I see your point. The sentence structure could have been much better:..8 years of Java programming which was followed by 8 years of Smalltalk.
The intended way to read it is that the Java years followed the Smalltalk years. I started programming Smalltalk in '87. You do certainly have a suspicous mind;-) But in today's troubled world I can understand. enjoy, root-a-begger (yes, I know begger is spelled wrong...this is intentional)
I agree with your concept of categorizing based on type/style of programming. I don't especially agree with your categories, but that's just my opinion. About 2 years ago, I went through the same thought process as asked in the original post. I was not encumbered by a large IT department that would dismiss my opinions if I came up with non-mainstream ideas. This led me to a very broad and lengthy search. Here is the result of my quest for an answer:
1 - Application language - Erlang 2 - Brute furce / close to the metal - C 3 - System scripts - Bash
I chose erlang after 8 years of Java programming which was followed by 8 years of Smalltalk. The main reasons for departing the mainstream OO world were concurrency, distribution and conceptual integrity. I found that in large systems what kept me worried most is being able to "prove" that my code worked as the system scaled and became distributed over local and worldwide "clusters". I wanted to be certain that no race conditions or locks occurred (just being able to monitor and restart VMs was not the answer for me). You can get concurrency assurance with Java or any "shared memory" / object pointer based langugage but you need very well written and tested frameworks to fully encapsulate anything that may be touched by more than one thread/process. Solutions like JBoss or other widely encompassing application servers also were not the answer for me as I had to trust that everything the app server did was correct and wading into these projects to find out if things are correct or to fix anomolies is a big challange. I simply grew tired of writting the frameworks required to encpsulate concurrency and limiting my application code to the nature of the frameworks. Sure, there are many existing frameworks in the Java world that encapsulate the hard work and concurrency for you. But thats exactly the problem: there are many of them. This gets me to the last point of my rational: conceptual integrity. Each Java framework unleashes its own concepts and patterns. I wanted one small set of patterns that are used everywhere. I found this in erlang. It turns out that by making concurrency a first class priority in the language design, the need to invent frameworks and other patterns to encapulate the hard work mostly dissapears leaving behind a clean slate to write your app.
The second category, C, speaks for itself. Occasionally, I need to touch the OS or even bare metal and want a very straightforward way to do this. My C code ends up being very limited, well tested and compartmentalized.
The third category was a tough call. I was tempted to pick Python/Ruby/Lua/Tcl for system scripts. But the bottom line is I didn't really need them and for anything complex, I could write system tools in erlang that were called by Bash. This keeps my usage of Bash simple and maintainable without introducing yet another language.
I realize that my first choice, erlang, brings up the obvious issues of how do you replace programmers easily when you can't find resumes with erlang expertise. I have found that no matter what lagugage you choose, you have to re-train programmers to do things your way and there is a learning curve to introducing anyone new to your IT group. My choice in erlang has not increased the learning curve for good programms I bring on board.
I realize this seems like a giant plug for erlang. It is and it isn't. My rational stands on its one regardless of your choice.
Precisely how is this a troll? The vast majority of resposes strongly state that C++ is not the best choice for the entire app. I also state that the existnig C++ libraries should be used but with a more appropriate language to control the entire system. Using erlang in this respect is no different from the first post that suggests using managed code. I suggested erlang because I am a recent convert and am realizing extreemly high productivity and can sleep better at night knowing that my system architecture is rock solid. My post was hardly a troll. It is honest advice about a choice of language that is fully interoperable with C++. Please save your mod points for vi vs. emacs posts.
Doing it all in C++ is certainly asking for trouble. I do recognize your assertion that it all must be C++, but this assertion needs to be seriously rethought. Its by far not the best choice of langugage for your stated requirements. The bottom line is, if you need performance and already have most of this in C/C++ libraries, then use them. For the overall system, UI, inter-proc communications, concurrency, etc... don't use C++. My plug is for you to use erlang (yes I'm serious www.erlang.org) for the entire system and make your C/C++ library calls through that. You will get great performance and not have to worry about system stability, portability and concurrency. Respost your question to the erlang questions maillist and you will get very well thought out responses. If you choose to do absolutely everything in C++, your just wasting time, money and the slashdot community's time as well since this type of question has well been answered in the past. Feel free to get in touch if you need more charitable info on why erlang is the best choice for the encompassing system archtecture. good luck
Rolling your own is an interesting option. Using a less popular distro would have certainly cost NZ more in initial R&D, so the Suse choice is pragmatic. I could certainly name a few of my best choices: tinysofa.org and freebsd.org. But as always, big government made decisions without consulting me.
I think we should all applaud the NZ gov for making such a decision and for choosing Suse/Novel in order to better control the outcome for them as I doubt RedHat would be as open to outside input on the future of the distro.
-- you'll get no sig out of me!!!
From my readings about bird flu vaccine availability, it seems cost is not the only limiting issue. Supply is the problem that will kill many if this latest bird flu gets out of hand. I'm sure Taiwan can afford some amount of the drug, but is enough available? From what I've read, Roche can't supply the whole world with enough if this flu gets out of hand.
Sometimes its not just about money...and a few eminent domain cases here and there (real or intellectual property) don't seem to destroy capitalism in the U.S. Why should countries preparing themselves for this bird flu be seen as destroying the global patent system?
The architecture pdf looks good and well thought through. If the goal is to create a rock solid enterprise capable messaging system, then a BSD port and tuning of the file and process permissions are in order.
This product installs lots of stuff!! lots of security screeing to do.
Great work...I have been waiting for somthing of this calliber for quite a while.
I've read many articals about Summer of Code. Yet, I've seen no web page listing all the accepted projects (not proposed). Now that its over, shouldn't there be a link list of finished work so we can go and see what these kids did?
All that attention to detail and they still couldn't include the patent free ogg vorbis format. Apple truly sucks big corporate balls for eschewing this most important of standards.
All you apple fanboys are salivating your way to a locked down DRM hell by continuing to buy these products.
I just bought a new iRiver T10. Its not as cool as the nano, but the sound quality is great and it supports ogg...enough said.
PHP and Ruby have lots of easy to use code libraries. But for secure, scalable, solid performing, provable code...I just can't get over my happiness with erlang. http://www.erlang.org./
I worked with Java for over 7 years. We developed very scalable network oriented apps. We built our own frameworks and used others as well. Much of the code was well engineered, but at a high cost of dev time and testing. The problem of massive concurrency was a continual worry. We could be very diligent in making things thread safe, but little things would pop up every now and again. Things that were very difficult to debug. New server, more CPUs...get ready for new found concurrency bugs.
As I started over last year to build a new system, I wanted completely away from concurrency problems. I also wanted frameworks that were more lightweight that J2EE ('nuff said). In addition, I wanted something new that made me enjoy programming again.
I ended up choosing erlang...yes, it has everything for developing web apps...and then some. It is very scalable and the code is provable to be correct for concurrency issues. Security is top notch and performce is very good. In addition, HTTP server, a good object/relation db, Jabber server, HTML script engine...everything is all written in erlang. No need for mixing code to get a complete solution!!!.
Venture out a little...try something new...you might be very surprised.
Looks like AOL wants to promote jabber.
There are plenty of good jabber clients available and the servers are in good shape as well...time to move on past AIM, ICQ, MSN, the whole lot.
I have been using tinysofa enterprise, tinysofa.org, for a while and find their position on preconfigured LDAP and Kerberos to be very good. If tinysofa is not 100% what you need it to be in regards to OpenLDAP out of the box, please participate to help get it there as I beleive the community is serious about this requirement.
good luck
I have lived in Shanghai for 4 years (U.S. born, white male). Life in Shanghai is very easy. Its simply a very large city...other than that, there is nothing that a normal U.S. citizen would find "oppressive".
If you are a person who is compelled to stand on street corners in the U.S. and stir up a riot over government policies, then neither the U.S. nor China are for you at the moment. But if you are a normal person who isn't interested in stirring a revolution, China is simply not an oppressive place. You can have small group and one-on-one conversations about anything you want (even politically sensitive issues).
You can access almost any content you may desire over the net (some porn sites have been blocked...some chinese political content (in Madarin, so you couldn't read it anyway) has been blocked)...but google works as you would expect and most any business which requires internet access can be conducted fairly easily.
Sure, doing things like extending your visa requires going to a gov building and waiting in line, but how often do you do this? Its not much different than going to a U.S. gov office. Other services are mostly private/free-enterprise and are very easily accessed; your largest barrier is language. As with almost any travel around the world, an open mind and a friendly smile will do lots to improve your experience.
In terms of the Internet...it is very slow to access non-China servers. This is caused by two major issues: 1 - the "Great Firewall" and 2 - enormous amounts of local traffic (lots of it due to infected PCs). Best guess is that its item 2 that is the biggest problem with traffic, since the content filter isn't real-time (or so it would appear). MS's recent announcement to not continue to security patch unlicensed copies of Windows will no doubt add to this problem.
As to other places besides Shanghai, well this is the top city China for westerners to do business so its the easiest...for anywhere else you can scale down your expectations on services from here; but freedom of expression, movement, etc...are all pretty smooth so long as your not here to stir up trouble.
Good luck to you...
Slashdot Mirror
this has already been relied to...
The sentence structure was poor, but the meaning should be obvious since you know the chronology.
I see your point. The sentence structure could have been much better: ..8 years of Java programming which was followed by 8 years of Smalltalk.
;-) But in today's troubled world I can understand.
The intended way to read it is that the Java years followed the Smalltalk years. I started programming Smalltalk in '87.
You do certainly have a suspicous mind
enjoy,
root-a-begger (yes, I know begger is spelled wrong...this is intentional)
I agree with your concept of categorizing based on type/style of programming. I don't especially agree with your categories, but that's just my opinion.
About 2 years ago, I went through the same thought process as asked in the original post. I was not encumbered by a large IT department that would dismiss my opinions if I came up with non-mainstream ideas. This led me to a very broad and lengthy search. Here is the result of my quest for an answer:
1 - Application language - Erlang
2 - Brute furce / close to the metal - C
3 - System scripts - Bash
I chose erlang after 8 years of Java programming which was followed by 8 years of Smalltalk. The main reasons for departing the mainstream OO world were concurrency, distribution and conceptual integrity. I found that in large systems what kept me worried most is being able to "prove" that my code worked as the system scaled and became distributed over local and worldwide "clusters". I wanted to be certain that no race conditions or locks occurred (just being able to monitor and restart VMs was not the answer for me). You can get concurrency assurance with Java or any "shared memory" / object pointer based langugage but you need very well written and tested frameworks to fully encapsulate anything that may be touched by more than one thread/process. Solutions like JBoss or other widely encompassing application servers also were not the answer for me as I had to trust that everything the app server did was correct and wading into these projects to find out if things are correct or to fix anomolies is a big challange.
I simply grew tired of writting the frameworks required to encpsulate concurrency and limiting my application code to the nature of the frameworks. Sure, there are many existing frameworks in the Java world that encapsulate the hard work and concurrency for you. But thats exactly the problem: there are many of them. This gets me to the last point of my rational: conceptual integrity. Each Java framework unleashes its own concepts and patterns. I wanted one small set of patterns that are used everywhere. I found this in erlang. It turns out that by making concurrency a first class priority in the language design, the need to invent frameworks and other patterns to encapulate the hard work mostly dissapears leaving behind a clean slate to write your app.
The second category, C, speaks for itself. Occasionally, I need to touch the OS or even bare metal and want a very straightforward way to do this. My C code ends up being very limited, well tested and compartmentalized.
The third category was a tough call. I was tempted to pick Python/Ruby/Lua/Tcl for system scripts. But the bottom line is I didn't really need them and for anything complex, I could write system tools in erlang that were called by Bash. This keeps my usage of Bash simple and maintainable without introducing yet another language.
I realize that my first choice, erlang, brings up the obvious issues of how do you replace programmers easily when you can't find resumes with erlang expertise. I have found that no matter what lagugage you choose, you have to re-train programmers to do things your way and there is a learning curve to introducing anyone new to your IT group. My choice in erlang has not increased the learning curve for good programms I bring on board.
I realize this seems like a giant plug for erlang. It is and it isn't. My rational stands on its one regardless of your choice.
good luck to you...
Precisely how is this a troll? The vast majority of resposes strongly state that C++ is not the best choice for the entire app. I also state that the existnig C++ libraries should be used but with a more appropriate language to control the entire system. Using erlang in this respect is no different from the first post that suggests using managed code.
I suggested erlang because I am a recent convert and am realizing extreemly high productivity and can sleep better at night knowing that my system architecture is rock solid.
My post was hardly a troll. It is honest advice about a choice of language that is fully interoperable with C++.
Please save your mod points for vi vs. emacs posts.
Doing it all in C++ is certainly asking for trouble. I do recognize your assertion that it all must be C++, but this assertion needs to be seriously rethought. Its by far not the best choice of langugage for your stated requirements.
The bottom line is, if you need performance and already have most of this in C/C++ libraries, then use them.
For the overall system, UI, inter-proc communications, concurrency, etc... don't use C++.
My plug is for you to use erlang (yes I'm serious www.erlang.org) for the entire system and make your C/C++ library calls through that. You will get great performance and not have to worry about system stability, portability and concurrency. Respost your question to the erlang questions maillist and you will get very well thought out responses.
If you choose to do absolutely everything in C++, your just wasting time, money and the slashdot community's time as well since this type of question has well been answered in the past.
Feel free to get in touch if you need more charitable info on why erlang is the best choice for the encompassing system archtecture.
good luck
Rolling your own is an interesting option. Using a less popular distro would have certainly cost NZ more in initial R&D, so the Suse choice is pragmatic. I could certainly name a few of my best choices: tinysofa.org and freebsd.org. But as always, big government made decisions without consulting me. I think we should all applaud the NZ gov for making such a decision and for choosing Suse/Novel in order to better control the outcome for them as I doubt RedHat would be as open to outside input on the future of the distro. -- you'll get no sig out of me!!!
From my readings about bird flu vaccine availability, it seems cost is not the only limiting issue. Supply is the problem that will kill many if this latest bird flu gets out of hand. I'm sure Taiwan can afford some amount of the drug, but is enough available? From what I've read, Roche can't supply the whole world with enough if this flu gets out of hand. Sometimes its not just about money...and a few eminent domain cases here and there (real or intellectual property) don't seem to destroy capitalism in the U.S. Why should countries preparing themselves for this bird flu be seen as destroying the global patent system?
The architecture pdf looks good and well thought through. If the goal is to create a rock solid enterprise capable messaging system, then a BSD port and tuning of the file and process permissions are in order. This product installs lots of stuff!! lots of security screeing to do. Great work...I have been waiting for somthing of this calliber for quite a while.
I've read many articals about Summer of Code. Yet, I've seen no web page listing all the accepted projects (not proposed). Now that its over, shouldn't there be a link list of finished work so we can go and see what these kids did?
All that attention to detail and they still couldn't include the patent free ogg vorbis format. Apple truly sucks big corporate balls for eschewing this most important of standards. All you apple fanboys are salivating your way to a locked down DRM hell by continuing to buy these products. I just bought a new iRiver T10. Its not as cool as the nano, but the sound quality is great and it supports ogg...enough said.
this is a must for removing that nasty WinXP virus.
PHP and Ruby have lots of easy to use code libraries. But for secure, scalable, solid performing, provable code...I just can't get over my happiness with erlang. http://www.erlang.org./ I worked with Java for over 7 years. We developed very scalable network oriented apps. We built our own frameworks and used others as well. Much of the code was well engineered, but at a high cost of dev time and testing. The problem of massive concurrency was a continual worry. We could be very diligent in making things thread safe, but little things would pop up every now and again. Things that were very difficult to debug. New server, more CPUs...get ready for new found concurrency bugs. As I started over last year to build a new system, I wanted completely away from concurrency problems. I also wanted frameworks that were more lightweight that J2EE ('nuff said). In addition, I wanted something new that made me enjoy programming again. I ended up choosing erlang...yes, it has everything for developing web apps...and then some. It is very scalable and the code is provable to be correct for concurrency issues. Security is top notch and performce is very good. In addition, HTTP server, a good object/relation db, Jabber server, HTML script engine...everything is all written in erlang. No need for mixing code to get a complete solution!!!. Venture out a little...try something new...you might be very surprised.
Looks like AOL wants to promote jabber. There are plenty of good jabber clients available and the servers are in good shape as well...time to move on past AIM, ICQ, MSN, the whole lot.
I have been using tinysofa enterprise, tinysofa.org, for a while and find their position on preconfigured LDAP and Kerberos to be very good. If tinysofa is not 100% what you need it to be in regards to OpenLDAP out of the box, please participate to help get it there as I beleive the community is serious about this requirement. good luck
I have lived in Shanghai for 4 years (U.S. born, white male). Life in Shanghai is very easy. Its simply a very large city...other than that, there is nothing that a normal U.S. citizen would find "oppressive". If you are a person who is compelled to stand on street corners in the U.S. and stir up a riot over government policies, then neither the U.S. nor China are for you at the moment. But if you are a normal person who isn't interested in stirring a revolution, China is simply not an oppressive place. You can have small group and one-on-one conversations about anything you want (even politically sensitive issues). You can access almost any content you may desire over the net (some porn sites have been blocked...some chinese political content (in Madarin, so you couldn't read it anyway) has been blocked)...but google works as you would expect and most any business which requires internet access can be conducted fairly easily. Sure, doing things like extending your visa requires going to a gov building and waiting in line, but how often do you do this? Its not much different than going to a U.S. gov office. Other services are mostly private/free-enterprise and are very easily accessed; your largest barrier is language. As with almost any travel around the world, an open mind and a friendly smile will do lots to improve your experience. In terms of the Internet...it is very slow to access non-China servers. This is caused by two major issues: 1 - the "Great Firewall" and 2 - enormous amounts of local traffic (lots of it due to infected PCs). Best guess is that its item 2 that is the biggest problem with traffic, since the content filter isn't real-time (or so it would appear). MS's recent announcement to not continue to security patch unlicensed copies of Windows will no doubt add to this problem. As to other places besides Shanghai, well this is the top city China for westerners to do business so its the easiest...for anywhere else you can scale down your expectations on services from here; but freedom of expression, movement, etc...are all pretty smooth so long as your not here to stir up trouble. Good luck to you...