Re:Aw, Java and Python had a baby!
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Yet more proof that if you only know Python, everything looks like Python.
I think it's more that Python doesn't "look like" anything, in that there's very little excess syntax. All languages that share that property will look similar to some extent.
I am always amazed by the amount of intelligent, highly educated adults that fail to grasp that the cost of goods is always as high as people can be convinced to pay for it.
Not in the presence of competition. We've established that Americans will pay $4/gallon for gasoline and make only slight cutbacks in driving. But because gas stations are highly competitive, the price gets driven down to the actual cost plus a small profit. On the other hand, the telecoms are an oligopoly and largely immune from competition.
I've never understood the market for the Mac Mini. So it might be "small" compared to the largest PCs
And quiet, and power-efficient. They make excellent HDTVs (although Apple doesn't want to advertise this because they'd rather you buy an AppleTV and be more locked in to iTunes), and they're good secondary computers for testing websites in Safari or developing iPhone apps. They're also cheaper than MacBooks if you already have a monitor, and unlike MacBooks can drive two large displays.
(And you can get small desktop PCs too, anyway, that will also be cheaper.)
The Dell Studio Hybrids are roughly the same price for comparable specs.
Men with expensive cars are saying the one thing that attracts women who will have sex with them. They are saying "I am willing to spend lots of money to get laid".
I'd say it's more that wealth is a proxy for high social status, which is what women have evolved to select for. (So their offspring will have more resources and be more likely to achieve high status themselves). Height is also important for the same reason. "Pick-up artists" don't use displays of wealth to get women; they're just able to project signals of high status very effectively.
Corollary: rich but socially inept geeks won't do much better than their non-rich counterparts.
Yeah, this sounds more like bragging than an actual problem. Reminds me of Generic_WB_Show where the main character thinks his life is so stressful because multiple gorgeous women want him.
Another possibility is that this is stealth marketing for the Wind.
So they're note outlawing criticism, or attacking free speech, they're outlawing defamation.. which all civilised countries have outlawed anyway.
What is "defamation"? If I say "fundamentalist Islam is a barbaric and misogynistic cult founded by a mass murderer", is your position that I should go to prison? I'm glad my country isn't "civilized".
If you're organization has 50 Java developers, the effort needed to train them to be Python developers is not trivial. Then you can't just rewrite everything because you still have all that Java code to maintain.
Yes, you shouldn't rewrite working Java code in Python just for kicks, or vice versa. I'm not sure how that's relevant.
It's not like Python is significantly less lines of codes than Java or anything. Especially now with annotations. Maybe 2x as many LOC
I'll agree that 2x is in the ballpark, and I find that to be quite significant, considering that studies have found that developers tend to produce lines of (debugged, working) code at the same rate regardless of language. Doubling developer productivity will very often be worth sacrificing performance, especially when the software isn't CPU-bound. Why do you think Java took over from C?
Plus, I don't think fewer LOC means greater maintainability.
All I can say is that I've been developing in Java for 12 years and Python for 2, and that's been my experience.
Let me give an example using a pizza recipe intead of a programming language.
I don't agree with that, because the short version leaves out critical information so of course it's not as useful. What I like about Python is that it largely lets me deal with *only* the stuff that matters to my application. In my questionable metaphor Python would be "Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes", and Java would be "Turn the temperature dial to 400, open the oven door, insert the pan in the oven, close the oven door, wait 15 minutes, open the oven door...". Ok not quite that bad, but the essential details are often obscured by unimportant boilerplate. And yes, you can get tools that automatically create and hide some of it, but that should just make you question why the language can't do that itself.
The main problem I see though. In 5 years, a lot of those Python developers are probably going to be working in a different language all together.
Since it is not going to be rewritten because of time, budget, it's good enough, [insert-your-own-excuse-here], let's opt to write it correctly and in an appropriate language from the onset.
If they're going to do a half-baked job in Python, then it would be tenth-baked in C. And if Python's performance is universally unacceptable today, I'm curious as to how you think we accomplished anything at all 10 years ago.
Not as much after the last update. The 9400M GPU certainly isn't top of the line, but it will run Doom 3/Quake 4 class games fine. Dual display support and Firewire 800 fix the other main weaknesses of the previous version.
Apple should make a mid-range desktop with a comparable GPU
Err, They err, they do have UPGRADE written on the boxes.
I'm looking at my retail Leopard box right now, and no it doesn't. Apple does sometimes send out upgrade DVDs, like right when a new OS version comes out and you recently bought a Mac with the previous version. Those do check for the presence of the previous OS X version, while the full versions don't.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. We're mostly on the same page.
The only words of yours I disagree with are "and achievement", at least when it comes to intellectual and not physical pursuits.
I was referring there to the tendency of men to have flatter distributions on a wide range of criteria, so there ends up being more men on both the top and the bottom. See here for more.
Women still love working in science, programming, number theory, mapping the human genome, designing space probes, every damn thing. Women have mathematical and scientific interest and ability. A hell of a lot of them do. You'd have to live under a rock to say that women have not made great contributions to STEM fields.
Absolutely. And the (unfortunately few) women I've worked with as a developer have all been very good; I'd guess that it takes a well above average amount of interest and dedication, and to overcome the cultural pressure against women being geeky. If that pressure went away I still don't think it would be 50-50, but it would be much closer than it is now, which would be good for everyone.
I support shortening the workweek for moms and dads with young children, while still giving full-time benefits. Yeah, it's understandable that workers without children would be pissed off. But they ought to realize that parents inherently have more work to do in any given day, and that raising well-adjusted, healthy children is legitimate work that benefits everyone in society.
Companies tried something like that with the "mommy track", and it caused major PR problems. I agree that we should try to make it easier to balance career and family (or really career and any outside activities); although I don't believe that it should be mandated that employees with family obligations receive the same compensation for less work. (And getting "benefits", which usually means health insurance, through your employer is a terrible system in general, but that's a separate rant).
But don't strong-arm people into jobs they aren't qualified for. Don't force employers to hunt around for applicants who simply aren't there and may never be interested in a given field, even in a totally fair system. Instead, empower people to become qualified for the careers they really want. Don't force niche employers to change the way they hire, until it has become clear that marginalized groups are receiving as much of the same training as everyone else and still being overlooked. Social change, toward equality, is good. But stupidity isn't going to help anybody.
The males on/., in general, seem to me to be a very forward-thinking bunch most of the time. It's hard to wrap my brain around the response I keep seeing here when it comes to women's issues.
Curious, what responses do you have a problem with? I don't see anyone advocating that women should be barefoot and pregnant whether they like it or not. But there are sound reasons to believe that the biological differences between men and women will result in different distributions of interest and achievement even in the absence of discrimination.
Right now, the women with the ability to produce intelligent sane children rarely do so. That's selfish.
It's not at all clear that an educated intelligent woman (or man) taking many years off work to raise children has a net benefit to society. There's their foregone contributions to society and the economy (with appropriate discount rate), the chance that their children will not become productive adults, and the environmental effects of increased pollution and resource usage their children will be responsible for.
If very few people were having kids then of course we'd want to encourage it, but that's not the case now; on the margin it's really not vital that you reproduce. Personally, I'm glad Grace Hopper focused on her career rather than driving her kids around town.
We're talking about population averages here, which individual cases don't negate. Men are on average physically stronger than women, yet Venus Williams could easily kick my ass. Men and women have different hormones, and millions of years of different evolutionary selection pressure. It would be astounding if neither had any impact on average psychological makeup.
Of course this in no way justifies discrimination; it just means that even in a gender-blind society we shouldn't expect equal numbers of men and women to be nurses or fighter pilots.
And, if I want eSATA I have to get an ExpressCard which isn't so bad EXCEPT the only model that works well, from the research I have done, runs around $90. That's a bit pricy.
I use this $28 card in my Rev B MBP. No driver installation required, and I haven't had any problems so far.
The short-term case of chasing the profit prevented the longer term view of seeing that what they were doing was destroying the market.
When the "market" consists of houses at ludicrously inflated prices, it should be destroyed. Ideally in a gentler manner than what we've experienced, but there's no reason why we should be compelled to help irresponsible borrowers (yes, the lenders were idiots too) stay in houses they could never legitimately afford, while insuring that responsible people remain priced out.
They're not stupid. That's why they're continuing to make bank.
They're making bank off their laptops, which are just like everyone else's except prettier. Their desktop sales are much lower in comparison. (Yes, the percentage of desktops is down overall; Apple's desktop percentage is down even more).
The problem continue to be, in this crowd in particular, a sense of entitlement. "I deserve to be able to install OS X wherever I want." No, you don't no more than I "deserve" to be able to throw a Honda alternator in a Dodge.
I agree that Honda shouldn't have to provide support for your attempts, but if you get it working they shouldn't be able to sue you either.
Mac Mini got its update but the price is absurd as well.
The mini is reasonably priced for an ultra-SFF. If you're just looking at it as a generic desktop then of course it's overpriced, but it compares well to a Dell Hybrid.
Of course, Apple will probably keep the mini at this configuration for another year and a half at which point it will be horribly obsolete again.
While I agree that it's a big gap (I've always hated iMacs, mainly because my monitors tend to have a much longer lifespan than the rest of the computer), who is an expandable mid-ranged desktop targeted at?
Geeks and gamers.
And anyone who cares about money. The problem with the iMac isn't that a built-in display inherently sucks, it's that it's *far* more expensive than a tower+display.
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Nothing the government can spend money on is as wasteful as having one in four able bodied adults sitting around doing nothing productive!
Government (or private) spending can easily be worse than useless. See ethanol, or most of the war on drugs.
Not only that, it's a string raise.
Yet more proof that if you only know Python, everything looks like Python.
I think it's more that Python doesn't "look like" anything, in that there's very little excess syntax. All languages that share that property will look similar to some extent.
I am always amazed by the amount of intelligent, highly educated adults that fail to grasp that the cost of goods is always as high as people can be convinced to pay for it.
Not in the presence of competition. We've established that Americans will pay $4/gallon for gasoline and make only slight cutbacks in driving. But because gas stations are highly competitive, the price gets driven down to the actual cost plus a small profit. On the other hand, the telecoms are an oligopoly and largely immune from competition.
I've never understood the market for the Mac Mini. So it might be "small" compared to the largest PCs
And quiet, and power-efficient. They make excellent HDTVs (although Apple doesn't want to advertise this because they'd rather you buy an AppleTV and be more locked in to iTunes), and they're good secondary computers for testing websites in Safari or developing iPhone apps. They're also cheaper than MacBooks if you already have a monitor, and unlike MacBooks can drive two large displays.
(And you can get small desktop PCs too, anyway, that will also be cheaper.)
The Dell Studio Hybrids are roughly the same price for comparable specs.
Men with expensive cars are saying the one thing that attracts women who will have sex with them. They are saying "I am willing to spend lots of money to get laid".
I'd say it's more that wealth is a proxy for high social status, which is what women have evolved to select for. (So their offspring will have more resources and be more likely to achieve high status themselves). Height is also important for the same reason. "Pick-up artists" don't use displays of wealth to get women; they're just able to project signals of high status very effectively.
Corollary: rich but socially inept geeks won't do much better than their non-rich counterparts.
Yeah, this sounds more like bragging than an actual problem. Reminds me of Generic_WB_Show where the main character thinks his life is so stressful because multiple gorgeous women want him.
Another possibility is that this is stealth marketing for the Wind.
So they're note outlawing criticism, or attacking free speech, they're outlawing defamation.. which all civilised countries have outlawed anyway.
What is "defamation"? If I say "fundamentalist Islam is a barbaric and misogynistic cult founded by a mass murderer", is your position that I should go to prison? I'm glad my country isn't "civilized".
If you're organization has 50 Java developers, the effort needed to train them to be Python developers is not trivial. Then you can't just rewrite everything because you still have all that Java code to maintain.
Yes, you shouldn't rewrite working Java code in Python just for kicks, or vice versa. I'm not sure how that's relevant.
It's not like Python is significantly less lines of codes than Java or anything. Especially now with annotations. Maybe 2x as many LOC
I'll agree that 2x is in the ballpark, and I find that to be quite significant, considering that studies have found that developers tend to produce lines of (debugged, working) code at the same rate regardless of language. Doubling developer productivity will very often be worth sacrificing performance, especially when the software isn't CPU-bound. Why do you think Java took over from C?
Plus, I don't think fewer LOC means greater maintainability.
All I can say is that I've been developing in Java for 12 years and Python for 2, and that's been my experience.
Let me give an example using a pizza recipe intead of a programming language.
I don't agree with that, because the short version leaves out critical information so of course it's not as useful. What I like about Python is that it largely lets me deal with *only* the stuff that matters to my application. In my questionable metaphor Python would be "Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes", and Java would be "Turn the temperature dial to 400, open the oven door, insert the pan in the oven, close the oven door, wait 15 minutes, open the oven door...". Ok not quite that bad, but the essential details are often obscured by unimportant boilerplate. And yes, you can get tools that automatically create and hide some of it, but that should just make you question why the language can't do that itself.
The main problem I see though. In 5 years, a lot of those Python developers are probably going to be working in a different language all together.
A fine argument for COBOL :)
The productivity gains of writing fewer lines of code seems stupid to me.
Correct. The win is *maintaining* fewer lines of code.
Since it is not going to be rewritten because of time, budget, it's good enough, [insert-your-own-excuse-here], let's opt to write it correctly and in an appropriate language from the onset.
If they're going to do a half-baked job in Python, then it would be tenth-baked in C. And if Python's performance is universally unacceptable today, I'm curious as to how you think we accomplished anything at all 10 years ago.
Psyco only works for 32-bit x86, and many Python features are unsupported.
The resulting AI would tile the solar system with tiny smiling faces.
MacMini: $700 outdated and overpriced
Not as much after the last update. The 9400M GPU certainly isn't top of the line, but it will run Doom 3/Quake 4 class games fine. Dual display support and Firewire 800 fix the other main weaknesses of the previous version.
Apple should make a mid-range desktop with a comparable GPU
Agreed.
Err, They err, they do have UPGRADE written on the boxes.
I'm looking at my retail Leopard box right now, and no it doesn't. Apple does sometimes send out upgrade DVDs, like right when a new OS version comes out and you recently bought a Mac with the previous version. Those do check for the presence of the previous OS X version, while the full versions don't.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. We're mostly on the same page.
The only words of yours I disagree with are "and achievement", at least when it comes to intellectual and not physical pursuits.
I was referring there to the tendency of men to have flatter distributions on a wide range of criteria, so there ends up being more men on both the top and the bottom. See here for more.
Women still love working in science, programming, number theory, mapping the human genome, designing space probes, every damn thing. Women have mathematical and scientific interest and ability. A hell of a lot of them do. You'd have to live under a rock to say that women have not made great contributions to STEM fields.
Absolutely. And the (unfortunately few) women I've worked with as a developer have all been very good; I'd guess that it takes a well above average amount of interest and dedication, and to overcome the cultural pressure against women being geeky. If that pressure went away I still don't think it would be 50-50, but it would be much closer than it is now, which would be good for everyone.
I support shortening the workweek for moms and dads with young children, while still giving full-time benefits. Yeah, it's understandable that workers without children would be pissed off. But they ought to realize that parents inherently have more work to do in any given day, and that raising well-adjusted, healthy children is legitimate work that benefits everyone in society.
Companies tried something like that with the "mommy track", and it caused major PR problems. I agree that we should try to make it easier to balance career and family (or really career and any outside activities); although I don't believe that it should be mandated that employees with family obligations receive the same compensation for less work. (And getting "benefits", which usually means health insurance, through your employer is a terrible system in general, but that's a separate rant).
But don't strong-arm people into jobs they aren't qualified for. Don't force employers to hunt around for applicants who simply aren't there and may never be interested in a given field, even in a totally fair system. Instead, empower people to become qualified for the careers they really want. Don't force niche employers to change the way they hire, until it has become clear that marginalized groups are receiving as much of the same training as everyone else and still being overlooked. Social change, toward equality, is good. But stupidity isn't going to help anybody.
Well said.
The males on /., in general, seem to me to be a very forward-thinking bunch most of the time. It's hard to wrap my brain around the response I keep seeing here when it comes to women's issues.
Curious, what responses do you have a problem with? I don't see anyone advocating that women should be barefoot and pregnant whether they like it or not. But there are sound reasons to believe that the biological differences between men and women will result in different distributions of interest and achievement even in the absence of discrimination.
This is a caricature and there are plenty of counter-examples.
There are indeed. That doesn't mean the statistical tendency doesn't exist.
Right now, the women with the ability to produce intelligent sane children rarely do so. That's selfish.
It's not at all clear that an educated intelligent woman (or man) taking many years off work to raise children has a net benefit to society. There's their foregone contributions to society and the economy (with appropriate discount rate), the chance that their children will not become productive adults, and the environmental effects of increased pollution and resource usage their children will be responsible for.
If very few people were having kids then of course we'd want to encourage it, but that's not the case now; on the margin it's really not vital that you reproduce. Personally, I'm glad Grace Hopper focused on her career rather than driving her kids around town.
We're talking about population averages here, which individual cases don't negate. Men are on average physically stronger than women, yet Venus Williams could easily kick my ass. Men and women have different hormones, and millions of years of different evolutionary selection pressure. It would be astounding if neither had any impact on average psychological makeup.
Of course this in no way justifies discrimination; it just means that even in a gender-blind society we shouldn't expect equal numbers of men and women to be nurses or fighter pilots.
And, if I want eSATA I have to get an ExpressCard which isn't so bad EXCEPT the only model that works well, from the research I have done, runs around $90. That's a bit pricy.
I use this $28 card in my Rev B MBP. No driver installation required, and I haven't had any problems so far.
The short-term case of chasing the profit prevented the longer term view of seeing that what they were doing was destroying the market.
When the "market" consists of houses at ludicrously inflated prices, it should be destroyed. Ideally in a gentler manner than what we've experienced, but there's no reason why we should be compelled to help irresponsible borrowers (yes, the lenders were idiots too) stay in houses they could never legitimately afford, while insuring that responsible people remain priced out.
They're not stupid. That's why they're continuing to make bank.
They're making bank off their laptops, which are just like everyone else's except prettier. Their desktop sales are much lower in comparison. (Yes, the percentage of desktops is down overall; Apple's desktop percentage is down even more).
The problem continue to be, in this crowd in particular, a sense of entitlement. "I deserve to be able to install OS X wherever I want." No, you don't no more than I "deserve" to be able to throw a Honda alternator in a Dodge.
I agree that Honda shouldn't have to provide support for your attempts, but if you get it working they shouldn't be able to sue you either.
Mac Mini got its update but the price is absurd as well.
The mini is reasonably priced for an ultra-SFF. If you're just looking at it as a generic desktop then of course it's overpriced, but it compares well to a Dell Hybrid.
Of course, Apple will probably keep the mini at this configuration for another year and a half at which point it will be horribly obsolete again.
While I agree that it's a big gap (I've always hated iMacs, mainly because my monitors tend to have a much longer lifespan than the rest of the computer), who is an expandable mid-ranged desktop targeted at?
Geeks and gamers.
And anyone who cares about money. The problem with the iMac isn't that a built-in display inherently sucks, it's that it's *far* more expensive than a tower+display.