Just out curiosity why is the Mac poor as a development environment? All I can guess is you mean you can't run Visual Studio, but since that's a Windows only application, that kind of goes without saying.
Yeah, it takes time to acclimate. I'm a unix junkie, and an ex Linux on the desktop user who switched over to OS X a few years ago. It just takes time to appreciate everything and get comfortable.
Once you find the good apps, such as iTerm instead of Terminal, figure out how to install XCode, MacPorts, and XWindows things start to feel good again. There are some warts, such as mounting Volumes where you like, but overall it's a pretty good setup. I'm in the command-line most of the day, but I can still run Photoshop, iTunes, and Office without using something like Wine.
Some of the open source OS X apps are excellent, such as Adium compared to GAIM; Adium is GAIM done right. Treat yourself to VLC, Handbrake, and the oh so awesome QuickSilver.
Some little things are nice, such as having the Command key, which lets you use Command-C for copy, leaving Control-c for the command-line; I never liked using shift-control-c in gnome. Some of the little things are weird, but this is because of BSD user-land, not OS X specifically.
I finally switched from VIM to TextMate; which is a good/bad thing; TextMate rocks, but I really miss the dual modes of VI; too bad TextMate went with Emacs keys; oh well I still get to visit my old friend when I'm on a server. FYI, try MacVim if you are looking for a GUI vim on OS X.
Re:I prefer EMACS!
on
Hacking VIM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have no mod points to give you to pull you out of AC zero land, so I'll just respond that I totally agree.
I can understand having simple tools for casual computer users or for learning purposes, but professional developers or admins who refuse to use something because it takes a little bit of work is disturbing. It's similar to programmers who can't type; seriously if you can't spend the 2 weeks it takes to learn how to touch type, then how much effort are you going to put into your craft?
All you're arguing is there should be a middle tier, to abstract out the business logic from the UI code. You won't get any arguments from any qualified developer.
However, I see no argument for why that middle tier should be stored procedures; everything you mention can be done in any number of technologies, including Ruby or Ruby on Rails.
Well, truthfully, there were a bunch of people with the sentiment "she's doing a good job, but I don't like her" and I just randomly picked yours to respond to. And to be fair "I can't stand her" would be taken by most people to mean that you don't like the person, rather than the job she's doing.
I don't live in NY, so I really don't much about Senator Clinton's performance there. I just find it weird that a bunch of engineers and geeks on/. seem to care more about personality than job performance; On "Salesperson Daily" blog I can understand that, but not on/..
So no "attack" was intended, just a little dialog.
Seriously, why does it matter if you "can stand her". Who cares if you like her personally. I fear we'll never get good qualified politicians, we'll always get the person who people "feel" is a wonderful person, or "down to earth" or just like me. I don't want a wonderful person as my President, I don't even want someone who doesn't lie or someone who hugs their kids real tight every night after praying to my God. I could care less. I want someone who can do the job, and do it well, and be effective. Jimmy Carter probably was the most decent person who's ever sat in the White House; who cares, he wasn't very good at the job.
Next time you have brain surgery, please pick your doctor on wether or not you like them as a person, rather than their skill as a brain surgeon.
The irony is, without the those people you don't understand, Perl would of never existed in the first place.
The world needs both conservative people like yourself, as well as the people always looking for the next greatest thing. You would be programming in assembly without them, and a lot less work would get done without people like you.
Ruby and Python are next generation languages that both address issues with languages such as Perl. They exist for a reason. I personally really like Ruby as it does Perl and Smalltalk better than Perl and Smalltalk.
In 5 years if Ruby is as popular as Perl, you will be here aghast at why anyone would try that new language when Ruby is obviously just fine.
Please excuse the rant, but this is a pet peeve of mine. I find the term "scripting language" meaningless, I can't seem to find any real definition for what that means.
Does it mean a language has an interpreter, so it can be used as as script? If that is the case, then c is a "scripting language".
Does it mean that a "program" has to use another program in order to execute. This meaning would exclude c and c++, but would include things like c# and Java.
Does it mean that it is dynamically typed? Then are Smalltalk and Lisp scripting languages? If this is the definition, then why not call them dynamically typed languages?
Does it mean a "glue" language, as in, the language is mostly used to call external programs that do most of the work. This would be something like Bash scripts or Batch files in Windows. If this is the case, then Perl, Python, and Ruby would not be scripting languages.
No matter what definition you pick, it either includes some languages that no-one considers scripting languages, or excludes languages that people consider scripting languages.
Seriously people, get over yourselves. That post couldn't of possibly had more tongue firmly applied in cheek. Furthermore, I was responded to a post with similar antagonistic language; thus my cheeky response.
Yes, I actually do hire people, and no, I don't really dock people who wear a suit and tie, I could care less what they wear, as long as it's clean. I care about the person's portfolio first and foremost; what they've done, and what they can do in our team. Everything else is weighed but much less important.
I don't think you get the point whatsoever. My response to your post was to point out, hopefully in a humorous way, that you ignored everything I wrote except for my few word usage (not spelling) mistakes. Instead of focusing on the content, you focused on superficial things. I assume that's what you are doing when you are looking for an expensive suit in an interview. Comfortable, engineer appropriate clothes can be clean, pressed, and stylish also.
Yes, of course, if you have spelling or word usage mistakes on your resume everyone is going to simply throw your resume away. No kidding, and water is wet, and the sky is blue. That's helpful information.
Do you really think I wrote my resume in 45 seconds, like I wrote that post on/., as if they are of similar importance?
Ok now, that's not fair, you were ribbing the guy, and I in turn was ribbing you. Now you go and write a sensible post without any inflammatory remarks; that's hardly fun.
It's totally true what you say (this post, not the last). And I do recommend that geeks learn to speak that other language as well (human), because unfortunately we don't yet rule the world (yet!), and we do have to deal with those other people on a daily basis.
However, I still disagree on dressing up. I think one should take the time to look nice and stylish, I just don't think one should emulate the other's style. But of course, this is also a regional and cultural thing. I work in the San Francisco bay area, and we geeks are a large population here and our style is common and acceptable.
So I guess what I'm saying is: sure learn to get along with everyone, but don't change who you are and be proud of being a geek, I know I sure am.
Yes, you're correct, in my haste to defend geekdom everywhere, that little "e" traveled from clothes to suit; my mistake.
I did review my resume, just to make sure, and luckily I didn't use either clothes or suit anywhere on it, which is strange really, as I'm a designer for Men's Wearhouse.
Give it a few years of seeing the guys wearing nice clothes making way more money than you, coming in at 8, going home at 5, weekends off, and being able to afford to retire way before you. Meanwhile you are working 7 or 8 till 7 or 8 and weekends etc. etc. Actually, no. I make more than most people, as my job is incredibly hard, and there isn't a line of people behind who are able to do it for less money. And It isn't because I'm young, as I've been doing this job since the early 90s. I work in a field where everything is based on what you can do, not what how you look or how much you can bullsh!t.
Next time you get on a airplane, I hope the engineer that designed it was picked because he had the nicest suite, not because he knew anything about aeronautical engineering.
I'm not sure what he hates, but I'll answer for myself. I hate when people can only look at surface level things, such as the price of one's outfit, and can't take the time to base opinions on a person's abilities, talents, and work ethic. Frankly if someone "above" me looks down on me because I don't wear expensive (I probably make more than them) enough cloths, then I do hope they mention it to me, so I can find another place to work that values my talent; as I actually have talent that won't be hard for me. I tend to notice the more someone works at playing politics, over dressing, etc, the lower the quality of their work is.
As for "IT conform to the 'non-conformist hippy' bit because they have self-esteem problems", that's laughable. I know it's hard to believe, but there is a geek culture, and there are certain ways that we geeks dress, as with every culture. Looking like a sales person does very little to help your career in IT. Personally when I'm hiring (as I'm a geek in a high position; that scares you doesn't it) I dock people if they show up in a suite and tie; I assume they are trying too hard to cover up some lack of skills.
Here is another thing that may surprise you, most "geeks" have no interest in becoming managers, sales people, or executives. This kind of work isn't a good fit for them, and wouldn't make them happy. Just as reading technical documentation and focusing on complex problems without human interaction for 10 hours a day wouldn't be a good fit for a CEO. Geeks don't aspire to be the slick sales person or the football star, as much as those type people would love to think they do.
They say you should dress for the job you want, not the job you have. I completely agree, thus why I dress like a "non-conformist hippy". I'm sure people like you would love to fire me, but then who would run your world for you?
Get a new job. I'm not even kidding. The reason companies can treat employees bad, is because employees refuse to hold them responsible. If good employees regularly left bad employers, as they should, the good employers would thrive, and the bad employers would die. A free market only works if people make use of it.
You payed "sales tax" on labor? Serious question, and perhaps that's how it works in your state. But in my state (CA), if you only provide services, without selling any product, you don't even have to get a seller's permit, as there is no taxes on services. I know because my company only provides services and no products.
The issue is no longer if M$ can make Vista "good enough" it's if Windoze has ever adequate. First, I'm a big Unix advocate, and I'm by no means a supporter of Microsoft's products. However, comments like yours does absolutely nothing to help your cause. As soon as I see M$, Windoze, or other such 5th grade silliness, I tune out a comment, disregarding any thoughtful or insightful analysis that it may have contained.
Perhaps there is a reason that your comments are "mod'd out of sight". Language can be powerful, do try to learn to wield that power effectively.
It is far easier to configure and manage Vista clients with users running as normal users, not as administrators. This will be true in the future, but not now, because so many applications just won't work with this setup (some of Microsoft's too, amazingly). Apps written for XP assume that the user is an admin, which of course isn't good development practices, but it's a reality. Vista's new security policies really fraks with an applications auto-update feature too, I've dealt with this myself with legacy custom applications, basically forced me to move applications out of Program Files, thus bypassing elevation issues. Of course the right thing to do is rewrite the way these legacy applications work, but that isn't going to get a high priority anytime soon.
...but if you are throwing out everything else anyway, why not go in favour of something that will at least save you money in terms of licensing and hardware requirements... This is very true, and what I believe will be the long term result of Vista. It's not that it's horrible, it's merely ok, and it causes enterprises to change a lot of their infrastructure. Once you have accepted that your infrastructure will be changing, the cost of switching to an alternative is much easier to swallow. It's a catch 22 for Microsoft, they have to make changes to their OS to compete, but it gives people an excuse to switch. The answer, of course, it to make your new OS so great that when compared to the alternatives, there is no question which one to go with. Vista is only OK, and that isn't good enough.
As a developer I went through the same thing years ago. I specialized in COM (ActiveX), COM+, and the rest of their DNA stuff (which they had just rolled out); I mainly used Visual C++ and some Visual Basic. Then Microsoft announced.net, and everything that came before was going away; all the stuff, a year ago they were saying was the future. The point of this long story is, I was going to have to relearn everything, and because of that the price to switch platforms was equal to staying with Microsoft. At that time I switched to Java completely. That switch to Java gave me opportunity to switch to unix, which I did. Now I only use Windows when I have to.
This kind of think, IMHO, is going to happen to the IT people, like it did to so many of us developers back then.
Yes, and the Oracle database I was just using uses 16gb of memory and takes minutes to start. So I guess, compared to my word processor Oracle is really freakin' slow. My point is Oracle isn't designed to compete on startup times or memory usage, for what's it's used for it's incredibly fast.
I guess I just don't understand the point of these "Java" is slow statements. 95% (probably more than that) of Java is used on the server, and it is very fast, even compared to languages like C, in that environment (sometimes faster because of Hotspot's ability to dynamically optimize). Yes it's slow on the desktop, but that is a tiny percentage of where it's used, so how is that a fair metric to go by?
I'm not sure how you define "slow", but Java is hardly slow whether you mean performant or scalability. It has slow startup times, and uses a lot of memory, compared to c for example, but it is hardly slow at runtime tasks (these two things are irrelevant where Java is used most, which is the server). Please to be showing me the benchmarks that shows it to be slow (not from 2002).
Stop bringing facts into Myth propagation. Without the ability to propagate myths, what would many/. users do? You insensitive clod.
Macs have one mouse button. Java is slow. You can't run Office on a Mac, so it's useless. Windows machines lock up every 14.5 minutes. Microsoft innovates (tm). An iPod can't play mp3s.
/ Myths are cool // So are slashies // Oh, sorry, this isn't Fark
"Last nights episode sucked. Everything Star Trek has sucked since TOS. Another rehash, more talking heads, time travel, Picard's feelings, blah blah blah. I watched the episode twice and man did it suck. I've seen every episode, at least two times or more, and they all suck so bad. Do they have writers? How about real actors? I'd write more, but Enterpise is on, and I have to watch it again, just to make sure it still sucks, just as bad."
California restricts this kind of silliness too; this concept that when you're employed, your employer owns your thoughts, even when those thoughts occur at home or about non-business related creations.
There is a reason that the Googles of the world start in CA (that and schools like Stanford, Berkley and a huge tech engineer base, but whatever:-) ).
If you work in a creative industry, such as I do (software designer), and your portfolio and ability to create are your career, then I'd strongly consider looking at your state laws, and working on changing them (voting, donating to orgs that fight for such things, etc), or moving to a state that believes in the American dream.
Slashdot Mirror
Just out curiosity why is the Mac poor as a development environment? All I can guess is you mean you can't run Visual Studio, but since that's a Windows only application, that kind of goes without saying.
Yeah, it takes time to acclimate. I'm a unix junkie, and an ex Linux on the desktop user who switched over to OS X a few years ago. It just takes time to appreciate everything and get comfortable.
Once you find the good apps, such as iTerm instead of Terminal, figure out how to install XCode, MacPorts, and XWindows things start to feel good again. There are some warts, such as mounting Volumes where you like, but overall it's a pretty good setup. I'm in the command-line most of the day, but I can still run Photoshop, iTunes, and Office without using something like Wine.
Some of the open source OS X apps are excellent, such as Adium compared to GAIM; Adium is GAIM done right. Treat yourself to VLC, Handbrake, and the oh so awesome QuickSilver.
Some little things are nice, such as having the Command key, which lets you use Command-C for copy, leaving Control-c for the command-line; I never liked using shift-control-c in gnome. Some of the little things are weird, but this is because of BSD user-land, not OS X specifically.
I finally switched from VIM to TextMate; which is a good/bad thing; TextMate rocks, but I really miss the dual modes of VI; too bad TextMate went with Emacs keys; oh well I still get to visit my old friend when I'm on a server. FYI, try MacVim if you are looking for a GUI vim on OS X.
I have no mod points to give you to pull you out of AC zero land, so I'll just respond that I totally agree.
I can understand having simple tools for casual computer users or for learning purposes, but professional developers or admins who refuse to use something because it takes a little bit of work is disturbing. It's similar to programmers who can't type; seriously if you can't spend the 2 weeks it takes to learn how to touch type, then how much effort are you going to put into your craft?
All you're arguing is there should be a middle tier, to abstract out the business logic from the UI code. You won't get any arguments from any qualified developer.
However, I see no argument for why that middle tier should be stored procedures; everything you mention can be done in any number of technologies, including Ruby or Ruby on Rails.
Well, truthfully, there were a bunch of people with the sentiment "she's doing a good job, but I don't like her" and I just randomly picked yours to respond to. And to be fair "I can't stand her" would be taken by most people to mean that you don't like the person, rather than the job she's doing.
/. seem to care more about personality than job performance; On "Salesperson Daily" blog I can understand that, but not on /..
I don't live in NY, so I really don't much about Senator Clinton's performance there. I just find it weird that a bunch of engineers and geeks on
So no "attack" was intended, just a little dialog.
Seriously, why does it matter if you "can stand her". Who cares if you like her personally. I fear we'll never get good qualified politicians, we'll always get the person who people "feel" is a wonderful person, or "down to earth" or just like me. I don't want a wonderful person as my President, I don't even want someone who doesn't lie or someone who hugs their kids real tight every night after praying to my God. I could care less. I want someone who can do the job, and do it well, and be effective. Jimmy Carter probably was the most decent person who's ever sat in the White House; who cares, he wasn't very good at the job.
Next time you have brain surgery, please pick your doctor on wether or not you like them as a person, rather than their skill as a brain surgeon.
The irony is, without the those people you don't understand, Perl would of never existed in the first place.
The world needs both conservative people like yourself, as well as the people always looking for the next greatest thing. You would be programming in assembly without them, and a lot less work would get done without people like you.
Ruby and Python are next generation languages that both address issues with languages such as Perl. They exist for a reason. I personally really like Ruby as it does Perl and Smalltalk better than Perl and Smalltalk.
In 5 years if Ruby is as popular as Perl, you will be here aghast at why anyone would try that new language when Ruby is obviously just fine.
Please excuse the rant, but this is a pet peeve of mine. I find the term "scripting language" meaningless, I can't seem to find any real definition for what that means.
Does it mean a language has an interpreter, so it can be used as as script? If that is the case, then c is a "scripting language".
Does it mean that a "program" has to use another program in order to execute. This meaning would exclude c and c++, but would include things like c# and Java.
Does it mean that it is dynamically typed? Then are Smalltalk and Lisp scripting languages? If this is the definition, then why not call them dynamically typed languages?
Does it mean a "glue" language, as in, the language is mostly used to call external programs that do most of the work. This would be something like Bash scripts or Batch files in Windows. If this is the case, then Perl, Python, and Ruby would not be scripting languages.
No matter what definition you pick, it either includes some languages that no-one considers scripting languages, or excludes languages that people consider scripting languages.
Seriously people, get over yourselves. That post couldn't of possibly had more tongue firmly applied in cheek. Furthermore, I was responded to a post with similar antagonistic language; thus my cheeky response.
Yes, I actually do hire people, and no, I don't really dock people who wear a suit and tie, I could care less what they wear, as long as it's clean. I care about the person's portfolio first and foremost; what they've done, and what they can do in our team. Everything else is weighed but much less important.
I don't think you get the point whatsoever. My response to your post was to point out, hopefully in a humorous way, that you ignored everything I wrote except for my few word usage (not spelling) mistakes. Instead of focusing on the content, you focused on superficial things. I assume that's what you are doing when you are looking for an expensive suit in an interview. Comfortable, engineer appropriate clothes can be clean, pressed, and stylish also.
/., as if they are of similar importance?
Yes, of course, if you have spelling or word usage mistakes on your resume everyone is going to simply throw your resume away. No kidding, and water is wet, and the sky is blue. That's helpful information.
Do you really think I wrote my resume in 45 seconds, like I wrote that post on
Was it that transparent?
Now you know, we aren't trying to fix bugs or iron out gameplay, we are simply trying to avoid sales tax.
Ok now, that's not fair, you were ribbing the guy, and I in turn was ribbing you. Now you go and write a sensible post without any inflammatory remarks; that's hardly fun.
It's totally true what you say (this post, not the last). And I do recommend that geeks learn to speak that other language as well (human), because unfortunately we don't yet rule the world (yet!), and we do have to deal with those other people on a daily basis.
However, I still disagree on dressing up. I think one should take the time to look nice and stylish, I just don't think one should emulate the other's style. But of course, this is also a regional and cultural thing. I work in the San Francisco bay area, and we geeks are a large population here and our style is common and acceptable.
So I guess what I'm saying is: sure learn to get along with everyone, but don't change who you are and be proud of being a geek, I know I sure am.
Yes, you're correct, in my haste to defend geekdom everywhere, that little "e" traveled from clothes to suit; my mistake.
I did review my resume, just to make sure, and luckily I didn't use either clothes or suit anywhere on it, which is strange really, as I'm a designer for Men's Wearhouse.
Next time you get on a airplane, I hope the engineer that designed it was picked because he had the nicest suite, not because he knew anything about aeronautical engineering.
I'm not sure what he hates, but I'll answer for myself. I hate when people can only look at surface level things, such as the price of one's outfit, and can't take the time to base opinions on a person's abilities, talents, and work ethic. Frankly if someone "above" me looks down on me because I don't wear expensive (I probably make more than them) enough cloths, then I do hope they mention it to me, so I can find another place to work that values my talent; as I actually have talent that won't be hard for me. I tend to notice the more someone works at playing politics, over dressing, etc, the lower the quality of their work is.
As for "IT conform to the 'non-conformist hippy' bit because they have self-esteem problems", that's laughable. I know it's hard to believe, but there is a geek culture, and there are certain ways that we geeks dress, as with every culture. Looking like a sales person does very little to help your career in IT. Personally when I'm hiring (as I'm a geek in a high position; that scares you doesn't it) I dock people if they show up in a suite and tie; I assume they are trying too hard to cover up some lack of skills.
Here is another thing that may surprise you, most "geeks" have no interest in becoming managers, sales people, or executives. This kind of work isn't a good fit for them, and wouldn't make them happy. Just as reading technical documentation and focusing on complex problems without human interaction for 10 hours a day wouldn't be a good fit for a CEO. Geeks don't aspire to be the slick sales person or the football star, as much as those type people would love to think they do.
They say you should dress for the job you want, not the job you have. I completely agree, thus why I dress like a "non-conformist hippy". I'm sure people like you would love to fire me, but then who would run your world for you?
Get a new job. I'm not even kidding. The reason companies can treat employees bad, is because employees refuse to hold them responsible. If good employees regularly left bad employers, as they should, the good employers would thrive, and the bad employers would die. A free market only works if people make use of it.
You payed "sales tax" on labor? Serious question, and perhaps that's how it works in your state. But in my state (CA), if you only provide services, without selling any product, you don't even have to get a seller's permit, as there is no taxes on services. I know because my company only provides services and no products.
Perhaps there is a reason that your comments are "mod'd out of sight". Language can be powerful, do try to learn to wield that power effectively.
...but if you are throwing out everything else anyway, why not go in favour of something that will at least save you money in terms of licensing and hardware requirements... This is very true, and what I believe will be the long term result of Vista. It's not that it's horrible, it's merely ok, and it causes enterprises to change a lot of their infrastructure. Once you have accepted that your infrastructure will be changing, the cost of switching to an alternative is much easier to swallow. It's a catch 22 for Microsoft, they have to make changes to their OS to compete, but it gives people an excuse to switch. The answer, of course, it to make your new OS so great that when compared to the alternatives, there is no question which one to go with. Vista is only OK, and that isn't good enough.As a developer I went through the same thing years ago. I specialized in COM (ActiveX), COM+, and the rest of their DNA stuff (which they had just rolled out); I mainly used Visual C++ and some Visual Basic. Then Microsoft announced
This kind of think, IMHO, is going to happen to the IT people, like it did to so many of us developers back then.
Yes, and the Oracle database I was just using uses 16gb of memory and takes minutes to start. So I guess, compared to my word processor Oracle is really freakin' slow. My point is Oracle isn't designed to compete on startup times or memory usage, for what's it's used for it's incredibly fast.
I guess I just don't understand the point of these "Java" is slow statements. 95% (probably more than that) of Java is used on the server, and it is very fast, even compared to languages like C, in that environment (sometimes faster because of Hotspot's ability to dynamically optimize). Yes it's slow on the desktop, but that is a tiny percentage of where it's used, so how is that a fair metric to go by?
I'm not sure how you define "slow", but Java is hardly slow whether you mean performant or scalability. It has slow startup times, and uses a lot of memory, compared to c for example, but it is hardly slow at runtime tasks (these two things are irrelevant where Java is used most, which is the server). Please to be showing me the benchmarks that shows it to be slow (not from 2002).
Stop bringing facts into Myth propagation. Without the ability to propagate myths, what would many /. users do? You insensitive clod.
// So are slashies
// Oh, sorry, this isn't Fark
Macs have one mouse button. Java is slow. You can't run Office on a Mac, so it's useless. Windows machines lock up every 14.5 minutes. Microsoft innovates (tm). An iPod can't play mp3s.
/ Myths are cool
"Last nights episode sucked. Everything Star Trek has sucked since TOS. Another rehash, more talking heads, time travel, Picard's feelings, blah blah blah. I watched the episode twice and man did it suck. I've seen every episode, at least two times or more, and they all suck so bad. Do they have writers? How about real actors? I'd write more, but Enterpise is on, and I have to watch it again, just to make sure it still sucks, just as bad."
California restricts this kind of silliness too; this concept that when you're employed, your employer owns your thoughts, even when those thoughts occur at home or about non-business related creations.
:-) ).
There is a reason that the Googles of the world start in CA (that and schools like Stanford, Berkley and a huge tech engineer base, but whatever
If you work in a creative industry, such as I do (software designer), and your portfolio and ability to create are your career, then I'd strongly consider looking at your state laws, and working on changing them (voting, donating to orgs that fight for such things, etc), or moving to a state that believes in the American dream.