I must take this to mean that we are dropping any attempts at rationality and going for extreme pedantry instead. If so, I really must point out that JavaScript does not interact with C++ at all - it "interacts with" machine code instructions the exact nature of which are dependant upon the architecture you are running the various pieces of software on. I am not currently aware of any hardware architectures that run native C++. It would seem that this debate has evolved in a direction that doesn't hold much interest for me so unless you can come up with something else worthy of discussion, I expect I'll be bowing out at about this time.
While there are definite similarities between C, C++ and Java, my experience with JavaScript suggests that it was created with Java in mind for more than just the PR bandwagon effect. As an example, it also has direct facilities for calling Java code from within JavaScript and use Java object references directly from within JavaScript etc. I expect this is largely intended for easy interaction with Java applets. I found good use for this when writing JavaScript test suites that could use Java-based libraries directly without much fuss. It really did, at times, give me the feeling of being a scripting language for Java but that's probably because I don't know JavaScript and so would call into Java libraries to get the difficult stuff done (not knowing how you're _actually_ supposed to do it with JavaScript):-) I would say that JavaScript has something to do with Java, but Java doesn't have anything to do with JavaScript.
I have done a great deal of Java programming over the years and some months back, I found it necessary to do some JavaScript (actually ECMAscript) programming. I found that this was quite easy once I adopted the philosophy that "JavaScript is like Java on acid" (*). They really are quite similar, and I expect this was an important design consideration when JavaScript was first created.
* - I eagerly await ad from Sun in which they first show you a snippet of Java code with a voiceover "This is your programming language", then show you a JavaScript snippet with the voiceover "This is your programming language on drugs":-)
Considering the size, power, and long life of the Roman Republic + Empire, the most astonishing thing about them is how _little_ they were able to do with it all. They did provide us with some remarkable advances within law and rhetoric, as well as a civil administration system out of which Europe could develop the middle ages. Its engineering may have been astonishing but since those skills failed to survive the fall of the western Empire, I don't see that this was any particular benefit to us. What they failed to do was to advance the state of the art in agriculture and non-engineering technical disciplines. Instead, they compensated for their growing domestic needs by expanding their empire rather than by improving their agricultural and manufacturing techniques. In contrast, the middle ages, in which local lords often could not take from others what they lacked themselves, brought us a wealth of improvements to the way we manufacture both food and tools. In many ways, the fall of the Romans was a prerequisite for European society to recover from a 500+ year period of stagnation. Which isn't to say the Romans didn't do _something_ for us, but by the time Christianity arrived the only major function left to them was to Christianize all of Europe and then fade away.
As far as I can understand, Microsoft isn't forcing anyone to use their own version of the written language. Rather, they are providing one way of doing it that you may choose to use or not to use. If people were being forced with threat of violence (e.g. via legislation) to use some undesired written form, it would a different case altogether.
if they can't standardize their own written language thier culture may be distroyed. Then they should do this. As I see it, Microsoft's contribution can be discarded entirely or perhaps they could try and mine it for good ideas. It seems to me that what they are trying to do is get Microsoft to pay for this parallell effort and I don't see that Microsoft should have to do this and certainly not that it is a human rights issue that Microsoft should have to do it. Chinese create a new alphabet, no forget that, new ideograms for written English then expects you to use the them instead of the Roman Alphabet. Then let them. This _is_ basically what we did to them when we started transcribing Chinese words into our own alphabet and I still don't see why it should be a human rights issue that we should be forced not to have done that.
I don't quite see that this is what is happening. Microsoft has provided them a _possible_ written language, but they are under no obligation to actually use it. If they want to make their own written language to use instead, then they can certainly do so. How are they any worse off now than they were before any writing systems existed for their language? And, no, if the Chinese decided to make an alternative Norwegian dictionary, I really wouldn't mind. I most probably wouldn't use it but I wouldn't mind that it existed.
While I see the distinction, I am not convinced that it makes much change to my conclusion. As I see it, there is some authority or other within the community that desires a great degree of control over the language process. It shouldn't be a human right that such authorities shall exist. Rather, if anything, it should be a human right that if someone wants to make an input in order to facilitate the development of your language, they should be allowed to do so. If any particular input turns out to be unwanted by the language community, it will get rejected anyway so the only loss is for whoever shelled out to make that input.
I would say that this is a human rights issue that favours Microsoft. It should be a basic human right to be allowed to communicate with other humans, and so anything that would prevent others from translating something to your language should be cast out. Otherwise, you can end up with entire communities being isolated because it's not legal for anyone to speak or write their language except with permission from some Authority or other. I would find this an intolerable situation. I can see the David Koreshes of the world jumping at the opportunity if languages are ever allowed to be locked down like this. How can you deprogram someone whose language you are not allowed to use?
Re:What friggin planet is he from....
on
You Call This Agile?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Spolsky comes from a world where management realises that in order to get effeciency out of programmers, you need to treat them right and give them the tools that they need for the job. Now, this may be common or it may be rare, but it most certainly is the right way to run a programming shop. So when he says "this is why programmers get . .." what he really means is "this is why _my_ programmers get and this is why _everyone's_ programmers should be getting . .." Of course, he's also a but picky about what he'll accept as a proper "programmer":-)
A serious project only needs a small staff of "serious" top-level maintainers. All the coders can quite happily be there for the fun of it so long as the people on top have good control of what goes into the project and what does not. And while an open source project may not generate enough revenue to fully salary all the "for the fun of it" members, it may very well be enough to keep the serious top-level staff well-paid. Which means that you can certainly have good projects that are mainly made up of fun-and-games coders.
I would like to point out that there is a significant difference between anti-tank mines and anti-personnel mines. I believe it's only the anti-personnel variety (and then only automated ones) that are banned by the treaty. Not that those aren't considered useful of course. Anyway, the practical result of banning various weapons and use of weapons is to cause non-desparate militiaries to think twice about using them. Obviously, if you're losing the war, you'll do anything at all to get ahead but if you're already winning, or superior from the get go, you might decide to observe the niceties of the situation for the benefit of your diplomatic efforts elsewhere. The expect more than this out of rules for war is to deceive oneself.
Well, it's one thing to record what happens when the shuttle sits snugly on the ground. I expect it's another thing entirely what happens when the shuttle is in orbit, busy calculating trajectories, and firing alignment boosters when the date suddenly flips (or not). I expect they'd have to run a relatively expensive simulation to find out how, exactly, the shuttle would perform in actual operating conditions in this case.
It's not that it's harder, it's probably easier. But Java tends to attract a number of programmers that couldn't write effecient GUIs whatever the language. If these same people had been told to write a C++-based GUI, you'd be lucky if it even started one out of ten times due to dangling pointers, buffer overruns etc. One can hope, of course, that the VB-crowd among these are now migrating to.NET, but then, hope springs eternal:-)
If this is the case, then I can only conclude that US trademark practice has deteriorated to the point where it is actually posing a danger to US language. Last time I checked, this is specifically not supposed to happen though so I still expect that any attempt to uphold the single word "Java" as a protected trademark will fail in the courts. Of course, Sun is free to _claim_ to the world that "Java" is their trademark, and they can add all the "TM"s they wish to it. Until they win a court case however (which I consider unlikely) this amounts to little more than FUDcasting. I'm not sure what the processes involved in getting a registered trademark are though. Does this include a vetting process so that obviously unsuitable trademarks are denied, or is it just a registry?
This has little to do with Java as such, but rather with the Swing library. Swing has its ups and downs when it comes to internal design and implementation. In this particular case, it is clear that they tried to make a framework that solves two different problems at once: that it should be easily usable out of the box _and_ that you should be able to customize it to your own particular needs. This works well when you're actually aware that this is how it is. The problem only arises when you get novice programmers who think that the one-size-fits-all default algorithms in there are good for all possible uses and don't bother to learn how you are _supposed_ to be using the library if you're actually doing something serious. These programmers then end up with poor software because of their own ignorance. Now we are starting to touch upon a feature of the Java language that might be unfortunate: the language is so attractive and easy to get things done in, it tends to attract a significant number of mediocre programmers. Mediocre programmers, of course, will write mediocre to lousy programs regardless of what language, exactly, they're dabbling in. In this, Java is perhaps a victim of its own popularity, but this is also not a problem with the language itself so much as a popularity problem. Personally, I strongly suspect that Java's alledged slowness is something that exists in people's minds only. When they see a slow Java program, that will enforce their preconceptions about the language and when they see a fast one, they won't register it's a Java program so that won't affect their prejudice much. Of course, this assessment places these people squarely in the same bin as UFO nuts and other superstitious people so I tend not to worry too much about them:-)
Sun still owns the Java trademark. I find it difficult to believe that you can actually trademark the name of a piece of geography. Isn't this why Sun insists on calling it "the Java programming language", "Java technology" etc.? The longer phrases can presumably be put under trademark protection. Of course, the Java logo as such is probably protected, but it is possible to write "Java" without using Sun's fonts and colour scheme.
Could you provide details? While I'm not him, I can at least point out a common error. It is easy to believe that you can just create, say, a Swing List widget and start "add"ing items to it and it will just magically display them and all will be good. To an extent, this is correct, but the default implementation of the List data model class doesn't handle large numbers of items very well so when you've added, say, 10,000 items things may start going very slow indeed. And you conclude that Java sucks and find something else. The solution is to access your data using your own implementation of the ListModel interface. With your more detailed knowledge of the data source and the sort of data held within it, you should easily be able to write something more effecient than the one-size-fits-all default algorithm that JList uses. The same is true for large or complex trees, tables, etc. The solution to most Swing programmers' performance problems tends to be: "write a custom data model".
Why can't they support keyboards and mice on consoles? I expect it¦'s a game design issue. Since console controllers typically don't give as accurate aiming as a mouse does, the games are designed with this in mind. You might have some level of auto-aim, or the enemies may move more sluggishly to compensate, etc. Since so few people would be expected to want to use keyboard&mouse on a console, it's probably just not worth the effort to design the game to cater for both types of control system.
This can serve to explain a lot about the CIA's more recent accuracy record. They actually have processes in place to automatically screen out intelligent applicants and preferentially include superstitious ones . . .
Only if you redfine 'leak' to be something other than data which is no longer reachable. That depends on what you mean by "reachable". It is quite easy to end up with memory that cannot be reached from Java code but will never be collected. This classically happened (and probably still does although I haven't checked for a while) if you forgot to call dispose() on GUI windows - the native GUI resource would not be freed because there is a piece of native code that hangs on to it until you call dispose(). Furthermore, you can easily "lose" your references into libraries that do not offer public access to them thereafter. For all practical purposes, these are not reachable from your code, although they certainly are reachable by the GC.
With NextGenTel's customer service record, you'd be lucky to get someone answering the phone in one hour - on a good day. Your proposed action would see each slashdotter getting through once, maybe twice, per day. This would be more hassle for each of us than it is for them in total:-) The monopoly seat in Norway is generally held by Telenor, the ex-state telecoms monopoly. NextGenTel is a pretty big contender though.
Not being an active politician, I generally don't have to take realpolitik into account too much. What I describe is what I consider an ideal situation. I believe we will start moving towards this ideal within a generation, and chances are we'll be mostly there in two to three generations. It really needs for current legislators and judges to be replaced with today's young people before it comes to full fruition: The current establishment simply doesn't understand the true capabilities of modern technology the way that the young generation does. As for the short term, the barriers to abolishing copyright are too great to have much hope of it happening any time soon. We have a huge entertainment industry that will need some time to reorient itself, and we should give it this time. We also have numerous international treaties that will need to be renegotiated for this reform to be possible, and that will most likely take decades in itself. In the mean time, I'll keep advocating my ideals:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I must take this to mean that we are dropping any attempts at rationality and going for extreme pedantry instead. If so, I really must point out that JavaScript does not interact with C++ at all - it "interacts with" machine code instructions the exact nature of which are dependant upon the architecture you are running the various pieces of software on. I am not currently aware of any hardware architectures that run native C++.
It would seem that this debate has evolved in a direction that doesn't hold much interest for me so unless you can come up with something else worthy of discussion, I expect I'll be bowing out at about this time.
While there are definite similarities between C, C++ and Java, my experience with JavaScript suggests that it was created with Java in mind for more than just the PR bandwagon effect. As an example, it also has direct facilities for calling Java code from within JavaScript and use Java object references directly from within JavaScript etc. I expect this is largely intended for easy interaction with Java applets. I found good use for this when writing JavaScript test suites that could use Java-based libraries directly without much fuss. It really did, at times, give me the feeling of being a scripting language for Java but that's probably because I don't know JavaScript and so would call into Java libraries to get the difficult stuff done (not knowing how you're _actually_ supposed to do it with JavaScript) :-)
I would say that JavaScript has something to do with Java, but Java doesn't have anything to do with JavaScript.
I have done a great deal of Java programming over the years and some months back, I found it necessary to do some JavaScript (actually ECMAscript) programming. I found that this was quite easy once I adopted the philosophy that "JavaScript is like Java on acid" (*). They really are quite similar, and I expect this was an important design consideration when JavaScript was first created.
:-)
* - I eagerly await ad from Sun in which they first show you a snippet of Java code with a voiceover "This is your programming language", then show you a JavaScript snippet with the voiceover "This is your programming language on drugs"
You can't really call them booby traps anymore - it wouldn't get past the pr0n filters :-)
Considering the size, power, and long life of the Roman Republic + Empire, the most astonishing thing about them is how _little_ they were able to do with it all. They did provide us with some remarkable advances within law and rhetoric, as well as a civil administration system out of which Europe could develop the middle ages. Its engineering may have been astonishing but since those skills failed to survive the fall of the western Empire, I don't see that this was any particular benefit to us. What they failed to do was to advance the state of the art in agriculture and non-engineering technical disciplines. Instead, they compensated for their growing domestic needs by expanding their empire rather than by improving their agricultural and manufacturing techniques. In contrast, the middle ages, in which local lords often could not take from others what they lacked themselves, brought us a wealth of improvements to the way we manufacture both food and tools. In many ways, the fall of the Romans was a prerequisite for European society to recover from a 500+ year period of stagnation.
Which isn't to say the Romans didn't do _something_ for us, but by the time Christianity arrived the only major function left to them was to Christianize all of Europe and then fade away.
As far as I can understand, Microsoft isn't forcing anyone to use their own version of the written language. Rather, they are providing one way of doing it that you may choose to use or not to use. If people were being forced with threat of violence (e.g. via legislation) to use some undesired written form, it would a different case altogether.
if they can't standardize their own written language thier culture may be distroyed.
Then they should do this. As I see it, Microsoft's contribution can be discarded entirely or perhaps they could try and mine it for good ideas. It seems to me that what they are trying to do is get Microsoft to pay for this parallell effort and I don't see that Microsoft should have to do this and certainly not that it is a human rights issue that Microsoft should have to do it.
Chinese create a new alphabet, no forget that, new ideograms for written English then expects you to use the them instead of the Roman Alphabet.
Then let them. This _is_ basically what we did to them when we started transcribing Chinese words into our own alphabet and I still don't see why it should be a human rights issue that we should be forced not to have done that.
I don't quite see that this is what is happening. Microsoft has provided them a _possible_ written language, but they are under no obligation to actually use it. If they want to make their own written language to use instead, then they can certainly do so.
How are they any worse off now than they were before any writing systems existed for their language?
And, no, if the Chinese decided to make an alternative Norwegian dictionary, I really wouldn't mind. I most probably wouldn't use it but I wouldn't mind that it existed.
While I see the distinction, I am not convinced that it makes much change to my conclusion. As I see it, there is some authority or other within the community that desires a great degree of control over the language process. It shouldn't be a human right that such authorities shall exist. Rather, if anything, it should be a human right that if someone wants to make an input in order to facilitate the development of your language, they should be allowed to do so.
If any particular input turns out to be unwanted by the language community, it will get rejected anyway so the only loss is for whoever shelled out to make that input.
I would say that this is a human rights issue that favours Microsoft. It should be a basic human right to be allowed to communicate with other humans, and so anything that would prevent others from translating something to your language should be cast out.
Otherwise, you can end up with entire communities being isolated because it's not legal for anyone to speak or write their language except with permission from some Authority or other. I would find this an intolerable situation.
I can see the David Koreshes of the world jumping at the opportunity if languages are ever allowed to be locked down like this. How can you deprogram someone whose language you are not allowed to use?
Spolsky comes from a world where management realises that in order to get effeciency out of programmers, you need to treat them right and give them the tools that they need for the job. Now, this may be common or it may be rare, but it most certainly is the right way to run a programming shop. So when he says "this is why programmers get . . ." what he really means is "this is why _my_ programmers get and this is why _everyone's_ programmers should be getting . . ." :-)
Of course, he's also a but picky about what he'll accept as a proper "programmer"
A serious project only needs a small staff of "serious" top-level maintainers. All the coders can quite happily be there for the fun of it so long as the people on top have good control of what goes into the project and what does not.
And while an open source project may not generate enough revenue to fully salary all the "for the fun of it" members, it may very well be enough to keep the serious top-level staff well-paid.
Which means that you can certainly have good projects that are mainly made up of fun-and-games coders.
There are those who feel that the FCC becoming merely worthless would be a desirable development :-)
I would like to point out that there is a significant difference between anti-tank mines and anti-personnel mines. I believe it's only the anti-personnel variety (and then only automated ones) that are banned by the treaty.
Not that those aren't considered useful of course.
Anyway, the practical result of banning various weapons and use of weapons is to cause non-desparate militiaries to think twice about using them. Obviously, if you're losing the war, you'll do anything at all to get ahead but if you're already winning, or superior from the get go, you might decide to observe the niceties of the situation for the benefit of your diplomatic efforts elsewhere. The expect more than this out of rules for war is to deceive oneself.
Well, it's one thing to record what happens when the shuttle sits snugly on the ground. I expect it's another thing entirely what happens when the shuttle is in orbit, busy calculating trajectories, and firing alignment boosters when the date suddenly flips (or not).
I expect they'd have to run a relatively expensive simulation to find out how, exactly, the shuttle would perform in actual operating conditions in this case.
It's not that it's harder, it's probably easier. But Java tends to attract a number of programmers that couldn't write effecient GUIs whatever the language. If these same people had been told to write a C++-based GUI, you'd be lucky if it even started one out of ten times due to dangling pointers, buffer overruns etc. .NET, but then, hope springs eternal :-)
One can hope, of course, that the VB-crowd among these are now migrating to
If this is the case, then I can only conclude that US trademark practice has deteriorated to the point where it is actually posing a danger to US language.
Last time I checked, this is specifically not supposed to happen though so I still expect that any attempt to uphold the single word "Java" as a protected trademark will fail in the courts. Of course, Sun is free to _claim_ to the world that "Java" is their trademark, and they can add all the "TM"s they wish to it. Until they win a court case however (which I consider unlikely) this amounts to little more than FUDcasting.
I'm not sure what the processes involved in getting a registered trademark are though. Does this include a vetting process so that obviously unsuitable trademarks are denied, or is it just a registry?
This has little to do with Java as such, but rather with the Swing library. Swing has its ups and downs when it comes to internal design and implementation. In this particular case, it is clear that they tried to make a framework that solves two different problems at once: that it should be easily usable out of the box _and_ that you should be able to customize it to your own particular needs. This works well when you're actually aware that this is how it is. :-)
The problem only arises when you get novice programmers who think that the one-size-fits-all default algorithms in there are good for all possible uses and don't bother to learn how you are _supposed_ to be using the library if you're actually doing something serious. These programmers then end up with poor software because of their own ignorance.
Now we are starting to touch upon a feature of the Java language that might be unfortunate: the language is so attractive and easy to get things done in, it tends to attract a significant number of mediocre programmers. Mediocre programmers, of course, will write mediocre to lousy programs regardless of what language, exactly, they're dabbling in. In this, Java is perhaps a victim of its own popularity, but this is also not a problem with the language itself so much as a popularity problem.
Personally, I strongly suspect that Java's alledged slowness is something that exists in people's minds only. When they see a slow Java program, that will enforce their preconceptions about the language and when they see a fast one, they won't register it's a Java program so that won't affect their prejudice much. Of course, this assessment places these people squarely in the same bin as UFO nuts and other superstitious people so I tend not to worry too much about them
Sun still owns the Java trademark.
I find it difficult to believe that you can actually trademark the name of a piece of geography. Isn't this why Sun insists on calling it "the Java programming language", "Java technology" etc.? The longer phrases can presumably be put under trademark protection.
Of course, the Java logo as such is probably protected, but it is possible to write "Java" without using Sun's fonts and colour scheme.
Could you provide details?
While I'm not him, I can at least point out a common error. It is easy to believe that you can just create, say, a Swing List widget and start "add"ing items to it and it will just magically display them and all will be good.
To an extent, this is correct, but the default implementation of the List data model class doesn't handle large numbers of items very well so when you've added, say, 10,000 items things may start going very slow indeed. And you conclude that Java sucks and find something else.
The solution is to access your data using your own implementation of the ListModel interface. With your more detailed knowledge of the data source and the sort of data held within it, you should easily be able to write something more effecient than the one-size-fits-all default algorithm that JList uses.
The same is true for large or complex trees, tables, etc. The solution to most Swing programmers' performance problems tends to be: "write a custom data model".
Why can't they support keyboards and mice on consoles?
I expect it¦'s a game design issue. Since console controllers typically don't give as accurate aiming as a mouse does, the games are designed with this in mind. You might have some level of auto-aim, or the enemies may move more sluggishly to compensate, etc.
Since so few people would be expected to want to use keyboard&mouse on a console, it's probably just not worth the effort to design the game to cater for both types of control system.
This can serve to explain a lot about the CIA's more recent accuracy record. They actually have processes in place to automatically screen out intelligent applicants and preferentially include superstitious ones . . .
Only if you redfine 'leak' to be something other than data which is no longer reachable.
That depends on what you mean by "reachable". It is quite easy to end up with memory that cannot be reached from Java code but will never be collected.
This classically happened (and probably still does although I haven't checked for a while) if you forgot to call dispose() on GUI windows - the native GUI resource would not be freed because there is a piece of native code that hangs on to it until you call dispose().
Furthermore, you can easily "lose" your references into libraries that do not offer public access to them thereafter. For all practical purposes, these are not reachable from your code, although they certainly are reachable by the GC.
With NextGenTel's customer service record, you'd be lucky to get someone answering the phone in one hour - on a good day. Your proposed action would see each slashdotter getting through once, maybe twice, per day. This would be more hassle for each of us than it is for them in total :-)
The monopoly seat in Norway is generally held by Telenor, the ex-state telecoms monopoly. NextGenTel is a pretty big contender though.
Not being an active politician, I generally don't have to take realpolitik into account too much. What I describe is what I consider an ideal situation. :-)
I believe we will start moving towards this ideal within a generation, and chances are we'll be mostly there in two to three generations. It really needs for current legislators and judges to be replaced with today's young people before it comes to full fruition: The current establishment simply doesn't understand the true capabilities of modern technology the way that the young generation does.
As for the short term, the barriers to abolishing copyright are too great to have much hope of it happening any time soon. We have a huge entertainment industry that will need some time to reorient itself, and we should give it this time. We also have numerous international treaties that will need to be renegotiated for this reform to be possible, and that will most likely take decades in itself.
In the mean time, I'll keep advocating my ideals