Guy with software-and-hardware crafting expertise, and successful design history, that far exceeds most degreed and officially licensed engineers in my fields. But. You know. Not "an engineer."
You are just reinventing machine language where data, instructions, and address pointers can be mixed willy-nilly.
Because machine language varies hugely, and c varies little or none, when working on one platform and then another, c is a convenient low-level way to get as many advantages of working close to the metal (obvious ones are speed and executable size) as possible.
Higher-level languages merely try to introduce discipline and consistency to such practices.
Yes, they do. And in the process, they often cause the resulting product to suffer in speed and/or execution size (and the source code in clarity.) When "mere" means "the product is less good", I translate it as "not mere."
There are reasons to go one way or another. It's not as simple as "HLL's are always better." Sometimes even machine language is the best place to go, embedded controllers with limited storage and small tasks that must be accomplished efficiently, for instance.
It's certainly possible, but if you can actually show me an instance of it, I'd be quite surprised. I don't recall seeing such a thing. Ever.
There's selection bias, where the story that is told is not the only story, and/or leaves out pertinent details that variously pollute the information transfer to the information consumer. This occurs at the publisher, editorial, reporter and information source levels.
There are errors in collecting information, which can be characterized as "impartial but wrong" which entirely undermines the value of "impartial."
There's the social underpinning, such as the assumptions by the platform from publisher down to reporter buy into memes like the drug war, human trafficking, mommyism, military adventurism, etc. as right and proper undertakings and tell stories in the context of the presumptive matrix that results from those memes.
There's ad-pumping, where the advertising pays more money in when more eyes are attracted, which creates a loop based on popularity rather than accuracy.
There's comment "moderation", where "I disagree / am offended / am trolling" can strongly affect visibility of information -- depending on the site, that can come from privileged (and usually wholly unqualified) individuals, as here on slashdot, or from the crowd, as on reddit.
It all adds up to an extremely formidable gauntlet that information has to run in order to get from wherever it arises over to the consideration of the consumer.
And, not that it's part of the problem of actually achieving impartial journalism, but were you to completely get past every aspect of that somehow, then you still have to find an impartial audience or all that work is for nothing.
IOW, if you manage to present the facts, all the facts, nothing but the facts, and your audience cries "fake news" or drags prejudice, superstition, confirmation bias, or anything from a very long list of similar cognitive failure modes into it, well, there you go. You might as well have written an SF novel.
If there's anything I've learned about journalism in the last 41 years, it's that everyone puts their own slant on it.
o Publishers - slant, selection bias o Advertisers - selection bias on source and slant by rewarding max eyeballs o Editors - slant, selection bias for stories o Reporters - slant, selection bias for sources o Information sources - slant, winners get to write history o Reader's choice of media - slant, selection bias
...it's not like it's showing any signs of getting better, either.
It is very wise to anticipate the need and establish and test it before it must become a mainstream standard.
But they're not doing that. This is a means-tested, graduated scale welfare mechanism.
This is not UBI, it doesn't even vaguely resemble UBI, and as a test of UBI, it's worthless, because its results are completely unrelated. To any degree the results are used to make any decisions at all about actual UBI, the decisions will be nonsensical. Garbage in, garbage out.
If it's my taxes being used to conduct this experiment, it damned well IS my business.
Not in a republic, it's not. If it's anyone's business, it's that of your representative. You know, the one you had/have a fractional millionth of an effect in selecting, and essentially none in influencing — that power has been purchased by the corporations.
I don't know how much an anatomically functional interactive sexbot will cost, but it will likely be way cheaper than alimony and child support, and it won't get headaches. If it has a "mute" button and can make sandwiches, that is even better.
True story:
My SO, Deb, and I were laying about in bed one lazy afternoon; she seemed to be dozing lightly.
Me: "Hey, baby?" Her: "Mmmm?"
Me: "When {unspoken:sex} robots come out, can we get a French maid?" She: "Sure."
Unions aren't the least bit obscure: they do very specific things, and just as you tell them to. It's a matter of skill. Not obscurity.
For instance, in my 6809 emulation, with a register that is sometimes independent 8-bit and sometimes single 16-bit (the 8-bit A and B registers become the 16-bit D register, depending on the instruction in play), a union is just the thing. It does exactly what is needed, when needed, and not otherwise.
Wow, you wrote that entire rant over a single letter. That's pathetic.
Language is an art, like painting. Technical language is an art where miscommunication leads to real world problems, and where evidence of lack of expertise leads to well justified lack of confidence up front.
With language, as with painting, you can paint like a master, or you can finger-paint like an addled child.
Which do you think will carry you further in life and in your career? Which do you think will result in more actual pathos?
Just having higher-order functions doesn't make a language a functional language any more than having structs makes C an object-oriented language.
Structs do, however, make the critical aspects of an object oriented approach practical in c. They can carry data, function pointers, etc., and they can be passed around.
I've been writing my c code like that since the 1980's. There are significant benefits.
I would add to this that reducing the complexity by turning everything into separate functions tends to also increase what I call "opacity by non-locality."
Not only are some things hard, some things benefit from having the logic right there in front of your face; not in a header, not in some function elsewhere, not in a library.
Benefits in both comprehension, and so ease of construction, but also in execution time and smaller executables depending on just how smart the language is in constructing its own executables.
So, for example, by storing functions as values in a dict you can build complex structures of execution without using any conditional codes.
This is the core mechanism of my text markup language. Once the specific built-in tokens are parsed out, they are immediately accessed via the language's function dictionary. This approach is quick, ultimately low-complexity, trivially extensible, and highly maintainable.
Would you consider unions in c a "means to circumvent the type system" as compared to a language with strong up-front typing?
Unions are certainly a very powerful, useful, and concise tool for manipulating data across type boundaries. If you don't have them, in trying to accomplish similar tasks as those unions make easy, in many languages you're going to be a lot more verbose, and likely a lot less efficient, than if you do.
I am assuming competence. Strong typing is a safety net. The need for such a thing varies with one's skill set. The fewer the participants, the more likely it is that the skill sets can be arranged to be similar. With larger teams, the need for safety nets almost always increases.
It might be an archaic term, but they've been in the business for a lot longer than you have (or you would have recognized the terminology).
I recognize the misuse just fine; I've been at this since the 1960's. Front panel toggles, punchcards and paper tape are wholly familiar to me, as are arranging diodes in a matrix and building CPUs out of RTL and TTL. The fact that I recognize the misuse is not motivation to appreciate it, any more than I would if some non-contemporaneous Babbage-era use of "gears" was suddenly thought to be a good idea to use as the go-to word for software, or if someone referred to a modern day stick of RAM as "core", or if someone insisted on referring to computers in general as abaci.
The industry is well centered around particular terminology right now and has been for decades. That's the terminology to use, unless you want people focusing more on what you said, than what you meant. Which tends to lead to the wrong place no matter what you do. Particularly in engineering. Words matter. Being sloppy is costly.
Referring to software and applications as 'codes' is common in many industries (example "here). People that use such terminology are of much higher than average intelligence.
And so they have even less excuse for their mangling of the terminology, and definitely should be smiled at, nodded to, and ultimately, ignored other than when they have some kind of arbitrary coercive power over you, in which case, do it in your head anyway.
If you walk up to a nuclear engineer with your 140 IQ and ask him to "turn up the atumz", he should probably just call security and have your ass thrown out on the street.
Seriously. If you don't know even the basics of an industry's terminology -- it's time to leave off trying to involve yourself until you get that handled. If you do.
Really? The book must be overwhelmed by the stuff then, because the film is almost completely full of it.
He's right. The book takes a much more serious look at government than the movie does. Books are a better platform for that sort of detail than movies are, there's just no way around that. But the movie does an excellent job of implying all manner of things without the detail, as such things go, and the post here was about movies, not books, so I made no commentary on that initially.
In whatever order I'm in the mood for, which varies:
Bladerunner - the original, with the narration. Firefly - TV show same. These were just plain fun, except for the pilot's death, which struck me as uncalled for. Starship Troopers - loved the twisted angle on government. Great bugs. Would you like to know more? Paul - hilarious, totally non-serious SF. Alien (original) - great SF horror, and great SF besides. Terminator - original The Martian - really good hard SF, quite rare to find
Slashdot Mirror
That in no wise means it's good or proper law.
Signed,
Guy with software-and-hardware crafting expertise, and successful design history, that far exceeds most degreed and officially licensed engineers in my fields. But. You know. Not "an engineer."
Response probably would have been somewhat along the lines of "You are fined $500 for falsely representing yourself as an anatomist."
More to the point, you can't make it better by avoiding using a union. Because it's optimum as is.
The right tool for the right job.
The job is the job. I have no problem using the right tool for the job.
Because machine language varies hugely, and c varies little or none, when working on one platform and then another, c is a convenient low-level way to get as many advantages of working close to the metal (obvious ones are speed and executable size) as possible.
Yes, they do. And in the process, they often cause the resulting product to suffer in speed and/or execution size (and the source code in clarity.) When "mere" means "the product is less good", I translate it as "not mere."
There are reasons to go one way or another. It's not as simple as "HLL's are always better." Sometimes even machine language is the best place to go, embedded controllers with limited storage and small tasks that must be accomplished efficiently, for instance.
It's certainly possible, but if you can actually show me an instance of it, I'd be quite surprised. I don't recall seeing such a thing. Ever.
There's selection bias, where the story that is told is not the only story, and/or leaves out pertinent details that variously pollute the information transfer to the information consumer. This occurs at the publisher, editorial, reporter and information source levels.
There are errors in collecting information, which can be characterized as "impartial but wrong" which entirely undermines the value of "impartial."
There's the social underpinning, such as the assumptions by the platform from publisher down to reporter buy into memes like the drug war, human trafficking, mommyism, military adventurism, etc. as right and proper undertakings and tell stories in the context of the presumptive matrix that results from those memes.
There's ad-pumping, where the advertising pays more money in when more eyes are attracted, which creates a loop based on popularity rather than accuracy.
There's comment "moderation", where "I disagree / am offended / am trolling" can strongly affect visibility of information -- depending on the site, that can come from privileged (and usually wholly unqualified) individuals, as here on slashdot, or from the crowd, as on reddit.
It all adds up to an extremely formidable gauntlet that information has to run in order to get from wherever it arises over to the consideration of the consumer.
And, not that it's part of the problem of actually achieving impartial journalism, but were you to completely get past every aspect of that somehow, then you still have to find an impartial audience or all that work is for nothing.
IOW, if you manage to present the facts, all the facts, nothing but the facts, and your audience cries "fake news" or drags prejudice, superstition, confirmation bias, or anything from a very long list of similar cognitive failure modes into it, well, there you go. You might as well have written an SF novel.
o Publishers - slant, selection bias
...it's not like it's showing any signs of getting better, either.
o Advertisers - selection bias on source and slant by rewarding max eyeballs
o Editors - slant, selection bias for stories
o Reporters - slant, selection bias for sources
o Information sources - slant, winners get to write history
o Reader's choice of media - slant, selection bias
Yes, said commenter clearly needs more money.
But they're not doing that. This is a means-tested, graduated scale welfare mechanism.
This is not UBI, it doesn't even vaguely resemble UBI, and as a test of UBI, it's worthless, because its results are completely unrelated. To any degree the results are used to make any decisions at all about actual UBI, the decisions will be nonsensical. Garbage in, garbage out.
Not in a republic, it's not. If it's anyone's business, it's that of your representative. You know, the one you had/have a fractional millionth of an effect in selecting, and essentially none in influencing — that power has been purchased by the corporations.
True story:
My SO, Deb, and I were laying about in bed one lazy afternoon; she seemed to be dozing lightly.
Me: "Hey, baby?"
Her: "Mmmm?"
Me: "When {unspoken:sex} robots come out, can we get a French maid?"
...a few seconds pass...
She: "Sure."
She: "We'll call him 'Pierre.'"
I made a photo-toon of this
Unions aren't the least bit obscure: they do very specific things, and just as you tell them to. It's a matter of skill. Not obscurity.
For instance, in my 6809 emulation, with a register that is sometimes independent 8-bit and sometimes single 16-bit (the 8-bit A and B registers become the 16-bit D register, depending on the instruction in play), a union is just the thing. It does exactly what is needed, when needed, and not otherwise.
Language is an art, like painting. Technical language is an art where miscommunication leads to real world problems, and where evidence of lack of expertise leads to well justified lack of confidence up front.
With language, as with painting, you can paint like a master, or you can finger-paint like an addled child.
Which do you think will carry you further in life and in your career? Which do you think will result in more actual pathos?
((((((((((((I hate lisp too))))))))))
Structs do, however, make the critical aspects of an object oriented approach practical in c. They can carry data, function pointers, etc., and they can be passed around.
I've been writing my c code like that since the 1980's. There are significant benefits.
I would add to this that reducing the complexity by turning everything into separate functions tends to also increase what I call "opacity by non-locality."
Not only are some things hard, some things benefit from having the logic right there in front of your face; not in a header, not in some function elsewhere, not in a library.
Benefits in both comprehension, and so ease of construction, but also in execution time and smaller executables depending on just how smart the language is in constructing its own executables.
IMHO, unit testing is a far, far more important aspect of advancing programming in general than are lambdas. Just my 2c. :)
This is the core mechanism of my text markup language. Once the specific built-in tokens are parsed out, they are immediately accessed via the language's function dictionary. This approach is quick, ultimately low-complexity, trivially extensible, and highly maintainable.
Would you consider unions in c a "means to circumvent the type system" as compared to a language with strong up-front typing?
Unions are certainly a very powerful, useful, and concise tool for manipulating data across type boundaries. If you don't have them, in trying to accomplish similar tasks as those unions make easy, in many languages you're going to be a lot more verbose, and likely a lot less efficient, than if you do.
I am assuming competence. Strong typing is a safety net. The need for such a thing varies with one's skill set. The fewer the participants, the more likely it is that the skill sets can be arranged to be similar. With larger teams, the need for safety nets almost always increases.
You may have misunderstood the previous poster's use of "poor coder."
I read it as "unfortunate coder", not "incompetent coder."
I could certainly be wrong. Perhaps clarification will be forthcoming.
...no, wait...
I have it!
We'll build projectile launchers into residential homes, and launch the people into the air! No "car" required! Think of the weight savings!
I recognize the misuse just fine; I've been at this since the 1960's. Front panel toggles, punchcards and paper tape are wholly familiar to me, as are arranging diodes in a matrix and building CPUs out of RTL and TTL. The fact that I recognize the misuse is not motivation to appreciate it, any more than I would if some non-contemporaneous Babbage-era use of "gears" was suddenly thought to be a good idea to use as the go-to word for software, or if someone referred to a modern day stick of RAM as "core", or if someone insisted on referring to computers in general as abaci.
The industry is well centered around particular terminology right now and has been for decades. That's the terminology to use, unless you want people focusing more on what you said, than what you meant. Which tends to lead to the wrong place no matter what you do. Particularly in engineering. Words matter. Being sloppy is costly.
And so they have even less excuse for their mangling of the terminology, and definitely should be smiled at, nodded to, and ultimately, ignored other than when they have some kind of arbitrary coercive power over you, in which case, do it in your head anyway.
If you walk up to a nuclear engineer with your 140 IQ and ask him to "turn up the atumz", he should probably just call security and have your ass thrown out on the street.
Seriously. If you don't know even the basics of an industry's terminology -- it's time to leave off trying to involve yourself until you get that handled. If you do.
He's right. The book takes a much more serious look at government than the movie does. Books are a better platform for that sort of detail than movies are, there's just no way around that. But the movie does an excellent job of implying all manner of things without the detail, as such things go, and the post here was about movies, not books, so I made no commentary on that initially.
In whatever order I'm in the mood for, which varies:
Bladerunner - the original, with the narration.
Firefly - TV show same. These were just plain fun, except for the pilot's death, which struck me as uncalled for.
Starship Troopers - loved the twisted angle on government. Great bugs. Would you like to know more?
Paul - hilarious, totally non-serious SF.
Alien (original) - great SF horror, and great SF besides.
Terminator - original
The Martian - really good hard SF, quite rare to find
The reason they can't keep the lights on at night is because they spend 22-23% of their GDP on the military, including nuclear weapons.
That is why they are a threat -- because they can do damage -- you don't make a military threat assessment by counting light bulbs.