Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You put it very well. It's possible that if I had seen this doc to begin with, I'd have stayed with perl. But perhaps I would merely have switched later. This was just the last straw -- I'd already spent three days trying to figure out perl syntax (and meanwhile, one colleague was strongly urging me to try python -- everyone else used perl). And I'd already read ESR's article on his first exposure to Python, so I had a favourable impression of it.
Having used python for about 3 years now, I'm yet to find something that I can't easily do in it, that I can in other languages. Except for speed/numbercrunching issues. And then I use ocaml (for new code) or C (for existing code). Even if I liked perl syntax and hated python's whitespace-significance (I don't and I don't), I imagine I'd have migrated to ruby by now.
Actually, the really cool feature of Python, one that I use all the time now, is "list comprehensions" -- an idea stolen from Haskell, and as far as I know, no other language has it. You can't do anything with it that you couldn't with map() and filter() but it's a much more elegant way of writing things -- just the way mathematicians would with sets.
Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
I think that's what someone told me later, and that's exactly why I hate perl...
Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
Yes, that's really intuitive, thanks. Especially when every perl doc I see around tells me to use curved parentheses for lists, and @ prefixes for variables that refer to them, and I have no clue what data structure you've used above.
My point was that I didn't need to wrap my head around such mindless syntax issues for python. (Or indeed for any language I've learned since: OCaml, a bit of Haskell and Lisp).
Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
Because perl lists use parenthesis, according to every damn doc I've read?
Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1, Informative
How do you write nested lists such as [[1,2],[3,4],5,[6,7,8]]?
My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Three years ago, I could program in C, but had never used a scripting language (except bash, for very basic stuff). I needed to do some non-trivial manipulation of text files and figured that this was a good time to learn. Since others in the group were using perl, I tried perl.
I knew what I wanted to do, but needed to learn the language. I struggled with the awful syntax for three days. The breaking point came when I wanted a list of lists and realised that Perl "flattens" nested lists. How do you write nested lists such as [[1,2],[3,4],5,[6,7,8]]? In Python, it's trivial (that's how you'd write it), but in perl, nobody I talked to could give me an answer. It flattens it, unasked, to [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] and, try as I might, I can't see the point. (It turns out it's possible to have nested lists, but it's yet another example of perl's horrendous syntax).
Finally, I decided to give python a try. I spent an hour reading the python tutorial, and in another three hours, I had reimplemented everything I'd done in the last three days in perl, and an hour after that I'd finished the job. Python syntax was, and still is, the cleanest I've ever seen. It's an amazing language. And it changed the way I think about programming: it gave me an appreciation of functional methods (I now use ocaml a lot) and also changed the way I write C (vastly for the better).
Pretty much any functional language has this sort of thing. In Ocaml, for examples, you have "match" statements that can use tuples, lists, or whatever as arguments:
let bool_and boolpair =
match boolpair with
(true, true) -> true
| _ -> false ;;
this defines a boolean "and" that takes a pair of bool's and returns "true" only if both are true. Not sure if this is what you meant... And by the way, ocaml compiles to pretty fast native code (comparable to C++) on most common architectures.
The author makes it very clear to the reader that other GUI toolkits exist. Since he likes GTK+ he writes an article advocating it.
His advocacy is a list of attributes that, as one of the ancestors of this post pointed out, all apply to Qt too. Though your wikipedia link has a huge number of toolkits, very few are cross-platform and free/open-source, and none of those are in particularly widespread use -- except Qt and GTK+. So, sorry, listing the "good points" of GTK for purposes of advocacy, and thereby implying that they're unique to GTK, is just wrong.
Re:Interestingly...
on
Why Use GTK+?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Eh... not quite, unless you plan to make open source software exclusively.
I just hate the GNU zealots. Qt just can't win can they. The entire GNU project is founded on the idea that proprietary software is bad (Stallman even wrote an essay on why you shouldn't use the LGPL, and renamed the first L from "Library" to "Lesser" to discourage use). But when Qt is using GPL, suddenly the GNU zealots turn around and say, hey that's bad, you can't write proprietary software with it! In fact Qt has the perfect business model -- if you want to write proprietary software, you buy a license from them and give them some revenue (as lots of people do), and if you want to write free software, it's all yours. The GNU supporters should be holding Qt up as an example.
Anyway... let people choose the toolkits based on their merits. Plenty of people seem to be choosing both. (Mozilla=GTK+, Opera=Qt. Acrobat Reader=GTK+, Scribus=Qt. Etc.) But I dislike disingenuous articles like the present developerworks article which pretends that GTK+ is the only toolkit that exists. Everyone knows Qt exists too -- if you believe GTK+ is better, explain why, but don't sweep the discussion under the carpet.
the article says things like colour coding (and probably the ABCDEF arrangement too, though it doesn't say) are to aid "hunt-and-peck" typists. It nowhere talks about increased speed, unlike dvorak.
The problem is nobody's likely to stay hunt-and-peck forever. And nobody's likely to use the same computer forever. I wouldn't recommend it even to newbies.
As for the claim that qwerty was meant to slow you down: that was a myth. What it was meant to do was to place frequently typed letters far apart so that they wouldn't jam if struck together.
"Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer." -- Edgser W. Dijkstra
John Perry Barlow (lyricist, but he has other claims to fame outside the Dead) was not happy. In this story he blames it on the drummers (Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann). The NYT quoted him as having had a "pretty heated discussion" with Weir, guitarist and his songwriting partner. Robert Hunter (Jerry Garcia's lyricist) was reportedly not happy either but is silent.
In a corporate set-up? "Our employees demanded games so we installed Linux..."
Seriously, lots of windows-using kids have been hooked by the games on my Linux laptop, and my wife and I often play frozen-bubble. Nothing wrong with the games available on linux. Multiperson shooters and jaw-dropping graphics do not good games make, and people who insist on those will likely as not buy a PS or Xbox or whatever (the markets for game consoles is way bigger than the PC market). 3D acceleration works fine with linux on most systems; as linux gains popularity, game writers will likely target linux, but I hardly see why linux developers should develop games.
Do not tell me I'll need a Media Player installed because I have Linux media players of all colors installed on my system.
Try mplayer-plugin (known on ubuntu as mozilla-mplayer), and the win32-codecs package. The site you point out works perfectly on my system if I choose windows media (mplayer-plugin) or realplayer (realplayer 10 for linux). As does Apple's trailers site (presently otherwise viewable only with quicktime 7) and a bunch of other stuff -- in fact, everything I've tried except some VRML stuff.
But from a purely browsing experience, I no longer think Firefox is the best open-source browser -- konqueror in kde 3.5 hasn't failed me on a site yet. The collaboration with Apple clearly helped...
Sure, you can master a CD that does that, but commercially mastered CDs filter out sounds outside the 20 Hz - 20000 Hz range (the sampling rate limits the high end but there is no technical limit on the low end).
Re:Theo is not the worst by any means.
on
OpenBSD Turns 10
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· Score: 2, Informative
He insulted you? Boo hoo.
He actually answered you very reasonably, and lost patience only when you went on repeating the same thing through the thread. Try that sort of thing with Theo and see where you end up.
Am I the only one who doesn't know any AIM-users at all? Everyone I know uses Yahoo or MSN -- sometimes both -- and absolutely nobody I know uses AIM. Maybe AIM is used only in America?
Lets see, everytime I try to use Transparency or drop shadows (in KDE 3.4.2) it wouldn't work. It wouldn't crash, just give me an error message.
What did the error message say? You do need to enable the composite, damage, fixes extensions on xorg. With those, it gives me a warning that it may not be stable, but it works.
If it had been the other way around, you'd have said Sparkle sounds cool, but Flash sounds... well, let's say exhibitionist.
Re:How can you vouche for the security of this?
on
Flash, Meet Sparkle
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
They have to be kicked and dragged into continuing to provide security fixes for NT, claiming "sorry, its 5 years old - we don't support it any more". Would you take that from any other manufacturer of any other product?
With Linux, you're lucky if you get security fixes after 6 months. (No, upgrading to a new version doesn't count.)
Re:How can you vouche for the security of this?
on
Flash, Meet Sparkle
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· Score: 1
Well, in that case, I'd like to point out that next year will not be the year for Linux on the desktop.
Indeed -- I currently own a Wharfedale pair (Diamond 8.4 -- among their low-end models). There is no comparable Bose at a comparable price. Indeed, I doubt there is a Bose with a comparable sound at any price. There are similarly-priced Boses and cheaper Boses (I used to own a pair), and they sound superficially OK at first (better than your average Sony or Panasonic, I'll grant you), but in the long run they're a subtle torture to the ears.
there is nothing the aficionado hates more than anything in his or her realm of expertise that is pretty good and reasonably priced
"Reasonably priced" doesn't apply to Bose. That's the complaint here: they're by no means the worst around but they're not nearly good enough to justify the insane prices. Name any Bose speaker system and I'll point you to something cheaper and far better. (I used to own a Bose pair.)
Slashdot Mirror
Having used python for about 3 years now, I'm yet to find something that I can't easily do in it, that I can in other languages. Except for speed/numbercrunching issues. And then I use ocaml (for new code) or C (for existing code). Even if I liked perl syntax and hated python's whitespace-significance (I don't and I don't), I imagine I'd have migrated to ruby by now.
Actually, the really cool feature of Python, one that I use all the time now, is "list comprehensions" -- an idea stolen from Haskell, and as far as I know, no other language has it. You can't do anything with it that you couldn't with map() and filter() but it's a much more elegant way of writing things -- just the way mathematicians would with sets.
print "@{$a->[0]} - @{$a->[1]} - @{$a->[2]} - @{$a->[3]} \n";
I think that's what someone told me later, and that's exactly why I hate perl...
Yes, that's really intuitive, thanks. Especially when every perl doc I see around tells me to use curved parentheses for lists, and @ prefixes for variables that refer to them, and I have no clue what data structure you've used above.
My point was that I didn't need to wrap my head around such mindless syntax issues for python. (Or indeed for any language I've learned since: OCaml, a bit of Haskell and Lisp).
Because perl lists use parenthesis, according to every damn doc I've read?
Indeed?
$ cat list.pl
@a = ((1,2),(3,4),5,(6,7,8));
print @a[0], " ", @a[1], " ", @a[2], " ", @a[3], " ", "\n";
print $a[0], " ", $a[1], " ", $a[2], " ", $a[3], " ", "\n";
$ perl list.pl
1 2 3 4
1 2 3 4
$ cat list.py
a = [[1,2],[3,4],5,[6,7,8]]
print a[0], " ", a[1], " ", a[2], " ", a[3]
$ python list.py
[1, 2] [3, 4] 5 [6, 7, 8]
$
Three years ago, I could program in C, but had never used a scripting language (except bash, for very basic stuff). I needed to do some non-trivial manipulation of text files and figured that this was a good time to learn. Since others in the group were using perl, I tried perl.
I knew what I wanted to do, but needed to learn the language. I struggled with the awful syntax for three days. The breaking point came when I wanted a list of lists and realised that Perl "flattens" nested lists. How do you write nested lists such as [[1,2],[3,4],5,[6,7,8]]? In Python, it's trivial (that's how you'd write it), but in perl, nobody I talked to could give me an answer. It flattens it, unasked, to [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] and, try as I might, I can't see the point. (It turns out it's possible to have nested lists, but it's yet another example of perl's horrendous syntax).
Finally, I decided to give python a try. I spent an hour reading the python tutorial, and in another three hours, I had reimplemented everything I'd done in the last three days in perl, and an hour after that I'd finished the job. Python syntax was, and still is, the cleanest I've ever seen. It's an amazing language. And it changed the way I think about programming: it gave me an appreciation of functional methods (I now use ocaml a lot) and also changed the way I write C (vastly for the better).
That was it. No more perl for me.
Pretty much any functional language has this sort of thing. In Ocaml, for examples, you have "match" statements that can use tuples, lists, or whatever as arguments:
this defines a boolean "and" that takes a pair of bool's and returns "true" only if both are true. Not sure if this is what you meant... And by the way, ocaml compiles to pretty fast native code (comparable to C++) on most common architectures.His advocacy is a list of attributes that, as one of the ancestors of this post pointed out, all apply to Qt too. Though your wikipedia link has a huge number of toolkits, very few are cross-platform and free/open-source, and none of those are in particularly widespread use -- except Qt and GTK+. So, sorry, listing the "good points" of GTK for purposes of advocacy, and thereby implying that they're unique to GTK, is just wrong.
I just hate the GNU zealots. Qt just can't win can they. The entire GNU project is founded on the idea that proprietary software is bad (Stallman even wrote an essay on why you shouldn't use the LGPL, and renamed the first L from "Library" to "Lesser" to discourage use). But when Qt is using GPL, suddenly the GNU zealots turn around and say, hey that's bad, you can't write proprietary software with it! In fact Qt has the perfect business model -- if you want to write proprietary software, you buy a license from them and give them some revenue (as lots of people do), and if you want to write free software, it's all yours. The GNU supporters should be holding Qt up as an example.
Anyway... let people choose the toolkits based on their merits. Plenty of people seem to be choosing both. (Mozilla=GTK+, Opera=Qt. Acrobat Reader=GTK+, Scribus=Qt. Etc.) But I dislike disingenuous articles like the present developerworks article which pretends that GTK+ is the only toolkit that exists. Everyone knows Qt exists too -- if you believe GTK+ is better, explain why, but don't sweep the discussion under the carpet.
The problem is nobody's likely to stay hunt-and-peck forever. And nobody's likely to use the same computer forever. I wouldn't recommend it even to newbies.
As for the claim that qwerty was meant to slow you down: that was a myth. What it was meant to do was to place frequently typed letters far apart so that they wouldn't jam if struck together.
"Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer." -- Edgser W. Dijkstra
John Perry Barlow (lyricist, but he has other claims to fame outside the Dead) was not happy. In this story he blames it on the drummers (Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann). The NYT quoted him as having had a "pretty heated discussion" with Weir, guitarist and his songwriting partner. Robert Hunter (Jerry Garcia's lyricist) was reportedly not happy either but is silent.
I'm just disappointed, that's all.
In a corporate set-up? "Our employees demanded games so we installed Linux..."
Seriously, lots of windows-using kids have been hooked by the games on my Linux laptop, and my wife and I often play frozen-bubble. Nothing wrong with the games available on linux. Multiperson shooters and jaw-dropping graphics do not good games make, and people who insist on those will likely as not buy a PS or Xbox or whatever (the markets for game consoles is way bigger than the PC market). 3D acceleration works fine with linux on most systems; as linux gains popularity, game writers will likely target linux, but I hardly see why linux developers should develop games.
Try mplayer-plugin (known on ubuntu as mozilla-mplayer), and the win32-codecs package. The site you point out works perfectly on my system if I choose windows media (mplayer-plugin) or realplayer (realplayer 10 for linux). As does Apple's trailers site (presently otherwise viewable only with quicktime 7) and a bunch of other stuff -- in fact, everything I've tried except some VRML stuff.
But from a purely browsing experience, I no longer think Firefox is the best open-source browser -- konqueror in kde 3.5 hasn't failed me on a site yet. The collaboration with Apple clearly helped...
Sure, you can master a CD that does that, but commercially mastered CDs filter out sounds outside the 20 Hz - 20000 Hz range (the sampling rate limits the high end but there is no technical limit on the low end).
He actually answered you very reasonably, and lost patience only when you went on repeating the same thing through the thread. Try that sort of thing with Theo and see where you end up.
If you can read it, you can photograph it. With a digital camera. And forward that to friends.
Am I the only one who doesn't know any AIM-users at all? Everyone I know uses Yahoo or MSN -- sometimes both -- and absolutely nobody I know uses AIM. Maybe AIM is used only in America?
What did the error message say? You do need to enable the composite, damage, fixes extensions on xorg. With those, it gives me a warning that it may not be stable, but it works.
If it had been the other way around, you'd have said Sparkle sounds cool, but Flash sounds... well, let's say exhibitionist.
With Linux, you're lucky if you get security fixes after 6 months. (No, upgrading to a new version doesn't count.)
And you'd be perfectly correct.
Indeed -- I currently own a Wharfedale pair (Diamond 8.4 -- among their low-end models). There is no comparable Bose at a comparable price. Indeed, I doubt there is a Bose with a comparable sound at any price. There are similarly-priced Boses and cheaper Boses (I used to own a pair), and they sound superficially OK at first (better than your average Sony or Panasonic, I'll grant you), but in the long run they're a subtle torture to the ears.
"Reasonably priced" doesn't apply to Bose. That's the complaint here: they're by no means the worst around but they're not nearly good enough to justify the insane prices. Name any Bose speaker system and I'll point you to something cheaper and far better. (I used to own a Bose pair.)
There were, but Bush was reluctant to accept.