Indeed. At this time all we can reliably say is that things are much more complicated than expected. Limiting research directions by a claim that it must be one thing (and doing so without any evidence at all) is just a stupid fundamentalist belief, not science.
There actually is no evidence at all for the other possibility (that you seem to be desperately in love with) either. The hard, scientific state-of-the-art is "nobody knows". Stop pretending it is otherwise. There is quite a bit of _indicators_ that neural nets without something extra (quantum effects, for example) cannot create intelligence on human level, and most decidedly cannot create consciousness.
Ahem, what? Is there even any type of argument in there? Or do you believe having more people able to code (and the additional ones being of significant lower competency) is somehow desirable?
And that is complete nonsense. Road-signs warn you of things you cannot anticipate. In coding, you have (or should have) the complete picture. So no analogy, just a sign of non-understanding.
I found that C++ is not worth it for me. Far too complicated and most of its features are not needed. I use Python as glue and C for the heavy lifting these days. That works pretty well. Of course, this is not an approach a beginner can take, as you rightfully point out. And, of course, somebody experienced and competent can indeed write good code with almost anything.
It is funny how code written in your "inherently more secure" languages gets exploited at the same or higher rates these days. What actually happens when languages get "safer" is that coder competence drops and bugs just move to a higher level, without being any less destructive. If you cannot see that happening over the last few decades, then you seem to be blind to what is going on.
That is pretty much how the argument goes. And if you look at the abysmal state of competence of most modern "web coders", you can see a very nice example of this idea in practice.
Well, in that sense "gcc -Wall" is strongly typed. In actual reality, it is not. Strong typing means the language stands actually in your way when you want to type anything dynamically, not that it only warns you that you may be doing something wrong.
Personally, I think strong typing is vastly overrated and those that need it should not be coding professionally. Warnings by the compiler about suspicious things are a whole different matter, as long as they can be turned off selectively. These are useful for double-checking things.
I did not claim things were moving "forward". It is more like "moving in spirals" (with circles you would at least get back to a sane state one in a while). I pretty much agree with you.
The problem is that each new "OS" needs a different UI, each new phone needs one, etc. for marketing purposes to give the appearance of "new" and trigger an unwarranted association of "better". Until that quiets down, it does not make much sense teaching this in school, as people will associate UI elements with actual functionality and UI changes will make that "knowledge" useless.
No, I assume it is code written by competent people. Sure, if the developers that wrote the code needed those training wheels, then removing them will have them fall over all the time. But leaving the wheels on is the wrong place to fix things.
If you have these problems, then something else is rather badly broken, like, say, the architecture of your code and the documentation that came with it. Sure, this sad state of affairs is the norm, but it is not a good state at all as it stems from developer incompetence.
Also you are quite wrong about "those that have coded a long time". You would be probably right if you had said "have coded for a long time and still cannot do it well".
For technological reasons, this gives the best value. There are also undersea fiber-optic cables with just 4 strands, and two of them are reserve ones. So the 8 pairs seen here are actually pretty high. And yes, it is mostly the amplifiers needed, they cannot get too large or you cannot just put them in the cable. These amplifiers are pretty tricky with laser-pumped Erbium embedded into the fiber.
Urgh, Typescript. Well, MS has creates some truly bad languages and they are still hard at it. Of course, the only aim MS ever had with its own languages was to chain people to its equally horrible platforms. This study seems to be just another element of this strategy.
I fully agree. Bugs are just getting more destructive and harder to find the less permissive a language is. Also, if you cannot make type-errors, then any random person can write type-error free code. Type-errors simply cease to become a quality-metric in that case. That does not mean that the code is better in any way though.
Spoken like a true cretin. While JavaScript is admittedly a really bad programming language, Python is a very good one. But both are real in any sense that matters and a competent coder can do real work of any size in both of them. The actual problem is that many people writing code these days are not "real" coders, but incompetent wannabees that like to blame the tools used for their personal limitations.
Strong typing is nice when people learn coding for the first time. Then they need to learn to do it without. The metric "less bugs in some code" is meaningless, just as the metric "fell over less" is with driving a bike. When you cannot do without training wheels than there is either something seriously wrong with you or you stopped learning way to early. The same applies to strong typing.
In essence, people that need strong typing do not have what it takes to get everything else right. They should stay away from professional coding altogether.
Well, first invalid "ad Hominem" argument, because you have no idea how long I have been doing this or how much I make. Also, salary is not necessarily related with skill. The problem with employed coders is that they are in a filter-bubble. If an employer only hires/bad cheap coders, he will never see what actually good ones can do. In such environments, still pretty terrible people can rise to the top and be regarded as really competent. I have seen it happen more than once.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. At this time all we can reliably say is that things are much more complicated than expected. Limiting research directions by a claim that it must be one thing (and doing so without any evidence at all) is just a stupid fundamentalist belief, not science.
There actually is no evidence at all for the other possibility (that you seem to be desperately in love with) either. The hard, scientific state-of-the-art is "nobody knows". Stop pretending it is otherwise. There is quite a bit of _indicators_ that neural nets without something extra (quantum effects, for example) cannot create intelligence on human level, and most decidedly cannot create consciousness.
Ahem, what? Is there even any type of argument in there? Or do you believe having more people able to code (and the additional ones being of significant lower competency) is somehow desirable?
And that is complete nonsense. Road-signs warn you of things you cannot anticipate. In coding, you have (or should have) the complete picture. So no analogy, just a sign of non-understanding.
I do that whenever it matters. In many places it does not, but sometimes it is really worthwhile.
I found that C++ is not worth it for me. Far too complicated and most of its features are not needed. I use Python as glue and C for the heavy lifting these days. That works pretty well. Of course, this is not an approach a beginner can take, as you rightfully point out. And, of course, somebody experienced and competent can indeed write good code with almost anything.
Hehehehehehehehehe ;-)====)
It is funny how code written in your "inherently more secure" languages gets exploited at the same or higher rates these days. What actually happens when languages get "safer" is that coder competence drops and bugs just move to a higher level, without being any less destructive. If you cannot see that happening over the last few decades, then you seem to be blind to what is going on.
That is pretty much how the argument goes. And if you look at the abysmal state of competence of most modern "web coders", you can see a very nice example of this idea in practice.
Well, in that sense "gcc -Wall" is strongly typed. In actual reality, it is not. Strong typing means the language stands actually in your way when you want to type anything dynamically, not that it only warns you that you may be doing something wrong.
Personally, I think strong typing is vastly overrated and those that need it should not be coding professionally. Warnings by the compiler about suspicious things are a whole different matter, as long as they can be turned off selectively. These are useful for double-checking things.
I did not claim things were moving "forward". It is more like "moving in spirals" (with circles you would at least get back to a sane state one in a while). I pretty much agree with you.
The problem is that each new "OS" needs a different UI, each new phone needs one, etc. for marketing purposes to give the appearance of "new" and trigger an unwarranted association of "better". Until that quiets down, it does not make much sense teaching this in school, as people will associate UI elements with actual functionality and UI changes will make that "knowledge" useless.
I see. So they put it back in. The patent has probably expired by now. Using it is not a good idea though.
Pay for my time to do a literature search and you will get sources...
You mean you cannot code in user-space? That seems to be a pretty peculiar disability....
No, I assume it is code written by competent people. Sure, if the developers that wrote the code needed those training wheels, then removing them will have them fall over all the time. But leaving the wheels on is the wrong place to fix things.
If you have these problems, then something else is rather badly broken, like, say, the architecture of your code and the documentation that came with it. Sure, this sad state of affairs is the norm, but it is not a good state at all as it stems from developer incompetence.
Also you are quite wrong about "those that have coded a long time". You would be probably right if you had said "have coded for a long time and still cannot do it well".
I see the "incompetent coder" faction on Slashdot had mod-points today. Mod me down all you like, does not make what I said any less true.
And fail. Assembler is a language (or rather a family of languages). You probably meant machine code.
For technological reasons, this gives the best value. There are also undersea fiber-optic cables with just 4 strands, and two of them are reserve ones. So the 8 pairs seen here are actually pretty high. And yes, it is mostly the amplifiers needed, they cannot get too large or you cannot just put them in the cable. These amplifiers are pretty tricky with laser-pumped Erbium embedded into the fiber.
So encryption will be banned on it?
Urgh, Typescript. Well, MS has creates some truly bad languages and they are still hard at it. Of course, the only aim MS ever had with its own languages was to chain people to its equally horrible platforms. This study seems to be just another element of this strategy.
I fully agree. Bugs are just getting more destructive and harder to find the less permissive a language is. Also, if you cannot make type-errors, then any random person can write type-error free code. Type-errors simply cease to become a quality-metric in that case. That does not mean that the code is better in any way though.
Spoken like a true cretin. While JavaScript is admittedly a really bad programming language, Python is a very good one. But both are real in any sense that matters and a competent coder can do real work of any size in both of them. The actual problem is that many people writing code these days are not "real" coders, but incompetent wannabees that like to blame the tools used for their personal limitations.
Strong typing is nice when people learn coding for the first time. Then they need to learn to do it without. The metric "less bugs in some code" is meaningless, just as the metric "fell over less" is with driving a bike. When you cannot do without training wheels than there is either something seriously wrong with you or you stopped learning way to early. The same applies to strong typing.
In essence, people that need strong typing do not have what it takes to get everything else right. They should stay away from professional coding altogether.
Well, first invalid "ad Hominem" argument, because you have no idea how long I have been doing this or how much I make. Also, salary is not necessarily related with skill. The problem with employed coders is that they are in a filter-bubble. If an employer only hires/bad cheap coders, he will never see what actually good ones can do. In such environments, still pretty terrible people can rise to the top and be regarded as really competent. I have seen it happen more than once.