Good programmers are good programmers on any platform. Even ones you think are crappy.
Bad programmers think they're good programmers, think pretty much everyone else is a bad programmer, and thinks that platforms matter more than they do.
I absolutely don't believe it. If this is true then I personally am nearly one percent of all the Linux users who visit the UK website. The figure is completely ridiculous; Linux is a niche, but not that niche.
The primary reason is that Netbeans has better out of the box support for Java standard frameworks. How's its support for non standard frameworks though? Spring, for example, is now pretty much a requirement for most enterprise Java projects. Eclipse has a plugin created and owned by the Spring framework's developers, so while I don't really know the Netbeans situation I'd be surprised if it was as good.
Eclipse's standard framework support is pretty good, so even if it's not as good as Netbeans I'd be reluctant to switch.
Eclipse's only major problem that I experience is its dependency management feature for upgrading and installing new components. When it works, it's lovely, but mostly for me I seem to end up with missing library dependencies that it doesn't offer to install for me - making that particular feature useless! Hopefully I'm doing something stupid and someone will now explain to me why I'm such an eejot:-)
Exactly. In my opinion, the clothes are irrelevant and basically a filter: if you are the sort of person that will judge Stallman by his clothes, then the wisdom he has to offer is lightyears beyond your reach. It is better that you just dismiss it rather than polluting the discussion. The problem with preaching to the choir is that you don't make any new converts.
Among them was Jon Katz who continued to write for us for a number of years until he decided it was time to write about dogs instead. Jon Katz's articles polarized your audience. What did you think about that?
I don't really understand why the Sony Reader isn't more popular. It's infinitely nicer reading text on the reader than it is trying to read it on a laptop. You can use the reader outside in direct sunlight and the screen is clearer than in dim lighting conditions. And unlike a paperback (otherwise the superior medium) you can carry thousands (literally) of texts in a pocket and still move.
I own one and use it constantly for reading project Gutenberg texts (pre rendered for the device and downloaded from http://www.mobileread.com/ and http://manybooks.net/ ). Like any early generation device, it has some rough spots, but none of them seem sufficient to explain its relative unpopularity.
For me it would attain perfection if O'Reilly integrated it with their Safari online technical catalogue so that I could replace my physical technical bookshelf (now approaching critical mass) with something a little more portable.
Sounds suspiciously like you're after performance as your number one priority, whereas I'm partly looking for reliability (remember, a series of Thinkpads and I've never had one break), and partly for ergonomic features.
I wouldn't suggest that Thinkpad's perfect for everyone, but the reliability alone makes it easy to see why they're the corporate workhorse of choice.
I'd be hard to dissuade from buying another Thinkpad. I have an X40 and an R60e. The latter is definitely post-lenovo vintage. The R60e does sterling duty as a desktop XP machine (I don't do games), the X40 ditto as a lightweight carry-anywhere Linux box.
The selling points on Thinkpads for me are:
Construction quality e.g. stainless steel hinges on current models.
Life expectancy I've never had one break - ever - despite reasonable punishment.
Keyboard feels like a "real" keyboard, has a desktop-like layout for special keys.
Trackpoint personal preference.
I dread that Lenovo will fritter away the Thinkpad's well-earned reputation for quality now they're unhooked from IBM - but so far things are still ok.
In general, in the UK at least, there is a presumption that it's ok to be ignorant about science. Bits of enamel come off my teeth when I have to listen to John Humphries (BBC radio pundit) patronising some scientist after telling us all how little he knows about science. This is something he'd be ashamed to do with politics, economics, or the arts - and more importantly his editor wouldn't let him.
There are a few special cases where the audience is expected to be unforgiving of inaccuracies. I find The Economist's science section to be disconcertingly accurate if disappointingly brief. Sadly New Scientist, the main popular science journal in the UK, seems to be lowering its standards. It may be time to end the subscription.
Try going to the news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm site instead. That's what I use for normal browsing. It's the low-graphics (not text only as the url implies) version of the normal site. Hopefully they don't intercept that!
What utter naïvity. Wildly offtopic, but it amused me that you bothered to put the diaeresis on the word, but then spelt it incorrectly anyway. It should be "naïvety."
Yep, I absolutely love Eclipse, but their website is utterly incomprehensible unless you already know exactly what you need.
The auto-installer isn't much better; it doesn't default to resolving dependencies for you, so you either have to notice an obscurely named checkbox to switch it on, or manually figure out why it's bitching about some TLA prefixed library when you only want to install some other TLA prefixed library.
Seriously it's an amazing environment but they need to do some usability testing, at least of the website, and address the problem.
I'm a developer who uses Java almost exclusively these days. I enjoy working with the language, and I think it's the cat's PJs when putting together big enterprise sites. And I think this move is... stupid. BUT I'm a developer, so I know nothing of the mystical ways of marketing. It might all be BS or there might be something in it; I don't really care all that much.
However, I do take substantial issue with one thing that Schwartz said, which I think is pretty badly thought out:
As for working professionals, I had dinner with a financial analyst a few months ago who said he saw the Java launch experience "a few times a day" when accessing intranet applications - as did tens of thousands of his fellow employees. He's basically saying: "We shove a splash screen in users faces every day". This is a Bad Thing! He's making users associate Java with applications that have poor performance - by definition if they're seeing this they're not getting to the application they want to work on as quickly as they should. The poor performance (web server performance) is out of their hands, but it's in their control to prevent the association with their brand!
I have high regards for Sun employees in general. Their management, however, I have my doubts about.
On any given system you only need to solve a subset of the problem. The elitist attitude must make you one hell of a treasure to work with on a team. Thanks for the ad hominem, but NIH won't earn you any friends either. If the framework is complicated it's probably because the problem domain is complicated. Maybe you should invest the time in understanding why it's complex.
I've worked with all manner of hellish tangled incompetent and broken toy-implementations created by people who thought that a real grown-up framework was too difficult or over complicated. Feel free to roll your own, though - I earn a good living from fixing that kind of screw up.
Hibernate is a particularly bad example for your case, because while the framework's implementation is certainly complicated (or dare I say it, sophisticated), the configuration complexity maps very closely to the complexity of the relationship between the entities and the database tables. I minimal mapped class looks like this:
@Entity public class Foo {
@Id
public Long primaryKey; }
Given that you have to say "I want this class to be persistent" and "I want this to be the primary key" it's hard to see how you could reduce that much even in your imaginary framework.
Ah yes because if it's not simple and intuitive it's easier to say everyone sucks at coding than to build a framework that doesn't require a PhD to use correctly. Feel free to build that ORM framework that doesn't require you to specify the mappings. It'll be slow and solve only the tiny subset of the problem that's easy to do without ORM anyway.
The internet being what it is, I suspect that the software will be subverted to allow you to digitally remove peoples' clothes in three... two... one...:-)
You should read the book. As others have pointed out, it was Wyndham, not Aldiss. And the comets weren't comets. And, in fact, it's nothing like as stupid as it sounds. The background to the story is a bit dated, but otherwise it's quite striking. Another good read is the Kraken Wakes, which in the light of global warming could almost be a parable!
The end result is you end up with what should be a fairly simple task (like OO-relational mapping) have 400 page manuals because... OR mapping frameworks require complex configuration only when you have to express complicated things about the relationships between the entities and the tables. There's no way to eliminate that without eliminating the relationship!
Sensible OR mapping frameworks use sensible defaults, however, so that for simple classes simple configuration is required. For example, using Hibernate with a class with no associations with other classes, all you have to do is annotate it with @Entity and annotate the primary key property with @Id. Ooooh, tricky.
In the time it takes you [...] you could have just written and tested the tedious JDBC code to load and unload an object from the database. That's just bollocks for anything except the most trivial of applications. If you have more than half a dozen entities and any even marginally complex relationships between them you'll save great big wadges of time by investing in learning the framework.
Frameworks are great. People who use them often suck.
Probably most games are not art in the normal sense. But there are some. I challenge Ebert to play "For a change" and emerge convinced that it's nor art.
Obviously a film reviewer, albeit a superlative one, is not the best person to make the call, not being aware of the breath of the genre. Not every film is Transformers, not every video game is Doom.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the precis; much appreciated.
Good programmers are good programmers on any platform. Even ones you think are crappy.
Bad programmers think they're good programmers, think pretty much everyone else is a bad programmer, and thinks that platforms matter more than they do.
I absolutely don't believe it. If this is true then I personally am nearly one percent of all the Linux users who visit the UK website. The figure is completely ridiculous; Linux is a niche, but not that niche.
Eclipse's standard framework support is pretty good, so even if it's not as good as Netbeans I'd be reluctant to switch.
Eclipse's only major problem that I experience is its dependency management feature for upgrading and installing new components. When it works, it's lovely, but mostly for me I seem to end up with missing library dependencies that it doesn't offer to install for me - making that particular feature useless! Hopefully I'm doing something stupid and someone will now explain to me why I'm such an eejot
I don't really understand why the Sony Reader isn't more popular. It's infinitely nicer reading text on the reader than it is trying to read it on a laptop. You can use the reader outside in direct sunlight and the screen is clearer than in dim lighting conditions. And unlike a paperback (otherwise the superior medium) you can carry thousands (literally) of texts in a pocket and still move.
I own one and use it constantly for reading project Gutenberg texts (pre rendered for the device and downloaded from http://www.mobileread.com/ and http://manybooks.net/ ). Like any early generation device, it has some rough spots, but none of them seem sufficient to explain its relative unpopularity.
For me it would attain perfection if O'Reilly integrated it with their Safari online technical catalogue so that I could replace my physical technical bookshelf (now approaching critical mass) with something a little more portable.
Sounds suspiciously like you're after performance as your number one priority, whereas I'm partly looking for reliability (remember, a series of Thinkpads and I've never had one break), and partly for ergonomic features.
I wouldn't suggest that Thinkpad's perfect for everyone, but the reliability alone makes it easy to see why they're the corporate workhorse of choice.
The selling points on Thinkpads for me are:
I dread that Lenovo will fritter away the Thinkpad's well-earned reputation for quality now they're unhooked from IBM - but so far things are still ok.
In general, in the UK at least, there is a presumption that it's ok to be ignorant about science. Bits of enamel come off my teeth when I have to listen to John Humphries (BBC radio pundit) patronising some scientist after telling us all how little he knows about science. This is something he'd be ashamed to do with politics, economics, or the arts - and more importantly his editor wouldn't let him.
There are a few special cases where the audience is expected to be unforgiving of inaccuracies. I find The Economist's science section to be disconcertingly accurate if disappointingly brief. Sadly New Scientist, the main popular science journal in the UK, seems to be lowering its standards. It may be time to end the subscription.
Try going to the news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm site instead. That's what I use for normal browsing. It's the low-graphics (not text only as the url implies) version of the normal site. Hopefully they don't intercept that!
Hear hear.
Incorrect spelling in code causes all sorts of minor confusion - I'd love an Eclipse plugin to address this.
Yep, I absolutely love Eclipse, but their website is utterly incomprehensible unless you already know exactly what you need.
The auto-installer isn't much better; it doesn't default to resolving dependencies for you, so you either have to notice an obscurely named checkbox to switch it on, or manually figure out why it's bitching about some TLA prefixed library when you only want to install some other TLA prefixed library.
Seriously it's an amazing environment but they need to do some usability testing, at least of the website, and address the problem.
Yawn. This troll is stale. Try something more imaginative.
However, I do take substantial issue with one thing that Schwartz said, which I think is pretty badly thought out: As for working professionals, I had dinner with a financial analyst a few months ago who said he saw the Java launch experience "a few times a day" when accessing intranet applications - as did tens of thousands of his fellow employees. He's basically saying: "We shove a splash screen in users faces every day". This is a Bad Thing! He's making users associate Java with applications that have poor performance - by definition if they're seeing this they're not getting to the application they want to work on as quickly as they should. The poor performance (web server performance) is out of their hands, but it's in their control to prevent the association with their brand!
I have high regards for Sun employees in general. Their management, however, I have my doubts about.
I seem to recall reading that he prefers KDE to Gnome though.
This one is not (yet) slashdotted:
http://www.efytimes.com/archive/144/news.htm
I've worked with all manner of hellish tangled incompetent and broken toy-implementations created by people who thought that a real grown-up framework was too difficult or over complicated. Feel free to roll your own, though - I earn a good living from fixing that kind of screw up.
Hibernate is a particularly bad example for your case, because while the framework's implementation is certainly complicated (or dare I say it, sophisticated), the configuration complexity maps very closely to the complexity of the relationship between the entities and the database tables. I minimal mapped class looks like this: Given that you have to say "I want this class to be persistent" and "I want this to be the primary key" it's hard to see how you could reduce that much even in your imaginary framework.
The internet being what it is, I suspect that the software will be subverted to allow you to digitally remove peoples' clothes in three... two... one... :-)
You should read the book. As others have pointed out, it was Wyndham, not Aldiss. And the comets weren't comets. And, in fact, it's nothing like as stupid as it sounds. The background to the story is a bit dated, but otherwise it's quite striking. Another good read is the Kraken Wakes, which in the light of global warming could almost be a parable!
Sensible OR mapping frameworks use sensible defaults, however, so that for simple classes simple configuration is required. For example, using Hibernate with a class with no associations with other classes, all you have to do is annotate it with @Entity and annotate the primary key property with @Id. Ooooh, tricky. In the time it takes you [...] you could have just written and tested the tedious JDBC code to load and unload an object from the database. That's just bollocks for anything except the most trivial of applications. If you have more than half a dozen entities and any even marginally complex relationships between them you'll save great big wadges of time by investing in learning the framework.
Frameworks are great. People who use them often suck.
Actually, having read TFA, it emerges that he said "Video games". So I kind of agree - I've never played one that I considered to be art.
Probably most games are not art in the normal sense. But there are some. I challenge Ebert to play "For a change" and emerge convinced that it's nor art.
Obviously a film reviewer, albeit a superlative one, is not the best person to make the call, not being aware of the breath of the genre. Not every film is Transformers, not every video game is Doom.