for no other reason that when I'm 5 levels deep and want to write something like someProperlyAndDescriptivelyNamedVariable = somObjectWithAnotherLongAndDescriptiveName.aMethod WithSimilarlyLongAndDescriptiveName(someObviouslyN amedParameters,someOtherObject.someOtherMethod()); it's running off the side of a normal xterm real quick
You know that Python lets you put parens around an expression, and then have the expression span multiple lines, right? eg:
I originally wanted to write a module to allow it to talk to MS SQL directly, but... well... both it and Sybase use an obscure tabular data format that I really don't have the patience to master right now.
Huh? "obscure tabular data format"? I think I missed something there... why aren't you doing SQL queries?
Okay, I think we got some wires crossed. I do agree that private clinics should be available. I also think that a completely privatized system is inferior to a pratially socialized one though.
Alberta patients are faced with a difficult choice: wait an agonizing six months for a free MRI scan at a public hospital or pay more than $700 for an immediate scan at a private clinic
And in the US they'd have the choice between paying the $700 or not having the scan at all.
Uh, hello? Have you ever actually bought a car in California? Apparently not. I've bought several cars in California -- in Silicon Valley, no less. Guess what, things don't work the way you describe at all, here in California.
When you buy cars here, they don't have cardboard plates that "look like regular plates, in that they have numbers and such". When you buy a car in California, the dealer typically leaves the advertisement plates there. The difference between a car on the lot and a purchased car is that they (the dealer) attach a sticker to the inside of the passenger's side of the front windshield that serves as a temporary license plate until you get your metal plate.
If you drive around in the Valley, you'll see lots of brand new cars with cardboard plates that say little more than the dealer's name and URL or phone number. You'll also see quite a few new cars with no plates at all. Yes, I agree that just having a small sticker in the front windshield wouldn't be much help in a high-speed chase. You can go tell that to the California DMV, but that's the way it works here.
- Someone who actually knows what they're talking about
Actually, it was 'mate on', the subliminal message the monolith sent into the brains of the monkeys. When they evolved into humans they eventually recorded it as "go forth and multiply"...
Two cars are so new their license plates still have dealer tags.
New cars in California, at least in Sillicon Valley, don't have "dealer tags" on their plates. A dealer sticker is placed in the front windshield, and the dealer also typically puts cardboard advertisment where the plates should go (though it's perfectly legal to remove them, and many people do).
Makes me a bit suspicious about the accuracy of the rest of the article...
I take it you don't work much with designers then?
I do. But JSPs don't make that any easier.
I thought jsps just compiled to servlets anyway- what is the problem there?
I've sure one could write a befunge to Java compiler too, but you probably don't want to write your servlets in befunge.
I would love to trust you on this one, but you haven't supported your argument very comprehensively here.
Hmmm, if I told you it was bad to stick a pencil in your eye would you be so skeptical...?:-)
JSPs have numerous problems, but what it boils down to is this: they're a maintenance nightmare. They don't support any real modularization (beyond include), you can't compile them at build time (if anyone knows otherwise, let me know), they remove the ability to do certain things (like sent the output encoding dynamically), they suck rocks for trying to do i18n, and they make it way too easy for people to insert actual Java code that should be in Java files, not JSPs.
If you don't believe me, go ahead and use them for a large project. But don't say I didn't warn you.
Imagine, next thing I may be advocating private provision of health care, or of education. Both of which, I might add, are provided much better by the market than by government.
I think it depends on what exactly you mean. Having lived in both Canada and the US for several years each, I've found that the socialized medical system in Canada is far better than the market-driven medical system in the US.
I cut and pasted some tutorial examples from the web a while back, and it wouldn't work until I made the blasted things tabs rather than spaces.
It doesn't matter if you use tabs or whitespaces, provided you use them consistantly. I never use tabs in my Python code, so so much for your theory about it requring tabs...
My editor -- nedit -- allows me to select a region of text and shift its indentation in our out as a unit.
...
Vi doesn't.
Vi does support shifting the indentation of blocks of text. You clearly never graduated from the "if I can't learn it in 5 minutes it can't be any good" school of thought.
Try using the < or > keys in normal mode. You can also use those keys in combination with any movement command or object selection command to shift in/out the appropriate chunk of text. Indentation is based on the setting of shiftwidth.
In Vim you can also visually select a block (hit V then move around, or use the mouse to select) and then hit < to outdent or > to indent.
I've never run into this problem in all the years I've been writing Python code, so your editor settings are probably to blame.
If you have your tab spacing set to 8 (which it should be) then you can mix tabs and spaces willy-nilly, and Python will still understand what you mean. It's only if you have tabs set to something other than 8 and you mix tabs and spaces, that you would run into problems.
In Vim, if you want to be extra careful, you can turn on expandtab. ie:
set expandtab
You can also turn on "list" mode, and run "retab" if you're editing code you're not sure about. And you should of course have ts set to 8.
These setting are also handy for other things that care about indentation, like Makefiles and Perforce files.
I don't use Emacs, but there's presumably similar things you could do there.
Okay, I'm not gonna jump in on this, but this is incorrect. Any emulator can run a piece of code through to see if it halts... or you can run it on the "programming" on the native environment.
Tell that to Alan Turing.
Running the program in an emulator (or 'on the "programming" on the native environment') wouldn't work. How long do you need to run the program before you know that it's halted? If you want a complete proof, go here, or ask your friendly neighborhood CS professor.
I can write a sonnet, and prove that it is correct (ie: a valid sonnet). In fact, I can quite easily write a prigram that can determine whether the input is a valid sonnet or not. Sonnets are quite mechanical. See http://www.english-teaching.co.uk/shakespeare.sonn et.htm.
On the other hand, it's imposssible to create programs that prove all sorts of things about other programs. Here's an excercise for you: write a program that takes a program as input, and proves that it halts.
But that's all moot anyway. Whether a program is 'correct' is at most a required condition of being art; it isn't a sufficient condition. To use the sonnet parallel, a sonnet isn't art just because it follows all of the rules of a sonnet.
If sonnets, music, architecture and photography are art, then so is programming. Yes, some programs aren't very artful, just as some photos, buildings, boy-band-songs, and the sonnet you wrote in grade 9 probably aren't very artful. Programming does require creativity though, and I've occasionally seen code that I would consider to be "a work of art". Like building or bridges though, code's function genrally overshadows the art hidden within, and sometimes much of the artistry is obvious only to the trained eye, much the way gourmet meals are just "nice food" to someone who isn't a connesouir.
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So you've got your editor configured incorrectly. Set your tab width to 8. Then you'll be seeing what Python's seeing.
for no other reason that when I'm 5 levels deep and want to write something like someProperlyAndDescriptivelyNamedVariable = somObjectWithAnotherLongAndDescriptiveName.aMethod WithSimilarlyLongAndDescriptiveName(someObviouslyN amedParameters,someOtherObject.someOtherMethod()); it's running off the side of a normal xterm real quick
d WithSimilarlyLongAndDescriptiveName(
You know that Python lets you put parens around an expression, and then have the expression span multiple lines, right? eg:
someProperlyAndDescriptivelyNamedVariable = (
somObjectWithAnotherLongAndDescriptiveName.aMetho
someObviouslyNamedParameters,
someOtherObject.someOtherMethod()
)
)
By the way, the trailing semicolon is unnecessary.
I originally wanted to write a module to allow it to talk to MS SQL directly, but... well... both it and Sybase use an obscure tabular data format that I really don't have the patience to master right now.
Huh? "obscure tabular data format"? I think I missed something there... why aren't you doing SQL queries?
You mean "Backslash"? (code name: Richard Nixon's Head)
Fountains of Paradise (also by Clarke, but printed in 1979) centers around the idea of a space elevator.
Okay, I think we got some wires crossed. I do agree that private clinics should be available. I also think that a completely privatized system is inferior to a pratially socialized one though.
Alberta patients are faced with a difficult choice: wait an agonizing six months for a free MRI scan at a public hospital or pay more than $700 for an immediate scan at a private clinic
And in the US they'd have the choice between paying the $700 or not having the scan at all.
I've never heard of those things called "tags". I've heard them called dealer "plates", but never "tags"...
Uh, hello? Have you ever actually bought a car in California? Apparently not. I've bought several cars in California -- in Silicon Valley, no less. Guess what, things don't work the way you describe at all, here in California.
When you buy cars here, they don't have cardboard plates that "look like regular plates, in that they have numbers and such". When you buy a car in California, the dealer typically leaves the advertisement plates there. The difference between a car on the lot and a purchased car is that they (the dealer) attach a sticker to the inside of the passenger's side of the front windshield that serves as a temporary license plate until you get your metal plate.
If you drive around in the Valley, you'll see lots of brand new cars with cardboard plates that say little more than the dealer's name and URL or phone number. You'll also see quite a few new cars with no plates at all. Yes, I agree that just having a small sticker in the front windshield wouldn't be much help in a high-speed chase. You can go tell that to the California DMV, but that's the way it works here.
- Someone who actually knows what they're talking about
The book and the movie were written concurrently. Try reading The Lost Worlds of 2001.
Actually, it was 'mate on', the subliminal message the monolith sent into the brains of the monkeys. When they evolved into humans they eventually recorded it as "go forth and multiply"...
At least, that's what Art told me.
And of course, a painting could never be so deceptive... :-)
Two cars are so new their license plates still have dealer tags.
New cars in California, at least in Sillicon Valley, don't have "dealer tags" on their plates. A dealer sticker is placed in the front windshield, and the dealer also typically puts cardboard advertisment where the plates should go (though it's perfectly legal to remove them, and many people do).
Makes me a bit suspicious about the accuracy of the rest of the article...
I take it you don't work much with designers then?
:-)
I do. But JSPs don't make that any easier.
I thought jsps just compiled to servlets anyway- what is the problem there?
I've sure one could write a befunge to Java compiler too, but you probably don't want to write your servlets in befunge.
I would love to trust you on this one, but you haven't supported your argument very comprehensively here.
Hmmm, if I told you it was bad to stick a pencil in your eye would you be so skeptical...?
JSPs have numerous problems, but what it boils down to is this: they're a maintenance nightmare. They don't support any real modularization (beyond include), you can't compile them at build time (if anyone knows otherwise, let me know), they remove the ability to do certain things (like sent the output encoding dynamically), they suck rocks for trying to do i18n, and they make it way too easy for people to insert actual Java code that should be in Java files, not JSPs.
If you don't believe me, go ahead and use them for a large project. But don't say I didn't warn you.
Imagine, next thing I may be advocating private provision of health care, or of education. Both of which, I might add, are provided much better by the market than by government.
I think it depends on what exactly you mean. Having lived in both Canada and the US for several years each, I've found that the socialized medical system in Canada is far better than the market-driven medical system in the US.
You could hook it up to nerves that control muscles you don't really need. I mean, do you really have to flare your nostrils?
- 40GB HDs that would only recognize as 8GB drives. The fix? Have them install MaxBlast or similar software.
That sounds suspiciously like a problem I've run into in NT4.0 (on non-Dell machines), rather than a problem with any particular Dell.
There's only one thing you realy need to know aboutr JSPs:
don't use them!
Trust me on this one. Servlets good, JSPs bad.
I guess it's a good thing FatBrain has it for the same price then...
I cut and pasted some tutorial examples from the web a while back, and it wouldn't work until I made the blasted things tabs rather than spaces.
It doesn't matter if you use tabs or whitespaces, provided you use them consistantly. I never use tabs in my Python code, so so much for your theory about it requring tabs...
My editor -- nedit -- allows me to select a region of text and shift its indentation in our out as a unit.
...
Vi doesn't.
Vi does support shifting the indentation of blocks of text. You clearly never graduated from the "if I can't learn it in 5 minutes it can't be any good" school of thought.
Try using the < or > keys in normal mode. You can also use those keys in combination with any movement command or object selection command to shift in/out the appropriate chunk of text. Indentation is based on the setting of shiftwidth.
In Vim you can also visually select a block (hit V then move around, or use the mouse to select) and then hit < to outdent or > to indent.
I've never run into this problem in all the years I've been writing Python code, so your editor settings are probably to blame.
If you have your tab spacing set to 8 (which it should be) then you can mix tabs and spaces willy-nilly, and Python will still understand what you mean. It's only if you have tabs set to something other than 8 and you mix tabs and spaces, that you would run into problems.
In Vim, if you want to be extra careful, you can turn on expandtab. ie:
set expandtab
You can also turn on "list" mode, and run "retab" if you're editing code you're not sure about. And you should of course have ts set to 8.
These setting are also handy for other things that care about indentation, like Makefiles and Perforce files.
I don't use Emacs, but there's presumably similar things you could do there.
What, you mean a stack trace? What's so hard about that?
Okay, I'm not gonna jump in on this, but this is incorrect. Any emulator can run a piece of code through to see if it halts... or you can run it on the "programming" on the native environment.
Tell that to Alan Turing.
Running the program in an emulator (or 'on the "programming" on the native environment') wouldn't work. How long do you need to run the program before you know that it's halted? If you want a complete proof, go here, or ask your friendly neighborhood CS professor.
I can write a sonnet, and prove that it is correct (ie: a valid sonnet). In fact, I can quite easily write a prigram that can determine whether the input is a valid sonnet or not. Sonnets are quite mechanical. See http://www.english-teaching.co.uk/shakespeare.sonn et.htm.
On the other hand, it's imposssible to create programs that prove all sorts of things about other programs. Here's an excercise for you: write a program that takes a program as input, and proves that it halts.
But that's all moot anyway. Whether a program is 'correct' is at most a required condition of being art; it isn't a sufficient condition. To use the sonnet parallel, a sonnet isn't art just because it follows all of the rules of a sonnet.
If sonnets, music, architecture and photography are art, then so is programming. Yes, some programs aren't very artful, just as some photos, buildings, boy-band-songs, and the sonnet you wrote in grade 9 probably aren't very artful. Programming does require creativity though, and I've occasionally seen code that I would consider to be "a work of art". Like building or bridges though, code's function genrally overshadows the art hidden within, and sometimes much of the artistry is obvious only to the trained eye, much the way gourmet meals are just "nice food" to someone who isn't a connesouir.