Well for mixing some C in with your D, you're laughing, as D supports C's ABI and all of C's fundamental and derived types. For C++, it's partial but you can extern to link to C++ objects. The D community is still quite small, but you'll find it heavily composed of C++ programmers going "wow, I like this.";)
You know, I agree with everything you just said. I too have a pile of programming languages under my belt. Heck, I seem to have learnt PHP entirely by accident since I don't recall ever actually meaning to learn it but just seem to have sat down and started coding up some web applications in it one day. As you say, a good programmer is a good programmer and one shouldn't characterise anyone by what language they use.
Oddly enough Java isn't one of the languages I know. I guess I just felt that being fluent in C++, I had that problem space covered and learned other things like Python instead. Also, it just wasn't as much fun as C++. Felt like typing in mittens, though it could just be lack of familiarity. Fun is a hard one to categorise or predict. Probably the most fun language I know right now is D. That's partly because I'm still learning it, but it covers the same problem space as C++, but has a certain lightness of feel to it which really lends itself well to my taste. I like programming in Python for example, but I can never quite lose the muggy lack of power feeling. Whereas D restores that.
Anyway, I went off-topic. I agree with you post.:)
True, but a lot of outsourcing goes to India now and I understand that JAVA is the popular one out there, so I'd say JAVA is the "one language everyone knows" these days.
Try D. There are a few things still to be done with it and the community is small. But I started out with C++ and have tried a number of languages (couldn't stand Ruby but liked Python for some reason). Anyway, D is rapidly becoming my favourite language. There's a very good book called 'The D Programming Language' by Andrei Alexandrescu which I have on my Kindle and I have to say, it's one of only two occasions when a programming book has actually been really fun to read. The book and the language are an absolutely great experience which I recommend to any C++ programmer that really gets some satisfaction out of programming.
A good programmer is a good programmer in almost any language. But I think there actually is a perceptual shift at work because C++ has been around a long time and those that remain in the language tend to be very experienced and good programmers. Younger and more inexperienced programmers are more likely to have learnt JAVA than C++ and so when an experienced programmer talks encounters an inexperienced one, it is not uncommonly a C++ programmer encountering a JAVA programmer.
Hell, I once did good programming in Visual Basic (pre.NET). Two weeks after starting I had half the other programmers there coming to ask me how to do things and I had only learnt the language the week before. Of course I had learnt programming in C++, not from a book that started with "to create a form, drag this icon onto your workspace. Now you can add buttons!". Nonetheless, the first thing that goes through my head when I hear "Visual Basic" is 'out of their depth scripter'. And for a lot of C++ programmers, the word JAVA triggers the thought "Lego coder". It will change, no doubt.
To me it looks like it is losing mind share from small business CIO's and the youth.
Seems so amongst "the youth" at least. Shamelessly anecdotal but I had some fresh out of uni graduate sneering at me because I wrote some applications in C++ (actually, also sneered for using C when I was writing a device driver). He felt superior because he used Python and wrote Django apps. *sigh* Using something created by clever people, does not make one clever oneself. But the point was lost on him. (Disclaimer: I use Python myself from time to time, when appropriate).
I don't know what it is. Perhaps it is that Universities want to be up to date and so blazon how they are teaching the latest languages (and it's good to keep current - I do), but in doing so they try to tell their students how well-rewarded and special they are for learning said language and what utterly the bee's knees it is. So they come out looking down on what came before. A destructive cycle.
Or maybe it's just that learning C and C++ is hard in this day and age (or rather it looks hard to modern eyes). And a certain mindset disparages that which it can't or wont do.
True. And it gives us a means to enforce things when we want to enforce them. I despise astroturfing and it's more sinister political cousins. Giving people the means to bring charges against such people, helps us fight it. It also shuts up the "it's not illegal so I've every right to do it" brigade. Not that there are many people sympathetic to astroturfers, but still.
Over the last few years, I have bought three computers (well, parts for three computers). But I have been responsible for the purchasing decisions of perhaps a dozen because people come to me for advice. That's one person, fifteen sales. Pissing off the tech-community matters.
And just on the DRM debate, I dislike DRM, but love watermarking. That's because I dislike piracy and watermarking is a counter-measure that doesn't get in my way.
That may be true, but if a giant fucking net was coming at me, I'd move out of the way.
If a giatn fucking net was coming toward you in the ocean, you wouldn't see it until it was around you. Or perhaps you think nets are big opaque things and the ocean is a clear Summer's day.
Oh, I'm sorry - dolphon sonar is probably great at picking up a big load of holes coming toward you.
Suddenly the price of oil plummeted tremendously, and now ordinary people who buy oil for the purpose of actually burning it and not trading it can afford to do so.
Which is a good thing! I get your point now, thank you.
Then, why did the price of gasoline drop $1.50 in a few weeks from record highs when the hedge funds dried up?
That question is clearly one designed as a counterpoint, but only to those who know what your supposed answer would be. For those of us not well up on the markets, can you explain what significance this has / you believe it has. (Not sarcastic - genuinely ignorant person here).
Perhaps it is usefully viewed not as "wielding a crusade" (good one, Slashdot editors), but more the process of evil being its own undoing.
Hey, it doesn't cost me anything what he's doing, and it might reduce the amount of spam I get. At the very least, that buys my nodding tolerance. Better if he actually shut them down, perhaps, but applying a cost to spam will have the same effect.
Point is that the aspects we're discussing as being analogous to high-level warfare - analytical ability, recognition of strategic patterns from previous battles, keeping track of different strategies, guessing your opponent's aims and watching for traps - well these might form a small percentage of the key to success in something like baseball, and at the very highest levels of the game when you've maxed out all the other factors such as physical fitness, training, natural athletic potential, then it's something you have to focus on. But that doesn't make it a valid comparison to Chess where these traits are near 100% the factors that determine success.
Last, random thought: why is it so non-PC to discuss differences in mental abilities? No one disputes that there are physical differences. We don't have men and women competing together in sports. Even where both may be equally good, the physical differences lead to completely different styles (think: floor gymnastics). We are built differently - why should it be surprising if our brains are wired differently too? To the contrary: Vive la difference!
It's non-PC for a few reasons. The first is the history of misuse of such research and discussions. Frankly, society has learnt its lesson that arguments about the "natural intelligence" of different races, genders and even social classes, have been falsely made, falsely justified and generally used to perpetuate injustice again and again. Is it possible that an over-reaction occurs? Perhaps, but it's marginally too far in one direction rather than the vast misdirection we've seen in the other direction through-out history. It is natural and right to be wary about re-occurences of such attitudes. What does being wary mean? It means whilst scientific research discussed by informed people might be fine, people making vague statements about races / genders / whatevers being less intelligent than others should be identified as what they are: ill-informed misrepresentation. Expanding on that brings us to the second point: accurate definitions of what is being talked about. You refer to manipulating 3D objects in your head. Maybe you are better at that than I am. This is something we can test. But it translates very badly into "you are more intelligent than I am". In fact, most things translate very badly into "intelligence" once you take them out of the context of scientific research and into the mainstream press. That's why it is taboo to start discussing differences in intelligence in the mainstream - because it becomes a bunch of dangerous innaccuracies the moment you take it away from people who actually understand what it's all about. If you're reading my reply in an adversarial mindset, you may be itching to reply that you wrote "mental abilities" not "intelligence". But I'm not responding to the question of whether 'bradley13' can discuss these things because you can. I'm responding to the general question of why it is so non-PC in the general case with the point that the moment you move to the general case, it's not you talking about rotating 3D models any more. It's someone saying "X is less intelligent than Y" (whilst the scientist who did the research has just had yet another lesson in dealing with the press).
And expanding on our hypothetical news story of "X is less intellignt than Y" brings us to our third and greatest reason why such discussions are taboo: Generalities. Suppose women turn out to be 10% more "intelligent" (there's that word again) than men. On average. Or whatever specific metric you choose to use: learning languages, navigation, numeracy, whatever. What does that 10% higher average mean. What does 10% actually mean? If it were an evenly distributed 10% rise across the gender (absurd, and huge, but go with this), that means that it's something like a 5% chance of any given woman being smarter than any given man. Is it efficient to start generalising at that point rather than assessing each individual? No - it's ridiculous. Unless you were for some reason rounding up vast segments of the population with no quality control, it would be absurd to start choosing for intelligence by gender. And that's with an absurd and vague 10% "more intelligent" example (for whatever intelligent means). And yet I can guarantee that for all the wasteful inefficiency of a society using even such an absurdly high difference as a basis for assessing individuals, it would have three immediate effects: people consciously or otherwise immediately begin judging everyone they met according to their new stereotype (the human brain is always looking for confirmation of negative suspicions); people within the negatively portra
Also women competing directly with men is still somewhat a taboo
And it will remain so until men stop having trouble dating someone who can beat them at something. Imagine the damage it would do the male demographic if women found a guy that earned more than them or could physically stand up to them as unattractive or started freaking out about not 'feeling womanly' anymore.
When the choice is no longer between dating and success, you'll start seeing more successful women.
Baseball & other sports take more mental prowess than you seem to think, at least on the professional level. A lot of a teams success can hang on managements ability to judge the other team, their own personnel & how they use their personnel.
Not really. What happens is that when all the other significant factors of co-ordination, physical fitness and practice, practice, practice have been pushed to the utter extremes by being taken to the high levels of national and international competition, to the point where everybody is a brilliant athete and sportsman, then at that point the factors which are normally dwarfed by such things, e.g. choosing to send in one person in to bat next over another, start to become relevant. But with Chess, it's like that all the way down.
How long does it take to fix a vulnerability that exists in a credit card system which covers many millions of cards and countless chip and pin units? I'm just asking because I don't know and you obviously do.
Odd. I thought it was for uploading files. I guess the only purpose of a knife is too kill people, then.
In this case, it's more like a knife that thousands use to kill people, and one token person standing there with a loaf of bread in their other hand. Putting aside legal defences of "it's not our fault if people misuse it", do you *honestly* believe the reality is other than Megaupload being overwhelmingly used for piracy?
Slashdot Mirror
Well for mixing some C in with your D, you're laughing, as D supports C's ABI and all of C's fundamental and derived types. For C++, it's partial but you can extern to link to C++ objects. The D community is still quite small, but you'll find it heavily composed of C++ programmers going "wow, I like this." ;)
You know, I agree with everything you just said. I too have a pile of programming languages under my belt. Heck, I seem to have learnt PHP entirely by accident since I don't recall ever actually meaning to learn it but just seem to have sat down and started coding up some web applications in it one day. As you say, a good programmer is a good programmer and one shouldn't characterise anyone by what language they use.
:)
Oddly enough Java isn't one of the languages I know. I guess I just felt that being fluent in C++, I had that problem space covered and learned other things like Python instead. Also, it just wasn't as much fun as C++. Felt like typing in mittens, though it could just be lack of familiarity. Fun is a hard one to categorise or predict. Probably the most fun language I know right now is D. That's partly because I'm still learning it, but it covers the same problem space as C++, but has a certain lightness of feel to it which really lends itself well to my taste. I like programming in Python for example, but I can never quite lose the muggy lack of power feeling. Whereas D restores that.
Anyway, I went off-topic. I agree with you post.
H.
I am. And boy does it bring a glow to my heart. :)
True, but a lot of outsourcing goes to India now and I understand that JAVA is the popular one out there, so I'd say JAVA is the "one language everyone knows" these days.
Two bytes meet. The first one says, "do you fancy a nibble?"
The second byte replies, "What do you think I am, a fucking peadophile?"
Try D. There are a few things still to be done with it and the community is small. But I started out with C++ and have tried a number of languages (couldn't stand Ruby but liked Python for some reason). Anyway, D is rapidly becoming my favourite language. There's a very good book called 'The D Programming Language' by Andrei Alexandrescu which I have on my Kindle and I have to say, it's one of only two occasions when a programming book has actually been really fun to read. The book and the language are an absolutely great experience which I recommend to any C++ programmer that really gets some satisfaction out of programming.
A good programmer is a good programmer in almost any language. But I think there actually is a perceptual shift at work because C++ has been around a long time and those that remain in the language tend to be very experienced and good programmers. Younger and more inexperienced programmers are more likely to have learnt JAVA than C++ and so when an experienced programmer talks encounters an inexperienced one, it is not uncommonly a C++ programmer encountering a JAVA programmer.
.NET). Two weeks after starting I had half the other programmers there coming to ask me how to do things and I had only learnt the language the week before. Of course I had learnt programming in C++, not from a book that started with "to create a form, drag this icon onto your workspace. Now you can add buttons!". Nonetheless, the first thing that goes through my head when I hear "Visual Basic" is 'out of their depth scripter'. And for a lot of C++ programmers, the word JAVA triggers the thought "Lego coder". It will change, no doubt.
Hell, I once did good programming in Visual Basic (pre
To me it looks like it is losing mind share from small business CIO's and the youth.
Seems so amongst "the youth" at least. Shamelessly anecdotal but I had some fresh out of uni graduate sneering at me because I wrote some applications in C++ (actually, also sneered for using C when I was writing a device driver). He felt superior because he used Python and wrote Django apps. *sigh* Using something created by clever people, does not make one clever oneself. But the point was lost on him. (Disclaimer: I use Python myself from time to time, when appropriate).
I don't know what it is. Perhaps it is that Universities want to be up to date and so blazon how they are teaching the latest languages (and it's good to keep current - I do), but in doing so they try to tell their students how well-rewarded and special they are for learning said language and what utterly the bee's knees it is. So they come out looking down on what came before. A destructive cycle.
Or maybe it's just that learning C and C++ is hard in this day and age (or rather it looks hard to modern eyes). And a certain mindset disparages that which it can't or wont do.
Nah, the revised and improved C++ is going to be called D.
;)
Oh wait, it already is.
True. And it gives us a means to enforce things when we want to enforce them. I despise astroturfing and it's more sinister political cousins. Giving people the means to bring charges against such people, helps us fight it. It also shuts up the "it's not illegal so I've every right to do it" brigade. Not that there are many people sympathetic to astroturfers, but still.
Over the last few years, I have bought three computers (well, parts for three computers). But I have been responsible for the purchasing decisions of perhaps a dozen because people come to me for advice. That's one person, fifteen sales. Pissing off the tech-community matters.
And just on the DRM debate, I dislike DRM, but love watermarking. That's because I dislike piracy and watermarking is a counter-measure that doesn't get in my way.
That may be true, but if a giant fucking net was coming at me, I'd move out of the way.
If a giatn fucking net was coming toward you in the ocean, you wouldn't see it until it was around you. Or perhaps you think nets are big opaque things and the ocean is a clear Summer's day.
Oh, I'm sorry - dolphon sonar is probably great at picking up a big load of holes coming toward you.
I've made +5 Funny Posts myself, and can therefore guarantee they mean bugger all.
Suddenly the price of oil plummeted tremendously, and now ordinary people who buy oil for the purpose of actually burning it and not trading it can afford to do so.
Which is a good thing! I get your point now, thank you.
Then, why did the price of gasoline drop $1.50 in a few weeks from record highs when the hedge funds dried up?
That question is clearly one designed as a counterpoint, but only to those who know what your supposed answer would be. For those of us not well up on the markets, can you explain what significance this has / you believe it has. (Not sarcastic - genuinely ignorant person here).
Perhaps it is usefully viewed not as "wielding a crusade" (good one, Slashdot editors), but more the process of evil being its own undoing.
Hey, it doesn't cost me anything what he's doing, and it might reduce the amount of spam I get. At the very least, that buys my nodding tolerance. Better if he actually shut them down, perhaps, but applying a cost to spam will have the same effect.
Point is that the aspects we're discussing as being analogous to high-level warfare - analytical ability, recognition of strategic patterns from previous battles, keeping track of different strategies, guessing your opponent's aims and watching for traps - well these might form a small percentage of the key to success in something like baseball, and at the very highest levels of the game when you've maxed out all the other factors such as physical fitness, training, natural athletic potential, then it's something you have to focus on. But that doesn't make it a valid comparison to Chess where these traits are near 100% the factors that determine success.
Last, random thought: why is it so non-PC to discuss differences in mental abilities? No one disputes that there are physical differences. We don't have men and women competing together in sports. Even where both may be equally good, the physical differences lead to completely different styles (think: floor gymnastics). We are built differently - why should it be surprising if our brains are wired differently too? To the contrary: Vive la difference!
It's non-PC for a few reasons. The first is the history of misuse of such research and discussions. Frankly, society has learnt its lesson that arguments about the "natural intelligence" of different races, genders and even social classes, have been falsely made, falsely justified and generally used to perpetuate injustice again and again. Is it possible that an over-reaction occurs? Perhaps, but it's marginally too far in one direction rather than the vast misdirection we've seen in the other direction through-out history. It is natural and right to be wary about re-occurences of such attitudes. What does being wary mean? It means whilst scientific research discussed by informed people might be fine, people making vague statements about races / genders / whatevers being less intelligent than others should be identified as what they are: ill-informed misrepresentation. Expanding on that brings us to the second point: accurate definitions of what is being talked about. You refer to manipulating 3D objects in your head. Maybe you are better at that than I am. This is something we can test. But it translates very badly into "you are more intelligent than I am". In fact, most things translate very badly into "intelligence" once you take them out of the context of scientific research and into the mainstream press. That's why it is taboo to start discussing differences in intelligence in the mainstream - because it becomes a bunch of dangerous innaccuracies the moment you take it away from people who actually understand what it's all about. If you're reading my reply in an adversarial mindset, you may be itching to reply that you wrote "mental abilities" not "intelligence". But I'm not responding to the question of whether 'bradley13' can discuss these things because you can. I'm responding to the general question of why it is so non-PC in the general case with the point that the moment you move to the general case, it's not you talking about rotating 3D models any more. It's someone saying "X is less intelligent than Y" (whilst the scientist who did the research has just had yet another lesson in dealing with the press).
And expanding on our hypothetical news story of "X is less intellignt than Y" brings us to our third and greatest reason why such discussions are taboo: Generalities. Suppose women turn out to be 10% more "intelligent" (there's that word again) than men. On average. Or whatever specific metric you choose to use: learning languages, navigation, numeracy, whatever. What does that 10% higher average mean. What does 10% actually mean? If it were an evenly distributed 10% rise across the gender (absurd, and huge, but go with this), that means that it's something like a 5% chance of any given woman being smarter than any given man. Is it efficient to start generalising at that point rather than assessing each individual? No - it's ridiculous. Unless you were for some reason rounding up vast segments of the population with no quality control, it would be absurd to start choosing for intelligence by gender. And that's with an absurd and vague 10% "more intelligent" example (for whatever intelligent means). And yet I can guarantee that for all the wasteful inefficiency of a society using even such an absurdly high difference as a basis for assessing individuals, it would have three immediate effects: people consciously or otherwise immediately begin judging everyone they met according to their new stereotype (the human brain is always looking for confirmation of negative suspicions); people within the negatively portra
Also women competing directly with men is still somewhat a taboo
And it will remain so until men stop having trouble dating someone who can beat them at something. Imagine the damage it would do the male demographic if women found a guy that earned more than them or could physically stand up to them as unattractive or started freaking out about not 'feeling womanly' anymore.
When the choice is no longer between dating and success, you'll start seeing more successful women.
Baseball & other sports take more mental prowess than you seem to think, at least on the professional level. A lot of a teams success can hang on managements ability to judge the other team, their own personnel & how they use their personnel.
Not really. What happens is that when all the other significant factors of co-ordination, physical fitness and practice, practice, practice have been pushed to the utter extremes by being taken to the high levels of national and international competition, to the point where everybody is a brilliant athete and sportsman, then at that point the factors which are normally dwarfed by such things, e.g. choosing to send in one person in to bat next over another, start to become relevant. But with Chess, it's like that all the way down.
How long does it take to fix a vulnerability that exists in a credit card system which covers many millions of cards and countless chip and pin units? I'm just asking because I don't know and you obviously do.
I find it had to take seriously any post that likens putting a sattellite into orbit with writing 'Hello World!'
Odd. I thought it was for uploading files. I guess the only purpose of a knife is too kill people, then.
In this case, it's more like a knife that thousands use to kill people, and one token person standing there with a loaf of bread in their other hand. Putting aside legal defences of "it's not our fault if people misuse it", do you *honestly* believe the reality is other than Megaupload being overwhelmingly used for piracy?
If hosting pirated content so that people can take it without paying is "striking a blow for freedom", then standards have seriously droppped.
That's okay, the prisoners can vote against such things. Oh wait - in the USA, the judiciary can take away your right to vote...