"which gives me the impression you're not a professional and/or experienced C++ coder (yet?). "
I've been doing professional coding for 14 years from everything from OS device drivers to network servers to OLTP to games mainly in C/C++ and Z80 & x86 assembler. But no , I have no experience obviously. I'm just a casual observer whose seen these flavour of the month paradigms and libraries come and go with depressing regularity with the standard issue fanboys and vested interest merchants jumping up and down about how wonderful they are. Yawn. Boost is just another that will hopefully join ACE in the Why Did They Bother? category.
"Then probably we should remove the operators for built-in types as well."
Oh hilarious , I never saw that coming!
You're unlikely to find someone whos rewritten the functionality for adding basic types are you? So why would you ever need to look for where it occurs to debug its implementation? FFS.
"Template metaprogramming also allows policy-based design, which essentially introduces permutations. Context vs. Context for instance. This way, you can optionally add thread safety at compile-time."
Is there an english translation for that? And when else would you add thread safety in a compiled program , runtime?
"which are orders of magnitude more powerful than OO only."
In what way powerful? They save a few lines of code. Period. At the expense of readability in most cases. If you really believe templates increase the problem solving domain of the language then you obviously have little experience of real programming.
Do you actually write real programs or do you just play around with coding paradigms all day? You seem to like name dropping - RAil , LOKI, SWIG (whatever the hell that is),binders, adapters, observer , mvc patterns (oooh , patterns , theres a word no-nothings drool over) but can you actually code? Could you sit down and write for example a network server to do real time trading and failover without being surrounded by a mountain of books to give you all the latest buzzwords & TLAs to impress your boss with and blocks of code you don't really understand and you couldn't write yourself to use as lego bricks to build your slow, bloated app? I doubt it somehow.
Sorry , but I get tired of people of your ilk. Perhaps I'm too old for coding , but when all it consists of is buzzword of the month and seeing the bloatware that gets dished up these days as "code" I do wonder about the general level of ability in the IT industry. It seems its gone the way of politics - all image , spin and buzzwords but little ability to get any decent work done.
Ah yes , the C++ commitee. The people who turned C++ from a learn OO version of C into the bloated mess we have today. Sorry , but they're hardly a name to drop in an argument to bolster your case.
Oh really? Well thats the first time I've heard of it. Provide a link.
"So you now don't know what an operator like does? So what, it does the what it is supposed to do in this context."
Well thats helpful when you're a maintenance programmer faced with 10,000 lines of code that could be doing anything and you have no idea what because the guy who wrote it thought it would be cool to overload every operator he could think off and to hell with readability and comprehension 2 years down the line.
"This helps to really rise the abstraction level of the language to solve problems of the problem domain, in a very efficient way."
Bullshit. Its no more efficient than function calling , its just a way for coders show off.
"you'd better get used to the "weird syntax" of templates and especially the boost libraries"
I'm used to templates syntax (though I think its ugly and Stroustrup could have done a lot better) but Boost makes it worse by overloading operators and then using them in ways never intended that produce syntax that a plain C++ wouldn't even recognise, never mind understand what its doing.eg the gratiutous overload of () for matrix ops where a simple function call would have been much cleaner and easier to follow.
Talk about a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Boost strikes me as the sort of library used by people who want to show off how up to date their skills are , not people who really need to write a program to get a job done. Its bloated , has a wierd syntax that differs from the C++ norm and doesn't solve any problem that isn't already solved or could be done quite easily by standard C++ anyway. What is its point except as intellectual masturbation by its authors? No this isn't a Troll, this is a post by someone who was forced to use Boost for a year and I loath it. Yeah , mod me down , whatever...
"Deviating from what is ordinary, usual, or expected; strange or peculiar:"
Well on my comp sci course I was taught a made up assembler (not Knuths) and lots of other British universities (proper uni's not some college on steriods who think Java is the 2nd coming) do too, so I guess we'll just have to differ on what we see as odd. To me its the standard method used.
"How odd to continue into the 21st century writing the definitive text(s) on computer science using your own made up assembly language?"
Not odd at all. Most computer science courses teach some form of idealised assembly language. What its trying to show is how the basic CPU components of registers , adders , shifters etc work and not have to worry about explaining the various oddities and historical baggage of a given CPU. And which assembler would you teach anyway? x86? Ok , and which syntax version , Intel or GNU? 16 bit or 32 bit? What Knuth does makes perfect sense.
Err , not if the grid power in your area/country comes from hydro, nuclear or renewables.
Does it use a "hacked" kernel?
on
Fedora 7 Released
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· Score: -1, Troll
I'm not accusing Fedora here because I don't know, I've never used it. Do they use their own special kernel version?
It annoys me that of the big distros (hello Suse) seem to think that the standard kernel isn't good enough for them. So if you want to upgrade your kernel you can't just grab the source and use/proc/config.gz from your current setup because a dozen options won't be valid. Is there a good reason they seem to think they know better than Linus and all the other devs working hard on the standard kernel or is it just an ego trip for the developers at these distros?
Bad design too. Copying files should be a seperate process entirely as is done with unix. It shouldn't be part of the GUI shell - that should just handle windowing and application lauching, period.
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious , but wasn't the much vaunted NT Hardware Abstraction Layer designed precisely so that the OS could be more easily ported to various architectures with only the very thin low level layer HAL changed? Isn't this all they'll be doing with multicore architectures? Just have install a different HAL for each one?
"People whinging about email tell more about themselves than email"
No, it says that you've never worked in a big organisation where people firing off an email for every trivial point to entire groups is virtually company policy.
If you want to represent a language on a computer (and not just numbers) then you need a way to enter and store all the characters that language uses. Obviously the less characters the better. The latin alphabet with all its variations, the cyrillic , hebrew, arabic & korean all lend themselves to this quite easily since they all have a manageable number of letters. Languages such as Chinese and Japanese don't , they don't even use alpabets , they use characters for each object/concept which as you can imagine is a bugger when you need a keyboard of a manageable size not to mention the memory to store each character bitmap (not an issue now , but 40 years ago it would have been a nightmare).
This is only a guess on my part but I suspect computers would have developed completely differently if they'd been developed by a culture that used symbols rather than alphabets.
"1.) New rendering paradigms in the operating system that require more resources, like resolution independence, vector graphics, and hardware acceleration of window textures in Quartz and Avalon."
Hardware acceleration shouldn't require more main memory. If anything the opposite should be true.
"2.) In the same vein, screen resolutions and color depths have increased."
Thats a function of graphics card memory. Even Macs don't bitmap the screen in main memory anymore.
"3.) Sound cards are operating at higher frequency and bit rates, and multiple speaker systems are not uncommon."
So what? Sound data sizes are tiny compared to other data sets.
"4.) Today's audio and video codecs are higher quality but more resource-intensive"
That doesn't necessarily equate to them requiring exponentially more memory to decode. Encoding yes , decoding not to much.
Pain in the arse services you mean that most people switch off.
"evelopers can specifically optimize for it to extreme degrees that desktop applications relying on high-level APIs and cross-platform compatibility can't afford."
Unfortunately these days programmers rely on high level APIs and toolkits because they don't have the ability to code low level. And because of this they don't realise that those extra objects they just threw into fooClass to save themselves 5 lines of code will be multiplied by 1000 times and soak up memory like its going out of fashion. Part of the problem is OO where coders know little and care less about what is going on inside the API object they use.
IMO these coders are the IT equivalent of Lego builders.
I know your comment was meant to be amusing but I think you've actually come up with a very good idea. If the OS could signal somehow to the app that its getting close to its limit and to either reduce its resource usage (of memory , IO whatever) or it'll get suspended/killed etc. I wonder if this has been implemented anywhere?
Yes , that was Stalins convenient excuse and typical russian revisionist history thinking. Going by the amount of people from eastern europe he sent to the Steppes you would think half the population were collaberators. Makes you wonder why the germans needed to use tanks to invade doesn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
"which gives me the impression you're not a professional and/or experienced C++ coder (yet?). "
I've been doing professional coding for 14 years from everything from OS device drivers to network servers to OLTP to games mainly in C/C++ and Z80 & x86 assembler. But no , I have no experience obviously. I'm just a casual observer whose seen these flavour of the month paradigms and libraries come and go with depressing regularity with the standard issue fanboys and vested interest merchants jumping up and down about how wonderful they are. Yawn. Boost is just another that will hopefully join ACE in the Why Did They Bother? category.
"The natural expression (as any mathematician will tell you) is v1 + v2."
For arrays? I don't think so, anymore than it is for strings which is why other languages use "&" for string concatenation.
"Then probably we should remove the operators for built-in types as well."
Oh hilarious , I never saw that coming!
You're unlikely to find someone whos rewritten the functionality for adding basic types are you? So why would you ever need to look for where it occurs to debug its implementation? FFS.
"Template metaprogramming also allows policy-based design, which essentially introduces permutations. Context vs. Context for instance. This way, you can optionally add thread safety at compile-time."
Is there an english translation for that? And when else would you add thread safety in a compiled program , runtime?
"which are orders of magnitude more powerful than OO only."
In what way powerful? They save a few lines of code. Period. At the expense of readability in most cases. If you really believe templates increase the problem solving domain of the language then you obviously have little experience of real programming.
"I suppose you like adding vector components manually, instead of doing v1 + v2?"
No , something like vectorAdd(v1,v2) would be a lot more readable and a damn site easier to grep for. Idiot.
Do you actually write real programs or do you just play around with coding paradigms all day? You seem to like name dropping - RAil , LOKI, SWIG (whatever the hell that is) ,binders, adapters, observer , mvc patterns (oooh , patterns , theres a word no-nothings drool over) but can you actually code? Could you sit down and write for example a network server to do real time trading and failover without being surrounded by a mountain of books to give you all the latest buzzwords & TLAs to impress your boss with and blocks of code you don't really understand and you couldn't write yourself to use as lego bricks to build your slow, bloated app? I doubt it somehow.
Sorry , but I get tired of people of your ilk. Perhaps I'm too old for coding , but when all it consists of is buzzword of the month and seeing the bloatware that gets dished up these days as "code" I do wonder about the general level of ability in the IT industry. It seems its gone the way of politics - all image , spin and buzzwords but little ability to get any decent work done.
"Apparently the C++ standard committee"
Ah yes , the C++ commitee. The people who turned C++ from a learn OO version of C into the bloated mess we have today. Sorry , but they're hardly a name to drop in an argument to bolster your case.
"was and is a key goal when C++ was developed."
Oh really? Well thats the first time I've heard of it. Provide a link.
"So you now don't know what an operator like does? So what, it does the what it is supposed to do in this context."
Well thats helpful when you're a maintenance programmer faced with 10,000 lines of code that could be doing anything and you have no idea what because the guy who wrote it thought it would be cool to overload every operator he could think off and to hell with readability and comprehension 2 years down the line.
"This helps to really rise the abstraction level of the language to solve problems of the problem domain, in a very efficient way."
Bullshit. Its no more efficient than function calling , its just a way for coders show off.
"you'd better get used to the "weird syntax" of templates and especially the boost libraries"
I'm used to templates syntax (though I think its ugly and Stroustrup could have done a lot better) but Boost makes it worse by overloading operators and then using them in ways never intended that produce syntax that a plain C++ wouldn't even recognise, never mind understand what its doing.eg the gratiutous overload of () for matrix ops where a simple function call would have been much cleaner and easier to follow.
Talk about a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Boost strikes me as the sort of library used by people who want to show off how up to date their skills are , not people who really need to write a program to get a job done. Its bloated , has a wierd syntax that differs from the C++ norm and doesn't solve any problem that isn't already solved or could be done quite easily by standard C++ anyway. What is its point except as intellectual masturbation by its authors? No this isn't a Troll, this is a post by someone who was forced to use Boost for a year and I loath it. Yeah , mod me down , whatever...
"Deviating from what is ordinary, usual, or expected; strange or peculiar:"
Well on my comp sci course I was taught a made up assembler (not Knuths) and lots of other British universities (proper uni's not some college on steriods who think Java is the 2nd coming) do too, so I guess we'll just have to differ on what we see as odd. To me its the standard method used.
"How odd to continue into the 21st century writing the definitive text(s) on computer science using your own made up assembly language?"
Not odd at all. Most computer science courses teach some form of idealised assembly language. What its trying to show is how the basic CPU components of registers , adders , shifters etc work and not have to worry about explaining the various oddities and historical baggage of a given CPU. And which assembler would you teach anyway? x86? Ok , and which syntax version , Intel or GNU? 16 bit or 32 bit? What Knuth does makes perfect sense.
Err , not if the grid power in your area/country comes from hydro, nuclear or renewables.
I'm not accusing Fedora here because I don't know, I've never used it. Do they use their own special kernel version?
/proc/config.gz from your current setup because a dozen options won't be valid. Is there a good reason they seem to think they know better than Linus and all the other devs working hard on the standard kernel or is it just an ego trip for the developers at these distros?
It annoys me that of the big distros (hello Suse) seem to think that the standard kernel isn't good enough for them. So if you want to upgrade your kernel you can't just grab the source and use
Bad design too. Copying files should be a seperate process entirely as is done with unix. It shouldn't be part of the GUI shell - that should just handle windowing and application lauching, period.
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious , but wasn't the much vaunted NT Hardware Abstraction Layer designed precisely so that the OS could be more easily ported to various architectures with only the very thin low level layer HAL changed? Isn't this all they'll be doing with multicore architectures? Just have install a different HAL for each one?
"People whinging about email tell more about themselves than email"
No, it says that you've never worked in a big organisation where people firing off an email for every trivial point to entire groups is virtually company policy.
"n the UK, a bobby will take that joint, destroy it and issue you with a street verbal warning"
Actually , having met some of the latest wastes of space they've hired in the Met he's more likely to keep it and use it himself later.
"with guns drawn wrestle you to the ground, handcuff you and put you in jail overnight"
Half of american cops are just ex-jocks on steroids so its not surprising they aggressively overreact at any misdemeanor.
"nothing amazing will ever be achieved"
True , but whats that got to do with deep diving? Its not amazing , just pointless and boring.
I use an ethernet cable. Its faster , cheaper , more reliable and impossible to hack from over the air.
If you want to represent a language on a computer (and not just numbers) then you need a way to enter and store all the characters that language uses. Obviously the less characters the better. The latin alphabet with all its variations, the cyrillic , hebrew, arabic & korean all lend themselves to this quite easily since they all have a manageable number of letters. Languages such as Chinese and Japanese don't , they don't even use alpabets , they use characters for each object/concept which as you can imagine is a bugger when you need a keyboard of a manageable size not to mention the memory to store each character bitmap (not an issue now , but 40 years ago it would have been a nightmare).
This is only a guess on my part but I suspect computers would have developed completely differently if they'd been developed by a culture that used symbols rather than alphabets.
"1.) New rendering paradigms in the operating system that require more resources, like resolution independence, vector graphics, and hardware acceleration of window textures in Quartz and Avalon."
Hardware acceleration shouldn't require more main memory. If anything the opposite should be true.
"2.) In the same vein, screen resolutions and color depths have increased."
Thats a function of graphics card memory. Even Macs don't bitmap the screen in main memory anymore.
"3.) Sound cards are operating at higher frequency and bit rates, and multiple speaker systems are not uncommon."
So what? Sound data sizes are tiny compared to other data sets.
"4.) Today's audio and video codecs are higher quality but more resource-intensive"
That doesn't necessarily equate to them requiring exponentially more memory to decode. Encoding yes , decoding not to much.
"5.) Convenience services like metadata file indexing, spellchecking, garbage collection, automatic network configuration,"
Pain in the arse services you mean that most people switch off.
"evelopers can specifically optimize for it to extreme degrees that desktop applications relying on high-level APIs and cross-platform compatibility can't afford."
Unfortunately these days programmers rely on high level APIs and toolkits because they don't have the ability to code low level. And because of this they don't realise that those extra objects they just threw into fooClass to save themselves 5 lines of code will be multiplied by 1000 times and soak up memory like its going out of fashion. Part of the problem is OO where coders know little and care less about what is going on inside the API object they use.
IMO these coders are the IT equivalent of Lego builders.
I know your comment was meant to be amusing but I think you've actually come up with a very good idea. If the OS could signal somehow to the app that its getting close to its limit and to either reduce its resource usage (of memory , IO whatever) or it'll get suspended/killed etc. I wonder if this has been implemented anywhere?
"Nazi collaborators,"
Yes , that was Stalins convenient excuse and typical russian revisionist history thinking. Going by the amount of people from eastern europe he sent to the Steppes you would think half the population were collaberators. Makes you wonder why the germans needed to use tanks to invade doesn't it?