if I have to write a script, I have to write it fast, it has to be small (less typing), it should allow me to either debug itself via a debugger or just verbose output mode.
A big part of being a scripting language is being quick to code. But it seldom happens that you can tell how quick it was to code by how many characters it was. For instance for some tasks (even some scripting tasks), IDEs can help you go faster. Proper, clear error messages and exceptions can help you go faster. etc.
The scriptometer didn't measure time to code at all, even though it is much more important than what they actually do measure.
Also, the definition of "scripting" is totally biased towards sh-based languages. Which language is best for driving a GUI word processor? Which one is best at scraping data from a web site or web service? Which one can tweak an XML configuration file? Which one can transcode from UTF-16 to UTF-8 quickly? Scripting is not just about files and regex filters.
Of course I probably wouldn't bother to post if my favourite language had won...
No, but it generally is faculty who want the latest buzzwords, and since three prof's sit on Oracle's board of directors, you can bet it was them giving the admins the orders....
The people who buy 60 million dollar finance systems are not "admins". They are VPs or CIOs or COOs. They far outweigh professors in power in their areas of expertise. They would be flayed alive if they blamed purchasing problems on buzzword-happy professors.
One of the fallacies that is repeated over and over again is that there is a slashdot hive mind. Maybe the posters in favour of freedom come out when there is an article about PATRIOT and the posters in favour of government protectionism come out when there is an article about offshoring. It seems pretty likely that people will post about the issues that interest them!
Google is switching from supporting one standard (under development), Atom to supporting two Atom and RSS. I suppose if you adhere to the belief that "more is better" then this is a good move. If you believe that corporations shouldn't take sides in standards wars then this is also a good move. But it certainly isn't a case of abandoning something proprietary for something standard as you are painting it.
I'm not sure you understand. There are about four mutually incompatible standards all called "RSS". The one that the W3C uses is by most of the same people who have now moved on to Atom to avoid the war over the RSS acronym.
Why should gays act "normal"? Why is acting normal more important than acting in a manner that makes you feel happy and comfortable? I'm straight but I'm certainly not normal (posting on Slashdot late at night for example). You're probably not totally normal yourself. So what: abnormality is what makes the world interesting.
But why should anyone be opposed to charging for software on principle?
First let me say that I am not myself opposed to charging for software. But those are have reasons. For instance, they argue that sharing information with others is a fundamental right and therefore it is wrong for software companies to impose licenses that restrict the ability of people to share information.
We're talking about performance. Pyrex implements a subset of Python that maintains all of Python's dynamicity. It runs at almost exactly the same performance as Python. You've never heard of it before today so don't bother arguing that it is "like" Python unless you are ready to argue that the differences are performance relevant.
The one difference that I have found is relevant is that if you add static type annotations to Pyrex you get Python-level speeds.
Pyrex is a Python compiler and yet it is (by default) much slower than Java, which is bytecode interpreted (but static). But then if you add type declarations, voila, it runs pretty damn fast: rivalling C sometimes. This is very well studied. The performance bottleneck is not the Python interpreter. It is the dynamic semantics of the Python language. a+b in Python involves a bunch of type checks and method calls. You can speed up dynamic languages (with or without a compiler) but it takes some seriously complicated code and Python's implementors have always tried to keep the implementation clean and simple.
As your inbox probably shows, it is quite unrealistic to think that client-side filtering will work as well as today's phone system does. The phone system has the dual advantages that inter-country calls cost Real Money and that within a country it is always possible (with the help of the cops) to figure out who is calling you. I fear that phone spam will be a huge issue with VOIP.
Re:Rational - but is this rational?
on
Google IPO Swami
·
· Score: 1
Even a person who wants them "just to have" has a price limit above which they feel the price is higher than the value (if only because it plunges them into bankruptcy). They should bid that price and not a penny more.
Let's say that the absolute maximum price you are willing to pay is $100/share. What is the incentive to bid a penny higher? Of course you could big much higher just to "guarantee" that you get stock but the goal is not to guarantee that you get stock. The goal is to get stock at a price that makes that stock a good investment. If you bid $500.00 and actually pay $100.00 when you believed that the stok was only a good investment at $60.00 then you are out $40.00 bucks. You should have bid $60.00.
Imagine that you did bid $60.00. Maybe other people will get stock and you won't, but if you believe that they are overpaying then from your point of view they are suckers, not winners. Remember that the goal of the game is not to get Google stock. It is to PROFIT from owning Google stock. If you bid high and get the stock and then watch it slide downward for years after you have lost, not won.
Maybe someday if slashdot regains its past glories we can have a thread devoted to the subject of whether ultimate code correctness bears any relationship to personal discipline, or if the entire matter rests with finding a suitable womb in which to program with protects the programmer from his or her own nature.
I would be amazed whether you could find anybody to support the latter assertion. Rather you will hear them say that there are a variety of factors that lead to correctness, including memory correctness, type correctness, mathematical correctness, correct business process modeling etc. Every form of correctness takes effort (i.e. time and money) to maintain. Language features can reduce this cost. Furthermore, language features can dramatically cut the cost of maintaining correctness across a team of people with diverse mental models and skills.
The thing I find your post deeply lacking is any mention of teams or of other people at all. It is frankly of no relevance to me that "epine" writes equally correct code in C++, C, PHP and Perl 5 (in addition, you seem to suggest, to Haskell). None of the twenty high quality programmers I work with on a day to day basis will report the same experience. If your brain works in a way that you write equally correct code in Haskell and C then good for you, you should probably go write kernels for small devices. Back in the world I live in, various languages dramatically affect the ability of programmers to write correct code: though none of C, C++, PHP or Perl are languages that are really designed with correctness as a priority.
is that ms word 4 did all I need, and now the newest office is a thousand times the size and uses so much more cpu and ram but does no more.
Newer versions of Word may not do new things that you need it to do, but many people do use the newer features of Word. For instance, the ability to see syntax errors without a separate syntax error pass and the superior WYSIWSYG display. I expect that there are people out there for whom notepad and lpr are good enough. You want a little more then that but less than what Word of today does. You are in the minority.
A better question to ask is, what the fuck is an operating system doing with those resources?
The operating system takes some percentage of the resources. It needs to manage the display which probably means scalable vector graphics. It needs to manage the newly massive hard disk and it might make sense to use different file system algorithms and layouts when drives are huge. The OS needs to support whatever apps will be popular then, with their massive address spaces. The OS needs to support the languages that will be popular on these kinds of computers.
It would be foolhardy of Microsoft to wait for someone else to build the operating system that takes advantage of the computer of the future and that supports applications that will run on it.
Paying a dividend is only one way of rewarding shareholders. The other is to reinvest in growth. No early investor of Microsoft complained that it took them years (decades?) to pay a dividend. The trick is for the company and the shareholders to both recognize when further growth is unlikely.
Sayeth the poster: "Scientists will have to decide whether or not to send Opportunity inside for a closer inspection without getting it stuck forever."
I am personally in favour of them sending it inside for a closer inspection without getting it stuck forever. Getting it stuck forever seems like it would be a bad idea...but maybe that's just short-term thinking on my part.
I'm looking at the source code for Python 1.1. It has a function called "extract_tb" which generates a list that you can manipulate and handle from a traceback. According to the changelog, that feature was added in 1994, the year before Java was released. I would bet money that the feature is much, much older than Python.
Java invented the dynamic analysis and handling of stack traces, not just exceptions.
Python has the same feature and Python is older than Java. It would take some effort to prove that Python had introspection of stack traces before Java did, but it seems quite likely to me. And it seems even more likely that some variant of Lisp had it long before Python.
What is all of this "kills Java" crap? Name a healthy technology that died out after it was open sourced. Even Netscape, which was already dieing, is undeniably doing better as open source then it would have.
Okay, so apps vendors should test on Linux and submit patches when they find bugs. What does any of this have to do with Solaris being GPLed? I don't understand!
Of course it is separable. Sometimes a company is growing and deciding where to put new development.
, and it's not a moral choice.
According to you. Merely asserting it does not make it so.
It's a short term gain with a long term loss - good if you're the only guy doing it, but disaster if it becomes popular.
Not true either. If it becomes popular, people in other countries get higher standards of living which they use to buy American products.
As far as shaming is for bitching about improving the economy in some other country, remember that charity begins at home.
Of course. Americans should look out for Americans. Indians for Indians. My tribe first! It's the law of the jungle!
I'm sure the local guy and his two kids are real happy for that guy in India whom he'll never meet.
The local guy has opportunities for jobs that the Indian would kill for. And the Indian doesn't just feed his two kids. He pours money into the local school, the local economy, the local hospital, the local vendors and helps hundreds of people around him. Then he also buys stuff from America and helps Americans too.
The discussion was about offshoring. It is about "giving" a job to someone in another country at the expense of someone who already has that job for the personal gain of a company executive.
That isn't the definition of offshoring. Here's the definition. It says nothing about firing people or the personal gain of the company executive. You're just making that stuff up.
What part of that did you not understand?
Excellent rhetorical technique. Bound to bring out reasoned analysis on the part of others in the discussion.
Before asking your own question, maybe you should answer the original poster's question. Is it immoral to give a job to a man with a college degree in another country? If not, then outsourcing is not immoral. Firing the local guy is a separable action. You could, for instance, only build new factories in other countries.
Slashdot Mirror
if I have to write a script, I have to write it fast, it has to be small (less typing), it should allow me to either debug itself via a debugger or just verbose output mode.
A big part of being a scripting language is being quick to code. But it seldom happens that you can tell how quick it was to code by how many characters it was. For instance for some tasks (even some scripting tasks), IDEs can help you go faster. Proper, clear error messages and exceptions can help you go faster. etc. The scriptometer didn't measure time to code at all, even though it is much more important than what they actually do measure.
Also, the definition of "scripting" is totally biased towards sh-based languages. Which language is best for driving a GUI word processor? Which one is best at scraping data from a web site or web service? Which one can tweak an XML configuration file? Which one can transcode from UTF-16 to UTF-8 quickly? Scripting is not just about files and regex filters.
Of course I probably wouldn't bother to post if my favourite language had won...
No, but it generally is faculty who want the latest buzzwords, and since three prof's sit on Oracle's board of directors, you can bet it was them giving the admins the orders....
The people who buy 60 million dollar finance systems are not "admins". They are VPs or CIOs or COOs. They far outweigh professors in power in their areas of expertise. They would be flayed alive if they blamed purchasing problems on buzzword-happy professors.
One of the fallacies that is repeated over and over again is that there is a slashdot hive mind. Maybe the posters in favour of freedom come out when there is an article about PATRIOT and the posters in favour of government protectionism come out when there is an article about offshoring. It seems pretty likely that people will post about the issues that interest them!
Google is switching from supporting one standard (under development), Atom to supporting two Atom and RSS. I suppose if you adhere to the belief that "more is better" then this is a good move. If you believe that corporations shouldn't take sides in standards wars then this is also a good move. But it certainly isn't a case of abandoning something proprietary for something standard as you are painting it.
I'm not sure you understand. There are about four mutually incompatible standards all called "RSS". The one that the W3C uses is by most of the same people who have now moved on to Atom to avoid the war over the RSS acronym.
Why should gays act "normal"? Why is acting normal more important than acting in a manner that makes you feel happy and comfortable? I'm straight but I'm certainly not normal (posting on Slashdot late at night for example). You're probably not totally normal yourself. So what: abnormality is what makes the world interesting.
But why should anyone be opposed to charging for software on principle?
First let me say that I am not myself opposed to charging for software. But those are have reasons. For instance, they argue that sharing information with others is a fundamental right and therefore it is wrong for software companies to impose licenses that restrict the ability of people to share information.
The one difference that I have found is relevant is that if you add static type annotations to Pyrex you get Python-level speeds.
References:
1: http://www.prescod.net/python/pyrexopt/optimizatio n.html
2: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/1999- April/001319.html (look for the words "interpreter" and "overhead")
3: http://www.python.org/pycon/dc2004/papers/1/paper. pdf
Pyrex is a Python compiler and yet it is (by default) much slower than Java, which is bytecode interpreted (but static). But then if you add type declarations, voila, it runs pretty damn fast: rivalling C sometimes. This is very well studied. The performance bottleneck is not the Python interpreter. It is the dynamic semantics of the Python language. a+b in Python involves a bunch of type checks and method calls. You can speed up dynamic languages (with or without a compiler) but it takes some seriously complicated code and Python's implementors have always tried to keep the implementation clean and simple.
As your inbox probably shows, it is quite unrealistic to think that client-side filtering will work as well as today's phone system does. The phone system has the dual advantages that inter-country calls cost Real Money and that within a country it is always possible (with the help of the cops) to figure out who is calling you. I fear that phone spam will be a huge issue with VOIP.
Even a person who wants them "just to have" has a price limit above which they feel the price is higher than the value (if only because it plunges them into bankruptcy). They should bid that price and not a penny more.
Imagine that you did bid $60.00. Maybe other people will get stock and you won't, but if you believe that they are overpaying then from your point of view they are suckers, not winners. Remember that the goal of the game is not to get Google stock. It is to PROFIT from owning Google stock. If you bid high and get the stock and then watch it slide downward for years after you have lost, not won.
Maybe someday if slashdot regains its past glories we can have a thread devoted to the subject of whether ultimate code correctness bears any relationship to personal discipline, or if the entire matter rests with finding a suitable womb in which to program with protects the programmer from his or her own nature.
I would be amazed whether you could find anybody to support the latter assertion. Rather you will hear them say that there are a variety of factors that lead to correctness, including memory correctness, type correctness, mathematical correctness, correct business process modeling etc. Every form of correctness takes effort (i.e. time and money) to maintain. Language features can reduce this cost. Furthermore, language features can dramatically cut the cost of maintaining correctness across a team of people with diverse mental models and skills.
The thing I find your post deeply lacking is any mention of teams or of other people at all. It is frankly of no relevance to me that "epine" writes equally correct code in C++, C, PHP and Perl 5 (in addition, you seem to suggest, to Haskell). None of the twenty high quality programmers I work with on a day to day basis will report the same experience. If your brain works in a way that you write equally correct code in Haskell and C then good for you, you should probably go write kernels for small devices. Back in the world I live in, various languages dramatically affect the ability of programmers to write correct code: though none of C, C++, PHP or Perl are languages that are really designed with correctness as a priority.
is that ms word 4 did all I need, and now the newest office is a thousand times the size and uses so much more cpu and ram but does no more.
Newer versions of Word may not do new things that you need it to do, but many people do use the newer features of Word. For instance, the ability to see syntax errors without a separate syntax error pass and the superior WYSIWSYG display. I expect that there are people out there for whom notepad and lpr are good enough. You want a little more then that but less than what Word of today does. You are in the minority.
A better question to ask is, what the fuck is an operating system doing with those resources?
The operating system takes some percentage of the resources. It needs to manage the display which probably means scalable vector graphics. It needs to manage the newly massive hard disk and it might make sense to use different file system algorithms and layouts when drives are huge. The OS needs to support whatever apps will be popular then, with their massive address spaces. The OS needs to support the languages that will be popular on these kinds of computers.
It would be foolhardy of Microsoft to wait for someone else to build the operating system that takes advantage of the computer of the future and that supports applications that will run on it.
Paying a dividend is only one way of rewarding shareholders. The other is to reinvest in growth. No early investor of Microsoft complained that it took them years (decades?) to pay a dividend. The trick is for the company and the shareholders to both recognize when further growth is unlikely.
I am personally in favour of them sending it inside for a closer inspection without getting it stuck forever. Getting it stuck forever seems like it would be a bad idea...but maybe that's just short-term thinking on my part.
I'm looking at the source code for Python 1.1. It has a function called "extract_tb" which generates a list that you can manipulate and handle from a traceback. According to the changelog, that feature was added in 1994, the year before Java was released. I would bet money that the feature is much, much older than Python.
Java invented the dynamic analysis and handling of stack traces, not just exceptions.
Python has the same feature and Python is older than Java. It would take some effort to prove that Python had introspection of stack traces before Java did, but it seems quite likely to me. And it seems even more likely that some variant of Lisp had it long before Python.
Python had this feature in around 1992, long before Java was called Java or was public.
What is all of this "kills Java" crap? Name a healthy technology that died out after it was open sourced. Even Netscape, which was already dieing, is undeniably doing better as open source then it would have.
Okay, so apps vendors should test on Linux and submit patches when they find bugs. What does any of this have to do with Solaris being GPLed? I don't understand!
firing the local guy is not separable
Of course it is separable. Sometimes a company is growing and deciding where to put new development.
, and it's not a moral choice.
According to you. Merely asserting it does not make it so.
It's a short term gain with a long term loss - good if you're the only guy doing it, but disaster if it becomes popular.
Not true either. If it becomes popular, people in other countries get higher standards of living which they use to buy American products.
As far as shaming is for bitching about improving the economy in some other country, remember that charity begins at home.
Of course. Americans should look out for Americans. Indians for Indians. My tribe first! It's the law of the jungle!
I'm sure the local guy and his two kids are real happy for that guy in India whom he'll never meet.
The local guy has opportunities for jobs that the Indian would kill for. And the Indian doesn't just feed his two kids. He pours money into the local school, the local economy, the local hospital, the local vendors and helps hundreds of people around him. Then he also buys stuff from America and helps Americans too.
The discussion was about offshoring. It is about "giving" a job to someone in another country at the expense of someone who already has that job for the personal gain of a company executive.
That isn't the definition of offshoring. Here's the definition. It says nothing about firing people or the personal gain of the company executive. You're just making that stuff up.
What part of that did you not understand?
Excellent rhetorical technique. Bound to bring out reasoned analysis on the part of others in the discussion.
Before asking your own question, maybe you should answer the original poster's question. Is it immoral to give a job to a man with a college degree in another country? If not, then outsourcing is not immoral. Firing the local guy is a separable action. You could, for instance, only build new factories in other countries.