Standard tabs are eight spaces. Standard indentation is four spaces. Anyone see the problem?
This is why I always convert tabs to spaces. It's just polite to other coders. Any decent editor will do this for you automatically. Are bytes so precious that we need to save three of them for every indent?
I remember once on the freebsd-newbies list when someone asked a question and other jumped on him with RTFM! He then sent a diatribe about about the rudeness of FreeBSD users, yada, yada, yada.
He closed his rant with the claim that he DID read the fcuking manual and the answer wasn't in it. He was then inundated with several dozen posts QUOTING the answer from the first chapter of the handbook. We never heard from him again.
It's okay to be stupid in the FreeBSD community, but it's not okay to be a liar.
You're basically validating my original thesis: that Lisp is unsuitable for mainstream programming. MAYBE if Lisp machines and architectures had taken off, MAYBE if Unix and Windows didn't hijack and corrupt the minds of our youth, MAYBE if Lisp had been taught to every CS freshman for the last two decades, MAYBE just MAYBE things would be different. But in the reality of this world, Lisp is unsuitable for mainstream programming.
I predict, without reading other post, that there will be one or more posts here claiming that comments are bad. Furthermore, I predict that at least one of these posts will be modded up.
How can I predict this? Easy! We always get them everytime the subject of code commenting has come up on Slashdot. Some will be touting the moral superiority of literate programming, others will be giving anecdotes about excessive comments as an excuse not to comment, and still others will claim that comments are bad because no one ever updates them when they update the code.
Now let me go read the comments and see if my prediction was correct...
Your arguments may make sense why C, C++ and Java are more popular than Lisp, but it doesn't explain why Python and Ruby are as well.
Your demographics argument is species. Old Lisp programmers where young once. So where are all their mainstream applications they wrote in their youth? You can't blame bitrot, because my current FreeBSD system has dozens of utilities that are directly descended from twenty year old code. Hell, the Free Software movement itself was started by a Lisp programmer! Other than parts of emacs, where are his Lisp programs?
You're the one who doesn't "get it". GNOME is not a core component of Linux, it's a freaking desktop! I suspect that GNOME isn't even installed in most Linux systems.
But that's minor. The big thing you "don't get" is that Linux (or BSD, GNOME, Solaris, KDE, XFCE, etc, etc) is not about you! Open Source is about freedom, choice, and openness. When you come along ranting that Linux doesn't "get it" because it isn't catering to your vision, it's you who are out of step and don't "get it".
Shit, you didn't even offer any concrete examples in your rant. At the very minimum you could have given us a real example and explained why the Solaris/OSX way is better than the GNOME way. Configs that don't make sense? Explain! Pissing about GNOME isn't going to fix anything.
The best evidence is the dearth of mainstream applications written in lisp. By "mainstream" I don't mean commercial, I mean some application or utility a non-programmer would use.
For a language that's as old and as evangelized and as well liked as lisp, this is very strange.
Reflection is a nice pattern. But the ADP book treats it as an *architectural* pattern. As in, it defines the entire structure of your system. Consequently, the architectural team at my work is making a brand new system based on the reflection pattern.
My coworkers aren't stupid, they've just getting a lot of positive feedback from their use of buzzwords.
Instead, what I often see if people spouting pattern names like one would name-drop at a party
I'm seeing this at work, and it's driving me nuts. Our new Bible is "Architectural Design Patterns". The big push right now is to move to.NET because "it's enables Reflection."
Unless of course, cElement is a cParent. In that case inheritance makes sense.
Using composition for everything is just as bad as using inheritance for everything. That inheritance seems to be your pet peeve, makes me think that you use composition much more than you should. Everything has its balance, but when you go out on a limb to tell someone else that he's unbalanced, make sure that limb doesn't break.
Language bigots always think they're language is perfect. They even seek out its imperfections just so they can figure out how to recast them as perfections instead. Language bigots are among the most prickly people. Even moreso than editor or OS bigots. Prick them and they explode.
Lisp is a great language, but it's not suitable for most mainstream programming tasks. Sorry, but it's not.
My company certainly wants.NET. They want it so bad they're willing to completely remove the real time OS from hard real time medical diagnostic system... just so they can use.NET.
Take a look at your example. Keep looking. Eventually you might see the problem.
Still can't see it? You've REPEATED the question in the answer! "Install Security Updates?" is identical to "Install Security Updates" except for the question mark. In other words, it's semantically identical to a simple "yes". So why is a simple "yes" evil? Why is a simple "yes" going to frighten the user into peeing his pants while an eight syllable phrase won't?
You make it seem as if not reading the dialog text is a good thing. For a security update, I WANT THE USER TO READ THE DIALOG TEXT! In actual behavior, so do you, because you repeated the dialog text in the question!
Of course you do! Except for self-titled usability experts, we ALL do! Let's imagine the standad configuration or preferences dialog with verb-object buttons: "Apply these settings and remove this dialog", "apply these settings", "remove this dialog".
Speaking of GIMP, its save dialog is one reason I dislike the new "usability". Because this dialog isn't usable. It's *different* from all the other dialogs on the desktop, it's jarring. Trying to close GIMP with an unsaved file is downright confusing, despite the verbs. That's because the verbs aren't linked to objects, so we don't know what they mean. I cheated above by using objects in my examples. Most usability experts strongly recommend a one word imperative verbs.
The GTK+2 file dialogs are the biggest pieces of unusability I've ever seen. It's like they combined the worst of the Windows explorer with the worst of the Mac finder. Pretending that the verbs make it all shiny and pristine is bullshit.
The save dialog uses a one-syllable word, "save". It's thus an exception. Similar examples would be "quit" or "run".
But the examples people keep bringing up (in their effort to portray KDE as a steaming pile of unusable shit) are phrases like "burn just these files to DVD". I've even once seen a dialog where the text in the buttons was longer then the text in the dialog. Which makes me wonder if in the future of "usability" whether we'll be told to get rid of text labels all together and put everything in buttons. Isn't that the final goal of usability experts, to make the entire desktop a single button that says "do it"?
Which is why the Republican part is starting to strain. The libertarian and small government side is trying to get away from the social conservative big government side. There's even a strain in the "religious right" between these two forces, as enough of them realize that replacing Jesus with Caesar is not wise course of action.
Slashdot Mirror
Standard tabs are eight spaces. Standard indentation is four spaces. Anyone see the problem?
This is why I always convert tabs to spaces. It's just polite to other coders. Any decent editor will do this for you automatically. Are bytes so precious that we need to save three of them for every indent?
Funny. It's monday morning at work as I read this. Maybe YOU are spending your saturday mornings posting about Slasdork, I'm not.
I remember once on the freebsd-newbies list when someone asked a question and other jumped on him with RTFM! He then sent a diatribe about about the rudeness of FreeBSD users, yada, yada, yada.
He closed his rant with the claim that he DID read the fcuking manual and the answer wasn't in it. He was then inundated with several dozen posts QUOTING the answer from the first chapter of the handbook. We never heard from him again.
It's okay to be stupid in the FreeBSD community, but it's not okay to be a liar.
You're basically validating my original thesis: that Lisp is unsuitable for mainstream programming. MAYBE if Lisp machines and architectures had taken off, MAYBE if Unix and Windows didn't hijack and corrupt the minds of our youth, MAYBE if Lisp had been taught to every CS freshman for the last two decades, MAYBE just MAYBE things would be different. But in the reality of this world, Lisp is unsuitable for mainstream programming.
I predict, without reading other post, that there will be one or more posts here claiming that comments are bad. Furthermore, I predict that at least one of these posts will be modded up.
How can I predict this? Easy! We always get them everytime the subject of code commenting has come up on Slashdot. Some will be touting the moral superiority of literate programming, others will be giving anecdotes about excessive comments as an excuse not to comment, and still others will claim that comments are bad because no one ever updates them when they update the code.
Now let me go read the comments and see if my prediction was correct...
Your arguments may make sense why C, C++ and Java are more popular than Lisp, but it doesn't explain why Python and Ruby are as well.
Your demographics argument is species. Old Lisp programmers where young once. So where are all their mainstream applications they wrote in their youth? You can't blame bitrot, because my current FreeBSD system has dozens of utilities that are directly descended from twenty year old code. Hell, the Free Software movement itself was started by a Lisp programmer! Other than parts of emacs, where are his Lisp programs?
You're the one who doesn't "get it". GNOME is not a core component of Linux, it's a freaking desktop! I suspect that GNOME isn't even installed in most Linux systems.
But that's minor. The big thing you "don't get" is that Linux (or BSD, GNOME, Solaris, KDE, XFCE, etc, etc) is not about you! Open Source is about freedom, choice, and openness. When you come along ranting that Linux doesn't "get it" because it isn't catering to your vision, it's you who are out of step and don't "get it".
Shit, you didn't even offer any concrete examples in your rant. At the very minimum you could have given us a real example and explained why the Solaris/OSX way is better than the GNOME way. Configs that don't make sense? Explain! Pissing about GNOME isn't going to fix anything.
I used a Xerox Star once. Cool machine. When the Lisa came out I thought it just a cheap Xerox with smaller monitor.
Do you even know what a pattern is?
Thank goodness I'm not a language bigot then :-)
That's nit picking. It's anal attention to trivialities like this that leads people to completely avoid inheritance.
The best evidence is the dearth of mainstream applications written in lisp. By "mainstream" I don't mean commercial, I mean some application or utility a non-programmer would use.
For a language that's as old and as evangelized and as well liked as lisp, this is very strange.
Reflection is a nice pattern. But the ADP book treats it as an *architectural* pattern. As in, it defines the entire structure of your system. Consequently, the architectural team at my work is making a brand new system based on the reflection pattern.
My coworkers aren't stupid, they've just getting a lot of positive feedback from their use of buzzwords.
Instead, what I often see if people spouting pattern names like one would name-drop at a party
.NET because "it's enables Reflection."
I'm seeing this at work, and it's driving me nuts. Our new Bible is "Architectural Design Patterns". The big push right now is to move to
Unless of course, cElement is a cParent. In that case inheritance makes sense.
Using composition for everything is just as bad as using inheritance for everything. That inheritance seems to be your pet peeve, makes me think that you use composition much more than you should. Everything has its balance, but when you go out on a limb to tell someone else that he's unbalanced, make sure that limb doesn't break.
Of course :-)
Language bigots always think they're language is perfect. They even seek out its imperfections just so they can figure out how to recast them as perfections instead. Language bigots are among the most prickly people. Even moreso than editor or OS bigots. Prick them and they explode.
Lisp is a great language, but it's not suitable for most mainstream programming tasks. Sorry, but it's not.
Then why the fcuk even bother putting text in the dialog to begin with? Or will that be GNOME's next Great Leap Forward?
My company certainly wants .NET. They want it so bad they're willing to completely remove the real time OS from hard real time medical diagnostic system... just so they can use .NET.
IM is for kids who want to converse but who have nothing to say.
IM is for kids who can track the threads of twenty different conversations simultaneously, but don't have an attention span longer than ten seconds.
IM is for kids who have nothing better to do than get interrupted with a message every nine seconds.
IM is for kids so unsocialized they need it to talk to someone standing only five feet away.
Take a look at your example. Keep looking. Eventually you might see the problem.
Still can't see it? You've REPEATED the question in the answer! "Install Security Updates?" is identical to "Install Security Updates" except for the question mark. In other words, it's semantically identical to a simple "yes". So why is a simple "yes" evil? Why is a simple "yes" going to frighten the user into peeing his pants while an eight syllable phrase won't?
You make it seem as if not reading the dialog text is a good thing. For a security update, I WANT THE USER TO READ THE DIALOG TEXT! In actual behavior, so do you, because you repeated the dialog text in the question!
i prefer ok/apply/cancel buttons in preferences
Of course you do! Except for self-titled usability experts, we ALL do! Let's imagine the standad configuration or preferences dialog with verb-object buttons: "Apply these settings and remove this dialog", "apply these settings", "remove this dialog".
Speaking of GIMP, its save dialog is one reason I dislike the new "usability". Because this dialog isn't usable. It's *different* from all the other dialogs on the desktop, it's jarring. Trying to close GIMP with an unsaved file is downright confusing, despite the verbs. That's because the verbs aren't linked to objects, so we don't know what they mean. I cheated above by using objects in my examples. Most usability experts strongly recommend a one word imperative verbs.
The GTK+2 file dialogs are the biggest pieces of unusability I've ever seen. It's like they combined the worst of the Windows explorer with the worst of the Mac finder. Pretending that the verbs make it all shiny and pristine is bullshit.
The save dialog uses a one-syllable word, "save". It's thus an exception. Similar examples would be "quit" or "run".
But the examples people keep bringing up (in their effort to portray KDE as a steaming pile of unusable shit) are phrases like "burn just these files to DVD". I've even once seen a dialog where the text in the buttons was longer then the text in the dialog. Which makes me wonder if in the future of "usability" whether we'll be told to get rid of text labels all together and put everything in buttons. Isn't that the final goal of usability experts, to make the entire desktop a single button that says "do it"?
The point is that using Yes/No forces the user to read the entire dialog.
And this is bad how?
KDE does not get this and they probably never will.
Which is a good thing, because I don't like desktops that assume I'm a lazy fcuk unable to read dialogs.
It is easy to confuse the meaning of a "yes" or "no" response if the question isn't correctly stated.
Then state it correctly! Fix the bugs instead of masking them.
If the KDE group wants KDE to be usable by the majority of people...
That's not the goal of KDE.
Which is why the Republican part is starting to strain. The libertarian and small government side is trying to get away from the social conservative big government side. There's even a strain in the "religious right" between these two forces, as enough of them realize that replacing Jesus with Caesar is not wise course of action.