Re:first language
on
Beginning Ruby
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· Score: 2, Interesting
As a first programming language, if you are serious about programming, learn C or some Assembler, this will make you understand how a computer actually works and think before you write sucky code. I disagree. It's not necessary to know C or Assembler to program, or even program well (program efficiently, perhaps). It'll teach you about the low level workings of a computer, sure, but not knowing how computers work at a low level is not, I don't think, the reason for 90% or even 95% of all the "sucky code" you'll find.
As a side note, it is interesting that at the school at which I took my MSc, they used Haskell as a first starting language, basically to tell everyone that "you don't know shit about programming" and bring the sufferers of the perfect programmer syndrome down to the ground. A very good thing indeed. Ouch! Trial by fire!:)
The advantage is that it doesn't have Python's tab problem. Sure, that's a problem, but not exactly a big one. You can solve it with a global search and replace if it ever crops up, whilst some of Ruby's problems are more difficult to get around. And the problem only crops up if you're copy-pasting code from a third party who shares different coding conventions to you.
Well, yeah, those are advantages, too. Its hardly as if one advantage negates the others. Any problem that can be solved in five seconds by a decent editor is not much of a problem. Especially when it's compared against Ruby's performance, or should I say lack of it:)
Python because white space does not affect logical flow in Ruby Yes, you can write unindented code in Ruby, but why is this an advantage?
If you're going to discuss advantages of Ruby over Python, anonymous blocks and Ruby's class system would be better choices.
Re:Enlighten me
on
Beginning Ruby
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Isn't the most important thing in a server side language fast performance rather than quick development time? Only if you need performance. Not every dynamic site on the web needs to serve a bazillion people a day, and throwing hardware at a problem is often far cheaper than employing a skilled software developer for longer.
If the main reason for writing server side software is web based applications, or at least dynamic content, isn't a huge factor in this how well it scales? Nobody makes sites to be used by 20 people. No, but very few sites have to deal with 11000 page views per second, as Twitter reputedly does. Since Rails (just) handles this, then it should handle more modest needs as well.
Also, the main problem Twitter has is the database bottleneck, not Ruby's speed (or lack thereof). Rails is designed to work around a single database, so clearly any web app that requires a dozen database servers in parallel is going to take a few specialised plugins or patches to achieve.
Finally, if anybody can explain it's popularity to me, should I learn it? I'm currently doing freelance web dev mostly in PHP, would it be useful? How? In my spare time I'm writing a AJAX web app with PHP back-end at the moment and it's mostly for my personal use (task tracking from anywhere), is Ruby good here with the limited audience the site'll have? Try it:)
Ruby's pretty good with AJAX, since it integrate Prototype and Scriptaculous functions into lots of easy helper functions. It also helps do away with a lot of boilerplate code when accessing a database.
Re:When you step back and consider history
on
Beginning Ruby
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· Score: 2, Insightful
How many different programming tools do we need? Wouldn't a venn diagram of key language features show substantial overlap? Sure, but that's not to say they overlap in the same places. I've never come across two programming languages with exactly the same strengths and weaknesses.
Ruby sounds like your typical well-done tool, which clearly has its audience. The only substantial criticism of Ruby I've ever heard is here Bah, you're obviously not looking hard enough:)
You can write pages on criticism on any language. For instance, you could criticise Ruby on it's efficiency, it's dynamic typing, it's syntax quirks, it's libraries, it's readability, it's method naming conventions... The list is substantial, and many people disagree whether certain features are advantageous or disadvantageous (the classic example is dynamic vs. static typing). In fact, I'd say you don't really know a language until you can point out it's flaws.
Still, I'm wondering, what is the Next Big Thing? Whatever it is, I'm hoping it will be functional;)
If we both agree to accept your point of view, then you give me that right, because you claim that same right for yourself in regards of judging the Thai government's stance on free speech. Correct, but if you agreed with me you wouldn't be arguing that in the first place.
If we both agree on my point of view, then I have no such right, but I don't need it because we are already in agreement. Fair enough.
If we don't agree on any point, then I give myself that right because if you don't accept my limitations I don't consider them as a valid defense. Uh... so you're arguing on grounds of hypocrisy? I don't think I understand what you mean.
I can't define exactly how much or which right the Thai government has to judge those within Thailand, but I'm pretty certain they have more right to do that than some stranger living thousands of miles away who's never been even close to the country. Some people believe that every human being is entitled to a set of fundamental human rights. If we accept this morale principle, then no person is beyond judgement. For example, if I believe that free speech is an inalienable right, and the Thai government is suppressing that right, then I'd believe that the Thai government is acting immorally.
You might say I have no right to judge the morality of the Thai government in such a fashion. But in saying that, you are in turn judging my sense of morality and my beliefs. What gives you any more right to criticise the morality of others, than they have in criticising the morality of the Thai government?
Thailand isn't "medieval" when it comes to morality - it is thai. Why do you think it is proper to judge a foreign country in terms of our history? They have a different morale, yeah. Now lets hear your objective definition of what makes "better" morales. Hold on. The grandparent post didn't say Thai morality was any worse; he said it was medieval. Are you saying that medieval morality is worse than modern western morality? Why do you think it is proper to judge a past time in terms of our modern sensibilities?
Hypocrisy aside, posts like these are a real source of irritation to me. If the grandparent poster has no right to judge the Thai government on morality, what right does the Thai government have to judge others, even those within its own borders?
Why is it very wrong? We observe traits of intelligence in other species, but nothing even approaching our own. A chimp might be able to plan a few steps ahead; for instance, chimps have been observed taking a sharp stick and ramming it into a smaller creature's hiding place in the aim of spearing it. This demonstrates some foresight ability, as the act of finding a sharp stick does not directly result in food. So some other animals can think several steps ahead; but humans regularly undertake projects that require foresight on a monumental scale. We don't just think a few steps ahead, we think thousands of steps ahead. We don't just make plans for the next few hours; we make plans for the next few decades.
We are not semi-divine beings essentially different from the other mammals, and the way we treat our relatives tells us something about ourselves. Whilst it's important to recognise the similarities between our species and other primates, there is a huge chasm of differences that we'd do well not to ignore. Our minds are orders of magnitude more complex than any of our cousin species; indeed than any other species of which we are aware.
That said, one could argue that if we don't afford rights to species of lower intellect, we'll have difficult taking the moral high ground when we're the species of lesser intelligence.
I think the thing that is hard to understand is that the law in this case is almost perversely refusing to say what it is that they *actually* want Microsoft to do, and continually just telling Microsoft: "That's not good enough". The EU has never refused to say what they want Microsoft to do. They've been crystal clear from the first. Allow me to quote from the court orders:
The first type of abusive conduct by Microsoft, described at recitals 546 to 791 to the Decision, consists in Microsoft's refusal to provide its competitors with 'interoperability information' and to allow its use for the purpose of developing and distributing products competing with Microsoft's own products on the work group server operating system market from October 1998 until the date of the Decision (Article 2(a) of the Decision). For the purpose of the Decision, 'interoperability information' means 'the complete and accurate specifications for all the Protocols implemented in Windows Work Group Server Operating Systems and... used by Windows Work Group Servers to deliver file and print services and group and user administration services, including the Windows Domain Controller services, Active Directory services and Group Policy services, to Windows Work Group Networks' (Article 1(1) of the Decision). 'Protocols' are defined as 'a set of rules of interconnection and interaction between various instances of Windows Work Group Server Operating Systems and Windows Client PC Operating Systems running on different computers in a Windows Work Group Network' (Article 1(2) of the Decision). Microsoft has yet to provide anything close to complete and accurate specifications. This isn't just the opinion of EU lawyers not understanding technical documentation, it's the opinion of prominent developers, like Andrew Tridgell, the creator of the Samba project.
What's more, Microsoft has had 2 years to document it's protocols, and it claims it has 300 engineers are working "day and night" on the problem, but despite that, little documentation has been forthcoming, and what there has been, has been smothered under a layer of restrictive licenses and NDAs.
It seems to me that a company as large as Microsoft should have at least some idea of how its network protocols work, and if not, is capable of finding out. You'd have thought that a company that prides itself on technical innovation and "Developers developers developers" would know how to write technical documentation. So either Microsoft is entirely incompetent, or it's flaunting the law. Whilst the former is tempting to believe, Microsoft didn't get where it is today by being staffed by morons, and so one has to conclude that they're deliberately disobeying the law. Hence the fine. It's that simple.
You didn't have to wait long. Am I the only one who finds these damn tags redundant and asinine? Asinine, perhaps, but not redundant. Out of all the tags on this story as of writing (mafiaa, haha, pwned, music and yro), 'music' and 'yro' are the only redundant ones, as the story is already in the two equivalent categories. The remaining tags (mafiaa, haha and pwned) are not redundant, because they contain unique information that cannot be found by the categories the story is in, nor in the words in the summary.
To my mind, the tag system works well, at least in this case. If, for example, you wanted to search for a set of stories where the RIAA or the MPAA has suffered a setback, then you could search for all stories tagged with 'mafiaa' and 'haha'. It seems to me that trying to find the same information via keywords would be far more problematic, and likely would not result in all of the desired stories being returned.
The main problem I see is that there is lack of focus in the functional arena. Many current functional languages are designed to use a VM with bytecode (Erlang for example) and don't support native threads easily (often requiring multiple VM instances and slow[er] message passing). The languages that do support native compiling almost always have other problems like horrible syntax (O'Caml, Lisp) or just general lack of refinement. Arguably Haskell comes the closest but suffers from a complicated and large backend support requirement like Java. Languages like Erlang do not use native threading not because they are unable, but because it is generally less efficient and more prone to error. There's a large overhead associated with creating a thread in Windows or Linux, whilst the user space processes in Erlang are extremely lightweight. If Erlang used native threads, it would use more memory, and be able to run less concurrent processes. I'd imagine I'd have some trouble creating a program that used a million or more pthreads under Linux, but I would not if I created the same amount of Erlang processes.
The other problem with native threads is that they are designed around the shared memory model. Functional languages like Erlang do not share memory between processes, but use message passing instead, as you correctly point out. This factors out a whole category of potential errors, and makes developing large concurrent applications considerably easier.
I've only started looking into Erlang's concurrency model, however, so I'm probably not the best person to point out its merits. However, from what I've read, I don't see functional languages benefiting much from native threads, which are generally designed around the shared memory/imperative model, and which does not translate well to pure functional languages.
don't really even care. Viacom sucks. So does Youtube. I hope they all somehow fail miserably, even though they probably won't. The world is full of idiots that can watch nut-shots all day long and never get tired of it. But really, Youtube is not "the little guy". Youtube started by a rich kid from a rich family (or at least, he married into wealth) and is now owned by google. It's not like there's some deserving indie guy here working hard for us. If it was profitable for Google to crack down on copyrights, they would do so. This isn't about right and wrong or philosophical points. It's about money.
The case also may set an important legal precedent, and I suspect that's why most people are interested in the case, because it's likely that the result of this decision will later affect smaller content hosting companies and individuals.
That's still the difference in my opinion. Aware and can be are two different things. I don't *want* my ISP to police and watch my traffic (hence, no AT&T). But as a business in the market of publishing video content to share I think it would be silly to think they don't see what content their hosting. Mm, I hadn't considered that. Still, what if it were a web-hosting company? I guess it all depends whether the videos are considered public or private, though the safe-harbour provisions of the DMCA would appear to be on Google's side.
I don't see what that has to do with anything. Both YouTube and ISPs can potentially profit from piracy (YouTube from advertising on uploaded copyrighted videos, ISPs from the bandwidth used to download torrents of copyrighted shows), and both are able to access the user's details such that they are aware piracy is taking place. Now, one could argue that the sheer volume of users makes it impossible (or at least very difficult) to police, but the same applies for both YouTube and the ISPs.
And pull in ad revenue based on that? The problem (IMHO) is that Youtube is directly and knowingly benefiting. If the customer is paying the ISP per GB, then the ISP would financially benefit the more data the customer downloads. Like Google, the ISP has access to its user's information, and like Google, the ISP profits when the traffic is greatest (Google via its ad revenues, the ISP via the customer's payments) - which often occurs when copyright infringement occurs.
If an ISP had a "per GB" pricing scheme, would you think that it would be justified for the entertainment industry to sue them from profiting from copyright infringement over P2P? If not, how is this different from YouTube? If so, does this mean you think ISPs should not have common carrier status?
Not if we keep procrastinating. If we don't take the first steps (i.e. actually going to Mars), it will never happen. Insightful? So if we don't go to Mars right now, then in several billion years we won't have the technology to relocate to another solar system when our Sun runs out of fuel? On that timescale, you'd have to delay a trip to Mars by at least a million years before anyone could seriously accuse you of procrastinating.
You're essentially asking us to believe that the British (and Canadians) could have liberated Europe without the U.S., but that the U.S. could not have done so alone. Without U.S. involvement, the invasion of Europe would not have happened. It happened on the eastern front without significant US involvement. Whether the invasion would have been as successful, or as complete, as it would have been without US involvement is probably unlikely, but even without the US, a significant number of German occupied territories would have been either liberated, or taken over by the USSR.
As for whether the US could have done it alone, it depends on the circumstances. If we assume that Hitler did not attack the USSR, but nor did the USSR intervene in any invasion of Europe, and if we assume that Britain did not fight in the war, but also remained neutral, and if we assume that the US tried to invade Germany without any other allies, then it seems debatable whether the US would succeed. The logistics would not be on the US's side, and there'd be a distinct lack of friendly territory from which to successfully launch an invasion. Further, the German military would be fresh and not already embattled on two fronts. I suspect that whoever wins this hypothetical battle comes down to who develops the Bomb first.
If you just mean the US could have done it alone after the German military had fought everyone else to a standstill, then that seems a more probable scenario.
Right or wrong, France has a poor ally to the United States - and it really is surprising considering our history together. One could also say the US has been a poor ally to France. Indeed, recently the US hasn't been a very good ally to anyone at all, though one can lay the blame to that at the feet of the current US administration.
You're right, that sounds *really* hard. So.... we shouldn't try? At our current level of technology, spending money on finding killer asteroids is, dollar for dollar, probably more beneficial for our long-term survival.
Disclaimer: I use Evolution. Yeah, I used Evolution for quite a while, since it integrates nicely with GNOME. Unfortunately, as you say, it's a complete pile of excrement with a stability that would shame beta software, let alone an application that claims to be stable.
Thunderbird's quite a nice replacement, if you just want an email client. I'm guessing you need something more, though.
Good info, but I think this brings up an issue with Linux on the desktop. Indeed the home directory is analogous to My Documents in Windows, but it could be anywhere on the file system. (I know it can be anywhere on Windows, but most of the time it will never change for normal users) It's the same with Linux; most of the time - indeed, practically all of the time - the home directory will never change. Indeed, out of all the Linux distributions I've seen, only GoboLinux puts the users in a different location, and GoboLinux is a distribution whose primary claim to fame is its unusual filesystem layout. Every other distribution is fairly standard.
My cat can log in with her account, type "sudo rm -Rf/", enter her password, and I'm out of business? Why would you give your cat administrator access in the first place? Cats can be very spiteful creatures, so I'd advise giving her an account with reduced sudo privileges.
The idea behind the Ubuntu system is that instead of giving certain users the root password, you instead give them administrator access via sudo. It's better for tracking who changed what, and gives more fine-grained control over access priviledges.
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If you're going to discuss advantages of Ruby over Python, anonymous blocks and Ruby's class system would be better choices.
Also, the main problem Twitter has is the database bottleneck, not Ruby's speed (or lack thereof). Rails is designed to work around a single database, so clearly any web app that requires a dozen database servers in parallel is going to take a few specialised plugins or patches to achieve. Finally, if anybody can explain it's popularity to me, should I learn it? I'm currently doing freelance web dev mostly in PHP, would it be useful? How? In my spare time I'm writing a AJAX web app with PHP back-end at the moment and it's mostly for my personal use (task tracking from anywhere), is Ruby good here with the limited audience the site'll have? Try it
Ruby's pretty good with AJAX, since it integrate Prototype and Scriptaculous functions into lots of easy helper functions. It also helps do away with a lot of boilerplate code when accessing a database.
Wouldn't a venn diagram of key language features show substantial overlap? Sure, but that's not to say they overlap in the same places. I've never come across two programming languages with exactly the same strengths and weaknesses. Ruby sounds like your typical well-done tool, which clearly has its audience.
The only substantial criticism of Ruby I've ever heard is here Bah, you're obviously not looking hard enough
You can write pages on criticism on any language. For instance, you could criticise Ruby on it's efficiency, it's dynamic typing, it's syntax quirks, it's libraries, it's readability, it's method naming conventions... The list is substantial, and many people disagree whether certain features are advantageous or disadvantageous (the classic example is dynamic vs. static typing). In fact, I'd say you don't really know a language until you can point out it's flaws. Still, I'm wondering, what is the Next Big Thing? Whatever it is, I'm hoping it will be functional
You might say I have no right to judge the morality of the Thai government in such a fashion. But in saying that, you are in turn judging my sense of morality and my beliefs. What gives you any more right to criticise the morality of others, than they have in criticising the morality of the Thai government?
Hypocrisy aside, posts like these are a real source of irritation to me. If the grandparent poster has no right to judge the Thai government on morality, what right does the Thai government have to judge others, even those within its own borders?
Why is it very wrong? We observe traits of intelligence in other species, but nothing even approaching our own. A chimp might be able to plan a few steps ahead; for instance, chimps have been observed taking a sharp stick and ramming it into a smaller creature's hiding place in the aim of spearing it. This demonstrates some foresight ability, as the act of finding a sharp stick does not directly result in food. So some other animals can think several steps ahead; but humans regularly undertake projects that require foresight on a monumental scale. We don't just think a few steps ahead, we think thousands of steps ahead. We don't just make plans for the next few hours; we make plans for the next few decades.
That said, one could argue that if we don't afford rights to species of lower intellect, we'll have difficult taking the moral high ground when we're the species of lesser intelligence.
What's more, Microsoft has had 2 years to document it's protocols, and it claims it has 300 engineers are working "day and night" on the problem, but despite that, little documentation has been forthcoming, and what there has been, has been smothered under a layer of restrictive licenses and NDAs.
It seems to me that a company as large as Microsoft should have at least some idea of how its network protocols work, and if not, is capable of finding out. You'd have thought that a company that prides itself on technical innovation and "Developers developers developers" would know how to write technical documentation. So either Microsoft is entirely incompetent, or it's flaunting the law. Whilst the former is tempting to believe, Microsoft didn't get where it is today by being staffed by morons, and so one has to conclude that they're deliberately disobeying the law. Hence the fine. It's that simple.
To my mind, the tag system works well, at least in this case. If, for example, you wanted to search for a set of stories where the RIAA or the MPAA has suffered a setback, then you could search for all stories tagged with 'mafiaa' and 'haha'. It seems to me that trying to find the same information via keywords would be far more problematic, and likely would not result in all of the desired stories being returned.
The other problem with native threads is that they are designed around the shared memory model. Functional languages like Erlang do not share memory between processes, but use message passing instead, as you correctly point out. This factors out a whole category of potential errors, and makes developing large concurrent applications considerably easier.
I've only started looking into Erlang's concurrency model, however, so I'm probably not the best person to point out its merits. However, from what I've read, I don't see functional languages benefiting much from native threads, which are generally designed around the shared memory/imperative model, and which does not translate well to pure functional languages.
The case also may set an important legal precedent, and I suspect that's why most people are interested in the case, because it's likely that the result of this decision will later affect smaller content hosting companies and individuals.
I don't see what that has to do with anything. Both YouTube and ISPs can potentially profit from piracy (YouTube from advertising on uploaded copyrighted videos, ISPs from the bandwidth used to download torrents of copyrighted shows), and both are able to access the user's details such that they are aware piracy is taking place. Now, one could argue that the sheer volume of users makes it impossible (or at least very difficult) to police, but the same applies for both YouTube and the ISPs.
If an ISP had a "per GB" pricing scheme, would you think that it would be justified for the entertainment industry to sue them from profiting from copyright infringement over P2P? If not, how is this different from YouTube? If so, does this mean you think ISPs should not have common carrier status?
As for whether the US could have done it alone, it depends on the circumstances. If we assume that Hitler did not attack the USSR, but nor did the USSR intervene in any invasion of Europe, and if we assume that Britain did not fight in the war, but also remained neutral, and if we assume that the US tried to invade Germany without any other allies, then it seems debatable whether the US would succeed. The logistics would not be on the US's side, and there'd be a distinct lack of friendly territory from which to successfully launch an invasion. Further, the German military would be fresh and not already embattled on two fronts. I suspect that whoever wins this hypothetical battle comes down to who develops the Bomb first.
If you just mean the US could have done it alone after the German military had fought everyone else to a standstill, then that seems a more probable scenario. Right or wrong, France has a poor ally to the United States - and it really is surprising considering our history together. One could also say the US has been a poor ally to France. Indeed, recently the US hasn't been a very good ally to anyone at all, though one can lay the blame to that at the feet of the current US administration.
Thunderbird's quite a nice replacement, if you just want an email client. I'm guessing you need something more, though.
The idea behind the Ubuntu system is that instead of giving certain users the root password, you instead give them administrator access via sudo. It's better for tracking who changed what, and gives more fine-grained control over access priviledges.