I've never met a Protestant who buys the concept of the trinity
I can't remember meeting one who doesn't. They pretty much have to, in order to justify why they believe this book above all others -- ultimately, the answer I get is, the Holy Spirit tells them it's this book, and tells them how to interpret it.
I have heard many Christians argue that Catholicism isn't really Christianity at all.
While I haven't specifically heard Catholics argue that Protestants aren't Christian, this is exactly what I'm talking about. It seems to me like there are enough Catholics calling themselves Christian that it makes little sense to make that distinction.
To be fair, Saints are 1) real people, mostly, according to historical record, and 2) Catholics don't accept saints as gods, but as heavenly entities who have the ear of god or somesuch.
To be fair, when you poll Catholics, you find more prayers to the Virgin Mary than to Jesus Christ.
I happen to like my God-given right to be left the hell alone as long as I'm not violating anyone else's rights.
I agree, and that's actually my point. Specifically:
...so being a good progressive you'd want to force them to change?
At home, I want a few very specific things which really would pretty much leave you alone. For example, gay marriage -- why would letting gays marry have any impact whatsoever on your life, assuming you're heterosexual? Or, government money going to religious organizations and displays -- why should any of us be forced to support a religion we don't subscribe to? Remember when the boy scouts were about actual, y'know, scouting, instead of this Mormon bullshit?
Around the world, there are people I most definitely would want to force to change -- mostly Islamic countries. No, you don't get to be "left the hell alone" when 50% of the population has their rights infringed on daily. Yes, I would like to force these people to stop cutting off their daughters' clitorises and sewing their vaginas shut before they force them to wear a cloth bag their entire life, only to kill her if she dares to be raped. If you aren't at least "progressive" enough to see that as appalling and wish desperately that you could change it, I have no problem saying you're a terrible human being and I want nothing to do with you.
1. You went to the airport without going through even a metal detector...
I agree, this has gotten worse. Metal detectors don't bother me, but the TSA molesting people is a bit too far.
2. Families by and large sat and ate dinner together. Mostly 2 parent households.
How recent is the single-parent phenomenon? I'd also have to wonder why that's the case. There could be any number of reasons for that. I bet a big factor is more support for women getting out of abusive relationships, and more acceptance that divorce sometimes is a better solution than staying in a relationship which is ultimately more damaging than the divorce for everyone involved.
Sitting and eating dinner together is nice once in awhile, but I'm not sure it's qualitatively better. You really have to look at what people are doing with that time instead. I, for one, stay in much better contact with my relatives around the world than I did when I was growing up, long distance was expensive, and the best way to talk to my grandparents was a hand-written letter.
3. Ok..only 3 channels, but when nothing was on those three channels worth watching, you went outside to play as a kid, or did family things together around the house or outside.
There can still be nothing on with 300 channels. I agree that going outside is better.
4. Kids could be kids. My whole fucking day wasn't planned out. During the summers I ran the neighborhood with my friends on bike, foot and skateboard. The only rule when I was young, was to call home from a friend's house every couple of hours or so to check in. No, my parent's weren't worried about me being kidnapped, etc..geez, we didn't even have cell phones...how did we ever survive?
Now that we have cell phones, it seems that happens even more, especially when those kids grow up. My parents would pretty much let me go wherever I want, so long as I let them know what I was up to and when they could expect me -- much easier to do that with a cell phone, and it was much easier on them.
5. We pretty much knew all our neighbors...and as a kid, if you acted up, a neighbor would easily discipline you (I got swatted by a friends mom more than once)..then, they'd call your parents, and you'd get it again when you got home. Taught kids to behave.
The neighbors are still there, and while I don't know as many of them as well as I'd like to, I do occasionally visit one for a movie night when I'm back in town.
6. There were no such things as guns in schools...if someone ever got caught with a knife, it was news for months in the city.
That depends on the city. Duradin presents a counterexample.
7. Drinking age in many cities was 18yrs. States still had more rights than the Feds..at least MANY more than they have today.
18 vs 21 -- which is better? People do pretty stupid things when drunk. I'd have left it at 18 with the rationale that if you're old enough to vote and die for your country, you're old enough to decide what you put in your body.
And why are states rights automatically good? We'd still have slavery in several states if this wasn't the case.
8. No one had a problem if you brought a fucking peanut butter and jelly sandwich to school.
Again, depends on the school. Some even give you long enough that you might have a chance to go home and have lunch with your family!
9. There was actually good music to be found on the common FM radio stations in town. You could find new and good music on radio while driving around.
I still do, it's just that most of it's repetitive, whatever ClearChannel is selling that month. However, I can also listen to whatever I want on the Internet. Pandora will show me new and good music based on what I seem to
You say that and I know you want to believe it because we all do.
What? No, I really don't. I would much rather believe that there was a time we were doing better than we are now, because right now is pretty sad.
Instead, I'm forced to acknowledge that it's most likely the past was worse, both because of all sorts of quality-of-life metrics I could use, and because of the massive bias of remembering the good stuff. We can actually see this over the short term -- anyone over 40 has music they love, and they'll view the music designed for people under 20 with disgust, when the reality is that 90% of all music is crap, it's just that the stuff the 40-year-olds still listen to is the good stuff.
he is enabled by the left's refusal to understand why people listen to him.
It's a rather large assumption, but it does seem like a reasonable default assumption, given what we know about how humans *do* operate.
I realize it's a somewhat controversial opinion, though I'm not entirely sure why. For one, it seems weak determinism is likely true, or that there's some element of randomness, but computer can be random also. Even if that wasn't the case, it seems like the alternative to anything algorithmic is necessarily a dualist stance, and that seems like a pretty big assumption as well.
Essentially, what I'm doing here is a very liberal application of Occam's Razor. It really does seem like the only options are an algorithmic reality or a dual one.
It seems to, and so you hear people asking for the good old days.
It seems to me that the world is better than ever, and only getting better. It also seems like much of the chaos is caused by religious fanatics who don't want to accept this sort of change.
This is a pretty common fallacy Christians like to use when they're embarrassed by other Christians. Given all the variations of "monotheistic" Christianity, especially given most of them accept the Trinity and many accept Saints as well, why should it be impossible for there to be a polytheistic brand of Christianity, and why would it matter to you?
That seems to presuppose things about consciousness and intent that I see no reason to believe would be any different for humans than for machines. In particular, I don't see any reason not to describe a human as a biological machine.
Maybe if we started by sufficiently defining "understanding," rather than relying on intuition, it'd be a stronger claim.
I bet more people have cell phones than have computers.
I'm not sure what you thought I was saying, but I'm not sure what your anecdote proves, especially when I didn't have a proper sentence (sorry about that).
Want a simple array of identical records? sorry you can't have it! you either have to run multiple parallel arrays (which is bad for locality of reference and also bad for code readability) or have an array of objects (which means every array element has all the overhead of an object).
Most likely, you go with the array of objects, because when you say "all the overhead", we're talking 16 bytes. Not usually an issue.
If it's really an issue, it's certainly possible to use similar tricks to what you'd do in C to deal with a blob of data -- just stuff it all into bytes and do some arithmetic to pull it out. Since you're not likely to have many structures where this kind of optimization is easy, wrap it in an object to hold your big array -- now that object overhead you're worried about is being applied once, for an overhead of O(1).
Want to pass parameters by reference? sorry the language simply won't let you
Let me pass _what_ by reference? I honestly can't think of a time I'd want to pass anything but an object by reference, and that's pretty much all you do with objects.
But this is exactly what I'm talking about. There may be cases where it makes perfect sense to do this in C++, so if you're trying to compare programs, you're either going to do this entirely the wrong way in Java, or if you're coming from Java to C++, you won't quite make full use of the power C++ gives you. It's kind of like when people go from C++ or Java to JavaScript and immediately try to build something like classes, thus missing the point of prototypal inheritance.
Mixing languages adds complexity to the code, the build process and the debugging process and this needs to be balanced against the benefits of doing it.
I think of it this way: How can I possibly know ahead of time what the performance characteristics of my code will be, until I actually profile it? I'd much rather write it in something that lets me get it working, and working well -- I'd go one level higher and use Ruby.
If you start that way, once you identify something slow enough that you actually care, the benefit is now that you get to keep your "prototype" code as production code, and that you get to use a language in which you're probably 50-90% more productive.
It's also not alway that bad. Ruby, even JRuby, can have inline C code. And regarding your comment about Java being painful to mix with others, it can certainly be painful to write raw JNI code, but chances are, the work's been done for you -- and it's often remarkably easy to connect JVM languages together. If you've got a Java codebase to play with, I'd strongly suggest playing with it in a JRuby irb session -- you can pretty much just pretend your Java objects are Ruby objects.
I find it hard to believe I'm defending Java. I really despise the language, but I also find it hard to call it slow.
And really, I enjoy both extremes. It's the middle I despise -- in fact, I find Java much too low-level for the high-level stuff, and there are some things C++ is much better at (like operator overloading and generic types), whereas Java
Give me JavaScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, even weird stuff like Lisp, Erlang, or Scheme, to write my high-level code. The low-level stuff, I'll write in C, and I do try to avoid situations where assembly is really needed, partly so I can develop on whatever platform is most convenient for me, not necessarily the same platform I'll be deploying to.
While your points do compare favorably with Java, I don't know how well they compare to other languages:
C++ makes it easy to mix different levels of code, you can write your app mostly in OOP using the STL (or even your own templates if you feel really adventurous) but you can also do pointer arithmetic and other low level stuff when it's the best fit for your problem.
Java allows this also, in that you can write C/C++ code which hooks into Java (via JNI), but it's far from easy. There are also fixed-length arrays, and I would think those get very efficient when you stuff them with primitives -- so Java and C++ are similar in that respect. Compare C++'s Vector class to Java's ArrayList, for example.
C++ is probablly second only to C in platform penetration, while your UI may need to be rewritten your core logic can be the same across a huge number of platforms.
While Java doesn't have quite the same penetration, it is pretty damned good. Windows/Mac/Linux, Android/Symbian/Blackberry, any Blu-Ray player, etc. I realize some of these platforms may take a significant amount of work to port to, but so would your C++ app -- as far as I know, the C spec doesn't require that you have any types which can hold more than a single byte, so you may come across a platform where sizeof(short)==sizeof(long) -- all it guarantees is that the "larger" size is at least as big as the "smaller" size.
There are also a large number of languages which have runtimes which are written in extremely portable C. I know Perl has historically had a goal of working everywhere C does, so long as it can physically fit there. I'm not sure how portable Java is, but with the JVM open now, it should be much easier to port it to new platforms.
C++ lets you (or a library author) create your own types that are efficient and pleasant to work with (e.g. for complex numbers, vectors etc). for any mathematical code this is a huge advantage.
The same is true of many languages, and with Java, this is mostly a syntactical problem.
C++ makes it really easy to access the platform's standard libraries (compared to a language like Java that lives in it's own world and makes it very painful to leave that world)
Again, there is JNI -- but I agree that it's painful to leave.
Let me contrast this with how I'd approach this problem: Ruby or JRuby, with C extensions where I need them, probably via RubyInline or something similar. Using this approach, I'd make my app at least as portable as Ruby and JRuby. The easy things are easy, the hard things are easier, and for the rare occasions performance makes things difficult, there's C -- at that point, C++ wouldn't buy me much anyway.
It gives me the same "mixing different levels of code" (even from JRuby), only much moreso. It is nice that C is part of C++, but then I can't do better than C++ -- then I'm still stuck with weird patterns like visitors and for loops with iterators to deal with the language's lack of closures, not to mention the fact that slicing happens and virtual being not the default is just dangerous. Don't talk to me about type safety when you have multiple kinds of typecasting, some of which might change the address of a pointer, thus a perfectly innocent-looking method call might hit a completely different virtual table than I expect, and call a completely unrelated method.
I mean, no, C++ does not get to claim to be high-level when I still have to think about issues like memory allocation, slicing, who's responsible for cleanup (caller or callee?), references vs pointers, whether to use an int or a long, and after all that bullshit, I still need some fucking preprocessor macros to reduce the sheer amount of redundancy in the code I write.
Because it has been the same damn program that people have been citing as proof of Java not being dead on the desktop FOR YEARS.
So what?
Shouldn't there be some new programs by now?
Minecraft, for one.
Why are so many programs still written in C++?
Partly because of FUD like this. Partly because C++ actually is a better language in some respects -- it has operator overloading, for one.
Mostly because of inertia. Put another way, why are so many server programs still written in Java? Why are so few written in C++? I have to imagine most of these are for historical reasons -- at some point, a critical mass of server people bought the Java hype, whereas at some point, Java on the desktop had a real opportunity to steal marketshare, but wasn't (yet) fast enough or well-tooled enough, and Microsoft's JVM convinced people it wasn't really portable after all.
Personally, I don't think I'd ever write a program of any significant size in either Java or C++ if I could possibly avoid it.
Given that it's the first program you ever saw with a CPU leak, I'd have to assume it's the Azureus developers' fault, unless Azureus was the first JVM or SWT program you ever saw.
I'm not in any way defending Azureus in that respect. It had a few cool features, but pretty much all of them have now been implemented in ktorrent, utorrent, etc.
I think I did elaborate on how a person might accomplish this.
In any case, my point is better written as, "they're the only ones who can fix it." We cannot shield our children entirely, even from teachers. If we did, all we'd be doing is pushing the problem back to their first boss.
I can offer one specific piece of advice which helped me: "I am not a Volkswagen." It doesn't matter what they call me if it isn't true -- after all, if they called me a Volkswagen, it wouldn't make me any more an automobile or less a human being than I am now.
Or, in more "adult" terms, don't depend on others for your self-worth, and don't allow them to define you -- or at least be careful who you trust with your emotional stability. When someone says something cruel about you which you know isn't true, unless you have good reason to trust them more than you trust yourself, you can treat this as a blatant demonstration of the kind of person this is and just how little their opinion or companionship is worth.
I leave "adult" in quotes because children, especially teenagers, are much smarter than they get credit for. These aren't hard concepts, but they take practice to develop.
I'm not saying we should deliberately hire teachers like this, any more than I would advocate rubbing your child's face in manure to build up their immune system. I certainly don't mean the children should have any blame for this. I do think they should be able to deal with it, and if they can't, now is an excellent time to learn.
Another reason is, "I want to target platforms Microsoft doesn't."
Say what you will about Oracle, but with OpenJDK, I can pretty much do what I want. The closes thing.NET has is Mono, which means you're basically castrating the feature set of.NET, whereas OpenJDK includes almost all of the Sun JDK, and is almost always out-of-the-box compatible.
Or I can write my code in JRuby, which means I run anywhere Java does and anywhere CRuby does, as well as anywhere anyone writes a Ruby interpreter in the future.
Some students are terrible, but so are some teachers. These aren't mutually exclusive.
I know I've been especially lucky so far, but then, none of my teachers have ever said anything like this to me, or to any of my peers. Consider that most students are not and never will be clique leaders. Even the worst of them, it's not really helping anything for the teacher to say "I hate you." That's essentially what she was doing.
In private? Sure, though I have to say, if you have that much contempt for your students, you shouldn't be teaching. It's not really clear if this was in private or not, though. If this was in public, and if it was using the students' actual names, that's really not ok.
You could just help them to get a sense of satisfaction.
First, I'm not sure that sense of satisfaction really gives me a clue that I should be doing this instead of, say, having a satisfying meal.
Second, I'm not sure I'd have the same sense of satisfaction if I didn't feel that way. What these women (and men) have gone through is horrifying, and that this place has to exist is undeniably sad.
But I suppose at this point, there's little difference. Being sad did help the situation, even if another emotion might've helped more. The important point was that they were appropriate, and that I controlled them, rather than the other way around.
You don't go back there because you are sad, but it is likely because you feel good helping them, I would think.
But I don't. In fact, I can't help but feel a little depressed helping them. The work itself is pretty much drudgery, the surroundings are kind of claustrophobic...
Now, I do feel good about what I'm helping to accomplish, what kind of an impact I've had. I feel good about the consequences of what I did there. But even that is a lot more real having actually been there, and knowing what kind of a situation it is.
but the anger means I'm going to go at this full-speed until it's done.
Rational thinking can do that, too.
Sometimes, yes, but for what I'm talking about, the adrenaline was very necessary, and I think anger is going to lead to better results in this case than fear.
I am of the opinion that getting things done sooner, rather than later, is the more intelligent decision because you do not know what the future holds (not to mention that you would likely feel a sense of satisfaction out of getting it done).
Oh, certainly, but there's a difference between getting a head start on stuff I need to have done, and "Oh shit the server is down and the entire office is offline!" That's not a case of working efficiently and ahead of schedule. That's a case of running through the office as you try to get a handle on things. It's not getting stuff unpacked sooner rather than later, it's ripping the box open that has the replacement hardware in it. It's not a matter of getting the most out of your eight-hour day, it's "I'm going to work on this non-fucking-stop until it's done, and you are not going to interrupt me unless it's to bring me coffee or pizza."
They are. However, that doesn't mean that any one emotion is completely controlling you.
I agree. My point was, saying you act out of logic instead of emotion is nonsensical, if your emotions are necessary predicates for your logic.
Fair enough, though keep in mind what "requiring" really entails here. First, they mentioned an app -- assuming that app generates stuff locally, it doesn't need to phone home, so they don't need your cell phone, and someone could port the app to your PC or the web in general.
Second, all it really means is that if they eventually decide to do this and it bothers you that much, you move to another free email provider. If you're paying for it for a domain, all the better, you won't even have to change your email address.
Given that the outcome desired is a certain degree, and what that degree is supposed to represent, I don't really see more that could be done in this respect.
Basically, employers value people from four-year universities, even with tons of liberal arts background, and a technical background, more than those from two-year universities with only a technical background. The two-year university does give the same "outcome" if you really think only courses directly related to your job are useful.
But basically, what we have here are people who want the certificate so they can get a better job with better pay, without having to do the work, or at least not whatever work they think is irrelevant. What employers want is the kind of person who has done the work.
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I've never met a Protestant who buys the concept of the trinity
I can't remember meeting one who doesn't. They pretty much have to, in order to justify why they believe this book above all others -- ultimately, the answer I get is, the Holy Spirit tells them it's this book, and tells them how to interpret it.
I have heard many Christians argue that Catholicism isn't really Christianity at all.
While I haven't specifically heard Catholics argue that Protestants aren't Christian, this is exactly what I'm talking about. It seems to me like there are enough Catholics calling themselves Christian that it makes little sense to make that distinction.
To be fair, Saints are 1) real people, mostly, according to historical record, and 2) Catholics don't accept saints as gods, but as heavenly entities who have the ear of god or somesuch.
To be fair, when you poll Catholics, you find more prayers to the Virgin Mary than to Jesus Christ.
I happen to like my God-given right to be left the hell alone as long as I'm not violating anyone else's rights.
I agree, and that's actually my point. Specifically:
...so being a good progressive you'd want to force them to change?
At home, I want a few very specific things which really would pretty much leave you alone. For example, gay marriage -- why would letting gays marry have any impact whatsoever on your life, assuming you're heterosexual? Or, government money going to religious organizations and displays -- why should any of us be forced to support a religion we don't subscribe to? Remember when the boy scouts were about actual, y'know, scouting, instead of this Mormon bullshit?
Around the world, there are people I most definitely would want to force to change -- mostly Islamic countries. No, you don't get to be "left the hell alone" when 50% of the population has their rights infringed on daily. Yes, I would like to force these people to stop cutting off their daughters' clitorises and sewing their vaginas shut before they force them to wear a cloth bag their entire life, only to kill her if she dares to be raped. If you aren't at least "progressive" enough to see that as appalling and wish desperately that you could change it, I have no problem saying you're a terrible human being and I want nothing to do with you.
So let's see:
1. You went to the airport without going through even a metal detector...
I agree, this has gotten worse. Metal detectors don't bother me, but the TSA molesting people is a bit too far.
2. Families by and large sat and ate dinner together. Mostly 2 parent households.
How recent is the single-parent phenomenon? I'd also have to wonder why that's the case. There could be any number of reasons for that. I bet a big factor is more support for women getting out of abusive relationships, and more acceptance that divorce sometimes is a better solution than staying in a relationship which is ultimately more damaging than the divorce for everyone involved.
Sitting and eating dinner together is nice once in awhile, but I'm not sure it's qualitatively better. You really have to look at what people are doing with that time instead. I, for one, stay in much better contact with my relatives around the world than I did when I was growing up, long distance was expensive, and the best way to talk to my grandparents was a hand-written letter.
3. Ok..only 3 channels, but when nothing was on those three channels worth watching, you went outside to play as a kid, or did family things together around the house or outside.
There can still be nothing on with 300 channels. I agree that going outside is better.
4. Kids could be kids. My whole fucking day wasn't planned out. During the summers I ran the neighborhood with my friends on bike, foot and skateboard. The only rule when I was young, was to call home from a friend's house every couple of hours or so to check in. No, my parent's weren't worried about me being kidnapped, etc..geez, we didn't even have cell phones...how did we ever survive?
Now that we have cell phones, it seems that happens even more, especially when those kids grow up. My parents would pretty much let me go wherever I want, so long as I let them know what I was up to and when they could expect me -- much easier to do that with a cell phone, and it was much easier on them.
5. We pretty much knew all our neighbors...and as a kid, if you acted up, a neighbor would easily discipline you (I got swatted by a friends mom more than once)..then, they'd call your parents, and you'd get it again when you got home. Taught kids to behave.
The neighbors are still there, and while I don't know as many of them as well as I'd like to, I do occasionally visit one for a movie night when I'm back in town.
6. There were no such things as guns in schools...if someone ever got caught with a knife, it was news for months in the city.
That depends on the city. Duradin presents a counterexample.
7. Drinking age in many cities was 18yrs. States still had more rights than the Feds..at least MANY more than they have today.
18 vs 21 -- which is better? People do pretty stupid things when drunk. I'd have left it at 18 with the rationale that if you're old enough to vote and die for your country, you're old enough to decide what you put in your body.
And why are states rights automatically good? We'd still have slavery in several states if this wasn't the case.
8. No one had a problem if you brought a fucking peanut butter and jelly sandwich to school.
Again, depends on the school. Some even give you long enough that you might have a chance to go home and have lunch with your family!
9. There was actually good music to be found on the common FM radio stations in town. You could find new and good music on radio while driving around.
I still do, it's just that most of it's repetitive, whatever ClearChannel is selling that month. However, I can also listen to whatever I want on the Internet. Pandora will show me new and good music based on what I seem to
You say that and I know you want to believe it because we all do.
What? No, I really don't. I would much rather believe that there was a time we were doing better than we are now, because right now is pretty sad.
Instead, I'm forced to acknowledge that it's most likely the past was worse, both because of all sorts of quality-of-life metrics I could use, and because of the massive bias of remembering the good stuff. We can actually see this over the short term -- anyone over 40 has music they love, and they'll view the music designed for people under 20 with disgust, when the reality is that 90% of all music is crap, it's just that the stuff the 40-year-olds still listen to is the good stuff.
he is enabled by the left's refusal to understand why people listen to him.
Alright, I'll bite. Why do people listen to him?
It's a rather large assumption, but it does seem like a reasonable default assumption, given what we know about how humans *do* operate.
I realize it's a somewhat controversial opinion, though I'm not entirely sure why. For one, it seems weak determinism is likely true, or that there's some element of randomness, but computer can be random also. Even if that wasn't the case, it seems like the alternative to anything algorithmic is necessarily a dualist stance, and that seems like a pretty big assumption as well.
Essentially, what I'm doing here is a very liberal application of Occam's Razor. It really does seem like the only options are an algorithmic reality or a dual one.
It seems to, and so you hear people asking for the good old days.
It seems to me that the world is better than ever, and only getting better. It also seems like much of the chaos is caused by religious fanatics who don't want to accept this sort of change.
This is a pretty common fallacy Christians like to use when they're embarrassed by other Christians. Given all the variations of "monotheistic" Christianity, especially given most of them accept the Trinity and many accept Saints as well, why should it be impossible for there to be a polytheistic brand of Christianity, and why would it matter to you?
It certainly doesn't seem to matter to his fans!
That seems to presuppose things about consciousness and intent that I see no reason to believe would be any different for humans than for machines. In particular, I don't see any reason not to describe a human as a biological machine.
Maybe if we started by sufficiently defining "understanding," rather than relying on intuition, it'd be a stronger claim.
What I meant to say was:
I bet more people have cell phones than have computers.
I'm not sure what you thought I was saying, but I'm not sure what your anecdote proves, especially when I didn't have a proper sentence (sorry about that).
First, I'm not sure that sense of satisfaction really gives me a clue that I should be doing this instead of, say, having a satisfying meal.
Well, if you care more about a meal than helping others, then that is your own problem.
I never said that. All I'm saying is that the reason I care isn't necessarily connected with a sense of satisfaction.
You can get motivated without anger.
I get the feeling you didn't read what you're quoting here. This isn't "getting motivated" -- here, I needed adrenaline.
I seem to do fine without anger or sadness, but as long as you don't do anything illogical due to those emotions...
I'd like to think I don't, but you are falling back into the same dichotomy I just destroyed in what you're quoting.
I feel like we're not really having a dialog anymore -- you're just quoting what you think is relevant and repeating your previous argument.
Well, let's see...
Want a simple array of identical records? sorry you can't have it! you either have to run multiple parallel arrays (which is bad for locality of reference and also bad for code readability) or have an array of objects (which means every array element has all the overhead of an object).
Most likely, you go with the array of objects, because when you say "all the overhead", we're talking 16 bytes. Not usually an issue.
If it's really an issue, it's certainly possible to use similar tricks to what you'd do in C to deal with a blob of data -- just stuff it all into bytes and do some arithmetic to pull it out. Since you're not likely to have many structures where this kind of optimization is easy, wrap it in an object to hold your big array -- now that object overhead you're worried about is being applied once, for an overhead of O(1).
Want to pass parameters by reference? sorry the language simply won't let you
Let me pass _what_ by reference? I honestly can't think of a time I'd want to pass anything but an object by reference, and that's pretty much all you do with objects.
But this is exactly what I'm talking about. There may be cases where it makes perfect sense to do this in C++, so if you're trying to compare programs, you're either going to do this entirely the wrong way in Java, or if you're coming from Java to C++, you won't quite make full use of the power C++ gives you. It's kind of like when people go from C++ or Java to JavaScript and immediately try to build something like classes, thus missing the point of prototypal inheritance.
Mixing languages adds complexity to the code, the build process and the debugging process and this needs to be balanced against the benefits of doing it.
I think of it this way: How can I possibly know ahead of time what the performance characteristics of my code will be, until I actually profile it? I'd much rather write it in something that lets me get it working, and working well -- I'd go one level higher and use Ruby.
If you start that way, once you identify something slow enough that you actually care, the benefit is now that you get to keep your "prototype" code as production code, and that you get to use a language in which you're probably 50-90% more productive.
It's also not alway that bad. Ruby, even JRuby, can have inline C code. And regarding your comment about Java being painful to mix with others, it can certainly be painful to write raw JNI code, but chances are, the work's been done for you -- and it's often remarkably easy to connect JVM languages together. If you've got a Java codebase to play with, I'd strongly suggest playing with it in a JRuby irb session -- you can pretty much just pretend your Java objects are Ruby objects.
I find it hard to believe I'm defending Java. I really despise the language, but I also find it hard to call it slow.
Which languages would these be?
And really, I enjoy both extremes. It's the middle I despise -- in fact, I find Java much too low-level for the high-level stuff, and there are some things C++ is much better at (like operator overloading and generic types), whereas Java
Give me JavaScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, even weird stuff like Lisp, Erlang, or Scheme, to write my high-level code. The low-level stuff, I'll write in C, and I do try to avoid situations where assembly is really needed, partly so I can develop on whatever platform is most convenient for me, not necessarily the same platform I'll be deploying to.
While your points do compare favorably with Java, I don't know how well they compare to other languages:
C++ makes it easy to mix different levels of code, you can write your app mostly in OOP using the STL (or even your own templates if you feel really adventurous) but you can also do pointer arithmetic and other low level stuff when it's the best fit for your problem.
Java allows this also, in that you can write C/C++ code which hooks into Java (via JNI), but it's far from easy. There are also fixed-length arrays, and I would think those get very efficient when you stuff them with primitives -- so Java and C++ are similar in that respect. Compare C++'s Vector class to Java's ArrayList, for example.
C++ is probablly second only to C in platform penetration, while your UI may need to be rewritten your core logic can be the same across a huge number of platforms.
While Java doesn't have quite the same penetration, it is pretty damned good. Windows/Mac/Linux, Android/Symbian/Blackberry, any Blu-Ray player, etc. I realize some of these platforms may take a significant amount of work to port to, but so would your C++ app -- as far as I know, the C spec doesn't require that you have any types which can hold more than a single byte, so you may come across a platform where sizeof(short)==sizeof(long) -- all it guarantees is that the "larger" size is at least as big as the "smaller" size.
There are also a large number of languages which have runtimes which are written in extremely portable C. I know Perl has historically had a goal of working everywhere C does, so long as it can physically fit there. I'm not sure how portable Java is, but with the JVM open now, it should be much easier to port it to new platforms.
C++ lets you (or a library author) create your own types that are efficient and pleasant to work with (e.g. for complex numbers, vectors etc). for any mathematical code this is a huge advantage.
The same is true of many languages, and with Java, this is mostly a syntactical problem.
C++ makes it really easy to access the platform's standard libraries (compared to a language like Java that lives in it's own world and makes it very painful to leave that world)
Again, there is JNI -- but I agree that it's painful to leave.
Let me contrast this with how I'd approach this problem: Ruby or JRuby, with C extensions where I need them, probably via RubyInline or something similar. Using this approach, I'd make my app at least as portable as Ruby and JRuby. The easy things are easy, the hard things are easier, and for the rare occasions performance makes things difficult, there's C -- at that point, C++ wouldn't buy me much anyway.
It gives me the same "mixing different levels of code" (even from JRuby), only much moreso. It is nice that C is part of C++, but then I can't do better than C++ -- then I'm still stuck with weird patterns like visitors and for loops with iterators to deal with the language's lack of closures, not to mention the fact that slicing happens and virtual being not the default is just dangerous. Don't talk to me about type safety when you have multiple kinds of typecasting, some of which might change the address of a pointer, thus a perfectly innocent-looking method call might hit a completely different virtual table than I expect, and call a completely unrelated method.
I mean, no, C++ does not get to claim to be high-level when I still have to think about issues like memory allocation, slicing, who's responsible for cleanup (caller or callee?), references vs pointers, whether to use an int or a long, and after all that bullshit, I still need some fucking preprocessor macros to reduce the sheer amount of redundancy in the code I write.
Because it has been the same damn program that people have been citing as proof of Java not being dead on the desktop FOR YEARS.
So what?
Shouldn't there be some new programs by now?
Minecraft, for one.
Why are so many programs still written in C++?
Partly because of FUD like this. Partly because C++ actually is a better language in some respects -- it has operator overloading, for one.
Mostly because of inertia. Put another way, why are so many server programs still written in Java? Why are so few written in C++? I have to imagine most of these are for historical reasons -- at some point, a critical mass of server people bought the Java hype, whereas at some point, Java on the desktop had a real opportunity to steal marketshare, but wasn't (yet) fast enough or well-tooled enough, and Microsoft's JVM convinced people it wasn't really portable after all.
Personally, I don't think I'd ever write a program of any significant size in either Java or C++ if I could possibly avoid it.
Given that it's the first program you ever saw with a CPU leak, I'd have to assume it's the Azureus developers' fault, unless Azureus was the first JVM or SWT program you ever saw.
I'm not in any way defending Azureus in that respect. It had a few cool features, but pretty much all of them have now been implemented in ktorrent, utorrent, etc.
I think I did elaborate on how a person might accomplish this.
In any case, my point is better written as, "they're the only ones who can fix it." We cannot shield our children entirely, even from teachers. If we did, all we'd be doing is pushing the problem back to their first boss.
I can offer one specific piece of advice which helped me: "I am not a Volkswagen." It doesn't matter what they call me if it isn't true -- after all, if they called me a Volkswagen, it wouldn't make me any more an automobile or less a human being than I am now.
Or, in more "adult" terms, don't depend on others for your self-worth, and don't allow them to define you -- or at least be careful who you trust with your emotional stability. When someone says something cruel about you which you know isn't true, unless you have good reason to trust them more than you trust yourself, you can treat this as a blatant demonstration of the kind of person this is and just how little their opinion or companionship is worth.
I leave "adult" in quotes because children, especially teenagers, are much smarter than they get credit for. These aren't hard concepts, but they take practice to develop.
I'm not saying we should deliberately hire teachers like this, any more than I would advocate rubbing your child's face in manure to build up their immune system. I certainly don't mean the children should have any blame for this. I do think they should be able to deal with it, and if they can't, now is an excellent time to learn.
Another reason is, "I want to target platforms Microsoft doesn't."
Say what you will about Oracle, but with OpenJDK, I can pretty much do what I want. The closes thing .NET has is Mono, which means you're basically castrating the feature set of .NET, whereas OpenJDK includes almost all of the Sun JDK, and is almost always out-of-the-box compatible.
Or I can write my code in JRuby, which means I run anywhere Java does and anywhere CRuby does, as well as anywhere anyone writes a Ruby interpreter in the future.
Some students are terrible, but so are some teachers. These aren't mutually exclusive.
I know I've been especially lucky so far, but then, none of my teachers have ever said anything like this to me, or to any of my peers. Consider that most students are not and never will be clique leaders. Even the worst of them, it's not really helping anything for the teacher to say "I hate you." That's essentially what she was doing.
In private? Sure, though I have to say, if you have that much contempt for your students, you shouldn't be teaching. It's not really clear if this was in private or not, though. If this was in public, and if it was using the students' actual names, that's really not ok.
You could just help them to get a sense of satisfaction.
First, I'm not sure that sense of satisfaction really gives me a clue that I should be doing this instead of, say, having a satisfying meal.
Second, I'm not sure I'd have the same sense of satisfaction if I didn't feel that way. What these women (and men) have gone through is horrifying, and that this place has to exist is undeniably sad.
But I suppose at this point, there's little difference. Being sad did help the situation, even if another emotion might've helped more. The important point was that they were appropriate, and that I controlled them, rather than the other way around.
You don't go back there because you are sad, but it is likely because you feel good helping them, I would think.
But I don't. In fact, I can't help but feel a little depressed helping them. The work itself is pretty much drudgery, the surroundings are kind of claustrophobic...
Now, I do feel good about what I'm helping to accomplish, what kind of an impact I've had. I feel good about the consequences of what I did there. But even that is a lot more real having actually been there, and knowing what kind of a situation it is.
but the anger means I'm going to go at this full-speed until it's done.
Rational thinking can do that, too.
Sometimes, yes, but for what I'm talking about, the adrenaline was very necessary, and I think anger is going to lead to better results in this case than fear.
I am of the opinion that getting things done sooner, rather than later, is the more intelligent decision because you do not know what the future holds (not to mention that you would likely feel a sense of satisfaction out of getting it done).
Oh, certainly, but there's a difference between getting a head start on stuff I need to have done, and "Oh shit the server is down and the entire office is offline!" That's not a case of working efficiently and ahead of schedule. That's a case of running through the office as you try to get a handle on things. It's not getting stuff unpacked sooner rather than later, it's ripping the box open that has the replacement hardware in it. It's not a matter of getting the most out of your eight-hour day, it's "I'm going to work on this non-fucking-stop until it's done, and you are not going to interrupt me unless it's to bring me coffee or pizza."
They are. However, that doesn't mean that any one emotion is completely controlling you.
I agree. My point was, saying you act out of logic instead of emotion is nonsensical, if your emotions are necessary predicates for your logic.
I'd bet people have cell phones than have computers. Just look at India.
Fair enough, though keep in mind what "requiring" really entails here. First, they mentioned an app -- assuming that app generates stuff locally, it doesn't need to phone home, so they don't need your cell phone, and someone could port the app to your PC or the web in general.
Second, all it really means is that if they eventually decide to do this and it bothers you that much, you move to another free email provider. If you're paying for it for a domain, all the better, you won't even have to change your email address.
Given that the outcome desired is a certain degree, and what that degree is supposed to represent, I don't really see more that could be done in this respect.
Basically, employers value people from four-year universities, even with tons of liberal arts background, and a technical background, more than those from two-year universities with only a technical background. The two-year university does give the same "outcome" if you really think only courses directly related to your job are useful.
But basically, what we have here are people who want the certificate so they can get a better job with better pay, without having to do the work, or at least not whatever work they think is irrelevant. What employers want is the kind of person who has done the work.
Because the words "topless" and "gangbang" in an otherwise non-sexual game suddenly makes it a sexual situation.
We already have FPGAs.
Rather than research it myself, I'm going to be lazy and just ask: How much better (or worse) is this than existing stuff like FPGAs?