I imagine that stopping to type code would slow down the rest of the game...
Maybe, but I don't see that causing problems in other games. Mass Effect, for instance, allows me to select abilities, change weapons, and otherwise order my squad around while the game is paused, but it's not like I'm tempted to stay in that mode forever -- more likely, I get into that for a few seconds, then back into the game.
Plus, it has a giant threatening countdown. I wonder if that pauses while you're typing code.
And I'm not going to lie, the gameplay is what looks most interesting here:
there's a combination of shooting code blocks from a first-person perspective and actually writing code.
Come on! Who doesn't want a game that lets you write code and then apply it to a game world using a gun?
The concept I got from the video was less that you'd be copying and pasting code, and more that you might have "copy and paste" as a code snippet which you could use on the actual game world.
It definitely looks like they're trying to have a plot and a goal.
Put it another way: Remember the Matrix games? They were all entertaining, and they were all about real goals, just like the movies were. However, they had no actual coding or hacking in them -- one had a commandline minigame, but as far as actual gameplay, they were shooters/fighters with additional powers -- so, "hacking" the Matrix boiled down to something like Force abilities in a Star Wars game.
But why couldn't a Matrix game allow you to do stuff like this?
Most went to college because it was a way to have mommy and daddy pay their way for another 6 years.
How's that relevant? Yes, I get that it's easier than the real world, but especially if you're this sort of person, you probably don't realize that yet. There are going to be plenty of times when dropping out seems like a good option. However much easier it may be, if you've got a degree that took 6 years, that means you actually stayed in school and didn't do terribly for 6 years.
A degree is probably the most generic, least useful (in terms of assessing someone's qualifications) certification out there, but somehow people think it's important.
A certification is sort of the equivalent of a degree mill -- you can get one very quickly with very little effort, literally from a book, without having any understanding of how stuff actually works.
A degree, on the other hand... Hopefully, there will have been classes which force you to actually do research, actually complete projects in your related field, etc.
Also, while relevant experience is important, one downside is that it leads to all these job postings with "15 years experience in.NET" and such. Even when they're possible, the net result is you end up with a lot of people who have no real-world experience and no real way to get it.
For the record, I wrote a single 3 paragraph report in my university's entrance exam (in the 90s), and that got me out of all English requirements. Through appropriate elective selections, I wrote a total of 0 papers in that 5 year engineering program.
Neither of these are an option for me. Even my physics course -- required for engineers, also -- had several projects which involved both math and writing.
Maybe I have led an extremely unusual life, or something. Surely, I'm not the only person in the world to have identified a lot of "educated" people, who occupy niches at the bottom end of the food chain. I've met doctors driving truck, professors working as sales clerks...
Out of curiosity, where are you? There are a lot of places, particularly (I'd guess) close to college towns, where there's a high concentration of highly-educated people and a low concentration of actual jobs.
We hear all the hype about college graduates earning a million dollars and more than their non-educated counterparts. As a generality, that is probably close to the truth.
"Generality", nothing. As a statistic it is true. Yes, you can become a billionaire without an education, and you can become homeless with an education, and where you end up probably has a lot to do with who you are. Still, if you've got a chance to be educated, it seems like it does give you a real advantage. And if nothing else, you're a much more enriched, intelligent truck driver.
Oh - the OTHER reason for all those degrees is, colleges make money based on bodies. The more bodies packed into their classrooms, the more money they get from all the various funding sources.
And yet, in order to get those bodies into those classrooms, it helps to not be known as a degree mill. Not that degree mills don't exist, or that they don't make money, but that's why it's in a college's best interests to have high standards.
It doesn't much matter to THEM that there is already a surplus in any given field, and that none of the grads will ever find work for which they are prepared.
Well, it also helps to have a high job placement rate in order to get those bodies. I know my school's comp sci program boasts a 100% job placement rate of graduates, and that's in comp sci related fields, with each graduate getting multiple job offers before graduation. We also have a lot more freshmen than graduating seniors any given year.
But maybe that's just comp sci. Maybe the people who fail comp sci don't get kicked for academic honesty or anything like that, and instead go into business or kinesiology, so they get a degree anyway.
Would you rather do business with an honest guy who doesn't know what he's doing, or a dishonest guy who knows exactly how to scam you for every penny you're worth?
Never mind that they're also scamming themselves out of the sort of education which might help them with exactly this...
In my career, I've found a bit of both. There's a lot that people don't get in school, but there's also a lot that people don't seem to get anywhere except school. There's also the fact that a degree shows, or is supposed to show, that you have some persistence and some base level of understanding of things like, say, English and communication.
In any case, I wouldn't get my hopes up too much. What it's likely to do is cause job requirements to be tightened. That is, if it turns out more and more people are graduating without being able to write a coherent paper, you might demand a sample of writing from them during the interview process, but you're probably still going to want a degree.
Most people never use their degree for anything other than as a line-item in a HR checklist.
In which case, WTF is the point of the degree in the first place?
We're not talking about engineering here, we're talking about business majors.
"We" are? I was talking about everyone, but ok, let's talk about business majors. We're teaching said business majors that the way to get ahead is to cheat and not get caught. Is that who you want running your business?
Moreover, we don't get people actually earning their degrees, which causes problems when we rely on people to actually know what they were supposed to have learned in school. The cheater also likely doesn't get what they want, ultimately, given that if you cheat your way into a degree, you're not going to be competent at what you do, and I can't imagine how you'd actually hold down a job.
No, it's not. Under the Gold Standard, I could take my currency and trade it in for an equivalent amount of gold. What can I trade a set of Bitcoins for?
Missing the point. Bitcoins are the otherwise-useless item which we all agree has value. With the Gold Standard, it'd be gold. If Bitcoin were to somehow take over (which seems unlikely), you'd likely have things like paper currency which would be backed by actual bitcoins being held in reserve somewhere, assuming the bitcoins themselves can't be made convenient enough (which is likely).
You speak as though gold is incredibly more valuable than data for some reason other than that gold is actually used for trade. Then you say this:
Oh, bullshit. How much would it actually be worth if we only valued it for its industrial applications?
Nowhere near what it's worth now.
Which was my point. The actual inherent value of a currency is almost entirely based on how much it's actually being used as a medium of exchange, and not some intrinsic properties of it. Dollars, for example, are not backed by the gold standard and have almost no use other than as a medium of exchange, and are more often digital than physical anyway -- so you could at best exchange "virtual" dollars in your bank account for "real" paper dollars.
For that matter, what's the industrial application of any "real money", like the dollar?
Facilitating trade.
Oh, zing!
Except you just contradicted yourself. If "facilitating trade" counts, then the dollar would be worth exactly what it's worth now. You just admitted it wouldn't be worth nearly that much. Clearly, you weren't talking about "facilitating trade" as an application of gold.
People are using real resources (computers and electricity) and paying for that with real money to produce a digital puff of smoke called a bitcoin,
I also use real resources (computers, electricity, and time) and I both pay for and am paid for these things with real money, in order to produce a digital puff of smoke called software.
in which they then place more trust than the money issued by the government they elected themselves.
This may be your most relevant argument, if you actually fleshed it out. But the rest of it...
Bitcoin isn't even close to the gold standard.
It's actually very close to the gold standard. People use real resources and real money to dig up a metal whose only real use is that it's kind of shiny, so people place value on it...
When a virtual currency is backed by gold, there is actual, physical gold in a repository to imbue the virtual representation of it with real value.
Only as much value as the actual gold contains. So let's see...
Even if you don't value gold for its own properties, at least it has industrial applications that are valuable.
Oh, bullshit. How much would it actually be worth if we only valued it for its industrial applications? By that logic, silicon should be our currency.
For that matter, what's the industrial application of any "real money", like the dollar? Unless people value it for its intrinsic properties, or for what it will buy, it's not like you're going to take those bills and build something out of them. Not that it would really matter, since more dollars these days are digital anyway than physical.
Bitcoin on the other hand is backed by unnecessary environmental pollution,
Which is again pretty much like the gold standard. I can't imagine that if we started distributing the gold in Fort Knox to industry, that we would actually need any mining for the next few decades, if not centuries.
For that matter, we need to be switching to alternative energy anyway. Electricity is possible to generate cleanly. Gold isn't.
My guess is that, at some point in time, all those geeks will realize they wasted numerous hours and real money costing resources to produce exactly nothing and that it ultimately was only their own misguided belief that gave it a shine of value.
And you could say the same thing about any other currency, except that we have collectively decided that these other currencies have value, but Bitcoin doesn't.
Most of your argument amounts to an argument against characteristics Bitcoin has in common with other currencies, and particularly with the gold standard. I'm not saying you're wrong, and it's true that Bitcoin will have no value if no one values it -- which is much more likely to happen to Bitcoin than to other forms of currency -- but to say that it isn't even close to the gold standard, and then enumerate a list of complaints about it that apply as easily to gold, makes no sense.
That does help, but even if I grant everything you said, it implies that Perl is approaching Ruby in terms of features I care about, and performance is still going to be python or worse. So I think my point about why C# is interesting still stands.
A few more points that would likely still irritate me about perl:
It's actually weakly typed, not dynamically typed. The number of values which can be 'true' or 'false' is a bit absurd -- the string '0' and the number 0 are false, the empty string is false but a string containing a single space is true...
It's annoying to require semicolons, and prefixing each variable. Not a deal-breaker, just annoying.
Unless something's changed, any OO-ish or data-structure-ish syntax is obnoxious. Depending on the type of variable you have (reference or value), you can either just use brackets, or the deref-arrow and then brackets.
It's GC'd, but it's reference-counted GC. This isn't necessarily a win against a real GC in terms of performance, and it's definitely a lose in terms of subtle memory leaks.
Is there finally a decent interactive Perl shell yet? I love IRB, python, and REPLs in general -- it's how I learn a language. There's probably something on CPAN, but I know I find it mildly annoying every time I want to just check if I have the right syntax for a single line, I end up running it under perl -e.
Too many keywords and global functions in the standard libraries. Especially with CPAN, a lot of that stuff could go away.
But everything you've said will be helpful if I am forced into Perl again. It'd be nice for it to be a decent language, instead of "Well, it's an improvement on C."
Every couple years you'll buy a better CPU/Graphics card/etc.
You could get away with every four or five years, and you can buy an entire new gaming machine for ~$500. At 4 years, that's about $10/mo. And it's not like games are the only reason a new desktop would be nice.
As for games... There are some pretty fantastic deals out there. I bought the entire Star Wars: Jedi Knight (or Dark Forces) series for $20 on Steam, and it took an hour or two to download ALL of them. (More like one minute to download Dark Forces -- the thing is only 70 megs or so!)
more importantly, it's not extra money out of my wallet.
It's still money out of your wallet. I don't see the difference between paying that on a copy of Windows you can use on your own computer for anything you want, or paying indirectly for a VM license you can only use for one thing.
Python is less obect-oriented and less featureful in general than Ruby, but executes faster. It is more fun to work with than Java, but slower. It doesn't change my point about having a language be as cool as Ruby, but as fast as Java -- python is neither, it's somewhere in between.
And here, again, Ruby wins. Bundler is a way to have gems installed system-wide, and managed/updated during development with dependency handling and everything else you'd expect of a good package manager, but precisely the correct version will be enabled in each app at runtime.
Essentially, it means that it's trivially easy to tell your app "Hey, go depend on (and download) the latest version of all libraries you're using." It just records those versions, all the way down, so that at deploy time, you can tell it "Install exactly what we had installed on my dev machine when all our tests passed."
The only configuration you as a developer need to set up is a tiny config file, written in Ruby -- check out the sample Gemfile on the Bundler homepage. Seriously, look at it -- tiny. I never want to go back to XML bloat again!
And rvm means I can trivially have a separate set of gems per Ruby version, which is where I actually do want duplication -- nokogiri will depend on and use very different things in MRI vs JRuby. Since rvm tends to install new Rubies by at least downloading if not compiling them from scratch, it will provide you with a Ruby that's more or less consistent across Unices, let alone distros.
All these things can be installed per-user, but they can also be installed to the entire system. So you get the best of both worlds -- reproducible behavior, but I can type 'bundle update' and roll all dependency versions forward, or add a line and type 'bundle install' to add a new library.
The downside to all of the above is that everything I just said is really about installing stuff on a Unix machine, likely a production server. For desktop apps, Java has a much more easily portable system, since you can't trust the user to have anything sane at the system level. (Of course, when users do, it'd be nice to have a Debian package or something.)
That's more or less the same argument, and it fails for more or less the same reason. You're still running Windows somewhere, just not on your Mac (or Linux box). It might not even save you money in the long run over buying a copy of Windows.
You mention some other advantages, and I'll give you that, but add to that all the disadvantages GP points out and I can't see it being worthwhile on any platform. I'm with tepples, I'd much rather just install Windows or stick to games that have native ports.
But Linux is not marketed as being written in C to demonstrate that an OS can be written in C.
Unix was.
And it does still demonstrate that fact. If I wrote a game entirely in Python, say, except for some OpenGL bindings in C, would you say I'd successfully written a game in Python, or would you nitpick about the OpenGL bindings and demand that I somehow write a video driver in Python, too?
Oh, and the C# CLR is written in C.
The OS doesn't run in the CLR. It compiles CLR bytecode to native and runs that.
Because the tools for packaging, dependency management and building are better than anything else around.
Have to disagree here. To be fair, I haven't actually built Java packages myself, but trying to get a Java library installed (with all dependencies) is much more annoying than installing a Ruby gem.
What does C# provide that's compelling enough for open source people to disregard the source of the language and it's past rude and evil behavior?
If past rude and evil behavior of the corporation which spawned a language is a reason to avoid the language, WTF are you doing using C?
It's not speed since C covers that. It's not object oriented since C++/python/ruby cover those.
Well, not all at once, though. C++ has OO, but it's a pain to use. Ruby's OO is awesome, but the language is very slow compared to C++, or even to C#. So, it's a nice mix of non-painful OO and programming in general (with garbage collection, closures, etc) and decent performance.
It's also cross-platform in principle (if you stick to the subset that works in both Mono and.NET), and it runs in a multi-language VM which makes it easy to tie multiple languages together.
Java is really the only competitor there -- Parrot would in theory be better, but there aren't enough languages actively targeting it. And even in Java, I still have to choose. I remember writing a one-off program in JRuby (so it could use some Java libraries), and after several attempts to optimize it to where it would run in less than several days, I rewrote it wholesale in Java. It was more painful to write, but it ran in minutes instead of days. If C# is better to program in than Java, that's already a win for cases where I care about performance.
I mean, listen to yourself:
It's not regular expressions since it's hard to compete with Perl and nigh well impossible to beat Perl on this.
I'd argue Ruby does a decent job of ripping Perl off here, but regardless... Perl has regexes. It also has a really twisted OO system -- elegant in its own way, but I don't know why you'd choose that if you have alternatives. It has ugly syntax, even when you know what you're doing. Anti-patterns are the default -- like, say, ignoring errors unless you explicitly handle them.
The point is that C# is actually a decent language in a lot of these ways all at once. I don't know about you, but I use regexes, closures, objects, and complex enough data-structures that garbage collection would be nice -- so I use Ruby, but having that plus performance would also be nice.
Portability? Not going to beat Posix.
How about portability without distributing source? For that, you need something like LLVM, at least.
Don't get me wrong, I still use Ruby, Java, and C instead, and I've made a point of not learning C#. I've worked as a web developer, so I'm used to hopping between languages. But it would be nice to not have to do that.
So, first of all, a lot of the more enthusiastically open source types are much more likely to contribute to other projects which are less likely to be annihilated by patents, and whose direction isn't set by a proprietary competitor. After all, if people actually want to develop a cross-platform app, there are already plenty of ways to do so, and if they don't, Wine and Mono are more or less band-aids to the underlying problem.
It's also worth mentioning that while open source occasionally does produce something awesome out of whole cloth, the most significant open source projects today have corporate sponsorship of some sort. It's not that proprietary development is better, per se, but that funded development may have more and more active contributors than weekend warrior development.
From personal experience, here are the ways I've interacted with open source:
First, tons of little one-off hacks on my own that make me happy it was open, but that I'm unlikely to ever share with another living soul. For instance, before PCI Express, I had a card which was AGP 8x / AGP 3.0. The ATI drivers were detecting it as... less than that, but for whatever reason, running it in that slower mode didn't work at all. At the time, the kernel proper did not have AGP at all (this was pre-2.6). Fortunately, ATI had this open-source glue code, which included their AGP implementation. I cracked it open, commented out all the autodetection, and hardcoded AGP 3.0. It worked beautifully, but there's no way in hell I'm submitting that upstream, and I wouldn't know where to start in fixing it properly. (Well, I wouldn't have at the time -- I was 15 and in no way a C developer.)
Second, paid to work on open source projects as a consequence of actual work. I have a patch in Ruby on Rails which I wrote on-the-clock, and a fork of a Rails plugin. This actually works best when it's MIT-licensed -- I don't want to maintain Rails or even necessarily that plugin, when I can have someone else or an entire community do it for me, so there's an incentive to submit patches upstream. However, I'm not sharing my entire code-base under GPL or something.
I never was employed as a full-time open source developer, but there are people who do that. For example, I have to imagine Chromium is largely developed by Google employees, but it's still open-source, and it's worth it to open-source -- they get not just vulnerability reports, but actual patches, when they screw something up.
Slashdot Mirror
I imagine that stopping to type code would slow down the rest of the game...
Maybe, but I don't see that causing problems in other games. Mass Effect, for instance, allows me to select abilities, change weapons, and otherwise order my squad around while the game is paused, but it's not like I'm tempted to stay in that mode forever -- more likely, I get into that for a few seconds, then back into the game.
Plus, it has a giant threatening countdown. I wonder if that pauses while you're typing code.
And I'm not going to lie, the gameplay is what looks most interesting here:
there's a combination of shooting code blocks from a first-person perspective and actually writing code.
Come on! Who doesn't want a game that lets you write code and then apply it to a game world using a gun?
The concept I got from the video was less that you'd be copying and pasting code, and more that you might have "copy and paste" as a code snippet which you could use on the actual game world.
How many times do we have to correct this?
Javascript is not Java.
And it's more Scheme-like than you think, but with an ALGOL-enough syntax that people can pick it up much more easily.
It definitely looks like they're trying to have a plot and a goal.
Put it another way: Remember the Matrix games? They were all entertaining, and they were all about real goals, just like the movies were. However, they had no actual coding or hacking in them -- one had a commandline minigame, but as far as actual gameplay, they were shooters/fighters with additional powers -- so, "hacking" the Matrix boiled down to something like Force abilities in a Star Wars game.
But why couldn't a Matrix game allow you to do stuff like this?
This. I take large amounts of disk images, and it's really not worthwhile to do this anywhere but Gigabit, so I don't do it offsite.
Apparently Slashdot has decided Informative is Funny?
I give up moderating.
Most went to college because it was a way to have mommy and daddy pay their way for another 6 years.
How's that relevant? Yes, I get that it's easier than the real world, but especially if you're this sort of person, you probably don't realize that yet. There are going to be plenty of times when dropping out seems like a good option. However much easier it may be, if you've got a degree that took 6 years, that means you actually stayed in school and didn't do terribly for 6 years.
A degree is probably the most generic, least useful (in terms of assessing someone's qualifications) certification out there, but somehow people think it's important.
A certification is sort of the equivalent of a degree mill -- you can get one very quickly with very little effort, literally from a book, without having any understanding of how stuff actually works.
A degree, on the other hand... Hopefully, there will have been classes which force you to actually do research, actually complete projects in your related field, etc.
Also, while relevant experience is important, one downside is that it leads to all these job postings with "15 years experience in .NET" and such. Even when they're possible, the net result is you end up with a lot of people who have no real-world experience and no real way to get it.
For the record, I wrote a single 3 paragraph report in my university's entrance exam (in the 90s), and that got me out of all English requirements. Through appropriate elective selections, I wrote a total of 0 papers in that 5 year engineering program.
Neither of these are an option for me. Even my physics course -- required for engineers, also -- had several projects which involved both math and writing.
Maybe I have led an extremely unusual life, or something. Surely, I'm not the only person in the world to have identified a lot of "educated" people, who occupy niches at the bottom end of the food chain. I've met doctors driving truck, professors working as sales clerks...
Out of curiosity, where are you? There are a lot of places, particularly (I'd guess) close to college towns, where there's a high concentration of highly-educated people and a low concentration of actual jobs.
We hear all the hype about college graduates earning a million dollars and more than their non-educated counterparts. As a generality, that is probably close to the truth.
"Generality", nothing. As a statistic it is true. Yes, you can become a billionaire without an education, and you can become homeless with an education, and where you end up probably has a lot to do with who you are. Still, if you've got a chance to be educated, it seems like it does give you a real advantage. And if nothing else, you're a much more enriched, intelligent truck driver.
Oh - the OTHER reason for all those degrees is, colleges make money based on bodies. The more bodies packed into their classrooms, the more money they get from all the various funding sources.
And yet, in order to get those bodies into those classrooms, it helps to not be known as a degree mill. Not that degree mills don't exist, or that they don't make money, but that's why it's in a college's best interests to have high standards.
It doesn't much matter to THEM that there is already a surplus in any given field, and that none of the grads will ever find work for which they are prepared.
Well, it also helps to have a high job placement rate in order to get those bodies. I know my school's comp sci program boasts a 100% job placement rate of graduates, and that's in comp sci related fields, with each graduate getting multiple job offers before graduation. We also have a lot more freshmen than graduating seniors any given year.
But maybe that's just comp sci. Maybe the people who fail comp sci don't get kicked for academic honesty or anything like that, and instead go into business or kinesiology, so they get a degree anyway.
Well, let me put it this way:
Would you rather do business with an honest guy who doesn't know what he's doing, or a dishonest guy who knows exactly how to scam you for every penny you're worth?
Never mind that they're also scamming themselves out of the sort of education which might help them with exactly this...
Do you have better criteria?
In my career, I've found a bit of both. There's a lot that people don't get in school, but there's also a lot that people don't seem to get anywhere except school. There's also the fact that a degree shows, or is supposed to show, that you have some persistence and some base level of understanding of things like, say, English and communication.
In any case, I wouldn't get my hopes up too much. What it's likely to do is cause job requirements to be tightened. That is, if it turns out more and more people are graduating without being able to write a coherent paper, you might demand a sample of writing from them during the interview process, but you're probably still going to want a degree.
Most people never use their degree for anything other than as a line-item in a HR checklist.
In which case, WTF is the point of the degree in the first place?
We're not talking about engineering here, we're talking about business majors.
"We" are? I was talking about everyone, but ok, let's talk about business majors. We're teaching said business majors that the way to get ahead is to cheat and not get caught. Is that who you want running your business?
Moreover, we don't get people actually earning their degrees, which causes problems when we rely on people to actually know what they were supposed to have learned in school. The cheater also likely doesn't get what they want, ultimately, given that if you cheat your way into a degree, you're not going to be competent at what you do, and I can't imagine how you'd actually hold down a job.
No, it's not. Under the Gold Standard, I could take my currency and trade it in for an equivalent amount of gold. What can I trade a set of Bitcoins for?
Missing the point. Bitcoins are the otherwise-useless item which we all agree has value. With the Gold Standard, it'd be gold. If Bitcoin were to somehow take over (which seems unlikely), you'd likely have things like paper currency which would be backed by actual bitcoins being held in reserve somewhere, assuming the bitcoins themselves can't be made convenient enough (which is likely).
You speak as though gold is incredibly more valuable than data for some reason other than that gold is actually used for trade. Then you say this:
Oh, bullshit. How much would it actually be worth if we only valued it for its industrial applications?
Nowhere near what it's worth now.
Which was my point. The actual inherent value of a currency is almost entirely based on how much it's actually being used as a medium of exchange, and not some intrinsic properties of it. Dollars, for example, are not backed by the gold standard and have almost no use other than as a medium of exchange, and are more often digital than physical anyway -- so you could at best exchange "virtual" dollars in your bank account for "real" paper dollars.
For that matter, what's the industrial application of any "real money", like the dollar?
Facilitating trade.
Oh, zing!
Except you just contradicted yourself. If "facilitating trade" counts, then the dollar would be worth exactly what it's worth now. You just admitted it wouldn't be worth nearly that much. Clearly, you weren't talking about "facilitating trade" as an application of gold.
Erm...
People are using real resources (computers and electricity) and paying for that with real money to produce a digital puff of smoke called a bitcoin,
I also use real resources (computers, electricity, and time) and I both pay for and am paid for these things with real money, in order to produce a digital puff of smoke called software.
in which they then place more trust than the money issued by the government they elected themselves.
This may be your most relevant argument, if you actually fleshed it out. But the rest of it...
Bitcoin isn't even close to the gold standard.
It's actually very close to the gold standard. People use real resources and real money to dig up a metal whose only real use is that it's kind of shiny, so people place value on it...
When a virtual currency is backed by gold, there is actual, physical gold in a repository to imbue the virtual representation of it with real value.
Only as much value as the actual gold contains. So let's see...
Even if you don't value gold for its own properties, at least it has industrial applications that are valuable.
Oh, bullshit. How much would it actually be worth if we only valued it for its industrial applications? By that logic, silicon should be our currency.
For that matter, what's the industrial application of any "real money", like the dollar? Unless people value it for its intrinsic properties, or for what it will buy, it's not like you're going to take those bills and build something out of them. Not that it would really matter, since more dollars these days are digital anyway than physical.
Bitcoin on the other hand is backed by unnecessary environmental pollution,
Which is again pretty much like the gold standard. I can't imagine that if we started distributing the gold in Fort Knox to industry, that we would actually need any mining for the next few decades, if not centuries.
For that matter, we need to be switching to alternative energy anyway. Electricity is possible to generate cleanly. Gold isn't.
My guess is that, at some point in time, all those geeks will realize they wasted numerous hours and real money costing resources to produce exactly nothing and that it ultimately was only their own misguided belief that gave it a shine of value.
And you could say the same thing about any other currency, except that we have collectively decided that these other currencies have value, but Bitcoin doesn't.
Most of your argument amounts to an argument against characteristics Bitcoin has in common with other currencies, and particularly with the gold standard. I'm not saying you're wrong, and it's true that Bitcoin will have no value if no one values it -- which is much more likely to happen to Bitcoin than to other forms of currency -- but to say that it isn't even close to the gold standard, and then enumerate a list of complaints about it that apply as easily to gold, makes no sense.
That does help, but even if I grant everything you said, it implies that Perl is approaching Ruby in terms of features I care about, and performance is still going to be python or worse. So I think my point about why C# is interesting still stands.
A few more points that would likely still irritate me about perl:
But everything you've said will be helpful if I am forced into Perl again. It'd be nice for it to be a decent language, instead of "Well, it's an improvement on C."
Every couple years you'll buy a better CPU/Graphics card/etc.
You could get away with every four or five years, and you can buy an entire new gaming machine for ~$500. At 4 years, that's about $10/mo. And it's not like games are the only reason a new desktop would be nice.
As for games... There are some pretty fantastic deals out there. I bought the entire Star Wars: Jedi Knight (or Dark Forces) series for $20 on Steam, and it took an hour or two to download ALL of them. (More like one minute to download Dark Forces -- the thing is only 70 megs or so!)
more importantly, it's not extra money out of my wallet.
It's still money out of your wallet. I don't see the difference between paying that on a copy of Windows you can use on your own computer for anything you want, or paying indirectly for a VM license you can only use for one thing.
I don't think it was a troll, or at least I don't read it as a troll. Notice, I started with:
I think that's a valid criticism of GP's point...
Python is less obect-oriented and less featureful in general than Ruby, but executes faster. It is more fun to work with than Java, but slower. It doesn't change my point about having a language be as cool as Ruby, but as fast as Java -- python is neither, it's somewhere in between.
And here, again, Ruby wins. Bundler is a way to have gems installed system-wide, and managed/updated during development with dependency handling and everything else you'd expect of a good package manager, but precisely the correct version will be enabled in each app at runtime.
Essentially, it means that it's trivially easy to tell your app "Hey, go depend on (and download) the latest version of all libraries you're using." It just records those versions, all the way down, so that at deploy time, you can tell it "Install exactly what we had installed on my dev machine when all our tests passed."
The only configuration you as a developer need to set up is a tiny config file, written in Ruby -- check out the sample Gemfile on the Bundler homepage. Seriously, look at it -- tiny. I never want to go back to XML bloat again!
And rvm means I can trivially have a separate set of gems per Ruby version, which is where I actually do want duplication -- nokogiri will depend on and use very different things in MRI vs JRuby. Since rvm tends to install new Rubies by at least downloading if not compiling them from scratch, it will provide you with a Ruby that's more or less consistent across Unices, let alone distros.
All these things can be installed per-user, but they can also be installed to the entire system. So you get the best of both worlds -- reproducible behavior, but I can type 'bundle update' and roll all dependency versions forward, or add a line and type 'bundle install' to add a new library.
The downside to all of the above is that everything I just said is really about installing stuff on a Unix machine, likely a production server. For desktop apps, Java has a much more easily portable system, since you can't trust the user to have anything sane at the system level. (Of course, when users do, it'd be nice to have a Debian package or something.)
That's more or less the same argument, and it fails for more or less the same reason. You're still running Windows somewhere, just not on your Mac (or Linux box). It might not even save you money in the long run over buying a copy of Windows.
You mention some other advantages, and I'll give you that, but add to that all the disadvantages GP points out and I can't see it being worthwhile on any platform. I'm with tepples, I'd much rather just install Windows or stick to games that have native ports.
But Linux is not marketed as being written in C to demonstrate that an OS can be written in C.
Unix was.
And it does still demonstrate that fact. If I wrote a game entirely in Python, say, except for some OpenGL bindings in C, would you say I'd successfully written a game in Python, or would you nitpick about the OpenGL bindings and demand that I somehow write a video driver in Python, too?
Oh, and the C# CLR is written in C.
The OS doesn't run in the CLR. It compiles CLR bytecode to native and runs that.
Because the tools for packaging, dependency management and building are better than anything else around.
Have to disagree here. To be fair, I haven't actually built Java packages myself, but trying to get a Java library installed (with all dependencies) is much more annoying than installing a Ruby gem.
What does C# provide that's compelling enough for open source people to disregard the source of the language and it's past rude and evil behavior?
If past rude and evil behavior of the corporation which spawned a language is a reason to avoid the language, WTF are you doing using C?
It's not speed since C covers that. It's not object oriented since C++/python/ruby cover those.
Well, not all at once, though. C++ has OO, but it's a pain to use. Ruby's OO is awesome, but the language is very slow compared to C++, or even to C#. So, it's a nice mix of non-painful OO and programming in general (with garbage collection, closures, etc) and decent performance.
It's also cross-platform in principle (if you stick to the subset that works in both Mono and .NET), and it runs in a multi-language VM which makes it easy to tie multiple languages together.
Java is really the only competitor there -- Parrot would in theory be better, but there aren't enough languages actively targeting it. And even in Java, I still have to choose. I remember writing a one-off program in JRuby (so it could use some Java libraries), and after several attempts to optimize it to where it would run in less than several days, I rewrote it wholesale in Java. It was more painful to write, but it ran in minutes instead of days. If C# is better to program in than Java, that's already a win for cases where I care about performance.
I mean, listen to yourself:
It's not regular expressions since it's hard to compete with Perl and nigh well impossible to beat Perl on this.
I'd argue Ruby does a decent job of ripping Perl off here, but regardless... Perl has regexes. It also has a really twisted OO system -- elegant in its own way, but I don't know why you'd choose that if you have alternatives. It has ugly syntax, even when you know what you're doing. Anti-patterns are the default -- like, say, ignoring errors unless you explicitly handle them.
The point is that C# is actually a decent language in a lot of these ways all at once. I don't know about you, but I use regexes, closures, objects, and complex enough data-structures that garbage collection would be nice -- so I use Ruby, but having that plus performance would also be nice.
Portability? Not going to beat Posix.
How about portability without distributing source? For that, you need something like LLVM, at least.
Don't get me wrong, I still use Ruby, Java, and C instead, and I've made a point of not learning C#. I've worked as a web developer, so I'm used to hopping between languages. But it would be nice to not have to do that.
So, first of all, a lot of the more enthusiastically open source types are much more likely to contribute to other projects which are less likely to be annihilated by patents, and whose direction isn't set by a proprietary competitor. After all, if people actually want to develop a cross-platform app, there are already plenty of ways to do so, and if they don't, Wine and Mono are more or less band-aids to the underlying problem.
It's also worth mentioning that while open source occasionally does produce something awesome out of whole cloth, the most significant open source projects today have corporate sponsorship of some sort. It's not that proprietary development is better, per se, but that funded development may have more and more active contributors than weekend warrior development.
From personal experience, here are the ways I've interacted with open source:
First, tons of little one-off hacks on my own that make me happy it was open, but that I'm unlikely to ever share with another living soul. For instance, before PCI Express, I had a card which was AGP 8x / AGP 3.0. The ATI drivers were detecting it as... less than that, but for whatever reason, running it in that slower mode didn't work at all. At the time, the kernel proper did not have AGP at all (this was pre-2.6). Fortunately, ATI had this open-source glue code, which included their AGP implementation. I cracked it open, commented out all the autodetection, and hardcoded AGP 3.0. It worked beautifully, but there's no way in hell I'm submitting that upstream, and I wouldn't know where to start in fixing it properly. (Well, I wouldn't have at the time -- I was 15 and in no way a C developer.)
Second, paid to work on open source projects as a consequence of actual work. I have a patch in Ruby on Rails which I wrote on-the-clock, and a fork of a Rails plugin. This actually works best when it's MIT-licensed -- I don't want to maintain Rails or even necessarily that plugin, when I can have someone else or an entire community do it for me, so there's an incentive to submit patches upstream. However, I'm not sharing my entire code-base under GPL or something.
I never was employed as a full-time open source developer, but there are people who do that. For example, I have to imagine Chromium is largely developed by Google employees, but it's still open-source, and it's worth it to open-source -- they get not just vulnerability reports, but actual patches, when they screw something up.