"anyone recommending C when Java is an option for cross platform development cannot possibly be classed as a good developer,"
Very few systems (especially in house ones) require true cross platform development so that's generally irrelevant anyway.
"advocating C over Java where Java is an option is simply the sign of a developer who is not capable of picking the right tool for the job."
Or maybe its a developer who doesn't have a knee jerk reaction that the tool that leads to the quickest prototype is the best. I've developed back-end trading apps in the past that required the fastest possible throughput of data (we're talking down to milliseconds being shaved off here) to beat the competition and for that Java simply was not an option. We went for a mixture of C and C++ using the standard sockets API and the system was blazingly fast.
Not every "app" is some floppy piece of GUI code that sits there doing bugger all 99% of its life - some apps are back end systems that are maxed out all the working day and for that you can't beat C and C++.
"Yes, you might need to charge more because there are fewer sales. Yes, it probably prevents you from getting wildly rich off a few months of coding. Tough. But look around, people are making an honest living on those terms."
Well thats alright then. As long as its only a salt-o-the-earth honest living , don't want anyone earning a dishonest living from selling their closed source code they've spent months writing and getting rich now do we because then some freeloading student couldn't hack it up and steal the ideas.
Theres a big difference between "I want a driver , I'll write one myself" to "software should be given away free no matter now much work went into it". If someone wants to spend time writing their own code and give it away thats their democratic choice. But they should NOT stand on some dubious moral high ground and dictate to everyone else that they should do the same.
"And can you point out any place where some people actually honestly tried to implement communism on a national level?"
Is this a trick question? The bolsheviks were true communists and they've been followed by Mao, kim Jong Il and various other tin pot african, asian and south/central american dictatorships.
"Look, "communism" was just a dream,"
It may just be a dream but some people want to make it a reality.
"I take it you are againt socialist funding of highways"
Why would I be? Taxation to fund necessary structures both real and social to keep society ticking along is as old as civilisation. Thats completely different to treating people as identical jelly mold robots.
"the whole idea seems to be to reward those who are successful less and less, and reward those who are failing more. "
One of the main tenets of communism is that everyone is equal no matter what their actual abilities. Unfortunately denying reality didn't work for a lot of nations but you still get plenty of tax payer funded examples of this species of thinker in the academic world where they're sheltered from the nasty facts of reality outside the thick walls of their ivory towers.
(I'll get modded down for this by some standard issue right-on teenage group-thinker but c'est la vie)
Or even just users and suppliers. Why does they have to be a single catchy buzzword? Or are management types really so dumb they can only handle one word at a time?
All MS is interested in is the bottom line. If they allow free implementations of.NET then as far as they see it they'll lose sales on their.NET compiler and whats more may even lose Windows sales if people port their.NET apps to a-n-other platform.
I'm not saying they're right but thats probably the way their short term thinking marketing and legal dept see it.
I'm afraid your commitment to excellence has not synergised with market driven realities of the mission critical holistic buzzwordverse. Buck up your ideas sonny and buy into the knowledge base on a going forward basis or you'll soon suffer negative organic growth in your wetware core vocal services vis-a-vis next generation corporate employment opportunity scenarios!
"which apparatus is causing more-than-normal energy consumption."
Hint - it'll be one of the big ones. Switch them off in turn and you'll find out. Unless you have 10 TVs and a dozen washing machines it won't take long.
A ground effect craft is still an aircraft. Anything kept off the ground by aerodynamic forces is flying though there is the question of whether a helicopter actually flies or just has an ongoing fight with gravity.
"jet up in the air, into the ground, or where-ever, depending on how the pilot reacts"
The only thing it has in common with a car is that it has wheels and runs on the ground. Given its size and weight it would be more accurate to call it a jet powered truck.
IMO the real land speed record is the wheel driven ones , not the one where you just strap a huge rocket on the back and try and stay on the ground.
Sometimes its for good national security reasons which in the long run protect the public. Reasons which a lot of wannabe Robin Hoods won't know about and as a consequence can put agents or even the entire country at risk.
Sure , some people in agencies will abuse their power occasionally, thats human nature. But people shouldn't write off all security issues as just the Men In Black trying to pull one over the little people. Life isn't that simple and only the naive would think it is.
It didn't have procedures like BBC Basic unfortunately , but what it did have was a simple type of multithreading. It had the AFTER and EVERY keywords which meant you could get the interpreter to call a subroutine once or all the time after a certain number of clock ticks. When I moved on to real multithreading in C then C++ my experience learnt on this helped me immensely since the race conditions you could get in posix threads are nothing compared to those that you can get in a multithreaded Basic language where all variables are global and there is no locking!
"A bad workman may blame his tools, but BASIC (traditional line numbered basic) is a tool that encourages formation of bad habits. "
That's saying hammers are to blame for people not using a screwdriver when they see a screw. Sure , if you're a lousy workman then all bets are off but if you have an aptitude for programming then you'll soon catch on to structured programming etc. BASIC is good for teaching basic logic which is what kids need.
I know a lot of OO evangelists would have us believe otherwise but it is a procedural method of programming except the procedures are conceptually wrapped up inside a container that also has data. If you need more proof just remember that its entirely possible to do OO programming in C (a procedural language if ever there was one) using function pointers inside structures - and in fact this is exactly the sort of code the early C++ to C precompilers produced (along with a load of unintelligable macros).
Slashdot Mirror
"anyone recommending C when Java is an option for cross platform development cannot possibly be classed as a good developer,"
Very few systems (especially in house ones) require true cross platform development so that's generally irrelevant anyway.
"advocating C over Java where Java is an option is simply the sign of a developer who is not capable of picking the right tool for the job."
Or maybe its a developer who doesn't have a knee jerk reaction that the tool that leads to the quickest prototype is the best. I've developed back-end trading apps in the past that required the fastest possible throughput of data (we're talking down to milliseconds being shaved off here) to beat the competition and for that Java simply was not an option. We went for a mixture of C and C++ using the standard sockets API and the system was blazingly fast.
Not every "app" is some floppy piece of GUI code that sits there doing bugger all 99% of its life - some apps are back end systems that are maxed out all the working day and for that you can't beat C and C++.
"Yes, you might need to charge more because there are fewer sales. Yes, it probably prevents you from getting wildly rich off a few months of coding. Tough. But look around, people are making an honest living on those terms."
Well thats alright then. As long as its only a salt-o-the-earth honest living , don't want anyone earning a dishonest living from selling their closed source code they've spent months writing and getting rich now do we because then some freeloading student couldn't hack it up and steal the ideas.
FFS.
"His belief in free software is pragmatic."
Theres a big difference between "I want a driver , I'll write one myself" to "software should be given away free no matter now much work went into it". If someone wants to spend time writing their own code and give it away thats their democratic choice. But they should NOT stand on some dubious moral high ground and dictate to everyone else that they should do the same.
"And can you point out any place where some people actually honestly tried to implement communism on a national level?"
Is this a trick question? The bolsheviks were true communists and they've been followed by Mao, kim Jong Il and various other tin pot african, asian and south/central american dictatorships.
"Look, "communism" was just a dream,"
It may just be a dream but some people want to make it a reality.
"I take it you are againt socialist funding of highways"
Why would I be? Taxation to fund necessary structures both real and social to keep society ticking along is as old as civilisation. Thats completely different to treating people as identical jelly mold robots.
"the whole idea seems to be to reward those who are successful less and less, and reward those who are failing more. "
One of the main tenets of communism is that everyone is equal no matter what their actual abilities. Unfortunately
denying reality didn't work for a lot of nations but you still get plenty of tax payer funded examples of this
species of thinker in the academic world where they're sheltered from the nasty facts of reality outside the thick
walls of their ivory towers.
(I'll get modded down for this by some standard issue right-on teenage group-thinker but c'est la vie)
"I see my other post is marked as a troll - interesting how dissenting viewpoints and opinions simply aren't allowed here any more."
You go against the left leaning teenage group-think at your peril.
So true. If only I had mod points :)
Or even just users and suppliers. Why does they have to be a single catchy buzzword? Or are management types really so dumb they can only handle one word at a time?
All MS is interested in is the bottom line. If they allow free implementations of .NET then as far as they see it they'll lose sales on their .NET compiler and whats more may even lose Windows sales if people port their .NET apps to a-n-other platform.
I'm not saying they're right but thats probably the way their short term thinking marketing and legal dept see it.
I'm afraid your commitment to excellence has not synergised with market driven realities of the mission critical holistic buzzwordverse. Buck up your ideas sonny and buy into the knowledge base on a going forward basis or you'll soon suffer negative organic growth in your wetware core vocal services vis-a-vis next generation corporate employment opportunity scenarios!
..there really is no hope for you.
"which apparatus is causing more-than-normal energy consumption."
Hint - it'll be one of the big ones. Switch them off in turn and you'll find out. Unless you have 10 TVs and a dozen washing machines
it won't take long.
Check your electricity meter.
Check it again the next day.
Subtract the 2 values.
Really , is this so difficult for some people that they need a gadget to do it for them?
Good thing Frank Sinatra's not alive to see this...
A ground effect craft is still an aircraft. Anything kept off the ground by aerodynamic forces is flying though there is the question of whether a helicopter actually flies or just has an ongoing fight with gravity.
"jet up in the air, into the ground, or where-ever, depending on how the pilot reacts"
I'm sure fly by wire autopilot could fix that.
Then chop part of the wings off so it could only fly using ground effect.
Somehow I still don't think it could realistically be called a LAND speed record , do you?
By your definition someone could break the land speed record by just flying a jet fighter at very low level.
"Today's hovercraft are not "airships" per se"
No , they're hovercrafts, not cars or ships.
The only thing it has in common with a car is that it has wheels and runs on the ground. Given its size and weight it would be more accurate to call it a jet powered truck.
IMO the real land speed record is the wheel driven ones , not the one where you just strap a huge rocket on the back and try and stay on the ground.
Motor carriage -> motor car -> car.
Horse drawn carriages were never called cars AFAIK. Though oddly railway carriages were.
Then of course there were carts.
Sometimes its for good national security reasons which in the long run protect the public. Reasons which a lot of wannabe Robin Hoods won't know about and as a consequence can put agents or even the entire country at risk.
Sure , some people in agencies will abuse their power occasionally, thats human nature. But people shouldn't write off all security issues as just the Men In Black trying to pull one over the little people. Life isn't that simple and only the naive would think it is.
POssibly , I don't know. It was certainly slower and it ran on a different CPU.
It didn't have procedures like BBC Basic unfortunately , but what it did have was a simple type of multithreading. It had the AFTER and EVERY keywords which meant you could get the interpreter to call a subroutine once or all the time after a certain number of clock ticks. When I moved on to real multithreading in C then C++ my experience learnt on this helped me immensely since the race conditions you could get in posix threads are nothing compared to those that you can get in a multithreaded Basic language where all variables are global and there is no locking!
"A bad workman may blame his tools, but BASIC (traditional line numbered basic) is a tool that encourages formation of bad habits. "
That's saying hammers are to blame for people not using a screwdriver when they see a screw. Sure , if you're a lousy workman then all bets are off but if you have an aptitude for programming then you'll soon catch on to structured programming etc. BASIC is good for teaching basic logic which is what kids need.
You don't learn to drive in a Ferrari.
I know a lot of OO evangelists would have us believe otherwise but it is a procedural method of programming except the procedures are conceptually wrapped up inside a container that also has data. If you need more proof just remember that its entirely possible to do OO programming in C (a procedural language if ever there was one) using function pointers inside structures - and in fact this is exactly the sort of code the early C++ to C precompilers produced (along with a load of unintelligable macros).
*sigh*
Don't microsoft *ever* learn?
Thank god I bailed out of Windows years ago.