I really don't see Java's place here. In the hands of a good programmer, Java isn't any more productive than C++. Python is an order of magnitude more productive than either, and IMO should replace both for application-level programming. But Java? I just don't see the benifet, aside from a smaller learning curve.
One thing I never understand about anti-C++ rants. Where's the beef? All I see is a whole bunch of hand waving and vague references to pseudo object orientation, incoherency, etc. No real meat at all. So from my point of view, some real evidence:
1) C++ is a systems programming language. The lack of pointers would make it entirely unsuitable for that purpose. For normal use, you should use references or smart pointers. Not doing so is no excuse. Using a C-style array when you don't need it is akin to deliberately writing an infinite loop. It's entirely the programmer's fault.
2) The object model doesn't lack anything that Java's model has, except introspection (which is fragile at best). If anything, Java's model is equally broken, because everything is not an object. What exactly about the object model is missing?
3) What's wrong with the C++ syntax? How is it that different from Java's syntax?
From my POV, peoples' biggest problem with C++ is that it doesn't prevent you from hurting yourself. That's okay. I hate all the consumer protection bullshit, and Nader and his "don't run with scissors" party, so I have no problem with my language having some teeth. I do a lot of low level programming, and I find that C++, more than any other language, allows one to do that will still maintaining a high level of abstraction.
Realize also that a half-pay H1-B job (in US currency) means a hell of a lot more in India than it does here. A dollar there goes a lot futher than the conversion rate would imply. Someone drawing a middle class salary in the US can live like a rich man in India. Also remember that these statistics take that into account. The upper number (250 million) is middle class by optimistic Indian standards. The lower number (40 million) is the middle class by conservative Western standards. Either way you slice it, that's a lot of people.
India is a Parlimentary system, so the Prime Minister is the real power. It's not better or worse, just different. In theory, the US has a better seperation, but (and I blame the media for this) the office of the President has gotten much more powerful than was intended, so in practice, it's not much different. Right now, ceremonial heads of state are mainly there so the people have a single person to rally around and look up to. This is also why this guy is much more palatable than your average politician.
The occasional stutter or miswording is far worse than just a polish issue. It indicates a lack of eloquence, and a lack of real mastery of the language. It is critical for a great leader to be eloquent and charismatic. He should be able to move people to action by his mere words. Bush cannot do this, so he must resort to using terrorism to scare people into following his policies.
Character is far less important than intelligence. The US system of government has many checks against corruption, but few against stupidity. I hear people say, "he may not be that smart, but he is resolute!" Good god! A dumb man who is resolute is just more dangerous than a dumb man who is not. I also hear people say, "he may not be that smart, but he has surrounded himself with smart people!" That's even worse! The American people did not elect those that the President chooses as advisors. A smart man can keep has advisors in check, and use their advice wisely. A dumb man is easily manipulated, or cannot see past his own beliefs to embarce ideas even though he does not agree with them. A good, decent, honest man is someone you befriend, and trust to watch your house while you are away. He is not someone you make president.
PS> Bush has done far more damage than any of the liberal opposition ever imagined. Check out today's Washington Post. The top two stories are about the White House proving that WMDs actually existed in Iraq, and about how Islamic courts are coming in to replace the government courts in Iraq. So, basically, we went to a war over WMDs that we couldn't find, and now have turned a secular nation into a conservative theocracy. If you don't agree with the last point, consider this: 60% of Iraq is composed of Shiite Muslims. The Shiite branch of Islam is a conservative one. If the US lives up to its promise of allowing the Iraqi's to hold free elections to create their own government, these Shiites will win the elections and form a Islamic theocracy modeled on that of Iran's. The only way the US can prevent this is to stop the democratic process.
PS2> As for your last paragraph, remember one thing: the US was populated by killing 80 million native American people in less than a century. The US allowed slavery to persist until the 1850's, or half a century after Great Britain declared slavery illegal. It hasn't until a century after that until blacks even started to get real civil rights. Of course, all of this is past us, and they do not negate all the good things the US has done and all the honorable principles on which it was founded. But it sure as hell should keep us very humble when we speak about other nations.
Look at it this way --- those that live in the South. How often do you get irked because someone things that everyone living in Mississippi or Alabama is poor? While it is true that the rate of poverty in these states is much higher than in other states (as someone who has lived in the suburbs of DC for most of his life, I was actually surprised to see this level of poverty in the US) there doesn't mean that everybody there is poor.
He said "sizable population" not "sizable percentage." It's an absolute value. The number of wealthy educated people, even though relatively small percentage-wise, is a large number in absolute terms. Since the original post as was about OSS software development, what matteres is not the percentage, but sheer numbers. Estimates put the size of the Indian middle class at 40-250 million people. That's a very sizable number, comparable to the total population of most European countries. Also, remember that among the Indian middle class, technology is a very common field of study. So the total number of potential OSS contributers in India (which, again, is what this thread is about) is a huge number.
That's actually more true than you realize. Developing nations, suffer very much from the problem of brain drain. Many educated and wealthy people leave the country because of prevailing conditions. India is much more stable than most other developing nations, but they still have to deal with this issue.
Maybe this is why the military is trying to recruit gamers? I'd suspect they have access to this kind of info a year or so before other people do, which might explain the army FPS game that was released recently.
My PS2 has played every DVD I've ever tried on it, in the several years I've owned it. Maybe I got lucky, but all my friend's PS2s play their DVDs fine too.
FOX is conservative biased and proud of it. It doesn't take a liberal to figure that out. Five minutes of watching Hannity and Colmes, with the over-the-top conservative, and the spineless, whipped liberal, is all it takes. How they managed to get all ten conservatives in the US media into one TV network never ceases to amaze me.
This UNIX IP character is damaged goods. Its apparently been around the block a few...dozen...times. Let's just give up and call it community property.
Of course, with metric units, its much less likely that you'll make conversion errors. It's kind of hard to make a mistake dividing/multiplying by 10. The problem with the calculator arguement is that calculators are really slow. I can do scaling in my head in the metric system, but I can't do that scaling with imperial units. Restorting to the calculator to do scalings is extremely tedious and time consuming. Of course, this isn't a problem in CAD, but doing quick sketches becomes irritating in imperial units.
Now this is an interesting thing. I'm sure that just about everybody has given up on trying to convert the American people to metric --- personally, I see no hope. But what about American engineers? At least in my classes, engineers are still strongly inclined towards imperial units. It's a pain in the ass scaling stuff in you're head when you're working in 1/8s of an inch!
The $390 per capita income thing is a bit misleading. One of the key things about living in foreign countries is that stuff is *cheap*. Labor is cheap, raw materials are cheap, etc. So even though the currency is converted into US dollars, it isn't representative of an equivilent amount by any means. When my dad was in Liberia, he changed $10, bought lunch every day for a week, and still had change left over. Whenever I go to Thailand, I feel really weird tipping the bell-boy a quarter, which is an enitrely reasonable tip there. Because of this discrepency in actual costs, its likely that rolling out these networks costs signficantly less in India than it does here, in terms of labor and materials costs.
PS> This discrepency is also the reason that having to import stuff from other countries is so harmful to the economies of these countries --- the cost of foreign products is very out-of-line with the prices in the local economy.
Interesting story. My dad is currently in Afghanistan for a project. He was unable to call us through land lines, because the phone network is in such bad shape. But apparently, the cell phones in Kabul still work!
Let me give you an example. A while ago I was trying to figure out how the Intel C++ compiler called global constructors during program initialization. This was before the standard x86 C++ ABI, so this wasn't documented anywhere. The only way to figure out how things were working was to wade through ASM listings and hex dumps. Also, there are lots of places where reverse engineering is absolutely crucial. For example you can sometimes figure out the protocol to a device by analyzing the binary code of the driver.
Yesh. We're not animals, dude. How many of those "advantages" are at all useful in the modern world? Zero. If natural processes were at work here, then the fact that Bill G is a physical wealking would inpinge on his ability to be the richest man in the world. The simple fact remains that an entire generation of women are being pushed into a mold of what women should be and should do. You see it less in more civilized places , but get into the south or into the country and the phenomenon becomes definately noticible. Hell, just watch TV commercials for five minutes and then tell me that the present social differences between men and women are due to physical differences.
That's a dump arguement. Java has the same problem of having to detect pointer size and the presence of certain function calls, except its one level down, inside the libraries. Of course, that's a non-feature, since libraries that abstract these differences are available for C/C++ as well. It always seems to me that most of the "great features" of Java I'm always hearing about are actually benifets of a large standard library, not anything about the language itself. I've been genuinely impressed by some of the stuff Lisp, Ocaml, and other functional languages have, that C++ doesn't, but the few advantages that Java *does* have (garbage collection, introspection) are outweighed by the disadvantages (no compile-time metaprogramming, no operator overloading, schism between built-in types and user-defined types).
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I really don't see Java's place here. In the hands of a good programmer, Java isn't any more productive than C++. Python is an order of magnitude more productive than either, and IMO should replace both for application-level programming. But Java? I just don't see the benifet, aside from a smaller learning curve.
One thing I never understand about anti-C++ rants. Where's the beef? All I see is a whole bunch of hand waving and vague references to pseudo object orientation, incoherency, etc. No real meat at all. So from my point of view, some real evidence:
1) C++ is a systems programming language. The lack of pointers would make it entirely unsuitable for that purpose. For normal use, you should use references or smart pointers. Not doing so is no excuse. Using a C-style array when you don't need it is akin to deliberately writing an infinite loop. It's entirely the programmer's fault.
2) The object model doesn't lack anything that Java's model has, except introspection (which is fragile at best). If anything, Java's model is equally broken, because everything is not an object. What exactly about the object model is missing?
3) What's wrong with the C++ syntax? How is it that different from Java's syntax?
From my POV, peoples' biggest problem with C++ is that it doesn't prevent you from hurting yourself. That's okay. I hate all the consumer protection bullshit, and Nader and his "don't run with scissors" party, so I have no problem with my language having some teeth. I do a lot of low level programming, and I find that C++, more than any other language, allows one to do that will still maintaining a high level of abstraction.
Any language that doesn't have an interactive interpreter is TOTALLY unsuited for teaching.
Realize also that a half-pay H1-B job (in US currency) means a hell of a lot more in India than it does here. A dollar there goes a lot futher than the conversion rate would imply. Someone drawing a middle class salary in the US can live like a rich man in India. Also remember that these statistics take that into account. The upper number (250 million) is middle class by optimistic Indian standards. The lower number (40 million) is the middle class by conservative Western standards. Either way you slice it, that's a lot of people.
India is a Parlimentary system, so the Prime Minister is the real power. It's not better or worse, just different. In theory, the US has a better seperation, but (and I blame the media for this) the office of the President has gotten much more powerful than was intended, so in practice, it's not much different. Right now, ceremonial heads of state are mainly there so the people have a single person to rally around and look up to. This is also why this guy is much more palatable than your average politician.
The occasional stutter or miswording is far worse than just a polish issue. It indicates a lack of eloquence, and a lack of real mastery of the language. It is critical for a great leader to be eloquent and charismatic. He should be able to move people to action by his mere words. Bush cannot do this, so he must resort to using terrorism to scare people into following his policies.
Character is far less important than intelligence. The US system of government has many checks against corruption, but few against stupidity. I hear people say, "he may not be that smart, but he is resolute!" Good god! A dumb man who is resolute is just more dangerous than a dumb man who is not. I also hear people say, "he may not be that smart, but he has surrounded himself with smart people!" That's even worse! The American people did not elect those that the President chooses as advisors. A smart man can keep has advisors in check, and use their advice wisely. A dumb man is easily manipulated, or cannot see past his own beliefs to embarce ideas even though he does not agree with them. A good, decent, honest man is someone you befriend, and trust to watch your house while you are away. He is not someone you make president.
PS> Bush has done far more damage than any of the liberal opposition ever imagined. Check out today's Washington Post. The top two stories are about the White House proving that WMDs actually existed in Iraq, and about how Islamic courts are coming in to replace the government courts in Iraq. So, basically, we went to a war over WMDs that we couldn't find, and now have turned a secular nation into a conservative theocracy. If you don't agree with the last point, consider this: 60% of Iraq is composed of Shiite Muslims. The Shiite branch of Islam is a conservative one. If the US lives up to its promise of allowing the Iraqi's to hold free elections to create their own government, these Shiites will win the elections and form a Islamic theocracy modeled on that of Iran's. The only way the US can prevent this is to stop the democratic process.
PS2> As for your last paragraph, remember one thing: the US was populated by killing 80 million native American people in less than a century. The US allowed slavery to persist until the 1850's, or half a century after Great Britain declared slavery illegal. It hasn't until a century after that until blacks even started to get real civil rights. Of course, all of this is past us, and they do not negate all the good things the US has done and all the honorable principles on which it was founded. But it sure as hell should keep us very humble when we speak about other nations.
Look at it this way --- those that live in the South. How often do you get irked because someone things that everyone living in Mississippi or Alabama is poor? While it is true that the rate of poverty in these states is much higher than in other states (as someone who has lived in the suburbs of DC for most of his life, I was actually surprised to see this level of poverty in the US) there doesn't mean that everybody there is poor.
He said "sizable population" not "sizable percentage." It's an absolute value. The number of wealthy educated people, even though relatively small percentage-wise, is a large number in absolute terms. Since the original post as was about OSS software development, what matteres is not the percentage, but sheer numbers. Estimates put the size of the Indian middle class at 40-250 million people. That's a very sizable number, comparable to the total population of most European countries. Also, remember that among the Indian middle class, technology is a very common field of study. So the total number of potential OSS contributers in India (which, again, is what this thread is about) is a huge number.
That's actually more true than you realize. Developing nations, suffer very much from the problem of brain drain. Many educated and wealthy people leave the country because of prevailing conditions. India is much more stable than most other developing nations, but they still have to deal with this issue.
Maybe this is why the military is trying to recruit gamers? I'd suspect they have access to this kind of info a year or so before other people do, which might explain the army FPS game that was released recently.
My PS2 has played every DVD I've ever tried on it, in the several years I've owned it. Maybe I got lucky, but all my friend's PS2s play their DVDs fine too.
FOX is conservative biased and proud of it. It doesn't take a liberal to figure that out. Five minutes of watching Hannity and Colmes, with the over-the-top conservative, and the spineless, whipped liberal, is all it takes. How they managed to get all ten conservatives in the US media into one TV network never ceases to amaze me.
This UNIX IP character is damaged goods. Its apparently been around the block a few...dozen...times. Let's just give up and call it community property.
Free love!
Of course, with metric units, its much less likely that you'll make conversion errors. It's kind of hard to make a mistake dividing/multiplying by 10. The problem with the calculator arguement is that calculators are really slow. I can do scaling in my head in the metric system, but I can't do that scaling with imperial units. Restorting to the calculator to do scalings is extremely tedious and time consuming. Of course, this isn't a problem in CAD, but doing quick sketches becomes irritating in imperial units.
Now this is an interesting thing. I'm sure that just about everybody has given up on trying to convert the American people to metric --- personally, I see no hope. But what about American engineers? At least in my classes, engineers are still strongly inclined towards imperial units. It's a pain in the ass scaling stuff in you're head when you're working in 1/8s of an inch!
The $390 per capita income thing is a bit misleading. One of the key things about living in foreign countries is that stuff is *cheap*. Labor is cheap, raw materials are cheap, etc. So even though the currency is converted into US dollars, it isn't representative of an equivilent amount by any means. When my dad was in Liberia, he changed $10, bought lunch every day for a week, and still had change left over. Whenever I go to Thailand, I feel really weird tipping the bell-boy a quarter, which is an enitrely reasonable tip there. Because of this discrepency in actual costs, its likely that rolling out these networks costs signficantly less in India than it does here, in terms of labor and materials costs.
PS> This discrepency is also the reason that having to import stuff from other countries is so harmful to the economies of these countries --- the cost of foreign products is very out-of-line with the prices in the local economy.
Interesting story. My dad is currently in Afghanistan for a project. He was unable to call us through land lines, because the phone network is in such bad shape. But apparently, the cell phones in Kabul still work!
Let me give you an example. A while ago I was trying to figure out how the Intel C++ compiler called global constructors during program initialization. This was before the standard x86 C++ ABI, so this wasn't documented anywhere. The only way to figure out how things were working was to wade through ASM listings and hex dumps. Also, there are lots of places where reverse engineering is absolutely crucial. For example you can sometimes figure out the protocol to a device by analyzing the binary code of the driver.
In addition, it has UI more towards Blender's end of the spectrum in the ease of use department, and a pricetag of $15,000, not $3000.
Lack of non child-proof language features?
Yesh. We're not animals, dude. How many of those "advantages" are at all useful in the modern world? Zero. If natural processes were at work here, then the fact that Bill G is a physical wealking would inpinge on his ability to be the richest man in the world. The simple fact remains that an entire generation of women are being pushed into a mold of what women should be and should do. You see it less in more civilized places , but get into the south or into the country and the phenomenon becomes definately noticible. Hell, just watch TV commercials for five minutes and then tell me that the present social differences between men and women are due to physical differences.
That's a dump arguement. Java has the same problem of having to detect pointer size and the presence of certain function calls, except its one level down, inside the libraries. Of course, that's a non-feature, since libraries that abstract these differences are available for C/C++ as well. It always seems to me that most of the "great features" of Java I'm always hearing about are actually benifets of a large standard library, not anything about the language itself. I've been genuinely impressed by some of the stuff Lisp, Ocaml, and other functional languages have, that C++ doesn't, but the few advantages that Java *does* have (garbage collection, introspection) are outweighed by the disadvantages (no compile-time metaprogramming, no operator overloading, schism between built-in types and user-defined types).
But it's the entire social hierarchy that makes it so that women are the one who take time off for raising children, rather than men.
Besides, the exact statistic is "76 cents to the dollar for same or comparable work" which takes into account seniority.
Only size 2 women are worth attacking :) ::ducks::
:)
PS> Before the three women on this board flame me, read my pro-women post a few responses up
When women stop getting payed 70% of a man's salary for doing the exact same job, then we can talk about reverse discrimination.