everyone has their syntax preference, but at the end of the day its the paradigm you apply that matters and not the language.
The differences between C++, C#, and VisualBasic are far deeper than syntactic. C#, for example, guarantees fault isolation, while C++ does not. C# has full reflection, while C++ does not. Programmer productivity in different languages can be orders of magnitude different.
Of course, most working programmers have the same superficial view of programming languages as you do and will make the same glib and ill-informed analogies to natural languages that you did. That's why people keep choosing C and C++, believing the differences to other languages to be merely syntactic, and then producing code that crashes, silently mangles data, and has gaping security holes.
Fortunately, the herd mentality is driving even people who don't know what they are doing away from C/C++. Even your own company bills itself as a.NET development house. You may not understand why C# is better for you than C++, your productivity may not increase, but the fact that you have switched means that your software will ultimately still cause fewer problems.
Programming languages that take all of that out of your hands (garbage collection, memory allocation, type definition, and whatever else) wind up being less efficient and less flexible.
Memory management in C/C++ is usually less efficient (both in space and time) than in high performance systems with garbage collection. And the main effect of C/C++'s type system and pointers is to prevent the compiler from doing optimizations. In fact, it's a misconception that giving more low-level control to the programmer ends up making software more efficient.
Nuclear plants may have some miniscule risks, but when properly managed, they are by far the best solution. The problem with nuclear energy (dealing with the waste included) is entirely political, not technical.
The problem is political, but not for the reasons you give.
Current nuclear technology is inherently so dirty that there is no safe solution to the waste problem, and none will ever be found; there simply is no place on earth where you can safely put indestructible waste that's going to be deadly for thousands of years. Currently deployed nuclear technology also only uses a tiny fraction of the energy contained in the nuclear fuel, which is highly irresponsible.
We have nuclear technology that is pretty clean, namely breeder reactors. Breeder reactors use nuclear fuel far more efficiently and they produce little highly radioactive waste. The resistance to breeder reactors is indeed purely political: they are viewed as a proliferation risk.
Nevertheless, in the end, we don't really need nuclear. Energy efficiency coupled with solar and bio power is more than enough to power the world, safely, easily, and forever.
A lot of people will come back with the argument that there should be something easier to learn than C or C++ for the beginners, but in my experience that's a flawed argument.
Well, I'll come back with the argument that any experienced programmer should know better than to choose C/C++ voluntarily. The problem with those languages is not that they are tedious, the problem is that it's too easy to make mistakes in them even for the most experienced programmers.
And the "we're so excellent, we can handle it" attitude is what really sets the mediocre programmers apart from the best programmers: the best programmers know that they can't handle it, they can at best muddle through in C/C++.
Java could have been a great language for teaching, but it has some serious problems. Among them are: bugs in its type systems (inheritance of array types), a broken implementation of genericity, a bloated and poorly designed GUI library, and lack of some important programming constructs (call-by-reference, multidimensional arrays, pointers).
C# fixes those problems. If you're going to use a Java-like language as a teaching language, then C# is the better choice (and it's also what the poster was asking about!).
The thing with these numbers is that they are misleading at best [CC], and the only thing they accomplish is immature fanboyism.
At least our immature fanboyism is superior to Apple's and Microsoft's immature fanboyism. No, wait, I take that back--that's an area in which Apple and Microsoft still have us beat.
Yes, Microsoft has been busy integrating Windows, Exchange, Outlook, Office, SharePoint and IIS into a big system. Is that the right way to go? I don't think so. I think the future is with web-based applications: rich in-page HTML editing, AJAX, Web 2.0. The office suite of the future will be the browser. And if you don't want to store your documents on a server, you'll just run the same web-based applications locally. Both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice are transitional technologies; they were never designed for broad, open, web-based systems, and they will never be really good at it. FWIW, OpenOffice's support for collaboration isn't actually all that bad: between WebDav support, XML file formats, and versioning support, you can, in fact, use it as part of a system that's very much like Microsoft's collaborative systems built around office. But, again, I don't think you'd want to.
If the Microsoft Office and OpenOffice codebases weren't such awful messes, then pieces of those suites might have found their way into the browsers, as rich text editors, diagram editors, etc. But here, too, the legacy of those applications weighs them down. The rich text controls, grid controls, diagramming controls, and graphics controls that will be built into Firefox, Mozilla, and Safari will be built on their built-in support for HTML, XML, CSS, and SVG.
For long runs, transmitting DC is viable and actually more efficient.
You're forgetting about the fact that transmission involves a lot of stepping up and down, and that's why AC wins. Whether running it over a long wire is more efficient is secondary (when it makes enough of a difference, you can convert the AC to DC before and after that particular transmission line).
Compared to the long-term (billions of years), we are currently in an atmospheric carbon drought.
Yes, and that "carbon drought" is the kind of environment we as a species, as well as the species we depend on, require for our continued existence.
I don't care about returning earth to some pristine state a billion years ago, I care about preserving it in a state that keeps it inhabitable, and that's the state that existed until the industrial revolution and that we are rapidly destroying.
There may be some useful ideas in there, but for a document proposing the future direction of a major piece of existing software goes, this is laughable: there are no references to user studies, feedback, or other kind of user-centered design in there; all this is based on is looking at Microsoft Office and a bit of navel gazing.
SCTP sounds like a kitchen sink solution; it has some nice features and some useless features.
For example, manually opening multiple connections through different interfaces and then having the SCTP implementation figure out which one to send through is nonsense; if the system has multiple routes to the Internet, then that can be taken care of at the IP level.
Similarly, preservation of write boundaries is a useless gimmick that is rarely needed, and when it is needed, can be easily implemented in user code.
The four-way handshake during setup is possibly useful, but you can trivially get the same with TCP in a backwards compatible fashion if you configure your kernel to protect against SYN spoofing.
Altogether, I'm not quite sure what problem SCTP is supposed to solve. SCTP has made its way into some other standards, so it will probably be unavoidable, but it's not a well-designed protocol in my opinion.
Which they extrapolated. 3 years is not a data set to base public policy OR firm geo science upon.
And what data is there to prove that continued emissions of CO2 is actually safe?
We have some data, evidence, and models that say it's risky to continue down this path, and we have no data, no evidence, and almost no models to support the current public policy.
We're not looking at generalisations, like physical laws, that can be repeated in a lab, but an event that happened once in our ancient history.
How do you know it can't be repeated in a lab? In fact, there is increasing experimental evidence that the steps that lead to life are not a unique accident, but repeatable.
(Not that repatability in a lab is a necessary or sufficient condition for something to be scientific anyway.)
It seems to me that it's a little futile to speculate on how cellular and multicellular life first appeared because the evidence was lost long ago.
The evidence is preserved in the fossil record, and many of the steps can be repeated expreimentally.
Towards the end of the 19th century the main French and British linguistic societies banned any further papers on the origins of langiage because unprovable speculation was so rife. I can't help feeling we need the same thing here.
Well, fortunately, science has overcome that folly--research into the origins of language is a hot field.
The problem is that the programs that are continuing are worthless:
The agency's administrator, Michael D. Griffin, says NASA needs the money to keep the space shuttle fleet aloft, complete the International Space Station and build a new crew exploration vehicle to replace the shuttle.
The shuttles and the ISS should be scrapped immediately, and the US shouldn't develop a replacement for the shuttle.
Instead, money should be redirected into low-cost unmanned launch options, robotics research, and missions that actually have scientific value.
It's not relevant whether these drugs are expensive to develop at this point; what is relevant is that, given current practices, any new drug we develop will quickly become useless as well.
The greed of the pharmaceutical industry is not that they want a lot of money for the development of drugs or that they charge a lot of money, but that they argue for the development of new drugs in an environment where it is clear that this is pointless.
However, if we were to correct these problems overnight, we would still be confronted with the drug resistant antibiotics that are already here.
Drug resistance would quickly disappear from the bacterial population.
Also, until this problem gets serious enough, behavior will not change. If we just throw money at the pharmaceutical industry, it will provide more drugs and people will just keep going the way they are.
Until we have a global ban on using antibiotics in animal feed, on most antibiotic treatment of livestock, and severe penalties for antibiotics misuse by doctors, there simply is no point throwing even more money at the problem.
I can also understand that the prospect of subsidizing big Pharma is also painful, especially when we know that they will turn around and overprice their drugs, claiming that they need to recoup the costs of development, even if that development money comes from the government.
I think overpricing of drugs is the best thing that can happen for antibiotics, because that finally discourages their use. And, sad as that may be, drugs with lots of unpleasant side effects are also good because they increase the cost and risk associated with antibiotic use. And if we don't make policy changes, then sooner or later, expensive and dangerous antibiotics will be all that's left and the problem will take care of itself--the hard way.
Seriously, this fad to use anti-bacterial soaps and cleansers: [...] b. builds resistance to antibiotics
No, it does not. The anti-bacterial agents in soap are different from antibiotic drugs. Even if bacteria did develop resistance to those agents, it wouldn't really matter as far as treating disease is concerned.
Some of those agents are convenient in a hospital setting, but there are excellent ways of disinfecting just about everything using traditional agents like steam, peroxide, bleach, mercury, alcohol, etc.
It's pointless to develop new antibiotics until people change their behavior. What needs to change? Hospitals need to operate in ways in which supergerms can't be created and germs aren't transmitted between patients (or maybe we just need to close hospitals altogether). Doctors need to stop overprescribing antibiotics; antibiotics abuse should be treated as far more serious than narcotics abuse. Veterinarian and feed use of antibiotics should largely be banned altogether. And individuals need to readjust their expectations and behavior, reduce the risk of exposure to common pathogens, and treat even physically small injuries seriously--generally, practice better hygiene.
Until that happens, bugs are going to become resistant faster to new drugs than we can create new drugs. OTOH, if we had limited antibiotics use to those cases where it is really important, penicillin would probably still be the drug of choice.
However, maybe economics will do what common sense didn't: as new antibiotics become more and more expensive, people will naturally reduce their unnecessary use.
I started bringing laptops to class around my Junior year. I'm unconvinced that they helped me with my grades.
Laptops aren't supposed to "help you with your grades". Taking a hard math class isn't going to "help you with your grades" either. The purpose of university is that you learn things. Not even useful or practical things in general, but the kinds of things that you need in order to be a scholar. Computer use is in that category. And, incidentally, it happens to be even useful and practical.
Like how? I have all the E-mail filtering technologies you can get and dozens of spam messages still get through every day. At some point, one has to complain when other people use that address irresponsibly.
And yes a simple life with modest needs is a big plus. It's simple because I keep it that way out of choice.
So, what interesting things do you do then? What are you contributing to the world? What will be left after you're gone?
This may actually not be such a bad thing; it may force the adoption of features in client software that permits the simultaneous use of multiple domain name systems. A transition to such a system would be painful because it would break cherished assumptions about domain names, but it is certainly workable. But, ultimately, it would make the administration of the system more democratic because people can vote with their feet.
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everyone has their syntax preference, but at the end of the day its the paradigm you apply that matters and not the language.
.NET development house. You may not understand why C# is better for you than C++, your productivity may not increase, but the fact that you have switched means that your software will ultimately still cause fewer problems.
The differences between C++, C#, and VisualBasic are far deeper than syntactic. C#, for example, guarantees fault isolation, while C++ does not. C# has full reflection, while C++ does not. Programmer productivity in different languages can be orders of magnitude different.
Of course, most working programmers have the same superficial view of programming languages as you do and will make the same glib and ill-informed analogies to natural languages that you did. That's why people keep choosing C and C++, believing the differences to other languages to be merely syntactic, and then producing code that crashes, silently mangles data, and has gaping security holes.
Fortunately, the herd mentality is driving even people who don't know what they are doing away from C/C++. Even your own company bills itself as a
Programming languages that take all of that out of your hands (garbage collection, memory allocation, type definition, and whatever else) wind up being less efficient and less flexible.
Memory management in C/C++ is usually less efficient (both in space and time) than in high performance systems with garbage collection. And the main effect of C/C++'s type system and pointers is to prevent the compiler from doing optimizations. In fact, it's a misconception that giving more low-level control to the programmer ends up making software more efficient.
Nuclear plants may have some miniscule risks, but when properly managed, they are by far the best solution. The problem with nuclear energy (dealing with the waste included) is entirely political, not technical.
The problem is political, but not for the reasons you give.
Current nuclear technology is inherently so dirty that there is no safe solution to the waste problem, and none will ever be found; there simply is no place on earth where you can safely put indestructible waste that's going to be deadly for thousands of years. Currently deployed nuclear technology also only uses a tiny fraction of the energy contained in the nuclear fuel, which is highly irresponsible.
We have nuclear technology that is pretty clean, namely breeder reactors. Breeder reactors use nuclear fuel far more efficiently and they produce little highly radioactive waste. The resistance to breeder reactors is indeed purely political: they are viewed as a proliferation risk.
Nevertheless, in the end, we don't really need nuclear. Energy efficiency coupled with solar and bio power is more than enough to power the world, safely, easily, and forever.
A lot of people will come back with the argument that there should be something easier to learn than C or C++ for the beginners, but in my experience that's a flawed argument.
Well, I'll come back with the argument that any experienced programmer should know better than to choose C/C++ voluntarily. The problem with those languages is not that they are tedious, the problem is that it's too easy to make mistakes in them even for the most experienced programmers.
And the "we're so excellent, we can handle it" attitude is what really sets the mediocre programmers apart from the best programmers: the best programmers know that they can't handle it, they can at best muddle through in C/C++.
Java could have been a great language for teaching, but it has some serious problems. Among them are: bugs in its type systems (inheritance of array types), a broken implementation of genericity, a bloated and poorly designed GUI library, and lack of some important programming constructs (call-by-reference, multidimensional arrays, pointers).
C# fixes those problems. If you're going to use a Java-like language as a teaching language, then C# is the better choice (and it's also what the poster was asking about!).
The thing with these numbers is that they are misleading at best [CC], and the only thing they accomplish is immature fanboyism.
At least our immature fanboyism is superior to Apple's and Microsoft's immature fanboyism. No, wait, I take that back--that's an area in which Apple and Microsoft still have us beat.
Yes, Microsoft has been busy integrating Windows, Exchange, Outlook, Office, SharePoint and IIS into a big system. Is that the right way to go? I don't think so. I think the future is with web-based applications: rich in-page HTML editing, AJAX, Web 2.0. The office suite of the future will be the browser. And if you don't want to store your documents on a server, you'll just run the same web-based applications locally. Both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice are transitional technologies; they were never designed for broad, open, web-based systems, and they will never be really good at it. FWIW, OpenOffice's support for collaboration isn't actually all that bad: between WebDav support, XML file formats, and versioning support, you can, in fact, use it as part of a system that's very much like Microsoft's collaborative systems built around office. But, again, I don't think you'd want to.
If the Microsoft Office and OpenOffice codebases weren't such awful messes, then pieces of those suites might have found their way into the browsers, as rich text editors, diagram editors, etc. But here, too, the legacy of those applications weighs them down. The rich text controls, grid controls, diagramming controls, and graphics controls that will be built into Firefox, Mozilla, and Safari will be built on their built-in support for HTML, XML, CSS, and SVG.
For long runs, transmitting DC is viable and actually more efficient.
You're forgetting about the fact that transmission involves a lot of stepping up and down, and that's why AC wins. Whether running it over a long wire is more efficient is secondary (when it makes enough of a difference, you can convert the AC to DC before and after that particular transmission line).
Compared to the long-term (billions of years), we are currently in an atmospheric carbon drought.
Yes, and that "carbon drought" is the kind of environment we as a species, as well as the species we depend on, require for our continued existence.
I don't care about returning earth to some pristine state a billion years ago, I care about preserving it in a state that keeps it inhabitable, and that's the state that existed until the industrial revolution and that we are rapidly destroying.
If you are going to propose a hypothesis that CO2 emissions are harmful, you have the burden of proof, not the other way around.
No, if you propose that unprecedented emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere are safe, the burden of proof is on YOU.
There may be some useful ideas in there, but for a document proposing the future direction of a major piece of existing software goes, this is laughable: there are no references to user studies, feedback, or other kind of user-centered design in there; all this is based on is looking at Microsoft Office and a bit of navel gazing.
SCTP sounds like a kitchen sink solution; it has some nice features and some useless features.
For example, manually opening multiple connections through different interfaces and then having the SCTP implementation figure out which one to send through is nonsense; if the system has multiple routes to the Internet, then that can be taken care of at the IP level.
Similarly, preservation of write boundaries is a useless gimmick that is rarely needed, and when it is needed, can be easily implemented in user code.
The four-way handshake during setup is possibly useful, but you can trivially get the same with TCP in a backwards compatible fashion if you configure your kernel to protect against SYN spoofing.
Altogether, I'm not quite sure what problem SCTP is supposed to solve. SCTP has made its way into some other standards, so it will probably be unavoidable, but it's not a well-designed protocol in my opinion.
Which they extrapolated. 3 years is not a data set to base public policy OR firm geo science upon.
And what data is there to prove that continued emissions of CO2 is actually safe?
We have some data, evidence, and models that say it's risky to continue down this path, and we have no data, no evidence, and almost no models to support the current public policy.
It seems to me the choice is clear.
The competition "caught up" long ago; RIM's products suck compared to Treo, Symbian, Hiptop, or even WinMobile.
We're not looking at generalisations, like physical laws, that can be repeated in a lab, but an event that happened once in our ancient history.
How do you know it can't be repeated in a lab? In fact, there is increasing experimental evidence that the steps that lead to life are not a unique accident, but repeatable.
(Not that repatability in a lab is a necessary or sufficient condition for something to be scientific anyway.)
It seems to me that it's a little futile to speculate on how cellular and multicellular life first appeared because the evidence was lost long ago.
The evidence is preserved in the fossil record, and many of the steps can be repeated expreimentally.
Towards the end of the 19th century the main French and British linguistic societies banned any further papers on the origins of langiage because unprovable speculation was so rife. I can't help feeling we need the same thing here.
Well, fortunately, science has overcome that folly--research into the origins of language is a hot field.
I personally think every government program should undergo significant funding cuts and those programs will be forced to be more efficient.
I personally think your salary should undergo significant cuts, and you will be forced to be more efficient.
The shuttles and the ISS should be scrapped immediately, and the US shouldn't develop a replacement for the shuttle.
Instead, money should be redirected into low-cost unmanned launch options, robotics research, and missions that actually have scientific value.
It's not relevant whether these drugs are expensive to develop at this point; what is relevant is that, given current practices, any new drug we develop will quickly become useless as well.
The greed of the pharmaceutical industry is not that they want a lot of money for the development of drugs or that they charge a lot of money, but that they argue for the development of new drugs in an environment where it is clear that this is pointless.
However, if we were to correct these problems overnight, we would still be confronted with the drug resistant antibiotics that are already here.
Drug resistance would quickly disappear from the bacterial population.
Also, until this problem gets serious enough, behavior will not change. If we just throw money at the pharmaceutical industry, it will provide more drugs and people will just keep going the way they are.
Until we have a global ban on using antibiotics in animal feed, on most antibiotic treatment of livestock, and severe penalties for antibiotics misuse by doctors, there simply is no point throwing even more money at the problem.
I can also understand that the prospect of subsidizing big Pharma is also painful, especially when we know that they will turn around and overprice their drugs, claiming that they need to recoup the costs of development, even if that development money comes from the government.
I think overpricing of drugs is the best thing that can happen for antibiotics, because that finally discourages their use. And, sad as that may be, drugs with lots of unpleasant side effects are also good because they increase the cost and risk associated with antibiotic use. And if we don't make policy changes, then sooner or later, expensive and dangerous antibiotics will be all that's left and the problem will take care of itself--the hard way.
Seriously, this fad to use anti-bacterial soaps and cleansers: [...] b. builds resistance to antibiotics
No, it does not. The anti-bacterial agents in soap are different from antibiotic drugs. Even if bacteria did develop resistance to those agents, it wouldn't really matter as far as treating disease is concerned.
Some of those agents are convenient in a hospital setting, but there are excellent ways of disinfecting just about everything using traditional agents like steam, peroxide, bleach, mercury, alcohol, etc.
It's pointless to develop new antibiotics until people change their behavior. What needs to change? Hospitals need to operate in ways in which supergerms can't be created and germs aren't transmitted between patients (or maybe we just need to close hospitals altogether). Doctors need to stop overprescribing antibiotics; antibiotics abuse should be treated as far more serious than narcotics abuse. Veterinarian and feed use of antibiotics should largely be banned altogether. And individuals need to readjust their expectations and behavior, reduce the risk of exposure to common pathogens, and treat even physically small injuries seriously--generally, practice better hygiene.
Until that happens, bugs are going to become resistant faster to new drugs than we can create new drugs. OTOH, if we had limited antibiotics use to those cases where it is really important, penicillin would probably still be the drug of choice.
However, maybe economics will do what common sense didn't: as new antibiotics become more and more expensive, people will naturally reduce their unnecessary use.
I started bringing laptops to class around my Junior year. I'm unconvinced that they helped me with my grades.
Laptops aren't supposed to "help you with your grades". Taking a hard math class isn't going to "help you with your grades" either. The purpose of university is that you learn things. Not even useful or practical things in general, but the kinds of things that you need in order to be a scholar. Computer use is in that category. And, incidentally, it happens to be even useful and practical.
C++ is programming.
No, C++ is self-flagellation.
However, it is something you should prepare for.
Like how? I have all the E-mail filtering technologies you can get and dozens of spam messages still get through every day. At some point, one has to complain when other people use that address irresponsibly.
And yes a simple life with modest needs is a big plus. It's simple because I keep it that way out of choice.
So, what interesting things do you do then? What are you contributing to the world? What will be left after you're gone?
This may actually not be such a bad thing; it may force the adoption of features in client software that permits the simultaneous use of multiple domain name systems. A transition to such a system would be painful because it would break cherished assumptions about domain names, but it is certainly workable. But, ultimately, it would make the administration of the system more democratic because people can vote with their feet.