Huge problem when you do introspection. ("reflection"). There is also an issue for binary compatibility.
If I use a member, and later I need backing logic, I have to change it to a method, if I don't have property support, since the semantic isn't part of the construct, it is implied (I mean, the public member "Foo" has the same semantic as the method "getFoo", except the later can have internal logic, the former cannot).
So basically, I cannot switch a member to have logic without breaking compatibility, or breaking the interface, even though the semantic meaning didn't change: in both cases I have publicly available data with (because of the semantic contract of public members and getters, even if they're a method) negligible work (that is, a getter method should never have significant performance requirement for example, as callers will assume they're almost "free" to call).
That makes very little difference when you're working code for yourself or within an organization, within the same project, etc. The difference is HUGE when you're writing a framework or component that will be used by an unknown client.
You have the same thing on C#. What docs are you looking at that doesn't have plain hierarchies with links to every class and full docs with examples? I use it every day.
I'll agree with the "drama" if you're using winforms and vb.net though. Long time.NET users have been burnt a few too many times by those environments, so they get emotional about them.
What you linked is similar to the TPL in.NET, which is also part of the standard library and not language constructs. They're very useful.
Async/await is a way to make these things a first class concept of the language, so that once you have fairly elaborate scenarios/continuations, you can still read the code from top to bottom.
Amusingly enough, the best examples of these concepts I've seen to explain them aren't in the C# documentation, its in CoffeeScript. IcedCoffeeScript rather. The later also implement the same concepts, and they have "before" and "after" examples showing the difference. In complex scenario, it reduces code complexity by a factor.
In.NET, the most common uses tend to be for responsive UI (not in the web sense. I mean UI that doesn't block the thread, ever). When you do stuff like that, which is standard these days, and rely on external resources (databases, web services, REST APIs, etc), you very, very quickly end up chaining promises and callbacks like crazy. Having good framework support makes things better. Having good language support makes things best.
You can and its rather frequent in C# to have them. Not too different from using an iterator within an iterator. Common, basic stuff. The yield operator is just syntax sugar to easily create iterators. They're used roughly for the same thing, but are closer to their semantic idea.
Since C# has quite a few functional constructs, having an easy way to create an iterator/generator is critical to keep the code clean, as they're used all over the place. In LINQ, they're basically in every methods.
The distinction is rather important. A property is a semantic construct. It has a meaning. A member is an implementation detail.
Its the same with Events and Delegates. While they do have some technical differences, the main difference is a semantic one. An event is a semantic way to interface with an object. A delegate is an lower level construct often, but not always, used in the implementation of an event.
Publishers support the console they make the most money on, which may not be the one that sells the most. Once upon a time the PSP was almost dead, until piracy on the DS went out of control, which gave the PSP a little bit of leverage to get back into the market (it never beat the DS, but...)
On the other hand, the Wii originally crushed the other consoles in numbers, and it didn't help it much in the long run.
MS is probably hoping that making an ultra-drm-friendly console, at the cost of a handful of alienated users, would make it more attractive to publishers. I guess they underestimated the potential backlash. We'll probably see them backpedaling soon. Probably too little even though the console isnt even out yet.
From the look of it, they're trying to make the Xbox One as "big publisher" friendly as possible..... basically doing the stuff of wet dreams of EA, Ubisoft, and all those other big names.
Unfortunately they forgot that they have to sell some consoles too, else it won't do much.
Not just OSS. Commercial products too. Oracle is pretty good at paying billion(s) for a company then alienating all its developers until the product is only a shell of what it used to be.
The one in Prudential in Boston also gets decent traffic. Of course, the Apple Store not too far from it is gigantic and packed, but its not within the mall so its not as obvious. Still, considering Boston feels like Apple-land, the fact that the Microsoft store there has a lot of people is interesting.
Travel costs are WAY cheaper. If you live in NYC or Boston you don't need a car. At all. Sure, its convenient, but there are services like zip cars in a pinch.
Not owning a car saves a fortune. It will not make up for the housing cost difference by a long shot, but it makes up for some of it.
The only major difference is the housing. If you want a giant house, in a low cost of living area, it will cost you 250k, in Manhattan...it may not even exist under 5 million dollars, so even making 250k you're not gonna get it.
Once your housing is taken care of, very few other things are different. So those cost of living calculator are kind of bullshit if "having a giant house" is not part of your big requirements.
The quality of life threshold only really matters for housing and a few other things.
Once you're paying your house, food (doesn't vary much), your utility bills and your insurances... everything else is used to purchase stuff at the same price as everyone else. Amazon.com is Amazon.com. The plane tickets to go to some random country are potentially cheaper because you live closer to a bigger airport. When you retire and sell your house to then move in the middle of nowhere, you're way better off. And so on and so forth.
My mortgage is 12 (!!!) times higher than what my housing cost were before I moved to the Cambridge, MA area. My salary "only" doubled. My purchasing power is still way, way higher than it used to be.
Depends on the environment i guess. Some internship programs require the company to go through a lot of hoops dealing with the college and whatsnot, having structured training systems to incorporate those interns which require a lot of time from other people who could be doing 10x the work during that period, and basically, you're doing the intern a favor in exchange for some good will, reputation, and as a kind of long term interview process.
Most places I worked for paid interns (quite well in many cases), and asked basically nothing in return (the projects given to them were usually training projects, if they succeed, great, but usually they were just thrown away, because there was basically nothing 99% of students in their second year or so could do for us).
Then my previous job, where interns were given the most boring, annoying, tedious tasks, were asked to work long hours, and in the end weren't paid. That was just...wrong on so many levels.
Sorry, I can't "hear" you over the 1.1 billion dollar/year we're making here by using that HTML5 vaporware and javascript to do more than just display text.
It's all this "idiocracy" of design that bothers me. I want to see dynamic, world-upsetting events and invasions. I don't mean one-shot stupidities, I mean real wars. I want to see cities invaded where the vendors and trainers get attacked and slaughtered, and the players don't know where to go anymore, so they'd better fight.
Guildwars 2 had that. Entire towns get wrecked and you have to get a group going to take them back if you ever want to see NPCs in that area again.
That was pretty cool, until the WoW (and similar) game fans came, complained about everything that was different, and convinced the devs to put a bunch of things back for their comfort zone...but not everything. So now no one's happy.
Most big companies are like that. I know a fair amount of people who work there (I live across the street from their Cambridge, MA office). Some love it, the ones that work on the cool stuff, some ran away from it, the ones that worked on the crap project and didnt get an opportunity for internal move.
Same at the company I work for now. My department is pretty amazing and everyone loves it, but with a few thousand engineers in various cities, not everyone gets to work on the cool shit, under the awesome manager who truly gets it. People in some of the other department post the shitty reviews on glassdoor (and I don't blame them, those department suck).
Its unsafe to concatenate sql statements in code you mean. In code parameterized queries are perfectly safe, and used all over some of the most security sensitive systems in the world.
Man you guys are dense. I live in one of those places, I'm a dev, I'm benefiting from it.
People are constantly whining that companies are hiring offshore or outsourcing. While devs in countries with lower standard of living may not be equivalent, a lot of devs in countries that are equivalent or better, do just as well. So of course jobs are going to be pushed out when companies get in a position where they can do so.
Thats all I'm saying. Regardless of the reasons, from an international standpoint, paying 120-150k for an average (not top tier) developer is stupid if you can just go and open an office in another country. These things take time though, and only the bottom feeders will be affected in the very near future. Until then, you can be sure I'm enjoying the payday.
Its mainly the other way around though. Take Cambridge near Boston, specifically Kendall Square.
Housing was relatively normal for a big city. Demand for developers skyrocketed to the point someone straight out of school with no experience, a bad GPA, no internship, nothing, could get 80-90k. Someone with experience could get much, much more.
Everyone starts flocking there. Rent in the area went up 20%+ a year.
As others mentioned, its supply and demand. But most countries don't seem to think paying 120k/year+ for someone that can barely get the job done is reasonable....yet if you live in Cali, MA or NY, its the norm.
Thats what I meant by "insane". Do note that I'm among those benefiting from this, so I'm not complaining. I just think its not very surprising that companies will hire in a different country.
Sounds like you were never involved in hiring tech people in one of the big coastal cities... If your hiring requirement involves anything beyond "can do basic HTML" and you don't pay insane salaries, forget it.
Slashdot Mirror
The line is probably being drawn at the whole "declare the transactions while filing taxes", which Blizzard most likely does.
Huge problem when you do introspection. ("reflection"). There is also an issue for binary compatibility.
If I use a member, and later I need backing logic, I have to change it to a method, if I don't have property support, since the semantic isn't part of the construct, it is implied (I mean, the public member "Foo" has the same semantic as the method "getFoo", except the later can have internal logic, the former cannot).
So basically, I cannot switch a member to have logic without breaking compatibility, or breaking the interface, even though the semantic meaning didn't change: in both cases I have publicly available data with (because of the semantic contract of public members and getters, even if they're a method) negligible work (that is, a getter method should never have significant performance requirement for example, as callers will assume they're almost "free" to call).
That makes very little difference when you're working code for yourself or within an organization, within the same project, etc. The difference is HUGE when you're writing a framework or component that will be used by an unknown client.
You have the same thing on C#. What docs are you looking at that doesn't have plain hierarchies with links to every class and full docs with examples? I use it every day.
I'll agree with the "drama" if you're using winforms and vb.net though. Long time .NET users have been burnt a few too many times by those environments, so they get emotional about them.
What you linked is similar to the TPL in .NET, which is also part of the standard library and not language constructs. They're very useful.
Async/await is a way to make these things a first class concept of the language, so that once you have fairly elaborate scenarios/continuations, you can still read the code from top to bottom.
Amusingly enough, the best examples of these concepts I've seen to explain them aren't in the C# documentation, its in CoffeeScript. IcedCoffeeScript rather. The later also implement the same concepts, and they have "before" and "after" examples showing the difference. In complex scenario, it reduces code complexity by a factor.
In .NET, the most common uses tend to be for responsive UI (not in the web sense. I mean UI that doesn't block the thread, ever). When you do stuff like that, which is standard these days, and rely on external resources (databases, web services, REST APIs, etc), you very, very quickly end up chaining promises and callbacks like crazy. Having good framework support makes things better. Having good language support makes things best.
You can and its rather frequent in C# to have them. Not too different from using an iterator within an iterator. Common, basic stuff. The yield operator is just syntax sugar to easily create iterators. They're used roughly for the same thing, but are closer to their semantic idea.
Since C# has quite a few functional constructs, having an easy way to create an iterator/generator is critical to keep the code clean, as they're used all over the place. In LINQ, they're basically in every methods.
The distinction is rather important. A property is a semantic construct. It has a meaning. A member is an implementation detail.
Its the same with Events and Delegates. While they do have some technical differences, the main difference is a semantic one. An event is a semantic way to interface with an object. A delegate is an lower level construct often, but not always, used in the implementation of an event.
Don't forget properties as a first class concept.
Publishers support the console they make the most money on, which may not be the one that sells the most. Once upon a time the PSP was almost dead, until piracy on the DS went out of control, which gave the PSP a little bit of leverage to get back into the market (it never beat the DS, but...)
On the other hand, the Wii originally crushed the other consoles in numbers, and it didn't help it much in the long run.
MS is probably hoping that making an ultra-drm-friendly console, at the cost of a handful of alienated users, would make it more attractive to publishers. I guess they underestimated the potential backlash. We'll probably see them backpedaling soon. Probably too little even though the console isnt even out yet.
From the look of it, they're trying to make the Xbox One as "big publisher" friendly as possible..... basically doing the stuff of wet dreams of EA, Ubisoft, and all those other big names.
Unfortunately they forgot that they have to sell some consoles too, else it won't do much.
Not just OSS. Commercial products too. Oracle is pretty good at paying billion(s) for a company then alienating all its developers until the product is only a shell of what it used to be.
The one in Prudential in Boston also gets decent traffic. Of course, the Apple Store not too far from it is gigantic and packed, but its not within the mall so its not as obvious. Still, considering Boston feels like Apple-land, the fact that the Microsoft store there has a lot of people is interesting.
Travel costs are WAY cheaper. If you live in NYC or Boston you don't need a car. At all. Sure, its convenient, but there are services like zip cars in a pinch.
Not owning a car saves a fortune. It will not make up for the housing cost difference by a long shot, but it makes up for some of it.
The only major difference is the housing. If you want a giant house, in a low cost of living area, it will cost you 250k, in Manhattan...it may not even exist under 5 million dollars, so even making 250k you're not gonna get it.
Once your housing is taken care of, very few other things are different. So those cost of living calculator are kind of bullshit if "having a giant house" is not part of your big requirements.
The quality of life threshold only really matters for housing and a few other things.
Once you're paying your house, food (doesn't vary much), your utility bills and your insurances... everything else is used to purchase stuff at the same price as everyone else. Amazon.com is Amazon.com. The plane tickets to go to some random country are potentially cheaper because you live closer to a bigger airport. When you retire and sell your house to then move in the middle of nowhere, you're way better off. And so on and so forth.
My mortgage is 12 (!!!) times higher than what my housing cost were before I moved to the Cambridge, MA area. My salary "only" doubled. My purchasing power is still way, way higher than it used to be.
Depends on the environment i guess. Some internship programs require the company to go through a lot of hoops dealing with the college and whatsnot, having structured training systems to incorporate those interns which require a lot of time from other people who could be doing 10x the work during that period, and basically, you're doing the intern a favor in exchange for some good will, reputation, and as a kind of long term interview process.
Most places I worked for paid interns (quite well in many cases), and asked basically nothing in return (the projects given to them were usually training projects, if they succeed, great, but usually they were just thrown away, because there was basically nothing 99% of students in their second year or so could do for us).
Then my previous job, where interns were given the most boring, annoying, tedious tasks, were asked to work long hours, and in the end weren't paid. That was just...wrong on so many levels.
congratulation, you just reinvented compression in both cases (lossy and non-lossy)
Oh no, we don't do games, but we use the same technologies you would use to make a game, so still relevant IMO.
Same deal Direct X or OpenGL aren't just used for games.
Sorry, I can't "hear" you over the 1.1 billion dollar/year we're making here by using that HTML5 vaporware and javascript to do more than just display text.
Guildwars 2 had that. Entire towns get wrecked and you have to get a group going to take them back if you ever want to see NPCs in that area again.
That was pretty cool, until the WoW (and similar) game fans came, complained about everything that was different, and convinced the devs to put a bunch of things back for their comfort zone...but not everything. So now no one's happy.
Most big companies are like that. I know a fair amount of people who work there (I live across the street from their Cambridge, MA office). Some love it, the ones that work on the cool stuff, some ran away from it, the ones that worked on the crap project and didnt get an opportunity for internal move.
Same at the company I work for now. My department is pretty amazing and everyone loves it, but with a few thousand engineers in various cities, not everyone gets to work on the cool shit, under the awesome manager who truly gets it. People in some of the other department post the shitty reviews on glassdoor (and I don't blame them, those department suck).
So is life!
Its unsafe to concatenate sql statements in code you mean. In code parameterized queries are perfectly safe, and used all over some of the most security sensitive systems in the world.
Man you guys are dense. I live in one of those places, I'm a dev, I'm benefiting from it.
People are constantly whining that companies are hiring offshore or outsourcing. While devs in countries with lower standard of living may not be equivalent, a lot of devs in countries that are equivalent or better, do just as well. So of course jobs are going to be pushed out when companies get in a position where they can do so.
Thats all I'm saying. Regardless of the reasons, from an international standpoint, paying 120-150k for an average (not top tier) developer is stupid if you can just go and open an office in another country. These things take time though, and only the bottom feeders will be affected in the very near future. Until then, you can be sure I'm enjoying the payday.
Its mainly the other way around though. Take Cambridge near Boston, specifically Kendall Square.
Housing was relatively normal for a big city. Demand for developers skyrocketed to the point someone straight out of school with no experience, a bad GPA, no internship, nothing, could get 80-90k. Someone with experience could get much, much more.
Everyone starts flocking there. Rent in the area went up 20%+ a year.
Chicken and the egg.
As others mentioned, its supply and demand. But most countries don't seem to think paying 120k/year+ for someone that can barely get the job done is reasonable....yet if you live in Cali, MA or NY, its the norm.
Thats what I meant by "insane". Do note that I'm among those benefiting from this, so I'm not complaining. I just think its not very surprising that companies will hire in a different country.
Sounds like you were never involved in hiring tech people in one of the big coastal cities... If your hiring requirement involves anything beyond "can do basic HTML" and you don't pay insane salaries, forget it.