I have this same problem -- there are a lot of interesting languages out there that I'm interested in trying, but I always keep going back to languages I already know because:
I have work to do; and
it's hard to objectively compare language merits in the short term or for trivial projects.
I was thinking that the solution to this is to have one program that I understand very well implemented as well and completely as possible in a language that I feel proficient in, and have that be my reference. Then, over the course of a couple of weeks (a month?), re-implement the same program in the new language and strive for the implementation to be as idiomatic of the new language as possible. After all, if you're still thinking in the old language but just using the new one's syntax, what's the point?
I feel like this would give you a lot of data to make a reasoned decision -- you can compare language features and how the implementation works in one versus the other; time to implementation (LOC, maybe?); how much of a mental shift the new language requires; the toolchain around the new language; etc.
The problem is figuring out what the reference app is, and having the stomach for implementing it over and over again. Tetris, maybe?;)
But, back to the resolution (and partially touched on) -- I don't think a week is enough time. A month is even cutting it close, IMO.
It seems like you don't know the right Christians, then.
Or, maybe, that these people are the same people as everywhere else -- generally rotten, hypocritical bastards.
In my personal experience, the Christians that I've known have been good and bad, same as everyone and everywhere else. I've been especially lucky, on the other hand, that the authority figures (priests) in the Church that I was raised in were good, well-educated men who had no problem with reconciling real life with what was written in the New Testament (I personally can't get over Christians that can quote the Old Testament better than they can the New Testament, but that's a different gripe altogether). In fact, the way that they managed to live what they preached -- one priest, for instance, donated a sizable sum of money to the Church when it fell on hard times, even though he makes a very small salary himself -- was truly inspirational to me. I would like to one day be as good a Christian as the example they set in front of me, but I'm not hopeful (I'm afraid I'm one of those other "normal" people).
I think you're guilty of the exact same kind of behavior, unfortunately, that you rail against from the theists -- a sense of moral and intellectual superiority that lets you separate them from yourself and subsequently dehumanize them in order to do them harm (in this case, social ridicule). Granted, some of the ideas are very bad, and especially can't be reconciled with modern scientific thought, but in my mind the way forward isn't to establish entrenched camps of intolerance and start firing at one another.
Or after we've actually gone through the trouble of figuring out that the solution we came up with fixed the problem at hand and caused many others due to the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Asbestos for everyone!
Seriously, though, if there are better solutions available today than terraforming and introducing pesticides that wipe out indigenous species (read: medicine and vaccines) and the only barrier to entry is the cost of said vaccines -- which are themselves artificially inflated to preserve drug company profits by trade agreements and intellectual property laws that effectively kill thousands of people around the world yearly -- don't you think the rich people that own the companies profiting while people who can't afford their products are dying should get an earful?
I thought C compilers had gotten to the point where C was just a convenient syntax for assembly anymore?
I'm only half-kidding here. I'm sure the main reason is for portability across different chipsets, as well as ease of debugging. But, as I said, I think a lot of current C compilers can generate code that's not appreciably larger than hand-written assembly.
I don't think the latest trend in RIAs and the associated frameworks is about changing the way we browse the web. I think it's about unifying desktop and web application development. You can sort of see it happening already with Silverlight, where you're effectively writing against the same WPF API, using the same XAML and.NET classes, for desktop apps and web apps intended to be run against the Silverlight runtime.
I think you're right in that all these schemes are effectively a reinvention of ActiveX and applets. But, honestly, I don't think that's a bad thing. The technologies themselves were bad and poorly implemented, but the ideas and motivations behind them were not.
One problem of adoption in the past, however, was that implementing any of these custom controls was prohibitively expensive from a bandwidth and "user education" perspective -- you absolutely could not count on a user waiting for your plugin to install (or, in Java's case, waiting for the full JRE to come down) or knowing how to install it properly. It's almost braindead with Flash and people still have problems from time to time. Silverlight has the advantage here, as Windows users will already have the runtime installed on their machines. Bandwidth is less of an issue today, but there's still the issue of platform (and which version, etc., etc.). It'll be interesting to see if that piece finally gets worked out.
Anyway, I for one will be glad to see the DOM and its many many many incompatible implementations go. HTML is meant for laying out pages, not for describing user interfaces. It has been 15 years and we still don't have a combobox, for fuck's sake!
XSL-FO is another markup language, but there's a good bit going for it, not the least of which is an application that renders it directly to PDF: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/
The main good thing about FO is the ability to take advantage of related XML technologies to help you generate the documents (and the various tools that you can use to generate them). You can embed SVG diagrams and MathML if you're comfortable with the namespaces; FOP can definitely render SVG via Apache's Batik project (which is also very good) and I'm pretty sure will also render inline MathML via an optional plugin. A lot of people mentioned OpenOffice, and the cool thing there is that since the documents it generates are XML documents (I'm pretty sure its equation editor emits MathML), you can use XSLTs to transform the documents that it generates into XSL-FO documents for rendering.
The obvious missing feature is the WYSIWYG app, but you'll find a bunch of links at the W3C's XSL-FO site.
The thing is that it wasn't a FPYITA prison. It was a minimum (no?) security prison that the guy basically just walked out of.
This guy was an asshole of such epic proportions it's ridiculous. His sentence was less than 2 years, and he felt the need to kill his young wife and baby girl as a result? What a selfish prick.
I totally agree with the tag that reads "editorsdontgetit". The problem with having this stealth update capability in the first place is that it's a clear and obvious vector for attack and p0wn4g3.
If somebody figures out how to hack these stealth updates (and now that people know the capability exists they will definitely try), then we can all look forward to the time when a rootkit or other exploit is pushed down to machines and installed with the blessing of the OS and the complete ignorance of the person whose machine just got screwed. And it'll look like a legitimate update as far as all parties are concerned after the fact.
The author claims that it's a "Bad Thing(tm)" when people eventually decide to pull the plug on Windows Update, and I agree given all the legitimate patches that have been made available this way. But on the other hand, what choice do we have? Do we leave a door open that has been proven to be used in an untrustworthy fashion by the very people that are telling us to trust them and that they're making our machines better/safer/++?
Will somebody please start writing games for Linux so I can be free of this nonsense?
Thanks for the reply -- I didn't go through your site in much detail before, but after about 2 clicks on the second visit I came to the "Ogre vs. CS" comparison page.
It looks like Ogre is at least as fully featured, and has some commercial games being developed on it right now.
By the way, this is a legitimate question -- I'm not a developer using either suite so I'm kind of curious if people out there have used both or if there was some rationale for the choice of one or the other.
Because in ratifying the Constitution, the states agree to abide by it? Maybe?
If anyone suing New York to shoot this law down can't get satisfaction from a state court (and I'd be utterly surprised if they didn't), they can take it to the Supreme Court and show that, as a matter of Constitutionality, this law violates the First Amendment and possibly the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment (as one other poster pointed out, under this law it's worse to sell video games to a kid than it is to sell cigarettes and alcohol. WTF??).
It will die, as it did in so many other states. And, again, it will waste a ton of money for New Yorkers when it goes to court to die.
Ignorance comes through pretty loud, doesn't it:( I've been programming on Windows for most of my professional work, and the stuff that I do on Linux is all Java.
Thanks very much for this information. I had no idea about this library nor that it had been around for almost 10 years already.
Well, for starters, point #1 was really aimed at the lack of an analog to DirectX on the Linux front. Yes, there's OpenGL and OpenML and OpenAL, but they're not a combined effort the way DirectX has Direct3D and DirectSound (and DirectInput and DirectNetwork and DirectEtc, Etc). The lack of truly portable APIs that are easy to work with and that work well together is a big problem for games development under Linux. It doesn't look like a solution has even been started, or that the community believes that such a solution is even necessary.
Second, the millions you want to recoup are outside the realm of indie games. That's why they're indie games to begin with. I agree that Linux users expect more direct access to the software for free, but that doesn't mean that software isn't sold on Linux. Far from it, in fact. The problem is that, until now, Linux has not been a user desktop / OS, and that has hindered the sale of end-user apps. As another poster pointed out, Mac users are more than happy to pay for software. There's no reason to not have a Linux version of your app if you have a MacOS version (except for Cocoa, which Apple is stupidly withholding when it could open it up and grow the size of their market by letting Linux developers hit their APIs, but that's a different rant for a different day). Anyway, my point is that you won't necessarily convince Linux users to shell out $50+ for a game, but an indie game should probably go for less, anyway. I think you *could* sell software to Linux users if the price was right.
Hell, I paid for CrossoverOffice! Not everyone that uses Linux (or, as in my case, wishes they could use it more than they already do) is dead opposed to paying for software.
I can't see that as a bad thing, frankly. If indie games start showing up natively in Linux out of necessity, it might create an atmosphere where:
The community puts more effort into supporting game developers on Linux (tools, APIs, etc.)
Linux begins to gain a reputation as a viable target for games (which it currently lacks)
Innovative games show up on Linux rather than Windows, possibly convincing people to convert
Granted, this doesn't mean that AAA titles will show up right away, but, given point #2, it might convince some developers apart from id and Epic to hit Linux with a native client for their games.
Plus, does anybody remember when Doom was an indie game and sold PCs? The bar has been raised, of course, but our tools have also become much more sophisticated in the interim.
Slashdot Mirror
I have this same problem -- there are a lot of interesting languages out there that I'm interested in trying, but I always keep going back to languages I already know because:
I was thinking that the solution to this is to have one program that I understand very well implemented as well and completely as possible in a language that I feel proficient in, and have that be my reference. Then, over the course of a couple of weeks (a month?), re-implement the same program in the new language and strive for the implementation to be as idiomatic of the new language as possible. After all, if you're still thinking in the old language but just using the new one's syntax, what's the point?
I feel like this would give you a lot of data to make a reasoned decision -- you can compare language features and how the implementation works in one versus the other; time to implementation (LOC, maybe?); how much of a mental shift the new language requires; the toolchain around the new language; etc.
The problem is figuring out what the reference app is, and having the stomach for implementing it over and over again. Tetris, maybe? ;)
But, back to the resolution (and partially touched on) -- I don't think a week is enough time. A month is even cutting it close, IMO.
C
(transliterated because Slashdot apparently doesn't allow input in other languages) "boroun na" ==> "are able to"
It's a typo in the article; basically it's saying the laser can pull objects from far away.
Haven't they played any of the Metroid games? We're all doomed!
C
It seems like you don't know the right Christians, then.
Or, maybe, that these people are the same people as everywhere else -- generally rotten, hypocritical bastards.
In my personal experience, the Christians that I've known have been good and bad, same as everyone and everywhere else. I've been especially lucky, on the other hand, that the authority figures (priests) in the Church that I was raised in were good, well-educated men who had no problem with reconciling real life with what was written in the New Testament (I personally can't get over Christians that can quote the Old Testament better than they can the New Testament, but that's a different gripe altogether). In fact, the way that they managed to live what they preached -- one priest, for instance, donated a sizable sum of money to the Church when it fell on hard times, even though he makes a very small salary himself -- was truly inspirational to me. I would like to one day be as good a Christian as the example they set in front of me, but I'm not hopeful (I'm afraid I'm one of those other "normal" people).
I think you're guilty of the exact same kind of behavior, unfortunately, that you rail against from the theists -- a sense of moral and intellectual superiority that lets you separate them from yourself and subsequently dehumanize them in order to do them harm (in this case, social ridicule). Granted, some of the ideas are very bad, and especially can't be reconciled with modern scientific thought, but in my mind the way forward isn't to establish entrenched camps of intolerance and start firing at one another.
C
Now, now, the Canadian government has apologized for Bryan Adams on several occasions!
Likewise in Southern New Jersey (and Philadelphia before this -- the very heart of Comcast darkness)
I get OpenDNS error pages for nonexistent domains.
Or after we've actually gone through the trouble of figuring out that the solution we came up with fixed the problem at hand and caused many others due to the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Asbestos for everyone!
Seriously, though, if there are better solutions available today than terraforming and introducing pesticides that wipe out indigenous species (read: medicine and vaccines) and the only barrier to entry is the cost of said vaccines -- which are themselves artificially inflated to preserve drug company profits by trade agreements and intellectual property laws that effectively kill thousands of people around the world yearly -- don't you think the rich people that own the companies profiting while people who can't afford their products are dying should get an earful?
C
I thought C compilers had gotten to the point where C was just a convenient syntax for assembly anymore?
I'm only half-kidding here. I'm sure the main reason is for portability across different chipsets, as well as ease of debugging. But, as I said, I think a lot of current C compilers can generate code that's not appreciably larger than hand-written assembly.
Compiler writers, please educate me otherwise.
C
I don't think the latest trend in RIAs and the associated frameworks is about changing the way we browse the web. I think it's about unifying desktop and web application development. You can sort of see it happening already with Silverlight, where you're effectively writing against the same WPF API, using the same XAML and .NET classes, for desktop apps and web apps intended to be run against the Silverlight runtime.
I think you're right in that all these schemes are effectively a reinvention of ActiveX and applets. But, honestly, I don't think that's a bad thing. The technologies themselves were bad and poorly implemented, but the ideas and motivations behind them were not.
One problem of adoption in the past, however, was that implementing any of these custom controls was prohibitively expensive from a bandwidth and "user education" perspective -- you absolutely could not count on a user waiting for your plugin to install (or, in Java's case, waiting for the full JRE to come down) or knowing how to install it properly. It's almost braindead with Flash and people still have problems from time to time. Silverlight has the advantage here, as Windows users will already have the runtime installed on their machines. Bandwidth is less of an issue today, but there's still the issue of platform (and which version, etc., etc.). It'll be interesting to see if that piece finally gets worked out.
Anyway, I for one will be glad to see the DOM and its many many many incompatible implementations go. HTML is meant for laying out pages, not for describing user interfaces. It has been 15 years and we still don't have a combobox, for fuck's sake!
C
Let the hate commence. Anyway:
XSL-FO is another markup language, but there's a good bit going for it, not the least of which is an application that renders it directly to PDF: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/
The main good thing about FO is the ability to take advantage of related XML technologies to help you generate the documents (and the various tools that you can use to generate them). You can embed SVG diagrams and MathML if you're comfortable with the namespaces; FOP can definitely render SVG via Apache's Batik project (which is also very good) and I'm pretty sure will also render inline MathML via an optional plugin. A lot of people mentioned OpenOffice, and the cool thing there is that since the documents it generates are XML documents (I'm pretty sure its equation editor emits MathML), you can use XSLTs to transform the documents that it generates into XSL-FO documents for rendering.
The obvious missing feature is the WYSIWYG app, but you'll find a bunch of links at the W3C's XSL-FO site.
Anyway, like I said, let the XML hate commence.
C
The thing is that it wasn't a FPYITA prison. It was a minimum (no?) security prison that the guy basically just walked out of.
This guy was an asshole of such epic proportions it's ridiculous. His sentence was less than 2 years, and he felt the need to kill his young wife and baby girl as a result? What a selfish prick.
OK. I know I'm an American and all, but I could swear that Canada is, in fact, on top of the US.
Don't try to further confuse my already small grasp of geography with your Canadian lies!
C
Dammit. I should have known that implied oral consent was not enough!
The cease-and-desist should be here any minute now...
C
Hey, I'm an American, and I can't think in these fancy units. I have no idea how you'd represent this in Football Fields.
How many Car Analogies is that, and how many ripped DVDs equal a Football Field?
Have we no standards anymore?
C
Uncouth to reply to my own post, I know, but do we even know that we can turn Windows Update off for these stealth updates in the first place?
C
I totally agree with the tag that reads "editorsdontgetit". The problem with having this stealth update capability in the first place is that it's a clear and obvious vector for attack and p0wn4g3.
If somebody figures out how to hack these stealth updates (and now that people know the capability exists they will definitely try), then we can all look forward to the time when a rootkit or other exploit is pushed down to machines and installed with the blessing of the OS and the complete ignorance of the person whose machine just got screwed. And it'll look like a legitimate update as far as all parties are concerned after the fact.
The author claims that it's a "Bad Thing(tm)" when people eventually decide to pull the plug on Windows Update, and I agree given all the legitimate patches that have been made available this way. But on the other hand, what choice do we have? Do we leave a door open that has been proven to be used in an untrustworthy fashion by the very people that are telling us to trust them and that they're making our machines better/safer/++?
Will somebody please start writing games for Linux so I can be free of this nonsense?
C
Are you sure it's in the cockles of your heart?
Is it possibly below the cockles? In the sub-cockle area, perhaps?
Maybe the liver or the kidneys?
The colon?
Maybe we'll never know...
C
Dude, that's hilarious. Damn youngsters don't understand good humor when they read it anymore. (...grumble, grumble, curmudgeon, curmudgeon ...)
Excellent SC2K reference!
C
Thanks for the reply -- I didn't go through your site in much detail before, but after about 2 clicks on the second visit I came to the "Ogre vs. CS" comparison page.
I guess you guys get this question a lot ;)
C
Thanks. The fingers go too fast today.
Ogre3D
It looks like Ogre is at least as fully featured, and has some commercial games being developed on it right now.
By the way, this is a legitimate question -- I'm not a developer using either suite so I'm kind of curious if people out there have used both or if there was some rationale for the choice of one or the other.
C
Because in ratifying the Constitution, the states agree to abide by it? Maybe?
If anyone suing New York to shoot this law down can't get satisfaction from a state court (and I'd be utterly surprised if they didn't), they can take it to the Supreme Court and show that, as a matter of Constitutionality, this law violates the First Amendment and possibly the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment (as one other poster pointed out, under this law it's worse to sell video games to a kid than it is to sell cigarettes and alcohol. WTF??).
It will die, as it did in so many other states. And, again, it will waste a ton of money for New Yorkers when it goes to court to die.
C
Ignorance comes through pretty loud, doesn't it :( I've been programming on Windows for most of my professional work, and the stuff that I do on Linux is all Java.
Thanks very much for this information. I had no idea about this library nor that it had been around for almost 10 years already.
C
Well, for starters, point #1 was really aimed at the lack of an analog to DirectX on the Linux front. Yes, there's OpenGL and OpenML and OpenAL, but they're not a combined effort the way DirectX has Direct3D and DirectSound (and DirectInput and DirectNetwork and DirectEtc, Etc). The lack of truly portable APIs that are easy to work with and that work well together is a big problem for games development under Linux. It doesn't look like a solution has even been started, or that the community believes that such a solution is even necessary.
Second, the millions you want to recoup are outside the realm of indie games. That's why they're indie games to begin with. I agree that Linux users expect more direct access to the software for free, but that doesn't mean that software isn't sold on Linux. Far from it, in fact. The problem is that, until now, Linux has not been a user desktop / OS, and that has hindered the sale of end-user apps. As another poster pointed out, Mac users are more than happy to pay for software. There's no reason to not have a Linux version of your app if you have a MacOS version (except for Cocoa, which Apple is stupidly withholding when it could open it up and grow the size of their market by letting Linux developers hit their APIs, but that's a different rant for a different day). Anyway, my point is that you won't necessarily convince Linux users to shell out $50+ for a game, but an indie game should probably go for less, anyway. I think you *could* sell software to Linux users if the price was right.
Hell, I paid for CrossoverOffice! Not everyone that uses Linux (or, as in my case, wishes they could use it more than they already do) is dead opposed to paying for software.
Your points, however, are well taken.
C
I can't see that as a bad thing, frankly. If indie games start showing up natively in Linux out of necessity, it might create an atmosphere where:
Granted, this doesn't mean that AAA titles will show up right away, but, given point #2, it might convince some developers apart from id and Epic to hit Linux with a native client for their games.
Plus, does anybody remember when Doom was an indie game and sold PCs? The bar has been raised, of course, but our tools have also become much more sophisticated in the interim.
C