You're going to have to deal with this prejudice, because what he's saying is, easily 90% of the time, true. If you're any good, you'll be the exception, and you're going to have to prove it to your students and peers who are good all the time. Argue the injustice all you want, be indignant all you want, but we think this way because most of the educators we've dealt with are worthless.
The thing is, whether you want to admit it or not, if you don't get out and do things, in the real world and not academia, no matter how intelligent or talented you are, you won't be as good of a teacher as you could be. Without real-world experience, you probably won't even be a particularly good teacher at all. Well, maybe you'll be good at teaching, but that doesn't count for much if you teach the wrong things.
Being satisfied with far less money than you could be making isn't exactly a trait common to the driven personality type it takes to be good at any sort of computer discipline. Myself? I'm going to give back, eventually. I'm going to retire into teaching, when I actually have some wisdom to pass on, and I'm too old and slow and burnt out to want to do it any more. Maybe I won't even be as current with new technologies as I could be, although I doubt it, I've spent a lifetime learning and don't intend to change that any time soon, but even if I am old and behind, well, new stuff is what young, talented, and driven PhD students are for.
There's a whole class of substances that have very similar effects to acid, that are typically sold as acid. Flat out, if they experienced brain damage, they took one of those, and not honest-to-god LSD-25.
Acid is extremely difficult to make, and many (most?) of its precursor chemicals are nearly as illegal as acid itself.
Most commonly, you'll get the stuff that makes you feel extremely "speedy". That's not acid, but for someone who hasn't had the real deal (most haven't) they'd never know.
If it were legalized and regulated, we wouldn't have that problem.
Well, first off, the term FUD implies an intent, or even an organized campaign. I did not even have the first, let alone the second. Secondly, it more than implies and specifically means Fear, Uncertainty, and/or Doubt. Trying to say that my statement was an attempt at any of those would require stretching the words themselves, and not the entire phrase--which, as a near idiom it really should be, to beyond what any reasonable person would accept. I was not trying to instill any of those against Python, merely saying that I did not like its whitespace requirements. I was mistaken on one particular aspect of that.
Given that in my original post I explicitly said not to let a little thing like Python's annoying whitespace issues stop him from checking it out, I think calling a single mistaken syntax recollection FUD is just plain silly.
The problem is that some editors written by clueless people (Eclipse, I'm looking at you) do take the liberty to redefine the Tab character, thus producing code that is illegible to everyone else, and I'm guessing that that is what HeronBlademaster is having trouble with.
The thing is, it's not just some. Visual Studio, VIM, NotePad++ I can think of exactly where in the options it is off the top of my head, and I can't think of a single code editor that doesn't let you redefine tab (yes, actual tab characters) stops, and I'm pretty sure I'd remember because it'd be odd. Do you know of one that doesn't let you do that?
Yes, I should definitely cure my OCD by adamantly sticking to exactly one editor all the time. That's a good one.
Also, thank you, thank you, thank you, for diagnosing my terrible affliction over Slashdot posts. You've changed my life already. Most trained psychologists, couldn't do that. You must be a genius.
I know a whole lot of really good programmers. That I know of, none of them have tabs set to 8 characters. Most use 4, some use 3. I prefer 2.
Can you change how many spaces a tab is worth in that feature? I can't see it being realistically useful if not. That also doesn't solve the situation of different people with different tab expansion working on a single project.
You can argue all you want that "this is the way tab is" which is great in theory, but completely ignores the reality of how people work. And yeah, people should change how they work if they're working on Python, but it seems a little odd that one language has all these new rules that most editors don't have great configuration options for.
I just don't get the huge benefit of it. Forcing code to be readable? If they didn't use whitespace as syntax, you could run it through tools that fix it up automatically! Plus any programmer that's so lazy that they don't get that right is going to write pretty shitty, undisciplined code, and it's not going to get better in Python. The drawbacks seem to seriously outweigh the benefits.
Is there any other benefit to it I'm not thinking of?
If you're looking for a language that will allow you to write clean code, and accomplish complex projects quickly and easily, Python is the way to go; the white space convention may seem odd at first (I certainly was very suspicious of it), but after a couple hours you'll find it quite comfortable, and you'll only get one indenting error for every ten semi-colons you would have forgotten in C, so it's ultimately a big time saver.
OK, I gotta call you out on this one.
I'm sure I've forgotten a semicolon, but I certainly can't think of a time it's happened. If it does, it prevents compilation. That's important. It's not an invisible mistake. Can you think of even one situation where forgetting a semicolon would still result in code that compiles? I wouldn't be completely surprised if there is, but I can't think of one, and if it exists it's an edge thing.
If you mess up indentation in Python, there's a real good chance it'll still run, but do something different. That's a serious issue.
Look, I'm not ragging on Python, it's got way too many people that love it and have accomplished really nice stuff really fast for me to say it's a bad language. Just, maybe it's nice in spite of the whitespace stuff.
No, it's not OCD. I'm picky about it because it has real (admittedly tiny) effects.
When inserting code after a blank line, I end up having to hit tab 2-4 times, sometimes more, before I insert that new line (or after, whatever). Some editors flat don't have an option to do it for you, and it's not always worth or possible it to fire up (or even install) your preferred one. It's just a pain in the ass. Extra keystrokes, they add up.
Plus, I dunno. Sometimes I scroll up and down a section and watch the cursor. It's kind of a low-level routine in my brain that I don't have to expend conscious though on, if that cursor stays in the same column, it's all one piece. Helps me visualize the code better, hold more information in my head at once. With those blank lines, it makes me think for a tenth of a second or two, and lose the "picture" in my head.
There's a ton of other reasons I like my blank lines to obey indenting that I can't think of right now, but it's basically a "beaten to death with feathers" situation where there's a million little nagging things about it that end up taking 0.2 seconds extra. And I work fine with others, if they're not right I fix 'em if I'm doing a bunch of work in one section and don't bother otherwise.
Besides, aren't you being a little OCD in getting antsy in the pantsy over my preferences?
It's not FUD, and it's not my whitespace that I'm worried about. I'm an absolute nazi about getting it right (tabs for indents, spaces for alignment!).
One issue with it is, it's a pain in the ass to get most code editors to leave it alone. Granted, that's a flaw in the code editors, but it doesn't change the reality that if you sit down at some terminal that you haven't carefully configured, editors do all kinds of funky things to your whitespace. Expand tabs to spaces. Strip blank line indentation--I know Python ignores that, but it's still a pain in the ass sometimes. Changes indent levels because of a line continuation. Whatever. Cut/paste code, all sorts of things that you can't see changes. It only gets worse when working with someone who isn't anal about their whitespace, or is anal in a slightly different way.
Whitespace is a great tool for expressing the intent of your code. That said, the intent doesn't always match the rules perfectly. Sometimes, on a continued line you might want to line the next one up with the open paren on the function call. Sometimes you might want to line it up with the second open paren. When your language doesn't care about that, not only are you free to express that "this line is a part of this function call" but if you don't like it, you can run it through a code prettifier. Try that with Python, and you could end up changing what your code does which is, in my opinion (I stress that's my opinion, we're talking about liking a language here, not whether it's good) is just plain wrong.
Look, this argument is total flamewar territory, which is why I'm trying to keep it in terms of liking rather than objective quality. These are my reasons for not liking it, you gave your reasons that you do like it, and that's fine, but I've done enough work in it to know that I don't care for it. Far be it from me to try to convince someone otherwise if they want to program in Python, I just hope it remains the only wide-usage language that cares about the stuff and that I never have to work on a project that uses it extensively (although SCons is the bomb diggity, I love that one).
I don't like Python. Not one bit, but I'm willing to admit that my dislike is mostly aesthetic, which has prevented me from really exploring it, so I can't debate its pros and cons with any pretense at having made an informed decision.
That said, the idea of using whitespace as syntax... well... Oh God, I can't lie, it's horrible. But. But! There's ways around it. Ideally a code editor would make line-leading whitespace visible while keeping the rest invisible. Once you get more than one person working on a project, different indentation preferences (expand tabs to spaces vs. not) it's ridiculously easy to have weird mistakes creep in.
Anyway, that's completely the opposite of what I meant to say. A little thing like syntax shouldn't be enough to stop you from getting to know a language. Hey, it's easier to give good advice than it is to take it, and as I understand Python makes a lot of things really easy.
That said, Linux is C, and if you use that or C++ you'll never run into one of those situations where you have to step outside (or rather, below) the library to do what you want to do, which can get nasty quick.
Orbital mechanics could be the bee's knees, if it was done right, like for example in Sins of a Solar Empire, where it's basically taken care of by the ship's computers and you can just move faster toward the sun than you can away from it. It would add "terrain" tactics to the mix, which is always a good thing... provided it's done right, of course.
Well, to be fair, within a solar system EVE actually simulates proper space, even during "warp" travel. If you and another ship warp at the same time, in the same direction, you'll see them flying next to you even though you're both traveling millions (? can't be bothered to do the math) of times faster than normal in-game travel. When you run a scan probe, if someone's in warp you catch them where they are between the two points, not at one point or the other. There's no blinking between places except when you go from one solar system to the other. Given that even in warp travel you're only going up to about 200 AU max, and that the length of your jumps is limited by your ship's capacitor, simulating the multi-light-year distances between solar systems would be pretty pointless.
Really, how fun of a game would it be if you could just pick a random 0.001 degree aberration from your course and be basically guaranteed that you won't run into trouble? The bottlenecks are a source of fun, not a detraction from it.
Who used to do that? I don't believe it, unless "a lot of people" is a shop you used to work at where they hired a lot of dumb guys. It's a foolish way to refer to RAID levels, since it both introduces ambiguity and fails to account for the fact that a RAID 51 can have more than two mirrors.
Slashdot Mirror
Not for me :(
That's what scrollbars are for. Thank God they're under the GPL license, or I might not be able to scroll past this tired old discussion.
Must have a lot of teachers with mod points today.
You're going to have to deal with this prejudice, because what he's saying is, easily 90% of the time, true. If you're any good, you'll be the exception, and you're going to have to prove it to your students and peers who are good all the time. Argue the injustice all you want, be indignant all you want, but we think this way because most of the educators we've dealt with are worthless.
The thing is, whether you want to admit it or not, if you don't get out and do things, in the real world and not academia, no matter how intelligent or talented you are, you won't be as good of a teacher as you could be. Without real-world experience, you probably won't even be a particularly good teacher at all. Well, maybe you'll be good at teaching, but that doesn't count for much if you teach the wrong things.
Being satisfied with far less money than you could be making isn't exactly a trait common to the driven personality type it takes to be good at any sort of computer discipline. Myself? I'm going to give back, eventually. I'm going to retire into teaching, when I actually have some wisdom to pass on, and I'm too old and slow and burnt out to want to do it any more. Maybe I won't even be as current with new technologies as I could be, although I doubt it, I've spent a lifetime learning and don't intend to change that any time soon, but even if I am old and behind, well, new stuff is what young, talented, and driven PhD students are for.
Things are getting so fast, they say, "That's so 2008," in 2008 now!
All the good jokes are from 2021 anyway.
There's a whole class of substances that have very similar effects to acid, that are typically sold as acid. Flat out, if they experienced brain damage, they took one of those, and not honest-to-god LSD-25.
Acid is extremely difficult to make, and many (most?) of its precursor chemicals are nearly as illegal as acid itself.
Most commonly, you'll get the stuff that makes you feel extremely "speedy". That's not acid, but for someone who hasn't had the real deal (most haven't) they'd never know.
If it were legalized and regulated, we wouldn't have that problem.
I don't think calling what the RIAA is doing economic terrorism would be any kind of a stretch.
Well, first off, the term FUD implies an intent, or even an organized campaign. I did not even have the first, let alone the second. Secondly, it more than implies and specifically means Fear, Uncertainty, and/or Doubt. Trying to say that my statement was an attempt at any of those would require stretching the words themselves, and not the entire phrase--which, as a near idiom it really should be, to beyond what any reasonable person would accept. I was not trying to instill any of those against Python, merely saying that I did not like its whitespace requirements. I was mistaken on one particular aspect of that.
Given that in my original post I explicitly said not to let a little thing like Python's annoying whitespace issues stop him from checking it out, I think calling a single mistaken syntax recollection FUD is just plain silly.
No, I was just wrong.
The problem is that some editors written by clueless people (Eclipse, I'm looking at you) do take the liberty to redefine the Tab character, thus producing code that is illegible to everyone else, and I'm guessing that that is what HeronBlademaster is having trouble with.
The thing is, it's not just some. Visual Studio, VIM, NotePad++ I can think of exactly where in the options it is off the top of my head, and I can't think of a single code editor that doesn't let you redefine tab (yes, actual tab characters) stops, and I'm pretty sure I'd remember because it'd be odd. Do you know of one that doesn't let you do that?
Durf, yep, forgot about that. I always do while(whatever) {} instead of while(whatever); but yeah, thanks, I knew there was something.
Yes, I should definitely cure my OCD by adamantly sticking to exactly one editor all the time. That's a good one.
Also, thank you, thank you, thank you, for diagnosing my terrible affliction over Slashdot posts. You've changed my life already. Most trained psychologists, couldn't do that. You must be a genius.
I know a whole lot of really good programmers. That I know of, none of them have tabs set to 8 characters. Most use 4, some use 3. I prefer 2.
Can you change how many spaces a tab is worth in that feature? I can't see it being realistically useful if not. That also doesn't solve the situation of different people with different tab expansion working on a single project.
You can argue all you want that "this is the way tab is" which is great in theory, but completely ignores the reality of how people work. And yeah, people should change how they work if they're working on Python, but it seems a little odd that one language has all these new rules that most editors don't have great configuration options for.
I just don't get the huge benefit of it. Forcing code to be readable? If they didn't use whitespace as syntax, you could run it through tools that fix it up automatically! Plus any programmer that's so lazy that they don't get that right is going to write pretty shitty, undisciplined code, and it's not going to get better in Python. The drawbacks seem to seriously outweigh the benefits.
Is there any other benefit to it I'm not thinking of?
If you're looking for a language that will allow you to write clean code, and accomplish complex projects quickly and easily, Python is the way to go; the white space convention may seem odd at first (I certainly was very suspicious of it), but after a couple hours you'll find it quite comfortable, and you'll only get one indenting error for every ten semi-colons you would have forgotten in C, so it's ultimately a big time saver.
OK, I gotta call you out on this one.
I'm sure I've forgotten a semicolon, but I certainly can't think of a time it's happened. If it does, it prevents compilation. That's important. It's not an invisible mistake. Can you think of even one situation where forgetting a semicolon would still result in code that compiles? I wouldn't be completely surprised if there is, but I can't think of one, and if it exists it's an edge thing.
If you mess up indentation in Python, there's a real good chance it'll still run, but do something different. That's a serious issue.
Look, I'm not ragging on Python, it's got way too many people that love it and have accomplished really nice stuff really fast for me to say it's a bad language. Just, maybe it's nice in spite of the whitespace stuff.
No, it's not OCD. I'm picky about it because it has real (admittedly tiny) effects.
When inserting code after a blank line, I end up having to hit tab 2-4 times, sometimes more, before I insert that new line (or after, whatever). Some editors flat don't have an option to do it for you, and it's not always worth or possible it to fire up (or even install) your preferred one. It's just a pain in the ass. Extra keystrokes, they add up.
Plus, I dunno. Sometimes I scroll up and down a section and watch the cursor. It's kind of a low-level routine in my brain that I don't have to expend conscious though on, if that cursor stays in the same column, it's all one piece. Helps me visualize the code better, hold more information in my head at once. With those blank lines, it makes me think for a tenth of a second or two, and lose the "picture" in my head.
There's a ton of other reasons I like my blank lines to obey indenting that I can't think of right now, but it's basically a "beaten to death with feathers" situation where there's a million little nagging things about it that end up taking 0.2 seconds extra. And I work fine with others, if they're not right I fix 'em if I'm doing a bunch of work in one section and don't bother otherwise.
Besides, aren't you being a little OCD in getting antsy in the pantsy over my preferences?
It's not FUD, and it's not my whitespace that I'm worried about. I'm an absolute nazi about getting it right (tabs for indents, spaces for alignment!).
One issue with it is, it's a pain in the ass to get most code editors to leave it alone. Granted, that's a flaw in the code editors, but it doesn't change the reality that if you sit down at some terminal that you haven't carefully configured, editors do all kinds of funky things to your whitespace. Expand tabs to spaces. Strip blank line indentation--I know Python ignores that, but it's still a pain in the ass sometimes. Changes indent levels because of a line continuation. Whatever. Cut/paste code, all sorts of things that you can't see changes. It only gets worse when working with someone who isn't anal about their whitespace, or is anal in a slightly different way.
Whitespace is a great tool for expressing the intent of your code. That said, the intent doesn't always match the rules perfectly. Sometimes, on a continued line you might want to line the next one up with the open paren on the function call. Sometimes you might want to line it up with the second open paren. When your language doesn't care about that, not only are you free to express that "this line is a part of this function call" but if you don't like it, you can run it through a code prettifier. Try that with Python, and you could end up changing what your code does which is, in my opinion (I stress that's my opinion, we're talking about liking a language here, not whether it's good) is just plain wrong.
Look, this argument is total flamewar territory, which is why I'm trying to keep it in terms of liking rather than objective quality. These are my reasons for not liking it, you gave your reasons that you do like it, and that's fine, but I've done enough work in it to know that I don't care for it. Far be it from me to try to convince someone otherwise if they want to program in Python, I just hope it remains the only wide-usage language that cares about the stuff and that I never have to work on a project that uses it extensively (although SCons is the bomb diggity, I love that one).
I don't like Python. Not one bit, but I'm willing to admit that my dislike is mostly aesthetic, which has prevented me from really exploring it, so I can't debate its pros and cons with any pretense at having made an informed decision.
That said, the idea of using whitespace as syntax ... well ... Oh God, I can't lie, it's horrible. But. But! There's ways around it. Ideally a code editor would make line-leading whitespace visible while keeping the rest invisible. Once you get more than one person working on a project, different indentation preferences (expand tabs to spaces vs. not) it's ridiculously easy to have weird mistakes creep in.
Anyway, that's completely the opposite of what I meant to say. A little thing like syntax shouldn't be enough to stop you from getting to know a language. Hey, it's easier to give good advice than it is to take it, and as I understand Python makes a lot of things really easy.
That said, Linux is C, and if you use that or C++ you'll never run into one of those situations where you have to step outside (or rather, below) the library to do what you want to do, which can get nasty quick.
Orbital mechanics could be the bee's knees, if it was done right, like for example in Sins of a Solar Empire, where it's basically taken care of by the ship's computers and you can just move faster toward the sun than you can away from it. It would add "terrain" tactics to the mix, which is always a good thing... provided it's done right, of course.
Well, to be fair, within a solar system EVE actually simulates proper space, even during "warp" travel. If you and another ship warp at the same time, in the same direction, you'll see them flying next to you even though you're both traveling millions (? can't be bothered to do the math) of times faster than normal in-game travel. When you run a scan probe, if someone's in warp you catch them where they are between the two points, not at one point or the other. There's no blinking between places except when you go from one solar system to the other. Given that even in warp travel you're only going up to about 200 AU max, and that the length of your jumps is limited by your ship's capacitor, simulating the multi-light-year distances between solar systems would be pretty pointless.
Really, how fun of a game would it be if you could just pick a random 0.001 degree aberration from your course and be basically guaranteed that you won't run into trouble? The bottlenecks are a source of fun, not a detraction from it.
Who used to do that? I don't believe it, unless "a lot of people" is a shop you used to work at where they hired a lot of dumb guys. It's a foolish way to refer to RAID levels, since it both introduces ambiguity and fails to account for the fact that a RAID 51 can have more than two mirrors.
You seven-digiters, I swear...
A raid 1 of a raid 0. example? sure
Raid 0 of 2 drives.
Raid 0 of 2 other drives.
a raid 1 of the raid 0 sets.
Magical aint it? Although raid 10 is stupid. do a raid 50.
You've just described RAID 0+1. The leaf members go first in RAID levels. Although yes, RAID 0+1 is a fairly useless level.
THIS. IS. SLASHDOT .
Clam down, I was just correcting you, not calling you an idiot.
RAID 5 mirrored is RAID 51.
... using RAID10 on the database ...
You mean RAID 5, right?