as gettable and settable - or (to keep full source code compatibility) the editor could do it. Simply,easily, tranparently. And why can't the editor hide everything except what I am concerned with? Microsoft does a better job of this in C#, but we could go much, much further. We seem stuck in the third generation language paradigm.
No we don't - at least not in the high school my daughter goes to, nor any of the other schools I've heard of.
(Nor, by the way, do schoolkids ride to school on kangaroos - I just thought I'd confirm that).
That said, the 10-5 regime sounds a really good idea - except for just one thing. They'd use that as an excuse to go to bed even later.
The problem seems to be the adolescent brain being determined to stay awake as long as possible, but the adolescent body needing sleep. Result - late to bed, real trouble getting up.
No more than 4 different technologies... so you aren't going to work for that bank I worked for, where, as has been pointed out, successive programmers had been resume mining, each adding a new layer of dubiously helpful "technology".
The sad thing is this is what we are doomed to currently. When you go into an existing project, you have no control over what happened before, and if there has been no control (I'm looking at you, software architects) then passing geeks will have gone wild with the "latest and greatest" technology.
You know, I wrote my first code (in FORTRAN) in 1970. I can't believe we are still hacking away at for loops 40 years later. What have we been smoking?
“Debugging is twice as hard as writing code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. - Brian Kernighan”
Where possible, I generate them from metadata using Java beans in simple JSP pages.
If you have lots of static pages, what's wrong with HTML + CSS ?
However, we seem to be an incredibly long way from the ideal. Graphic designer ought to be able to format pages so they look great. Programmers ought to be able to code pages so they do the right stuff. We are doing, in my opinion, a miserable job of simplifying development. I have been developing code for almost 40 years, and it has become drastically more difficult - certainly complex - in the last 10-15 (I am reasonably sure it isn't me).
But your point is well made - what's actually good, as opposed to trendy? We have a flurry of frameworks, each more bizarre than the next, each claiming to be the solution to all problems, then fading.
Survivors include Java, JSP, SQL, HTML/CSS, SQL (I am not too keen on Hibernate, personally, it seems to hinder as much as help). Spring seems to be doing really well and I quite like it - used with restraint. I avoid AOP like the plague, because you can never tell what code you are working with, it's too confusing.
We really need to remember the simple rule: if you code something that is at the limits of your understanding, you won't be able to debug it. (That's a misquote from someone, can't remember who).
The complexity people seem to delight in putting into things always amazes me. I was recently working at a major bank (they didn't like me eventually as I'm bad at authority structures). Anyway the area I was working on involved opening bank accounts from the web site. Complicated, right? The new account holder has to choose the type of account they want (of about 7), enter their details (name, address, etc), and press go. Data gets passed about, the mainframe makes the account, and we return the new account number.
Gosh.
So why, oh tell me why, did they use the following list of technologies (usually all on the same jsp page) [I may have missed some] HTML CSS JSP (with pure java on the page) Javascript (modifying the page) JQuery XML XSLT JDBC with Hibernate JDBC without Hibernate Custom Tag library Spring (including AOP) J2EE EJBs JMS
Awesome. All this on each of the countless pages, each custom designed and built. Staggering. In fact, the site needed about 30 pages, many of them minor variations of each other. The whole thing could have been built using simple metadtata. It would have run faster, been easier to debug and test (the existing system was a nightmare), and easily changeable to suit the new business requirements that poured in.
So instead of using one efficient, smart programmer for a while, then limited support after that, they had a team of (cheap) very nervous programmers, furiously coding away, terrified lest they break something. And yes, there were layers and layers of software, each overriding the other as the new programmer didn't understand the original system, so added their own. Palimpsest, anyone?
And yet, despite my offers to rebuild the whole thing this way (including demos), management loved it. Staggering.
But I still like to keep things simple. And yes, my name is Simon. And yes, I do want a new job.
Some years ago, I wrote an Internet chat system for a major Australian bank (which bank? No comment). Ok, innovative enough at the time, but not too exciting.
But here's the interesting bit - they sent me a list of words they considered offensive. I had to write a special scanner to handle this - the most challenging part being dick. I was supposed to reject "dick", but accept "dick smith" [which is a major Australia techie shop, equivalent to Tandy or Radio Shack, perhaps] .
So anyway, I was left in possession of a list of words banks don't like. Maybe I should publish it.
>> harmlessly radioactive unless you a) spend a long time there or b) get some of the radioactive stuff on or in you and it sticks with you for an extended period of time.
Sadly, Davros's invasion force was stymied when it came across the first set of stairs, and failed miserably. Meanwhile, my invasion force using the HRP-4 went on to become a huge hit on Broadway!
No, no, you don't understand. Haven't you noticed this obsession lately from various government agencies in making everything "accessible" - with ramps everywhere? THEY ARE IN THE PAY OF THE DALEKS - we are all doomed.
"And he's a classic Aussie in the sense that he's a bit of a male chauvinist."
You (ok, they) speak of a country where my state member is female, my federal state member is female, the premier of my state is female, the Prime Minster is female (currently), the state governor is female, the governor general is female, and we report to the Queen.
Odd position for a country of male chauvinists to be in, wouldn't you say?
Yes, the computers may be a million times faster than when I started, and I am not. So realise this and let the computers do the heavy lifting. It's amazing how bad people are at doing this. Incredible.
I've been coding since about 1970. Burned out - no. Tired of crappy management, poorly designed systems, stupid approaches, ass-kissing, idiotic schedules, idiotic interfaces, idiots in general, yes.
I can outcode most of the "new kids" and still go home on time, but it is certainly true that experience - or perhaps age - counts against you in this industry after a while.
Maybe I should write a new resume with me born in 1975 instead of 1955. See if I get more interviews.
(And yes, if you need a good Java etc architect/designer/programmer in Sydney I am available... and yes, I can code in just about anything from COBOL to Scala, and do it well)
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. Let's see. I started writing code in, oh, 1970. I don't know about a file - but there's bound to be some punched cards left over in, let me think, FORTRAN I suppose. There must be a copy of my chess playing program from then (it was rubbish, but it DID work - and heck, I was only 15). Maybe in the back of a cupboard somewhere.
But to heck with files - what about actual running programs? The other day I visited an old customer of mine. And he was still running - all the time - a program written in Clipper to handle his auctioneer business. Yes, from 1985.
I reckon he got good value!
But I think the folk who wrote the programs for Voyager 1, launched in 1977, ought to claim that prize! Hats off to you, wherever you are.
This technique is widely used here, in sunny Australia. Virgin, for example, Australia Post, and the Commonwealth Bank, etc.
The downside is the time takes for the person at the front to realise they are actually next, and where to go - they have dings and lights, but people are surprisingly dopey, I have observed.
And halfway along, one of the cashiers closes, but Monty offers to put you in another line.
Trust me, take this offer ...
(A Geeky Christmas to all, and to all a good night)
>> It's the kind of shit that makes the USA look like a bunch of unreasonable prudes before the rest of the world.
Er, yup.
Though, to be fair (unusual for me to be fair when talking of Americans, given my English/Australian background, but let's give it a try) it seems to be a common theme in English speaking nations. They seem astonishingly prudish about skin. And sex. And unreasonably keen on blood and violence. (Even Australia is nowhere near as relaxed as its public image would lead people to believe).
Pick other European nations, say France, or Germany, and they seem much less worried about it all - skin, sex, etc. Whether they are more or less worried about violence, I do not know, though I do know that Nordic nations seem much more worried about their kids seeing violence, and much less concerned about sex - and skin, come to that.
Which seems more sensible, frankly.
As to other nations, perhaps someone else could comment. If we believe anything in the media (hard, I know) the Middle East seems deeply upset by anything to do with sex or skin - at least if it's female - and fairly keen on violence. As to Africa, who knows? Big place. Asia seems quite varied. China is run by people who seem pretty prudish. And south America is fairly overrun by Catholics, who seem prudish in general, but the there's the carnival in Rio - gosh.
William Henry "Bill" Gates III (born October 28, 1955)
Gosh, that was hard. Thanks Wikipedia.
This is Slashdot, not Fox News. We expect occasional checking of the facts.
So this means that if you have a one night stand with someone, it might be worth having a bit of a go with their sister - or mother - or daughter? [Change to our preferred genders as appropriate]
Of course, if you really want to look at high charges, have a look at charges for messaging (texting, SMS). Here (Oz) carriers charge up to 20 cents (US dollar is about the same these days) for a message.
It's, what, 140 bytes. Hmm, that works out at $1,428,571 per megabyte.
Now that's what I call a profit margin!
Clearly you have never worked with anybody else's code - had you dealt with the pages and pages of rubbish churned out by underskilled, underpaid workers (not programmers), you might start to agree with me ...
"Set the variable directly" ... which part of object oriented programming classes did you miss?
Damn I'm grumpy this morning. Need caffeine.
Employment insurance?
>> It's not the editor's fault you are using a shit language.
Hmm. The single most popular computer language on earth. Yup. Clearly shit.
A bit like criticising English for the same reason. Get over yourself - of course there are new languages with more succinct syntax - but really, can we not progress what we have? It's clearly possible to have editors aid considerably in the development of programs. Handling getters and setters would be but one tiny step.
How about using colour coding better - and holding a decent display of the current object. Allowing that model to be editable? Allowing some halfway decent object relationship modelling. The list is long. (Maybe UML could finally deliver on its promise - but I confess I doubt it).
Saying "it's the language, stupid" is a waste of time. Yes, there are briefer languages - APL was unquestionably one of them. But it hasn't been very popular, has it? Indeed, the most popular language of all time, which was surely COBOL wasn't exactly brief, now was it?
So instead of trying to change the language (Esperanto, anyone?(), let's make the tools better.
Of course eclipse WILL generate getters etc, but I have to ask. Also they get in the way all the time. We can do far better
Incredibly, I worked for a major investment company who had, indeed, done something useful in APL. In fact they had written their entire set of analysis routine in it, and deeply interwoven it with SQL. I had to untangle it all. (Would you beleive they had 6 page SQL stored procedures? No, nor did I - but they did).
APL is great sometimes - especially if you happen to be a maths whizz and good at weird scripts. Not exactly easy to debug, though. Sort of a write-only language.
For the last ten plus years, we have been steadily moving in the direction of more human readable data - the move to XML was supposed to be a huge improvement. It meant you could - sort of - read what was going on at ever level. It also meant we had a common interchange between multiple platforms.
So you want to chuck all that away to get better symbols for programming? No, I don't think so.
I must point out that the entire canon of English Literature is written in - surprise - English, and that's definitely ascii text. I don't think it has suffered due to lack of expressive capability.
What does supriose me, though, is how fundementally weak our editors are. Programs, to me, are a collection of parts - objects, methods, etc, all with internal structure. We seem very poor at further abstracting that - why, oh tell me why, when I write a simple - trivial - bit of Java code, do I need to write funtions for getters and setters all over the place - dammit, just declare them as gettable and settable - or (to keep full source code compatibility) the editor could do it. Simply ,easily, tranparently. And why can't the editor hide everything except what I am concerned with?
Microsoft does a better job of this in C#, but we could go much, much further. We seem stuck in the third generation language paradigm.
If this is a real product, than it could indeed change the game.
I admit to a suspicion of a slight whiff of snake oil, but heck, let's dream for once!
No we don't - at least not in the high school my daughter goes to, nor any of the other schools I've heard of.
(Nor, by the way, do schoolkids ride to school on kangaroos - I just thought I'd confirm that).
That said, the 10-5 regime sounds a really good idea - except for just one thing. They'd use that as an excuse to go to bed even later.
The problem seems to be the adolescent brain being determined to stay awake as long as possible, but the adolescent body needing sleep. Result - late to bed, real trouble getting up.
Now, back to my didgeridoo
No more than 4 different technologies ... so you aren't going to work for that bank I worked for, where, as has been pointed out, successive programmers had been resume mining, each adding a new layer of dubiously helpful "technology".
The sad thing is this is what we are doomed to currently. When you go into an existing project, you have no control over what happened before, and if there has been no control (I'm looking at you, software architects) then passing geeks will have gone wild with the "latest and greatest" technology.
You know, I wrote my first code (in FORTRAN) in 1970. I can't believe we are still hacking away at for loops 40 years later. What have we been smoking?
“Debugging is twice as hard as writing code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. - Brian Kernighan”
What should you write web pages in?
Where possible, I generate them from metadata using Java beans in simple JSP pages.
If you have lots of static pages, what's wrong with HTML + CSS ?
However, we seem to be an incredibly long way from the ideal. Graphic designer ought to be able to format pages so they look great. Programmers ought to be able to code pages so they do the right stuff. We are doing, in my opinion, a miserable job of simplifying development. I have been developing code for almost 40 years, and it has become drastically more difficult - certainly complex - in the last 10-15 (I am reasonably sure it isn't me).
But your point is well made - what's actually good, as opposed to trendy? We have a flurry of frameworks, each more bizarre than the next, each claiming to be the solution to all problems, then fading.
Survivors include Java, JSP, SQL, HTML/CSS, SQL (I am not too keen on Hibernate, personally, it seems to hinder as much as help). Spring seems to be doing really well and I quite like it - used with restraint. I avoid AOP like the plague, because you can never tell what code you are working with, it's too confusing.
We really need to remember the simple rule: if you code something that is at the limits of your understanding, you won't be able to debug it. (That's a misquote from someone, can't remember who).
The complexity people seem to delight in putting into things always amazes me. I was recently working at a major bank (they didn't like me eventually as I'm bad at authority structures). Anyway the area I was working on involved opening bank accounts from the web site. Complicated, right? The new account holder has to choose the type of account they want (of about 7), enter their details (name, address, etc), and press go. Data gets passed about, the mainframe makes the account, and we return the new account number.
Gosh.
So why, oh tell me why, did they use the following list of technologies (usually all on the same jsp page) [I may have missed some]
HTML
CSS
JSP (with pure java on the page)
Javascript (modifying the page)
JQuery
XML
XSLT
JDBC with Hibernate
JDBC without Hibernate
Custom Tag library
Spring (including AOP)
J2EE EJBs
JMS
Awesome. All this on each of the countless pages, each custom designed and built. Staggering. In fact, the site needed about 30 pages, many of them minor variations of each other. The whole thing could have been built using simple metadtata. It would have run faster, been easier to debug and test (the existing system was a nightmare), and easily changeable to suit the new business requirements that poured in.
So instead of using one efficient, smart programmer for a while, then limited support after that, they had a team of (cheap) very nervous programmers, furiously coding away, terrified lest they break something. And yes, there were layers and layers of software, each overriding the other as the new programmer didn't understand the original system, so added their own. Palimpsest, anyone?
And yet, despite my offers to rebuild the whole thing this way (including demos), management loved it. Staggering.
But I still like to keep things simple. And yes, my name is Simon. And yes, I do want a new job.
Some years ago, I wrote an Internet chat system for a major Australian bank (which bank? No comment). Ok, innovative enough at the time, but not too exciting.
But here's the interesting bit - they sent me a list of words they considered offensive. I had to write a special scanner to handle this - the most challenging part being dick. I was supposed to reject "dick", but accept "dick smith" [which is a major Australia techie shop, equivalent to Tandy or Radio Shack, perhaps] .
So anyway, I was left in possession of a list of words banks don't like. Maybe I should publish it.
>> harmlessly radioactive unless you a) spend a long time there or b) get some of the radioactive stuff on or in you and it sticks with you for an extended period of time.
You mean like, oh, I don't know, a plant, maybe?
Sadly, Davros's invasion force was stymied when it came across the first set of stairs, and failed miserably. Meanwhile, my invasion force using the HRP-4 went on to become a huge hit on Broadway!
No, no, you don't understand. Haven't you noticed this obsession lately from various government agencies in making everything "accessible" - with ramps everywhere? THEY ARE IN THE PAY OF THE DALEKS - we are all doomed.
"And he's a classic Aussie in the sense that he's a bit of a male chauvinist."
You (ok, they) speak of a country where my state member is female, my federal state member is female, the premier of my state is female, the Prime Minster is female (currently), the state governor is female, the governor general is female, and we report to the Queen.
Odd position for a country of male chauvinists to be in, wouldn't you say?
Hey - I don't think there ARE any computer older than my dad. Lemme see, he was born in ... er, 1929.
Nope, not too many PCs then ...
Yes, the computers may be a million times faster than when I started, and I am not. So realise this and let the computers do the heavy lifting.
It's amazing how bad people are at doing this. Incredible.
I've been coding since about 1970. Burned out - no. Tired of crappy management, poorly designed systems, stupid approaches, ass-kissing, idiotic schedules, idiotic interfaces, idiots in general, yes.
I can outcode most of the "new kids" and still go home on time, but it is certainly true that experience - or perhaps age - counts against you in this industry after a while.
Maybe I should write a new resume with me born in 1975 instead of 1955. See if I get more interviews.
(And yes, if you need a good Java etc architect/designer/programmer in Sydney I am available ... and yes, I can code in just about anything from COBOL to Scala, and do it well)