Possible. I wrote a resume generator in it, which stored my resume as a giant list with regularly occurring structures. I wrote some code to break this structure down and output chunks of text encoded within. It was very easy to change the output type to any markup language I cared to write an emitter for. I also wrote a database analyzer which read a database and looked columns with the same name in different tables. It would recursively find all the relationships between one table and another one, with a top bound on recursion so it didn't get out of hand. I didn't really use the language to its fullest, but I am pretty comfortable with how it stores its data, how to build useful lists and how to break lists down to process them.
I go through these phases where I look at LISP and think to myself that it's a wonderfully elegant language and I should try to write something in it. Then I realize I'd have to write all my libraries for sockets and low level machine access myself, which doesn't sound like much fun.
It's a flavor of kool aid they want you to drink. It's composed od several other very bad flavors, most distinct of which are active record and magic. Active record is also very magic-flavored, which one might find confusing until they figure out what this is all about. If you read about it, it sounds delicious. Once you actually find out how it's made, you might change your mind. And you have to find out how it's made if you actually want to do anything useful with it.
It tried to be, but it largely failed. People who don't program are't that great at breaking instructions down to that level. Not that they didn't try. There are still billions of lines of craptastic COBOL code out there. The difference in COBOL is that after it's written, trying to read it makes your eyes bleed whether it was written by a fantastic structural programmer or some manager somewhere.
Learning Lisp is really what changed my thinking in this regard. Lisp is another one of those languages where you can store arbitrary objects (more parentheses) in lists. Objects in Lisp don't have a type, they're just lists. If you want to store different types of data in the lists you're storing, you have to write some code to look at the list and figure out what type of data each component of the list is. You can further break those components down, if you're so inclined.
Doing all this really is a huge pain in the ass, kind of like maintaining your own objects in C using structs and pointers to functions. You can do it, but it takes a fair bit of discipline. And most of the programmers I know don't have that kind of discipline.
Optional typing is not highly desirable. Everyone got all starry-eyed when they talked about how object oriented programming would allow you to have a container of objects and you could just put any arbitrary object into the container. Which is a great idea as long as you don't really think about it. Eventually you have to know what kind of object you're holding and you actually to use it to do some real work. The same thing goes for functional programming. Eventually you need to know what kind of data you're operating on, and you actually have to operate on it to do some real work. When the time comes to do some real work, you quickly realize just how much of a mess optional typing makes of your program.
I've looked at a lot of code over the years that pushes the actual work to be done around like a two-year-old pushes peas around a plate. I've gotten to the point where I can read the mind of the programmer through the code he's written. He's thinking "If I push this over here maybe it will magically go away and I won't have to deal with it." Most of the time this is because he doesn't actually understand the business logic behind the code he's writing. He's writing to a series of requirements but he has no understanding of why the requirements exist or how they drive the business. So he tries to keep his code abstract as possible and hopes that no one notices.
Sadly no one has yet written a language that forces you to actually understand the problem domain that you're coding. I'm sure it wouldn't be very popular if anyone ever did. Neither has anyone actually managed to write a language that allows you to write useful code without understanding the problem domain, and no one ever will. Now if someone could write a language that a non-programmer who understands why he needs code written to describe what needs to be done directly to the computer, that might fundamentally change my job description. Given that most of those people obviously can't even express this to another human being (Judging from their requirements docs,) I'm not losing any sleep over it.
What the people who flit from language to language or framework to framework like bees are looking for is a tool that allows them to write code without understanding a problem. Someone who actually understands the problem will always outperform them in any given language. In other words, just because your language has an expressive syntax or any specific feature doesn't mean you can hire chimpanzees to code your application.
It's really been a long time since I've taken a job because of the salary or I needed the money. Come to think of it, I can't think of a single job that I didn't go into because I thought it'd be interesting work. More often than not that was true, too. I've gotten to work at some very cool places over the years. Even my first job doing general IT and some programming support at a company that did dog track management software sent me all over the country and exposed me to a lot of challenges. Doing security auditing on AT&T's C library while working at Data General taught me a lot about C. Various contracting gigs at IBM and Sun always afforded opportunities to learn, and each time gave me more experience to leverage toward the next position. A while back I took a test position at Ericsson just to get my hands on that hardware, and learned an awful lot about how our telephone networks work. Ericsson's switches are masterpieces of engineering, if you ever get a chance to work with one don't pass it up. Lately I'm maintaining satellite tracking software in C++.
No company has ever used the full range of my abilities, but each one has taught me something new. Or rather, I've made a point to take away something new from each job. Of course, you don't need a degree to do that. I never got one.
Just because you're agile, doesn't mean you crap daisies and unicorns. I often see inept upper managers latch onto agile as the latest magic bullet which will solve all their problems with no other changes on their part. Except they keep all the micromanagement bits, discard all the engineer empowerment bits and hand their scrum team a year's worth of priority 1 stories to implement in the next sprint. Good managers will likely be successful no mater what methodology they use, bad ones will likely fail no matter what methodology they use and the ones in between will have mixed results no matter what methodology they use.
If I were designing them, they'd thrive on the poison in the traps. Of course, if I were designing them, the cockroaches would be the focus of the experiment. I'd throw increasingly difficult challenges at them, culminating in some moderately clever primates. Once the cockroach Alpha arises, it would be saved for future study, and the rest of the experiment would be reset. That's the problem with an intelligent designer, isn't it? One tends to believe that they're the focus of the experiment. One tends to think that they will somehow qualify for special treatment. When, in fact, all that awaits you is euthanasia and a brain dissection. And that's if you're one of the lucky ones.
It's just because the professors are vague about it. There's really nothing so difficult about "This particle collides with that one, causing the two to spin in opposite directions." If you measure one, you know the other one is spinning in the other direction. But I guess you can't write a $50 million research grant around THAT. I still suspect that some of the other mysticism around it is caused by artifacts of the measurement or modeling process, but I suppose that's where it might be handy to be a second year student...
Take RogueWave. Before the VCs took over, the coffee there was so good you really didn't mind the urine so much. After the VCs took over, the coffee there was so bad, the urine improved the flavor.
Your taxes go to pay for things we ALL need. Like roads, and firemen and teachers. When someone cheats on their taxes, they're cheating ALL of us!
Ahh ha ha! Why do you guys make me read this shit? They know we're just going to tax the crap out of them to pay for hooker and cocaine parties for Washington lobbyists! Why LIE to them? !#%!WA
Yup. The lawyers will get $30 million, and the users will get a $10 gift certificate to Hot Topic. Which they also don't have in Canada! Damn you, Bell Mobility!
It can probably check your birthday on your facebook page. That information is probably also encoded on the magstripe or 3D bar-code on your driver's license.
AWW! I accidentally COPIED it! God damn it! Hang on...
AWW! Now there are FOUR copies! And one of them's on xtube! Oh well, at least all the waving penises in the ads will distract you from the content of the video. What kind of idiot tries to DELETE things from the INTERNET anyway? Every time you try, THIS is what happens!
Those shiny geegaws might do well on the consumer side but there's always going to be some bank or some company that's going to need a batch processor running mainframe assembly running somewhere. There's plenty of room to work in things you don't think suck. I'm seeing more opportunities to do development work on Linux platforms lately, not fewer.
You have to solve your problems, though. If you think all GUI libraries currently suck, you could just write your own. You don't have to be satisfied with existing software, if you can just make your own.
I've been burned so many times by AMD's hardware in the past that I won't even consider buying anything of theirs anymore, no matter how awesome it is. They could make a hand job robot with perfect Linux drivers, don't care, wouldn't buy it.
AMD could get back on my list by NOT SUCKING for, oh, about a decade, but I don't see it happening. Say what you will about Nvidia, I've never had to spend two days fixing a system after upgrading THEIR drivers.
For once Microsoft actually gave users something they'd actually want. I'm actually starting to avoid youtube because of how obnoxious it's becoming. If youtube were my killer app, Microsoft's implementation would completely eliminate all the suck that's been introduced to youtube over the past year, and then-some! That'd be enough for me to buy their device. I'll give them props when they deserve it (They occasionally do.)
Since Google's inevitably going to shoot them down, I'm going to have to start looking for someplace else to upload my videos from now on. Maybe xtube. They're not pornographic, but at least there all you have to deal with is a browser full of waving penises while you watch your video. It's like a forest of penises, gently waving in the breeze...
Could you use it to drive clicks for ads on a web page? Is there any URL it'd be interesting for Microsoft to be clicking on a lot? livegoatporn.com maybe?
Yeah, but you're selecting for bystanders who can dodge bullets! That's what he's on about! Give everyone a gun! (300M guns in the USA we're pretty much already there!) If you survive you must be pretty reasonably good at dodging bullets! By the fourth or fifth generation we'll have kids who can dodge bullets like Neo! Then to win any war we just drop one guy with 2 handguns and a black duster onto the battlefield and he just stalks through the place picking off bad guys and calmly dodging anything they shoot at him!
Slashdot Mirror
Just get raided by some law enforcement agency. Your membership will triple overnight!
I go through these phases where I look at LISP and think to myself that it's a wonderfully elegant language and I should try to write something in it. Then I realize I'd have to write all my libraries for sockets and low level machine access myself, which doesn't sound like much fun.
It's a flavor of kool aid they want you to drink. It's composed od several other very bad flavors, most distinct of which are active record and magic. Active record is also very magic-flavored, which one might find confusing until they figure out what this is all about. If you read about it, it sounds delicious. Once you actually find out how it's made, you might change your mind. And you have to find out how it's made if you actually want to do anything useful with it.
It tried to be, but it largely failed. People who don't program are't that great at breaking instructions down to that level. Not that they didn't try. There are still billions of lines of craptastic COBOL code out there. The difference in COBOL is that after it's written, trying to read it makes your eyes bleed whether it was written by a fantastic structural programmer or some manager somewhere.
Doing all this really is a huge pain in the ass, kind of like maintaining your own objects in C using structs and pointers to functions. You can do it, but it takes a fair bit of discipline. And most of the programmers I know don't have that kind of discipline.
Something Texas has done that I think is actually a pretty sensible idea? What... what have I become? YOU DID THIS TO ME!
I've looked at a lot of code over the years that pushes the actual work to be done around like a two-year-old pushes peas around a plate. I've gotten to the point where I can read the mind of the programmer through the code he's written. He's thinking "If I push this over here maybe it will magically go away and I won't have to deal with it." Most of the time this is because he doesn't actually understand the business logic behind the code he's writing. He's writing to a series of requirements but he has no understanding of why the requirements exist or how they drive the business. So he tries to keep his code abstract as possible and hopes that no one notices.
Sadly no one has yet written a language that forces you to actually understand the problem domain that you're coding. I'm sure it wouldn't be very popular if anyone ever did. Neither has anyone actually managed to write a language that allows you to write useful code without understanding the problem domain, and no one ever will. Now if someone could write a language that a non-programmer who understands why he needs code written to describe what needs to be done directly to the computer, that might fundamentally change my job description. Given that most of those people obviously can't even express this to another human being (Judging from their requirements docs,) I'm not losing any sleep over it.
What the people who flit from language to language or framework to framework like bees are looking for is a tool that allows them to write code without understanding a problem. Someone who actually understands the problem will always outperform them in any given language. In other words, just because your language has an expressive syntax or any specific feature doesn't mean you can hire chimpanzees to code your application.
No company has ever used the full range of my abilities, but each one has taught me something new. Or rather, I've made a point to take away something new from each job. Of course, you don't need a degree to do that. I never got one.
Just because you're agile, doesn't mean you crap daisies and unicorns. I often see inept upper managers latch onto agile as the latest magic bullet which will solve all their problems with no other changes on their part. Except they keep all the micromanagement bits, discard all the engineer empowerment bits and hand their scrum team a year's worth of priority 1 stories to implement in the next sprint. Good managers will likely be successful no mater what methodology they use, bad ones will likely fail no matter what methodology they use and the ones in between will have mixed results no matter what methodology they use.
If I were designing them, they'd thrive on the poison in the traps. Of course, if I were designing them, the cockroaches would be the focus of the experiment. I'd throw increasingly difficult challenges at them, culminating in some moderately clever primates. Once the cockroach Alpha arises, it would be saved for future study, and the rest of the experiment would be reset. That's the problem with an intelligent designer, isn't it? One tends to believe that they're the focus of the experiment. One tends to think that they will somehow qualify for special treatment. When, in fact, all that awaits you is euthanasia and a brain dissection. And that's if you're one of the lucky ones.
It's just because the professors are vague about it. There's really nothing so difficult about "This particle collides with that one, causing the two to spin in opposite directions." If you measure one, you know the other one is spinning in the other direction. But I guess you can't write a $50 million research grant around THAT. I still suspect that some of the other mysticism around it is caused by artifacts of the measurement or modeling process, but I suppose that's where it might be handy to be a second year student...
Their computer works not by quantum entanglement but by magic.
Take RogueWave. Before the VCs took over, the coffee there was so good you really didn't mind the urine so much. After the VCs took over, the coffee there was so bad, the urine improved the flavor.
Maybe we should go have a talk to the FDA about "Radioactive materials Americans eat each year."
Ahh ha ha! Why do you guys make me read this shit? They know we're just going to tax the crap out of them to pay for hooker and cocaine parties for Washington lobbyists! Why LIE to them? !#%!WA
Yup. The lawyers will get $30 million, and the users will get a $10 gift certificate to Hot Topic. Which they also don't have in Canada! Damn you, Bell Mobility!
Too bad the scientific method is no match for the stick-your-fingers-in-your-ears-and-yell-la-la-la-la-la method.
It can probably check your birthday on your facebook page. That information is probably also encoded on the magstripe or 3D bar-code on your driver's license.
AWW! I accidentally COPIED it! God damn it! Hang on...
AWW! Now there are FOUR copies! And one of them's on xtube! Oh well, at least all the waving penises in the ads will distract you from the content of the video. What kind of idiot tries to DELETE things from the INTERNET anyway? Every time you try, THIS is what happens!
You have to solve your problems, though. If you think all GUI libraries currently suck, you could just write your own. You don't have to be satisfied with existing software, if you can just make your own.
AMD could get back on my list by NOT SUCKING for, oh, about a decade, but I don't see it happening. Say what you will about Nvidia, I've never had to spend two days fixing a system after upgrading THEIR drivers.
Since Google's inevitably going to shoot them down, I'm going to have to start looking for someplace else to upload my videos from now on. Maybe xtube. They're not pornographic, but at least there all you have to deal with is a browser full of waving penises while you watch your video. It's like a forest of penises, gently waving in the breeze...
Could you use it to drive clicks for ads on a web page? Is there any URL it'd be interesting for Microsoft to be clicking on a lot? livegoatporn.com maybe?
Yeah, but you're selecting for bystanders who can dodge bullets! That's what he's on about! Give everyone a gun! (300M guns in the USA we're pretty much already there!) If you survive you must be pretty reasonably good at dodging bullets! By the fourth or fifth generation we'll have kids who can dodge bullets like Neo! Then to win any war we just drop one guy with 2 handguns and a black duster onto the battlefield and he just stalks through the place picking off bad guys and calmly dodging anything they shoot at him!
Seems like defamation and extortion to me, but I'm not a lawyer. If they keep this up, they won't be either.