You're not paying for the distro - that is free on GitHub. You're paying for the button in Windows Store that installs everything for you. Basically, you're paying to save your time. Those other distros work fine, but you need to configure them if you want, say, X to work. If you know how, it's not hard. But many people don't want to waste time figuring that out.
XP was a very important milestone for games (which is a crowd that, at the time, intersected heavily with power users). It was the first NT-series OS on which more Windows games worked than didn't.
MY experience with the Python I run is that one version gives no warning, going up one point release throws multiple fatal errors.
Can you give an example? I'm just not aware of any, and it makes me suspect that what you were running into was an issue in a third-party library (some of which do indeed have a cowboy attitude towards breaking changes - but that's common across all languages).
Maybe that's the thing - one has read the changelogs to see what is deprecated, as opposed to getting a clear deprecation warning from the interpreter/compiler like you would with C, Perl, and other languages?
And I have never, ever seen a deprecation warning in C or C++. You have to read the change sections for new standards to see what was deprecated or removed.
There is a module system. But it's kind of clunky and confusing. I, at least, have never warmed to it. There has to be some solution used in really large Python systems, but I don't know what it is.
What's wrong with the Python module system? It's pretty similar to the Java package system in principle (mapping 1:1 to directories and files), and that, while not perfect, didn't prevent a lot of large enterprise systems being written and maintained.
One exception to that -- list methods act on the list and return an error flag rather than returning the modified list. a = [2,1,3]; b = a.sort(). You expect b to be [1,2,3]? Nope a is [1,2,3], b is None (operation successful). If you wanted b linked to the sorted list? you should have used the sorted function. b=sorted(a)
Because lists are mutable, you need both sort() and sorted() to distinguish between "I want to sort this list, and have everyone else who has a reference to it see that", and "I want a new list with data from this list, but sorted". Pretty much all imperative languages have sort() behaving in the same way (e.g. see std::list::sort in C++) - that Python offers sorted() as well is actually more off the beaten track if anything. IMO, the names are chosen well to highlight the distinction - list.sort() reads as "sort this list" (implying in-place modification), while sorted() implies a new view on the data. The reason why sorted() is a function rather than a method on lists is because it can sort any sequence that way, not just list; OTOH, in-place sorting has to be collection-specific.
Also, list.sort() does not return an error flag. The usual reason why it might fail is if the comparison, or your key extraction function if one was specified, fails by raising an exception - and then that exception will simply be propagated. The only other reason is if your key extractor tries to mutate the list while it's being sorted, in which case you usually get a ValueError if it can be detected. Exceptions aside, the method always returns None, because all methods in Python return something; None is just the conventional unit value.
Returning error flags in general are very much frowned upon in Python, and exceptions are the standard way to communicate failures, much more so than in other languages (because CPython implements them as error code returns under the hood, they're very cheap).
That's plainly not true - Python follows the established deprecate-first-remove-next cycle. This is readily obvious when you look at the changelogs. For example, from the 2.6 changelog:
The threading module API is being changed to use properties such as daemon instead of setDaemon() and isDaemon() methods, and some methods have been renamed to use underscores instead of camel-case; for example, the activeCount() method is renamed to active_count(). Both the 2.6 and 3.0 versions of the module support the same properties and renamed methods, but don’t remove the old methods. No date has been set for the deprecation of the old APIs in Python 3.x; the old APIs won’t be removed in any 2.x version.
For another example, the ability to throw strings (rather than BaseException-derived objects) was deprecated in 2.3 (2003) and finally removed in 2.6 (2008).
For comparison, in the C++ land, dynamic exception specifications were deprecated in C++11, and removed in C++17. So the time scale is comparable.
C is just mutilated B anyway. B was also lightning fast, and it was much smaller than C at that (no need to mess with types - you deal with machine words, and context defines whether it's a number or a pointer etc). Why not go back to that?
Python is for when you value your development time more than execution time later (e.g. because the latter is going to be so small as to be irrelevant with either tool).
That covers surprisingly much - including 90% of what's traditionally written in C, especially on Unix.
I'm not sure what this has to do with Julia, given that it's a language specifically for scientific and numeric computing, statistics, machine learning, and similar sort of thing. It's competing with R, Python and Matlab, not with Ruby, JavaScript, and web framework of the day.
It's not a new general-purpose language (well, it is, but that's not how it's positioned). It's a new language for a specific niche, which at the moment has a lot of really crappy languages in it (like R), and then some general-purpose languages that were adapted by the community (Python).
You're welcome to stick to C++, but that just means that you're not in the niche they're targeting, so your opinion is largely irrelevant anyway.
It would not cut into their margins, because it's a lot more expensive to 3D-print or CNC-machine a gun than it is to just buy one off the shelf - economy of scale is still at play. These days, gun manufacturers don't enjoy big margins, either - the market is flooded with guns, so demand is low and supply is high. In fact, we're at the point right now where a new American-made AR-15 costs less than an AK imported from Romania. Which means that customers enjoy most of those economy of scale benefits directly, in form of low prices. No-one is going to go buy a 3D printer (for the amount of money they could buy another full-fledged gun) to manufacture a single-shot.380 pistol on it, that can maybe handle 5 shots before it explodes if you use the right material - if you use the wrong one, it explodes on first shot.
The DD Ghost Gunner, which is just a small CNC mill capable of manufacturing an AR-15 receiver (or a similarly sized item) is slightly more practical, but only just. It's still a lot of money for just the receiver - more than a full rifle would cost. And then you'd still need to buy parts to assemble a rifle from that receiver. So what it really buys you is the ability to have a firearm without any record anywhere saying that you do. Which can be attractive to certain people, but your average gun buyer doesn't care about that sort of stuff.
Not yet. There's still the possibility of outlawing these particular CAD files containing gun designs just like we outlaw particular JPEGs containing child porn.
There's a big difference between the two in that the creation of child porn inherently requires commission of a violent crime, but it is not so for gun schematics.
Now, you're right - it may well be the case that, if public opinion is sufficiently strong on this, these files will be outlawed under this exact premise. And the moment that happens, it'll set a precedent to do the same for strong crypto. In fact, I would argue that this whole story is just another battle in Crypto Wars - it's not a coincidence that they're trying to use the same legal framework (ITAR) to crack down on these files today, as they used to crack down on PGP in the 90s. It's the same fundamental issue.
This has nothing to do with the Second Amendment. It's entirely about the First.
And what's "something previously illegal" that you're talking about? It was never illegal to manufacture firearms yourself, or to 3D print them, or to share information on how to do so. At most, it was illegal to export that information (under ITAR).
Slashdot Mirror
If nobody cares, why are you so incensed about it?
You're not paying for the distro - that is free on GitHub. You're paying for the button in Windows Store that installs everything for you. Basically, you're paying to save your time. Those other distros work fine, but you need to configure them if you want, say, X to work. If you know how, it's not hard. But many people don't want to waste time figuring that out.
See, only assholes think that Linus isn't an asshole. QED.
"Please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place."
- Linus Torvalds, speaking in a professional conference
It's called "direct democracy".
And the other thing is "representative democracy".
But both are still "democracy".
What was unique about RedHat's handling of Spectre and Meltdown?
XP was a very important milestone for games (which is a crowd that, at the time, intersected heavily with power users). It was the first NT-series OS on which more Windows games worked than didn't.
It's open source and thus, by definition, supports whatever you want it to.
No. It supports whatever you have the skill and the time to implement, and then maintain, which is not at all the same as whatever you want.
MY experience with the Python I run is that one version gives no warning, going up one point release throws multiple fatal errors.
Can you give an example? I'm just not aware of any, and it makes me suspect that what you were running into was an issue in a third-party library (some of which do indeed have a cowboy attitude towards breaking changes - but that's common across all languages).
Maybe that's the thing - one has read the changelogs to see what is deprecated, as opposed to getting a clear deprecation warning from the interpreter/compiler like you would with C, Perl, and other languages?
Like this?
And I have never, ever seen a deprecation warning in C or C++. You have to read the change sections for new standards to see what was deprecated or removed.
There is a module system. But it's kind of clunky and confusing. I, at least, have never warmed to it. There has to be some solution used in really large Python systems, but I don't know what it is.
What's wrong with the Python module system? It's pretty similar to the Java package system in principle (mapping 1:1 to directories and files), and that, while not perfect, didn't prevent a lot of large enterprise systems being written and maintained.
One exception to that -- list methods act on the list and return an error flag rather than returning the modified list. a = [2,1,3]; b = a.sort(). You expect b to be [1,2,3]? Nope a is [1,2,3], b is None (operation successful). If you wanted b linked to the sorted list? you should have used the sorted function. b=sorted(a)
Because lists are mutable, you need both sort() and sorted() to distinguish between "I want to sort this list, and have everyone else who has a reference to it see that", and "I want a new list with data from this list, but sorted". Pretty much all imperative languages have sort() behaving in the same way (e.g. see std::list::sort in C++) - that Python offers sorted() as well is actually more off the beaten track if anything. IMO, the names are chosen well to highlight the distinction - list.sort() reads as "sort this list" (implying in-place modification), while sorted() implies a new view on the data. The reason why sorted() is a function rather than a method on lists is because it can sort any sequence that way, not just list; OTOH, in-place sorting has to be collection-specific.
Also, list.sort() does not return an error flag. The usual reason why it might fail is if the comparison, or your key extraction function if one was specified, fails by raising an exception - and then that exception will simply be propagated. The only other reason is if your key extractor tries to mutate the list while it's being sorted, in which case you usually get a ValueError if it can be detected. Exceptions aside, the method always returns None, because all methods in Python return something; None is just the conventional unit value.
Returning error flags in general are very much frowned upon in Python, and exceptions are the standard way to communicate failures, much more so than in other languages (because CPython implements them as error code returns under the hood, they're very cheap).
It's not just ML, but data science in general.
And the other big thing was many universities switching to it from Java for their CS courses.
By "undefined variable" I think he means undeclared (or, in Python, unassigned in the proper scope, since locals are declared implicitly).
That's plainly not true - Python follows the established deprecate-first-remove-next cycle. This is readily obvious when you look at the changelogs. For example, from the 2.6 changelog:
The threading module API is being changed to use properties such as daemon instead of setDaemon() and isDaemon() methods, and some methods have been renamed to use underscores instead of camel-case; for example, the activeCount() method is renamed to active_count(). Both the 2.6 and 3.0 versions of the module support the same properties and renamed methods, but don’t remove the old methods. No date has been set for the deprecation of the old APIs in Python 3.x; the old APIs won’t be removed in any 2.x version.
For another example, the ability to throw strings (rather than BaseException-derived objects) was deprecated in 2.3 (2003) and finally removed in 2.6 (2008).
For comparison, in the C++ land, dynamic exception specifications were deprecated in C++11, and removed in C++17. So the time scale is comparable.
C is just mutilated B anyway. B was also lightning fast, and it was much smaller than C at that (no need to mess with types - you deal with machine words, and context defines whether it's a number or a pointer etc). Why not go back to that?
Arrays and matrices are 1-based in math and statistics, like it or not.
This is a language for that crowd first and foremost, so it's going to be using conventions that are well-established in their field.
If you squint hard enough, everything is assembler in the end.
But it's hard doing useful things when you're squinting all the time.
Python is for when you value your development time more than execution time later (e.g. because the latter is going to be so small as to be irrelevant with either tool).
That covers surprisingly much - including 90% of what's traditionally written in C, especially on Unix.
I'm not sure what this has to do with Julia, given that it's a language specifically for scientific and numeric computing, statistics, machine learning, and similar sort of thing. It's competing with R, Python and Matlab, not with Ruby, JavaScript, and web framework of the day.
It's not a new general-purpose language (well, it is, but that's not how it's positioned). It's a new language for a specific niche, which at the moment has a lot of really crappy languages in it (like R), and then some general-purpose languages that were adapted by the community (Python).
You're welcome to stick to C++, but that just means that you're not in the niche they're targeting, so your opinion is largely irrelevant anyway.
It was misused from the moment it was devised - by design.
Fun fact: the "fire in a crowded theater" trope was originally invented to justify jailing draft protesters and socialists during WW1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It would not cut into their margins, because it's a lot more expensive to 3D-print or CNC-machine a gun than it is to just buy one off the shelf - economy of scale is still at play. These days, gun manufacturers don't enjoy big margins, either - the market is flooded with guns, so demand is low and supply is high. In fact, we're at the point right now where a new American-made AR-15 costs less than an AK imported from Romania. Which means that customers enjoy most of those economy of scale benefits directly, in form of low prices. No-one is going to go buy a 3D printer (for the amount of money they could buy another full-fledged gun) to manufacture a single-shot .380 pistol on it, that can maybe handle 5 shots before it explodes if you use the right material - if you use the wrong one, it explodes on first shot.
The DD Ghost Gunner, which is just a small CNC mill capable of manufacturing an AR-15 receiver (or a similarly sized item) is slightly more practical, but only just. It's still a lot of money for just the receiver - more than a full rifle would cost. And then you'd still need to buy parts to assemble a rifle from that receiver. So what it really buys you is the ability to have a firearm without any record anywhere saying that you do. Which can be attractive to certain people, but your average gun buyer doesn't care about that sort of stuff.
Not yet. There's still the possibility of outlawing these particular CAD files containing gun designs just like we outlaw particular JPEGs containing child porn.
There's a big difference between the two in that the creation of child porn inherently requires commission of a violent crime, but it is not so for gun schematics.
Now, you're right - it may well be the case that, if public opinion is sufficiently strong on this, these files will be outlawed under this exact premise. And the moment that happens, it'll set a precedent to do the same for strong crypto. In fact, I would argue that this whole story is just another battle in Crypto Wars - it's not a coincidence that they're trying to use the same legal framework (ITAR) to crack down on these files today, as they used to crack down on PGP in the 90s. It's the same fundamental issue.
This has nothing to do with the Second Amendment. It's entirely about the First.
And what's "something previously illegal" that you're talking about? It was never illegal to manufacture firearms yourself, or to 3D print them, or to share information on how to do so. At most, it was illegal to export that information (under ITAR).
You know the worst part about Conservapedia? The guy who runs it also does homeschooling.