Machine generated code doesn't count. According to my experience over the years I'd say that 100 lines of code* per day is about average for good developers over the life of a project. Yea that's 12.5 LOC per hour, sustained. My unscientific findings support the research by IBM, et.al for what that's worth.
* That's 100 lines of code that actually provides computational value towards function points of the application - not machine generated code, not getters and setters, not formatting web pages - real work. It also includes the time testing, documenting, debugging, and getting the code working in an integrated fashion with the rest of the code by other developers.
Just a thought - unless I'm mistaken, the floppy cable that plugs into a 3.5" drive also fits in a 5.25" drive - and the power connector for regular PATA hard drives also fits the 5.25" floppy drive. If that is still the case, all he needs to do is put his old 5.25" drive next to a new computer, plug in the cables and fire it up. Create a boot floppy using the Windows 95 'create a boot floppy' utility or however you make boot floppys now (I have a.img file of that boot floppy I use to create boot CDs, so it's been a while since I made a boot floppy - format a:/s maybe?)
Put the 5.25" drive and your new boot floppy back in and Voila! you are all set.
I have forgotten how much I actually loved that game. To get that much enjoyment out of a game that built vehicles out of what - like twelve polygons - is a testament to excellent game design with an eye for playability, not glamor effects.
The 360 joysticks have about a quarter inch throw to them, whereas regular joysticks have half a foot of throw to them. This is the big kicker. The 360 joysticks have no mass, no inertia, and no resistance to movement (the triggers are pretty nice, however). Real joysticks have all of the above (although the triggers are usually binary.) The 360 controllers don't have a 'set it and leave it' for throttle. Most regular joysticks do.
Add to the joystick / keyboard crew the precision of a mouse for aiming and honestly - there's no comparison. Port any console first person shooter over to the PC and let people use the mouse for control and they will completely own it. Don't take my word for it - put a crew of Quake 3 or 4 (or TFC2 or whatever) using mice / keyboards up against a crew using the 360 controllers (they are available for the PC) and let me know how that turns out.
In short - if the game designers wrap the controls around a 360 controller and don't do a completely second set of controls for keyboard / mouse / joystick - I'm guessing it's gonna suck. But that is just the opinion of a consumer that's been playing BattleTech since before computers were powerful enough to play multiplayer video games.
Ever consider what it would be worth to a company that wanted to make the same kind of transactions that GS makes, therefore making the same kind of profit GS makes?
Maybe this isn't about hosing GS, and more about making money. There is no profit in hosing GS - but there is plenty of profit in repeating their methods. Follow the money.
Beyond the obvious keyword flags (any various drug names and the various ways to spell mortgage) I have three pretty simple rules : 1. If it has invalid html tags in the text, it is probably spam. 2. If the originating IP address isn't from within the US, it is probably spam. 3. If my email address isn't the only email address the email was sent to, it is probably spam. Anybody who emails me knows that if it isn't worth sending me my very own copy, it probably isn't worth me reading either.
Honestly for me though, gmail filtering has been very, very good.
Afterall the government can't put into action an elaborate conspiracy against the people if we do our jobs and monitor them, that is kind of the point of a democracy.
Germany was a democracy in 1933, when Hitler was effectively voted into power. Shortly after he was voted in, a large series of government buildings were set to fire by communists (aka 'terrorists'), allowing him to get passed a decree entitled "For the Protection of the People and the State", suspending the German constitution. It got worse after that - read about it here. Sound familiar?
That said, India is nowhere near as far along the SS trail as America (and I say that as an American.)
4000/8 = 500mph true velocity over ground 4000/7 = 571mph true velocity over ground
Assuming equal thrust in both cases, vehicle flying the average of the two when in idle wind = 535mph.
Impact of the wind in either direction = 35mph.
Not really as high as I might have imagined. The larger question is : does the wind speed have a 1:1 relation to the change in vehicle velocity, or is the impact of wind some other ratio (ie, does a 35mph headwind = 35mph slower, or does it take a 50mph headwind to cause a 35mph slowdown?)
Quite honestly I'd like to know where the software was coded. I'm not going to say what I'm thinking, but given the magnitude of the failure and the potential for future impact it's a valid question.
Yea, evidently I get quite animated and am easily amused after a few drinks, and I was taking a new bottle of Scotch for a test drive. Glenfiddich 21 Year Old, in case anybody is curious, and it's pretty damn good. If you don't see the humor in my post, have a few glasses of this stuff and read it again.
At least I didn't email all my friends or start texting random people on my phone - they aren't nearly as open minded about language holy wars as your average/. reader.
As for the difference in performance between COBOL on a 'frame and Java on new servers - I'm guessing that their 'frame is a mainframe in name only, meaning it is probably a good 10+ years old but is still running CICS on Z, and all that jazz. In its day even a 9370 was a serious machine, but it would have trouble keeping up with a stack of Mac Mini's today.
Excellent - I've been looking for an OS written completely in Java. Could you name that one for me? I've got a spare laptop laying around and I could install it to play with it. I'm getting bored with all those C based operating systems like Windows and all those variants of Linux.
As for the JRE, I was talking about the Sun JRE. Last I heard it was written in C. In sticking with a factual (rather than emotional) discussion you might have brought light to that fact. Let's not let the facts get in the way of a perfectly good reply, however.
Ah, I see. You're an idiot who confuses a language with an implementation of a language.
No, I believe the phrase you are looking for is 'retard'. As in 'Arguing on the Internet is a lot like competing in the Special Olympics, even if you win, you're still a retard.'
For future reference, when your discussion has merit it will succeed without name calling. It's possible that you have completely redeemed Java in all its glory in that paragraph, yet your delivery was abrasive and started with name calling - destroying any benefit your efforts might have had. It's counter productive.
If you want to espouse the merits of Java, do so on its strengths. Machine specific compiled code and operating systems as they are generally understood are not Java's strength, so don't try to force that issue. Instead, redefine operating system into what the bigger picture of an OS has become (much the way Microsoft has extended their OS to include interaction with the Internet resources - Internet Explorer.) When you consider the bigger picture of user interaction with a machine, Internet based productivity suites such as Google's suite of productivity tools as delivered through the browser - Java allows the developer to create applications that can be coded platform agnostic and run on any platform capable of hosting the runtime engine, allowing a distributed environment of clients and servers. When you redefine the computer from 'the bare metal' to 'the machine (including the core underlying OS and the browser capable of running web based applications) then Java is a damn fine language for implementing what is, in effect, the 'operating system' upon which distributed applications (web based applications) run. Java evolved over time parallel to the popularity growth of TCP/IP based communications and a computing environment that moved away from isolated machines towards a grid of networked resources, and adopted to the distributed applications model allowing for centrally stored code to be run on remote clients without concern for binary compatibility. The development of the J2EE model and extensions to the Java language allowed for developers to build stateful applications in a stateless environment, allowing for the distributed commerce model we all use today. And once we've redefined the computer to be the sandbox in which all of this runs (ie, the JRE running on 'the machine', client or server) then Java is not only a good choice for 'operating system' - it's the only choice for 'operating system'.
You haven't truly lived until you have opened the binaries to your production application in a hex editor and tweaked them to do what you want. It's better than sex. Well not better than sex with another person, but better than regular solo sex.
It's also quite straightforward and simple. And it does pretty much exactly what it looks like it does.
And it doesn't suffer from rounding issues, dropping pennies from a twenty page business ledger due to the inherent issues in representing fractions in binary.
Disclaimer - I don't actually code in the language, and I will deny knowing about the language if anybody actually tries to force me to program in it.
Don't worry RD - all those guys are full of shit. I tell you what, let's show those guys just how awesome Java is...
Let's start with the fundamental awesomeness of Java (over that weak ass C and C++) by listing all the operating systems written completely in Java.
No?
Ok, maybe all the boot loaders written completely in Java.
No?
Hmmm.
Ok, maybe all the space vehicles and satellites running completely on Java.
No?
Shit.
Ok, how about the end-all, be-all of language completeness : this will show them - WHAT LANGUAGE IS THE JAVA RUNTIME WRITTEN IN?
What's that? Not Java?
Well shit.
Fuck those haters. You watch, some day someone is going to invent a nice Java-like language (we can use pretty much the same syntax as Java) that is compiled instead of interpreted and will create native executables that run on the bare metal, something that can be used to write lightning fast applications, and even be used to write Unix and Windows type operating systems. It will be like 'Compiled Java', or maybe CJ for short. Maybe even shorten it a little more to just 'C'. And then people will write all kinds of fast, stable, OS quality binary code in this new version of Java, which we will call C. That will show them how awesome Java really is.
Pair programming is the most effective in the circumstance that makes the best use of it - two circumstances to be exact :
1. Pair an experienced programmer with an inexperienced programmer. 2. Pair an experienced programmer with strong subject matter expertise on one domain with an experienced programmer with a completely different domain of experience.
The first is highly effective in getting the weaker guy up to speed on the first guy's domain. The second is effective at solving a set of problems that eclipse the domain of either developer.
I'm just saying that being a ten ton living creature that spends most of its time on land wasn't a particularly viable model for long term survival. If it were, there'd be more of them (big 10 ton non-aquatic beasts) roaming the lands, but it isn't since there aren't.
There is that whole meteor thing, but since life started over (I envision some things actually survived - hence the Darwin reference) and none of the big dino's came back when a zillion other life forms did...
Recursive programming is probably the number one thing that sets real programmers apart from the wanna-be's. Real programmers use it to get stuff done (and have fun while they are coding it), and the rest of the world not only can't code it, they can't even read it.
Thanks, this post brings back years of good memories from working with self-taught 'programmers' and effectively demonstrates the difference between 'learning just enough to write code that fixes a problem' and professional software engineering.
Trust me, while you may wish you were learning how to write applications in the latest pop language during undergrad, the rest of the world wishes you had been taught computer language theory, set theory, data analysis by inference, proper documentation of your code, the 'non-coding' aspects of any number of different SDLC lifecycles, complete code coverage testing approaches, the interaction between software and the machine (where the machine is the network of machines, and the rest of the software running on those machines) and critical thought / problem solving during your undergrad years.
Your disdain for COBOL, FORTRAN, and Pascal show exactly why it's a bad idea to teach a single 'current' language and spend four years focusing on all the APIs and subtle language quirks - languages come and go. Entire platforms come and go. And yet the same people adapt over time (if they are good) and continue to implement strong software engineering principles in whatever comes along to replace those obsolete technologies.
Perhaps during those classes you weren't supposed to be focusing on the medium (the language) and rather be focusing on the lesson (data structures, analysis of algorithms, queue theory, set theory, or the one that has caused the world the most problems - handling every input that could possibly be handed to a routine.)
All of the above can be taught in any language, including one made up by the professor (RIP Edgar Dykstra.)
Actually I wonder if the code written on the Vic 20 is exactly the code that matters. Even if it was just copying right from Byte magazine.
Here's what it says to me:
This is a software developer that was doing computer stuff when he was young because he enjoyed it. Not IM, not games, not first person shooters or flight sims. Software development in its basest form. For free. Because he could.
It also says he has been doing it for a very long time. If he is still doing it, he does it because he enjoys it - not because of how much it pays or how glamorous it is or how 'easy' it is compared to other jobs.
There were plenty of kids with the opportunity to spend all day every day on the Vic 20, but very few did so because in all honesty from an 'entertainment' perspective it sucked.
Give me someone who grew up hacking on a Vic 20 any day over a coder who knows the Java API set inside out (but started coding it three years ago, and doesn't know anything else.)
Slashdot Mirror
Machine generated code doesn't count.
According to my experience over the years I'd say that 100 lines of code* per day is about average for good developers over the life of a project. Yea that's 12.5 LOC per hour, sustained. My unscientific findings support the research by IBM, et.al for what that's worth.
* That's 100 lines of code that actually provides computational value towards function points of the application - not machine generated code, not getters and setters, not formatting web pages - real work. It also includes the time testing, documenting, debugging, and getting the code working in an integrated fashion with the rest of the code by other developers.
Lotus Notes.
That said, using Notes makes the Outlook/Exchange experience look like the best thing since sliced bread.
While you're checking, settle something for us.
Any questions about COBOL?
Just a thought - unless I'm mistaken, the floppy cable that plugs into a 3.5" drive also fits in a 5.25" drive - and the power connector for regular PATA hard drives also fits the 5.25" floppy drive. If that is still the case, all he needs to do is put his old 5.25" drive next to a new computer, plug in the cables and fire it up. Create a boot floppy using the Windows 95 'create a boot floppy' utility or however you make boot floppys now (I have a .img file of that boot floppy I use to create boot CDs, so it's been a while since I made a boot floppy - format a: /s maybe?)
Put the 5.25" drive and your new boot floppy back in and Voila! you are all set.
I have forgotten how much I actually loved that game. To get that much enjoyment out of a game that built vehicles out of what - like twelve polygons - is a testament to excellent game design with an eye for playability, not glamor effects.
The 360 joysticks have about a quarter inch throw to them, whereas regular joysticks have half a foot of throw to them. This is the big kicker.
The 360 joysticks have no mass, no inertia, and no resistance to movement (the triggers are pretty nice, however). Real joysticks have all of the above (although the triggers are usually binary.)
The 360 controllers don't have a 'set it and leave it' for throttle. Most regular joysticks do.
Add to the joystick / keyboard crew the precision of a mouse for aiming and honestly - there's no comparison. Port any console first person shooter over to the PC and let people use the mouse for control and they will completely own it. Don't take my word for it - put a crew of Quake 3 or 4 (or TFC2 or whatever) using mice / keyboards up against a crew using the 360 controllers (they are available for the PC) and let me know how that turns out.
In short - if the game designers wrap the controls around a 360 controller and don't do a completely second set of controls for keyboard / mouse / joystick - I'm guessing it's gonna suck. But that is just the opinion of a consumer that's been playing BattleTech since before computers were powerful enough to play multiplayer video games.
Ever consider what it would be worth to a company that wanted to make the same kind of transactions that GS makes, therefore making the same kind of profit GS makes?
Maybe this isn't about hosing GS, and more about making money.
There is no profit in hosing GS - but there is plenty of profit in repeating their methods. Follow the money.
Beyond the obvious keyword flags (any various drug names and the various ways to spell mortgage) I have three pretty simple rules :
1. If it has invalid html tags in the text, it is probably spam.
2. If the originating IP address isn't from within the US, it is probably spam.
3. If my email address isn't the only email address the email was sent to, it is probably spam. Anybody who emails me knows that if it isn't worth sending me my very own copy, it probably isn't worth me reading either.
Honestly for me though, gmail filtering has been very, very good.
Hokey religions and arcade sticks are no match for a good keyoard and a mouse at your side, kid.
Afterall the government can't put into action an elaborate conspiracy against the people if we do our jobs and monitor them, that is kind of the point of a democracy.
Germany was a democracy in 1933, when Hitler was effectively voted into power. Shortly after he was voted in, a large series of government buildings were set to fire by communists (aka 'terrorists'), allowing him to get passed a decree entitled "For the Protection of the People and the State", suspending the German constitution. It got worse after that - read about it here. Sound familiar?
That said, India is nowhere near as far along the SS trail as America (and I say that as an American.)
4000/8 = 500mph true velocity over ground
4000/7 = 571mph true velocity over ground
Assuming equal thrust in both cases, vehicle flying the average of the two when in idle wind = 535mph.
Impact of the wind in either direction = 35mph.
Not really as high as I might have imagined. The larger question is : does the wind speed have a 1:1 relation to the change in vehicle velocity, or is the impact of wind some other ratio (ie, does a 35mph headwind = 35mph slower, or does it take a 50mph headwind to cause a 35mph slowdown?)
Quite honestly I'd like to know where the software was coded.
I'm not going to say what I'm thinking, but given the magnitude of the failure and the potential for future impact it's a valid question.
Yea, evidently I get quite animated and am easily amused after a few drinks, and I was taking a new bottle of Scotch for a test drive. Glenfiddich 21 Year Old, in case anybody is curious, and it's pretty damn good. If you don't see the humor in my post, have a few glasses of this stuff and read it again.
At least I didn't email all my friends or start texting random people on my phone - they aren't nearly as open minded about language holy wars as your average /. reader.
As for the difference in performance between COBOL on a 'frame and Java on new servers - I'm guessing that their 'frame is a mainframe in name only, meaning it is probably a good 10+ years old but is still running CICS on Z, and all that jazz. In its day even a 9370 was a serious machine, but it would have trouble keeping up with a stack of Mac Mini's today.
Excellent - I've been looking for an OS written completely in Java. Could you name that one for me? I've got a spare laptop laying around and I could install it to play with it. I'm getting bored with all those C based operating systems like Windows and all those variants of Linux.
As for the JRE, I was talking about the Sun JRE. Last I heard it was written in C. In sticking with a factual (rather than emotional) discussion you might have brought light to that fact. Let's not let the facts get in the way of a perfectly good reply, however.
Ah, I see. You're an idiot who confuses a language with an implementation of a language.
No, I believe the phrase you are looking for is 'retard'. As in 'Arguing on the Internet is a lot like competing in the Special Olympics, even if you win, you're still a retard.'
For future reference, when your discussion has merit it will succeed without name calling. It's possible that you have completely redeemed Java in all its glory in that paragraph, yet your delivery was abrasive and started with name calling - destroying any benefit your efforts might have had. It's counter productive.
If you want to espouse the merits of Java, do so on its strengths. Machine specific compiled code and operating systems as they are generally understood are not Java's strength, so don't try to force that issue. Instead, redefine operating system into what the bigger picture of an OS has become (much the way Microsoft has extended their OS to include interaction with the Internet resources - Internet Explorer.) When you consider the bigger picture of user interaction with a machine, Internet based productivity suites such as Google's suite of productivity tools as delivered through the browser - Java allows the developer to create applications that can be coded platform agnostic and run on any platform capable of hosting the runtime engine, allowing a distributed environment of clients and servers. When you redefine the computer from 'the bare metal' to 'the machine (including the core underlying OS and the browser capable of running web based applications) then Java is a damn fine language for implementing what is, in effect, the 'operating system' upon which distributed applications (web based applications) run. Java evolved over time parallel to the popularity growth of TCP/IP based communications and a computing environment that moved away from isolated machines towards a grid of networked resources, and adopted to the distributed applications model allowing for centrally stored code to be run on remote clients without concern for binary compatibility. The development of the J2EE model and extensions to the Java language allowed for developers to build stateful applications in a stateless environment, allowing for the distributed commerce model we all use today. And once we've redefined the computer to be the sandbox in which all of this runs (ie, the JRE running on 'the machine', client or server) then Java is not only a good choice for 'operating system' - it's the only choice for 'operating system'.
You haven't truly lived until you have opened the binaries to your production application in a hex editor and tweaked them to do what you want.
It's better than sex. Well not better than sex with another person, but better than regular solo sex.
It's also quite straightforward and simple. And it does pretty much exactly what it looks like it does.
And it doesn't suffer from rounding issues, dropping pennies from a twenty page business ledger due to the inherent issues in representing fractions in binary.
Disclaimer - I don't actually code in the language, and I will deny knowing about the language if anybody actually tries to force me to program in it.
Don't worry RD - all those guys are full of shit. ...
I tell you what, let's show those guys just how awesome Java is
Let's start with the fundamental awesomeness of Java (over that weak ass C and C++) by listing all the operating systems written completely in Java.
No?
Ok, maybe all the boot loaders written completely in Java.
No?
Hmmm.
Ok, maybe all the space vehicles and satellites running completely on Java.
No?
Shit.
Ok, how about the end-all, be-all of language completeness : this will show them - WHAT LANGUAGE IS THE JAVA RUNTIME WRITTEN IN?
What's that? Not Java?
Well shit.
Fuck those haters. You watch, some day someone is going to invent a nice Java-like language (we can use pretty much the same syntax as Java) that is compiled instead of interpreted and will create native executables that run on the bare metal, something that can be used to write lightning fast applications, and even be used to write Unix and Windows type operating systems. It will be like 'Compiled Java', or maybe CJ for short. Maybe even shorten it a little more to just 'C'. And then people will write all kinds of fast, stable, OS quality binary code in this new version of Java, which we will call C. That will show them how awesome Java really is.
Pair programming is the most effective in the circumstance that makes the best use of it - two circumstances to be exact :
1. Pair an experienced programmer with an inexperienced programmer.
2. Pair an experienced programmer with strong subject matter expertise on one domain with an experienced programmer with a completely different domain of experience.
The first is highly effective in getting the weaker guy up to speed on the first guy's domain. The second is effective at solving a set of problems that eclipse the domain of either developer.
Just curious - from your understanding, how much COBOL code is out there still running today?
I'm just saying that being a ten ton living creature that spends most of its time on land wasn't a particularly viable model for long term survival.
If it were, there'd be more of them (big 10 ton non-aquatic beasts) roaming the lands, but it isn't since there aren't.
There is that whole meteor thing, but since life started over (I envision some things actually survived - hence the Darwin reference) and none of the big dino's came back when a zillion other life forms did ...
Recursive programming is probably the number one thing that sets real programmers apart from the wanna-be's. Real programmers use it to get stuff done (and have fun while they are coding it), and the rest of the world not only can't code it, they can't even read it.
Thanks, this post brings back years of good memories from working with self-taught 'programmers' and effectively demonstrates the difference between 'learning just enough to write code that fixes a problem' and professional software engineering.
Trust me, while you may wish you were learning how to write applications in the latest pop language during undergrad, the rest of the world wishes you had been taught computer language theory, set theory, data analysis by inference, proper documentation of your code, the 'non-coding' aspects of any number of different SDLC lifecycles, complete code coverage testing approaches, the interaction between software and the machine (where the machine is the network of machines, and the rest of the software running on those machines) and critical thought / problem solving during your undergrad years.
Your disdain for COBOL, FORTRAN, and Pascal show exactly why it's a bad idea to teach a single 'current' language and spend four years focusing on all the APIs and subtle language quirks - languages come and go. Entire platforms come and go. And yet the same people adapt over time (if they are good) and continue to implement strong software engineering principles in whatever comes along to replace those obsolete technologies.
Perhaps during those classes you weren't supposed to be focusing on the medium (the language) and rather be focusing on the lesson (data structures, analysis of algorithms, queue theory, set theory, or the one that has caused the world the most problems - handling every input that could possibly be handed to a routine.)
All of the above can be taught in any language, including one made up by the professor (RIP Edgar Dykstra.)
And now there arn't.
Excellent reference.
Can you cite any concrete current examples of implementation?
Understand that I'm genuinely curious from a software engineering perspective, and not 'calling you out' per se.
Actually I wonder if the code written on the Vic 20 is exactly the code that matters. Even if it was just copying right from Byte magazine.
Here's what it says to me:
This is a software developer that was doing computer stuff when he was young because he enjoyed it. Not IM, not games, not first person shooters or flight sims. Software development in its basest form. For free. Because he could.
It also says he has been doing it for a very long time. If he is still doing it, he does it because he enjoys it - not because of how much it pays or how glamorous it is or how 'easy' it is compared to other jobs.
There were plenty of kids with the opportunity to spend all day every day on the Vic 20, but very few did so because in all honesty from an 'entertainment' perspective it sucked.
Give me someone who grew up hacking on a Vic 20 any day over a coder who knows the Java API set inside out (but started coding it three years ago, and doesn't know anything else.)