Sorry. I don't take orders from the likes of imbeciles like yourself. I don't owe you a damn thing. There is more than ample evidence to support climate change and no amount of additional evidence will convince the likes of you. I've seen your prior posts and they tell me all I need to know about you.
Oh, and by the way, my grandkids will get a kick out of "I am betting you are a snot-nosed, know-it-all teenager who should be doing homework". That's the best insult I've gotten in years!
Thank God man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt Nasa would be telling us that this year is now the hottest since humans began keeping records. The weather satellites would show that even when heat from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still got hotter. Russia's vast forests would be burning to the ground in the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapour, the world's storms would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence – drowning one fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China.
The world's ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks four times the size of Manhattan. The cost of bread would be soaring across the world as heat shrivelled the wheat crops. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans, making them more acidic and so killing 40 per cent of the phytoplankton that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain.
One of the complaints about Android is that it's UI is not as smooth as iOS, occasionally stalling and providing a generally more "jerky" user experience. Some of this is due to the garbage collection that (somewhat randomly) occurs within the Dalvik VM. A second core that can perform GC in the background will be a major benefit to achieving a smoother UI experience on par with iOS 4. Since iOS (Objective-C specifically) does not have GC, it will not gain as much of an improvement.
As an aside, another improvement coming in Gingerbread (Android 2.3) is an updated NDK (r5) that will allow native applications to be coded directly in C or C++ instead of only being a callable library as is the case in the current NDK. For the first time, developers will be able to develop C/C++ applications for Android without writing a single line of Java. This will usher a new wave of high performance applications we haven't seen on any previous mobile platform.
Full details of the experiments are not yet available, but the basic set-up is as follows. Two adjacent but physically separate test tubes were placed within a copper coil and subjected to a very weak extremely low frequency electromagnetic field of 7 hertz. The apparatus was isolated from Earth's natural magnetic field to stop it interfering with the experiment. One tube contained a fragment of DNA around 100 bases long; the second tube contained pure water.
After 16 to 18 hours, both samples were independently subjected to the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a method routinely used to amplify traces of DNA by using enzymes to make many copies of the original material. The gene fragment was apparently recovered from both tubes, even though one should have contained just water (see diagram).
DNA was only recovered if the original solution of DNA - whose concentration has not been revealed - had been subjected to several dilution cycles before being placed in the magnetic field. In each cycle it was diluted 10-fold, and "ghost" DNA was only recovered after between seven and 12 dilutions of the original. It was not found at the ultra-high dilutions used in homeopathy.
Physicists in Montagnier's team suggest that DNA emits low-frequency electromagnetic waves which imprint the structure of the molecule onto the water. This structure, they claim, is preserved and amplified through quantum coherence effects, and because it mimics the shape of the original DNA, the enzymes in the PCR process mistake it for DNA itself, and somehow use it as a template to make DNA matching that which "sent" the signal (arxiv.org/abs/1012.5166).
All I can say is, pretty spooky action at a distance!
I just use the simple approach of keeping VERY little money in my accounts. With the economy the way it's been lately, that hasn't been much of a problem.
No, just 35+ years of (~12 hrs/day) heads down development. I still use (as in getting paid for using) nearly all of these languages from time to time. No language is an island unto itself and all languages are related to other (previous) languages to some extent so that when I encounter a new language it tends to build on what I've already learned. I don't claim to be a "master" of anything and I'd dismiss immediately anyone who did make that claim.
I've always been interested in computer languages and spent a good deal of time studying compiler and language design, including a period of time spent helping to develop the ANSI X3.74-1981 spec for "PL/I General-Purpose Subset".
I do claim competence in what I know and my clients can vouch (and do vouch with their $$$) for that. I do question the intellectual abilities (and sanity) of anyone who can spent 35 years in software development and still only knows one or two languages.
Machine language is probably the most widely used of all since everything eventually breaks down to it, but does that mean it's a programming language?
Sure. So is Java bytecode. Just because it's obnoxious to use doesn't mean it's not a programming language.
No, I'm sorry. Allowing that machine language is a programming language it taking it a bit far. Keep in mind that "machine language" != "assembly language".
Nothing is more ubiquitous today than HTML, yet most "programmers" would argue that HTML is not a programming language, but guess what - it is a "declarative" language as opposed to an "imperative" language, but does that really disqualify it as a programming language? Many would argue yes, it does.
Ah, now see, HTML is an interesting question. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I would tend to say "no", though I'm not completely set on that belief.
But that declarative vs imperative? Not at all the problem. Haskell is clearly a programming language, and it's not imperative. I would say Prolog is too, and it's quite declarative (although I don't understand how you would actually use it for most tasks, that's my own failing).
No, if HTML isn't a programming language, it's because it's not Turing complete. Heck, I don't even know how you could add 1 + 1 with HTML and display 2 let alone do more complex loop/recursion computations.
Is being Turing complete what constitutes a programming language? Again, machine language is Turing complete, but does a string of ones and zeros stored in memory constitute a programming language?
CLisp, Clojure and Arc are not the same as LISP, they are dialects of LISP.
Okay, fair enough, but then why bring up LISP? Has anyone actually used true LISP any time in the last couple decades?
I didn't bring up LISP, I was simply responding to a prior post that brought it up and I made the (apparently heretical) mistake to note that there is debate over whether (original) LISP is a true programming language.
Maybe it's a "stupidly restrictive definition", but by your logic, nearly anything can be considered a programming language. Machine language is probably the most widely used of all since everything eventually breaks down to it, but does that mean it's a programming language?
Nothing is more ubiquitous today than HTML, yet most "programmers" would argue that HTML is not a programming language, but guess what - it is a "declarative" language as opposed to an "imperative" language, but does that really disqualify it as a programming language? Many would argue yes, it does.
CLisp, Clojure and Arc are not the same as LISP, they are dialects of LISP. Would you consider VB.Net the same as ANSI Basic? I think not. Just because they share a common heritage (Dartmouth Basic) does not make them the same language. Almost all modern languages today implement ideas that were pioneered in LISP, but that does not make them all LISP.
You can pretend that there is no debate if you wish. As I stated, I can see points on both sides of the debate and I don't have a dog in either fight.
The examples you give are from a dialect of LISP (CLisp I presume). However, CLisp is not the original LISP anymore than Scheme or Arc or Clojure are original LISP - they are dialects - extensions to the original language. Most, if not all modern languages implement ideas that were pioneered by the original LISP. As far as the grammar, no the entire original LISP grammar is almost exactly as I stated above. I only listed the basic grammar statements, but a complete implementation of a LISP parser for bison can be found at http://ragnermagalhaes.blogspot.com/2007/08/bison-lisp-grammar.html
Geez, people are so religious about their languages. As stated earlier, I personally am not sure where I stand on the debate, but I am aware of it because I've heard it thrown around for the last 30 years or so whenever LISP was mentioned. I suppose it goes back to the origins of the language. John McCarthy invented LISP as an excecise in mathematics to describe an alternate implementation of a Turing machine. He was actually surprised when one of his students was able to implement it on a real machine. I've heard it said that programming in LISP is not really programming, but rather doing math.
Today's dialects (Scheme, CLisp, Clojure, etc) are not the same as the original lisp. No of this in anyway diminishes the import of LISP as many of the concepts it pioneered are part of most modern languages today (if-then-else, recursion, functional programming, lambda calculus, etc).
Java was never suited for realtime development. In fact, the original EULA for Java spelled that out. There is a spec for Java RTS (JSR-001) which is supposed to address "some" of the concerns for real-time systems, but I know next to nothing about it and would be reluctant to recommend it for RTS. Generally, any system that does garbage collection is going to be unsuitable for RTS. This includes C#, Obj-C2, Python, Lisp, and a host of other languages.
However, believe it or not, there is software other than embedded real-time systems.
For systems that don't have the constraints imposed by RTS, garbage collection is a great feature. Not only does it make the programmers life easier, it can (if not abused) make memory leaks and data corruption a thing of the past.
No one in their right mind would use Java for RTS, but by the same token, no one in their right mind (today) would use C, C++ or Ada to develop a web application, business application or other software system for which being deterministic is not a critical factor. There are just too many better (as in higher programmer productivity) language systems than C/C++ for these type of applications.
If I recall correctly, IBM VisualAge C++ (4.0 I believe) made the creation and inclusion of header files optional many years ago. I never used that feature but I do remember it being available. Whether this was done in the compiler itself, or just masked by the IDE I can't say. Seemed like a neat feature at the time though.
You're exactly correct. Smalltalk is one of the few languages that truly implement OO as it was originally described, but it's performance was less than optimal. C++ was an attempt to tack on OO features to the C language, but still maintain high performance. Objective-C was a similar attempt to extend concepts OO to C and perhaps truer to the original description of OO than C++, but it's implementation of message passing and dynamic binding resulted in inferior performance to C++, (not to mention ugly as sin syntax - just my opinion).
If you aren't aware of this debate, then I suggest you research the history of LISP. I've already covered this on another post. I'm not even sure where I stand on the debate as I can see points on both sides, but I'm not idiotic enough to pretend that there is no debate.
It's not about whether there is a lot of LISP code out there - there certainly is - emacs is full of lisp macros. AI research and mathematics use it heavily.
The debate is more about whether it fits the classic definition of a computer language.
Classically, computer languages are defined by a specific, usually fairly extensive grammar, whereas the LISP grammar is basically
expr: ID | STR | NUM | list
list: ( seq )
seq: | expr seq
Again, this is not to say that it's not powerful or to deride it's significance, but to try and explain why there is legitimate debate over what constitutes a programming language.
It's not false nor misleading. LISP was originally created as a List Processing "system", not specifically a language. It describes an alternative way to implement a Turing machine. The original paper can be found at http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive/node4.html
If my statement above offends you, then you misinterpreted my intent. LISP has it's place as a powerful tool for creating domain specific languages and as a macro processor (as used in emacs), in AI and mathematics, but is not and was never intended as a general purpose programming language.
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Want, hell. Why don't you just make them do what you want? You seem to know what is best for them.
Well of course I think I do, we all do. The difference is that the smartest people in the world happen to agree with me. :)
It's like I tell people all the time, "Think about it. Do you you really think I'd take the time to argue with you if you were right?"
Oh, and by the way, my grandkids will get a kick out of "I am betting you are a snot-nosed, know-it-all teenager who should be doing homework". That's the best insult I've gotten in years!
http://www.amishrakefight.org/gfy/
Oh.... that's in DECIMAL?
Sorry, carry on.
He stole this crap from George Carlin http://gospelofreason.com/2007/05/24/george-carlin-the-planet-is-fine.
The difference that he missed however, was that George was being his (typical) sarcastic self.
Thank God man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt Nasa would be telling us that this year is now the hottest since humans began keeping records. The weather satellites would show that even when heat from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still got hotter. Russia's vast forests would be burning to the ground in the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapour, the world's storms would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence – drowning one fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China.
The world's ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks four times the size of Manhattan. The cost of bread would be soaring across the world as heat shrivelled the wheat crops. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans, making them more acidic and so killing 40 per cent of the phytoplankton that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain.
Oh, wait.....
No kidding. When I ran across this the old Steam song started running though my head...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaG2Acg8n60
One of the complaints about Android is that it's UI is not as smooth as iOS, occasionally stalling and providing a generally more "jerky" user experience. Some of this is due to the garbage collection that (somewhat randomly) occurs within the Dalvik VM. A second core that can perform GC in the background will be a major benefit to achieving a smoother UI experience on par with iOS 4. Since iOS (Objective-C specifically) does not have GC, it will not gain as much of an improvement.
As an aside, another improvement coming in Gingerbread (Android 2.3) is an updated NDK (r5) that will allow native applications to be coded directly in C or C++ instead of only being a callable library as is the case in the current NDK. For the first time, developers will be able to develop C/C++ applications for Android without writing a single line of Java. This will usher a new wave of high performance applications we haven't seen on any previous mobile platform.
Full details of the experiments are not yet available, but the basic set-up is as follows. Two adjacent but physically separate test tubes were placed within a copper coil and subjected to a very weak extremely low frequency electromagnetic field of 7 hertz. The apparatus was isolated from Earth's natural magnetic field to stop it interfering with the experiment. One tube contained a fragment of DNA around 100 bases long; the second tube contained pure water.
After 16 to 18 hours, both samples were independently subjected to the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a method routinely used to amplify traces of DNA by using enzymes to make many copies of the original material. The gene fragment was apparently recovered from both tubes, even though one should have contained just water (see diagram).
DNA was only recovered if the original solution of DNA - whose concentration has not been revealed - had been subjected to several dilution cycles before being placed in the magnetic field. In each cycle it was diluted 10-fold, and "ghost" DNA was only recovered after between seven and 12 dilutions of the original. It was not found at the ultra-high dilutions used in homeopathy.
Physicists in Montagnier's team suggest that DNA emits low-frequency electromagnetic waves which imprint the structure of the molecule onto the water. This structure, they claim, is preserved and amplified through quantum coherence effects, and because it mimics the shape of the original DNA, the enzymes in the PCR process mistake it for DNA itself, and somehow use it as a template to make DNA matching that which "sent" the signal (arxiv.org/abs/1012.5166).
All I can say is, pretty spooky action at a distance!
they figure out a way to connect my WiFi to my DNA so I can use my body to connect to the internet and stop paying these ridiculous 3G prices.
I just use the simple approach of keeping VERY little money in my accounts. With the economy the way it's been lately, that hasn't been much of a problem.
Those damn C pointers will get you everytime...
**futureWorldWideWeb = bleak;
Would they have to change the name to ROL (Russion On Line)?
No, just 35+ years of (~12 hrs/day) heads down development. I still use (as in getting paid for using) nearly all of these languages from time to time. No language is an island unto itself and all languages are related to other (previous) languages to some extent so that when I encounter a new language it tends to build on what I've already learned. I don't claim to be a "master" of anything and I'd dismiss immediately anyone who did make that claim.
I've always been interested in computer languages and spent a good deal of time studying compiler and language design, including a period of time spent helping to develop the ANSI X3.74-1981 spec for "PL/I General-Purpose Subset".
I do claim competence in what I know and my clients can vouch (and do vouch with their $$$) for that. I do question the intellectual abilities (and sanity) of anyone who can spent 35 years in software development and still only knows one or two languages.
Now you're dismissed.
Machine language is probably the most widely used of all since everything eventually breaks down to it, but does that mean it's a programming language?
Sure. So is Java bytecode. Just because it's obnoxious to use doesn't mean it's not a programming language.
No, I'm sorry. Allowing that machine language is a programming language it taking it a bit far. Keep in mind that "machine language" != "assembly language".
Nothing is more ubiquitous today than HTML, yet most "programmers" would argue that HTML is not a programming language, but guess what - it is a "declarative" language as opposed to an "imperative" language, but does that really disqualify it as a programming language? Many would argue yes, it does.
Ah, now see, HTML is an interesting question. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I would tend to say "no", though I'm not completely set on that belief.
But that declarative vs imperative? Not at all the problem. Haskell is clearly a programming language, and it's not imperative. I would say Prolog is too, and it's quite declarative (although I don't understand how you would actually use it for most tasks, that's my own failing).
No, if HTML isn't a programming language, it's because it's not Turing complete. Heck, I don't even know how you could add 1 + 1 with HTML and display 2 let alone do more complex loop/recursion computations.
Is being Turing complete what constitutes a programming language? Again, machine language is Turing complete, but does a string of ones and zeros stored in memory constitute a programming language?
CLisp, Clojure and Arc are not the same as LISP, they are dialects of LISP.
Okay, fair enough, but then why bring up LISP? Has anyone actually used true LISP any time in the last couple decades?
I didn't bring up LISP, I was simply responding to a prior post that brought it up and I made the (apparently heretical) mistake to note that there is debate over whether (original) LISP is a true programming language.
Maybe it's a "stupidly restrictive definition", but by your logic, nearly anything can be considered a programming language. Machine language is probably the most widely used of all since everything eventually breaks down to it, but does that mean it's a programming language?
Nothing is more ubiquitous today than HTML, yet most "programmers" would argue that HTML is not a programming language, but guess what - it is a "declarative" language as opposed to an "imperative" language, but does that really disqualify it as a programming language? Many would argue yes, it does.
CLisp, Clojure and Arc are not the same as LISP, they are dialects of LISP. Would you consider VB .Net the same as ANSI Basic? I think not. Just because they share a common heritage (Dartmouth Basic) does not make them the same language. Almost all modern languages today implement ideas that were pioneered in LISP, but that does not make them all LISP.
You can pretend that there is no debate if you wish. As I stated, I can see points on both sides of the debate and I don't have a dog in either fight.
The examples you give are from a dialect of LISP (CLisp I presume). However, CLisp is not the original LISP anymore than Scheme or Arc or Clojure are original LISP - they are dialects - extensions to the original language. Most, if not all modern languages implement ideas that were pioneered by the original LISP. As far as the grammar, no the entire original LISP grammar is almost exactly as I stated above. I only listed the basic grammar statements, but a complete implementation of a LISP parser for bison can be found at
http://ragnermagalhaes.blogspot.com/2007/08/bison-lisp-grammar.html
Yes, deterministic in the context of the discussion - RTS.
Geez, people are so religious about their languages. As stated earlier, I personally am not sure where I stand on the debate, but I am aware of it because I've heard it thrown around for the last 30 years or so whenever LISP was mentioned. I suppose it goes back to the origins of the language. John McCarthy invented LISP as an excecise in mathematics to describe an alternate implementation of a Turing machine. He was actually surprised when one of his students was able to implement it on a real machine. I've heard it said that programming in LISP is not really programming, but rather doing math.
http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html
Today's dialects (Scheme, CLisp, Clojure, etc) are not the same as the original lisp. No of this in anyway diminishes the import of LISP as many of the concepts it pioneered are part of most modern languages today (if-then-else, recursion, functional programming, lambda calculus, etc).
What in the world could they possible need more than a thousand people for?
One to hold the lightbulb and 1063 to turn the chair around?
Java was never suited for realtime development. In fact, the original EULA for Java spelled that out. There is a spec for Java RTS (JSR-001) which is supposed to address "some" of the concerns for real-time systems, but I know next to nothing about it and would be reluctant to recommend it for RTS. Generally, any system that does garbage collection is going to be unsuitable for RTS. This includes C#, Obj-C2, Python, Lisp, and a host of other languages.
However, believe it or not, there is software other than embedded real-time systems.
For systems that don't have the constraints imposed by RTS, garbage collection is a great feature. Not only does it make the programmers life easier, it can (if not abused) make memory leaks and data corruption a thing of the past.
No one in their right mind would use Java for RTS, but by the same token, no one in their right mind (today) would use C, C++ or Ada to develop a web application, business application or other software system for which being deterministic is not a critical factor. There are just too many better (as in higher programmer productivity) language systems than C/C++ for these type of applications.
If I recall correctly, IBM VisualAge C++ (4.0 I believe) made the creation and inclusion of header files optional many years ago. I never used that feature but I do remember it being available. Whether this was done in the compiler itself, or just masked by the IDE I can't say. Seemed like a neat feature at the time though.
You're exactly correct. Smalltalk is one of the few languages that truly implement OO as it was originally described, but it's performance was less than optimal. C++ was an attempt to tack on OO features to the C language, but still maintain high performance. Objective-C was a similar attempt to extend concepts OO to C and perhaps truer to the original description of OO than C++, but it's implementation of message passing and dynamic binding resulted in inferior performance to C++, (not to mention ugly as sin syntax - just my opinion).
It's not about whether there is a lot of LISP code out there - there certainly is - emacs is full of lisp macros. AI research and mathematics use it heavily.
The debate is more about whether it fits the classic definition of a computer language.
Classically, computer languages are defined by a specific, usually fairly extensive grammar, whereas the LISP grammar is basically
expr: ID | STR | NUM | list
list: ( seq )
seq: | expr seq
Again, this is not to say that it's not powerful or to deride it's significance, but to try and explain why there is legitimate debate over what constitutes a programming language.
If my statement above offends you, then you misinterpreted my intent. LISP has it's place as a powerful tool for creating domain specific languages and as a macro processor (as used in emacs), in AI and mathematics, but is not and was never intended as a general purpose programming language.