Re:Languages continue to evolve into ... Lisp
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Python 2.5 Released
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I tried to get into LISP. I tried so hard. I ended up falling for Scheme and Haskell instead, Haskell more so. If you find some time and want to try your groove at functional programming again, and just can't get into LISP, give Haskell a shot. Something about the way Haskell is put together, I found it more intuitive. Although Haskell's syntax is, to quote Tim Sweeny of Epic Megagames, "scary", it's a really straight-forward language, and I like that. I did struggle with the severe type restrictions at first, they are especially severe if you're coming from C where everything can be anything else so long as you cast it, but it's nothing that can't be overcome with a bit of practice.
What pisses me off about this, more than anything else, is that these clowns have received billions of dollars of federal money to build up their infrastructure, yet we're being charged more money and receive less service than many other developed nations. We paid for these pipes! The only reason they exist is because the federal government decided to allocate significant resources to the telecoms for building a backbone (which they severely fucked up). They are owed NOTHING, and their (probably ultimately successful) attempts to scam us really boil my blood.
What even sadder is that I don't have even a remote clue of how to answer this problem. No matter what I think of, someone will find a way to absorb resources allocated for any project, and ultimately ruin it. What's there to do with a population that blatantly REFUSES to educate itself, and an upper echelon that uses that to bone the rest of us?
Sun has been adding support for dynamic languages (for example, Java 6 has Rhino built right into the JRE), and the idea itself has been in discussion for a long time. They're also adding a new bytecode to the JVM to support dynamic calls. That's huge, and unfortunately it is taking them a long time to implement, but Sun is very keen on keeping the JVM bytecode stable, so I can understand. InvokeDynamic (the bytecode to support dynamic calls) should be in Java 7, which should come out late 2007/early 2008.
The one thing Java will *not* do (at least according to Gilad Bracha's blog) is support native continutations. I'm on the fence personally on that one, I can see points both for and against adding call/cc support to the JVM. Since a lot of modren dynamic languages have continuations (and a lot of older languages too, but they're not the buzzword of the day) that will obviously hamper their use on the JVM. I haven't seen a good method of "faking" continuations in Java yet, and I can only hazard a guess that any attempt at it would not be very performant, which is unfortunate. I think that, at the end of the day, Sun adding continuation support would be good overall, even if the Java language never uses it, just so that the JVM bytecode can be a native target for more languages. The modern JVM (1.5+) is a very nice piece of work.
Beating off takes a bit of energy; raises the heart rate and such. I'd imagine a stroke, heart attack, or possibly an aneurysm could happen during heavy pron viewage. I think the only shitter way to die than that would be blowing a blood vessel while taking a dump. Cheapest. Death. Ever.
I wouldn't say the whole language is a waste simply because it has superfluous syntax. I actually like a lot of aspects of Java. But I do not believe for a second that getters/setters are useful to the programmer in any way, and I do believe it's a problem. The compiler could just as easily generate methods automatically for dealing with class fields, and if you need functionality beyond simple getting/setting (like needing a form of initialization or flag modification), you can simply override it. I believe that's how Ruby does it, and I believe that's how C# does it. Sadly I haven't used either language enough to say, and if I'm wrong please correct me, but that's how I hope they behave.
I spend a lot of time at work maintaining/refactoring old Java code, and from my point of view, these autogenerated methods haven't helped me a single bit, and have actually made it harder to read some of these 3000 line monster classes written by people who simply don't understand how to program. When a source file has 50-70% of itself dedicated to multiple 3-line accessor methods, you have to admit that's wasteful. I'm personally a big believer in source as documentation, and littering source code with methods like getXXX() and setXXX() really doesn't give the programmer any power and takes away from the readability of that particular source file.
You've missed the point. I can click ONE BUTTON and have tons of code generated (most specifically getters and setters), possibly adding hundreds of lines to my sources files that are really not needed. The example you're stating requires the programmer to begin the construct before the IDE can resolve what it is the programmer wants to do. In that instance, if you read my post, I actually enjoy the autocompletion the IDE provides. You keep arguing about the machine code, which is again totally a different angle. I'm saying, if you have a machine that is capable of generating, FROM SCRATCH, code, then the compiler can do it, so why isn't it?
Exactly my point. If I can push a button to generate getters and setters (a la Eclipse) then why can't the compiler infer that I want them? C# seems to be closer to the ideal in this instance, but I must be honest in stating I have not programmed enough C# to know the details of how the class presents private fields to external methods. I do know that I dislike the way C++ and Java do it. Ruby may have it right too, from what I've seen.
It almost sounds like "I should never have to write the same series of commands more than once!", which is childish at best.
If you find yourself writing the same/similar stuff over and over, you generalize the problem and make a function. I fail to see how you can defend another point of view, except in very rare cases. When you write code once, you have less chance for bugs to occur, much easier maintenece, and better code cache coherency.
The rest of your comment is unreadable, so I won't address it.
I think the IDE is a symptom and not the disease. Programming is hard and programmers are expensive, so to make programming cheaper, it needs to be easier to program. IDE's lower the barrier for entry, thus providing a larger pool of programmers, thereby allowing less experienced/motivated/intelligent (and cheaper!) programmers access to development resources they normally wouldn't have been able to cope with otherwise. There's also a push for these IDE's to automatically do a lot of menial coding tasks (I believe that if you can click a button and have an IDE generate code, that the language is bad or the problem is designed wrong, but that's another discussion). So there's tons of machine generated code, plus inexperience, which pretty much is *the* recipie for the worst code ever. I can see where the hate is coming from.
The one thing that autocompleting IDE's do that bugs the hell out of me is that they make it easier to slip into the i, ii, iii syndrome without *immediate* consequences. At work, we had one clown that wrote all this page handling shit I'm dealing with who would sprinkle his code with various iterations of what would be best defined by the regular expression: [a-z]+ (he also put lots of business code inside of JSPs, but that's yet another story). The IDE made it too easy for him do that because he could just summon the magical autocompletion and not have to think about the difference between i and iiii.
That said, I think that hating on the IDE because people are retarded is wrong. I personally love the autocompletion because it saves me time by not even giving me a chance to typo. That, plus the automatic red underline for syntax errors (usually unimported resources) make writing code that much easier; instead of focusing on the syntax, I can focus on the algorithm.
I have a 16 LED flashlight and looking at it is like looking at the sun. It's pretty ridiculous how bright it is. It pretty much obsoletes incandescent flashlights.
Somehow, we have a mystery pisser where I work that manages to pee on top of the urinal. Then someone else (or perhaps the same guy, I can't say) wipes their nose gold on the walls above that. Why?
This is exactly what I'm banking on for my father, who just turned 59. He loves playing Final Fantasy/Dragon Quest games, but the buttons really screw him up for some reason. He just can't memorize X, O, triangle, square, R1, R2, R3, L1, L2, L3 at the speed at which some of these games require. His memory and motor skills just aren't there anymore. It sort of makes me sad because I know he just wants to smash more monsters without having to dick around with button combinations in some stupid puzzle to continue the game.
I think the Wiimote will work well for him, if done right. I'm hoping he'll just have to wave the dumb thing around, point at what he wants to smash, and click the button.
"I'm calling to report my neighbor Yankel Rabinovitz as an enemy of the State. He is hiding undeclared diamonds in his firewood."
"This will be noted."
Next day, the KGB goons come over to Rabinovitz's house. They search the shed where the firewood is kept, break every piece of wood, find no diamonds, swear at Yankel Rabinovitz and leave.
The phone rings at Rabinovitz's house.
"Hello, Yankel! Did the KGB come?"
"Yes."
"Did they chop your firewood?"
"Yes, they did."
"Okay, now it's your turn to call. I need my vegetable patch plowed."
Perhaps the idea is to find a way to architect multiple GPU-like cores into looking like a current single core. AMD did state that they were looking at making multi-cored chips appear to the host as 1 CPU. Perhaps this is part of that idea?
Ah FF3. I was in the final castle, I'd estimate 10 minutes away from the last dude, and my buddy came over one night and magically killed the computer. I never picked it back up. I did preorder it for the DS though. Here's hoping that it's the same game just with updated graphics.
The only thing I can think of is their free text searching as part of their SQL Server, and the mssearch.exe indexing engine. Certainly, if they have an "enterprise search solution" that goes beyond the two I mentioned, it hasn't been marketed well enough.
There's actually a law that prevents an automaker from doing just this. If you install an aftermarket part and an emissions related component fails, the burden of proof that the part you installed caused the problem is on the hands of the dealer. They CANNOT deny warranty service unless it truly is your fault. Read more here: http://www.enjoythedrive.com/content/?id=8128
There's no way to have proper laissez faire competition in a utility. The concept of the market does not apply to something like telecom. Describe to me how you (as a hypothetical newcomer) would service an area when the major player in town owns all the infrastructure.
Therefore, I think that, while the TV features more and more violence and gore, due to the same TV, the audience grew extremely sensitive to accidents due to the extreme spin TV (and modern media, to a lesser degree) gives to these incidents. People die every year in those super fast boat races, but nobody seems to care and it doesn't preclude the continuation of the sport.
Weird, huh?
Live by the sword, die by the sword. Or would that be live by the TV, die by the TV?
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What can I say, you're right.
I tried to get into LISP. I tried so hard. I ended up falling for Scheme and Haskell instead, Haskell more so. If you find some time and want to try your groove at functional programming again, and just can't get into LISP, give Haskell a shot. Something about the way Haskell is put together, I found it more intuitive. Although Haskell's syntax is, to quote Tim Sweeny of Epic Megagames, "scary", it's a really straight-forward language, and I like that. I did struggle with the severe type restrictions at first, they are especially severe if you're coming from C where everything can be anything else so long as you cast it, but it's nothing that can't be overcome with a bit of practice.
What pisses me off about this, more than anything else, is that these clowns have received billions of dollars of federal money to build up their infrastructure, yet we're being charged more money and receive less service than many other developed nations. We paid for these pipes! The only reason they exist is because the federal government decided to allocate significant resources to the telecoms for building a backbone (which they severely fucked up). They are owed NOTHING, and their (probably ultimately successful) attempts to scam us really boil my blood.
What even sadder is that I don't have even a remote clue of how to answer this problem. No matter what I think of, someone will find a way to absorb resources allocated for any project, and ultimately ruin it. What's there to do with a population that blatantly REFUSES to educate itself, and an upper echelon that uses that to bone the rest of us?
Sun has been adding support for dynamic languages (for example, Java 6 has Rhino built right into the JRE), and the idea itself has been in discussion for a long time. They're also adding a new bytecode to the JVM to support dynamic calls. That's huge, and unfortunately it is taking them a long time to implement, but Sun is very keen on keeping the JVM bytecode stable, so I can understand. InvokeDynamic (the bytecode to support dynamic calls) should be in Java 7, which should come out late 2007/early 2008.
The one thing Java will *not* do (at least according to Gilad Bracha's blog) is support native continutations. I'm on the fence personally on that one, I can see points both for and against adding call/cc support to the JVM. Since a lot of modren dynamic languages have continuations (and a lot of older languages too, but they're not the buzzword of the day) that will obviously hamper their use on the JVM. I haven't seen a good method of "faking" continuations in Java yet, and I can only hazard a guess that any attempt at it would not be very performant, which is unfortunate. I think that, at the end of the day, Sun adding continuation support would be good overall, even if the Java language never uses it, just so that the JVM bytecode can be a native target for more languages. The modern JVM (1.5+) is a very nice piece of work.
Beating off takes a bit of energy; raises the heart rate and such. I'd imagine a stroke, heart attack, or possibly an aneurysm could happen during heavy pron viewage. I think the only shitter way to die than that would be blowing a blood vessel while taking a dump. Cheapest. Death. Ever.
I wouldn't say the whole language is a waste simply because it has superfluous syntax. I actually like a lot of aspects of Java. But I do not believe for a second that getters/setters are useful to the programmer in any way, and I do believe it's a problem. The compiler could just as easily generate methods automatically for dealing with class fields, and if you need functionality beyond simple getting/setting (like needing a form of initialization or flag modification), you can simply override it. I believe that's how Ruby does it, and I believe that's how C# does it. Sadly I haven't used either language enough to say, and if I'm wrong please correct me, but that's how I hope they behave.
I spend a lot of time at work maintaining/refactoring old Java code, and from my point of view, these autogenerated methods haven't helped me a single bit, and have actually made it harder to read some of these 3000 line monster classes written by people who simply don't understand how to program. When a source file has 50-70% of itself dedicated to multiple 3-line accessor methods, you have to admit that's wasteful. I'm personally a big believer in source as documentation, and littering source code with methods like getXXX() and setXXX() really doesn't give the programmer any power and takes away from the readability of that particular source file.
You've missed the point. I can click ONE BUTTON and have tons of code generated (most specifically getters and setters), possibly adding hundreds of lines to my sources files that are really not needed. The example you're stating requires the programmer to begin the construct before the IDE can resolve what it is the programmer wants to do. In that instance, if you read my post, I actually enjoy the autocompletion the IDE provides. You keep arguing about the machine code, which is again totally a different angle. I'm saying, if you have a machine that is capable of generating, FROM SCRATCH, code, then the compiler can do it, so why isn't it?
Exactly my point. If I can push a button to generate getters and setters (a la Eclipse) then why can't the compiler infer that I want them? C# seems to be closer to the ideal in this instance, but I must be honest in stating I have not programmed enough C# to know the details of how the class presents private fields to external methods. I do know that I dislike the way C++ and Java do it. Ruby may have it right too, from what I've seen.
Then tell me the solution, Mr. Wizard.
The rest of your comment is unreadable, so I won't address it.
I think the IDE is a symptom and not the disease. Programming is hard and programmers are expensive, so to make programming cheaper, it needs to be easier to program. IDE's lower the barrier for entry, thus providing a larger pool of programmers, thereby allowing less experienced/motivated/intelligent (and cheaper!) programmers access to development resources they normally wouldn't have been able to cope with otherwise. There's also a push for these IDE's to automatically do a lot of menial coding tasks (I believe that if you can click a button and have an IDE generate code, that the language is bad or the problem is designed wrong, but that's another discussion). So there's tons of machine generated code, plus inexperience, which pretty much is *the* recipie for the worst code ever. I can see where the hate is coming from.
The one thing that autocompleting IDE's do that bugs the hell out of me is that they make it easier to slip into the i, ii, iii syndrome without *immediate* consequences. At work, we had one clown that wrote all this page handling shit I'm dealing with who would sprinkle his code with various iterations of what would be best defined by the regular expression: [a-z]+ (he also put lots of business code inside of JSPs, but that's yet another story). The IDE made it too easy for him do that because he could just summon the magical autocompletion and not have to think about the difference between i and iiii.
That said, I think that hating on the IDE because people are retarded is wrong. I personally love the autocompletion because it saves me time by not even giving me a chance to typo. That, plus the automatic red underline for syntax errors (usually unimported resources) make writing code that much easier; instead of focusing on the syntax, I can focus on the algorithm.
I have a 16 LED flashlight and looking at it is like looking at the sun. It's pretty ridiculous how bright it is. It pretty much obsoletes incandescent flashlights.
Somehow, we have a mystery pisser where I work that manages to pee on top of the urinal. Then someone else (or perhaps the same guy, I can't say) wipes their nose gold on the walls above that. Why?
This is exactly what I'm banking on for my father, who just turned 59. He loves playing Final Fantasy/Dragon Quest games, but the buttons really screw him up for some reason. He just can't memorize X, O, triangle, square, R1, R2, R3, L1, L2, L3 at the speed at which some of these games require. His memory and motor skills just aren't there anymore. It sort of makes me sad because I know he just wants to smash more monsters without having to dick around with button combinations in some stupid puzzle to continue the game.
I think the Wiimote will work well for him, if done right. I'm hoping he'll just have to wave the dumb thing around, point at what he wants to smash, and click the button.
http://www.netjeff.com/humor/item.cgi?file=kgb.txt
The phone rings at KGB headquarters.
"Hello?"
"Hello, is this KGB?"
"Yes. What do you want?"
"I'm calling to report my neighbor Yankel Rabinovitz as an enemy of the
State. He is hiding undeclared diamonds in his firewood."
"This will be noted."
Next day, the KGB goons come over to Rabinovitz's house. They search
the shed where the firewood is kept, break every piece of wood, find no
diamonds, swear at Yankel Rabinovitz and leave.
The phone rings at Rabinovitz's house.
"Hello, Yankel! Did the KGB come?"
"Yes."
"Did they chop your firewood?"
"Yes, they did."
"Okay, now it's your turn to call. I need my vegetable patch plowed."
Apache seems to be banking pretty hard on it.
Perhaps the idea is to find a way to architect multiple GPU-like cores into looking like a current single core. AMD did state that they were looking at making multi-cored chips appear to the host as 1 CPU. Perhaps this is part of that idea?
Matrox, Intel, Trident? It is pretty hard, I don't even know if Trident still exists in that capacity any more...
Ah FF3. I was in the final castle, I'd estimate 10 minutes away from the last dude, and my buddy came over one night and magically killed the computer. I never picked it back up. I did preorder it for the DS though. Here's hoping that it's the same game just with updated graphics.
The only thing I can think of is their free text searching as part of their SQL Server, and the mssearch.exe indexing engine. Certainly, if they have an "enterprise search solution" that goes beyond the two I mentioned, it hasn't been marketed well enough.
This is why I didn't graduate college :(
I understand the Java for drinking and the Smalltalk for thinking, but the C for sinking I just don't get.
There's actually a law that prevents an automaker from doing just this. If you install an aftermarket part and an emissions related component fails, the burden of proof that the part you installed caused the problem is on the hands of the dealer. They CANNOT deny warranty service unless it truly is your fault. Read more here: http://www.enjoythedrive.com/content/?id=8128
There's no way to have proper laissez faire competition in a utility. The concept of the market does not apply to something like telecom. Describe to me how you (as a hypothetical newcomer) would service an area when the major player in town owns all the infrastructure.