You know, the part where you said C deallocation is easier than C++.
Except that's not what I said. I said it was harder to write C++ code, using the C++ language features that differentiate it from C, and not leak memory.
Freeing up the memory when you know you need to is easy. Catching every case in which you need to no matter what unexpected thing happens is not easy. A C++ programmer who thinks it's easy either has been working with C++ a very long time, or, more likely, is leaking memory and doesn't realize it.
Yeah, the C++ community has tried to come up with solutions to these problems; IMHO, the cure is almost always worse than the disease.
Nice. If you don't like C++, it must be because you're a bad programmer.
It's much harder to write C++ code that, for example, will never leak memory no matter what goes wrong than in the assorted garbage collected languages, or even vanilla C. That, I don't see how anyone could even reasonably argue.
C++ was an important step on the way to better languages (for the problems it was trying to solve -- not for everything), but that doesn't mean that given today's alternatives it should be considered good.
Being a good programmer is about being good at solving the problem at hand in a clean, maintainable way. It's not about being able to memorize the weird inconsistencies in a language or fight a better fight with a difficult language. Even for a project that has to be done close to the machine, you'll almost always get in less trouble using C. (Or, if you must, using C++ but generally ignoring the C++ features.)
It's worth noticing that the guy bothered with a GUI and an interactive filtering option for such a simple program. I wonder whether he ever heard of CLI, because it looks like a perfect fit for this kind of program.
For what it's worth, throwing together quick GUIs for things like this in.NET is so fast and easy, I typically do it for things like this, where I'd make a CLI when working with anything else.
I mean, being the "heir to Visual Basic" (among other things) is kind of a mixed bag, but in this specific case it's pretty handy.
And how many people have automatic-updates turned off in windows?
Nearly every company of medium or greater size. They want to roll out on their schedule, not Microsoft's. I'm not going to argue whether or not this is a smart choice -- it's just the reality out there.
Shit, over a quarter of the world is still using IE6 -- and IE7 is two years old.
Are you sure you read the same 1984 I read? Cause pretty much nothing in there is real even now, aside from the paranoia you and others who think it is happening seem to exhibit.
What about the massive rise of cameras watching everything in the U.K.? (Not quite yet to 1984 levels, but I think it's hard to argue that it's not going in that direction.)
Or the U.S. passing laws (e.g., the Patriot Act) that increase the government's power to spy on and repress its citizens and getting the people to go along with it by declaring a war that can never be won? Okay, that's not Oceania declaring war on Eastasia, but it's pretty damn close -- if anything, it's more clever and diabolical than Orwell's conception of the same.
You're assuming everyone uses the most current version of their chosen browser. That would generally be the smart thing to do, so of course it's not what people as a whole actually do.:)
MS Project paves the way to waterfall projects, mainly because most managers don't understand iterative development.
I'd say the problem is more general: most business people don't understand iterative development. They want hard deadlines and schedules and guarantees, even though software development doesn't really work that way.
Essentially, they stick their heads in the sand and want software development to be just like manufacturing.
Give most businesses a choice between a waterfall development PM and an iterative development PM, and they're going to pick the waterfall guy because he's willing to give them a (probably very inaccurate) deadline of when the whole giant project will be done.
As judgements go, this seems toothless or perhaps worse . . . unless you consider the specter of this years ago to have caused Microsoft to make some different decisions.
According to TFA, the DoJ is mainly concerned with:
- Compatability/bundling in four areas, three of which, such as bundling an instant messenger, Microsoft has given up on since '01. Web browser is the area on that list still in play.
- Making sure that bugs in previous versions of Windows don't recur. Congratulations, your tax dollars are providing extra Windows QA.
But all the time I spent as a kid trying to get games to work on Windows 95, when they were made for Windows 95, "Just Works" is not something that I would use to label it then.
It might be a matter of perspective. Relative to DOS and what was going on in Apple land at the time it was a lot easier -- even though it was more of a struggle than we're used to now.
I'd be afraid to smoke what they apparently put in the crack pipes at Lotus, at least in the Notes division.
No kidding. People who live in glass houses and all that.
Although that being said, I have to be honest and admit that the newest version of Notes is a big improvement. It's still a giant eyesore and usability nightmare and generally inferior to Outlook in nearly every way that matters to the typical user (and come on, that's not THAT high of a bar to reach for), but at least it doesn't constantly crash and refuse to start up again.
That's the nice thing about freedom in the US. You could have had it another way, but you chose not to.
I agree that it's a matter of opportunity costs and priorities; however, I suspect you think Americans generally have made these choices for more arbitrary reasons than they actually do.
For example: in most American cities, schools are beyond terrible by any reasonable metric. If you want your children to have a passable education, one needs to either invest in private education (not cheap), have one parent stay home and homeschool (not cheap), or live in the suburbs where schools are usually ridiculously better.
Now, I grant you, if a whole bunch of parents decided to move downtown together, get involved in politics, and successfully push for the raising of property taxes to improve the quality of city schools... it's not impossible that they'd be successful. But, this is not a choice an individual American can make.
And just how do you propose driving in a foot of snow in a car? Oh, they clear the roads? Gotcha.
Ah, clever! But no.
As it happens, part of my commute this last winter was not regularly plowed. During a few snowstorms I learned that my car will, in fact, handle driving in about a foot of snow. (Also about a foot of water, which has come up with the same car under different commuting circumstances.)
I've tried that on a bicycle; it's much less pretty.
Oh, wow. That's like... half an hour by bike. The horror.
That's true. Now do that in -40 degree (convieniently, the same in celsius or fahrenheit! no conversion necessary) windchill and get back to me. Possibly in a foot of snow.
I mean, sure, I walked about 2 miles to class in conditions like that a couple months of the year when I was in college, but I also was young and in good shape. That would literally kill a decent chunk of the population.
So one conservative over a million liberals makes it exclusively conservative? The Teachers' Unions, the current Congress, the Dept of Education all like to bitch that they need more money to execute NCLB, but no one is getting rid of it, are they?
Keep in mind, NCLB is an absolute piece of crap that was doomed from the start. I think its only point was to show that the US public education system is so broken by a Teachers' Union who won't allow any progressive change, that only fools would send their kids to public schools. Luckily for the public schools, they create a ready supply of fools.
NCLB was also passed by a Republican congress.:)
Pretty much every teacher I know (which is more than a few -- every kid in my generation of my extended family except me became a teacher) was very vocal about NCLB being crap and doomed by the start. I'm not sure if the teacher's unions were in that boat in general, but I'd need to see some evidence to believe you can lay NCLB in their lap either.
They had a show like that in the 90's...Boston Public?
Yeah, I remember that. I probably should've mentioned it in my original post.
It was on for a couple seasons, but ratingswise it was nowhere near on the success scale of a show like L.A. Law. We need the closest Boston Public equivalent to that.
For starters, get your fat *ss out of your SUV when going places less than a mile away...
What you may not realize is that America is, in general, much more spread out and less densely populated than Europe.
There literally isn't a single business within a mile of my house. I purposely chose my home location to minimize my distance to shopping/work, and we're still talking multiple miles to get to any of the above in different directions. 20-30 mile commutes each way are typical in my area, not exceptional, and I know more than a few people with much longer commutes. Public transportation is poor at best. (It's better in some cities.)
I'm not saying any of this isn't our fault as a country, but the situation in general is a lot different than yours with respect to driving.
What we need to fix the education problems in America (eventually) are some big hit TV shows that glamorize the life of a teacher.
I remember reading this survey years ago wherein they asked recent law school graduates what their original inspiration to become a lawyer was. Something like 90% of them said L.A. Law. Thanks, TV producers, we didn't have enough lawyers.
A lot of people naturally gravitate towards one career or another, but I get the feeling that there are still a lot of smart people in each generation who could be successful in a lot of different fields but whom will gravitate towards whatever career is seen as exciting or prestigious. I think if we can just find a way to make teacher that profession, over time the average quality of teachers will increase and the quality of education in this country will improve. Currently, since teachers get little respect and little money, it's a career of either people who really love to teach and are willing to do it despite the downsides, or people too lazy or unqualified to make it in a more challenging field. Imagine the quality of teachers if it instead was the field of those who love it, but also of driven achievers instead of yahoos who want the summer off.
But, according to the liberals in charge of the NKLB Policy, its okay to let the smart kids suffer as long as the slower kids are meant to feel 'bad' about being slower.
Uh... didn't NCLB come specifically out of the Bush administration?
A lot of people don't want to work for DARPA because it means living in or around Arlington, Virginia. (Source: http://www.darpa.gov/hrd/ )
My friends aren't there. My family isn't there. It would take a shit ton of money for me to be able to financially justify relocating there, which would involve my wife needing to quit her job to come with, as well as needing to sell my house in a shitty market for selling houses.
Sorry, but if you have only one location and you want the best and the brightest, you have to be willing to offer stupid amounts of money to make sure it's financially viable for all the best and the brightest. I think it'd be cool as hell to work on a lot of the projects I've seen come out of DARPA, but not enough to enter poverty (and more, to ask my family to enter poverty) to do it.
If they want to play dirty then let the rest of the world play dirty against them. I hope the whole world has their chance to sue Microsoft for no good reason.
Yeah, because two wrongs clearly make a right.
Doing wrong even to those who do wrong to you always comes back around. Not because any sense of karma or universal justice, but because nothing in the world happens in a vacuum, and there are always consequences.
Why the assumption there is a natural and inherent link between 'people who do' and 'people who know'? Do 'real world conditions' provide the opportunities for reflexivity, assessment, and critical engagement with practices?
There's a saying in boxing: everyone has a plan until they get hit. It's very similar to the saying that a battle plan never survives contact with the enemy.
The best software design principles and processes can survive levels of incredible retardation and bad choices beyond your control that you probably will never experience in academia, but that you will experience in industry on a daily basis. It's only when you're dealing with something like having to perform maintenance on uncommented code that serves up web pages that someone unavailable wrote in COBOL ten years ago for some reason that you really can see the strengths or weaknesses of some possible design or process choices.
JavaScript libraries are better and more capable than they ever have been, but they can't escape being what they are. There are just too many questions that they are not the right answer for, and getting cross-platform cross-browser compability to be as good as the promise of open standards is not yet there for any reasonably complex web app. (That is to say, you can get a complex app to work right on a variety of platforms, but you're kidding yourself if you think it's going to be free/easy.)
Something like Flash/Flex or Silverlight isn't the answer to all web problems either, and never will be -- but more and more I'm seeing businesses ask for extremely rich interface intranet-ish apps to be done as web apps, and then be frustrated when the standards/JavaScript/etc. solution either is quirky or non-performant in some way that really matters to them. I think this kind of app is going to be done more and more with Flex or Silverlight or something similar in the next few years, and I don't see SproutCore as seriously competing in that space.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, if you love C so much, then why not use full-on C style memory management? Then it's almost exactly the same as C.
Of course C++ is no worse than C if you ignore all of its unique features, but then, what did using C++ get you?
You know, the part where you said C deallocation is easier than C++.
Except that's not what I said. I said it was harder to write C++ code, using the C++ language features that differentiate it from C, and not leak memory.
Freeing up the memory when you know you need to is easy. Catching every case in which you need to no matter what unexpected thing happens is not easy. A C++ programmer who thinks it's easy either has been working with C++ a very long time, or, more likely, is leaking memory and doesn't realize it.
Yeah, the C++ community has tried to come up with solutions to these problems; IMHO, the cure is almost always worse than the disease.
Nice. If you don't like C++, it must be because you're a bad programmer.
It's much harder to write C++ code that, for example, will never leak memory no matter what goes wrong than in the assorted garbage collected languages, or even vanilla C. That, I don't see how anyone could even reasonably argue.
C++ was an important step on the way to better languages (for the problems it was trying to solve -- not for everything), but that doesn't mean that given today's alternatives it should be considered good.
Being a good programmer is about being good at solving the problem at hand in a clean, maintainable way. It's not about being able to memorize the weird inconsistencies in a language or fight a better fight with a difficult language. Even for a project that has to be done close to the machine, you'll almost always get in less trouble using C. (Or, if you must, using C++ but generally ignoring the C++ features.)
It's worth noticing that the guy bothered with a GUI and an interactive filtering option for such a simple program. I wonder whether he ever heard of CLI, because it looks like a perfect fit for this kind of program.
For what it's worth, throwing together quick GUIs for things like this in .NET is so fast and easy, I typically do it for things like this, where I'd make a CLI when working with anything else.
I mean, being the "heir to Visual Basic" (among other things) is kind of a mixed bag, but in this specific case it's pretty handy.
And how many people have automatic-updates turned off in windows?
Nearly every company of medium or greater size. They want to roll out on their schedule, not Microsoft's. I'm not going to argue whether or not this is a smart choice -- it's just the reality out there.
Shit, over a quarter of the world is still using IE6 -- and IE7 is two years old.
Are you sure you read the same 1984 I read? Cause pretty much nothing in there is real even now, aside from the paranoia you and others who think it is happening seem to exhibit.
What about the massive rise of cameras watching everything in the U.K.? (Not quite yet to 1984 levels, but I think it's hard to argue that it's not going in that direction.)
Or the U.S. passing laws (e.g., the Patriot Act) that increase the government's power to spy on and repress its citizens and getting the people to go along with it by declaring a war that can never be won? Okay, that's not Oceania declaring war on Eastasia, but it's pretty damn close -- if anything, it's more clever and diabolical than Orwell's conception of the same.
You're assuming everyone uses the most current version of their chosen browser. That would generally be the smart thing to do, so of course it's not what people as a whole actually do. :)
MS Project paves the way to waterfall projects, mainly because most managers don't understand iterative development.
I'd say the problem is more general: most business people don't understand iterative development. They want hard deadlines and schedules and guarantees, even though software development doesn't really work that way.
Essentially, they stick their heads in the sand and want software development to be just like manufacturing.
Give most businesses a choice between a waterfall development PM and an iterative development PM, and they're going to pick the waterfall guy because he's willing to give them a (probably very inaccurate) deadline of when the whole giant project will be done.
As judgements go, this seems toothless or perhaps worse . . . unless you consider the specter of this years ago to have caused Microsoft to make some different decisions.
According to TFA, the DoJ is mainly concerned with:
- Compatability/bundling in four areas, three of which, such as bundling an instant messenger, Microsoft has given up on since '01. Web browser is the area on that list still in play.
- Making sure that bugs in previous versions of Windows don't recur. Congratulations, your tax dollars are providing extra Windows QA.
I thought everyone knew open source projects didn't have documentation!
(The above is a joke, albeit one with a grain of truth to it.)
But all the time I spent as a kid trying to get games to work on Windows 95, when they were made for Windows 95, "Just Works" is not something that I would use to label it then.
It might be a matter of perspective. Relative to DOS and what was going on in Apple land at the time it was a lot easier -- even though it was more of a struggle than we're used to now.
By your "logic", Edison would have been a "genius" for buying an electric light bulb from someone else who built one.
If he made a ridiculously enormous pile of money thereby, he sure would be.
Engineering genius, while great, isn't the only kind of genius in the world.
I'd be afraid to smoke what they apparently put in the crack pipes at Lotus, at least in the Notes division.
No kidding. People who live in glass houses and all that.
Although that being said, I have to be honest and admit that the newest version of Notes is a big improvement. It's still a giant eyesore and usability nightmare and generally inferior to Outlook in nearly every way that matters to the typical user (and come on, that's not THAT high of a bar to reach for), but at least it doesn't constantly crash and refuse to start up again.
That's the nice thing about freedom in the US. You could have had it another way, but you chose not to.
I agree that it's a matter of opportunity costs and priorities; however, I suspect you think Americans generally have made these choices for more arbitrary reasons than they actually do.
For example: in most American cities, schools are beyond terrible by any reasonable metric. If you want your children to have a passable education, one needs to either invest in private education (not cheap), have one parent stay home and homeschool (not cheap), or live in the suburbs where schools are usually ridiculously better.
Now, I grant you, if a whole bunch of parents decided to move downtown together, get involved in politics, and successfully push for the raising of property taxes to improve the quality of city schools... it's not impossible that they'd be successful. But, this is not a choice an individual American can make.
And just how do you propose driving in a foot of snow in a car? Oh, they clear the roads? Gotcha.
Ah, clever! But no.
As it happens, part of my commute this last winter was not regularly plowed. During a few snowstorms I learned that my car will, in fact, handle driving in about a foot of snow. (Also about a foot of water, which has come up with the same car under different commuting circumstances.)
I've tried that on a bicycle; it's much less pretty.
Oh, wow. That's like ... half an hour by bike. The horror.
That's true. Now do that in -40 degree (convieniently, the same in celsius or fahrenheit! no conversion necessary) windchill and get back to me. Possibly in a foot of snow.
I mean, sure, I walked about 2 miles to class in conditions like that a couple months of the year when I was in college, but I also was young and in good shape. That would literally kill a decent chunk of the population.
So one conservative over a million liberals makes it exclusively conservative? The Teachers' Unions, the current Congress, the Dept of Education all like to bitch that they need more money to execute NCLB, but no one is getting rid of it, are they?
:)
Keep in mind, NCLB is an absolute piece of crap that was doomed from the start. I think its only point was to show that the US public education system is so broken by a Teachers' Union who won't allow any progressive change, that only fools would send their kids to public schools. Luckily for the public schools, they create a ready supply of fools.
NCLB was also passed by a Republican congress.
Pretty much every teacher I know (which is more than a few -- every kid in my generation of my extended family except me became a teacher) was very vocal about NCLB being crap and doomed by the start. I'm not sure if the teacher's unions were in that boat in general, but I'd need to see some evidence to believe you can lay NCLB in their lap either.
They had a show like that in the 90's...Boston Public?
Yeah, I remember that. I probably should've mentioned it in my original post.
It was on for a couple seasons, but ratingswise it was nowhere near on the success scale of a show like L.A. Law. We need the closest Boston Public equivalent to that.
For starters, get your fat *ss out of your SUV when going places less than a mile away...
What you may not realize is that America is, in general, much more spread out and less densely populated than Europe.
There literally isn't a single business within a mile of my house. I purposely chose my home location to minimize my distance to shopping/work, and we're still talking multiple miles to get to any of the above in different directions. 20-30 mile commutes each way are typical in my area, not exceptional, and I know more than a few people with much longer commutes. Public transportation is poor at best. (It's better in some cities.)
I'm not saying any of this isn't our fault as a country, but the situation in general is a lot different than yours with respect to driving.
What we need to fix the education problems in America (eventually) are some big hit TV shows that glamorize the life of a teacher.
I remember reading this survey years ago wherein they asked recent law school graduates what their original inspiration to become a lawyer was. Something like 90% of them said L.A. Law. Thanks, TV producers, we didn't have enough lawyers.
A lot of people naturally gravitate towards one career or another, but I get the feeling that there are still a lot of smart people in each generation who could be successful in a lot of different fields but whom will gravitate towards whatever career is seen as exciting or prestigious. I think if we can just find a way to make teacher that profession, over time the average quality of teachers will increase and the quality of education in this country will improve. Currently, since teachers get little respect and little money, it's a career of either people who really love to teach and are willing to do it despite the downsides, or people too lazy or unqualified to make it in a more challenging field. Imagine the quality of teachers if it instead was the field of those who love it, but also of driven achievers instead of yahoos who want the summer off.
But, according to the liberals in charge of the NKLB Policy, its okay to let the smart kids suffer as long as the slower kids are meant to feel 'bad' about being slower.
Uh... didn't NCLB come specifically out of the Bush administration?
A lot of people don't want to work for DARPA because it means living in or around Arlington, Virginia. (Source: http://www.darpa.gov/hrd/ )
My friends aren't there. My family isn't there. It would take a shit ton of money for me to be able to financially justify relocating there, which would involve my wife needing to quit her job to come with, as well as needing to sell my house in a shitty market for selling houses.
Sorry, but if you have only one location and you want the best and the brightest, you have to be willing to offer stupid amounts of money to make sure it's financially viable for all the best and the brightest. I think it'd be cool as hell to work on a lot of the projects I've seen come out of DARPA, but not enough to enter poverty (and more, to ask my family to enter poverty) to do it.
If they want to play dirty then let the rest of the world play dirty against them. I hope the whole world has their chance to sue Microsoft for no good reason.
Yeah, because two wrongs clearly make a right.
Doing wrong even to those who do wrong to you always comes back around. Not because any sense of karma or universal justice, but because nothing in the world happens in a vacuum, and there are always consequences.
Why the assumption there is a natural and inherent link between 'people who do' and 'people who know'? Do 'real world conditions' provide the opportunities for reflexivity, assessment, and critical engagement with practices?
There's a saying in boxing: everyone has a plan until they get hit. It's very similar to the saying that a battle plan never survives contact with the enemy.
The best software design principles and processes can survive levels of incredible retardation and bad choices beyond your control that you probably will never experience in academia, but that you will experience in industry on a daily basis. It's only when you're dealing with something like having to perform maintenance on uncommented code that serves up web pages that someone unavailable wrote in COBOL ten years ago for some reason that you really can see the strengths or weaknesses of some possible design or process choices.
Yeah, that's what I got out of it as well.
JavaScript libraries are better and more capable than they ever have been, but they can't escape being what they are. There are just too many questions that they are not the right answer for, and getting cross-platform cross-browser compability to be as good as the promise of open standards is not yet there for any reasonably complex web app. (That is to say, you can get a complex app to work right on a variety of platforms, but you're kidding yourself if you think it's going to be free/easy.)
Something like Flash/Flex or Silverlight isn't the answer to all web problems either, and never will be -- but more and more I'm seeing businesses ask for extremely rich interface intranet-ish apps to be done as web apps, and then be frustrated when the standards/JavaScript/etc. solution either is quirky or non-performant in some way that really matters to them. I think this kind of app is going to be done more and more with Flex or Silverlight or something similar in the next few years, and I don't see SproutCore as seriously competing in that space.