Name a programmer's tool that doesn't respect whitespace.
In my experience the only kinds of tools that cause problems are office tools like PowerPoint and Outlook. If you care strongly about running code through those, then you're right, you may have problems.
You don't know what you are talking about. The security protocols have changed alot. "TKIP, or the temporal key integrity protocol, packages three improvements to replace the flawed wired equivalent privacy protocol (WEP). With Wi-Fi, data sent over the wireless network is encrypted, but sharing the keys that encrypted the information has always been a problem. TKIP scrambles the keys using a so-called hashing algorithm and ensures the keys haven't been tampered with by adding integrity checking."
Dude: there are two guys creating a whole new language. They have no community yet. They have no technical writers yet. Their target audience is the subset of people who already like another language. Cut them some slack. They aren't exactly trying to compete with Java and C# (yet).
You are so far out of the target demographic that the fact that you are offended is irrelevant.
I know for a fact that Notepad is Python-friendly. I don't dispute that somewhere out there there is an editor that munges Python code but I would be surprised if it actually bills itself as a programmer's editor. Any programmer's editor should be smart enough to know that there is a difference between tabs and spaces (unless it has been misconfigured to translate one into the other).
The only tools I use that I have a problem with are office productivity tools: Outlook and PowerPoint in particular. But obviously the problem there isn't that my Python file is getting corrupted as much as the person reading can't see the code correctly.
With no doubt, this must be the biggest security hole I have seen lately. 802.11g [schneier.com] directly to the hard drive.
You use the term 802.11g but then you link to a three year old article on problems with 802.11b (which I think have been fixed even in newer 802.11b gear). That's pretty deceptive.
Any language that uses whitespace or backslashes for line continuation is madness. This 2004 people. Write a damn compiler that can do the thinking, don't make me screw around with formatting to get my program working. Moronic. Stupid.
This is as logical as saying: "Any language that uses curly braces for block delimiters or semicolons for statement delimiters is madness. This is 2004 people. Write a damn compiler that can do the thinking. Don't make me screw around with punctuation to get my program working.
The whitespace and backslashes are not in addition to something else that unambiguously describes the structure. They are instead of the stuff that other languages use (curly braces and semicolons).
I remember after OS/2 I was pretty pumped about Object REXX. Back in the day Python was unknown and Perl was, er, Perl. But IBM decided to make Object REXX pay-to-play and it never became popular.
I suspect the biggest benefit for Microsoft buying AOL will be to compete against Google for search market share.
Why do you think that the search engine market is more valuable to Microsoft than the ISP market? Think of the control they could have over Internet standards, advertising contracts etc. if they own the biggest ISP? IMHO, search would be a tiny aspect of the whole picture.
And to put an answer to your rhetorical questions, it does matter, because it matters today. People running OS X and Linux are affected by the proliferation of Windows and their accompanying attacks. It brings down connectivity. Even though you can't get infected, you still get the crap hitting your IPs and in your inboxes. Which is why Linux adherents have long prootested against the situation.
So your first point is that once Linux is popular, we will all wish for the "good old days." Now you undermine that point by saying that the problems you describe already exist. How are spam and viruses going to get worse if they are coming from EzMailLinux and Lindows rather than Outlook and Windows?
Argh. You are the second or third to bring up this silly spell checker analogy.
The software is not called the "mistake-tolerant" shell. It is the fault tolerant shell. It handles faults like hard drive crashes, network outages, cosmic rays, and yes, probably software bugs as a side effect. Look at the feature set: they are much more geared towards hardware failure than software failure. How does retry or exponential backoff help if a software bug prevents a computation from correctly completing? Actually, those things really help to keep the system running while somebody switches from the database server with the system crash to the backup machine. These sorts of retry algorithms are built into protocols like SMTP and TCP for the same reasons.
Someday, someone will explain to me why 'We' want linux to be adopted by the other 95% of the market. 'we' all lament what has happened to the Internet since 'they' finally found out about it (and thought it had just been invented). We pine about the good old days of the usenet, when it was like, useful.
Usenet is a communications mechanism, not software. When Microsoft put the BSD FTP client on every desktop did that affect you at all? When Winzip became popular did that hurt people who use infozip? Ignore the consumer distributions of Linux and move on with your life.
I dread a scenario where, around 2005, everyone and their grandma is buying a Linux box (that new OS that just came out year or so ago). And it all goes to shit. You just know it will.
No it won't. They'll use Lycoris. You'll use Gentoo or Dragonfly or some other 'leet *nix distribution. There will be essentially no interaction between the two. Why do you care? You're like a high school student who is afraid that they won't be cool and unique if everyone else listens to the same music they do.
Everyone will run as root, open viruses, execute them.
So what? Why does it matter to you whether these viruses come from computers running Linux rather than Windows?
All our favorite apps will become add-filled feature-burdened piles of stinking filth rushed to market despite thousands of high severity bugs.
Sure. Grandma is going to ask for a graphical interface in VI and smilies in Berkley mail.
It willl suck hard and we'll all look back fondly on the good old days
Wha makes you think that famine, disease and war are getting worse and worse? Most of the largest countries like India and China are relatively prosperous, relatively healthy and relatively at peace compared to (let's say) the period from 1910-1960.
Your link states that Dave Brubeck couldn't read music in 1942 when he graduated from university. But it seems unlikely to me that he never learned. Consider this bit from the same URL: Brubeck also had written several symphonic works, which include a ballet. How do you think he communicates his symphonies to the orchestra? By humming?
Re:How do you "accidently" buy RealOne?
on
Real's Reality
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Two issues. The first issue is that their favorite radio host tells them to download the free realplayer to listen to the show online. They go to the site and can't find a free player. They say: "I guess it costs money now. But I love that show: I'll just pay for it."
Then the second thing is that Real tricks you into buying add-ons which you don't know about until you get the credit card bill. In extreme cases the add-on is a monthly recurring charge.
How do you think you do compilation without code generation? Compilation is the conversion of code in one format (in this case Java bytecodes) to code in another (e.g. x86 assembly).
Assuming they could get over these, what is the need for such a platform and why?
Network-delivered applications are the future. Every business loves them because they are easy to deploy. Open source teams love them (think Bugzilla, SourceForge, groups.google.com) for the same reason. Service providers (Google, HotMail, Expedia) love them too. It's a total love-fest. The only problem is that the user-interfaces suck rocks.
Microsoft is attacking this problem on a few fronts including.NET Winforms and Longhorm XAML. It makes no sense for the open source world to wait for Microsoft to establish a standard and then say: "we could do that too. Let's clone it!"
I am happy to see MOzilla be pro-active here. Let's make network-delivered applications as rich as installed applications (except where bandwidth makes that impossible).
So millions and millions of people post content, but how much is useful, easy to read, and informative? Probably less than one percent.
You might as well ask what percentage of information transported over the telephone is useful, easy to read and informative? Who cares? People are communicating with other people and the quality of the communication is (as another poster said) in the eye of the beholder. A dump of pictures from my wedding is probably dreck to you but interesting to my mother in law.
No he can't. He licensed and released the code under the GPL license. As long as you, I, SCO, Hitler, Osoma Bin Laden, Michael Landen, or joe sysadmin follows the terms of the GPL for that software, Fyodor can't do jack shit. SCO has claimed the GPL is illegal and/or unconstitutional, but that's irrelevant. What matters is if they will provide, for free/nominal cost, the source code for their version of nmap.
NMAP version X might be distributed under the GPL. NMAP version Y could be distributed under a totally different license. Obviously nothing in the license or release notes of NMAP version Y affects the licensees of version X except that they are now unable to follow the upgrade path that everyone else is following from X to Y. Over time this can cause the corporation a big headache.
It makes me wonder whether the FSF should rev the GPL, adding an anti-SCO clause. It would be contraversial for sure but it would also show the power of the free software community to wield its power against those who attack it. It would be interesting to see how many projects would explicitly choose the new license, how many would use it just by reference and how many would reject it as an inappropriate power play.
The last benchmarks I saw that compared Java to the fastest Python implementation the author could find (though he didn't try Jython which might have been faster;) left Python behind by a factor of 10. I don't have the link handy, sorry
The guy wasn't doing it the way any real Python programmer would do it: using the library for high-performance numeric computation. If he did (or if he had used Pyrex), Python would have stomped Java. But more to the point, what is the benefit of using Java and getting to the wrong answer faster.
Python is a nice language, and I'd love to see a very high performance implementation - suitable for 3D game development, for instance. Do you have any pointers?
Python would be fine for parts of 3D game development (and has been used that way several times already) but I wouldn't use it (or Java or C#) to write a 3D game engine. Let's keep in mind our points of comparison. Python programmers do not claim to compete for performance against C!
No - yet again you are confusing protocols with applications. E-mail is an appallingly bad collaboration system - security is an add-on, there is no document management system, there is no standard for generation of receipts, there is no version control.
Email is not a protocol. SMTP is a protocol. Email is an application of SMTP. You can believe it is as bad as you like. People are using it instead of proprietary collaboration systems. Deal with it. Notes is a legacy application at most companies because it was replaced either with Exchange or with Intranet (portal)+Internet Email.
Regarding the numerical work - in your example Python is NOT used for the numerics: It simply makes calls to pre-compiled C libraries.
This is silly. The scientist needs to calculate what happens when the bomb explodes. He can reach for Java with its famously terrible floating point or he can reach for Numeric Python. At Lawrence Livermore and NASA they reach for Python. Do they care how much is done in a library and how much is pure Python? Of course not. They are using Python to do heavy-duty numerics in contradiction to your claim that only maniacs would do so.
I think that is called cheating! Java can deliver high-performance math with nothing but pure Java code, and can even exceed the equivalent C code.
If the runtime is slower than Numeric Python and the results are less accurate why would the scientist feel better that the library happened to be written in pure Java? Only Sun gets a warm fuzzy from 100% java. It is precisely because Python can so easily delegate work to the Best Language For the Job (which may be C, or Pyrex or Fortran) that it will trounce 100% Java in the long run.
They aren't competitors. Notes is a collaboration/groupware suite.
And we aren't collaborating in a group right now? People don't use Intranets and Internet email for what they would have bought Notes for in the mid-90s? I knwo for a fact that that's what happens at non-Microsoft shops. w.g. Oracle doesn't use Notes internally. It uses Internet email, web-based solutions and some collaborative addons of their own.
They aren't competitors. XML is just one of many protocols that can be used to implement CORBA. Corba is an Architecture, XML is a data transmission format.
I was talking about XML in the large: XML+SOAP+WSDL, etc. Obviously these are both pitched as enterprise integration technologies and XML-based ones have a lot more traction in business today (think.NET and Axis) than CORBA does.
You don't (if you are sane) use a scripting language to write enterprise-level apps like finance or CRM software, or secure distributed systems, or high-performance numerical software.
GNU Enterprise is finance software written in Python. Secure distribute systems in Python? How about mojo nation or ZEO, or the MEMS Exchange or BitTorrent. High performance numerical software? You'd better tell someone down at Lawrence Livermore National Labs that they are insane because they show up at every Python conference and by now have spent millions on Python code. I don't see Java or C# mentioned on their list of key languages. Java in particular is a horrible language for that sort of thing. Do a Google for "Java Floating Point".
Look: you can understimate Python just as the Unix vendors understimated Linux. In the long run it doesn't really hurt anyone, even you. It is always more comfortable to presume that things will stay in the mental boxes we've built for them in our minds.
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Name a programmer's tool that doesn't respect whitespace.
In my experience the only kinds of tools that cause problems are office tools like PowerPoint and Outlook. If you care strongly about running code through those, then you're right, you may have problems.
You don't know what you are talking about. The security protocols have changed alot. "TKIP, or the temporal key integrity protocol, packages three improvements to replace the flawed wired equivalent privacy protocol (WEP). With Wi-Fi, data sent over the wireless network is encrypted, but sharing the keys that encrypted the information has always been a problem. TKIP scrambles the keys using a so-called hashing algorithm and ensures the keys haven't been tampered with by adding integrity checking."
Is it dynamic (can I define functions at runtime)? Yes.
Is it compiled? That's a property of the implementation, not the language
Can I easily write code that manipulates code? Probably.
Are functions first class objects? Yes.
Can I extend the language seamlessly? Yes.
Your post was totally vacuous. I can't believe it got modded up!
Dude: there are two guys creating a whole new language. They have no community yet. They have no technical writers yet. Their target audience is the subset of people who already like another language. Cut them some slack. They aren't exactly trying to compete with Java and C# (yet).
You are so far out of the target demographic that the fact that you are offended is irrelevant.
I know for a fact that Notepad is Python-friendly. I don't dispute that somewhere out there there is an editor that munges Python code but I would be surprised if it actually bills itself as a programmer's editor. Any programmer's editor should be smart enough to know that there is a difference between tabs and spaces (unless it has been misconfigured to translate one into the other).
The only tools I use that I have a problem with are office productivity tools: Outlook and PowerPoint in particular. But obviously the problem there isn't that my Python file is getting corrupted as much as the person reading can't see the code correctly.
Is this Chris from UWaterloo?
With no doubt, this must be the biggest security hole I have seen lately. 802.11g [schneier.com] directly to the hard drive.
You use the term 802.11g but then you link to a three year old article on problems with 802.11b (which I think have been fixed even in newer 802.11b gear). That's pretty deceptive.
Any language that uses whitespace or backslashes for line continuation is madness. This 2004 people. Write a damn compiler that can do the thinking, don't make me screw around with formatting to get my program working. Moronic. Stupid.
This is as logical as saying: "Any language that uses curly braces for block delimiters or semicolons for statement delimiters is madness. This is 2004 people. Write a damn compiler that can do the thinking. Don't make me screw around with punctuation to get my program working.
The whitespace and backslashes are not in addition to something else that unambiguously describes the structure. They are instead of the stuff that other languages use (curly braces and semicolons).
Documented is not open. The flash file format is legally encumbered.
SVG Print is a page description language.
I remember after OS/2 I was pretty pumped about Object REXX. Back in the day Python was unknown and Perl was, er, Perl. But IBM decided to make Object REXX pay-to-play and it never became popular.
I suspect the biggest benefit for Microsoft buying AOL will be to compete against Google for search market share.
Why do you think that the search engine market is more valuable to Microsoft than the ISP market? Think of the control they could have over Internet standards, advertising contracts etc. if they own the biggest ISP? IMHO, search would be a tiny aspect of the whole picture.
And to put an answer to your rhetorical questions, it does matter, because it matters today. People running OS X and Linux are affected by the proliferation of Windows and their accompanying attacks. It brings down connectivity. Even though you can't get infected, you still get the crap hitting your IPs and in your inboxes. Which is why Linux adherents have long prootested against the situation.
So your first point is that once Linux is popular, we will all wish for the "good old days." Now you undermine that point by saying that the problems you describe already exist. How are spam and viruses going to get worse if they are coming from EzMailLinux and Lindows rather than Outlook and Windows?
Argh. You are the second or third to bring up this silly spell checker analogy.
The software is not called the "mistake-tolerant" shell. It is the fault tolerant shell. It handles faults like hard drive crashes, network outages, cosmic rays, and yes, probably software bugs as a side effect. Look at the feature set: they are much more geared towards hardware failure than software failure. How does retry or exponential backoff help if a software bug prevents a computation from correctly completing? Actually, those things really help to keep the system running while somebody switches from the database server with the system crash to the backup machine. These sorts of retry algorithms are built into protocols like SMTP and TCP for the same reasons.
Someday, someone will explain to me why 'We' want linux to be adopted by the other 95% of the market. 'we' all lament what has happened to the Internet since 'they' finally found out about it (and thought it had just been invented). We pine about the good old days of the usenet, when it was like, useful.
Usenet is a communications mechanism, not software. When Microsoft put the BSD FTP client on every desktop did that affect you at all? When Winzip became popular did that hurt people who use infozip? Ignore the consumer distributions of Linux and move on with your life.
I dread a scenario where, around 2005, everyone and their grandma is buying a Linux box (that new OS that just came out year or so ago). And it all goes to shit. You just know it will.
No it won't. They'll use Lycoris. You'll use Gentoo or Dragonfly or some other 'leet *nix distribution. There will be essentially no interaction between the two. Why do you care? You're like a high school student who is afraid that they won't be cool and unique if everyone else listens to the same music they do.
Everyone will run as root, open viruses, execute them.
So what? Why does it matter to you whether these viruses come from computers running Linux rather than Windows?
All our favorite apps will become add-filled feature-burdened piles of stinking filth rushed to market despite thousands of high severity bugs.
Sure. Grandma is going to ask for a graphical interface in VI and smilies in Berkley mail.
It willl suck hard and we'll all look back fondly on the good old days
The usual elitist blah blah.
Wha makes you think that famine, disease and war are getting worse and worse? Most of the largest countries like India and China are relatively prosperous, relatively healthy and relatively at peace compared to (let's say) the period from 1910-1960.
Your link states that Dave Brubeck couldn't read music in 1942 when he graduated from university. But it seems unlikely to me that he never learned. Consider this bit from the same URL: Brubeck also had written several symphonic works, which include a ballet. How do you think he communicates his symphonies to the orchestra? By humming?
Two issues. The first issue is that their favorite radio host tells them to download the free realplayer to listen to the show online. They go to the site and can't find a free player. They say: "I guess it costs money now. But I love that show: I'll just pay for it." Then the second thing is that Real tricks you into buying add-ons which you don't know about until you get the credit card bill. In extreme cases the add-on is a monthly recurring charge.
How do you think you do compilation without code generation? Compilation is the conversion of code in one format (in this case Java bytecodes) to code in another (e.g. x86 assembly).
Assuming they could get over these, what is the need for such a platform and why?
Network-delivered applications are the future. Every business loves them because they are easy to deploy. Open source teams love them (think Bugzilla, SourceForge, groups.google.com) for the same reason. Service providers (Google, HotMail, Expedia) love them too. It's a total love-fest. The only problem is that the user-interfaces suck rocks.
Microsoft is attacking this problem on a few fronts including .NET Winforms and Longhorm XAML. It makes no sense for the open source world to wait for Microsoft to establish a standard and then say: "we could do that too. Let's clone it!"
I am happy to see MOzilla be pro-active here. Let's make network-delivered applications as rich as installed applications (except where bandwidth makes that impossible).
So millions and millions of people post content, but how much is useful, easy to read, and informative? Probably less than one percent.
You might as well ask what percentage of information transported over the telephone is useful, easy to read and informative? Who cares? People are communicating with other people and the quality of the communication is (as another poster said) in the eye of the beholder. A dump of pictures from my wedding is probably dreck to you but interesting to my mother in law.
No he can't. He licensed and released the code under the GPL license. As long as you, I, SCO, Hitler, Osoma Bin Laden, Michael Landen, or joe sysadmin follows the terms of the GPL for that software, Fyodor can't do jack shit. SCO has claimed the GPL is illegal and/or unconstitutional, but that's irrelevant. What matters is if they will provide, for free/nominal cost, the source code for their version of nmap.
NMAP version X might be distributed under the GPL. NMAP version Y could be distributed under a totally different license. Obviously nothing in the license or release notes of NMAP version Y affects the licensees of version X except that they are now unable to follow the upgrade path that everyone else is following from X to Y. Over time this can cause the corporation a big headache.
It makes me wonder whether the FSF should rev the GPL, adding an anti-SCO clause. It would be contraversial for sure but it would also show the power of the free software community to wield its power against those who attack it. It would be interesting to see how many projects would explicitly choose the new license, how many would use it just by reference and how many would reject it as an inappropriate power play.
The last benchmarks I saw that compared Java to the fastest Python implementation the author could find (though he didn't try Jython which might have been faster;) left Python behind by a factor of 10. I don't have the link handy, sorry
The guy wasn't doing it the way any real Python programmer would do it: using the library for high-performance numeric computation. If he did (or if he had used Pyrex), Python would have stomped Java. But more to the point, what is the benefit of using Java and getting to the wrong answer faster.
Python is a nice language, and I'd love to see a very high performance implementation - suitable for 3D game development, for instance. Do you have any pointers?
Python would be fine for parts of 3D game development (and has been used that way several times already) but I wouldn't use it (or Java or C#) to write a 3D game engine. Let's keep in mind our points of comparison. Python programmers do not claim to compete for performance against C!
No - yet again you are confusing protocols with applications. E-mail is an appallingly bad collaboration system - security is an add-on, there is no document management system, there is no standard for generation of receipts, there is no version control.
Email is not a protocol. SMTP is a protocol. Email is an application of SMTP. You can believe it is as bad as you like. People are using it instead of proprietary collaboration systems. Deal with it. Notes is a legacy application at most companies because it was replaced either with Exchange or with Intranet (portal)+Internet Email.
Regarding the numerical work - in your example Python is NOT used for the numerics: It simply makes calls to pre-compiled C libraries.
This is silly. The scientist needs to calculate what happens when the bomb explodes. He can reach for Java with its famously terrible floating point or he can reach for Numeric Python. At Lawrence Livermore and NASA they reach for Python. Do they care how much is done in a library and how much is pure Python? Of course not. They are using Python to do heavy-duty numerics in contradiction to your claim that only maniacs would do so.
I think that is called cheating! Java can deliver high-performance math with nothing but pure Java code, and can even exceed the equivalent C code.
If the runtime is slower than Numeric Python and the results are less accurate why would the scientist feel better that the library happened to be written in pure Java? Only Sun gets a warm fuzzy from 100% java. It is precisely because Python can so easily delegate work to the Best Language For the Job (which may be C, or Pyrex or Fortran) that it will trounce 100% Java in the long run.
They aren't competitors. Notes is a collaboration/groupware suite.
And we aren't collaborating in a group right now? People don't use Intranets and Internet email for what they would have bought Notes for in the mid-90s? I knwo for a fact that that's what happens at non-Microsoft shops. w.g. Oracle doesn't use Notes internally. It uses Internet email, web-based solutions and some collaborative addons of their own.
They aren't competitors. XML is just one of many protocols that can be used to implement CORBA. Corba is an Architecture, XML is a data transmission format.
I was talking about XML in the large: XML+SOAP+WSDL, etc. Obviously these are both pitched as enterprise integration technologies and XML-based ones have a lot more traction in business today (think .NET and Axis) than CORBA does.
You don't (if you are sane) use a scripting language to write enterprise-level apps like finance or CRM software, or secure distributed systems, or high-performance numerical software.
GNU Enterprise is finance software written in Python. Secure distribute systems in Python? How about mojo nation or ZEO, or the MEMS Exchange or BitTorrent. High performance numerical software? You'd better tell someone down at Lawrence Livermore National Labs that they are insane because they show up at every Python conference and by now have spent millions on Python code. I don't see Java or C# mentioned on their list of key languages. Java in particular is a horrible language for that sort of thing. Do a Google for "Java Floating Point".
Look: you can understimate Python just as the Unix vendors understimated Linux. In the long run it doesn't really hurt anyone, even you. It is always more comfortable to presume that things will stay in the mental boxes we've built for them in our minds.