Or those who don't have the money to buy out threatening innovative small companies and technologies. Or those who haven't made a monopoly out of a lie, a lot of luck, a poor ludibriated schmuck and millions of ignorant consumers.
assembly language is all you ever need to program computers, i've never used a compiler for creating my programs because there's no need to; you have far greater control of what's going on when you're doing assembly by hand than you ever will with GCC/Perl/whatever.
Though i feel the same as you, i'd say such tools are designed to boost productivity, regardless of the fact that, yes, all languages are ultimately Turing-equivalent and that writing your program/website in assembly/notepad gives you much more control over what you're doing than compilers/WYSIWYG tools.
And PHBs love such tools because they make tasks so easy that it makes up for a large, cheap, easily replaceable, market of fast button pushers for common business operations. That's the main target of VB, Dreamweaver and alikes...
Yeah, let's all use the real web standard out there: IE. And Longhorn and XAML, soon enough...
...or, let's just play by rules that most large industry strength players have agreed upon (W3C committees) rather than a single one. Standard or not, it's better than simply giving up on thinking on your on and having Microsoft babysitting you while you have money for it.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but it does work in IE, at least the latest XP patched one.
Except for some minor alignment issues, it looks almost as good as in Firefox and behaves exactly the same. Which is amazing given that Microsoft knows CSS + XHTML is a serious threat for their proprietary publishing/formatting office softwares and so doesn't do much to support it.
Yeah, but it doesn't do a proper emulation, nor provides the necessary functionality to ensure the same sort of user experience.
Not only it does provide proper emulation, it surpasses it by providing (some very nice) themes.
However, WMaker is concerned with the NeXTSTep visual alone. If you want "necessary functionality", i suggest you install the whole GNUStep environment. Feel the love...:)
it's available and free. I just like saying "you're wrong".
Yeah, what a charitable company is Microsoft, huh? Freely distributing software at no cost at all!
Of course you forget:
To run it, you need Windows (and a license)
Since it's core technology is so integrated and is a vital part of Windows, its cost is included in Windows price
and, finally: it is good for them to be sure that everyone is using it, paid for or not. Even if it was really free of cost -- which it is not -- because once you have control, it is far easier to start demanding the prices you think you deserve.
Despite being simplistic by today standards, the NeXTStep graphical environment, which WMaker emulates, still is one of the most productive and unintrusive environments ever. And it can look damn good with some proper themes and fine-tuning.
The Xft2 addition is a particularly very welcome one.
This is great news. I hope the integration with GNUStep is a step further too.:)
if it's such a "Best thing since sliced bread" and it's been around for the past 10 years.... why hasn't it been adopted at any large xor larger rate/scale? isn't the 'defacto standard' everyone of us use(s)?
Perhaps for the same reason why Visual Basic, Access, PHP or other lamers are so popular: because they're easy tools for non-professional, non-educated, programmers to get into and quickly build up a-something?
so why is it not? why is it not used in a larger scale then the 'tiny' fraction that it is used today?
Because Real Tools (TM) are for Real Programmers (TM) to build up Real Systems (TM), and, today, that's really just a fraction of a large market saturated by non-professional bozos highly dependent on development environments deployed by a large monopoly which shall remain nameless.
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
10th anniversary of something that barely anyone has ever used (in the big scheme of things) is really not any great thing to celebrate...
Stoopid
So i guess we should'n celebrate that magic year of 1969 or something when Doug Engelbart showed the world (actually, just a few people in a room) the mouse, huh? After all, how many people actually used that damn thing??!
Likewise, not many people used NeXT: they were very expensive and way ahead of their time. But still, you can see their shadow now in MacOS X and the GNUStep environment. Oh, and let's not forget one of the sweetest programming languages around: the highly dynamic Objective-C.
Firefox will only get a single shot with most users. If they download Firefox and have any problems with it at all they will go back to IE and never consider Firefox again.
That's correct, but if we don't try to change that, it'll remain like that forever. If more people are aware of Firefox and actually using it for their daily webbrowising experience, it'll lead to more open-standards complient pages and more awareness of what open-standards mean: no single vendor is able to lock you into their proprietary tools.
It may be better to wait a little longer and let Firefox muture a bit more before trying to convert the general masses with this type of advertising campaign.
Firefox won't ever "muture" to the point of supporting the old IE proprietary "standards of on e vendor alone", so it won't ever handle old pages designed specifically for IE quite right.
So please, don't come with this "let's wait and see" while Microsoft tries to lock the web with XAML and other sickness...
The time is now to change that. We have a kick-ass modern, slick web browser which is open-standards compliant and comes shock-full of great usability appliances and is also secretely comes with a fine smart-client technology which futurely will see much better use: XUL GUIs.
My plan was to do a little work and then write a short pithy article called, "Why.NET is a terrible platform for dynamic languages". My plans changed when...
Interesting how things change when money is involved, huh? By Java's open nature, it was unlikely anyone would ever give him a job for Jython alone, but what about beginning a project to port Python for.Net? It is very well known that M$ treats developers real good, heck why not? Well, good for him! At least he can come out with as good an implementation as.Net possibly can.
Anyway, i agree with parent about ObjC. The author doesn't know what he's talking about, comparing a statically typed, tiresomely declarative language like C# to the likes of Python or Ruby. Sure ObjC feels a lot more close...
Not only it is a great raytracer in itself, it is also a very powerful learning tool: learning complex geometry and programming was never so fun. It's an interactive process by which some truly wonderful artwork may result.
Kudos to the POV-Ray team and all the great artists/hackers who roam around IRTC.
Perhaps getting a free software license could bolster POV-Ray usage a little more, specially if it could be package along with something like KPOVmodeller from the open-source KDE project.
Of course, the real fun is to make worlds born and carefully crafted from your very fingers through a simple text editor. Reminds me of P&P RPGs where you only need your imagination to go wild.
They're also compiled to an intermediate language, so they're faster than scripting languages (yes, Python and Ruby have various different compilers to build C code, java bytecode,.NET IL code, etc, but in their vanilla forms they're interpreted scripting languages).
This is incorrect.
Perl, Python and Ruby standard implementations don't work by sluggishly interpreting each line of code everytime, like the old, putrid Basic interpreters from the 80's. They *do* compile the text source code to an internal, more convenient form: Python to bytecode and Ruby and Perl to an internal graph structure.
What do make Java and C# faster to execute is that type-checking is done at compile time, while in dynamically typed languages like those above the checking is done at runtime.
However, you get faster execution by having the developer of statically-compiled languages to explicitly declare every and all variables and parameters with the correct types, and this clearly is overkill for many application software.
Dynamically-typed languages get this burden off the developer by providing an execution environment which does exactly that at the cost of some execution overhead. The developer is then freed from the boresome and mechanical type declarations to worry about more important matters, such as actually making the code do something useful.
One would reply: "But you lost all benefits from getting correctly compiled code.", like as if the compilation stage doesn't report lots of errors in dynamically-typed languages or if the compilation itself was proof that the software is free of bugs and doesn't need to be thoroughly tested for runtime errors.
I ask, if you still need to go through the pain of testing thoroughly, what real benefits come from statically-compiled languages other than execution speed and perhaps some subtle runtime bugs difficult to discover? Is it worth to lose conciseness or development time just for it?
Here's a lovely trivial example in C#, using the standard.Net framework. This is how i declare a RadioButtonList webcontrol in ASP.NET:
using wctl = System.Web.UI.WebControls; . . . protected wctl.RadioButtonList lstACTY_CD_ID;
Well, that wasn't so bad, and then there's semantic autocompletion of symbols (something M$ marketing dept calls "Intellisense") -- if you're using a featurefull IDE, that is -- which automatically provide you with a quick selection and online documentation of all available completions or operations for the symbol just left of the cursor. Yes, writing type declarations with such tool is trivially easy, though reading through them afterwards and mantaining the code-base is not. Don't understand yet? Here's a very nasty, and yet very common taste of stupid statically typed syntax, following the same example above:
No, i'm not kidding: this is how you preselect some item in a radiobutton list given a particular value from the same datasource. That is real production code from an app i'm working on here at work. Well, at least, in the end it could be worse: like most other people doing.Net development, i could be writing.Net code in VB! Ouch!
So, in the end, it's all a matter of what you value most: development time versus execution time; verbosity vs. conciseness. Noting that execution time should, for most purposes, be made irrelevant in about 6 months and faster and cheaper hardware.
that sort of intelligence isn't all that rare. Which is why a coding career isn't as lucrative as it once was, I guess.
You're guessing wrong, i guess.
The reason why a coding career isn't as lucrative as it used to be is because with modern development tools you barely code at all! I'm talking Microsoft-esque, point-and-click, drag-n-drop, template-ridden tools like Visual Studio here, folks, where any Joe Schmoe can feel like he's actually something -- when in fact he's just a user of a powerful tool.
But, to some extend, even VHLLs like Perl or Ruby can take some blame for that too: you code a lot less and do a lot more with these languages too, making system administrators feel like they are software engineers...
So, there you are, the reason for low salaries in the field for most programmers: anyone can program now, at least for the most mundane tasks of everyday businesses. Certainly, none of them will be developing the next Windows of Visual Studio, so Microsoft can be cool all the while getting richer from those poor enslaved souls so dependent upon their products...
You know what i mean: being in a lonely quest to save the world - or some princess - all by yourself, exploring countless labirynthic, hypnotic dungeons all the while. Old Metroid titles were like that, Castlevania was like that - especially SotN - and the last game i played like that was Zelda: OoT on N64 - Celda, by its on nature, doesn't feel eerie enough...
Today you look around and see lots and lots of flashy racing games, FPSs and, of course, gorgeous-looking fighting games which gets old real fast. And when you look at fantasy games of today, they are either IRC-like chatrooms like MMPRPGs - where many idiots ruin any fantasy mood whatsoever the "game" was supposed to offer - or - pardon me here - a sequence of linear, barely interactive cut-scenes with some crap action going on in-between - can you say Parappa the Rapper and its many clones, Metal Gear Solid 2 (not 1) and, yes, FFX.
Other thing i don't like about this games is the goal for "realism". I can't understand why game makers spend so much time trying to mimick reality with polygons. So, you have a machine which can throw, say, 10000000000 polygons per second, and what you draw on the screen? Everyday reality, that's what. They seem to forget many of us play games to escape reality boredom.
Sure, realism is good for sports, simulation games. For fantasy games it sucks big time. Why not anime-looking characters in the lastest Final Fantasy games? Why have characters in silly costumes look realistic? I not asking for the old short-big headed sprites from yesterday, but how about some sweet-looking Neon Genesis Evangelion-like character designs in full 3D? It doesn't even need to be in cell-shading...
Well, for while ill be playing some Infocom classics...:)
today most websites do not consist of static pages
need to handle serverside scripting like jsp/php
I don't know if you're a programmer, but dynamic, database-driven sites are created by having server-side scripting tools like jsp, php or asp customize static HTML docs like those produced by Composer or Dreamweaver, and then send the resulting web page to the client. So, you sure need static HTML docs, you can think of them as templates to the programming tools.
The webdesigner using the wysiwyg authoring tools should not deal with programming, scripting, databases or whatever.
What about OpenOffice.org right now? It has a lot going for it, like being free, open software which gives freedom to their users and it even interoperates well with closed, proprietary slaying file formats like those from Microsoft Office so that you can read what your underpowered Windows friends send you, without giving up on security or stability though...
Interoperability with EVERYONE else I knew. No converting and reformatting, no font problems, no nothing.
I'm almost sure you may have eXPerienced some minor gripes like worms, trojan or virus. Not to even mention irritating pop-up ads while on the web.
It was fast, easy, and nice.
So is any modern GNU/Linux distribution.
IE was far superior to Mozilla.
That was then. What about compare the ultra-slick Mozilla Firebird with it right now? You'd be surprised to find out IE offers an outdated web browsing experience...
I opened the browser and pages loaded faster, nice.
That's the nice thing about cheating or solely ignoring standards. The bad thing is that you have to follow Microsoft rules rather than standards to comply. Some developers just aren't happy with it. I sure don't want one company alone to own every aspect of digital life, like webbrowsing, controlling my computer or overall saying what i can do or not with my own computer.
I clicked on movies and low and behold codecs were downloaded automatically and the movies started playing (all without having to compile mplayer, get codecs, and fool with Mozilla to get it to play them).
That's the good thing about commercial offerings: they already configured and loaded a product with lots of important features for you. Mozilla the project can't do that (come loaded with third-party software like Macromedia Flash) because it's not a commercial product, but Netscape Navigator can. Or you can do it for yourself, when you're free.
Of course, the bad thing is that you have to pay for it.
Upgrading Windows was easy. Either do it through the web or through the GUI. I didn't have to worry about dependencies breaking, problems with "stable", "unstable", or "seriously broken and use at your own risk".
Is it easier than simply typing at any command prompt: "apt-get upgrade" (assuming you go with Debian)?
What about removing virus and such? is it easy to go through the hole cycle of forget_to_update_anti_virus-get_infested-reinstall -lament_you_didnt_backup_anything?
The good thing about stable, robust software like GNU/Linux is that you don't have to reinstall it. You're just likely to go upgrading and your system is always up-to-date and secure...
While I have complaints about Windows (still evil) I think it is a far superior experience to Linux.
You're being unfair, we both know it. Boot Knopix or something to give a modern distribution another chance...
Re:The superiority of PHP over Perl
on
PHP Cookbook
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
>>Recently I've had a chance to do some web design with PHP.
some (?) web design (??)... how much of it to begin with?
>>Previously I'd used Perl because I'd heard from many people that Perl was the end all and be all of scripting languages for the web. Imagine my suprise to discover that PHP was vastly superior!
Perhaps your surprise came from the fact that you were using CGI Perl and that PHP was a fast Apache module? You'd be surprised to learn, though, that today there's also a Perl Apache module as well which is as fast or faster than PHP's...
>>I know this is a bold statement, but I have solid arguements to support it.
You better have them as we'll see below...
>>I'm not arguing that PHP is better than Perl in all cases. There is certainly still a use for Perl.
Actually, it's the contrary: Perl is one of the most flexible and faster high level languages in existence. It is used for nearly any tasks imaginable dealing mostly with character string processing, that is, it's an overall great general purpose Turing machine. PHP for some misterious reason is used solely as a tool for building html pages, or perhaps PDF using some commercial library...
Besides, you're aware that php was born from Perl, aren't you? They just dumbed it down so as not to scare ex-M$ users away and because of this the language just lost much of its strengh and flexibility. Ever heard of Perl's motto: "There's more than one way to do it"? It means you can express the same computation many different ways. It means, for instance, that you may express in purely procedural fashion or object oriented, where you see fit. In php (and Python as well) you're trapped in OO craze. There's just one way to do things.
Also, Perl is one of the most compact (and therefore faster) languages in existence. Of course, people's unwillingness to learn the language make them look at features such as "do { print if/anypattern/; } while();" as beyond their comprehension, but it's not the language's fault if they don't wanna use some the languages builtin features for their great advantage...
So, i say, i'm not saying Perl is better than php in all cases, there's certainly still a use for php...:)
>>Finally, I'm not the most talented Perl programmer out there.
That seems obvious!
>>I generally prefer to use the vastly superior Python, but can use Perl if I have to.
I like Python too and highly regard it to be Perl's spiritual brother. But i wouldn't say one or the other is better. Though i would take Perl's flexibility and compactness over Python's rigid OO syntax anyday. One thing is true: they both beat the crap out of php and its VB-like stand...
>>* Ease of use. I would definitely not recommend anyone new to programming begin with Perl.
I wouldn't say ease of use is one of Perl's deficiencies. But surely the learning curve for the language is kinda steep. Still, power comes at a price and if you are willing to use a powerful tool you'd better learn how to use it and use it well.
I can say once you learn Perl right, most other languages just feel like lacking in flexibility, expressiveness or compactness.
Yes, if you never used a katana, you'd better get to grips first with a bamboo stick or something.
>> * The OO of PHP is excellent. In my experience, it rivals Smalltalk.
Who do you think you're fooling? PHP's OO features are more like Javascript than Smalltalk, stop daydreaming. If you want high level OO stuff go with Python's multi-inheritance model.
>>Hopefully Perl will be patched up so it supports such must-have OO features like introspection, reflection, self-replication and ontological data-points.
When there's real need for such features, yes. Because Perl doesn't force you into OO syntax, many constructs which just make sense in a purely OO view of the world are not really need
Replace the damned Notepad with Emacs (not sure regular joes will ever use it)
and finally, if the need for a good shell ever arises, be sure to get bash installed so that command line interface doesn't get confounded with lameness
Slashdot Mirror
Those that can't innovate litigate.
Or those who don't have the money to buy out threatening innovative small companies and technologies. Or those who haven't made a monopoly out of a lie, a lot of luck, a poor ludibriated schmuck and millions of ignorant consumers.
Though i feel the same as you, i'd say such tools are designed to boost productivity, regardless of the fact that, yes, all languages are ultimately Turing-equivalent and that writing your program/website in assembly/notepad gives you much more control over what you're doing than compilers/WYSIWYG tools.
And PHBs love such tools because they make tasks so easy that it makes up for a large, cheap, easily replaceable, market of fast button pushers for common business operations. That's the main target of VB, Dreamweaver and alikes...Yeah, let's all use the real web standard out there: IE. And Longhorn and XAML, soon enough...
Sorry to burst your bubble, but it does work in IE, at least the latest XP patched one. Except for some minor alignment issues, it looks almost as good as in Firefox and behaves exactly the same. Which is amazing given that Microsoft knows CSS + XHTML is a serious threat for their proprietary publishing/formatting office softwares and so doesn't do much to support it.
Yeah, but it doesn't do a proper emulation, nor provides the necessary functionality to ensure the same sort of user experience.
Not only it does provide proper emulation, it surpasses it by providing (some very nice) themes.
However, WMaker is concerned with the NeXTSTep visual alone. If you want "necessary functionality", i suggest you install the whole GNUStep environment. Feel the love... :)
suck it, Squenix, suck it...
anyway, FFVII was just about as great as its imediate antecessor in the SNES, but with far more visual punch.
i despise eternal sequels, though... and it's unlikely the plot will ever live up to the original.
it's available and free. I just like saying "you're wrong".
Yeah, what a charitable company is Microsoft, huh? Freely distributing software at no cost at all!
Of course you forget:
Despite being simplistic by today standards, the NeXTStep graphical environment, which WMaker emulates, still is one of the most productive and unintrusive environments ever. And it can look damn good with some proper themes and fine-tuning.
The Xft2 addition is a particularly very welcome one.
This is great news. I hope the integration with GNUStep is a step further too. :)
i thought it was about their z-machine for text adventure games from the eighties... :)
if it's such a "Best thing since sliced bread" and it's been around for the past 10 years .... why hasn't it been adopted at any large xor larger rate/scale? isn't the 'defacto standard' everyone of us use(s)?
Perhaps for the same reason why Visual Basic, Access, PHP or other lamers are so popular: because they're easy tools for non-professional, non-educated, programmers to get into and quickly build up a-something?
so why is it not? why is it not used in a larger scale then the 'tiny' fraction that it is used today?
Because Real Tools (TM) are for Real Programmers (TM) to build up Real Systems (TM), and, today, that's really just a fraction of a large market saturated by non-professional bozos highly dependent on development environments deployed by a large monopoly which shall remain nameless.
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
Ok, you know less than i do.
Did you place the word "muture" in quotes to secretely poke fun at the parent poster's spelling?
Yes
Maybe his webbrowiser doesn't have a good spell-checker built in like yours.
I actually rely on good ol' fashioned knowledge, so i don't become completely dependent on some electronic nany someday...
It's a very complete, elegant and large OO framework for quickly developing applications of any kind, even CLI ones.
That's exactly why it can run on Mac, using it's pretty GUI, or using a NeXT-style GUI like WindowMaker.
10th anniversary of something that barely anyone has ever used (in the big scheme of things) is really not any great thing to celebrate...
Stoopid
So i guess we should'n celebrate that magic year of 1969 or something when Doug Engelbart showed the world (actually, just a few people in a room) the mouse, huh? After all, how many people actually used that damn thing??!
Likewise, not many people used NeXT: they were very expensive and way ahead of their time. But still, you can see their shadow now in MacOS X and the GNUStep environment. Oh, and let's not forget one of the sweetest programming languages around: the highly dynamic Objective-C.
stoopid
Firefox will only get a single shot with most users. If they download Firefox and have any problems with it at all they will go back to IE and never consider Firefox again.
That's correct, but if we don't try to change that, it'll remain like that forever. If more people are aware of Firefox and actually using it for their daily webbrowising experience, it'll lead to more open-standards complient pages and more awareness of what open-standards mean: no single vendor is able to lock you into their proprietary tools.
It may be better to wait a little longer and let Firefox muture a bit more before trying to convert the general masses with this type of advertising campaign.
Firefox won't ever "muture" to the point of supporting the old IE proprietary "standards of on e vendor alone", so it won't ever handle old pages designed specifically for IE quite right.
So please, don't come with this "let's wait and see" while Microsoft tries to lock the web with XAML and other sickness...
The time is now to change that. We have a kick-ass modern, slick web browser which is open-standards compliant and comes shock-full of great usability appliances and is also secretely comes with a fine smart-client technology which futurely will see much better use: XUL GUIs.
Doh! Everyone knows the greatest console ever was Sega Genesis. :)
Interesting how things change when money is involved, huh? By Java's open nature, it was unlikely anyone would ever give him a job for Jython alone, but what about beginning a project to port Python for .Net? It is very well known that M$ treats developers real good, heck why not? Well, good for him! At least he can come out with as good an implementation as .Net possibly can.
Anyway, i agree with parent about ObjC. The author doesn't know what he's talking about, comparing a statically typed, tiresomely declarative language like C# to the likes of Python or Ruby. Sure ObjC feels a lot more close...
Not only it is a great raytracer in itself, it is also a very powerful learning tool: learning complex geometry and programming was never so fun. It's an interactive process by which some truly wonderful artwork may result.
Kudos to the POV-Ray team and all the great artists/hackers who roam around IRTC.
Perhaps getting a free software license could bolster POV-Ray usage a little more, specially if it could be package along with something like KPOVmodeller from the open-source KDE project.
Of course, the real fun is to make worlds born and carefully crafted from your very fingers through a simple text editor. Reminds me of P&P RPGs where you only need your imagination to go wild.
This is incorrect.
Perl, Python and Ruby standard implementations don't work by sluggishly interpreting each line of code everytime, like the old, putrid Basic interpreters from the 80's. They *do* compile the text source code to an internal, more convenient form: Python to bytecode and Ruby and Perl to an internal graph structure.
What do make Java and C# faster to execute is that type-checking is done at compile time, while in dynamically typed languages like those above the checking is done at runtime.
However, you get faster execution by having the developer of statically-compiled languages to explicitly declare every and all variables and parameters with the correct types, and this clearly is overkill for many application software.
Dynamically-typed languages get this burden off the developer by providing an execution environment which does exactly that at the cost of some execution overhead. The developer is then freed from the boresome and mechanical type declarations to worry about more important matters, such as actually making the code do something useful.
One would reply: "But you lost all benefits from getting correctly compiled code.", like as if the compilation stage doesn't report lots of errors in dynamically-typed languages or if the compilation itself was proof that the software is free of bugs and doesn't need to be thoroughly tested for runtime errors.
I ask, if you still need to go through the pain of testing thoroughly, what real benefits come from statically-compiled languages other than execution speed and perhaps some subtle runtime bugs difficult to discover? Is it worth to lose conciseness or development time just for it?
Here's a lovely trivial example in C#, using the standard .Net framework. This is how i declare a RadioButtonList webcontrol in ASP.NET:
Well, that wasn't so bad, and then there's semantic autocompletion of symbols (something M$ marketing dept calls "Intellisense") -- if you're using a featurefull IDE, that is -- which automatically provide you with a quick selection and online documentation of all available completions or operations for the symbol just left of the cursor. Yes, writing type declarations with such tool is trivially easy, though reading through them afterwards and mantaining the code-base is not. Don't understand yet? Here's a very nasty, and yet very common taste of stupid statically typed syntax, following the same example above:
No, i'm not kidding: this is how you preselect some item in a radiobutton list given a particular value from the same datasource. That is real production code from an app i'm working on here at work. Well, at least, in the end it could be worse: like most other people doing .Net development, i could be writing .Net code in VB! Ouch!
So, in the end, it's all a matter of what you value most: development time versus execution time; verbosity vs. conciseness. Noting that execution time should, for most purposes, be made irrelevant in about 6 months and faster and cheaper hardware.
You're guessing wrong, i guess.
The reason why a coding career isn't as lucrative as it used to be is because with modern development tools you barely code at all! I'm talking Microsoft-esque, point-and-click, drag-n-drop, template-ridden tools like Visual Studio here, folks, where any Joe Schmoe can feel like he's actually something -- when in fact he's just a user of a powerful tool.
But, to some extend, even VHLLs like Perl or Ruby can take some blame for that too: you code a lot less and do a lot more with these languages too, making system administrators feel like they are software engineers...
So, there you are, the reason for low salaries in the field for most programmers: anyone can program now, at least for the most mundane tasks of everyday businesses. Certainly, none of them will be developing the next Windows of Visual Studio, so Microsoft can be cool all the while getting richer from those poor enslaved souls so dependent upon their products...
Actually, i'm just wondering how will they name their OS now? "Introducing: MS Windowless Server 2004. Taking you to the next level: CLI"
You know what i mean: being in a lonely quest to save the world - or some princess - all by yourself, exploring countless labirynthic, hypnotic dungeons all the while. Old Metroid titles were like that, Castlevania was like that - especially SotN - and the last game i played like that was Zelda: OoT on N64 - Celda, by its on nature, doesn't feel eerie enough...
Today you look around and see lots and lots of flashy racing games, FPSs and, of course, gorgeous-looking fighting games which gets old real fast. And when you look at fantasy games of today, they are either IRC-like chatrooms like MMPRPGs - where many idiots ruin any fantasy mood whatsoever the "game" was supposed to offer - or - pardon me here - a sequence of linear, barely interactive cut-scenes with some crap action going on in-between - can you say Parappa the Rapper and its many clones, Metal Gear Solid 2 (not 1) and, yes, FFX.
Other thing i don't like about this games is the goal for "realism". I can't understand why game makers spend so much time trying to mimick reality with polygons. So, you have a machine which can throw, say, 10000000000 polygons per second, and what you draw on the screen? Everyday reality, that's what. They seem to forget many of us play games to escape reality boredom.
Sure, realism is good for sports, simulation games. For fantasy games it sucks big time. Why not anime-looking characters in the lastest Final Fantasy games? Why have characters in silly costumes look realistic? I not asking for the old short-big headed sprites from yesterday, but how about some sweet-looking Neon Genesis Evangelion-like character designs in full 3D? It doesn't even need to be in cell-shading...
Well, for while ill be playing some Infocom classics... :)
today most websites do not consist of static pages
need to handle serverside scripting like jsp/php
I don't know if you're a programmer, but dynamic, database-driven sites are created by having server-side scripting tools like jsp, php or asp customize static HTML docs like those produced by Composer or Dreamweaver, and then send the resulting web page to the client. So, you sure need static HTML docs, you can think of them as templates to the programming tools.
The webdesigner using the wysiwyg authoring tools should not deal with programming, scripting, databases or whatever.
What about OpenOffice.org right now? It has a lot going for it, like being free, open software which gives freedom to their users and it even interoperates well with closed, proprietary slaying file formats like those from Microsoft Office so that you can read what your underpowered Windows friends send you, without giving up on security or stability though...
Interoperability with EVERYONE else I knew. No converting and reformatting, no font problems, no nothing.I'm almost sure you may have eXPerienced some minor gripes like worms, trojan or virus. Not to even mention irritating pop-up ads while on the web.
It was fast, easy, and nice.So is any modern GNU/Linux distribution.
IE was far superior to Mozilla.That was then. What about compare the ultra-slick Mozilla Firebird with it right now? You'd be surprised to find out IE offers an outdated web browsing experience...
I opened the browser and pages loaded faster, nice.That's the nice thing about cheating or solely ignoring standards. The bad thing is that you have to follow Microsoft rules rather than standards to comply. Some developers just aren't happy with it. I sure don't want one company alone to own every aspect of digital life, like webbrowsing, controlling my computer or overall saying what i can do or not with my own computer.
I clicked on movies and low and behold codecs were downloaded automatically and the movies started playing (all without having to compile mplayer, get codecs, and fool with Mozilla to get it to play them).That's the good thing about commercial offerings: they already configured and loaded a product with lots of important features for you. Mozilla the project can't do that (come loaded with third-party software like Macromedia Flash) because it's not a commercial product, but Netscape Navigator can. Or you can do it for yourself, when you're free.
Of course, the bad thing is that you have to pay for it.
Upgrading Windows was easy. Either do it through the web or through the GUI. I didn't have to worry about dependencies breaking, problems with "stable", "unstable", or "seriously broken and use at your own risk".Is it easier than simply typing at any command prompt: "apt-get upgrade" (assuming you go with Debian)?
What about removing virus and such? is it easy to go through the hole cycle of forget_to_update_anti_virus-get_infested-reinstall -lament_you_didnt_backup_anything?
The good thing about stable, robust software like GNU/Linux is that you don't have to reinstall it. You're just likely to go upgrading and your system is always up-to-date and secure...
While I have complaints about Windows (still evil) I think it is a far superior experience to Linux.You're being unfair, we both know it. Boot Knopix or something to give a modern distribution another chance...
>>Recently I've had a chance to do some web design with PHP.
/anypattern/; } while();" as beyond their comprehension, but it's not the language's fault if they don't wanna use some the languages builtin features for their great advantage...
:)
some (?) web design (??)... how much of it to begin with?
>>Previously I'd used Perl because I'd heard from many people that Perl was the end all and be all of scripting languages for the web. Imagine my suprise to discover that PHP was vastly superior!
Perhaps your surprise came from the fact that you were using CGI Perl and that PHP was a fast Apache module? You'd be surprised to learn, though, that today there's also a Perl Apache module as well which is as fast or faster than PHP's...
>>I know this is a bold statement, but I have solid arguements to support it.
You better have them as we'll see below...
>>I'm not arguing that PHP is better than Perl in all cases. There is certainly still a use for Perl.
Actually, it's the contrary: Perl is one of the most flexible and faster high level languages in existence. It is used for nearly any tasks imaginable dealing mostly with character string processing, that is, it's an overall great general purpose Turing machine. PHP for some misterious reason is used solely as a tool for building html pages, or perhaps PDF using some commercial library...
Besides, you're aware that php was born from Perl, aren't you? They just dumbed it down so as not to scare ex-M$ users away and because of this the language just lost much of its strengh and flexibility. Ever heard of Perl's motto: "There's more than one way to do it"? It means you can express the same computation many different ways. It means, for instance, that you may express in purely procedural fashion or object oriented, where you see fit. In php (and Python as well) you're trapped in OO craze. There's just one way to do things.
Also, Perl is one of the most compact (and therefore faster) languages in existence. Of course, people's unwillingness to learn the language make them look at features such as "do { print if
So, i say, i'm not saying Perl is better than php in all cases, there's certainly still a use for php...
>>Finally, I'm not the most talented Perl programmer out there.
That seems obvious!
>>I generally prefer to use the vastly superior Python, but can use Perl if I have to.
I like Python too and highly regard it to be Perl's spiritual brother. But i wouldn't say one or the other is better. Though i would take Perl's flexibility and compactness over Python's rigid OO syntax anyday. One thing is true: they both beat the crap out of php and its VB-like stand...
>>* Ease of use. I would definitely not recommend anyone new to programming begin with Perl.
I wouldn't say ease of use is one of Perl's deficiencies. But surely the learning curve for the language is kinda steep. Still, power comes at a price and if you are willing to use a powerful tool you'd better learn how to use it and use it well.
I can say once you learn Perl right, most other languages just feel like lacking in flexibility, expressiveness or compactness.
Yes, if you never used a katana, you'd better get to grips first with a bamboo stick or something.
>> * The OO of PHP is excellent. In my experience, it rivals Smalltalk.
Who do you think you're fooling? PHP's OO features are more like Javascript than Smalltalk, stop daydreaming. If you want high level OO stuff go with Python's multi-inheritance model.
>>Hopefully Perl will be patched up so it supports such must-have OO features like introspection, reflection, self-replication and ontological data-points.
When there's real need for such features, yes. Because Perl doesn't force you into OO syntax, many constructs which just make sense in a purely OO view of the world are not really need
Replace IE with Mozilla
Replace Works with OpenOffice.org
Replace Paintbrush with the Gimp
Replace the damned Notepad with Emacs (not sure regular joes will ever use it)
and finally, if the need for a good shell ever arises, be sure to get bash installed so that command line interface doesn't get confounded with lameness