Well seeing as python's standard library is perfectly adequate, why should I? Isn't the micro edition non-free as well?
The point is, why should I deal with having a subset of the language's standard library when I can have the whole thing in a lot less space. The only thing I've needed extensions for is mbuff (shared memory with a kernel module) and the serial port (which, last I checked, is not standard in java). Is there a real advantage to using the micro edition? Is it really as small in terms of disk/memory usage as a stripped, minimalist python install?
I'm usually happy with python's whitespace significance, but I can think of a few cases where you don't want it. Think about html/xml generation. Semantically you want this.
which I find to make much less sense. Another one is OpenGL where you really want to indent when you push something onto the stack. To be fair, people have made tag libraries using __getattribute__ which lend to very readable code. I don't think you could use that for GL and GL-like situations, though.
And for those noting spaces/tabs problems, yes they're real. I generally start editing a python file from someone else by figuring out how to deal with whitespace. There's a solution to this--don't let people choose between spaces or tabs. This unfortunately means forcing spaces, but it means that the code can never deceive because of different tab/space setups, etc. YAML does it this way (spaces-only) and though it's a bit annoying (as I've always been on the tabs side of the fence), it does work.
Once you get used to wxPython, it becomes a very productive environment. I learned Qt first and loved it, but the licensing prevented it from becoming an option. I don't really like the GPL and I don't want to pay large sums of money to trolltech just to create some BSD licensed software. Robin Dunn has done amazing things for the wxWidgets/wxPython world and the libraries he's helped build are beginning to become formidable.
In an ideal world, there'd be a good implementation of the OpenStep API on all three major platforms. I'd be there in a heartbeat. Cocoa programming is just so..joyous (even/especially in python). Unfortunately, it's confined to the mac.
I agree with a lot of what you are saying, though it doesn't tend to stop me from using python.
If you want a language that's consistently unsurprising and surprisingly efficient, then try ruby. Performance is not a dream, but that's what compiled languages are for. It lacks most of python's inconsistencies and is really quite pleasant to work with. in ruby there are two sort methods, sort and sort!. One does it in place and one returns a new list. (the ! suffix for mutation and ? suffix for predicates is a gem. I'm pretty sure it was stolen from scheme. It really, really helps make your code clearer)
I still find python more practical for large projects, though, because of the large library and potential for rapid development. I generally use python (possibly with C underpinnings) for larger apps and ruby (with its perl heritage) for scripting. Blocks are the greates when you're dealing with ssh sessions, opening and closing files/database connections, etc. As for per,l I've generally avoided after a few bad experiences trying to decipher six month old code. I really don't think it has a place when ruby has most of its features and enough of it's syntax along with the slickest object system around short of smalltalk.
Have you used python recently (i.e. since 2.2 and new-style classes)?
Java's OO lacks multiple inheritance, mixins, and metaclasses. I don't think that a language needs all three (You can often implement mixins with metaclasses and mixins effectively replace multiple inheritance, as seen in ruby), but there should at least be a metaclass mechanism for when higher-order classes *are* truly the right pattern.
Also, if it's so object oriented, why are there primitive types? This is a real crutch of Java's type system and one that causes me to doubt whether it's completely an object oriented language. Also, why aren't classes objects? Why can't objects be introspected reasonably, efficiently, and without a complex API?
Java needs answers to these questions before I'll consider it the "handle OO better than python".
I'm an embedded python/ruby developer. I use both languages in situations where speed and predictability matter and so long as you write your code write, they excel. I couldn't even think of putting Java and it's massive standard library onto a compactflash card. It's just absurd.
Also, while the install size of java and python are roughly comparable, the memory footprint is not. A simple "hello world" in java allocates 12mb of unique (non virtual) memory. Python weighs in at 2.1mb. This is hardly "comparable". Also keep in mind that the default python install is more comparable to J2SE than J2RE. I've gotten python and neccesary libs for an embedded app into a handful of megabytes. The java class libs are not so decoupled as to make that practical.
First of all his equating a 400Mhz G4 with an 800Mhz PIII is ludacris. It doesn't take into account the overhead of running panther on an older machine like that.
Secondly, the warm start should be with the app preloaded. Why? Well, the way that mac apps work isn't like windows. I load safari once, at boot. After that I just close the active window and click the safari icon to get a new one. It remains resident the whole time and creating a new window is instant. Safari is getting a bad rap for being slow to load when in the way that it's used most, there's no loading going on. IMHO, this approach to applications and documents allows a much more versatile, heavyweight framework to be linked into everything without diminishing the user experience due to launch time.
A drunk can't drop the phone or hang up and suddenly have his BAC drop back to normal if a situation starts to arise. It's rare that an accident is sudden, usually multiple things have to go wrong ahead of time for it to happen. Even on a cell phone you can notice this if you're not a complete retard. The drunk is impaired no matter what. He can't react to a stimulus and shed his impairment in a matter of seconds.
Why not drop all these nonsense and give reckless driving tickets to those who are driving recklessly. If someone elderly/on a cell phone/looking for an address/etc. is swerving or being troublesome then cite them for what they did wrong. If they can handle themselves in these situations then they're not harming anyone.
Funny how preemptive war is automatically bad, but preemtive limitations of our rights are a-ok.
Think about how you'd feel if you, a unix user in a unix company, were told that the past ten-fifteen years you spent learning all about unix were to waste and it was time to switch to a Microsoft OS. You'd resist it, right? You'd try to keep at least your pc running unix, just so you wouldn't have to bother with anything else.
Believe it or not, most people are like that about windows. It works. They want word, excel, and ppt and they don't tolerate bad imitations well. People smart enough to work at IBM are smart enough to know the difference. They're not people who can be told to 'pretend' that it's really windows they're using.
This thing is the best I have seen in web frameworks. The productivity is stunning. Seriously, I spend more time on site layout than I do on actual backend (and this site has quite a bit of backend). Very few of my functions are more than a few lines long and rails does a better job of discouraging coupling than any framework I've seen.
ActiveRecord is the best out there. For those criticizing it's reflection/defaults approach to configuration, be aware that everything is predictable and where it isn't right for you, all defaults can be overridden simply and easily (just pass in an options hash to your associations (or validations, or anything really), for instance)
As for hosts, I've heard good things about textdrive. Keep in mind that you can get a decent VPS for $14.95 a month...that means root access so you can install/compile anything you want. I've been with adiungo for a while now and they've been good to me. I haven't put rails up on the server yet, but it's really only a matter of time. Since I have the gcc toolchain on that server, I know that I can do it one way or another...
Have you ever run a small business? Worked for one?
$5000 is very, very affordable. Our accountant always says "at home I write checks in the hundreds, at work I write checks in the thousands". Writing a $5000 check is not too uncommon an occurance and this is a small (eight employees) company in a dead-end industry.
For a one man show? probably not, but think of it this way--how many one man business generate 50,000 documents. Remember, google desktop search will do this for a single computer for free.
First of all, more points of failure makes for a less useable/reliable weapon. Second of all, it supposedly verifies you partially by the way you pull the trigger. This sounds like the worst poossible idea. Isn't that going to change appreciably when you're nervous, pursued, in an awkward situation, etc? I mean a person on the test range will fire it the same every time within measureable deltas, but in a real life-or-death situation? No thanks.
The criminals will still have non-smart guns, with the serial numbers filed off just like they do today. Citizens should be prepared to counter whatever they should expect to run into in a self defense situation.
The past forty or so years of data have shown us that an encounter with one gun is significantly more likely to result in a casualty than an encounter in which both parties are armed. Also keep in mind that most incidents that are terminated without shots fired go unreported.
Also keep in mind that when Florida changed their laws to allow concealed-carry their murder rates went down about as much a the rates in the rest of the country went up. If you're concerned with protecting children from the hazard of a gun in the house, keep in mind that many more children per year die in plastic buckets of water then due to a gunshot wound.
Can someone explain to me why this is a good idea?
They have their place. So does Mathematica and friends, for that matter. That place is not high school. When I landed at university, supposedly prepared for multi-variable calculus, I found that it was my TI-89 skills that I had prepared. Not good. The first few weeks of school me and some others in similar situations sat around and learned Calc 1/2 all over again. Any math that you're going to be concerned with in high school can pretty much be solved without resorting to a calculator. Equations should be done symbolically and concrete results should have less significance.
On the other hand, in my probability theory course we use computer algebra systems to numerically integrate things with no closed form, or simulate queueing situations that can not be solved traditionally, or approximate the stationary probabilities for a markov chain. This is where they belong. And even in this class, we avoid the CAS whenever possible.
Bottom line is it does more harm than good early on. Multi variable calculus was, sadly, more of an algebra lesson for me than a course in calculus. Why? My algebra skills sucked coming in. Now I'm not afraid of complicated algebraic expressions. But this is after taking several higher mathematics courses. Precalc was supposed to be preparaion and it wasn't, largely thanks to the TI-89.
How does wxRuby compare to wxPython? I have extensive experience with the latter, but have never experimented with the former. wxPython has the best user-community of any open source project I've encountered, and Robin Dunn is IMHO one of the most dedicated project heads out there. There is also a lot of python-specific wx stuff in wxPython (custom widgets, STC, OGL, etc). Does wxRuby have similar extensions or is it basically a thin layer over wxWidgets?
Re:Another scripting language
on
RAD with Ruby
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· Score: 1, Insightful
How can a language in which functions are not first-class objects be semantically similar to scheme? Semantically Python has much more in common with lisp variants such as scheme than Ruby ever has.
Objects, messages, mix-ins, the mixing in of kernel to the implicit root object, etc. are not elements of scheme. Blocks come from smalltalk, though they enjoy relatively simple representation in scheme, they're in no way the same concept. Iterators (in the ruby sense) don't appear in scheme either.
I generally think of scheme as a predominantly functional language and ruby as an overtly object oriented one. You'd think that this would imply semantic differences, though apparently the parent poster disagrees.
Actually I'm a programmer and musician. You conclude that because I want contracts to mean what they say then I must be in a management position?
You're not entitled to a $50,000 a year salary because you got a masters degree. You're entitled to what wealth you are able to create of your own ability and no more. If you contract out your ability in return for money then that's between you and the other person. If they violate it then take them to court. Don't cry foul cause you "imagined" that it would be different and neglected to make that part of the contract.
Because I realize that you sacrifice a lot of freedom by working for someone, I am exercising my choice not to by becoming an entrepreneur. Until that choice doesn't exist, I have no sympathy.
You belie your own point through your comparison to martyrdom--martyrdom is by its nature voluntary. Martyr's die because they choose to stick to their beliefs/goals against the society they're in. Likewise, non-martyrs choose otherwise. The emphasis in on choice. No one *has* to work at EA. There are plenty of lower-stress jobs out there.
Their right to engage in any contract with you that you two consesually agree on is balanced by your right to not sign that contract or leave the job. If there's a contract that says in a more well-defined manner, "no unreasonable working conditions", then there's an issue.
It's not exploitation if you agreed to do it and are receiving everything that they agreed to pay you.
Unless EA is chaining workers to their desks there's no issue. The ridiculous state of tort law in this country is victimizing companies that do nothing wrong. Just because they drew up an "evil" contract and employees agreed to it in return for pay doesn't mean that they broke the law. It is imperative in a free society that two parties may engage consensually in a contract and be able to expect no retaliation so long as the contract is upheld.
Since I haven't seen *anyone* demonstrating anything but bleeding-heart emotional commentary on the matter, I'll assume that this is another case of whiny Americans feeling that they are entitled to more than the market dictates. News flash to EA employees--you can leave your job at any time (unless you explicitly signed away your right to do that, which would be stupid and your own damn fault). If you're staying it's because you feel that what you're being given (the chance to work with games, a paycheck, etc.) is worth what you're putting out (hours, loss of health, etc). If it's not worth it then leave, don't hold EA at the tip of a gun and make demands.
Seriously. If EA has violated a contract then take them to court, else what you're putting up with is what you agreed to.
Note that EA doesn't have trouble finding programmers willing to do this. Yeah, it's tough. Perhaps not a good choice for someone with a family, but it's not EA's responsibility to be a good company for the "family man". Their responsibility is to make money or go belly-up. The owners of the company who rake in the big bucks likely took huge risks at the outset and are reaping the benefits of them. Without taking such risks into account, you can't compare a hired, salaried employee to a higher-up. CEO's are often hired after the fact (though not always), and are in enough demand to warrant such a salary. It's important to the company to attract talent, and it's pretty clear that management talent is expensive.
Bottom line is that you dont have to take on a high-stress job if you don't want to. There are plenty of jobs that you can live moderately comfortably on that are not ridiculous out there. No you won't make as much as an EA programmer, but you won't have trouble eating.
The entire tone of the article presumes one entitlement after the other. Bottom line is that the CEO of EA has no obligation to his employees beyond the contract they'ce agreed to. Since there is no mention of a contract in this appeal, I'll assume that it's simply someone whining about them/their spouse's decisions.
Drupal is a CMS, Zope is an Application Server. Drupal depends on an external web server, Zope is one. Zope is much lower-level than Drupal. You could compare Drupal with Plone fairly, though.
There is no real PHP counterpart to Zope because PHP was designed for the web and for tight apache integration (this second part is more recently changing). Python has no builtin "web application" features, so Zope provides them (along with Quixote, Webware, Nevow, etc.) PHP does a lot more for you in the language proper, but is much less object-oriented (yes, I know PHP has object-orientation, but it's nothing like Zope/Webware style object publishing).
But at the root, Drupal IS a CMS and zope is something you might use to build one. They're not similar in any way I can think of beyond that. I've worked with both, but correct me if I'm wrong?
In my experiences with the wxWidgets code, I found it to be actively maintained, even more actively supported, and not rife with #ifdefs.
There's a separate directory for each target in the tree that contains sensibly named source files like "notebook.cpp" which implement their name.
It is true that wxWidgets does not behave identically on each platform. These issues, where they arise, are often dealt with or documented, but it comes down to this--In the several thousand lines of wxWidgets-using code that I've written, I've never once had to detect the platform explicitly. I've occasionally had to tweak something, or fix a bug in my code that one toolkit forgave and another did not, but I've always ended up with one set of code that works on all three platforms. This speaks well of the wxWidgets codebase, as well.
To be fair, Qt is better at this, but I'm not comfortable with the licensing. Qt was the first toolkit I learned, back in the 1.0 days, and I still remember it as one of the most sanely implemented C++ libraries I've ever encountered...and of course the documentation is among the best.
I just don't like the limitations on the licensing of software that links against Qt. A library shouldn't affect its applications' licensing in such an overt fashion (GPL or cough up the $$$, pretty much).
Except when you find a bug in some library written in some dead/weird/etc language and all you have is the bytecode...I mean, in theory it sounds great, but when there's a potential for different objects to be implemented in a wide variety of languages, can you imagine the barrier for entry? I mean, python/perl/ruby is one thing, but what about these new 'renaissance' languages?
There are lots of Qt bindings too. I've used PyQt personally. According to google, RubyQt, PerlQt, JavaQt and Qt# Exist too. SWIG has gotten very good at generating cross-language interfaces for C/C++ libraries and the result of that is what you see here. All of these bindings seem to support the KDE api as well.
You should probably consider asking google before spouting nonsense.
As for high level languages, I think that implementing the core in one could be a dangerous move for performance. C# or C++ I'm ok with. Java, marginally ok, but python/perl/ruby? Enable app development with them, sure, but it would be best if you could implement performance critical code segments in something that's not just interpreted.
An interesting combination is what we see with Cocoa--in one application you can implement different classes in Objective C, Python, or Java. If the class that does screen drawing is too slow in python, write a parent class with just the drawing code in Objective-C, subclass it in python to get the logic, and you've just attained the best of both worlds.
I think this is probably the best way to go. Even though objective-c can be awkward, I would think it a good choice for Gnome for this reason. It's simple enough to make bindings for anything, but to have the choice of three distinct languages with varying features and benefits for each object in your app independently is an incredible leap ahead.
Slashdot Mirror
It just loaded in 500ms for me on my crappy wireless connection--what are you talking about?
Well seeing as python's standard library is perfectly adequate, why should I? Isn't the micro edition non-free as well?
The point is, why should I deal with having a subset of the language's standard library when I can have the whole thing in a lot less space. The only thing I've needed extensions for is mbuff (shared memory with a kernel module) and the serial port (which, last I checked, is not standard in java). Is there a real advantage to using the micro edition? Is it really as small in terms of disk/memory usage as a stripped, minimalist python install?
I'm usually happy with python's whitespace significance, but I can think of a few cases where you don't want it. Think about html/xml generation. Semantically you want this.
i tle",content="%s"%title)_ tag("html")
emit_tag("html")
emit_tag("head")
emit_tag("title",content="%s"%title)
emit_tag("head")
close_tag("html")
You're forced to write that like this:
emit_tag("html")
emit_tag("head")
emit_tag("t
emit_tag("head")
close
which I find to make much less sense. Another one is OpenGL where you really want to indent when you push something onto the stack. To be fair, people have made tag libraries using __getattribute__ which lend to very readable code. I don't think you could use that for GL and GL-like situations, though.
And for those noting spaces/tabs problems, yes they're real. I generally start editing a python file from someone else by figuring out how to deal with whitespace. There's a solution to this--don't let people choose between spaces or tabs. This unfortunately means forcing spaces, but it means that the code can never deceive because of different tab/space setups, etc. YAML does it this way (spaces-only) and though it's a bit annoying (as I've always been on the tabs side of the fence), it does work.
Once you get used to wxPython, it becomes a very productive environment. I learned Qt first and loved it, but the licensing prevented it from becoming an option. I don't really like the GPL and I don't want to pay large sums of money to trolltech just to create some BSD licensed software. Robin Dunn has done amazing things for the wxWidgets/wxPython world and the libraries he's helped build are beginning to become formidable.
In an ideal world, there'd be a good implementation of the OpenStep API on all three major platforms. I'd be there in a heartbeat. Cocoa programming is just so..joyous (even/especially in python). Unfortunately, it's confined to the mac.
I agree with a lot of what you are saying, though it doesn't tend to stop me from using python.
If you want a language that's consistently unsurprising and surprisingly efficient, then try ruby. Performance is not a dream, but that's what compiled languages are for. It lacks most of python's inconsistencies and is really quite pleasant to work with. in ruby there are two sort methods, sort and sort!. One does it in place and one returns a new list. (the ! suffix for mutation and ? suffix for predicates is a gem. I'm pretty sure it was stolen from scheme. It really, really helps make your code clearer)
I still find python more practical for large projects, though, because of the large library and potential for rapid development. I generally use python (possibly with C underpinnings) for larger apps and ruby (with its perl heritage) for scripting. Blocks are the greates when you're dealing with ssh sessions, opening and closing files/database connections, etc. As for per,l I've generally avoided after a few bad experiences trying to decipher six month old code. I really don't think it has a place when ruby has most of its features and enough of it's syntax along with the slickest object system around short of smalltalk.
Have you used python recently (i.e. since 2.2 and new-style classes)?
Java's OO lacks multiple inheritance, mixins, and metaclasses. I don't think that a language needs all three (You can often implement mixins with metaclasses and mixins effectively replace multiple inheritance, as seen in ruby), but there should at least be a metaclass mechanism for when higher-order classes *are* truly the right pattern.
Also, if it's so object oriented, why are there primitive types? This is a real crutch of Java's type system and one that causes me to doubt whether it's completely an object oriented language. Also, why aren't classes objects? Why can't objects be introspected reasonably, efficiently, and without a complex API?
Java needs answers to these questions before I'll consider it the "handle OO better than python".
I'm an embedded python/ruby developer. I use both languages in situations where speed and predictability matter and so long as you write your code write, they excel. I couldn't even think of putting Java and it's massive standard library onto a compactflash card. It's just absurd.
Also, while the install size of java and python are roughly comparable, the memory footprint is not. A simple "hello world" in java allocates 12mb of unique (non virtual) memory. Python weighs in at 2.1mb. This is hardly "comparable". Also keep in mind that the default python install is more comparable to J2SE than J2RE. I've gotten python and neccesary libs for an embedded app into a handful of megabytes. The java class libs are not so decoupled as to make that practical.
First of all his equating a 400Mhz G4 with an 800Mhz PIII is ludacris. It doesn't take into account the overhead of running panther on an older machine like that.
Secondly, the warm start should be with the app preloaded. Why? Well, the way that mac apps work isn't like windows. I load safari once, at boot. After that I just close the active window and click the safari icon to get a new one. It remains resident the whole time and creating a new window is instant. Safari is getting a bad rap for being slow to load when in the way that it's used most, there's no loading going on. IMHO, this approach to applications and documents allows a much more versatile, heavyweight framework to be linked into everything without diminishing the user experience due to launch time.
A drunk can't drop the phone or hang up and suddenly have his BAC drop back to normal if a situation starts to arise. It's rare that an accident is sudden, usually multiple things have to go wrong ahead of time for it to happen. Even on a cell phone you can notice this if you're not a complete retard. The drunk is impaired no matter what. He can't react to a stimulus and shed his impairment in a matter of seconds.
Why not drop all these nonsense and give reckless driving tickets to those who are driving recklessly. If someone elderly/on a cell phone/looking for an address/etc. is swerving or being troublesome then cite them for what they did wrong. If they can handle themselves in these situations then they're not harming anyone.
Funny how preemptive war is automatically bad, but preemtive limitations of our rights are a-ok.
Think about how you'd feel if you, a unix user in a unix company, were told that the past ten-fifteen years you spent learning all about unix were to waste and it was time to switch to a Microsoft OS. You'd resist it, right? You'd try to keep at least your pc running unix, just so you wouldn't have to bother with anything else.
Believe it or not, most people are like that about windows. It works. They want word, excel, and ppt and they don't tolerate bad imitations well. People smart enough to work at IBM are smart enough to know the difference. They're not people who can be told to 'pretend' that it's really windows they're using.
Can you argue with this logically rather than appealing to emotion? I'd be interested to see some *real* discussion on the topic.
Checking in as a rails user.
This thing is the best I have seen in web frameworks. The productivity is stunning. Seriously, I spend more time on site layout than I do on actual backend (and this site has quite a bit of backend). Very few of my functions are more than a few lines long and rails does a better job of discouraging coupling than any framework I've seen.
ActiveRecord is the best out there. For those criticizing it's reflection/defaults approach to configuration, be aware that everything is predictable and where it isn't right for you, all defaults can be overridden simply and easily (just pass in an options hash to your associations (or validations, or anything really), for instance)
As for hosts, I've heard good things about textdrive. Keep in mind that you can get a decent VPS for $14.95 a month...that means root access so you can install/compile anything you want. I've been with adiungo for a while now and they've been good to me. I haven't put rails up on the server yet, but it's really only a matter of time. Since I have the gcc toolchain on that server, I know that I can do it one way or another...
Go forth and check out rails!
Have you ever run a small business? Worked for one?
$5000 is very, very affordable. Our accountant always says "at home I write checks in the hundreds, at work I write checks in the thousands". Writing a $5000 check is not too uncommon an occurance and this is a small (eight employees) company in a dead-end industry.
For a one man show? probably not, but think of it this way--how many one man business generate 50,000 documents. Remember, google desktop search will do this for a single computer for free.
First of all, more points of failure makes for a less useable/reliable weapon. Second of all, it supposedly verifies you partially by the way you pull the trigger. This sounds like the worst poossible idea. Isn't that going to change appreciably when you're nervous, pursued, in an awkward situation, etc? I mean a person on the test range will fire it the same every time within measureable deltas, but in a real life-or-death situation? No thanks.
The criminals will still have non-smart guns, with the serial numbers filed off just like they do today. Citizens should be prepared to counter whatever they should expect to run into in a self defense situation.
The past forty or so years of data have shown us that an encounter with one gun is significantly more likely to result in a casualty than an encounter in which both parties are armed. Also keep in mind that most incidents that are terminated without shots fired go unreported.
Also keep in mind that when Florida changed their laws to allow concealed-carry their murder rates went down about as much a the rates in the rest of the country went up. If you're concerned with protecting children from the hazard of a gun in the house, keep in mind that many more children per year die in plastic buckets of water then due to a gunshot wound.
Can someone explain to me why this is a good idea?
They have their place. So does Mathematica and friends, for that matter. That place is not high school. When I landed at university, supposedly prepared for multi-variable calculus, I found that it was my TI-89 skills that I had prepared. Not good. The first few weeks of school me and some others in similar situations sat around and learned Calc 1/2 all over again. Any math that you're going to be concerned with in high school can pretty much be solved without resorting to a calculator. Equations should be done symbolically and concrete results should have less significance.
On the other hand, in my probability theory course we use computer algebra systems to numerically integrate things with no closed form, or simulate queueing situations that can not be solved traditionally, or approximate the stationary probabilities for a markov chain. This is where they belong. And even in this class, we avoid the CAS whenever possible.
Bottom line is it does more harm than good early on. Multi variable calculus was, sadly, more of an algebra lesson for me than a course in calculus. Why? My algebra skills sucked coming in. Now I'm not afraid of complicated algebraic expressions. But this is after taking several higher mathematics courses. Precalc was supposed to be preparaion and it wasn't, largely thanks to the TI-89.
How does wxRuby compare to wxPython? I have extensive experience with the latter, but have never experimented with the former. wxPython has the best user-community of any open source project I've encountered, and Robin Dunn is IMHO one of the most dedicated project heads out there. There is also a lot of python-specific wx stuff in wxPython (custom widgets, STC, OGL, etc). Does wxRuby have similar extensions or is it basically a thin layer over wxWidgets?
How can a language in which functions are not first-class objects be semantically similar to scheme? Semantically Python has much more in common with lisp variants such as scheme than Ruby ever has.
Objects, messages, mix-ins, the mixing in of kernel to the implicit root object, etc. are not elements of scheme. Blocks come from smalltalk, though they enjoy relatively simple representation in scheme, they're in no way the same concept. Iterators (in the ruby sense) don't appear in scheme either.
I generally think of scheme as a predominantly functional language and ruby as an overtly object oriented one. You'd think that this would imply semantic differences, though apparently the parent poster disagrees.
Actually I'm a programmer and musician. You conclude that because I want contracts to mean what they say then I must be in a management position?
You're not entitled to a $50,000 a year salary because you got a masters degree. You're entitled to what wealth you are able to create of your own ability and no more. If you contract out your ability in return for money then that's between you and the other person. If they violate it then take them to court. Don't cry foul cause you "imagined" that it would be different and neglected to make that part of the contract.
Because I realize that you sacrifice a lot of freedom by working for someone, I am exercising my choice not to by becoming an entrepreneur. Until that choice doesn't exist, I have no sympathy.
You belie your own point through your comparison to martyrdom--martyrdom is by its nature voluntary. Martyr's die because they choose to stick to their beliefs/goals against the society they're in. Likewise, non-martyrs choose otherwise. The emphasis in on choice. No one *has* to work at EA. There are plenty of lower-stress jobs out there.
Their right to engage in any contract with you that you two consesually agree on is balanced by your right to not sign that contract or leave the job. If there's a contract that says in a more well-defined manner, "no unreasonable working conditions", then there's an issue.
It's not exploitation if you agreed to do it and are receiving everything that they agreed to pay you.
Unless EA is chaining workers to their desks there's no issue. The ridiculous state of tort law in this country is victimizing companies that do nothing wrong. Just because they drew up an "evil" contract and employees agreed to it in return for pay doesn't mean that they broke the law. It is imperative in a free society that two parties may engage consensually in a contract and be able to expect no retaliation so long as the contract is upheld.
Since I haven't seen *anyone* demonstrating anything but bleeding-heart emotional commentary on the matter, I'll assume that this is another case of whiny Americans feeling that they are entitled to more than the market dictates. News flash to EA employees--you can leave your job at any time (unless you explicitly signed away your right to do that, which would be stupid and your own damn fault). If you're staying it's because you feel that what you're being given (the chance to work with games, a paycheck, etc.) is worth what you're putting out (hours, loss of health, etc). If it's not worth it then leave, don't hold EA at the tip of a gun and make demands.
Seriously. If EA has violated a contract then take them to court, else what you're putting up with is what you agreed to.
Note that EA doesn't have trouble finding programmers willing to do this. Yeah, it's tough. Perhaps not a good choice for someone with a family, but it's not EA's responsibility to be a good company for the "family man". Their responsibility is to make money or go belly-up. The owners of the company who rake in the big bucks likely took huge risks at the outset and are reaping the benefits of them. Without taking such risks into account, you can't compare a hired, salaried employee to a higher-up. CEO's are often hired after the fact (though not always), and are in enough demand to warrant such a salary. It's important to the company to attract talent, and it's pretty clear that management talent is expensive.
Bottom line is that you dont have to take on a high-stress job if you don't want to. There are plenty of jobs that you can live moderately comfortably on that are not ridiculous out there. No you won't make as much as an EA programmer, but you won't have trouble eating.
The entire tone of the article presumes one entitlement after the other. Bottom line is that the CEO of EA has no obligation to his employees beyond the contract they'ce agreed to. Since there is no mention of a contract in this appeal, I'll assume that it's simply someone whining about them/their spouse's decisions.
Drupal and Zope are not comparable at all--
Drupal is a CMS, Zope is an Application Server. Drupal depends on an external web server, Zope is one. Zope is much lower-level than Drupal. You could compare Drupal with Plone fairly, though.
There is no real PHP counterpart to Zope because PHP was designed for the web and for tight apache integration (this second part is more recently changing). Python has no builtin "web application" features, so Zope provides them (along with Quixote, Webware, Nevow, etc.) PHP does a lot more for you in the language proper, but is much less object-oriented (yes, I know PHP has object-orientation, but it's nothing like Zope/Webware style object publishing).
But at the root, Drupal IS a CMS and zope is something you might use to build one. They're not similar in any way I can think of beyond that. I've worked with both, but correct me if I'm wrong?
In my experiences with the wxWidgets code, I found it to be actively maintained, even more actively supported, and not rife with #ifdefs.
There's a separate directory for each target in the tree that contains sensibly named source files like "notebook.cpp" which implement their name.
It is true that wxWidgets does not behave identically on each platform. These issues, where they arise, are often dealt with or documented, but it comes down to this--In the several thousand lines of wxWidgets-using code that I've written, I've never once had to detect the platform explicitly. I've occasionally had to tweak something, or fix a bug in my code that one toolkit forgave and another did not, but I've always ended up with one set of code that works on all three platforms. This speaks well of the wxWidgets codebase, as well.
To be fair, Qt is better at this, but I'm not comfortable with the licensing. Qt was the first toolkit I learned, back in the 1.0 days, and I still remember it as one of the most sanely implemented C++ libraries I've ever encountered...and of course the documentation is among the best.
I just don't like the limitations on the licensing of software that links against Qt. A library shouldn't affect its applications' licensing in such an overt fashion (GPL or cough up the $$$, pretty much).
Brian
Except when you find a bug in some library written in some dead/weird/etc language and all you have is the bytecode...I mean, in theory it sounds great, but when there's a potential for different objects to be implemented in a wide variety of languages, can you imagine the barrier for entry? I mean, python/perl/ruby is one thing, but what about these new 'renaissance' languages?
There are lots of Qt bindings too. I've used PyQt personally. According to google, RubyQt, PerlQt, JavaQt and Qt# Exist too. SWIG has gotten very good at generating cross-language interfaces for C/C++ libraries and the result of that is what you see here. All of these bindings seem to support the KDE api as well.
You should probably consider asking google before spouting nonsense.
As for high level languages, I think that implementing the core in one could be a dangerous move for performance. C# or C++ I'm ok with. Java, marginally ok, but python/perl/ruby? Enable app development with them, sure, but it would be best if you could implement performance critical code segments in something that's not just interpreted.
An interesting combination is what we see with Cocoa--in one application you can implement different classes in Objective C, Python, or Java. If the class that does screen drawing is too slow in python, write a parent class with just the drawing code in Objective-C, subclass it in python to get the logic, and you've just attained the best of both worlds.
I think this is probably the best way to go. Even though objective-c can be awkward, I would think it a good choice for Gnome for this reason. It's simple enough to make bindings for anything, but to have the choice of three distinct languages with varying features and benefits for each object in your app independently is an incredible leap ahead.