After all, if you can make the legal case that "clicking OK doesn't really count as accepting a license", you can easily make the case that "doing absolutely nothing (which is all that is required to accept the GPL) sure as hell doesn't count as accepting a license". If Microsoft can't implicitly force you to accept a contract, neither can the FSF. The law doesn't care if you're nice or not.
Unlike shrinkwrap licenses, the GPL does not resrtict rights that the user would otherwise have. Rather it gives the user a right to redistribute which copyright law by default prohibits. If you want this _extra_ right then you also have some responsibilities. This could not be further from a shrinkwrap license. On the other hand, I'm not a fan of either.
And he was worried that global organizations were hurting national sovereignty, if I interpreted his speech correctly. He was talking about organizations like the World Trade Organization whose agreements bind member nations to follow their policy above their own local laws, or be punished. It isn't just the national organiztaions that we must pay attention to now, but international ones like the World Intellectual Property Organizations whose treaties bind their members to follow their laws, for better or for worse.
International organizations probably do hurt your national sovereignty if you are American. But for the many smaller or poorer countries in the world, the international organizations at least allow them to negotiate as a block rather than bidirectionally with the much more powerful western countries. That increases their ability to strike deals in their own favour. Of course the US can always refuse to ratify any that they don't like, such as the Kyoto protocol or the UN Convention on the Rights of Children.
Re:Good for some, nightmare for others
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Peek-a-Boo(ty)
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· Score: 2
You think that the only securityhazard of this is that people surf porn??
This enables people in companies to break company reglations.
I just don't see logfile checking or IP address filtering as an effective way to enforce corporate regulations. If you want to stop big downloads, stop big downloads. If you want to stop people from messing up their machines then lock down the machines. Filtering or logging IP addresses can be at best a reactionary move because you don't know the "bad" IP addresses in advance anyhow (unless they have very obvious domain names). Plus, proxies exist today. I could probably surf porn
Re:This still won't work!
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· Score: 2
I hate to say it, but this system simply isn't ready yet. They have not come up with a technically sound solution.
The best is the enemy of the good. It doesn't make sense to hold up a solution with some flaws in favor of an impossible system with no flaws.
Freedom fighters take risks. That's their choice. We should help them to understand the risks they are taking but we should not deny them the right to even try to work around the system. Proxies are popular today even though they have the problems you describe. Peek-a-booty just ups the ante a little bit.
Re:Good for some, nightmare for others
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· Score: 2
No, employees spending the time that their getting paid anywhere from $6-$60 an hour for are using it to surf pr0n.
If you don't have good ways to monitor their productivity then you need to trust them. Let's say that they aren't surfing porn. What if they bring it in on a floppy disk? Or mail it to themselves? Or bring in a magazine?
plus there's always the threat of getting a sexual harrassment suit filed.
Same question above. And anyhow, does any of this rate in importance even close to the issue of human rights?
Good point. I think he was trying to say that it wasn't necessary for an AI to have direct storage access, not that it wouldn't be possible. By the same token, it would be really cool if we had a few hundred neurons wired up as a perfect, lightning quick calculator. It's theoretically possible; it just hasn't evolved in our species.
But it isn't as if we were once calculators and lost the ability. For an AI to "forget" how to calculate numbers quickly it would have to forget the path to "/bin/bc". Since *I* remember the path any AI would remember it too. But it would have direct electronic access rather than analog access. Put it this way: we don't know whether an AI would have significantly more direct access to useful information and processes but it would have much quicker indirect access through a digital interface to storage and processes.
Re:Good for some, nightmare for others
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Peek-a-Boo(ty)
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· Score: 4, Insightful
So what you're saying is: "On the good side, fundamental human rights. On the bad side, makes life harder for pointy haired bosses who feel that lunch breaks spent playing cards are fine but lunch breaks surfing porn are an abomination.
This is a misconception about AI. Just because an AI implementation has a mass digital storage, doesn't mean the AI "being" has mass digital storage in any significant sense. The AI level is so far above the storage level, that the AI would probably not interface to the storage any differently from how you or I would. In other words, it would be little different from a person with an MP3/DVD player.
I find this implausible. At what point in the development of the AI would we cut the cord beween the AI level and the storage level? Why would we cut that cord? Sure, the AI level wouldn't work at the storage level on a day to day basis but why wouldn't it be able to drill down to deal with storage when that is useful? They might not have perfect recall in the sense that they never forget anything but they should be able to do anything we could do at a keyboard except without any analog IO interface.
Remember that you're a beginner only at the beginning, and after you learn it, you're an expert for the rest of your life. That is why I don't prefer to save few hours (or even few months) at the start and stick with something simple and easy to the end of my days. I prefer to chose what's better for me in the long run.
Fortunately, you don't have to choose. You can have easy at the beginning and sophisticated in the long run.
What is your point? Do you say that Perl is not "designed somehow similar to natural languages"?
I'm saying that no linguist other than Larry Wall would think that Perl was anything vaguely similar to a natural language. Yes, natural languages are crufty and context sensitive and Perl is crufty and context sensitive. That doesn't mean Perl is like a natural language.
Here you assumed that: I use Perl, therefore my code is less maintainable. Which is irrational, I hope you realize that.
I said "probably". As in "statistically". As in "that's what I've observed" and "heard many other people observe". If you've observed otherwise and we don't have the funds for a study I guess I'll have to leave it at that. No way to come to agreement. You can have the last word if you want it.
When you know the syntax and semantics, you won't have problems reading different styles. At least I don't have any problems, and I don't consider myself a Perl guru.
Lots of Perl people do tell me that they have trouble reading other people's Perl code. The examples you give are four extremely readable Perl snippets. They are not typical. Even so, they are enough to confuse a new Perl programmer which I would say is reason enough to choose one way and stick with it.
When you have a good code, you don't have to fully understand or often even read the implementation details to maintain it (not to say about simply using it). All you need is to understand the interfaces.
And when you find that there is a bug in that code? Or need to add a feature that cannot be added by subclassing (i.e. MOST features!)
Perl is designed somehow similar to natural languages.
I know that that it the mantra of the Perl community but that doesn't make it either true or relevant.
You don't have anything in English, Latin, Polish, Russian or any other natural language, which would "encourage a consistent and readable style", still there's a lot of great art.
When I'm working together on a project artistry is secondary to engineering. Natural languages are not typically used for engineering. In fact, we tend to use languages that are more formal: like algebraic symbols or pseudo-code languages.
Remember that there's not only one good style of English, almost every poet, every novelist, every writer has his or her own, unique style. And that freedom of choice also means that you can hear lots of crap. But we can't restrict English to only a subset of lexical and semantic rules, because any restrictions which would prevent stupid people from saying stupid things, would also prevent really smart people from saying really smart things.
The descriptive power of a natural language is not proportional to either its vocabulary or its grammatical complexity. As I'm sure you've been told, the problem solving power of a programming language is exactly equivalent to that of any other programming language. Really smart people can say really smart things in ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE. So if you want to compare languages you have to look at other factors such as cost of development, cost of maintenance, amount of fun (Perl probably wins in that category for some people), etc.
If what you really mean to say is that Perl is more fun, for you, and you've actually tried the other languages to compare, then I will support that wholeheartedly. But there is a price to be paid: and whoever has maintain your code is probaby paying it. And there is no payoff in descriptive power or cost of development.
Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.
The problem is that programmers that care will differ radically in which the consider the most readable one and many programmers just don't care at all. So in either case we have trouble reading each other's code because even when we are trying our hardest we can easily make code that is mutually incomprehensible. Python cannot prevent this but it can encourage a consistent and readable style. The language encourages good taste. No more, no less.
"Your complaint that Ruby has no unicode support is particularly amusing since Ruby's core developer are Japanese.
Japanese programmers are not, by and large, required to make internationalized software. European and American programmers are.
"Not to provide unicode support was a simple design decision from people likely to be far more competent on multilingual matters than Python's core developers."
And this decision resulted in what replacement for Unicode? None! AFAIK, Ruby has no support for character sets outside of one popular in Japan and ASCII. That's really great if you are Chinese or Israeli.
"As for clear syntax - there are plenty of people despising Python for it's rigid indentation rules. Last but not least it is easier to write C-extensions in Ruby than in Python."
Really?
import PyInline.C, __main__
x = C.Builder(code="""
double my_add(double a, double b) {
return a + b;
}""",
targetmodule=__main__)
What makes you say that? I don't see him mentioned in the article. I don't see anything that indicates that the Justice department is on the wrong side of the issue. They are at least holding hearings which indicates that they understand there is cause for concern!
Ruby simply didn't offer enough of a reason to switch off of Perl, Java or Python. Its elegant but not groundbreaking, and frankly the market for programming languages is already overpopulated.
You don't have to win to survive. There are still people around promoting Objective-C! Ruby has found an audience and will continue to strike a cord with disaffected Perl programmers who choose not to use Python (perhaps out of a sense of pride, or because they really don't like its style). Also, Ruby will probably be a very major language in Japan: perhaps the most popular high level language there.
Such as?
(lets see, docstrings, tuples, what else?)
Non-blocking threads. Unicode. Simple syntax. Fully functional JVM port. Palm port. Plan 9 port. Strong COM and CORBA support. Sophisticated numeric library. Excellent graphics package. Several IDEs. Bundled with most versions of Linux. More robust Windows port. Clear license (finally!). Large deployed applications like Mailman, Twisted Matrix and Zope, dozens of books, etc. etc.
The same thing could be said the other way:
Ruby has features which have no counterpart in Python (of course Python 2.2 added some of these features (like iterators and a more unified type/class system (but Ruby had these from day one) )- but since they've been added so late in the game Python's built-in libs do not use them, so you end up with a patchwork of Python pre 2.2 and PYthon post 2.2.
Python always had an iterator-like syntax. The only change is how the iterators are implemented. Similarly, types and classes always behaved similarly. Now they are just the same thing under the covers.
As mentioned, Ruby had a unified type/class system from day one meaning you could extend and subclass built-in types from the start. Ruby also had iterators from the start as well - the significance being that Ruby's collection classes (like Array and Hash) use iterators. Python couldn't till now.
Oh really? I wonder what the xrange function did? If you don't know Python, why not just admit it and move on. You're a poor Ruby advocate if you can't even come up with a single Ruby feature that Python does not have...only features that Python did not have until recently. Even as Python advocate I could do better than that in promoting Ruby! But even so, I think it is pretty clear that in the areas where Python was weak, it is catching up or has caught up and in the areas it is strong, Ruby has a Long Way to Go. Native Threads, Unicode and a JVM port are each person-years of effort.
Personally, I'm against the 'war on drugs', but I don't think a totally unregulated drug market would be a good thing either. Are non-chemical psychological 'drugs' really that different?
A better analogy would be gambling. EverQuest is a game like Poker. People love it for the adrenalin high that they get. I doubt it would ever be regulated. Remember the furor about Dungeons and Dragons? That was never regulated. Gambling is regulated because it is really easy to gamble away your life savings. Gaming away your time is considered your own problem, not the governments! They are probably happy to have you wasting your time in front of the computer instead of participating in democracy.
This is actively working against evolution. I demand this stop immediately. Not only do we allow blind, deaf, ugly, and stupid people to pro-create, but now we're going to start allowing sterile people to procreate? Someday, we'll all end up stuck in the matrix feeding tubes, and it won't be imposed on us by some AI run amuck.... it will be done by our own choice.
Selective evolution works on a time period of millenia. Genetic engineering will bec commonplace in decades. Selective evolution is not relevant anymore.
While I am not a big fan of Blockbuster, per se, I see absolutely *NO* advantages of this technology over renting at Blockbuster.
You could sell these in variety stores, supermarkets, street and mall kiosks etc. If you were walking down the street and someone had a kiosk where you could buy a movie that you'd never have to return to the kiosk then you'd be a hell of a lot more likely to do so without worrying about where you are and how and when you'll get back to return the movie.
As long as the language is Turing-complete, it should be possible; the question is in the level of difficulty, and I don't see why.NET would be harder to support than, say, TCP/IP or HTTP. I mean, Emacs was written in LISP; if they can do that, is.NET such a challenge?
There is a big difference between implement EMACS or TCP/IP *in* a language and implementing a language *on*.NET! Your mixing apples and oranges.
Nevertheless, there is no question whether functional and logic languages can work on.NET. The only question is whether they can work with sufficient efficiency that they will be tools, not toys.
And I have a second task as well. Slashdot is occasionally criticized for getting a story wrong, even though we diligently correct ourselves when necessary. My theory is that the difference between Slashdot and other media is that they never correct themselves, no matter how inaccurate, so readers are left with a false picture of accuracy.
All of the reports said "So and so CLAIMED to have done X and Y." Reporting a claim is not the same as getting a story wrong. I'm not saying that they SHOULD have published it but I don't see why they should publish a retraction...
Would you feel the same way about a movie from the point of view of a WWII German squad? A pure-hearted group of boys fights the American invaders? I would object to that because context matters. Unless it was done just right, our sense of respect and compassion for the boys could naturally be transferred to the cause that they are fighting for. Or worse, the Germans could be shown fighting French people so that American anti-French biases could be strengthened.
I haven't seen the movie yet. Some say it has enough context. Some say it doesn't. My point is that the question *matters*. A responsible film-maker can't just glorify a moment in time without thinking how that will influence the viewer's interpretation of the surrounding events.
Yes, sometimes resources critical to our national wellbeing ARE worth going to war over.
Could you clarify something? Let's say that tomorrow we find a compound that is millions of times more potent than oil. A few gallons of this stuff will keep the US economy running for years. All known resources are in a poor country that refuses to share it with the US. Does the US have the right to go to war with that country to get that resource?
Was this the case in Somalia? No. But I'm trying to get at the underlying moral principle you are invoking here. It sounds as if you are saying that if a powerful country really, really, really needs something then it can put aside the wellbeing of others to get it.
Unfortunately, oil IS currently a critical piece of our economy, until we figure out a workaround for that (i.e. fuel cell powered vehicles combined with efficient fusion, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric power generation on large scales).
Might not fuel cell technology be further ahead if the US le the price of oil rise to a natural level? After all, sending the military all over the world is a form of very expensive subsidy.
Nevertheless, I don't think your characterizations of people who resent the Arab world and the Islamist movements are at all accurate.
The Arab world is one thing. The Ismlamist movement is another. When we start to treat them as one and the same we've implicitly given up hope of peace and democracy in a highly populated part of the world.
In fact, radical Islamists share quite a bit in common with Chomsky and the far left wing of our own country. For one thing, you are supposed to accept their principles on faith, and reason never enters into the equation (don't get me wrong, the far right is largely the same).
One can be both far-left and highly reasonable. Have you read any Marx? He was a genious, way ahead of his time, with a first-rate mind. He also made many mistakes. Who doesn't?
I say this because the far left is largely characterized by reliance on Moral Relativism and a retreat to an intellectually weak stance in which one refuses to acknowledge that some moral systems are based on logic, reason, and the common good and some are based on arbitrary systems of faith that do not promote maximal Utility by any sort of reality-based perception.
There are so many fallicies there that I don't know where to start. First, you presume that moral systems are like operating systems. You just pick the one that is optimal. Second, you act as if there is some universal definition of utility. Third, morals are not logical. They cannot be derived from observation of nature nor from the pure exercise of reason. They are inherently cultural, biological and often theological.
I'm not saying the US government is perfect. I really wish we would be honest about our motivations for actions in Somalia and elsewhere (Gulf War). But come on, you have to be stupid ultimately if you didn't realize what it was all about. Just do some background reading. And for the rest of the sheeple in the US, they are happier just thinking of these things in simpler terms anyway, and can't deal with the morally grey areas of international politics.
I'm sorry, that's just elitist, anti-democratic name calling. The people of the United States and allied countries can make decisions about right and wrong when they are not bombarded by misleading propoganda all day. Unfortunately, most people do not have the energy to spend all day, every day, working through the web of lies spun by the government and dutifully parotted by the media. Trying to get to the true story of what the government is doing in the world should not be a full-time job but unfortunately I have found that it pretty much is.
There is no excuse for this state of affairs and it is quite unfair to shift the blame from the liars to those who are just trying to live their lives.
I will conclude with this: I can not condone arbitrary agression by the US government against foreign regimes, but I do believe that if such a regime is acting in a way that harms our people's interests, then it is our government's fiduciary responsibility as our representative to the international community to take action.
Might makes right? My people need X. Your people have X. Therefore it is my responsibility to look only at the needs of my people and take X.
Each government is responsible to exactly the set of its own people and its own country.
That's bullshit. Just as citizens have a responsibility not to shoot each other, governments have a responsibility not to attack other countries.
However, if "the interests of it's people" gets reinterpreted as "increasing profits by certain monopolistic or cartel organizations based in the country that feed kickbacks to politicians", I agree we have a problem, but I believe that problem is better solved through reform of campaign and political finance legislation than by left wing rhetoric about how much we should care about how many thousands of Somalis died (who were trying to kill US soldiers, and therefore got the logical result they could have expected).
You admit the average person isn't knowledgable about what is going on in the world. You admit that things are shadier than they would seem if you only watch mainstream news sources. Yet you criticize those who would try to publicize the real situation for doing so. But your real reason for criticizing them is clear from the sentence above: because they are on the left. Chomsky's got nothing on you when it comes to irrational bias.
I don't know whether the US was right or wrong to go to Somalia. But I think that Chomsky is likely to shed a little more light on the subject than Ridley Scott. I don't know why you wish him to do otherwise.
Yes people will still have to think logically, I didn't claim otherwise. What I claimed and continue to claim is that the high-wage high-skill programmer of today will not be the person using these applications in 2015.
Thinking logically is the hard part, right? Why do you think that it will get easier (i.e. require less "high-skill") soon?
A small number of them will be producing these tools, but the users of the tools will most definitely be lower pay overseas help or general business people.
I don't think it is helpful to lump overseas "help" and general business people together. Overseas programmers could be highly technical. In fact, the easier programming is to do, the more sense it makes to do it in North America. Because if it is really easy technically then the "hard part" is interpreting the specifications which involves communicating with the customer. So why involve a foreigner? But really, programming will always be highly technical and the reason to bring in a foreigner is to have them implement tricky algorithms.
But as far as business people doing programming? That's what they said about COBOL. People have been predicting this since the sixties. Why should we believe you? What's going to magically change in 2015?
It has nothing to do with a backlog of work, or elegance of code - it has everything to do with cost. The same arguments you make were made about the car industry - there is no way the Japanese could produce half the cars the US wants, right? Right?
That's a ridiculous analogy. A car is a physical item. There are a finite number of places to put them. They have hard material costs. The market for them is bounded by at least these two unchangable realities.
How does one decide when there is enough "software" in the world? The more software there *is* the more software business wants to create. New operating systems give rise to new applications. New applications make new demands on the operating system. New programming languages allow projects that were previously too expensive. Those Indians and Chinese are going to invent new development platforms that our bosses are going to demand we learn about and leverage. I don't know how many programmers the world economy can support but I do know that we are nowhere close to that limit. If we were, there wouldn't be such a backlog of hard problems to be solved.
I don't know how to decide the size of the world market for programmers but it is very different than deciding the world market for physical items. It is even quite a bit different than figuring out the world market for artistic works because software intrinsically builds on software.
Slashdot Mirror
After all, if you can make the legal case that "clicking OK doesn't really count as accepting a license", you can easily make the case that "doing absolutely nothing (which is all that is required to accept the GPL) sure as hell doesn't count as accepting a license". If Microsoft can't implicitly force you to accept a contract, neither can the FSF. The law doesn't care if you're nice or not.
Unlike shrinkwrap licenses, the GPL does not resrtict rights that the user would otherwise have. Rather it gives the user a right to redistribute which copyright law by default prohibits. If you want this _extra_ right then you also have some responsibilities. This could not be further from a shrinkwrap license. On the other hand, I'm not a fan of either.
And he was worried that global organizations were hurting national sovereignty, if I interpreted his speech correctly. He was talking about organizations like the World Trade Organization whose agreements bind member nations to follow their policy above their own local laws, or be punished. It isn't just the national organiztaions that we must pay attention to now, but international ones like the World Intellectual Property Organizations whose treaties bind their members to follow their laws, for better or for worse.
International organizations probably do hurt your national sovereignty if you are American. But for the many smaller or poorer countries in the world, the international organizations at least allow them to negotiate as a block rather than bidirectionally with the much more powerful western countries. That increases their ability to strike deals in their own favour. Of course the US can always refuse to ratify any that they don't like, such as the Kyoto protocol or the UN Convention on the Rights of Children.
You think that the only securityhazard of this is that people surf porn?? This enables people in companies to break company reglations.
I just don't see logfile checking or IP address filtering as an effective way to enforce corporate regulations. If you want to stop big downloads, stop big downloads. If you want to stop people from messing up their machines then lock down the machines. Filtering or logging IP addresses can be at best a reactionary move because you don't know the "bad" IP addresses in advance anyhow (unless they have very obvious domain names). Plus, proxies exist today. I could probably surf porn
I hate to say it, but this system simply isn't ready yet. They have not come up with a technically sound solution.
The best is the enemy of the good. It doesn't make sense to hold up a solution with some flaws in favor of an impossible system with no flaws. Freedom fighters take risks. That's their choice. We should help them to understand the risks they are taking but we should not deny them the right to even try to work around the system. Proxies are popular today even though they have the problems you describe. Peek-a-booty just ups the ante a little bit.
No, employees spending the time that their getting paid anywhere from $6-$60 an hour for are using it to surf pr0n.
If you don't have good ways to monitor their productivity then you need to trust them. Let's say that they aren't surfing porn. What if they bring it in on a floppy disk? Or mail it to themselves? Or bring in a magazine?
plus there's always the threat of getting a sexual harrassment suit filed.
Same question above. And anyhow, does any of this rate in importance even close to the issue of human rights?
Good point. I think he was trying to say that it wasn't necessary for an AI to have direct storage access, not that it wouldn't be possible. By the same token, it would be really cool if we had a few hundred neurons wired up as a perfect, lightning quick calculator. It's theoretically possible; it just hasn't evolved in our species.
But it isn't as if we were once calculators and lost the ability. For an AI to "forget" how to calculate numbers quickly it would have to forget the path to "/bin/bc". Since *I* remember the path any AI would remember it too. But it would have direct electronic access rather than analog access. Put it this way: we don't know whether an AI would have significantly more direct access to useful information and processes but it would have much quicker indirect access through a digital interface to storage and processes.
So what you're saying is: "On the good side, fundamental human rights. On the bad side, makes life harder for pointy haired bosses who feel that lunch breaks spent playing cards are fine but lunch breaks surfing porn are an abomination.
And this gives you mixed feelings???
This is a misconception about AI. Just because an AI implementation has a mass digital storage, doesn't mean the AI "being" has mass digital storage in any significant sense. The AI level is so far above the storage level, that the AI would probably not interface to the storage any differently from how you or I would. In other words, it would be little different from a person with an MP3/DVD player.
I find this implausible. At what point in the development of the AI would we cut the cord beween the AI level and the storage level? Why would we cut that cord? Sure, the AI level wouldn't work at the storage level on a day to day basis but why wouldn't it be able to drill down to deal with storage when that is useful? They might not have perfect recall in the sense that they never forget anything but they should be able to do anything we could do at a keyboard except without any analog IO interface.
Remember that you're a beginner only at the beginning, and after you learn it, you're an expert for the rest of your life. That is why I don't prefer to save few hours (or even few months) at the start and stick with something simple and easy to the end of my days. I prefer to chose what's better for me in the long run.
Fortunately, you don't have to choose. You can have easy at the beginning and sophisticated in the long run.
What is your point? Do you say that Perl is not "designed somehow similar to natural languages"?
I'm saying that no linguist other than Larry Wall would think that Perl was anything vaguely similar to a natural language. Yes, natural languages are crufty and context sensitive and Perl is crufty and context sensitive. That doesn't mean Perl is like a natural language.
Here you assumed that: I use Perl, therefore my code is less maintainable. Which is irrational, I hope you realize that.
I said "probably". As in "statistically". As in "that's what I've observed" and "heard many other people observe". If you've observed otherwise and we don't have the funds for a study I guess I'll have to leave it at that. No way to come to agreement. You can have the last word if you want it.
When you know the syntax and semantics, you won't have problems reading different styles. At least I don't have any problems, and I don't consider myself a Perl guru.
Lots of Perl people do tell me that they have trouble reading other people's Perl code. The examples you give are four extremely readable Perl snippets. They are not typical. Even so, they are enough to confuse a new Perl programmer which I would say is reason enough to choose one way and stick with it.
When you have a good code, you don't have to fully understand or often even read the implementation details to maintain it (not to say about simply using it). All you need is to understand the interfaces.
And when you find that there is a bug in that code? Or need to add a feature that cannot be added by subclassing (i.e. MOST features!)
Perl is designed somehow similar to natural languages.
I know that that it the mantra of the Perl community but that doesn't make it either true or relevant.
You don't have anything in English, Latin, Polish, Russian or any other natural language, which would "encourage a consistent and readable style", still there's a lot of great art.
When I'm working together on a project artistry is secondary to engineering. Natural languages are not typically used for engineering. In fact, we tend to use languages that are more formal: like algebraic symbols or pseudo-code languages.
Remember that there's not only one good style of English, almost every poet, every novelist, every writer has his or her own, unique style. And that freedom of choice also means that you can hear lots of crap. But we can't restrict English to only a subset of lexical and semantic rules, because any restrictions which would prevent stupid people from saying stupid things, would also prevent really smart people from saying really smart things.
The descriptive power of a natural language is not proportional to either its vocabulary or its grammatical complexity. As I'm sure you've been told, the problem solving power of a programming language is exactly equivalent to that of any other programming language. Really smart people can say really smart things in ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE. So if you want to compare languages you have to look at other factors such as cost of development, cost of maintenance, amount of fun (Perl probably wins in that category for some people), etc.
If what you really mean to say is that Perl is more fun, for you, and you've actually tried the other languages to compare, then I will support that wholeheartedly. But there is a price to be paid: and whoever has maintain your code is probaby paying it. And there is no payoff in descriptive power or cost of development.
Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.
The problem is that programmers that care will differ radically in which the consider the most readable one and many programmers just don't care at all. So in either case we have trouble reading each other's code because even when we are trying our hardest we can easily make code that is mutually incomprehensible. Python cannot prevent this but it can encourage a consistent and readable style. The language encourages good taste. No more, no less.
"Your complaint that Ruby has no unicode support is particularly amusing since Ruby's core developer are Japanese.
Japanese programmers are not, by and large, required to make internationalized software. European and American programmers are.
"Not to provide unicode support was a simple design decision from people likely to be far more competent on multilingual matters than Python's core developers."
And this decision resulted in what replacement for Unicode? None! AFAIK, Ruby has no support for character sets outside of one popular in Japan and ASCII. That's really great if you are Chinese or Israeli.
"As for clear syntax - there are plenty of people despising Python for it's rigid indentation rules. Last but not least it is easier to write C-extensions in Ruby than in Python."
Really?
import PyInline.C, __main__
x = C.Builder(code="""
double my_add(double a, double b) {
return a + b;
}""",
targetmodule=__main__)
x.build()
print my_add(4.5, 5.5)
What makes you say that? I don't see him mentioned in the article. I don't see anything that indicates that the Justice department is on the wrong side of the issue. They are at least holding hearings which indicates that they understand there is cause for concern!
Ruby simply didn't offer enough of a reason to switch off of Perl, Java or Python. Its elegant but not groundbreaking, and frankly the market for programming languages is already overpopulated.
You don't have to win to survive. There are still people around promoting Objective-C! Ruby has found an audience and will continue to strike a cord with disaffected Perl programmers who choose not to use Python (perhaps out of a sense of pride, or because they really don't like its style). Also, Ruby will probably be a very major language in Japan: perhaps the most popular high level language there.
Such as? (lets see, docstrings, tuples, what else?)
Non-blocking threads. Unicode. Simple syntax. Fully functional JVM port. Palm port. Plan 9 port. Strong COM and CORBA support. Sophisticated numeric library. Excellent graphics package. Several IDEs. Bundled with most versions of Linux. More robust Windows port. Clear license (finally!). Large deployed applications like Mailman, Twisted Matrix and Zope, dozens of books, etc. etc.
The same thing could be said the other way: Ruby has features which have no counterpart in Python (of course Python 2.2 added some of these features (like iterators and a more unified type/class system (but Ruby had these from day one) )- but since they've been added so late in the game Python's built-in libs do not use them, so you end up with a patchwork of Python pre 2.2 and PYthon post 2.2.
Python always had an iterator-like syntax. The only change is how the iterators are implemented. Similarly, types and classes always behaved similarly. Now they are just the same thing under the covers.
As mentioned, Ruby had a unified type/class system from day one meaning you could extend and subclass built-in types from the start. Ruby also had iterators from the start as well - the significance being that Ruby's collection classes (like Array and Hash) use iterators. Python couldn't till now.
Oh really? I wonder what the xrange function did? If you don't know Python, why not just admit it and move on. You're a poor Ruby advocate if you can't even come up with a single Ruby feature that Python does not have...only features that Python did not have until recently. Even as Python advocate I could do better than that in promoting Ruby! But even so, I think it is pretty clear that in the areas where Python was weak, it is catching up or has caught up and in the areas it is strong, Ruby has a Long Way to Go. Native Threads, Unicode and a JVM port are each person-years of effort.
Personally, I'm against the 'war on drugs', but I don't think a totally unregulated drug market would be a good thing either. Are non-chemical psychological 'drugs' really that different?
A better analogy would be gambling. EverQuest is a game like Poker. People love it for the adrenalin high that they get. I doubt it would ever be regulated. Remember the furor about Dungeons and Dragons? That was never regulated. Gambling is regulated because it is really easy to gamble away your life savings. Gaming away your time is considered your own problem, not the governments! They are probably happy to have you wasting your time in front of the computer instead of participating in democracy.
This is actively working against evolution. I demand this stop immediately. Not only do we allow blind, deaf, ugly, and stupid people to pro-create, but now we're going to start allowing sterile people to procreate? Someday, we'll all end up stuck in the matrix feeding tubes, and it won't be imposed on us by some AI run amuck.... it will be done by our own choice.
Selective evolution works on a time period of millenia. Genetic engineering will bec commonplace in decades. Selective evolution is not relevant anymore.
While I am not a big fan of Blockbuster, per se, I see absolutely *NO* advantages of this technology over renting at Blockbuster.
You could sell these in variety stores, supermarkets, street and mall kiosks etc. If you were walking down the street and someone had a kiosk where you could buy a movie that you'd never have to return to the kiosk then you'd be a hell of a lot more likely to do so without worrying about where you are and how and when you'll get back to return the movie.
As long as the language is Turing-complete, it should be possible; the question is in the level of difficulty, and I don't see why .NET would be harder to support than, say, TCP/IP or HTTP. I mean, Emacs was written in LISP; if they can do that, is .NET such a challenge?
There is a big difference between implement EMACS or TCP/IP *in* a language and implementing a language *on* .NET! Your mixing apples and oranges.
Nevertheless, there is no question whether functional and logic languages can work on .NET. The only question is whether they can work with sufficient efficiency that they will be tools, not toys.
Who???
Google doesn't have much information on Peter Chambers!
And I have a second task as well. Slashdot is occasionally criticized for getting a story wrong, even though we diligently correct ourselves when necessary. My theory is that the difference between Slashdot and other media is that they never correct themselves, no matter how inaccurate, so readers are left with a false picture of accuracy.
All of the reports said "So and so CLAIMED to have done X and Y." Reporting a claim is not the same as getting a story wrong. I'm not saying that they SHOULD have published it but I don't see why they should publish a retraction...
The captain in Das Boot expresses distaste for the Fuhrer. That's context.
Would you feel the same way about a movie from the point of view of a WWII German squad? A pure-hearted group of boys fights the American invaders? I would object to that because context matters. Unless it was done just right, our sense of respect and compassion for the boys could naturally be transferred to the cause that they are fighting for. Or worse, the Germans could be shown fighting French people so that American anti-French biases could be strengthened.
I haven't seen the movie yet. Some say it has enough context. Some say it doesn't. My point is that the question *matters*. A responsible film-maker can't just glorify a moment in time without thinking how that will influence the viewer's interpretation of the surrounding events.
Yes, sometimes resources critical to our national wellbeing ARE worth going to war over.
Could you clarify something? Let's say that tomorrow we find a compound that is millions of times more potent than oil. A few gallons of this stuff will keep the US economy running for years. All known resources are in a poor country that refuses to share it with the US. Does the US have the right to go to war with that country to get that resource?
Was this the case in Somalia? No. But I'm trying to get at the underlying moral principle you are invoking here. It sounds as if you are saying that if a powerful country really, really, really needs something then it can put aside the wellbeing of others to get it.
Unfortunately, oil IS currently a critical piece of our economy, until we figure out a workaround for that (i.e. fuel cell powered vehicles combined with efficient fusion, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric power generation on large scales).
Might not fuel cell technology be further ahead if the US le the price of oil rise to a natural level? After all, sending the military all over the world is a form of very expensive subsidy.
Nevertheless, I don't think your characterizations of people who resent the Arab world and the Islamist movements are at all accurate.
The Arab world is one thing. The Ismlamist movement is another. When we start to treat them as one and the same we've implicitly given up hope of peace and democracy in a highly populated part of the world.
In fact, radical Islamists share quite a bit in common with Chomsky and the far left wing of our own country. For one thing, you are supposed to accept their principles on faith, and reason never enters into the equation (don't get me wrong, the far right is largely the same).
One can be both far-left and highly reasonable. Have you read any Marx? He was a genious, way ahead of his time, with a first-rate mind. He also made many mistakes. Who doesn't?I say this because the far left is largely characterized by reliance on Moral Relativism and a retreat to an intellectually weak stance in which one refuses to acknowledge that some moral systems are based on logic, reason, and the common good and some are based on arbitrary systems of faith that do not promote maximal Utility by any sort of reality-based perception.
There are so many fallicies there that I don't know where to start. First, you presume that moral systems are like operating systems. You just pick the one that is optimal. Second, you act as if there is some universal definition of utility. Third, morals are not logical. They cannot be derived from observation of nature nor from the pure exercise of reason. They are inherently cultural, biological and often theological.
I'm not saying the US government is perfect. I really wish we would be honest about our motivations for actions in Somalia and elsewhere (Gulf War). But come on, you have to be stupid ultimately if you didn't realize what it was all about. Just do some background reading. And for the rest of the sheeple in the US, they are happier just thinking of these things in simpler terms anyway, and can't deal with the morally grey areas of international politics.
I'm sorry, that's just elitist, anti-democratic name calling. The people of the United States and allied countries can make decisions about right and wrong when they are not bombarded by misleading propoganda all day. Unfortunately, most people do not have the energy to spend all day, every day, working through the web of lies spun by the government and dutifully parotted by the media. Trying to get to the true story of what the government is doing in the world should not be a full-time job but unfortunately I have found that it pretty much is.
There is no excuse for this state of affairs and it is quite unfair to shift the blame from the liars to those who are just trying to live their lives.
I will conclude with this: I can not condone arbitrary agression by the US government against foreign regimes, but I do believe that if such a regime is acting in a way that harms our people's interests, then it is our government's fiduciary responsibility as our representative to the international community to take action.
Might makes right? My people need X. Your people have X. Therefore it is my responsibility to look only at the needs of my people and take X.
Each government is responsible to exactly the set of its own people and its own country.
That's bullshit. Just as citizens have a responsibility not to shoot each other, governments have a responsibility not to attack other countries.
However, if "the interests of it's people" gets reinterpreted as "increasing profits by certain monopolistic or cartel organizations based in the country that feed kickbacks to politicians", I agree we have a problem, but I believe that problem is better solved through reform of campaign and political finance legislation than by left wing rhetoric about how much we should care about how many thousands of Somalis died (who were trying to kill US soldiers, and therefore got the logical result they could have expected).
You admit the average person isn't knowledgable about what is going on in the world. You admit that things are shadier than they would seem if you only watch mainstream news sources. Yet you criticize those who would try to publicize the real situation for doing so. But your real reason for criticizing them is clear from the sentence above: because they are on the left. Chomsky's got nothing on you when it comes to irrational bias.
I don't know whether the US was right or wrong to go to Somalia. But I think that Chomsky is likely to shed a little more light on the subject than Ridley Scott. I don't know why you wish him to do otherwise.
Yes people will still have to think logically, I didn't claim otherwise. What I claimed and continue to claim is that the high-wage high-skill programmer of today will not be the person using these applications in 2015.
Thinking logically is the hard part, right? Why do you think that it will get easier (i.e. require less "high-skill") soon?
A small number of them will be producing these tools, but the users of the tools will most definitely be lower pay overseas help or general business people.
I don't think it is helpful to lump overseas "help" and general business people together. Overseas programmers could be highly technical. In fact, the easier programming is to do, the more sense it makes to do it in North America. Because if it is really easy technically then the "hard part" is interpreting the specifications which involves communicating with the customer. So why involve a foreigner? But really, programming will always be highly technical and the reason to bring in a foreigner is to have them implement tricky algorithms.
But as far as business people doing programming? That's what they said about COBOL. People have been predicting this since the sixties. Why should we believe you? What's going to magically change in 2015?
It has nothing to do with a backlog of work, or elegance of code - it has everything to do with cost. The same arguments you make were made about the car industry - there is no way the Japanese could produce half the cars the US wants, right? Right?
That's a ridiculous analogy. A car is a physical item. There are a finite number of places to put them. They have hard material costs. The market for them is bounded by at least these two unchangable realities.
How does one decide when there is enough "software" in the world? The more software there *is* the more software business wants to create. New operating systems give rise to new applications. New applications make new demands on the operating system. New programming languages allow projects that were previously too expensive. Those Indians and Chinese are going to invent new development platforms that our bosses are going to demand we learn about and leverage. I don't know how many programmers the world economy can support but I do know that we are nowhere close to that limit. If we were, there wouldn't be such a backlog of hard problems to be solved.
I don't know how to decide the size of the world market for programmers but it is very different than deciding the world market for physical items. It is even quite a bit different than figuring out the world market for artistic works because software intrinsically builds on software.