At the risk of being modded redundant (hah!) I have to point out that a correlation between sloppy coding and errors does, in fact, exist. Many of us who write software have suspected this for a long time, and it is good to know that our hypothesis is supported by concrete research from the academic community, who seem to have finally proven that "redundancies seemed to flag confused or poor programmers who were prone to other error types."
Hopefully, we can expect much more of such valuable breakthroughs from the academic community in the future, complete with papers full of badly formatted C code!
By Lisp (no, it's not spelled all uppercase anymore) bytecode, do you mean Lisp Machine microcode? Because aside from that (and it wasn't even a standard), there is no such thing as "the Lisp bytecode." If that's what you mean, then the processor microcode won't do you any good as it's not any different from writing assembler.
If, like you state in your second paragraph, you just want a VM sitting on top of the OS executing all the code, go buy some.Net or something. Then come back in a couple of years once everyone's realized the "thing" is incredibly slow*, and doesn't really do anything security-wise.
Also, it's "funny" you mention that programming languages and OSes shouldn't be mixed, and then talk about Lisp. Have you actually used a Lisp environment in the past 20 years? The philosophy that the language is the OS (at least from the application's and the editor's point of view) is the pervasive paradigm for Lisp coding - and not only does it work, but it is also incredibly useful and efficient.
* There is no such thing as the perfect (or even best) universal VM - the fact that different hardware architectures as well as different languages exist now and evolve at a rapid pace prevent it from existing.
Except that functional and relational paradigms are the foundation stones of Lisp, instead of subsets or side-effects of something else. Sure, pure functional or pure relational styles can be expressed more easily with other syntaxes, but you quickly run into problems with multi-paradigm programming. The fact that Lisp can be so easily and cleanly extended (or transparently reduced into, via macros) to other paradigms ("structured" style control structures for programming efficiency, OO, and more recently constraints, parallel/distributed programming, and design-by-contract extensions to CLOS).
This used to be true for DOS and a lot of early PC operating systems, but isn't anymore. Hardware is accessed directly - the hardware drivers are now the intermediaries between the OS and the hardware. That being said, there is a reason people stopped using the BIOS for hardware access (besides the fact that the BIOS limited what and how you could use devices) - it was slow. Same thing with a sandwhich layer OS, except now you are getting the benefits of architecture abstraction.
Which brings me to the next point - the OS doesn't have to talk to the hardware in a "sandwhich" OS. See for example the Flux OSKit project - it just provides a layer of hardware drivers with a common interface for higher-level OS facilities. It's being used for a lot of the current language-as-an-os projects.
As a matter of fact, it's how Smalltalk started out (well, alright, Smalltalk wasn't used as a systems language on those machines, but it was used a lot for the interfaces and other stuff).
For supporting your position with hard, anecdotal evidence! After all, no decent publisher in their right mind would release your poorly argued, incoherent and unsupported "sewage" upon the unsuspecting general public - and that is why you are left "dumping" on some Interweb site.
However, based on this fact I must argue with your assertion that weblogs are a good way to filter out "crap". Because much of your "sewage" occurs on your own web "log", you are therefore contradicting yourself!
The only way I see to remedy this problem is to write a two-paragraph long, first-person (make sure to emphasize this by using the word "I" a lot) response that is barely longer than the quote you are responding to.
Regards,
Dr. Cling Wrap, Ph.D. Financial Fourberie, MIT (Mexican Insurance Training), 1973
Author of best-selling book, Make money on the Internet: The investor's guide to dog food DVD delivery vertical market synergy start-ups
Consumers have a right not to buy something if they do not like the terms. If Joe Consumer does not want to buy an eBook because he can't copy it to multiple devices, then there is nobody forcing him to do so. If Joe Consumer wants to buy a real, hard copy book, then his rights have been restricted as well.
You obviously haven't no idea who a "consumer" is. Yes, some of us are forced to buy your books and their restrictions. Medical, law and engineering professionals are forced to buy books to practice their trade. Scholars and researches are forced to subscribe to journals and periodicals to do their job. Students are forced to buy books to pass their courses.
Don't believe that last one? I didn't, until that exact thing happened to me only (literally) yesterday. The professor for the course (without any prior notification in the course description) demanded that we purchase a certain copy of a book that comes with a software license, and that the only way for us to hand in assignments (and therefore pass the course) is to use the software*. I didn't agree with the licensing restrictions of the software (non-transferrable, and the license key expires at the end of the term), I don't run Windows, and I had already purchased a used copy of the book (thankfully the copy I had was only $20, and the book itself seems ok). When I raised this objection, the instructor basically told me to piss off and take another class. Although the course is required for the program I'm pursuing, I won't be able to take it this semester.
What you are not realising is that DRM will significantly affect the current market and anyone involved. There will be absolutely no new markets created by DRM. Consumables and consumers determine a market - you are neither creating new types of consumables, nor drawing new consumers. What you are doing is placing trade restrictions on the current markets with absolutely no economic justification or historical precedence.
* For the record, it was a logic course offered by the department of philosophy under the faculty of humanities - there was absolutely no reason why the particular (or any, for that matter) software had to be used to complete the coursework.
Java and many other languages suffer far too much from name bloat.
Maybe someone should get an editor with name completions? That takes care of conciseness, while saving you from memorizing new, exciting and totally useless pseudo-acronyms.
Offering a crippled version of Linux (since the hardware/bootloader is intentionally handicapped, and the kit comes with a restrictive EULA) to push sales by a few thousand extra units (and apparently boost their PR image among unwitting techies and open-source groupies) doesn't undo Sony's current corporate policies.
Now, which Japanese owned mega-conglomerate is it that supports the DMCA, trusted computing, and RIAA's antics all at the same time?
The hypocrisy of open source groupies and wannabes dumping Windows because they don't like Microsoft's political actions and then loudly proclaiming how great their new gaming console/DVD-player is never ceases to amaze me. Compared to the Gamecube and PS2, Windows is really "open".
about how little the debugging process has improved over the last 5,10 or even 30 years.
A big part of the reason is that the languages paradigms that are popular today are directly copied from what was popular 5, 10, or even 30 years ago, with a little bit of a half-baked object system thrown on top (think C++, Java, etc.). Statically compiled "structured" programs don't lend themselves well to debugging, period. First of all, the debugger has to do a lot of contortion to do relatively simple stuff like stack and variable inspection. Then comes the problem of the "structured" style itself, which depends heavily on variable assignment and is very un-modular.
OO-design does reduce the granularity of program modularization and lessens the dependence on global variables somewhat, but inside, the objects are still programmed in a "structured" way. Even worse, object-overuse leads to a rat's nest of an object graph (my big beef with single-inheritance only object systems is that they encourage this).
For debuggers, steppers and stack-tracing to be really effective, a program has to be modularized with as fine granularity as possible. This is why functional and pseudo-functional languages generally tend to have and develop the best debuggers. Even before implementing any features, an interactive top-level is probably the best debugging tool available. But implementing stuff like advanced condition handling/breakpoints, stack-tracing/variable inspection, and function-tracing/steppers fits naturally into the language environment with minimal detriments to code size (anyone up for a little Java catch?) and performance.
"Where do those trucks go, you ask? The dump, same as the other trucks."
So, you mean to tell me that now my neighborhood recycling plant counts as a trash dump? And the 5c deposit on glass bottles is just a liberal ploy to enslave humanity? Next thing you know, indoor plumbing will be exposed as the evil device of Communism it really is!
Your critiques of this learning initiative, however, do have some valid points.
Obviously identifies him as a troll. Many institutions (and even the FSF) had problems being burned with software being placed in public domain - that's why the current free software licenses require you to copyright your work. The most famous example of this abuse is probably Gosling Emacs. James Gosling originally distributed the source code as public domain, and GNU Emacs used some of that source code. Then Gosling decided to sell the program and source to Unipress, which took objection to this and so all the Gosling Emacs source had to be purged from GNU Emacs. Supposedly, several universities were prevented from distributing their public-domain software after some companies started selling commercial derivatives, although I haven't personally heard of a specific case.
I'd argue that C isn't useful at all to teaching the way hardware works, especially as time passes. "Pointer arithmetic" is obviously useless even for optimizations today, as all major architectures employ virtual memory and caches on the processor. It's become an abstraction, that's now more trouble than it's worth (yeah, byte strings work great until you get to Unicode!). And how many modern compilers completely ignore register declarations?
So now they are re-inventing both Unix ("e.g. aliases, job control, command substitution, pipelines, regular expressions, transparent remote execution") and Lisp and/or VMS ("e.g. command discovery via.NET reflection API's, object-based properties/methods, 1:many server scripting, pervasive auto-complete") at the same time in the same product. Isn't it wonderful that mainstream computing is still stuck in the 80s?
Wow, another moon of Jupiter discovered! Who would have thought? Even my astronomy professor says the whole Jupiter-has-a-lot-of-moons thing isn't very interesting (but that may be because it gets more press than his research, or maybe because he has to compete with those guys for timeshares on the Mauna Kea observatory).
multiplayer game* and combining it with a "character statistic treadmill" (something which a surprising number of games developers confuse with "role playing" nowadays) into one game? Sucky game type 1* + sucky game 2 != good game. To top it off, the game generates constant revenue despite the fact that it's buggy and not being fixed - you're just encouraging Sony not to do anything about it.
* Note - not all multiplayer games suck. The only ones that don't suck are the ones that:
a. Have little or no stupid/immature people with verbal diarrhea playing them.
b. Are the ones you don't take seriously.
So far, at least in my experience, the type of game that most encourages both a and b seem to be (ironically enough, considering point b), semi-realistic military simulators. Examples being the Spec Ops games from Zombie, and Delta Force from Novalogic (and definitly not WWII-based games (which are for the most part WWII-based because viciously slaughtering Nazis is considered non-offensive and therefore marketing-safe) like MOHAA and BF1942).
charge? Because they will take what you have written in and spit it back in your face (read the last paragraph of the section titled "Software Patents"). It has been a problem for a while that only the highest-paying lobbying groups have been able to influence the decision making of elected officials, but now it is also the case that commissions of any kind can disregard the wishes of those they are supposed to represent and justify it by "interpreting" their input to correspond to whatever the commission's preconceived goals were. The sham of public input is so thinly veiled that the pre-decided decisions can be just passed into law straight away, and not many more people would mind. What a shame.
Now I wish more doctors would admit it
on
Complications
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· Score: 1
Here is a neat paper describing how Plan9 made the full transition to Unicode. Not exactly an easy feat, although it was harder than necessary for them because they decided to do it back when Unicode was still being standardized. And of course, ASCII isn't going away anytime soon, as there are plenty of systems that don't need it but do need all the memory they can get.
Samit's got a good point there. Integrate cell phone and mp3 player, allow musicians to easily set up a pay-per-file DoCoMo-like service that charges to your phone bill, and the whole thing might just work to cut out the record company and distribution middlemen and replace them with a network provider.
Yes, and in the Soviet Union there was the imperialist stick-waving Monroe doctrine shaking Amerikkkan/Japanese/British scare. Undermining US citizens' privacy and freedom rights didn't do anything to help "fight Communism" (well, unless you consider propping fascist South American regimes as such), and won't do anything to stop "terrorism" (whatever act is labelled by the government as such).
Oh, and David Horowitz is not exactly the best source for accurate political information.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully, we can expect much more of such valuable breakthroughs from the academic community in the future, complete with papers full of badly formatted C code!
If you consider political science (or any "social" science really) a real science, then there's also James Woods.
By Lisp (no, it's not spelled all uppercase anymore) bytecode, do you mean Lisp Machine microcode? Because aside from that (and it wasn't even a standard), there is no such thing as "the Lisp bytecode." If that's what you mean, then the processor microcode won't do you any good as it's not any different from writing assembler.
If, like you state in your second paragraph, you just want a VM sitting on top of the OS executing all the code, go buy some .Net or something. Then come back in a couple of years once everyone's realized the "thing" is incredibly slow*, and doesn't really do anything security-wise.
Also, it's "funny" you mention that programming languages and OSes shouldn't be mixed, and then talk about Lisp. Have you actually used a Lisp environment in the past 20 years? The philosophy that the language is the OS (at least from the application's and the editor's point of view) is the pervasive paradigm for Lisp coding - and not only does it work, but it is also incredibly useful and efficient.
* There is no such thing as the perfect (or even best) universal VM - the fact that different hardware architectures as well as different languages exist now and evolve at a rapid pace prevent it from existing.
Except that functional and relational paradigms are the foundation stones of Lisp, instead of subsets or side-effects of something else. Sure, pure functional or pure relational styles can be expressed more easily with other syntaxes, but you quickly run into problems with multi-paradigm programming. The fact that Lisp can be so easily and cleanly extended (or transparently reduced into, via macros) to other paradigms ("structured" style control structures for programming efficiency, OO, and more recently constraints, parallel/distributed programming, and design-by-contract extensions to CLOS).
This used to be true for DOS and a lot of early PC operating systems, but isn't anymore. Hardware is accessed directly - the hardware drivers are now the intermediaries between the OS and the hardware. That being said, there is a reason people stopped using the BIOS for hardware access (besides the fact that the BIOS limited what and how you could use devices) - it was slow. Same thing with a sandwhich layer OS, except now you are getting the benefits of architecture abstraction.
Which brings me to the next point - the OS doesn't have to talk to the hardware in a "sandwhich" OS. See for example the Flux OSKit project - it just provides a layer of hardware drivers with a common interface for higher-level OS facilities. It's being used for a lot of the current language-as-an-os projects.
As a matter of fact, it's how Smalltalk started out (well, alright, Smalltalk wasn't used as a systems language on those machines, but it was used a lot for the interfaces and other stuff).
However, based on this fact I must argue with your assertion that weblogs are a good way to filter out "crap". Because much of your "sewage" occurs on your own web "log", you are therefore contradicting yourself!
The only way I see to remedy this problem is to write a two-paragraph long, first-person (make sure to emphasize this by using the word "I" a lot) response that is barely longer than the quote you are responding to.
Regards,
Dr. Cling Wrap, Ph.D. Financial Fourberie, MIT (Mexican Insurance Training), 1973
Author of best-selling book, Make money on the Internet: The investor's guide to dog food DVD delivery vertical market synergy start-ups
You obviously haven't no idea who a "consumer" is. Yes, some of us are forced to buy your books and their restrictions. Medical, law and engineering professionals are forced to buy books to practice their trade. Scholars and researches are forced to subscribe to journals and periodicals to do their job. Students are forced to buy books to pass their courses.
Don't believe that last one? I didn't, until that exact thing happened to me only (literally) yesterday. The professor for the course (without any prior notification in the course description) demanded that we purchase a certain copy of a book that comes with a software license, and that the only way for us to hand in assignments (and therefore pass the course) is to use the software*. I didn't agree with the licensing restrictions of the software (non-transferrable, and the license key expires at the end of the term), I don't run Windows, and I had already purchased a used copy of the book (thankfully the copy I had was only $20, and the book itself seems ok). When I raised this objection, the instructor basically told me to piss off and take another class. Although the course is required for the program I'm pursuing, I won't be able to take it this semester.
What you are not realising is that DRM will significantly affect the current market and anyone involved. There will be absolutely no new markets created by DRM. Consumables and consumers determine a market - you are neither creating new types of consumables, nor drawing new consumers. What you are doing is placing trade restrictions on the current markets with absolutely no economic justification or historical precedence.
* For the record, it was a logic course offered by the department of philosophy under the faculty of humanities - there was absolutely no reason why the particular (or any, for that matter) software had to be used to complete the coursework.
Maybe someone should get an editor with name completions? That takes care of conciseness, while saving you from memorizing new, exciting and totally useless pseudo-acronyms.
Offering a crippled version of Linux (since the hardware/bootloader is intentionally handicapped, and the kit comes with a restrictive EULA) to push sales by a few thousand extra units (and apparently boost their PR image among unwitting techies and open-source groupies) doesn't undo Sony's current corporate policies.
Now, which Japanese owned mega-conglomerate is it that supports the DMCA, trusted computing, and RIAA's antics all at the same time?
The hypocrisy of open source groupies and wannabes dumping Windows because they don't like Microsoft's political actions and then loudly proclaiming how great their new gaming console/DVD-player is never ceases to amaze me. Compared to the Gamecube and PS2, Windows is really "open".
A big part of the reason is that the languages paradigms that are popular today are directly copied from what was popular 5, 10, or even 30 years ago, with a little bit of a half-baked object system thrown on top (think C++, Java, etc.). Statically compiled "structured" programs don't lend themselves well to debugging, period. First of all, the debugger has to do a lot of contortion to do relatively simple stuff like stack and variable inspection. Then comes the problem of the "structured" style itself, which depends heavily on variable assignment and is very un-modular.
OO-design does reduce the granularity of program modularization and lessens the dependence on global variables somewhat, but inside, the objects are still programmed in a "structured" way. Even worse, object-overuse leads to a rat's nest of an object graph (my big beef with single-inheritance only object systems is that they encourage this).
For debuggers, steppers and stack-tracing to be really effective, a program has to be modularized with as fine granularity as possible. This is why functional and pseudo-functional languages generally tend to have and develop the best debuggers. Even before implementing any features, an interactive top-level is probably the best debugging tool available. But implementing stuff like advanced condition handling/breakpoints, stack-tracing/variable inspection, and function-tracing/steppers fits naturally into the language environment with minimal detriments to code size (anyone up for a little Java catch?) and performance.
So, you mean to tell me that now my neighborhood recycling plant counts as a trash dump? And the 5c deposit on glass bottles is just a liberal ploy to enslave humanity? Next thing you know, indoor plumbing will be exposed as the evil device of Communism it really is!
Your critiques of this learning initiative, however, do have some valid points.
Bender: No it isn't. I just took some pictures of your face and stuck them on someone else's body.
Leela: [looks inside] Hey!"
(episode 2ACV09, A Bicyclops Built For Two)
Obviously identifies him as a troll. Many institutions (and even the FSF) had problems being burned with software being placed in public domain - that's why the current free software licenses require you to copyright your work. The most famous example of this abuse is probably Gosling Emacs. James Gosling originally distributed the source code as public domain, and GNU Emacs used some of that source code. Then Gosling decided to sell the program and source to Unipress, which took objection to this and so all the Gosling Emacs source had to be purged from GNU Emacs. Supposedly, several universities were prevented from distributing their public-domain software after some companies started selling commercial derivatives, although I haven't personally heard of a specific case.
they really had keyboards with 50,000 keys on them!
I'd argue that C isn't useful at all to teaching the way hardware works, especially as time passes. "Pointer arithmetic" is obviously useless even for optimizations today, as all major architectures employ virtual memory and caches on the processor. It's become an abstraction, that's now more trouble than it's worth (yeah, byte strings work great until you get to Unicode!). And how many modern compilers completely ignore register declarations?
So now they are re-inventing both Unix ("e.g. aliases, job control, command substitution, pipelines, regular expressions, transparent remote execution") and Lisp and/or VMS ("e.g. command discovery via .NET reflection API's, object-based properties/methods, 1:many server scripting, pervasive auto-complete") at the same time in the same product. Isn't it wonderful that mainstream computing is still stuck in the 80s?
Wow, another moon of Jupiter discovered! Who would have thought? Even my astronomy professor says the whole Jupiter-has-a-lot-of-moons thing isn't very interesting (but that may be because it gets more press than his research, or maybe because he has to compete with those guys for timeshares on the Mauna Kea observatory).
* Note - not all multiplayer games suck. The only ones that don't suck are the ones that:
a. Have little or no stupid/immature people with verbal diarrhea playing them.
b. Are the ones you don't take seriously.
So far, at least in my experience, the type of game that most encourages both a and b seem to be (ironically enough, considering point b), semi-realistic military simulators. Examples being the Spec Ops games from Zombie, and Delta Force from Novalogic (and definitly not WWII-based games (which are for the most part WWII-based because viciously slaughtering Nazis is considered non-offensive and therefore marketing-safe) like MOHAA and BF1942).
charge? Because they will take what you have written in and spit it back in your face (read the last paragraph of the section titled "Software Patents"). It has been a problem for a while that only the highest-paying lobbying groups have been able to influence the decision making of elected officials, but now it is also the case that commissions of any kind can disregard the wishes of those they are supposed to represent and justify it by "interpreting" their input to correspond to whatever the commission's preconceived goals were. The sham of public input is so thinly veiled that the pre-decided decisions can be just passed into law straight away, and not many more people would mind. What a shame.
and stop pretending they know everything.
Here is a neat paper describing how Plan9 made the full transition to Unicode. Not exactly an easy feat, although it was harder than necessary for them because they decided to do it back when Unicode was still being standardized. And of course, ASCII isn't going away anytime soon, as there are plenty of systems that don't need it but do need all the memory they can get.
Samit's got a good point there. Integrate cell phone and mp3 player, allow musicians to easily set up a pay-per-file DoCoMo-like service that charges to your phone bill, and the whole thing might just work to cut out the record company and distribution middlemen and replace them with a network provider.
Oh, and David Horowitz is not exactly the best source for accurate political information.