Anyone reading this site ought to be technical enough to be able to learn how to secure their system and understand the importance of practicing safe computing. I know that Windows doesn't need AV software and security monitoring software, and using IE all the time is fine, because that's how I run, and I've never caught anything. Norton et al are for people who don't know and don't want to know about security, who cannot resist anything offered to be installed to them for free, and who already have their machines so bogged down with and unstable from things like AOL software, consumer-grade HP printer drivers, etc., that they'd hardly notice the extra load.
I'm not going to dicker with you over the liberties you're taking with the term "binary". But I do thank you for calling Java a "platform", which it is (i.e. it is not "cross-platform", it is "cross-OS^H^Hseveral-OSes"). I will point this out, though:
C++ can never match this - I would have to test my application on all those platforms to be confident.
You'd be widely viewed as a fool if you don't anyways. "Write once, debug everywhere" may not be as much the case nowadays (holy shit was it back in the JDK 1.0 and 1.1 days!), but only a fool doesn't test before deploying. (Or is that what your customers are for?;-)
Even if I didn't, I would have to provide separate binaries and libraries - it is a mess!
Interestingly, with Java, instead of having the burden that you refer to here of conforming to your customers' platform(s), you code to one platform and your customers have the burden (and often the expense) of acquiring the (correct version of) the platform you've chosen, with the accompanying performance loss of one level of indirection/not running directly on the native platform. Definitely an advantage of Java, to the developer.
You're right, I do assume that, so I guess there's something we agree on. IT is mostly run by PHB's, who are largely unable to resist marketing, and definitely cannot make judgments for themselves based on years of experience with computer languages (because they have none). And most fresh college grads are only going to have studied what was in the curriculum, and that's based on what's hyped at the time (because colleges need enrollees), and they're graduating with student loan debt and just want to get a fucking job, and don't care in what or if some other language is better or the same or whatnot. I'll add a third category, consultants/authors: These people are wise enough to see the strengths and weaknesses and overlap, but they make their livelihood on riding the hype, no matter how unfounded. So there's a huge group who can't tell the difference, and two other groups who really have to just go along with it, to survive.
The flaw in your thinking is that you forgot that "most popular" does not always equal "best". Much more often it equals "most marketed", as in the case of the two redundant (to C++) languages mentioned.
The most insightful post here yet. These compromise languages are, by design, almost never "the best tool for the job". They only exist for fodder in the pissing contest between Sun and MS, and the PHB's and fresh college grads caught up in it.
Unless you're morally opposed to Amazon or something, you could always go there and check out the reviews -- there's 100 of them currently.
I haven't read this book, but did read that author's COM/ATL book, and he was a fantastic teacher. I learned more from him than in several other books on the subject that I had read, or the two Uni extension classes I took on it. It was a fat book, tho.
Re:I don't want to be stuck with one..
on
Pro C#
·
· Score: 1
If the platform you are on won't scale anymore or yoiu don't have money to throw 5 machines at a problem that may only take only Linux box,...
That's a lot of "ifs" and "mays" -- you're dangerously close to the legal limit of 3 weasel words per sentence. Or a successful career in advertising. Okay, so if I'm ever in a situation where we completely fucked up the requirements and got the scale completely wrong, plus we're absolutely broke and cannot afford a few cheap commodity Wintel boxes, and we do some experimenting and find out that deliverance from our pickle entails nothing more than moving to Linux, then I'll admit you told me so.
For engineers, portability is always an issue...
I've never worked for engineers. I'm hired by businesses, and they're run by business people. So they decide what are the issues. And, unsurprisingly, they don't seem to be caught up in kooky religious wars over mundane things like computer operating systems, or chasing after engineering theoretical purity. Practically everyone has a Windows box lying around, so portability in practice is effectively a non-issue.
Well, PHB's listen to what big companies whose names they've heard of say, not to the recommendations of the kinds of dorks they used to make fun of in school. Unless Python has a big-name backer or three, it will stay obscure. If not, it'll be sullied in the same way as Java and VB -- PHB's will believe that just about any warm body can do it, and will set salaries such that only barely warm bodies will apply, and its developer community will be overrun by the mediocre to worse, and the language's reputation will suffer.
(BTW, on your username and sig, as someone who had to support NS4 several summers ago in a new web development project (customer had some really old installations), I could not possibly agree more. It works fine for basic HTML and forms, but try DHTML or slightly complex layouts, or non-trivial js, and it's unbelievably crash city all over itself. Biggest f'ing POS ever.)
Others would say it was the skill level and mentality of the typical VB developer that caused most VB projects to fail. Incidently, I see the same thing with Java. Whether it's Sun or MS, market a language/platform to PHB's telling them it's easier and they won't have to hire expensive C/C++ people, and it will become hugely popular. (I had read estimates that there were 10 times as many VB programmers than there were C++ programmers (developing for Windows)).
Completely miss the Java trend, and still stuck with old tech, or what?
Actually that's exactly why many of us skipped the Java trend -- it's old tech/largely a duplicative language. For example, the shift from C to C++ was challenging and a tremendous boost. The shift I took in college from Pascal to C was not. They're largely redundant languages. As Java is to C++.
Another perspective from which Java is old-tech is Web Services/SOA. Java is just more of the same tightly-coupled, language-specific, platform-dependent way of combining pieces of functionality together into an application. Java calls Java, C++ calls C++, CORBA calls CORBA, COM calls COM, etc. It's time to move on to looser coupling based on language/platform/OS-independent standards. I pray that Java is the last of the old-school redundant technologies that businesses get suckered into.
Excellent post, and recalls something I've thought for a long time: The ultimate CS curriculum, or at least in terms of computer languages, would be essentially historically chronological. That is, start off with hex and binary and machine opcodes, for something simple like the 6502, then asm, then a more modern CPU instruction set and addressing modes, then C, then C++, and further into farther abstractions from the "bare metal", but then each successive learned abstraction is in context, based on the core foundation of understanding "how things really work".
Nope. And I have an additional feeling about this that, taken together, makes me almost as queasy as thinking about their "food": Not only is it creating more physical trash, but I think it further devalues media content to the level of physical trash.
Now granted many American movies and much of American pop music are not exactly "works of art", but still I feel it diminishes them by the way they're sliced and diced and slung around. For example, I'm against movies being "edited for television" and colorization of B&W movies, simply because it deviates from the creators' original work. Whether it's fine art or not. Slicing a movie or song etc. into pieces and reducing them to the value of a paper McDonalds Monopoly piece makes me uneasy. I guess I'm really talking about two different things here, integrity and cheapening, but they seem to go hand in hand (inversely).
Being environmentally conscious isn't a pet theory...
No one said it was. I thought we were talking about Global Warming.
...given the option of that or driving yourself into extinction.
You mean, "given the option of that or driving yourself into extinction, according to my pet theory."
...based on a misplaced sense of nationalism...
Wow, you didn't interpret any of this correctly. It's not about any bogeyman "-ism", it's about treasuring what my country still mostly believes in that the rest of the world has seemingly forgotten or never known -- personal freedom. It's sad to me that freedom from others imposing their pet theories on oneself has become a quaint pet theory itself to the rest of the world and 49% or so of this country.
It's sad that people like you are so misguided -- driving cars is not doing wrong, forcing your pet theories on human beings is. I hope Americans never "learn"/join the rest of the world on this.
This whole thing smells of BS. I don't know if this is an ad for IBM or what. Georgia Tech CS majors can't program? Their EE majors can program much better? Ya, that must be because the EE curriculum has sooo many more programming courses than the CS one. Just as you'd expect, right?
You get zero resumes from experienced programmers. You hired and let go seven programmers this year. You had 3 EE grads that weren't even programmers, yet they were "world-class programmers". Hmm. Maybe you don't know what a "world-class programmer" is. There's a bit more to it than just dividing the system up into modules and loosely coupling the components. Why aren't you asking yourself why no one who has a choice wants to work for you/your company? It sounds like you're only getting takers who are CS flunkies or frustrated EE folk who can't find hardware jobs.
I don't feel super strongly about Hungarian notation either way, so I'm not dickering about that, but I would just point out that I think your argument, that it shouldn't be used because the variable prefix can get out of sync with the var's actual data type, is the same argument some people put forth for being against commenting their code (i.e. they can get out of sync). So while I don't throw an absolute hissy when I see code that's not commented or Hungarianized (like some Slashdotters evidently do when they see code that is HN-ed), I think it's in general slightly less desirable.
Nice. Agreeing that it's the same, but with a weasel-out clause. Which is not really agreeing that it's the same. Which indicates what I suspected, but didn't want to jump the gun on: You don't mean "A boogieman is something you have an irrational, and unnecessary, fear of", you mean "A boogieman is something you have a fear of, that I just personally consider irrational and unnecessary, but I could be mistaken and it could very well be a rational and necessary fear."
I couldn't agree more. We need to start with the news media. They report daily American soldier body counts coming from Iraq, but rarely anything about the tremendous numbers of Americans that die daily, not in a combat zone, but on the roads of their own land. Reportedly 42,643 people perished on our highways in 2003. That's a little over 116 people per day! They call it an unusually bloody day in Iraq when we lose around half a dozen or so or more of our own. So what do we call what goes on every single day here, genocide? I guess that makes the war in Iraq, like terrorism, a bogeyman.
Just because they exist doesn't mean they aren't boogiemen. A boogieman is something you have an irrational, and unnecessary, fear of. I'd say terrorists fit that description for most Americans.
Then you'd also count Global Warming as a bogeyman, right?
As long as you never need a dead tree version of your code. Hard copy doesn't scroll horizontally, it wraps, making following the code indentation more difficult.
I can use the mouse scroll wheel or the page up/down keys to quickly scroll vertically through code. Having to scroll right so that most of the code and its indentation is out of view just slows me down.
Sure, you can write your comments first, although don't write them as comments, write them as function names. That is, when you go to code a function, think about the steps that need to be accomplished, and make each a descriptively-named subroutine call. Then your function comments itself, which it should. Save actual commenting for things that can't be said in code.
Besides, what would a "pointer to unsigned short 'sy'" look like in hungarian notation?:-)
We get it. But if it's so damn important that you had to use an unsigned short, and couldn't just use an int, don't you think it should be documented so people don't come along and overflow it or assign or compare negative values with it?
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone reading this site ought to be technical enough to be able to learn how to secure their system and understand the importance of practicing safe computing. I know that Windows doesn't need AV software and security monitoring software, and using IE all the time is fine, because that's how I run, and I've never caught anything. Norton et al are for people who don't know and don't want to know about security, who cannot resist anything offered to be installed to them for free, and who already have their machines so bogged down with and unstable from things like AOL software, consumer-grade HP printer drivers, etc., that they'd hardly notice the extra load.
I'm not going to dicker with you over the liberties you're taking with the term "binary". But I do thank you for calling Java a "platform", which it is (i.e. it is not "cross-platform", it is "cross-OS^H^Hseveral-OSes"). I will point this out, though:
;-)
C++ can never match this - I would have to test my application on all those platforms to be confident.
You'd be widely viewed as a fool if you don't anyways. "Write once, debug everywhere" may not be as much the case nowadays (holy shit was it back in the JDK 1.0 and 1.1 days!), but only a fool doesn't test before deploying. (Or is that what your customers are for?
Even if I didn't, I would have to provide separate binaries and libraries - it is a mess!
Interestingly, with Java, instead of having the burden that you refer to here of conforming to your customers' platform(s), you code to one platform and your customers have the burden (and often the expense) of acquiring the (correct version of) the platform you've chosen, with the accompanying performance loss of one level of indirection/not running directly on the native platform. Definitely an advantage of Java, to the developer.
You're right, I do assume that, so I guess there's something we agree on. IT is mostly run by PHB's, who are largely unable to resist marketing, and definitely cannot make judgments for themselves based on years of experience with computer languages (because they have none). And most fresh college grads are only going to have studied what was in the curriculum, and that's based on what's hyped at the time (because colleges need enrollees), and they're graduating with student loan debt and just want to get a fucking job, and don't care in what or if some other language is better or the same or whatnot. I'll add a third category, consultants/authors: These people are wise enough to see the strengths and weaknesses and overlap, but they make their livelihood on riding the hype, no matter how unfounded. So there's a huge group who can't tell the difference, and two other groups who really have to just go along with it, to survive.
No... Java is going to change the world! Write once run slowly everywhere!
;-)
Not everywhere: "You acknowledge that Licensed Software is not designed or intended for use in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any nuclear facility." Good thing, too, or it might indeed "change the world"!
The flaw in your thinking is that you forgot that "most popular" does not always equal "best". Much more often it equals "most marketed", as in the case of the two redundant (to C++) languages mentioned.
The most insightful post here yet. These compromise languages are, by design, almost never "the best tool for the job". They only exist for fodder in the pissing contest between Sun and MS, and the PHB's and fresh college grads caught up in it.
Unless you're morally opposed to Amazon or something, you could always go there and check out the reviews -- there's 100 of them currently.
I haven't read this book, but did read that author's COM/ATL book, and he was a fantastic teacher. I learned more from him than in several other books on the subject that I had read, or the two Uni extension classes I took on it. It was a fat book, tho.
If the platform you are on won't scale anymore or yoiu don't have money to throw 5 machines at a problem that may only take only Linux box,...
That's a lot of "ifs" and "mays" -- you're dangerously close to the legal limit of 3 weasel words per sentence. Or a successful career in advertising. Okay, so if I'm ever in a situation where we completely fucked up the requirements and got the scale completely wrong, plus we're absolutely broke and cannot afford a few cheap commodity Wintel boxes, and we do some experimenting and find out that deliverance from our pickle entails nothing more than moving to Linux, then I'll admit you told me so.
For engineers, portability is always an issue...
I've never worked for engineers. I'm hired by businesses, and they're run by business people. So they decide what are the issues. And, unsurprisingly, they don't seem to be caught up in kooky religious wars over mundane things like computer operating systems, or chasing after engineering theoretical purity. Practically everyone has a Windows box lying around, so portability in practice is effectively a non-issue.
Well, PHB's listen to what big companies whose names they've heard of say, not to the recommendations of the kinds of dorks they used to make fun of in school. Unless Python has a big-name backer or three, it will stay obscure. If not, it'll be sullied in the same way as Java and VB -- PHB's will believe that just about any warm body can do it, and will set salaries such that only barely warm bodies will apply, and its developer community will be overrun by the mediocre to worse, and the language's reputation will suffer.
(BTW, on your username and sig, as someone who had to support NS4 several summers ago in a new web development project (customer had some really old installations), I could not possibly agree more. It works fine for basic HTML and forms, but try DHTML or slightly complex layouts, or non-trivial js, and it's unbelievably crash city all over itself. Biggest f'ing POS ever.)
Others would say it was the skill level and mentality of the typical VB developer that caused most VB projects to fail. Incidently, I see the same thing with Java. Whether it's Sun or MS, market a language/platform to PHB's telling them it's easier and they won't have to hire expensive C/C++ people, and it will become hugely popular. (I had read estimates that there were 10 times as many VB programmers than there were C++ programmers (developing for Windows)).
Completely miss the Java trend, and still stuck with old tech, or what?
Actually that's exactly why many of us skipped the Java trend -- it's old tech/largely a duplicative language. For example, the shift from C to C++ was challenging and a tremendous boost. The shift I took in college from Pascal to C was not. They're largely redundant languages. As Java is to C++.
Another perspective from which Java is old-tech is Web Services/SOA. Java is just more of the same tightly-coupled, language-specific, platform-dependent way of combining pieces of functionality together into an application. Java calls Java, C++ calls C++, CORBA calls CORBA, COM calls COM, etc. It's time to move on to looser coupling based on language/platform/OS-independent standards. I pray that Java is the last of the old-school redundant technologies that businesses get suckered into.
Excellent post, and recalls something I've thought for a long time: The ultimate CS curriculum, or at least in terms of computer languages, would be essentially historically chronological. That is, start off with hex and binary and machine opcodes, for something simple like the 6502, then asm, then a more modern CPU instruction set and addressing modes, then C, then C++, and further into farther abstractions from the "bare metal", but then each successive learned abstraction is in context, based on the core foundation of understanding "how things really work".
Am I the only one that feels this way?
Nope. And I have an additional feeling about this that, taken together, makes me almost as queasy as thinking about their "food": Not only is it creating more physical trash, but I think it further devalues media content to the level of physical trash.
Now granted many American movies and much of American pop music are not exactly "works of art", but still I feel it diminishes them by the way they're sliced and diced and slung around. For example, I'm against movies being "edited for television" and colorization of B&W movies, simply because it deviates from the creators' original work. Whether it's fine art or not. Slicing a movie or song etc. into pieces and reducing them to the value of a paper McDonalds Monopoly piece makes me uneasy. I guess I'm really talking about two different things here, integrity and cheapening, but they seem to go hand in hand (inversely).
No one said it was. I thought we were talking about Global Warming.
You mean, "given the option of that or driving yourself into extinction, according to my pet theory."
Wow, you didn't interpret any of this correctly. It's not about any bogeyman "-ism", it's about treasuring what my country still mostly believes in that the rest of the world has seemingly forgotten or never known -- personal freedom. It's sad to me that freedom from others imposing their pet theories on oneself has become a quaint pet theory itself to the rest of the world and 49% or so of this country.
...we need to really force our citizens...
It's sad that people like you are so misguided -- driving cars is not doing wrong, forcing your pet theories on human beings is. I hope Americans never "learn"/join the rest of the world on this.
This whole thing smells of BS. I don't know if this is an ad for IBM or what. Georgia Tech CS majors can't program? Their EE majors can program much better? Ya, that must be because the EE curriculum has sooo many more programming courses than the CS one. Just as you'd expect, right?
You get zero resumes from experienced programmers. You hired and let go seven programmers this year. You had 3 EE grads that weren't even programmers, yet they were "world-class programmers". Hmm. Maybe you don't know what a "world-class programmer" is. There's a bit more to it than just dividing the system up into modules and loosely coupling the components. Why aren't you asking yourself why no one who has a choice wants to work for you/your company? It sounds like you're only getting takers who are CS flunkies or frustrated EE folk who can't find hardware jobs.
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98\Bin\VCVARS32.BAT, then /all <EXE or DLL or other executable file name> | find "SetWindowsHook"
dumpbin
For example.
The WH_*'s are #defines, so they don't show up/can't be searched for in the binary.
I don't feel super strongly about Hungarian notation either way, so I'm not dickering about that, but I would just point out that I think your argument, that it shouldn't be used because the variable prefix can get out of sync with the var's actual data type, is the same argument some people put forth for being against commenting their code (i.e. they can get out of sync). So while I don't throw an absolute hissy when I see code that's not commented or Hungarianized (like some Slashdotters evidently do when they see code that is HN-ed), I think it's in general slightly less desirable.
Nice. Agreeing that it's the same, but with a weasel-out clause. Which is not really agreeing that it's the same. Which indicates what I suspected, but didn't want to jump the gun on: You don't mean "A boogieman is something you have an irrational, and unnecessary, fear of", you mean "A boogieman is something you have a fear of, that I just personally consider irrational and unnecessary, but I could be mistaken and it could very well be a rational and necessary fear."
I couldn't agree more. We need to start with the news media. They report daily American soldier body counts coming from Iraq, but rarely anything about the tremendous numbers of Americans that die daily, not in a combat zone, but on the roads of their own land. Reportedly 42,643 people perished on our highways in 2003. That's a little over 116 people per day! They call it an unusually bloody day in Iraq when we lose around half a dozen or so or more of our own. So what do we call what goes on every single day here, genocide? I guess that makes the war in Iraq, like terrorism, a bogeyman.
Just because they exist doesn't mean they aren't boogiemen. A boogieman is something you have an irrational, and unnecessary, fear of. I'd say terrorists fit that description for most Americans.
Then you'd also count Global Warming as a bogeyman, right?
As long as you never need a dead tree version of your code. Hard copy doesn't scroll horizontally, it wraps, making following the code indentation more difficult.
I can use the mouse scroll wheel or the page up/down keys to quickly scroll vertically through code. Having to scroll right so that most of the code and its indentation is out of view just slows me down.
Sure, you can write your comments first, although don't write them as comments, write them as function names. That is, when you go to code a function, think about the steps that need to be accomplished, and make each a descriptively-named subroutine call. Then your function comments itself, which it should. Save actual commenting for things that can't be said in code.
Besides, what would a "pointer to unsigned short 'sy'" look like in hungarian notation? :-)
We get it. But if it's so damn important that you had to use an unsigned short, and couldn't just use an int, don't you think it should be documented so people don't come along and overflow it or assign or compare negative values with it?
And enum values in all ucase are sooo 80's! ;-)
enum DataAction
{
eLoadData,
eSaveData,
eDestroyData
};