The title "Choosing Your Next Programming Job -- Perl Or.NET?" is totally misleading. It's clear to you and to me that your deciding factors are, in order:
1) Fun: social/work environment, large/small company considerations 2) Money: Salary and benefits 3) Toolset: perl or.net.
Having said that, you can do worse than c#. I even prefer it to perl, the syntax is less of a mess. But your mileage can and will vary.
all European Space Agency was trying to do was to use the Ariane 4 code in Ariane 5. And the rocket blew up 40 seconds after the launch. Why? Ariane 5 flies faster than Ariane 4.. the main software thought the readings were too high and marked lateral velocity sensors as "failed"
You claim that this rocket failure is due to software reuse. That just sounds wrong to me. I don't think that not starting from scratch is that relevant. I could more convincingly argue that the failure is due to the software not being tested with the input values that it would receive during operational use. That is important, be the code new or old; and when a failure costs millions, not doing so is inexcusable.
Look at recently developed programming environments that have made it big: Java and C#, running on a virtual machine, using a large class library.
My first impression of Java was of "a small language with a big class library" - I don't mean that in a bad way, the relatively small number of syntactic elements in the actual language and handing of things like say, threading to classes is a good thing.
But coding from scratch? What's that supposed to mean - typing ones and zeros at a OS-less motherboard? Working with all this support is the present and future of coding. Working without it is becoming a niche - for people who make the VMS, Oss, device drivers and class libraries that the rest of us depend upon. And yes, this trend for richer class libraries will continue. Duh.
Given that clinical obesity in people in the US 20 years or older runs at around 30%, and extreme muscular biggitude in the same population is probably under 0.1%, I do not think that there is a significant innacuracy with using BMI as a measure of obesity in large groups of US people. It's a sophisticated version of the "I'm not fat, I'm big boned" argument.
But I agree, correlation does not imply causation in either direction. "More research is needed" as they say...
approach to fighting botnets. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (x) It will stop botnets for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of windows will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from botherders ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (x) Many pc users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers (x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for the internet (x) Ease of searching tiny numeric address space of all IP adresses (x) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) Extreme profitability of botnets ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with botherders ( ) Dishonesty on the part of botherders themselves (x) Scope creep of any powerfull monitoring tool that is introduced to deal with a particular burning issue (x) The old "Who watches the watchmen" problem (x) The powerfull temptation to use it as a tool for censorship.
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) Connections should not be the subject of legislation (x) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck (x) We should be able to use P2P without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud (x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free (x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Correct, but it is a measure. It is my opinion that it is accurate enough be fit for purpose when looking at the population as a whole. For individuals? Not always. However, a glance will usually distingush the obese from the pumped.
Keeping in mind that muscle weighs more than fat, it is entirely possible that you could have someone who is the epitome of health and have a high BMI because they have a lot of muscle.
Possible, but uncommon. You may be an exception. If you suspect that this applies to you after all that weight training you've been doing, then try a more accurate measure. They do exist.
You say that if we keep pushing our luck, sooner or later it's going to run out. I say that if our luck consistently doesn't run out, after a while it's not really luck anymore, is it?
And if wishes were limosines, beggars would ride in style. Face it, our luck can run out. Powerful civilisations can fall over in a big heap before beacuse they exhaust thier resources. It has happened before.
RFID-style cards are in wide use in London and while the idea that they can be read from several meters away with the right reader is disturbing; it is good that they still work when they're still in your wallet, a distance of a bit more than 1mm.
I would expect pointer arithmetic to be the source of problems, but if I recall correctly, Pascal's pointers have arithmetic as well.
No, they don't.
That depends entirely on what you mean by "pascal". The pascal language as spec'd doesn't. But nobody uses that, so this not a very useful definition to adhere to.
Most users of "pascal" use/used Borland Turbo Pascal or Delphi. In those languages you *can* do pointer arithmetic. Sure you have to jump through more hoops and casts than with C (it can be considered a good thing that you have to go out of your way in order to write dodgy code) but you can do it. Trust me on this, I've done it myself.
The UK TV licence funds the BBC's ability to produce video content. If you watch any of the BBCs video streams, by any mechanism, you are supposed to pay for it.
I tell you the cost of refitting ships with FLIR that operates at -40, you might decide you don't really want that feature and grant a waver on the mil-spec. Why would you do that ? Well, you might know that the ship's engines won't work at that temperature either because the fuel oil will be too viscus.
It it pointless to kit out a ship to able to sail at -40 (Celsius or Fahrenheit, makes no difference). The sea would be solid at that temperature.
It is my understanding that Iran would like to build a uranium nuclear device
What makes you say that?
"nuclear weapons are not our goal.... We are not a threat to anybody" - from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech, at the opening of this plant on Saturday.
Call him a liar if you want, but give a reason for it, not just the usual war-talk and enemy-smearing from Washington DC and fox "news".
All the code that goes into your program must be certified and follow the coding rules.
But must all the tools? Is your compiler? Is your IDE? I'm not sure that all the supporting infrastructure needs to be held to the same standard as code that goes into the final build. IF a tool finds a flaw, is that flaw somehow not a flaw if the tool is not certified?
Holy crap, you mean the Library of Congress is massless?!
No, just that it's not of fixed mass. You can put several books on a DVD, and the DVD weighs less. Or you could put them on stone tablets instead if tha's your thing.
there are already multiple projects who have brought there bugs down to zero.
You mean "who have brought down the count of their bugs that this tool can detect down to zero." I'm sure they will have other bugs in code and design.
How does this tool compare to tools that do analysis by introspection on bytecode from languages like C# and Java. I use FxCop on C# code, and while it is very cool, using it is not newsworthy at all. Does this tool do more? Is is the news that it's used in a high-profile C++ program?
Integrating tools like this into your build process may be cutting-edge best-practice at present, but give it a while.
You're missing the point of garbage collection. Garbage collection isn't there to save your effort. In fact, garbage collection does not save you effort at all.
Many people think that the purpose of garbage collection is to make programming easier.
Having used both, I would say that "making programming easier" is definitely among its benefits.
But that's not the purpose of garbage collection at all.
It has only one purpose?
Memory management in a garbage collected language is at least as much effort as memory management in a language with manual storage management,
You know, it certainly doesn't feel that way. You don't need a try -finally block to deallocate local vars. You don't need to care which of several lists owns the items. You can create objects and return them in a "fire and forget" manner - no more worrying about who's responsibility it is to deallocate them. You write less lines of code, and get more done.
it requires at least as much experience to use well.
There are pitfalls and knacks to everything, but I find GC easier.
Err... why single out Apple?... If someone is going to get all up in arms about DRM, let's take a look at some of the major DRM players.
And who are the major players in online sales of DRM-protected music? Apple iTunes is the major players. In portable music players? The Apple iPod is the major players.
I know there are a (not-insignificant) group of people who feel that OSS projects shouldn't be ported to Windows, and instead should be reserved as a "killer app" to convince others to migrate.
That particular issue has been debated a while back here on Slashdot. The smart money is on the side of porting apps to multiple OSs. It's the thin end of the open source acceptance wedge, and makes changing the user's OS later easier.
OO.o is becoming an acceptable substitute to MS Office. What ultimately needs to happen is for these open source projects to become superior to their proprietary counterparts.
I haven't used OO, but I hear it's ten tears behind MSWord. Hehe. The good news is that MSwWord hit the sweet spot about ten years ago, and it's been a difficult task for MS to try to justify users buying this year's model ever since. Another good thing about Open source is that it's free of that treadmill.
Slashdot Mirror
The title "Choosing Your Next Programming Job -- Perl Or .NET?" is totally misleading. It's clear to you and to me that your deciding factors are, in order:
.net.
1) Fun: social/work environment, large/small company considerations
2) Money: Salary and benefits
3) Toolset: perl or
Having said that, you can do worse than c#. I even prefer it to perl, the syntax is less of a mess. But your mileage can and will vary.
No, it's not new. What's new is how mainstream it has become. It's possible that a majority of employed programmers are working this way now.
all European Space Agency was trying to do was to use the Ariane 4 code in Ariane 5. And the rocket blew up 40 seconds after the launch. Why? Ariane 5 flies faster than Ariane 4 .. the main software thought the readings were too high and marked lateral velocity sensors as "failed"
You claim that this rocket failure is due to software reuse. That just sounds wrong to me. I don't think that not starting from scratch is that relevant. I could more convincingly argue that the failure is due to the software not being tested with the input values that it would receive during operational use. That is important, be the code new or old; and when a failure costs millions, not doing so is inexcusable.
Look at recently developed programming environments that have made it big: Java and C#, running on a virtual machine, using a large class library.
My first impression of Java was of "a small language with a big class library" - I don't mean that in a bad way, the relatively small number of syntactic elements in the actual language and handing of things like say, threading to classes is a good thing.
But coding from scratch? What's that supposed to mean - typing ones and zeros at a OS-less motherboard? Working with all this support is the present and future of coding. Working without it is becoming a niche - for people who make the VMS, Oss, device drivers and class libraries that the rest of us depend upon. And yes, this trend for richer class libraries will continue. Duh.
Given that clinical obesity in people in the US 20 years or older runs at around 30%, and extreme muscular biggitude in the same population is probably under 0.1%, I do not think that there is a significant innacuracy with using BMI as a measure of obesity in large groups of US people.
It's a sophisticated version of the "I'm not fat, I'm big boned" argument.
But I agree, correlation does not imply causation in either direction. "More research is needed" as they say...
Oops, I missed that one when editing the spam template.
Your post advocates a
(x) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting botnets. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop botnets for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of windows will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from botherders
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many pc users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for the internet
(x) Ease of searching tiny numeric address space of all IP adresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of botnets
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with botherders
( ) Dishonesty on the part of botherders themselves
(x) Scope creep of any powerfull monitoring tool that is introduced to deal with a particular burning issue
(x) The old "Who watches the watchmen" problem
(x) The powerfull temptation to use it as a tool for censorship.
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) Connections should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(x) We should be able to use P2P without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
BMI is an inaccurate measure of body fat.
Correct, but it is a measure. It is my opinion that it is accurate enough be fit for purpose when looking at the population as a whole. For individuals? Not always. However, a glance will usually distingush the obese from the pumped.
Keeping in mind that muscle weighs more than fat, it is entirely possible that you could have someone who is the epitome of health and have a high BMI because they have a lot of muscle.
Possible, but uncommon. You may be an exception. If you suspect that this applies to you after all that weight training you've been doing, then try a more accurate measure. They do exist.
You say that if we keep pushing our luck, sooner or later it's going to run out.
I say that if our luck consistently doesn't run out, after a while it's not really luck anymore, is it?
And if wishes were limosines, beggars would ride in style. Face it, our luck can run out. Powerful civilisations can fall over in a big heap before beacuse they exhaust thier resources. It has happened before.
1mm is too close.
RFID-style cards are in wide use in London and while the idea that they can be read from several meters away with the right reader is disturbing; it is good that they still work when they're still in your wallet, a distance of a bit more than 1mm.
I would expect pointer arithmetic to be the source of problems, but if I recall correctly, Pascal's pointers have arithmetic as well.
No, they don't.
That depends entirely on what you mean by "pascal". The pascal language as spec'd doesn't. But nobody uses that, so this not a very useful definition to adhere to.
Most users of "pascal" use/used Borland Turbo Pascal or Delphi. In those languages you *can* do pointer arithmetic. Sure you have to jump through more hoops and casts than with C (it can be considered a good thing that you have to go out of your way in order to write dodgy code) but you can do it. Trust me on this, I've done it myself.
The UK TV licence funds the BBC's ability to produce video content. If you watch any of the BBCs video streams, by any mechanism, you are supposed to pay for it.
Programmers are solo beasts
Really? So what percentage of major, important or commonly used programs were written by only one person?
copy protection ... A single bit flag that commercial CD burning software respects would be enough.
Given a choice between software that always respects this flag, and software that allows you as a user to ignore it, which one would you want to use?
I tell you the cost of refitting ships with FLIR that operates at -40, you might decide you don't really want that feature and grant a waver on the mil-spec. Why would you do that ? Well, you might know that the ship's engines won't work at that temperature either because the fuel oil will be too viscus.
It it pointless to kit out a ship to able to sail at -40 (Celsius or Fahrenheit, makes no difference). The sea would be solid at that temperature.
It is my understanding that Iran would like to build a uranium nuclear device
... We are not a threat to anybody" - from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech, at the opening of this plant on Saturday.
What makes you say that?
"nuclear weapons are not our goal.
Call him a liar if you want, but give a reason for it, not just the usual war-talk and enemy-smearing from Washington DC and fox "news".
All the code that goes into your program must be certified and follow the coding rules.
But must all the tools? Is your compiler? Is your IDE? I'm not sure that all the supporting infrastructure needs to be held to the same standard as code that goes into the final build. IF a tool finds a flaw, is that flaw somehow not a flaw if the tool is not certified?
Holy crap, you mean the Library of Congress is massless?!
No, just that it's not of fixed mass. You can put several books on a DVD, and the DVD weighs less. Or you could put them on stone tablets instead if tha's your thing.
there are already multiple projects who have brought there bugs down to zero.
You mean "who have brought down the count of their bugs that this tool can detect down to zero." I'm sure they will have other bugs in code and design.
How does this tool compare to tools that do analysis by introspection on bytecode from languages like C# and Java. I use FxCop on C# code, and while it is very cool, using it is not newsworthy at all. Does this tool do more? Is is the news that it's used in a high-profile C++ program?
Integrating tools like this into your build process may be cutting-edge best-practice at present, but give it a while.
101 Reasons why Java is better than .NET - http://helpdesk-software.ws/it/29-04-2004.htm
.NET languages.
.NET programs well
I stopped reading around #7: There has yet to be a production release of a database that supports any
MS SQL Server 2005 does this. That item is wrong.
#8 Nobody seems to know how to write
this is not even wrong, just completely content-free.
You're missing the point of garbage collection. Garbage collection isn't there to save your effort. In fact, garbage collection does not save you effort at all.
Speak for yourself. It saves me effort.
Many people think that the purpose of garbage collection is to make programming easier.
Having used both, I would say that "making programming easier" is definitely among its benefits.
But that's not the purpose of garbage collection at all.
It has only one purpose?
Memory management in a garbage collected language is at least as much effort as memory management in a language with manual storage management,
You know, it certainly doesn't feel that way. You don't need a try -finally block to deallocate local vars. You don't need to care which of several lists owns the items. You can create objects and return them in a "fire and forget" manner - no more worrying about who's responsibility it is to deallocate them. You write less lines of code, and get more done.
it requires at least as much experience to use well.
There are pitfalls and knacks to everything, but I find GC easier.
Err... why single out Apple? ... If someone is going to get all up in arms about DRM, let's take a look at some of the major DRM players.
And who are the major players in online sales of DRM-protected music? Apple iTunes is the major players. In portable music players? The Apple iPod is the major players.
I remember reading that they need 10 million to even be able to produce them. They are still a long way off.
You remembered wrong:
"The laptop won't be produced unless at least five countries sign up at a million laptops each.
Four out of five isn't that far off.
I know there are a (not-insignificant) group of people who feel that OSS projects shouldn't be ported to Windows, and instead should be reserved as a "killer app" to convince others to migrate.
That particular issue has been debated a while back here on Slashdot. The smart money is on the side of porting apps to multiple OSs. It's the thin end of the open source acceptance wedge, and makes changing the user's OS later easier.
OO.o is becoming an acceptable substitute to MS Office. What ultimately needs to happen is for these open source projects to become superior to their proprietary counterparts.
I haven't used OO, but I hear it's ten tears behind MSWord. Hehe. The good news is that MSwWord hit the sweet spot about ten years ago, and it's been a difficult task for MS to try to justify users buying this year's model ever since. Another good thing about Open source is that it's free of that treadmill.