In my experience CSS isn't as easy or usable by people who code HTML by hand- especially on a casual basis.
What the heck do you mean? I always coded all of my HTML by hand (it's not much, but it's something), and when I discovered CSS I thought that it was contrived by Jesus and designed by Moses himself. Look, ma, I can change the color of all links, on all pages on my website, by fixing this one value.
I know, I'm a lazy bastard. You guys probably just go into the Perl interaction mode and fix it with a single regexp...
I agree. What is the average time-to-live for an MS Office document, anyway?
How many 6 month old MSO documents do you have on your computer--or in your office--which you still use
AND for which it is important to be formatted exactly as they were originally?
I am really guessing, but there cannot be many of them.
As other posters indicated, the only real problem is with Excel.
There must be a truckload of very old, yet crucially important spreadsheets
in every office. If the competitor does not open them perfectly,
it's clearly a non-starter.
Never programmed professionally, never taught CS, but really want to
agree with you. Python is awesome in that it allows you to start
writing simple yet very instructive programs, like sorting, without
worrying about #include and other such nonsense
(I love C, don't get me wrong, but teaching the first course in
CS is not the same as writing HalfLife 2 engine). Python has very
clear syntax, and it implements all the bells and whistles
of the OO programming.
The only difficulty I can see is that you would have to explain
what an object is first (same problem with Java). That may be a good
enough reason to settle for a functional language, like C++ , or
the declarative omnipotence of Lisp. Another reason to choose Lisp
is that it is easy to grade: just give everyone A+ for being
on the path to redemption.
The availability of libraries is totally irrelevant to the question,
only the syntax matters. And, speaking of C++, you can dig up a class
for nearly anything. A good first language should have a clear syntax
for implementing the vanilla CS concepts, that's all. The concepts are:
data structures and objects, control structures, functions, pointers
(references), recursion. I agree with you, C[++] is not a bad choice
at all, but for a different reason.
What's wrong with Python? I never used to hack for a living, and my interest
in programming is altogether academical. I am a LISP whore, for one.
I really prefer Python over both c[++] and Java. It is very much OO
and it looks cleaner than either of those. Not flaming, just asking,
what's wrong with Python?
That does not invalidate my point. They are still sciences.
If you throw away what we think of
as scientific method, i.e. providing explanation through natural causes
and supporting statements with factual evidence, then history, for example,
will become one bloody mess. I know, I am inviting more flaming, but
without a scientific approach the story of Joseph Smith is just as plausible
as any other rendition of American history.
All I am trying to say is that scientists are just as likely to
engage in "intellectual whoredom" as anyone else. No surprise here,
since they alone are being paid for merely thinking up new stuff.
Are you kidding me? It varies field by field, and some fields are much more
susceptible to what the GP is describing. Political, medical, language science,
economics, and history (just to name a few) are ones obviously influenced
by all kinds of cultural and political biases. And don't tell me that these are not
"real" sciences, for in each of these fields one can apply the scientific method.
The only bogus science today, I think, is psychology. (Flame away, that's not my
point.)
Just on the practical level, consider how scientists operate in the
real world. Scientists rarely work alone, and rarely are they the only
individual looking into a class of phenomena.
Yeah, they work in communities and cliques, and some of these communities are
heavily biased, and some of the cliques are bought out. So they have their peer
review and wide acceptance of their methods
and results, no matter how loopy they are.
All these points are straight from Moglen, and they are most
certainly about the free software, not OSS. You are right that
RMS does not venture to discuss the economics, but what does
it have to do with me speaking in Boring RMS Voice?
I feel like we are finally reaching a consensus here. Yes, Word/OO paradigm is
backwards for the reasons you've outlined, which is exactly why I ditched them
entirely and switched to the TeX+Emacs combo. But there is no cure. Like you say,
it is good for a popular application to have a couple of layers of interface, top one
for a dummy and the bottom one for a professional. The problem is, the dummy
always wants the current design fad, be it nested bulleted lists, cute borders,
or interactive links to company email. By their very nature, these fads are
changing all the time at an incredible rate. It takes a vast amount of research
just to find out what they are on December 12, 2006, let alone implement them while
there is still interest. The result? A bloated program with 2.7569+e37 features
which were "cool" 3 years ago. There's no cure, as dummies simply get what they
want.
[...] at a videoconference last week, with several relatively senior members of staff from all around the world and with very limited time available, we wasted upwards of five minutes while the expensive external consultant leading the presentation tried to get his bullet lists in Word to look consistent using Format Painter (which kept turning his text into Greek). He did the same thing the week before, too.
That is your justification for needing a better text processor!?? My immediate response is:
User error. Replace user and press any key...[]
How about those business people trying out word processors which they are
capable to understand, like Wordpad? Or, alternatively, hiring someone who
understands the Tao of MS Word? If you are not trained to typeset official
documents, why do it yourself? I have some odd experience in typesetting,
having done a philosophy journal for my college, and I appreciate it as
a job which requires considerable skill and training, regardless of which
tools you are using.
At present, it appears as though the free software community has little in original ideas
when it comes to a commodity application. Even Firefox has its roots in a non-free world.
But I am convinced that it is caused by the circumstances, and not by the nature
of communal software development process. Many ideas were generated by the private
interests, and they are good ideas, and we need free implementations of those.
As the free software movement gains momentum, we will see it winning in all
areas where its products compete directly with non-free software. It has been shown
again and again, most strikingly in the case of Linux vs. UNIX. And it is especially obvious
when the idea is original, like with TeX, Emacs, P2P applications, and languages.
Are there commercial Python, Perl interpreters coming out soon? Surely we could
benefit from (very expensive) interpreters implemented by professionals,
as opposed to a bunch of disorganized hacks? Apparently not.
Once we close this gap (which was created artificially through the copyright
laws) we will finally see the free software movement generating most new ideas.
Of course, there still will be people posting nonsense like "the community is
going the wrong way because they do not implement my wildest dreams, but settle
instead for something useful to most of us" (that goes to the root, not parent).
Word, in particular, is crying out to be overtaken by a piece of software that provides WYSIWYG cuteness for the masses but makes it easier to create serious documents.
To restate the assumption, there is a huge community of people who need an application
with properties outlined above. It follows that there exist a smaller, but still signficant
community of programmers who are working on implementing the said application. But no
such community exists. QED.
As much as you wish it, there is no need to create an application that is
easy for masses to use and is at the same time capable of creating advanced documents.
We already have Notepad, Wordpad, Word, and TeX. Every typesetting task I can think of can be
accomplished very efficiently with at least one of these. Do you want an "immensly powerful,
yet easy to use" application just for the heck of it? Then write it! The rest of us will
keep using the right tool for the right job.
<Boring RMS voice> This exercise is not futile because using a free application is better
than using a non-free one, even if the latter is functionally superior.
Excel is going the way of the dodo, if only because it is a non-free
commodity application. On economic grouds only, it has no chance of
beating free software in the marketplace (give it some time). And when
it finally fizzles, the free alternative
will be much better than anything that could be possibly produced by
Microsoft. In fact, this is one of the reasons why it will finally
go away.
</Boring RMS voice>
You are right when you say that Gnumeric is a clone of Excel. But my original
point was that it is not a clone of MSO, because it tries to accomplish
a slightly different goal (what the root poster wanted OO to do, with no
good justification).
I also agree with you if you are implying that Excel kicks ass,
and there does not seem to be a better way to program a spreadsheet application.
That may well be true, but there is no shame in trying to emulate it.
Who cares if Microsoft came up with an idea first? If it happens to be
exactly what the community needs, then let us agree that Microsoft did
a good job for once and make our our free clone.
The OO development is driven by a community, as far as I know. It means that
the community actually sees merit in having a free (as in freedom) MS Office clone.
In my opinion, they are right. There are already free products which provide different
functionality, like AbiWord, Gnumeric, LaTeX and etc. (I, for instance, stopped using
word processors altogether after I've discovered LaTeX; does it mean that everyone
would benefit from making such a move? I don't think so.) These are all excellent
products, but their existence does not alleviate the perceived need for core
MSO functionality, and hence we have OO.
Since when did record companies start creating anything?
Well, creating a recording is not the same as creating music. It used to
be expensive and difficult, accessible only to people with proper budgets.
But if that is the only thing that RIAA is doing for us, then god help them.
These days almost anyone can afford a quality digital recording, and they
can do it without leaving their garage. Even when a band has no money
at all, having any kind of popularity should allow it to mooch a recording
session off a fan.
Look at the
Sublime
phenomenon. These guys recorded most of their music
during private parties. Have you seen the video clips? What was
their "recording studio" like? Most of the time it is a corner in a room with
a bunch of punks who are almost too drunk to hold their PBR cans.
The more I find out about the contemporary music history, the more I am convinced
that creators of great music are motivated not by royalties, but instead
by weed, acid, coke, and opiates.
After 30 years of continuous development, Free Software still does not require the user to bend over and get reamed from behind by the throbbing memeber of corporate greed.
This is just PR pitch, folks, pure make-belief. That's what they really really want, but even they (Sun) no longer have any real hope. I mean, they are GPL-ing Java. I didn't think I'd live to see that happen, but Moglen was right: the non-free software circus is in its last season.
Hey, personally, I am for writing provably correct code without bugs. But the moment I mention it on Slashdot I get spammed by a bunch of professional programmers and other hacks who say it's anything from "unrealistic" to "idealistic" (I don't know which is worse). Bringing up TeX does nothing.
To put it succinctly, adjoining a multiplicative inverse of zero to the field
of real (or complex) numbers yields a contradiction. In other words, there is no
way to extend these structures with division by zero while keeping their properties
intact. A lot of people in analysis believe that these numbers were given to us
by god, so good luck changing their perspective.
That being said, division by zero is a serious problem. From my teaching experience,
a good quarter of college freshpeople (being feminist makes one make up funny
words) do that on their finals in a pre-calc class. But, by god's great intestine,
computers are not that dumb. If you do not want your kernel to panic every time
your program divides by zero, why not wrap your arithmetic in a class that
makes a saving throw every time that happens?
As far as I can tell without watching TFV, this is another shot at "1/0 = infinity-like
oddity". Let's move on already.
Slashdot Mirror
Why did you have to go all epistemological on our ass?
In my experience CSS isn't as easy or usable by people who code HTML by hand- especially on a casual basis.
What the heck do you mean? I always coded all of my HTML by hand (it's not much, but it's something), and when I discovered CSS I thought that it was contrived by Jesus and designed by Moses himself. Look, ma, I can change the color of all links, on all pages on my website, by fixing this one value.
I know, I'm a lazy bastard. You guys probably just go into the Perl interaction mode and fix it with a single regexp...
I agree. What is the average time-to-live for an MS Office document, anyway? How many 6 month old MSO documents do you have on your computer--or in your office--which you still use AND for which it is important to be formatted exactly as they were originally? I am really guessing, but there cannot be many of them.
As other posters indicated, the only real problem is with Excel. There must be a truckload of very old, yet crucially important spreadsheets in every office. If the competitor does not open them perfectly, it's clearly a non-starter.
My bad, I meant procedural, not functional.
Never programmed professionally, never taught CS, but really want to agree with you. Python is awesome in that it allows you to start writing simple yet very instructive programs, like sorting, without worrying about #include and other such nonsense (I love C, don't get me wrong, but teaching the first course in CS is not the same as writing HalfLife 2 engine). Python has very clear syntax, and it implements all the bells and whistles of the OO programming.
The only difficulty I can see is that you would have to explain what an object is first (same problem with Java). That may be a good enough reason to settle for a functional language, like C++ , or the declarative omnipotence of Lisp. Another reason to choose Lisp is that it is easy to grade: just give everyone A+ for being on the path to redemption.
The availability of libraries is totally irrelevant to the question, only the syntax matters. And, speaking of C++, you can dig up a class for nearly anything. A good first language should have a clear syntax for implementing the vanilla CS concepts, that's all. The concepts are: data structures and objects, control structures, functions, pointers (references), recursion. I agree with you, C[++] is not a bad choice at all, but for a different reason.
What's wrong with Python? I never used to hack for a living, and my interest in programming is altogether academical. I am a LISP whore, for one. I really prefer Python over both c[++] and Java. It is very much OO and it looks cleaner than either of those. Not flaming, just asking, what's wrong with Python?
AbiWord opens it OK. The document seems to be empty.
That does not invalidate my point. They are still sciences. If you throw away what we think of as scientific method, i.e. providing explanation through natural causes and supporting statements with factual evidence, then history, for example, will become one bloody mess. I know, I am inviting more flaming, but without a scientific approach the story of Joseph Smith is just as plausible as any other rendition of American history.
All I am trying to say is that scientists are just as likely to engage in "intellectual whoredom" as anyone else. No surprise here, since they alone are being paid for merely thinking up new stuff.
Are you kidding me? It varies field by field, and some fields are much more susceptible to what the GP is describing. Political, medical, language science, economics, and history (just to name a few) are ones obviously influenced by all kinds of cultural and political biases. And don't tell me that these are not "real" sciences, for in each of these fields one can apply the scientific method. The only bogus science today, I think, is psychology. (Flame away, that's not my point.)
Just on the practical level, consider how scientists operate in the real world. Scientists rarely work alone, and rarely are they the only individual looking into a class of phenomena.
Yeah, they work in communities and cliques, and some of these communities are heavily biased, and some of the cliques are bought out. So they have their peer review and wide acceptance of their methods and results, no matter how loopy they are.
May be that's why I am studying pure math...
All these points are straight from Moglen, and they are most certainly about the free software, not OSS. You are right that RMS does not venture to discuss the economics, but what does it have to do with me speaking in Boring RMS Voice?
I feel like we are finally reaching a consensus here. Yes, Word/OO paradigm is backwards for the reasons you've outlined, which is exactly why I ditched them entirely and switched to the TeX+Emacs combo. But there is no cure. Like you say, it is good for a popular application to have a couple of layers of interface, top one for a dummy and the bottom one for a professional. The problem is, the dummy always wants the current design fad, be it nested bulleted lists, cute borders, or interactive links to company email. By their very nature, these fads are changing all the time at an incredible rate. It takes a vast amount of research just to find out what they are on December 12, 2006, let alone implement them while there is still interest. The result? A bloated program with 2.7569+e37 features which were "cool" 3 years ago. There's no cure, as dummies simply get what they want.
[...] at a videoconference last week, with several relatively senior members of staff from all around the world and with very limited time available, we wasted upwards of five minutes while the expensive external consultant leading the presentation tried to get his bullet lists in Word to look consistent using Format Painter (which kept turning his text into Greek). He did the same thing the week before, too.
That is your justification for needing a better text processor!?? My immediate response is:
User error. Replace user and press any key...[]
How about those business people trying out word processors which they are capable to understand, like Wordpad? Or, alternatively, hiring someone who understands the Tao of MS Word? If you are not trained to typeset official documents, why do it yourself? I have some odd experience in typesetting, having done a philosophy journal for my college, and I appreciate it as a job which requires considerable skill and training, regardless of which tools you are using.
At present, it appears as though the free software community has little in original ideas when it comes to a commodity application. Even Firefox has its roots in a non-free world. But I am convinced that it is caused by the circumstances, and not by the nature of communal software development process. Many ideas were generated by the private interests, and they are good ideas, and we need free implementations of those. As the free software movement gains momentum, we will see it winning in all areas where its products compete directly with non-free software. It has been shown again and again, most strikingly in the case of Linux vs. UNIX. And it is especially obvious when the idea is original, like with TeX, Emacs, P2P applications, and languages.
Are there commercial Python, Perl interpreters coming out soon? Surely we could benefit from (very expensive) interpreters implemented by professionals, as opposed to a bunch of disorganized hacks? Apparently not.
Once we close this gap (which was created artificially through the copyright laws) we will finally see the free software movement generating most new ideas. Of course, there still will be people posting nonsense like "the community is going the wrong way because they do not implement my wildest dreams, but settle instead for something useful to most of us" (that goes to the root, not parent).
For contradiction, assume that:
Word, in particular, is crying out to be overtaken by a piece of software that provides WYSIWYG cuteness for the masses but makes it easier to create serious documents.
To restate the assumption, there is a huge community of people who need an application with properties outlined above. It follows that there exist a smaller, but still signficant community of programmers who are working on implementing the said application. But no such community exists. QED.
As much as you wish it, there is no need to create an application that is easy for masses to use and is at the same time capable of creating advanced documents. We already have Notepad, Wordpad, Word, and TeX. Every typesetting task I can think of can be accomplished very efficiently with at least one of these. Do you want an "immensly powerful, yet easy to use" application just for the heck of it? Then write it! The rest of us will keep using the right tool for the right job.
<Boring RMS voice>
This exercise is not futile because using a free application is better than using a non-free one, even if the latter is functionally superior. Excel is going the way of the dodo, if only because it is a non-free commodity application. On economic grouds only, it has no chance of beating free software in the marketplace (give it some time). And when it finally fizzles, the free alternative will be much better than anything that could be possibly produced by Microsoft. In fact, this is one of the reasons why it will finally go away.
</Boring RMS voice>
You are right when you say that Gnumeric is a clone of Excel. But my original point was that it is not a clone of MSO, because it tries to accomplish a slightly different goal (what the root poster wanted OO to do, with no good justification).
I also agree with you if you are implying that Excel kicks ass, and there does not seem to be a better way to program a spreadsheet application. That may well be true, but there is no shame in trying to emulate it. Who cares if Microsoft came up with an idea first? If it happens to be exactly what the community needs, then let us agree that Microsoft did a good job for once and make our our free clone.
You are going to hate me, but the most powerful spreadsheet application (by far) is the SES module for Emacs ;)
The OO development is driven by a community, as far as I know. It means that the community actually sees merit in having a free (as in freedom) MS Office clone. In my opinion, they are right. There are already free products which provide different functionality, like AbiWord, Gnumeric, LaTeX and etc. (I, for instance, stopped using word processors altogether after I've discovered LaTeX; does it mean that everyone would benefit from making such a move? I don't think so.) These are all excellent products, but their existence does not alleviate the perceived need for core MSO functionality, and hence we have OO.
Since when did record companies start creating anything?
Well, creating a recording is not the same as creating music. It used to be expensive and difficult, accessible only to people with proper budgets. But if that is the only thing that RIAA is doing for us, then god help them. These days almost anyone can afford a quality digital recording, and they can do it without leaving their garage. Even when a band has no money at all, having any kind of popularity should allow it to mooch a recording session off a fan.
Look at the Sublime phenomenon. These guys recorded most of their music during private parties. Have you seen the video clips? What was their "recording studio" like? Most of the time it is a corner in a room with a bunch of punks who are almost too drunk to hold their PBR cans.
The more I find out about the contemporary music history, the more I am convinced that creators of great music are motivated not by royalties, but instead by weed, acid, coke, and opiates.
In other news:
After 30 years of continuous development, Free Software still does not require the user to bend over and get reamed from behind by the throbbing memeber of corporate greed.
This is just PR pitch, folks, pure make-belief. That's what they really really want, but even they (Sun) no longer have any real hope. I mean, they are GPL-ing Java. I didn't think I'd live to see that happen, but Moglen was right: the non-free software circus is in its last season.
Hey, personally, I am for writing provably correct code without bugs. But the moment I mention it on Slashdot I get spammed by a bunch of professional programmers and other hacks who say it's anything from "unrealistic" to "idealistic" (I don't know which is worse). Bringing up TeX does nothing.
To put it succinctly, adjoining a multiplicative inverse of zero to the field of real (or complex) numbers yields a contradiction. In other words, there is no way to extend these structures with division by zero while keeping their properties intact. A lot of people in analysis believe that these numbers were given to us by god, so good luck changing their perspective.
That being said, division by zero is a serious problem. From my teaching experience, a good quarter of college freshpeople (being feminist makes one make up funny words) do that on their finals in a pre-calc class. But, by god's great intestine, computers are not that dumb. If you do not want your kernel to panic every time your program divides by zero, why not wrap your arithmetic in a class that makes a saving throw every time that happens?
As far as I can tell without watching TFV, this is another shot at "1/0 = infinity-like oddity". Let's move on already.
So, for example, make it legal for natural persons to do anything noncomercially that would otherwise be infringing.
**IA's sees a problem here, a big one. What you propose + bittorrent = abolition of copyright for all practical purposes.