Java, on the other hand, puts the best parts of Objective-C into a reasonable syntax
Hmm, for the past few months I've been programming Java (after using C++ for some time) and I have to say its syntax is completely spoiled by the type casts that need to be all over the place. As Bjarne said, the lack of MI in a strongly typed language means typecasts, everywhere. Especially since no such thing as templates exists. Brrrr.
All containers (such as Lists) are containers of Ojbects. You must cast those back to what they were, each time with the risk of a Class-mismatch (causing exceptions). Not only is this ugly, you also loose all advantage of a strongly typed language.
EPOC, the 32-bit OS for Psion PDA's, and soon for several mobile phones (such as Nokia) was written in C++, at least that's what their white papers claim (see www.symbian.com). Also the system API's are in C++. btw these PDA's also contain a JVM and can be programmed either in C++ or Java.
For me anyway, I appreciate Perl's string processing and hashes more because of what a pain in the neck they can be in C++, which was my first language.
Have you ever used the STL? With that, hashes, maps and other collections are dead-simple. Also you have a nice set of algorithms to apply on them built into the STL. When I first really used it a year ago, I was very impressed. I'm using Java now, but it's container classes are no match for C++/STL.
With multiple coders come multiple editors. With multiple editors come different ways of indentation.
Using a consistent indentation is good. But forcing it upon the programmer is, IMO, not the best solution. It's not necessary if there's only one programmer, and inconvenient when there are multiple programmers.
It is horrible to have multiple ways of indentation within one project in combination with version control tools. If you try to do a diff between two versions to see the differences, often you see 10% real diffs, and 90% where someone just changed the indentation (like Emacs with it's auto-indent-region). Thus it is great to force people within a team to use the same indentation conventions.
The only thing that makes sense to me is to always use one tab for one indentation level. To how much space a tab expands, everyone can choose for himself (and doesn't affect the contents of the file).
Also 'self-documenting' code is even better than lots of comments.
btw. I used Perl a lot, Python never. Out of habit I'll take Perl but I'd really like to learn Python. Large programs in Perl, even if documented, tend to get unmaintainable. Yes, with lots of documentation you can even make assembly understandable, but code that is clear and speaks for itself always is to be preferred.
FreeBSD and BSD in general is much odler than Linux.
Both Linux and FreeBSD use lots of GNU stuff. However, FreeBSD doesn't use much Linux-specific (i.e. non GNU) stuff. OTOH, Linux uses lots of BSD stuff such as drivers, networking tools etc. If anyone has stolen from anyone, Linux stole from FreeBSD, not the other way round.
I prefer not to think in terms of stealing however. It is just reuse. It is very wise of Linux to reuse things that already exist instead of reinventing the wheel.
Also, UNIX prospers for 30 years now and has grown so string because there are different version competing with each other. It is the evolutionary approach. If only one single UNIX would survive, I'm sure it would die soon because of incest.
This thinking like "unify, conquer the world, fighting for domination" etc is 100% contradictory to the UNIX way, and is typical for Linux newbies/fanatics. It only hurts the "good cause".
As a workstation, BSD is also fine. It has mostly the same apps, and those lacking run well under the Linux emulator (even vmware).
Still, having native applications is even better, and thus it would be great if Informix would port their (excellent) RDBMS to native FreeBSD. Next to a decent Java2 implementation an RDBMS is the most serious thing lacking at the moment.
Porting between FreeBSD and other Unixes is easy, differences are minor.
Sometimes porting between Linux and other Unixes is more difficult, because Linux uses GNU libc, a baroque/proc, sometimes strange (deviant) filesystem-layout. It has some incompatible extentions. It greatly depends on the program's author: if he has general UNIX experience then usually the program is portable. If he only knows Linux and doesn't give a damn about the rest of UNIX, probably his program is Linux specific and is harder to port.
It is sad to see so much UNIX ignorance and lack of appreciation for portability and standards amongst some Linux people these days.
It is good to have compatability with 'legacy' Operating systems. Note that Windows-NT also has compatability for DOS, and runs most windows-3 applications, etc.
I'm working on a 16-CPU sun here with an uptime of months. It has 2.5GB RAM, is running lots of heavy Oracle queries. At the moment, apart from long-running queries, there are 20 interactive users busy. I've never seen an NT machine with a load like this stay up for more than a few days.
I've been visiting both over a year ago, investigating how it would be to move there from the Netherlands (I moved to Switserland btw, not to Canada).
Ottawa was by far the nicest town IMO. Montreal was second, but the problem there is that you're in Quebec. If you don't speak french very well you'll be in a bad position, as the Quebec govt really tries to separate from Canada and to eradicate the use of non-french.
Also Ottawa clearly has more high-tech firms and better IT possibilities. In general, Ontario's economy is strong and improving, taxes are lower. Quebec, preoccupied with language wars and such, is going down and it's future doesn't seem to look so good. Lots of companies have left Quebec, because there are weird laws forcing them to only advertise in french and things like that.
RT-Linux blows Win-CE, PalmOS, and other RTos's away.
And other RTos's?!? You can't really call Win-CE nor PalmOS RTos's. Better compare it with real ones like VxWorks, VRTX, QNX, maybe OS-9 (a bit dated). I don't know RT-Linux but I cannot imagine it is any party for VxWorks for example.
Whould you have asked the same question about a FreeBSD version of QoS if the announcement would have been on Linux/Eclipse?
People may have good (technical) reasons to prefer using FreeBSD for a testbed like this. I know some Linux zealots may find this amazing, but it's true.
a> I suspect Europeans love SuSE because its half dozen CD's save a> DAYS of download time over those state owned and/or regulated a> wires. Sometimes throwing in the kitchen sing is a good a> thing. API
I don't think that is important: I pay by the hour for Internet access (in Switserland) but it's only the equivalent of 35 dollarcent per hour (and the ISP is free) so downloading the ISO still is much cheaper than buying the distribution.
For the first time in years I'm glad (from a consumer point of view) that I live in Europe (Switserland to be exact). I used to think that we in Europe have bad luck because of higher prices (less competition) but obviously there are also advantages.
It is only to be hoped that the USA won't and cannot blackmail Europe to adopt such awful laws and measures too (like "If you don't change your laws your business won't be allowed to trade in the USA" etc, as has happened in some cases before on different issues).
DVD players are sold with built-in region-free & macrovision disabling kits in retail stores btw.
Brrr. Reading a story like this makes me only want top copy movies & music in the future.
Personally I've money enough to buy them, and it is more convenient than copying. But I can't stand the idea that my money goes to such immoral companies trying to sue a 16 year old. Everyone has the right to research protection schemes or whatever. If it breaks, than they should have made it better and it's completely their fault.
Linux has its own problems. But those problems get fixed faster, and with better overall results, than the problems in Solaris. Is Linux the One and Only Solution? Not yet. But I can't find one instance where Solaris is really the best of breed.
How about NFS, absolutely a must in a serious enterprise environment. Linux has been trying to catch up for three years, and still it's NFS implementation is no good.
Things like NIS+ (or IBM's equivalent add-ons for AIX) are also lacking for Linux.
Yes Linux has its 'niche' but to claim that it has made Solaris etc. superfluous is complete nonsense.
Some, like SGI and IBM, have long since seen this coming, and realized that an OS is an expensive and unprofitable product to make, and taken steps to ensure the survival of their real business, hardware.
Do you really believe IBM is stopping development of AIX or OS/390 (on which they've done an amazing job making it UNIX compliant)?
As for SGI: they have the behaviour typical for a company on the brink of collapse: They go with every trend (last year NT, this year Linux) in a desparate attempt to recover.
In that sense I found McNeally's remark on vendors first going with NT, now with the next 'new popular thing' a very good one. Sun has enough selfconfidence and strength to go on with its own plans and doesn't need to follow every trend that comes along.
Yes, SUN is not always as nice to open source etc. as we would like. Still it is good that there is one company left that is 100% committed to UNIX and makes enough money to keep itself and the UNIX market alive.
The fact that it is something to get excited about (reaching 100% potato status) is not a good sign. I know how difficult it is (I did it myself once): congratulations, you've been extremely lucky to get this done.
Still, FreeBSD's cvsup + make world is much simpeler and more predictable.
Indeed, Linux mainly immitates other Unices when it comes to the kernel. I think it was Linus' original goal to make a UNIX clone, thus he is very conservative with what goes into the kernel. OTOH w.r.t. userspace Linux is quite innovative.
FreeBSD has another focus, just to mention an example. It has a much higher level of innovation when it comes to the kernel but for userspace it trails Linux/UNIX and is more conservative.
Each project just has its own focusses, but to say that open-source isn't a good innovator is very inaccurate.
Oh my, those threads again. Without threads, apache makes one of the worlds fastsest webservers. Apache is a proof that threads are not necessary (often even contraproductive because of all the locking complexity you get) for performance.
In discussions on using threaded vs. event-driven architecture I always use apache to prove a point. I hope it never gets any threads.
The idea that threads are good is IMO coming from (bad) experiences in the Windows world: Win3.x had a broken event-driven archtitectur. Then came Win "new technology" (cough) with its threaded architecture. Since win3 was so bad it looked good (relatively). But on UNIX there have been very good & efficient event-driven architectures for long.
This is not true. I've been using a dual boot FreeBSD (-current) and Linux system for half a year. I have a shared homedirectory on ext2fs which I access regularly from FreeBSD.
The only annoyance is that in case of a crash in FreeBSD, I have to boot into Linux to fsck the ext2fs filesystem. There is no fsck for ext2fs in FreeBSD yet.
but it didn't detect my hard drive correctly either, so desperate to get away from windows I downloaded all of FreeBSD (over a 56k connection) and installed it. It worked with the hard drive beautifully. FreeBSD wasnt't exactly what I was looking for in a desktop OS though and although I much prefered it to Windows I still wanted Linux again,
While I don't think there's much difference between Linux and FreeBSD w.r.t. large drives (both work if installed properly) I don't see much of a difference as a desktop OS either. I use both and most people that try my computer cannot tell the difference and only find out what I'm currently running with uname -a.
FreeBSD comes with less add-ons such as bash (it's default shell is more primitive) all kinds of window managers etc etc but you can/have to add these through the ports system. The advantage is a less cluttered system. Also, all add-ons are installed seperate from the main system, in/usr/local and below.
Mounting drives: This is a good and logical thing. Yes, some things can be improved, but mounting drives happens in all UNIX versions and there are good reasons for it.
Just because something happens different than Windows, doesn't mean that it is more difficult and should be changed. UNIX/Linux is not a Windows clone, but an OS with it's own history and it's own rules. While it can sometimes learn some userfriendlyness from other environments, we should not compromise all good things just to make it look more like Windows.
If you think donating to the FSF is so cool, and that would be the reason for buying a copy of RMS Linux, then why not just donate the whole $29.95 directly to the FSF?
The only way to specify externally where to look for a DLL is PATH. PATH is also used for finding executables. Weird to use it for both. A user may have to set some directory in front of it's path but not want to have the DLL's in that dir.
Even more stupid is that PATH is only searched after all other possibilities.
There should be a unique environment variable for this, which overrides other mechanisms such as \WINDOWS etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, for the past few months I've been programming Java (after using C++ for some time) and I have to say its syntax is completely spoiled by the type casts that need to be all over the place. As Bjarne said, the lack of MI in a strongly typed language means typecasts, everywhere. Especially since no such thing as templates exists. Brrrr.
All containers (such as Lists) are containers of Ojbects. You must cast those back to what they were, each time with the risk of a Class-mismatch (causing exceptions). Not only is this ugly, you also loose all advantage of a strongly typed language.
EPOC, the 32-bit OS for Psion PDA's, and soon for several mobile phones (such as Nokia) was written in C++, at least that's what their white papers claim (see www.symbian.com). Also the system API's are in C++. btw these PDA's also contain a JVM and can be programmed either in C++ or Java.
Have you ever used the STL? With that, hashes, maps and other collections are dead-simple. Also you have a nice set of algorithms to apply on them built into the STL. When I first really used it a year ago, I was very impressed. I'm using Java now, but it's container classes are no match for C++/STL.
Using a consistent indentation is good. But forcing it upon the programmer is, IMO, not the best solution. It's not necessary if there's only one programmer, and inconvenient when there are multiple programmers.
It is horrible to have multiple ways of indentation within one project in combination with version control tools. If you try to do a diff between two versions to see the differences, often you see 10% real diffs, and 90% where someone just changed the indentation (like Emacs with it's auto-indent-region). Thus it is great to force people within a team to use the same indentation conventions.
The only thing that makes sense to me is to always use one tab for one indentation level. To how much space a tab expands, everyone can choose for himself (and doesn't affect the contents of the file).
We're talking about reading someone else's code.
Also 'self-documenting' code is even better than lots of comments.
btw. I used Perl a lot, Python never. Out of habit I'll take Perl but I'd really like to learn Python. Large programs in Perl, even if documented, tend to get unmaintainable. Yes, with lots of documentation you can even make assembly understandable, but code that is clear and speaks for itself always is to be preferred.
What a scandalous twisting of history.
FreeBSD and BSD in general is much odler than Linux.
Both Linux and FreeBSD use lots of GNU stuff. However, FreeBSD doesn't use much Linux-specific (i.e. non GNU) stuff. OTOH, Linux uses lots of BSD stuff such as drivers, networking tools etc. If anyone has stolen from anyone, Linux stole from FreeBSD, not the other way round.
I prefer not to think in terms of stealing however. It is just reuse. It is very wise of Linux to reuse things that already exist instead of reinventing the wheel.
Also, UNIX prospers for 30 years now and has grown so string because there are different version competing with each other. It is the evolutionary approach. If only one single UNIX would survive, I'm sure it would die soon because of incest.
This thinking like "unify, conquer the world, fighting for domination" etc is 100% contradictory to the UNIX way, and is typical for Linux newbies/fanatics. It only hurts the "good cause".
As a workstation, BSD is also fine. It has mostly the same apps, and those lacking run well under the Linux emulator (even vmware).
Still, having native applications is even better, and thus it would be great if Informix would port their (excellent) RDBMS to native FreeBSD. Next to a decent Java2 implementation an RDBMS is the most serious thing lacking at the moment.
Porting between FreeBSD and other Unixes is easy, differences are minor.
/proc, sometimes strange (deviant) filesystem-layout. It has some incompatible extentions. It greatly depends on the program's author: if he has general UNIX experience then usually the program is portable. If he only knows Linux and doesn't give a damn about the rest of UNIX, probably his program is Linux specific and is harder to port.
Sometimes porting between Linux and other Unixes is more difficult, because Linux uses GNU libc, a baroque
It is sad to see so much UNIX ignorance and lack of appreciation for portability and standards amongst some Linux people these days.
It is good to have compatability with 'legacy' Operating systems. Note that Windows-NT also has compatability for DOS, and runs most windows-3 applications, etc.
This provides a 'migration path'.
Then replace the system administrator.
I'm working on a 16-CPU sun here with an uptime of months. It has 2.5GB RAM, is running lots of heavy Oracle queries. At the moment, apart from long-running queries, there are 20 interactive users busy. I've never seen an NT machine with a load like this stay up for more than a few days.
I've been visiting both over a year ago, investigating how it would be to move there from the Netherlands (I moved to Switserland btw, not to Canada).
Ottawa was by far the nicest town IMO. Montreal was second, but the problem there is that you're in Quebec. If you don't speak french very well you'll be in a bad position, as the Quebec govt really tries to separate from Canada and to eradicate the use of non-french.
Also Ottawa clearly has more high-tech firms and better IT possibilities. In general, Ontario's economy is strong and improving, taxes are lower. Quebec, preoccupied with language wars and such, is going down and it's future doesn't seem to look so good. Lots of companies have left Quebec, because there are weird laws forcing them to only advertise in french and things like that.
And other RTos's?!? You can't really call Win-CE nor PalmOS RTos's. Better compare it with real ones like VxWorks, VRTX, QNX, maybe OS-9 (a bit dated). I don't know RT-Linux but I cannot imagine it is any party for VxWorks for example.
Is that so strange (no).
Whould you have asked the same question about a FreeBSD version of QoS if the announcement would have been on Linux/Eclipse?
People may have good (technical) reasons to prefer using FreeBSD for a testbed like this. I know some Linux zealots may find this amazing, but it's true.
btw. I'm running Slackware Linux.
a> I suspect Europeans love SuSE because its half dozen CD's save a> DAYS of download time over those state owned and/or regulated a> wires. Sometimes throwing in the kitchen sing is a good a> thing. API
I don't think that is important: I pay by the hour for Internet access (in Switserland) but it's only the equivalent of 35 dollarcent per hour (and the ISP is free) so downloading the ISO still is much cheaper than buying the distribution.
For the first time in years I'm glad (from a consumer point of view) that I live in Europe (Switserland to be exact). I used to think that we in Europe have bad luck because of higher prices (less competition) but obviously there are also advantages.
It is only to be hoped that the USA won't and cannot blackmail Europe to adopt such awful laws and measures too (like "If you don't change your laws your business won't be allowed to trade in the USA" etc, as has happened in some cases before on different issues).
DVD players are sold with built-in region-free & macrovision disabling kits in retail stores btw.
Brrr. Reading a story like this makes me only want top copy movies & music in the future.
Personally I've money enough to buy them, and it is more convenient than copying. But I can't stand the idea that my money goes to such immoral companies trying to sue a 16 year old. Everyone has the right to research protection schemes or whatever. If it breaks, than they should have made it better and it's completely their fault.
How about NFS, absolutely a must in a serious enterprise environment. Linux has been trying to catch up for three years, and still it's NFS implementation is no good.
Things like NIS+ (or IBM's equivalent add-ons for AIX) are also lacking for Linux.
Yes Linux has its 'niche' but to claim that it has made Solaris etc. superfluous is complete nonsense.
Some, like SGI and IBM, have long since seen this coming, and realized that an OS is an expensive and unprofitable product to make, and taken steps to ensure the survival of their real business, hardware.
Do you really believe IBM is stopping development of AIX or OS/390 (on which they've done an amazing job making it UNIX compliant)?
As for SGI: they have the behaviour typical for a company on the brink of collapse: They go with every trend (last year NT, this year Linux) in a desparate attempt to recover.
In that sense I found McNeally's remark on vendors first going with NT, now with the next 'new popular thing' a very good one. Sun has enough selfconfidence and strength to go on with its own plans and doesn't need to follow every trend that comes along.
Yes, SUN is not always as nice to open source etc. as we would like. Still it is good that there is one company left that is 100% committed to UNIX and makes enough money to keep itself and the UNIX market alive.
The fact that it is something to get excited about (reaching 100% potato status) is not a good sign. I know how difficult it is (I did it myself once): congratulations, you've been extremely lucky to get this done.
Still, FreeBSD's cvsup + make world is much simpeler and more predictable.
Indeed, Linux mainly immitates other Unices when it comes to the kernel. I think it was Linus' original goal to make a UNIX clone, thus he is very conservative with what goes into the kernel. OTOH w.r.t. userspace Linux is quite innovative.
FreeBSD has another focus, just to mention an example. It has a much higher level of innovation when it comes to the kernel but for userspace it trails Linux/UNIX and is more conservative.
Each project just has its own focusses, but to say that open-source isn't a good innovator is very inaccurate.
Oh my, those threads again. Without threads, apache makes one of the worlds fastsest webservers. Apache is a proof that threads are not necessary (often even contraproductive because of all the locking complexity you get) for performance.
In discussions on using threaded vs. event-driven architecture I always use apache to prove a point. I hope it never gets any threads.
The idea that threads are good is IMO coming from (bad) experiences in the Windows world: Win3.x had a broken event-driven archtitectur. Then came Win "new technology" (cough) with its threaded architecture. Since win3 was so bad it looked good (relatively). But on UNIX there have been very good & efficient event-driven architectures for long.
This is not true. I've been using a dual boot FreeBSD (-current) and Linux system for half a year. I have a shared homedirectory on ext2fs which I access regularly from FreeBSD.
The only annoyance is that in case of a crash in FreeBSD, I have to boot into Linux to fsck the ext2fs filesystem. There is no fsck for ext2fs in FreeBSD yet.
While I don't think there's much difference between Linux and FreeBSD w.r.t. large drives (both work if installed properly) I don't see much of a difference as a desktop OS either. I use both and most people that try my computer cannot tell the difference and only find out what I'm currently running with uname -a.
FreeBSD comes with less add-ons such as bash (it's default shell is more primitive) all kinds of window managers etc etc but you can/have to add these through the ports system. The advantage is a less cluttered system. Also, all add-ons are installed seperate from the main system, in /usr/local and below.
Mounting drives: This is a good and logical thing.
Yes, some things can be improved, but mounting
drives happens in all UNIX versions and there are good reasons for it.
Just because something happens different than Windows, doesn't mean that it is more difficult and should be changed. UNIX/Linux is not a Windows clone, but an OS with it's own history and it's own rules. While it can sometimes learn some userfriendlyness from other environments, we should not compromise all good things just to make it look more like Windows.
If you think donating to the FSF is so cool, and that would be the reason for buying a copy of RMS Linux, then why not just donate the whole $29.95 directly to the FSF?
LoadLibraryEx is stupid, since:
The only way to specify externally where to look for a DLL is PATH. PATH is also used for finding executables. Weird to use it for both. A user may have to set some directory in front of it's path but not want to have the DLL's in that dir.
Even more stupid is that PATH is only searched after all other possibilities.
There should be a unique environment variable for this, which overrides other mechanisms such as \WINDOWS etc.