> It's still a hot debate, but some Republicans definitely perked their ears up when Ron Reagan's family started getting involved with stem cell lobbying.
Yep, like Bill Frist. Using a veto when your party controls congress is an embarassing display of disunity -- using it against your own senate majority leader is mortifying. Karl Rove must be getting really distracted by the grand jury to not be greasing the wheels here.
> Exactly. I'm not too fond of Rockstar lately, what with their trying to pass the 'blame' for the hot coffee mod onto people who discovered it ON THE DISC
The mod adds naked textures. The original mini-game had all participants fully clothed. How salacious.
Story is that the name of the game was originally "Puck-Man" (due to the shape), but that vandals were scratching out part of the "P" on the console to spell the obvious derivative word.
Even alpha rays can be bad news internally. Your skin is ablative protection against alpha rays (it absorbs them and eventually sloughs off and regenerates). Your lungs are not.
Starting by running some decent lists. These folks run some amazingly slipshod lists, usually unconfirmed optin, and sometimes outright buying addresses. What do they expect? They're spamming!
But they figure that since they're not commercial, that they have a cause and a message, that they don't really have to pay attention to running a clean list, and anyone who blocks them must be a political censor.
I'm a left liberal, but I find myself blocking the DNC more often than the RNC, simply because the former has less stringent mail practices.
> In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say that the majority of slashdot readers are Windows users. Exclusively.
I wouldn't go that far. I would certainly say most of 'em are about as rank-and-file as you can get. Pretty much anyone who says "I'd fire anyone who" or otherwise blathers about who they'd hire and fire are almost certainly in no position of actually having that power. Thank god.
I suspect Microsoft will put lots of spin on the interview answer, and I suspect it will be countered with spin of its own from slashbots. This is Jerry Springer, or at best Crossfire, hardly a roundtable forum.
Oh PHP, how do I hate thee, let me count the ways:
1. Namespace. Everything in one big global namespace of functions.
2. Consistency. Grossly inconsistent function naming scheme. Sometimes it's noun_verb, sometimes it's verb_noun, sometimes there's an underscore, sometimes there isn't, sometimes it changes these conventions within the same module. Making matters worse are about a dozen different ways to compare and match strings, typically a different one for case-insensitive or not. I guess that's the one nod to consistency -- being consistent with C of all things.
3. Pass-by-value. You need special syntax to pass objects by value. I actually had to lecture the primary PHP devs on the concept of object identity, yet they still managed to screw up the implementation of === to not use it.
4. Culture. "I'll whip it up in PHP and MySQL and it'll cost you a shiny nickel sir, don't throw your money away on a shopping cart that will survive a crash!"
5. Magic quotes.
Yes, it's possible to write good PHP. I've seen industrial-strength well-written apps in VB 6. But you get no help from the language in doing so.
What's nice about Rails is how little code you actually write. It makes it easier to pick up Ruby gradually that way. If you know perl, ruby won't take you long. Learning some of Ruby's odd idioms might take longer, but you aren't forced to use 'em.
Ruby has poor unicode support however, which makes it a non-starter for my current application (which has to deal with data in UTF-8 that's often in Russian, Chinese, and Korean just to name a few).
Example? In fact ruby is more verbose than Python in some ways, because of the need for block delimiters.
Python has block delimiters too. They prefix every single line. Just because you can't see them printed doesn't mean they're not there. Just try leaving them out.
I can deal with the indentation syntax, I in fact write and maintain quite a bit of code in python. I also used to work on Infoseek pages way back, and I can tell you that I cannot deal with the indentation syntax when code is embedded into web pages. Python's indentation syntax might actually be the best thing to happen to "separation of presentation and code", because it's such a pain to actually embed code.
Cheetah looks like one of the better template engines for Python. No whitespace silliness in it either.
Rails isn't all that hot as a template engine, as it uses nasty ASP-ish syntax, where conditionals look especially noisy. For generating front-ends to databases though, it's sure nice. Now if they'd only work on that Oracle DBI driver.
> Except that Ruby does have continuations, and Common Lisp doesn't...
And scheme does. What's the "except" about? I thought it would be obvious which one I was saying had them. I guess "turning into lisp" is kind of backward. I meant "translated into lisp".
I don't find CL all that minimal, unfortunately. The fact that it can be bootstrapped is uninteresting to me. In fact, having to deal with the hyperspec as a reference makes me imagine it to be an elephantine design-by-committee abomination (contrast to R5RS). I know this isn't quite true of the language, but the documentation and the CUMBERSOMELY-LONG-IDENTIFIERS just don't give an overall impression of "lean".
Are you going to trot out the "parenthesis are hard to read" argument? Well take a look at XML: that has TWICE THE NUMBER OF PARENTHESIS, only they're pointy instead of curved.
No one programs in XML. Well, XSLT is almost a programming language. A decent language at that, but with awful syntax.
The fairer comparison is to say C has nearly as many parenthesis as lisp, they just come in different shapes. I mean look at it:
void foo(int a, char *b) {
int z = blah(b,a);
woof(z - a); }
(defun foo (a b)
(let ((z (blah b a)))
(woof (- z a))))
Yes, granted that's more. But hey look, no semicolons. No commas. You don't even need to use indentation to do it. About the only thing cooler than sexp syntax is haskell ("putStrLn $ show $ foo bar baz"... mmmm)
Perl6 perhaps may re-enter the race, but it is effectively a different language from the Perl we all know and despise, and Perl6 doesn't seem to be happening.
www.pugscode.org
Virtually the whole language has been implemented. Now they're working on porting it to itself, leaving only a small haskell core. Perl6 aims to be ready by the end of 2005, and it's quite on schedule.
And yeah, it's quite a different language, and a whole new kind of ugly.
> Perl has a reputation for being a "write-only language"
Among people who only ever learned perl by rote from 1-day trainings and copying and pasting CGI libraries. Yes, you can do some severe golf in perl, and a schwartzian sort is baffling, but a good 90% of perl is easier to grok than most C code. If it were really a write-only language, it would not have the traction it has.
THIS is a write-only language. A gold star to whoever identifies it first.
> But compared to a language like Ruby or Python, Lisp is an anachronism. No standardization. No standard Unicode, threads.
It's interesting you mention Ruby, as it also lacks unicode.
clisp has good unicode support, and its CLOS implementation has gotten quite mature these days. No idea on how speed is doing, but it's always run dizzyingly tight little circles around python.
Ruby would have a hard time turning into lisp, given the lack of continuations. Scheme might do all right.
> Can anyone point out any strong advantages Lisp has over more modern functional languages?
It's multi-paradigm. Compared to the ML family, I'd have a hard time calling Common Lisp functional. Maybe scheme, but I'm not even sure about that. Modern FP tends to revolve heavily around type theory, while lisp only ever tends to use types as a compiler optimization or ala carte when some amount of type discipline is desired here or there.
Haskell is still nigh unreadable whenever complex state or flow control is involved. Haskell also encourages people to really play golf with folds and eta reduction as well. It's not that I don't appreciate that expressiveness being there, but the culture is certainly prone to abusing it.
ATI's development cycle is far too slow for linux. They develop for it to work on the current *stable* kernel, rather than the mm kernel or the development kernel.
God forbid that a hardware company should develop a driver on a stable target, rather than one that gratuitously changes the AGP and PCI API's in a 0.0.x (what the rest of the world calls a patchlevel) revision in what is supposed to be the STABLE kernel. I hold ATI absolutely blameless for that mess.
The fglrx driver is quite solid now, and blender is screaming fast, but I don't bother with 3d games, because I know I'm going to find them lacking. However, there is an open source 3d accellerated driver for the r300 series cards (which includes the X800) that's picking up steam.
Still, my next card will probably be nvidia, thanks to the pitiful linux support of ATI. Hell, they even have drivers for OpenSolaris (not sure if that means 3d accellerated or not though)
Personally, I'd say that I prefer to use an enum for the obj's type and then use a switch to handle the different cases within the member functions.
Our browsers handle line breaks just fine thank you.
Anyway, congratulations on reinventing polymorphism. Of course by keeping all the code in one place, you no longer keep the behavior of a particular object in one place. Changed from a linked list to a hashtable? Better update 20 functions in 20 files.
I know it's considered bad-practice, but it does keep all the code in one place.
Look into languages with generic functions like (you saw this coming) common lisp. Actually even C++ lets you write generics, though it's not quite as smart about dispatching. For a java flavor, you can try Nice.
Katamari's soundtrack was cute and infectiously bubbly, but God of War most certainly deserves Best Original Soundtrack (though it's more what I'd term a score, not a soundtrack).
It was a fun cute game, but it doesn't deserve paeans until the end of days. The multiplayer was wretched, and the challenges were pretty limited (basically only three -- size, collect category, collect 1 in category). The sequel looks somewhat more promising there.
I most heartily agree, actually. Movies are nice, but I prefer game in my game. Most good games I've played with long cutscenes still used the game engine to render them (though I suspect they're actually FMV for the sake of smoothness, since they often switch to a letterbox format just for those scenes).
The cart games did tend to remain pricey though, but I don't know whether that's due to form factor or not. They certainly are more expensive to make.
But as I browse the submitters of actual code, it seems that it's no longer the every-man's operating system.
More and more often we're seeing Red Hat and IBM employees tinkering with the code.
All this means is that these companies are now paying people to work on Linux instead of hack on it in their spare time. There's even people with @microsoft.com addresses in the contributors file.
Linus verifies most submissions in the dev kernel, but he often does it now as merges from someone else's branch, instead of having to laboriously go through every single diff. The stable kernels are delegated entirely to another person, currently a fellow named Marcelo I believe.
I mean, the game is freaking called Grand Theft Auto! You know? As in, the crime of grand theft auto?!?
Actually, for a long time (all the up til Vice City) I thought the game mostly involved having to find creative ways to steal cars. Little did I know that only cop cars are equipped with locks in GTA, and all you need do is walk up, yank anyone out, and drive around for a little bit before the Alzheimers-afflicted police forget about you.
In the big picture, those are just tweaks. Microsoft engineers spent tens of thousands of hours working on IE, so adding tabbed browsing was likely relatively easy.
According to the blogs of someone who actually worked on tabs in IE7, it was actually quite difficult. Not for the browser, but so many BHO's would break without some really dastardly trickery. Browsers like Maxthon punt and just don't work with most BHO's. From recent news it looks like they still decided "screw it, let the vendors fix their own toolbars".
The N64 was the beginning of Nintendo's shunning by independent developers. Cartridges meant fast load time, but virtually no FMV. These days I'd choose the faster load times, but not if it means still paying $50 for a 3 year old game.
The mini-discs have nearly the capacity of a DVD anyway. It might have hurt them in Japan, where people bought a PS2 as a DVD player, but I doubt it's a factor stateside. The form factor can't be a help anywhere, especially Japan -- it only sits one way and won't ever fit in a shelf since it opens from the top (of course so does the new PS2, so *shrug*). Console piracy is actually pretty minimal since it requires nontrivial hacks like modchipping, and there's a thriving used market.
They do have an army of zealous brand-loyal fans the likes of which is only seen in Apple and Amiga communities. Sony and Microsoft don't exactly inspire warmth even from people who prefer their products.
Slashdot Mirror
> It's still a hot debate, but some Republicans definitely perked their ears up when Ron Reagan's family started getting involved with stem cell lobbying.
Yep, like Bill Frist. Using a veto when your party controls congress is an embarassing display of disunity -- using it against your own senate majority leader is mortifying. Karl Rove must be getting really distracted by the grand jury to not be greasing the wheels here.
> Exactly. I'm not too fond of Rockstar lately, what with their trying to pass the 'blame' for the hot coffee mod onto people who discovered it ON THE DISC
The mod adds naked textures. The original mini-game had all participants fully clothed. How salacious.
Rockstar needs to take out a few libel suits.
Story is that the name of the game was originally "Puck-Man" (due to the shape), but that vandals were scratching out part of the "P" on the console to spell the obvious derivative word.
Any truth to that?
Even alpha rays can be bad news internally. Your skin is ablative protection against alpha rays (it absorbs them and eventually sloughs off and regenerates). Your lungs are not.
Starting by running some decent lists. These folks run some amazingly slipshod lists, usually unconfirmed optin, and sometimes outright buying addresses. What do they expect? They're spamming!
But they figure that since they're not commercial, that they have a cause and a message, that they don't really have to pay attention to running a clean list, and anyone who blocks them must be a political censor.
I'm a left liberal, but I find myself blocking the DNC more often than the RNC, simply because the former has less stringent mail practices.
> In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say that the majority of slashdot readers are Windows users. Exclusively.
I wouldn't go that far. I would certainly say most of 'em are about as rank-and-file as you can get. Pretty much anyone who says "I'd fire anyone who" or otherwise blathers about who they'd hire and fire are almost certainly in no position of actually having that power. Thank god.
I suspect Microsoft will put lots of spin on the interview answer, and I suspect it will be countered with spin of its own from slashbots. This is Jerry Springer, or at best Crossfire, hardly a roundtable forum.
Oh PHP, how do I hate thee, let me count the ways:
1. Namespace. Everything in one big global namespace of functions.
2. Consistency. Grossly inconsistent function naming scheme. Sometimes it's noun_verb, sometimes it's verb_noun, sometimes there's an underscore, sometimes there isn't, sometimes it changes these conventions within the same module. Making matters worse are about a dozen different ways to compare and match strings, typically a different one for case-insensitive or not. I guess that's the one nod to consistency -- being consistent with C of all things.
3. Pass-by-value. You need special syntax to pass objects by value. I actually had to lecture the primary PHP devs on the concept of object identity, yet they still managed to screw up the implementation of === to not use it.
4. Culture. "I'll whip it up in PHP and MySQL and it'll cost you a shiny nickel sir, don't throw your money away on a shopping cart that will survive a crash!"
5. Magic quotes.
Yes, it's possible to write good PHP. I've seen industrial-strength well-written apps in VB 6. But you get no help from the language in doing so.
What's nice about Rails is how little code you actually write. It makes it easier to pick up Ruby gradually that way. If you know perl, ruby won't take you long. Learning some of Ruby's odd idioms might take longer, but you aren't forced to use 'em.
Ruby has poor unicode support however, which makes it a non-starter for my current application (which has to deal with data in UTF-8 that's often in Russian, Chinese, and Korean just to name a few).
Example? In fact ruby is more verbose than Python in some ways, because of the need for block delimiters.
Python has block delimiters too. They prefix every single line. Just because you can't see them printed doesn't mean they're not there. Just try leaving them out.
I can deal with the indentation syntax, I in fact write and maintain quite a bit of code in python. I also used to work on Infoseek pages way back, and I can tell you that I cannot deal with the indentation syntax when code is embedded into web pages. Python's indentation syntax might actually be the best thing to happen to "separation of presentation and code", because it's such a pain to actually embed code.
Cheetah looks like one of the better template engines for Python. No whitespace silliness in it either.
Rails isn't all that hot as a template engine, as it uses nasty ASP-ish syntax, where conditionals look especially noisy. For generating front-ends to databases though, it's sure nice. Now if they'd only work on that Oracle DBI driver.
> Except that Ruby does have continuations, and Common Lisp doesn't...
And scheme does. What's the "except" about? I thought it would be obvious which one I was saying had them. I guess "turning into lisp" is kind of backward. I meant "translated into lisp".
I don't find CL all that minimal, unfortunately. The fact that it can be bootstrapped is uninteresting to me. In fact, having to deal with the hyperspec as a reference makes me imagine it to be an elephantine design-by-committee abomination (contrast to R5RS). I know this isn't quite true of the language, but the documentation and the CUMBERSOMELY-LONG-IDENTIFIERS just don't give an overall impression of "lean".
Are you going to trot out the "parenthesis are hard to read" argument? Well take a look at XML: that has TWICE THE NUMBER OF PARENTHESIS, only they're pointy instead of curved.
... mmmm)
No one programs in XML. Well, XSLT is almost a programming language. A decent language at that, but with awful syntax.
The fairer comparison is to say C has nearly as many parenthesis as lisp, they just come in different shapes. I mean look at it:
void foo(int a, char *b) {
int z = blah(b,a);
woof(z - a);
}
(defun foo (a b)
(let ((z (blah b a)))
(woof (- z a))))
Yes, granted that's more. But hey look, no semicolons. No commas. You don't even need to use indentation to do it. About the only thing cooler than sexp syntax is haskell ("putStrLn $ show $ foo bar baz"
Perl6 perhaps may re-enter the race, but it is effectively a different language from the Perl we all know and despise, and Perl6 doesn't seem to be happening.
www.pugscode.org
Virtually the whole language has been implemented. Now they're working on porting it to itself, leaving only a small haskell core. Perl6 aims to be ready by the end of 2005, and it's quite on schedule.
And yeah, it's quite a different language, and a whole new kind of ugly.
> Perl has a reputation for being a "write-only language"
) {(. z)[t y]. x}[link[t;t;k]]''`last,,o)}
Among people who only ever learned perl by rote from 1-day trainings and copying and pasting CGI libraries. Yes, you can do some severe golf in perl, and a schwartzian sort is baffling, but a good 90% of perl is easier to grok than most C code. If it were really a write-only language, it would not have the traction it has.
THIS is a write-only language. A gold star to whoever identifies it first.
group:{[t;k;f;o].+(k,{`$($x),"_",$y}'[o;f];,/(k;f
> But compared to a language like Ruby or Python, Lisp is an anachronism. No standardization. No standard Unicode, threads.
It's interesting you mention Ruby, as it also lacks unicode.
clisp has good unicode support, and its CLOS implementation has gotten quite mature these days. No idea on how speed is doing, but it's always run dizzyingly tight little circles around python.
Ruby would have a hard time turning into lisp, given the lack of continuations. Scheme might do all right.
> Can anyone point out any strong advantages Lisp has over more modern functional languages?
It's multi-paradigm. Compared to the ML family, I'd have a hard time calling Common Lisp functional. Maybe scheme, but I'm not even sure about that. Modern FP tends to revolve heavily around type theory, while lisp only ever tends to use types as a compiler optimization or ala carte when some amount of type discipline is desired here or there.
Haskell is still nigh unreadable whenever complex state or flow control is involved. Haskell also encourages people to really play golf with folds and eta reduction as well. It's not that I don't appreciate that expressiveness being there, but the culture is certainly prone to abusing it.
Ocaml is nice, but no overloading? Blech.
ATI's development cycle is far too slow for linux. They develop for it to work on the current *stable* kernel, rather than the mm kernel or the development kernel.
God forbid that a hardware company should develop a driver on a stable target, rather than one that gratuitously changes the AGP and PCI API's in a 0.0.x (what the rest of the world calls a patchlevel) revision in what is supposed to be the STABLE kernel. I hold ATI absolutely blameless for that mess.
The fglrx driver is quite solid now, and blender is screaming fast, but I don't bother with 3d games, because I know I'm going to find them lacking. However, there is an open source 3d accellerated driver for the r300 series cards (which includes the X800) that's picking up steam.
Still, my next card will probably be nvidia, thanks to the pitiful linux support of ATI. Hell, they even have drivers for OpenSolaris (not sure if that means 3d accellerated or not though)
Personally, I'd say that I prefer to
use an enum for the obj's type and then
use a switch to handle the different
cases within the member functions.
Our browsers
handle line
breaks just
fine thank
you.
Anyway, congratulations on reinventing polymorphism. Of course by keeping all the code in one place, you no longer keep the behavior of a particular object in one place. Changed from a linked list to a hashtable? Better update 20 functions in 20 files.
I know it's considered bad-practice, but
it does keep all the code in one place.
Look into languages with generic functions like (you saw this coming) common lisp. Actually even C++ lets you write generics, though it's not quite as smart about dispatching. For a java flavor, you can try Nice.
> I've written this before, but there are a million ways to fill a HD-DVD.
You mention a dozen esoteric ways to fill a HD-DVD except the obvious one:
Full motion video at 1080p
Katamari's soundtrack was cute and infectiously bubbly, but God of War most certainly deserves Best Original Soundtrack (though it's more what I'd term a score, not a soundtrack).
It was a fun cute game, but it doesn't deserve paeans until the end of days. The multiplayer was wretched, and the challenges were pretty limited (basically only three -- size, collect category, collect 1 in category). The sequel looks somewhat more promising there.
I most heartily agree, actually. Movies are nice, but I prefer game in my game. Most good games I've played with long cutscenes still used the game engine to render them (though I suspect they're actually FMV for the sake of smoothness, since they often switch to a letterbox format just for those scenes).
The cart games did tend to remain pricey though, but I don't know whether that's due to form factor or not. They certainly are more expensive to make.
> There's even people with @microsoft.com addresses in the contributors file.
:)
I should probably mention that those folks are almost certainly still "spare timers"
But as I browse the submitters of actual code, it seems that it's no longer the every-man's operating system.
More and more often we're seeing Red Hat and IBM employees tinkering with the code.
All this means is that these companies are now paying people to work on Linux instead of hack on it in their spare time. There's even people with @microsoft.com addresses in the contributors file.
Linus verifies most submissions in the dev kernel, but he often does it now as merges from someone else's branch, instead of having to laboriously go through every single diff. The stable kernels are delegated entirely to another person, currently a fellow named Marcelo I believe.
And what does RMS have to do with any of it?
I mean, the game is freaking called Grand Theft Auto! You know? As in, the crime of grand theft auto?!?
Actually, for a long time (all the up til Vice City) I thought the game mostly involved having to find creative ways to steal cars. Little did I know that only cop cars are equipped with locks in GTA, and all you need do is walk up, yank anyone out, and drive around for a little bit before the Alzheimers-afflicted police forget about you.
In the big picture, those are just tweaks. Microsoft engineers spent tens of thousands of hours working on IE, so adding tabbed browsing was likely relatively easy.
According to the blogs of someone who actually worked on tabs in IE7, it was actually quite difficult. Not for the browser, but so many BHO's would break without some really dastardly trickery. Browsers like Maxthon punt and just don't work with most BHO's. From recent news it looks like they still decided "screw it, let the vendors fix their own toolbars".
The N64 was the beginning of Nintendo's shunning by independent developers. Cartridges meant fast load time, but virtually no FMV. These days I'd choose the faster load times, but not if it means still paying $50 for a 3 year old game.
The mini-discs have nearly the capacity of a DVD anyway. It might have hurt them in Japan, where people bought a PS2 as a DVD player, but I doubt it's a factor stateside. The form factor can't be a help anywhere, especially Japan -- it only sits one way and won't ever fit in a shelf since it opens from the top (of course so does the new PS2, so *shrug*). Console piracy is actually pretty minimal since it requires nontrivial hacks like modchipping, and there's a thriving used market.
They do have an army of zealous brand-loyal fans the likes of which is only seen in Apple and Amiga communities. Sony and Microsoft don't exactly inspire warmth even from people who prefer their products.