I am a bit jealous of some Git features, but the place I work -- and me for my personal projects -- use SVN for one big reason: TortoiseSVN. It is a great interface to version control and not everyone (probably the majority) who needs to contribute is a programmer, or has any idea about command line interfaces, ssh, branching, merging, etc.
I am aware of TortoiseGit, but it has not reached a stable release, so it is not up for consideration in a serious environment.
There are other things to keep in mind too; SVN is much more tailored to our repo structure than Git, so that's a big plus for SVN -- at least for us.
I'm definitely in favor of self-documenting code, but no matter how well you try to do it, it is never going to be as easy to read as a well written comment.
While '// increment x' is definitely overkill, I like to comment my code in such a way that you can easily skim over just the comments to get to the piece of code you are looking for. Usually this takes the form of coding in paragraphs with a comment above each paragraph describing what it does. Each comment has a line of whitespace (or a single bracket) above it to separate the paragraphs and make the comments stand out.
I can't speak for Solaris, but I've used various Linux distros quite a bit (both for servers and desktops). I absolutely love FreeBSD. Having everything unified and maintained by one group brings consistency that you just don't find in linux. Ports is amazing; it has over 17,000 packages iirc and you can be sure they will 'just work', installing everything in just the right places (consistency!), automatically installing prereqs, and even compiling from source if you wish. Like others have mentioned: it's faster, more secure, and handles load better. It even has a more open license than Linux! I really wonder why more people don't prefer FreeBSD. Using it on a server or a desktop is a breeze.
I was using Ubuntu as a desktop for a while, because I was afraid getting gnome to work on FreeBSD would be hard. Turns out it takes two commands: pkg_add -r xorg && pkg_add -r gnome2. That's it! Done! And I was even quite surprised that installing packages via ports automatically created entries in the gnome menus as you would expect on Ubuntu.
The docs are also great and provide step by step walkthroughs for just about anything.
That said, I do hate the installer -- but at least there are good doc pages for it.
I don't know of any recent benchmarks comparing Rakudo to Perl 5, but I think there are some Parrot benchmarks on the language shootout pages. They are fairly impressive IIRC, but also keep in mind that the version of Parrot used to make those benchmarks is fairly ancient (over a year old I think), so it's probably gotten even better.
It's also important to keep in mind that Parrot opens up new possibilities for perl code. Instead of just interpreting and running it every time as you do now, you can compile the code down to parrot bytecode and run that directly, instead of re-interpreting it completely every execution. Parrot also has JIT which should speed things up even more.
Very sorry for double posting, but I checked the wrong formatting box on the previous post.
This post is a little misleading. Perl 6 is not done, this isn't a 'Perl 6 release'. It's just another Parrot release, with the neat feature that you can finally run a perl 6 binary instead of going through the parrot one. This, by itself, is nothing major. The main reason for this post is to publicize the great amount of progress Perl 6 and Parrot have made, particularly within the last few months. And by publicizing that, to hopefully get more people involved.
If you're interested in running Perl 6 now, check out www.pugscode.org -- Audrey's compiler is still further along than the official 'Rakudo' one (although it shouldn't be for too much longer;-). However, this is still great news to Perl fans. I'm not a contributor, but I do subscribe to the parrot mailing list; the fact that the real Perl 6 interpreter (although incomplete) is finally underway and making great progress, and the momentum that comes with that, is exciting.
Even if you're not a Perl fan, the Parrot bits should still be quite interesting to anyone that enjoys language implementation. The PCT (Parrot Compiler Toolkit) is maturing nicely and many languages have working interpreters/compilers (to various levels of completion) using it. The amazing thing about it is the sheer speed that you can get a working language together. Rakudo is built on top of NQP (not-quite-perl6) -- a subset of perl 6 built in a matter of (a very few) weeks. And it's important to keep in mind that while Perl 6 is the star of the show for Parrot, Parrot is being designed to fit all dynamic languages; so don't be scared off because you think Parrot is too Perlish. I regularly see posts on the mailing list helping to make Parrot friendlier for other languages (particularly TCL) as people develop using parrot.
For open source fans, I think Parrot is our best bet for a VM to give.NET a fight (although feel free to reply with other suggestions, I don't keep up with too many others;-).
This post is a little misleading. Perl 6 is not done, this isn't a 'Perl 6 release'. It's just another Parrot release, with the neat feature that you can finally run a perl 6 binary instead of going through the parrot one. This, by itself, is nothing major. The main reason for this post is to publicize the great amount of progress Perl 6 and Parrot have made, particularly within the last few months. And by publicizing that, to hopefully get more people involved.
If you're interested in running Perl 6 now, check out www.pugscode.org -- Audrey's compiler is still further along than the official 'Rakudo' one (although it shouldn't be for too much longer;-). However, this is still great news to Perl fans. I'm not a contributor, but I do subscribe to the parrot mailing list; the fact that the real Perl 6 interpreter (although incomplete) is finally underway and making great progress, and the momentum that comes with that, is exciting.
Even if you're not a Perl fan, the Parrot bits should still be quite interesting to anyone that enjoys language implementation. The PCT (Parrot Compiler Toolkit) is maturing nicely and many languages have working interpreters/compilers (to various levels of completion) using it. The amazing thing about it is the sheer speed that you can get a working language together. Rakudo is built on top of NQP (not-quite-perl6) -- a subset of perl 6 built in a matter of (a very few) weeks. And it's important to keep in mind that while Perl 6 is the star of the show for Parrot, Parrot is being designed to fit all dynamic languages; so don't be scared off because you think Parrot is too Perlish. I regularly see posts on the mailing list helping to make Parrot friendlier for other languages (particularly TCL) as people develop using parrot.
For open source fans, I think Parrot is our best bet for a VM to give.NET a fight (although feel free to reply with other suggestions, I don't keep up with too many others;-).
I agree with this wholeheartedly; and I am a young entry level programmer. I started at a video game company a few months ago. The pay is decent, not amazing. I don't have an office -- I don't even have a cubicle yet. But, the management really understands how to handle the IT folk.
Hours are flexible as long as we get the job done and are able to stay coordinated as a team. We've got a fully stocked fridge that anyone is free to pillage. We use some spare warehouse space as a basketball court. There's regular video game tournaments a few days a week. There's roughly 70 people on site and I haven't run into a single unlikable person, including management. There's no corporate spyware, internet access is fast and unrestricted; everyone talks via IM and browses the web. People even regularly barbecue out back during lunch.
This isn't a random startup company that is blowing money and will go bankrupt from their ridiculous practices in a year. This is currently their tenth year and we're currently working on at least four games (that I've overheard), including contract work for major companies like Disney. You can probably guess, but Disney games aren't terribly enthralling to work on; even with mediocre pay, no privacy, and Disney IP, I wouldn't dream of quitting.
"I've been a big proponent of the new OS over the past few months, even going so far as loading it onto most of my computers and spending hours tweaking and optimizing it."
The fact that he actually went through the trouble of installing and tweaking it on so many machines makes me doubt that he was just bowing to financial pressure. This isn't a pro-Vista comment though; the fact that he had extensive experience with Vista and still found it unusable does not bode well for Microsoft.
Let me start by saying that I'm no Microsoft fanboy. I can't think of one good reason to run Windows on my servers (<3 freebsd), but I do prefer it over nix/bsd for desktop use; I'm a gamer, and virtual machines are enough to give me my linux fix. I tried Vista RC2 very briefly and hated it. After my display drivers became so problematic that I literally could not see anything properly enough to even log in, I gave up.
However, I was building a new rig a few months ago and decided to give it another shot, only for DX10. In months of very heavy use (running games + movies + several virtual machines at the same time), I've been pleasantly surprised how decent it has turned out to be. The only problem I've had is widescreen not working in one game (which was achieved through an unsupported hack in the first place). The UI is significantly better, and I really do miss the improvements when I use my XP laptop for anything productive. Stability has been great, I haven't had any sort of entire-os crash at all. Drivers were exactly as they were in XP: visit site, download, click next a few times, reboot, done.
Maybe my experience is atypical, but I think the amount of criticism Vista gets is unwarranted; in particular, it really bothers me when people bash it when their experience with Vista comes from nothing but/. comments by users with equal Vista experience. Is it the best thing since sliced bread? No. Could Microsoft have done better? Very much so. Is it better than XP? Definitely.
The internet may not be a top priority (food, medicine, etc). But, bringing the internet to people may help with these things. What if poor farmers could learn new agricultural techniques using the internet? Or what about spreading better disease awareness? Not to mention the potential freedom it could bring once people realize there are alternative forms of government. Instead of just throwing fistfulls of money and medicine at these countries, open internet access could help them start doing more for themselves.
No, I wouldn't say bringing the internet to third world countries is the top priority, but it certainly won't hurt.
Perl is stable -- Perl 5 has been out what... 10 years now? CPAN is also an amazing module repository and makes installing modules a breeze. Perl is also more powerful than php, and the syntax allows for certain things to be done more succinctly.
The best thing about PHP is that it's easy. The syntax is simpler than Perl, so it is easier to pick up. It also has a ton of built-in functionality so you don't have to go looking for modules as often, but that mass of bundled functionality combined with the fact that PHP doesn't have namespaces makes for a mess, compounded by the fact that the included functions are often named inconsistently.
Having done hundreds of thousands of lines of code in both languages, I favor perl; but don't hate PHP either. Both have tons of documentation (PHP's being more newbie friendly, but Perl's being more extensive). Both are very fast when coded properly.
I don't really see how this will improve the chances of their standards being adopted. It's not exactly like the leap from html to xhtml is all that confusing as is. This will just be even more confusing. Good luck getting all of the major browsers to support all of these incremental changes when they can't even keep up with the standards suggested years ago.
They do make biodegradable airsoft BBs (in fact I think most are). I play matches on public land out here (southern cali) and all they require of us is that we play far from the road and use biodegradable BBs.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a bit jealous of some Git features, but the place I work -- and me for my personal projects -- use SVN for one big reason: TortoiseSVN. It is a great interface to version control and not everyone (probably the majority) who needs to contribute is a programmer, or has any idea about command line interfaces, ssh, branching, merging, etc.
I am aware of TortoiseGit, but it has not reached a stable release, so it is not up for consideration in a serious environment.
There are other things to keep in mind too; SVN is much more tailored to our repo structure than Git, so that's a big plus for SVN -- at least for us.
1) Better tools... improve EPIC. Perl lacks a good IDE.
Activestate's Komodo is a pretty decent IDE.
I'm definitely in favor of self-documenting code, but no matter how well you try to do it, it is never going to be as easy to read as a well written comment.
While '// increment x' is definitely overkill, I like to comment my code in such a way that you can easily skim over just the comments to get to the piece of code you are looking for. Usually this takes the form of coding in paragraphs with a comment above each paragraph describing what it does. Each comment has a line of whitespace (or a single bracket) above it to separate the paragraphs and make the comments stand out.
I can't speak for Solaris, but I've used various Linux distros quite a bit (both for servers and desktops). I absolutely love FreeBSD. Having everything unified and maintained by one group brings consistency that you just don't find in linux. Ports is amazing; it has over 17,000 packages iirc and you can be sure they will 'just work', installing everything in just the right places (consistency!), automatically installing prereqs, and even compiling from source if you wish. Like others have mentioned: it's faster, more secure, and handles load better. It even has a more open license than Linux! I really wonder why more people don't prefer FreeBSD. Using it on a server or a desktop is a breeze. I was using Ubuntu as a desktop for a while, because I was afraid getting gnome to work on FreeBSD would be hard. Turns out it takes two commands: pkg_add -r xorg && pkg_add -r gnome2. That's it! Done! And I was even quite surprised that installing packages via ports automatically created entries in the gnome menus as you would expect on Ubuntu. The docs are also great and provide step by step walkthroughs for just about anything. That said, I do hate the installer -- but at least there are good doc pages for it.
I don't know of any recent benchmarks comparing Rakudo to Perl 5, but I think there are some Parrot benchmarks on the language shootout pages. They are fairly impressive IIRC, but also keep in mind that the version of Parrot used to make those benchmarks is fairly ancient (over a year old I think), so it's probably gotten even better.
It's also important to keep in mind that Parrot opens up new possibilities for perl code. Instead of just interpreting and running it every time as you do now, you can compile the code down to parrot bytecode and run that directly, instead of re-interpreting it completely every execution. Parrot also has JIT which should speed things up even more.
Very sorry for double posting, but I checked the wrong formatting box on the previous post.
;-). However, this is still great news to Perl fans. I'm not a contributor, but I do subscribe to the parrot mailing list; the fact that the real Perl 6 interpreter (although incomplete) is finally underway and making great progress, and the momentum that comes with that, is exciting.
.NET a fight (although feel free to reply with other suggestions, I don't keep up with too many others ;-).
This post is a little misleading. Perl 6 is not done, this isn't a 'Perl 6 release'. It's just another Parrot release, with the neat feature that you can finally run a perl 6 binary instead of going through the parrot one. This, by itself, is nothing major. The main reason for this post is to publicize the great amount of progress Perl 6 and Parrot have made, particularly within the last few months. And by publicizing that, to hopefully get more people involved.
If you're interested in running Perl 6 now, check out www.pugscode.org -- Audrey's compiler is still further along than the official 'Rakudo' one (although it shouldn't be for too much longer
Even if you're not a Perl fan, the Parrot bits should still be quite interesting to anyone that enjoys language implementation. The PCT (Parrot Compiler Toolkit) is maturing nicely and many languages have working interpreters/compilers (to various levels of completion) using it. The amazing thing about it is the sheer speed that you can get a working language together. Rakudo is built on top of NQP (not-quite-perl6) -- a subset of perl 6 built in a matter of (a very few) weeks. And it's important to keep in mind that while Perl 6 is the star of the show for Parrot, Parrot is being designed to fit all dynamic languages; so don't be scared off because you think Parrot is too Perlish. I regularly see posts on the mailing list helping to make Parrot friendlier for other languages (particularly TCL) as people develop using parrot.
For open source fans, I think Parrot is our best bet for a VM to give
This post is a little misleading. Perl 6 is not done, this isn't a 'Perl 6 release'. It's just another Parrot release, with the neat feature that you can finally run a perl 6 binary instead of going through the parrot one. This, by itself, is nothing major. The main reason for this post is to publicize the great amount of progress Perl 6 and Parrot have made, particularly within the last few months. And by publicizing that, to hopefully get more people involved. If you're interested in running Perl 6 now, check out www.pugscode.org -- Audrey's compiler is still further along than the official 'Rakudo' one (although it shouldn't be for too much longer ;-). However, this is still great news to Perl fans. I'm not a contributor, but I do subscribe to the parrot mailing list; the fact that the real Perl 6 interpreter (although incomplete) is finally underway and making great progress, and the momentum that comes with that, is exciting.
Even if you're not a Perl fan, the Parrot bits should still be quite interesting to anyone that enjoys language implementation. The PCT (Parrot Compiler Toolkit) is maturing nicely and many languages have working interpreters/compilers (to various levels of completion) using it. The amazing thing about it is the sheer speed that you can get a working language together. Rakudo is built on top of NQP (not-quite-perl6) -- a subset of perl 6 built in a matter of (a very few) weeks. And it's important to keep in mind that while Perl 6 is the star of the show for Parrot, Parrot is being designed to fit all dynamic languages; so don't be scared off because you think Parrot is too Perlish. I regularly see posts on the mailing list helping to make Parrot friendlier for other languages (particularly TCL) as people develop using parrot.
For open source fans, I think Parrot is our best bet for a VM to give .NET a fight (although feel free to reply with other suggestions, I don't keep up with too many others ;-).
I agree with this wholeheartedly; and I am a young entry level programmer. I started at a video game company a few months ago. The pay is decent, not amazing. I don't have an office -- I don't even have a cubicle yet. But, the management really understands how to handle the IT folk.
Hours are flexible as long as we get the job done and are able to stay coordinated as a team. We've got a fully stocked fridge that anyone is free to pillage. We use some spare warehouse space as a basketball court. There's regular video game tournaments a few days a week. There's roughly 70 people on site and I haven't run into a single unlikable person, including management. There's no corporate spyware, internet access is fast and unrestricted; everyone talks via IM and browses the web. People even regularly barbecue out back during lunch.
This isn't a random startup company that is blowing money and will go bankrupt from their ridiculous practices in a year. This is currently their tenth year and we're currently working on at least four games (that I've overheard), including contract work for major companies like Disney. You can probably guess, but Disney games aren't terribly enthralling to work on; even with mediocre pay, no privacy, and Disney IP, I wouldn't dream of quitting.
"I've been a big proponent of the new OS over the past few months, even going so far as loading it onto most of my computers and spending hours tweaking and optimizing it."
The fact that he actually went through the trouble of installing and tweaking it on so many machines makes me doubt that he was just bowing to financial pressure. This isn't a pro-Vista comment though; the fact that he had extensive experience with Vista and still found it unusable does not bode well for Microsoft.
Let me start by saying that I'm no Microsoft fanboy. I can't think of one good reason to run Windows on my servers (<3 freebsd), but I do prefer it over nix/bsd for desktop use; I'm a gamer, and virtual machines are enough to give me my linux fix. I tried Vista RC2 very briefly and hated it. After my display drivers became so problematic that I literally could not see anything properly enough to even log in, I gave up.
However, I was building a new rig a few months ago and decided to give it another shot, only for DX10. In months of very heavy use (running games + movies + several virtual machines at the same time), I've been pleasantly surprised how decent it has turned out to be. The only problem I've had is widescreen not working in one game (which was achieved through an unsupported hack in the first place). The UI is significantly better, and I really do miss the improvements when I use my XP laptop for anything productive. Stability has been great, I haven't had any sort of entire-os crash at all. Drivers were exactly as they were in XP: visit site, download, click next a few times, reboot, done.
Maybe my experience is atypical, but I think the amount of criticism Vista gets is unwarranted; in particular, it really bothers me when people bash it when their experience with Vista comes from nothing but /. comments by users with equal Vista experience. Is it the best thing since sliced bread? No. Could Microsoft have done better? Very much so. Is it better than XP? Definitely.
The internet may not be a top priority (food, medicine, etc). But, bringing the internet to people may help with these things. What if poor farmers could learn new agricultural techniques using the internet? Or what about spreading better disease awareness? Not to mention the potential freedom it could bring once people realize there are alternative forms of government. Instead of just throwing fistfulls of money and medicine at these countries, open internet access could help them start doing more for themselves. No, I wouldn't say bringing the internet to third world countries is the top priority, but it certainly won't hurt.
Here you go, expose and dock for vista, enjoy: http://insentient.net/
"by Novell" I'm not saying the study was wrong, but I'd take it with a grain of salt ;-P
Perl is stable -- Perl 5 has been out what... 10 years now? CPAN is also an amazing module repository and makes installing modules a breeze. Perl is also more powerful than php, and the syntax allows for certain things to be done more succinctly.
The best thing about PHP is that it's easy. The syntax is simpler than Perl, so it is easier to pick up. It also has a ton of built-in functionality so you don't have to go looking for modules as often, but that mass of bundled functionality combined with the fact that PHP doesn't have namespaces makes for a mess, compounded by the fact that the included functions are often named inconsistently.
Having done hundreds of thousands of lines of code in both languages, I favor perl; but don't hate PHP either. Both have tons of documentation (PHP's being more newbie friendly, but Perl's being more extensive). Both are very fast when coded properly.
I doubt the warranty covers using the heatsink as a stove.
I don't really see how this will improve the chances of their standards being adopted. It's not exactly like the leap from html to xhtml is all that confusing as is. This will just be even more confusing. Good luck getting all of the major browsers to support all of these incremental changes when they can't even keep up with the standards suggested years ago.
They do make biodegradable airsoft BBs (in fact I think most are). I play matches on public land out here (southern cali) and all they require of us is that we play far from the road and use biodegradable BBs.
You seem to have forgotten one important group of people.... the average users.