I wouldn't really know about whether PHP makes it hard to code well, and I see a lot of sites/packages written in PHP that are very nice, like MediaWiki, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. I never got into the object oriented portion of PHP, but I can imagine it must have been a pain to have to write one. Although I've personally never had any problems with PHP, I am hearing more and more about its limitations and defects so I'm looking into other languages for web development. Thanks to you, now I can speak Ruby and I'm also looking into Python, which is fun. The AC comment was from me, not sure why it's AC though.
Well, when people start college these days it's likely that they've already had previous programming experience, whether from an AP class in high school in the US or just from self-teaching. But I think that's still important for a first course, don't need to be so pedantic about whether it's actually their first experience with programming. As long as it's their first college experience it should have a good impact.
Oh, wtf. I don't know anything about what the profs think but I just feel like Harvey is very attached to this book. I watched some webcasts and it seems like he always mentions how SICP is the best book for CS in the first lecture.
Yeah, I am talking about CS61A, some people couldn't get past not having loops I guess, and things looking funny compared to C-likes. Plus I guess not everyone has a good handle on recursion by the time they get to college.
Cool, thanks, I probably will sometime. Yeah, I can see what you mean by unlearning stuff, although I don't think I picked anything bad up from VB, just that it was horrible limited pre.Net and.Net isn't really the same as VB6 so I might as well move on to a more capable language anyway.
Ah, this brings back memories of about two weeks ago, when we had to write a logo interpreter for our CS project, just because we used the same characters for a prompt. Good times. This also seems somewhat reminicent of python, or at least the smidgen of Python that I know. I will definitely look into this more, as well as Python, because right now I feel a bit limited by Java when I just want to automate a short task. And Ruby and Python seem like they would be more fun to do web development in than PHP, although I don't really know PHP well, although I guess some would say that it's impossible to code PHP well.
Yeah, I can see how you could develop bad habits with VB but there are probably those kinds of things in every language. I think Basic type languages are good for getting your feet wet because you don't have to think too much and when you're not used to programming it might seem daunting to do C or Lisp or something, but Basic is more friendly. It's probably best to do the actual CS teaching in another language though, because at least for me with VB, after learning a real OO language trying to continue a project I had started in VB was just too painful.
I agree, although it makes it harder for me to move to other languages because I keep looking for stuff like the JDK documentation and being disappointed. I'm kind of able to write C but I don't know much more than the theory of memory management and I'm working on learning more because C runs on (almost) everything.
They did? No way! We're still using it at Berkeley and I don't think it's going away anytime soon, the guy who teaches it most of the time is obsessed with Lisp, or something, and he probably has a lot of clout and seniority and whatnot.
I think it depends more on how people are taught rather than the language they start in. I taught myself to program with Visual Basic and then later learned Java, and I had no problem picking up Lisp (Scheme) and excelling in CS so far. I don't think all the people who started out by learning BASIC had rotten brains, either.
I agree, it's a pretty great introductory textbook, especially because most people (like myself) who learned to program before college learned imperative or object oriented programming, and SICP forces you to think functionally and really learn the concepts.
That's similar to what my first college CS course has been like. We used SICP and it was a really interesting semester. We did functional, OO, client/server, and logic programming (or well those were the 4 paradigms that the prof considered the main ones) and it was pretty interesting. Since most people came in with OO experience only, doing functional programming through people for a loop at first. Of course, we did it all in Scheme, which is a cool language, too.
I've had it for a while, since it first was in beta and it's still slow to load applets. Java is the main language I program in right now so I usually update whenever something interesting comes up and I did not see much worth talking about in Update 10. It feels a little faster than previous versions, but that's like comparing a turtle's pace to a snail's. Neither is exactly ideal.
Oh man, p-code. Actually, IIRC, I think p-code executables were smaller than regular exes, which back then might have been a fair tradeoff for speed if you wanted something manageable to download over dialup, although I don't think the difference would have been big enough to warrant it.
Most addons that don't use the bookmarks system will probably work unmodified (aside from bumping the compatible version) on Firefox 3, since that's the main area of API change. You can use something like Nightly Tester Tools or MRTech Toolkist to force compatibility. I've never had working video plugins in Firefox anyway besides Flash video players I guess. But I suppose the speed issue varies from system to system, Firefox 3 has been noticeably faster on my computers than Firefox 2 ever was, and uses significantly less RAM.
I'm not a wireless expert, but I thought a lot of draft n stuff would be firmware upgradable to the final draft when it comes out. Is that just for certain routers? My laptop has draft n but I've never used it, n routers are too expensive and I'm not sure if DD-WRT supports draft n anyway.
I think they were doing something with fsync on the 3.1 trunk but I don't know what happened with that, and I don't use Linux primarily so I don't really know. I find the "Awesome Bar" much more useful than the regular address bar, and google copied it for Chrome so it seems like they think it's a good idea too. I again don't see how 3 isn't a known quantity, it's been out for ages and the speed improvement is really nice. I don't understand why anyone wouldn't want faster javascript knowing that it's there, since stuff like Display2 is javascript heavy and AJAX is the Next Big Thing (TM). Also, bookmarking is ridiculously simple in Firefox 3 and tagging and everything is really nice, and the bookmarks are stored in an SQLLite database so it's a lot faster searching with large numbers of bookmarks. I guess if that's not how you use your browser it might not help much, but I don't think there are any significant regressions in Firefox 3, unless you count the Awesome Bar as a regression, which I think is a stupid way to think personally.
I agree that the self signed certs are stupid, but I've had a much more stable experience with Firefox 3 than 2, and I ran the nightlies for several months. I'm running 3.1 nightlies right now too and almost all of my extensions still work. I don't see how Firefox 3 is getting security updates any more frequently than Firefox 2; most of the time they have simultaneous updates for 2 and 3. And it's not that new anymore either... I would probably blame crashes on bad extensions or plugins.
Not sure what's so bleeding-edge about FF 3, it's a lot more stable and faster than Firefox 2 was. I think your word choice is a bit disingenuous and designed to make FF 3 look bad. And the situation is a bit different since upgrading from XP to Vista costs money, whereas unless you're on Windows 98 upgrading from Firefox 2 to 3 doesn't cost a thing.
I have to agree with that statement, I don't see what Windows has to do with making a job boring. I don't think there are that many game programmers using Linux, or at least they have to run the games in Windows most of the time. That's probably fairly interesting to a lot of people.
S40 then? I haven't seen many Symbian devices since they aren't that common here in the US, but in Bangladesh my relatives had these basic phones that ran S40 and it was actually pretty advanced for regular feature phones.
I'm not a copyright expert by any means, far from it, but isn't the BSD license really permissive? There's BSD code in Windows too, the old networking stack IIRC (pre-Vista I think). And in any case, OS X being based on BSD doesn't make it open. I think the GP was correct, the kernel is open source but that doesn't mean the GUI stuff has to be.
Mario Kart and Brawl are both mainly fun with other people, and I guess whether you enjoy the single player depends on your tastes. I find Mario Kart fun to try to perfect my times and scores, if mainly just to unlock more characters. I'm not really into any fighting games besides Brawl.
If they changed the treasure chest sound in the next Zelda I would hunt you down and kill you with a life-sized replica Master Sword. OK, maybe not, but a lot of the appeal of games like Zelda is nostalgia factor, which I will admit affects me a lot too. Zelda games also have a lot of polish, and I especially enjoyed the music in Twilight Princess and WindWaker. I think the reason the controls were basically mappings of buttons to gestures in TP is because it was originally a Gamecube game and they just ported it to have a decent game for launch.
I agree that usually their biggest and best titles are continuations of their classic franchises, but you have to admit that those games (Zelda, Mario Kart, Metroid (which is not an FPS by the way), Smash) are all really good, and Smash and Mario Kart have an incredible amount of replay value. I play Brawl nearly every day, and a lot of people in college do the same. They might not always make huge innovations in gameplay, but they do make pretty damn fun games.
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I wouldn't really know about whether PHP makes it hard to code well, and I see a lot of sites/packages written in PHP that are very nice, like MediaWiki, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. I never got into the object oriented portion of PHP, but I can imagine it must have been a pain to have to write one. Although I've personally never had any problems with PHP, I am hearing more and more about its limitations and defects so I'm looking into other languages for web development. Thanks to you, now I can speak Ruby and I'm also looking into Python, which is fun. The AC comment was from me, not sure why it's AC though.
Well, when people start college these days it's likely that they've already had previous programming experience, whether from an AP class in high school in the US or just from self-teaching. But I think that's still important for a first course, don't need to be so pedantic about whether it's actually their first experience with programming. As long as it's their first college experience it should have a good impact.
Oh, wtf. I don't know anything about what the profs think but I just feel like Harvey is very attached to this book. I watched some webcasts and it seems like he always mentions how SICP is the best book for CS in the first lecture.
Yeah, I am talking about CS61A, some people couldn't get past not having loops I guess, and things looking funny compared to C-likes. Plus I guess not everyone has a good handle on recursion by the time they get to college.
Cool, thanks, I probably will sometime. Yeah, I can see what you mean by unlearning stuff, although I don't think I picked anything bad up from VB, just that it was horrible limited pre .Net and .Net isn't really the same as VB6 so I might as well move on to a more capable language anyway.
Ah, this brings back memories of about two weeks ago, when we had to write a logo interpreter for our CS project, just because we used the same characters for a prompt. Good times. This also seems somewhat reminicent of python, or at least the smidgen of Python that I know. I will definitely look into this more, as well as Python, because right now I feel a bit limited by Java when I just want to automate a short task. And Ruby and Python seem like they would be more fun to do web development in than PHP, although I don't really know PHP well, although I guess some would say that it's impossible to code PHP well.
Yeah, I can see how you could develop bad habits with VB but there are probably those kinds of things in every language. I think Basic type languages are good for getting your feet wet because you don't have to think too much and when you're not used to programming it might seem daunting to do C or Lisp or something, but Basic is more friendly. It's probably best to do the actual CS teaching in another language though, because at least for me with VB, after learning a real OO language trying to continue a project I had started in VB was just too painful.
I agree, although it makes it harder for me to move to other languages because I keep looking for stuff like the JDK documentation and being disappointed. I'm kind of able to write C but I don't know much more than the theory of memory management and I'm working on learning more because C runs on (almost) everything.
They did? No way! We're still using it at Berkeley and I don't think it's going away anytime soon, the guy who teaches it most of the time is obsessed with Lisp, or something, and he probably has a lot of clout and seniority and whatnot.
I think it depends more on how people are taught rather than the language they start in. I taught myself to program with Visual Basic and then later learned Java, and I had no problem picking up Lisp (Scheme) and excelling in CS so far. I don't think all the people who started out by learning BASIC had rotten brains, either.
I agree, it's a pretty great introductory textbook, especially because most people (like myself) who learned to program before college learned imperative or object oriented programming, and SICP forces you to think functionally and really learn the concepts.
That's similar to what my first college CS course has been like. We used SICP and it was a really interesting semester. We did functional, OO, client/server, and logic programming (or well those were the 4 paradigms that the prof considered the main ones) and it was pretty interesting. Since most people came in with OO experience only, doing functional programming through people for a loop at first. Of course, we did it all in Scheme, which is a cool language, too.
I've had it for a while, since it first was in beta and it's still slow to load applets. Java is the main language I program in right now so I usually update whenever something interesting comes up and I did not see much worth talking about in Update 10. It feels a little faster than previous versions, but that's like comparing a turtle's pace to a snail's. Neither is exactly ideal.
Oh man, p-code. Actually, IIRC, I think p-code executables were smaller than regular exes, which back then might have been a fair tradeoff for speed if you wanted something manageable to download over dialup, although I don't think the difference would have been big enough to warrant it.
Most addons that don't use the bookmarks system will probably work unmodified (aside from bumping the compatible version) on Firefox 3, since that's the main area of API change. You can use something like Nightly Tester Tools or MRTech Toolkist to force compatibility. I've never had working video plugins in Firefox anyway besides Flash video players I guess. But I suppose the speed issue varies from system to system, Firefox 3 has been noticeably faster on my computers than Firefox 2 ever was, and uses significantly less RAM.
I'm not a wireless expert, but I thought a lot of draft n stuff would be firmware upgradable to the final draft when it comes out. Is that just for certain routers? My laptop has draft n but I've never used it, n routers are too expensive and I'm not sure if DD-WRT supports draft n anyway.
I think they were doing something with fsync on the 3.1 trunk but I don't know what happened with that, and I don't use Linux primarily so I don't really know. I find the "Awesome Bar" much more useful than the regular address bar, and google copied it for Chrome so it seems like they think it's a good idea too. I again don't see how 3 isn't a known quantity, it's been out for ages and the speed improvement is really nice. I don't understand why anyone wouldn't want faster javascript knowing that it's there, since stuff like Display2 is javascript heavy and AJAX is the Next Big Thing (TM). Also, bookmarking is ridiculously simple in Firefox 3 and tagging and everything is really nice, and the bookmarks are stored in an SQLLite database so it's a lot faster searching with large numbers of bookmarks. I guess if that's not how you use your browser it might not help much, but I don't think there are any significant regressions in Firefox 3, unless you count the Awesome Bar as a regression, which I think is a stupid way to think personally.
I agree that the self signed certs are stupid, but I've had a much more stable experience with Firefox 3 than 2, and I ran the nightlies for several months. I'm running 3.1 nightlies right now too and almost all of my extensions still work. I don't see how Firefox 3 is getting security updates any more frequently than Firefox 2; most of the time they have simultaneous updates for 2 and 3. And it's not that new anymore either... I would probably blame crashes on bad extensions or plugins.
Not sure what's so bleeding-edge about FF 3, it's a lot more stable and faster than Firefox 2 was. I think your word choice is a bit disingenuous and designed to make FF 3 look bad. And the situation is a bit different since upgrading from XP to Vista costs money, whereas unless you're on Windows 98 upgrading from Firefox 2 to 3 doesn't cost a thing.
I honestly don't think many people actually even know about the phishing protection, and I assume the update would inform users that it was removed.
I have to agree with that statement, I don't see what Windows has to do with making a job boring. I don't think there are that many game programmers using Linux, or at least they have to run the games in Windows most of the time. That's probably fairly interesting to a lot of people.
S40 then? I haven't seen many Symbian devices since they aren't that common here in the US, but in Bangladesh my relatives had these basic phones that ran S40 and it was actually pretty advanced for regular feature phones.
I'm not a copyright expert by any means, far from it, but isn't the BSD license really permissive? There's BSD code in Windows too, the old networking stack IIRC (pre-Vista I think). And in any case, OS X being based on BSD doesn't make it open. I think the GP was correct, the kernel is open source but that doesn't mean the GUI stuff has to be.
Mario Kart and Brawl are both mainly fun with other people, and I guess whether you enjoy the single player depends on your tastes. I find Mario Kart fun to try to perfect my times and scores, if mainly just to unlock more characters. I'm not really into any fighting games besides Brawl.
If they changed the treasure chest sound in the next Zelda I would hunt you down and kill you with a life-sized replica Master Sword. OK, maybe not, but a lot of the appeal of games like Zelda is nostalgia factor, which I will admit affects me a lot too. Zelda games also have a lot of polish, and I especially enjoyed the music in Twilight Princess and WindWaker. I think the reason the controls were basically mappings of buttons to gestures in TP is because it was originally a Gamecube game and they just ported it to have a decent game for launch.
I agree that usually their biggest and best titles are continuations of their classic franchises, but you have to admit that those games (Zelda, Mario Kart, Metroid (which is not an FPS by the way), Smash) are all really good, and Smash and Mario Kart have an incredible amount of replay value. I play Brawl nearly every day, and a lot of people in college do the same. They might not always make huge innovations in gameplay, but they do make pretty damn fun games.