3. Usually some college kid with a semester of CS pops by and writes several pages about how sad it is that everyone is using high level languages and wasting all the processing power of the computer. Also, how they're using Linux instead of Windows (because Linux is written in C) and how it is much faster. All this without realizing that the browser they're writing it in probably has significant portions written in Javascript.
See this one? This is you! You really think no systems language can ever best C?
Take a long-standing conflict like, say, Israel and Palestine. Do we really want it to be possible to pre-program the next generation with vivid memories of all of the perceived injustices and wrongs committed over the last 50/100/1000 years?
Once again, Dune dealt with this problem. The idea is that you leave the genetic memories latent within the person until they reach adulthood, have a well-formed psyche, and are prepared for it, then let them remember their ancestors' lives. This prevents memories of events that happened 1000 years ago from traumatizing a person or becoming to integrated into their identity.
Of course, in the Israel-Palestine case you still run into the problem that the settlers and the Arabs already define themselves by supposed atrocities perpetrated against them anywhere from 50 to 2000 years ago without any genetic memories at all. Letting them remember that the XYZ Massacre was actually faked (yeah, some have been in that area) or that the ABC Conquest wasn't as violent as the stories and histories say might actually be beneficial, now that I think of it.
The trick is to A) be marginally physically fit, B) have social skills and charm, C) help a girl with her laptop out of genuine altruism, and D) actually realize that she's started to like you and ask her out.
Don't worry, I failed at D, so you don't have to revoke my geek card.
The only solution to social engineering of the user is to have a more knowledgeable system administrator. This just ups the ante on the social engineering.
Got any links I could read about? I always can use a happy reminder that Israel can actually feed itself when the Western world decides to cut them off.
Actually the First World has seen many of its countries' population growth rates become negative. Then they run into the problem that their economies and welfare/pension systems simply cannot handle a situation in which the number of dependents becomes larger than the number of workers.
There's nothing wrong with C, and the newer standards offer a lot, but the notion that it's the superlative language for every task has got to go.
I never said it was the superlative language for every task. I said that, in its own domain (embedded systems, operating systems, and some core game code), nothing has ever truly replaced it.
While the game you were tuning clearly had problems with the generational garbage collector (more to do with sloppy object allocation and destructors than the GC implementation itself, probably), I can't see how that is a point-blank indictment of garbage collection.
It's an indictment of the style of programming that garbage collection enables: "create it, use it, forget it". You can say that the object allocation or destructors were sloppy, but from my perspective it seemed as though the game should know what resources it needs to free when going from graphics level 4 to 3 and free them using whatever the game's language had instead of a C++ delete operator. Any small bits that leaked out would be caught by the GC eventually, but the majority of the resources (the part that actually affected program performance) would be immediately freed and performance would immediately improve.
People have given though to replacing C (D, C++), and some of those developments are quite old (Lisp).
Thing is, C++, D, and Lisp work by putting a layer of runtime between themselves and the hardware. They can't replace C because they define and build themselves in such a way as to push them out of C's problem domain.
The problem with your comment is that it deals with hero stories and romances, whereas the GP dealt with Fight Club (wtf genre does "Fight Club" fall into anyway?) and horror games.
I'll give you Delphi-Pascal, Ada, and Forth. The rest require garbage collectors, which are too much infrastructure for use in the performance-critical, bare-metal environments like games* or operating systems in which C/C++ thrives. Requiring garbage collection (or even a small RTL like Delphi-Pascal does)also requires that someone actually write one for each platform to which they plan to port the language -- a small but functioning Delphi-Pascal operating-systems programming community has always slogged through the extra work and actually find it well worth their/our while, but most programmers are too lazy.
That's the thing about C (not so much C++, but definitely C): it imposes a runtime burden only marginally higher than that of assembly. It can run without a C library, OS interface, or even a dynamic memory allocator. It gives the programmer true control over their machine. Other languages don't do that, and for good reason: C lets you shoot yourself in the foot.
And for some reason, the programming-languages research and development community seems content to keep building modern, advanced languages on top of C with little real thought given to replacing C. Some people in the research community talk about how to make C safe, how to layer high-level features (almost always including garbage collection) on top of C, or how to compile a higher-level language down to C code that won't require infrastructure, but few seem to think about how to actually replace C with a language that will allow the programmer that same level of control over their system while still adding modern language features and minimizing the ultra-common bugs that almost always infest C code.
* -- When I was tuning a game-that-I-shall-leave-unnamed-to-protect-the-guilty's graphics settings I found that turning them down again after turning them too high would not give me back the performance I had lost from tuning the settings too high until I reset the game. Why? Because unless I reset the game the extra data loaded and computed by the higher settings would never be garbage-collected for performance reasons -- the GC was written to run collections only at opportune moments (good). Apparently the programmers put in the effort to write an opportunistic GC, but they couldn't be bothered to just explicitly free their resources.
Storing/transferring what we call a "file" would be better served by persistence & portability of objects.
Really? I agree on a certain level that we can and should probably leave behind explicit open/close/read/write calls by now in favor of an automatic persistence of some sort of "object", but that leaves a few questions. First, how does the program tell the OS about an object so it can be persisted? Secondly, what kind of naming system and name-space is applied to these objects? After all, I don't want my operating system to classify a document I'm not currently working on as garbage and delete it; I want the system to distinguish between "trash" objects to delete as soon as the last reference goes away and "closed" objects to maintain in some sort of name-space for later use.
Unfortunately (or maybe not) the truth is 20 years later, to write multi-platform products, the best option is still C/C++...
Well yeah, because nobody has even attempted to create a more advanced language that can still compile to C and C++'s target: bare metal with no software beneath it. It's this absolute lack of requirements other than a Turing-complete processor and a memory address-space that have made C/C++ so absolutely portable, and it's this absolute portability to different platforms that has made them successful.
Backwards compatibility is not a huge issue. Distro differences are not a huge issue. Configure and Make really takes care of most of it.
You cannot possibly expect proprietary ISVs to ship their program source for Linux - with configure scripts that output makefiles - to the user and expect them to do the work of compiling and installing the software without so much as a package manager!
Israel survives and prospers because of the promises Jehovah God made your ancestors Abraham Isaac and Jacob as well as to King David.
I'm just going to laugh right now. Sure, God made promises to Avraham, Yitzchak, Ya'akov and David ha'Melech. But if you honestly think He interferes in modern-day politics, I want to hear your explanation for Ha'Shoah.
God sticks to religious affairs; if He was messing about in politics the Arabs would all be dead of an old-fashioned, Old Testament smiting.
Mentats were trained to be "outsiders" and to deal entirely within the realm of pure logic. This excludes moral conscience, except as one of the many factors that affect human reactions.
Pure logic also excludes physical observation without postulates. Morality can be taken as a postulate to any sound logical process, thus making the reasoner a moral being.
If he had the power and knew he could get away with it, he would do it today rather than wait for tomorrow.
Yes, but he doesn't have the power nor a particular mandate from his people. Sure, the Iranian Persians who were brought up under the Islamic Republic probably hate Jews as much as any good Muslim brought up under a fanatic regime. But they haven't met very many and don't experience a war with Israel on a daily basis, so exterminating the Jews sort of rests in the back of their minds.
There are currently about 80,000 Jews in Iran who seem happy enough to remain there. They were and have been offered aliyah to Israel a great number of times, but have chosen to stay in Iran. Even if Ahmedinejad had the power, he couldn't kill all of them without a solid ass-whooping and a quick evacuation of all Iranian Jews by the Israel Defense Force.
It is the avowed goal of the Muslim enemies of Israel, not only in Iran, to push that nation into the Mediterranean and exterminate every last Jew on planet Earth.
I'm Jewish; I know this stuff. But now, unlike 70 years ago, we Jews have a country of our own that defends us whenever our existence is threatened. Unlike what a bizarre coalition of Muslim fanatics, American far-right nativists, anti-Semites, and nearly all Western leftists* seem to think, that country isn't going away any time soon. Even if, tomorrow, Barack Obama woke up a Seekrit Muzlim and decided to cut off all military and economic aid to Israel, the country would survive. It would take an economic hit and have to quickly tighten the belt on its military, that's for damn sure, but it would survive without having to suddenly concede everything to the Arabs or regress from a First-World to Second-World standard of living.
They hate the United States, mostly because it is the only nation that supports Israel.
Also because you're policies in the Middle East amount to nothing less than flagrant imperialism for the sake of oil. Remember, Osama bin Laden ordered 9/11 because the USA had its troops on holy Saudi soil. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was just a secondary excuse.
In short, the Jews are OK right now and will most likely be OK tomorrow. It's not that crazy bastards don't exist anymore; it's that we've become paranoid enough after the first one that we've got escape plans and military force prepared to deal with a second.
* -- I find it astounding the way political ideologies that claim to be based on notions of right and wrong are in fact not. From my observations, rightism is based on the principle of "might makes right", and leftism is based upon "weakness makes right". The USA supports Israel because it's a right-wing country with a Jewish voting bloc, and therefore enjoys seeing a triumphant and thriving Jewish state. Europe is leftist, and they've managed to forget how Jews and Israel were once their darling little weak people triumphing over the strong empires. Thus, they hate Israel for being strong in the face of foes wishing to destroy it, and love the Palestinian Arabs for their victimhood.
According to a number of sources, President Mahmoud "Untreatable-Psychotic" Ahmadinejad of Iran firmly believes that Allah will aid him in wiping out the infidels of the world. Therefore, if he were to start a nuclear war that wiped out the entire planet, Iran would be safe amid piles of smoking rubble covering the rest of the planet.
Luckily for the rest of the world, the President of Iran doesn't have very much power.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever actually tried a Mac?
3. Usually some college kid with a semester of CS pops by and writes several pages about how sad it is that everyone is using high level languages and wasting all the processing power of the computer. Also, how they're using Linux instead of Windows (because Linux is written in C) and how it is much faster. All this without realizing that the browser they're writing it in probably has significant portions written in Javascript.
See this one? This is you! You really think no systems language can ever best C?
Since when did a population of 25000 qualify you to call yourselves a city?
There's actually already a language named Alef. Now we just named Bet, Gimel, Gimel++, etc.
Suckware!
Take a long-standing conflict like, say, Israel and Palestine. Do we really want it to be possible to pre-program the next generation with vivid memories of all of the perceived injustices and wrongs committed over the last 50/100/1000 years?
Once again, Dune dealt with this problem. The idea is that you leave the genetic memories latent within the person until they reach adulthood, have a well-formed psyche, and are prepared for it, then let them remember their ancestors' lives. This prevents memories of events that happened 1000 years ago from traumatizing a person or becoming to integrated into their identity.
Of course, in the Israel-Palestine case you still run into the problem that the settlers and the Arabs already define themselves by supposed atrocities perpetrated against them anywhere from 50 to 2000 years ago without any genetic memories at all. Letting them remember that the XYZ Massacre was actually faked (yeah, some have been in that area) or that the ABC Conquest wasn't as violent as the stories and histories say might actually be beneficial, now that I think of it.
The trick is to A) be marginally physically fit, B) have social skills and charm, C) help a girl with her laptop out of genuine altruism, and D) actually realize that she's started to like you and ask her out.
Don't worry, I failed at D, so you don't have to revoke my geek card.
The only solution to social engineering of the user is to have a more knowledgeable system administrator. This just ups the ante on the social engineering.
No system can defeat social engineering.
Naw, a sensible person knows to call it the Shai-Hulud Particle.
Got any links I could read about? I always can use a happy reminder that Israel can actually feed itself when the Western world decides to cut them off.
Actually the First World has seen many of its countries' population growth rates become negative. Then they run into the problem that their economies and welfare/pension systems simply cannot handle a situation in which the number of dependents becomes larger than the number of workers.
So I guess we might sum up the state of things with, "The oil must flow."?
GOD DAMN. Where are my mod points when I need them!?
There's nothing wrong with C, and the newer standards offer a lot, but the notion that it's the superlative language for every task has got to go.
I never said it was the superlative language for every task. I said that, in its own domain (embedded systems, operating systems, and some core game code), nothing has ever truly replaced it.
While the game you were tuning clearly had problems with the generational garbage collector (more to do with sloppy object allocation and destructors than the GC implementation itself, probably), I can't see how that is a point-blank indictment of garbage collection.
It's an indictment of the style of programming that garbage collection enables: "create it, use it, forget it". You can say that the object allocation or destructors were sloppy, but from my perspective it seemed as though the game should know what resources it needs to free when going from graphics level 4 to 3 and free them using whatever the game's language had instead of a C++ delete operator. Any small bits that leaked out would be caught by the GC eventually, but the majority of the resources (the part that actually affected program performance) would be immediately freed and performance would immediately improve.
People have given though to replacing C (D, C++), and some of those developments are quite old (Lisp).
Thing is, C++, D, and Lisp work by putting a layer of runtime between themselves and the hardware. They can't replace C because they define and build themselves in such a way as to push them out of C's problem domain.
The problem with your comment is that it deals with hero stories and romances, whereas the GP dealt with Fight Club (wtf genre does "Fight Club" fall into anyway?) and horror games.
I'll give you Delphi-Pascal, Ada, and Forth. The rest require garbage collectors, which are too much infrastructure for use in the performance-critical, bare-metal environments like games* or operating systems in which C/C++ thrives. Requiring garbage collection (or even a small RTL like Delphi-Pascal does)also requires that someone actually write one for each platform to which they plan to port the language -- a small but functioning Delphi-Pascal operating-systems programming community has always slogged through the extra work and actually find it well worth their/our while, but most programmers are too lazy.
That's the thing about C (not so much C++, but definitely C): it imposes a runtime burden only marginally higher than that of assembly. It can run without a C library, OS interface, or even a dynamic memory allocator. It gives the programmer true control over their machine. Other languages don't do that, and for good reason: C lets you shoot yourself in the foot.
And for some reason, the programming-languages research and development community seems content to keep building modern, advanced languages on top of C with little real thought given to replacing C. Some people in the research community talk about how to make C safe, how to layer high-level features (almost always including garbage collection) on top of C, or how to compile a higher-level language down to C code that won't require infrastructure, but few seem to think about how to actually replace C with a language that will allow the programmer that same level of control over their system while still adding modern language features and minimizing the ultra-common bugs that almost always infest C code.
* -- When I was tuning a game-that-I-shall-leave-unnamed-to-protect-the-guilty's graphics settings I found that turning them down again after turning them too high would not give me back the performance I had lost from tuning the settings too high until I reset the game. Why? Because unless I reset the game the extra data loaded and computed by the higher settings would never be garbage-collected for performance reasons -- the GC was written to run collections only at opportune moments (good). Apparently the programmers put in the effort to write an opportunistic GC, but they couldn't be bothered to just explicitly free their resources.
Storing/transferring what we call a "file" would be better served by persistence & portability of objects.
Really? I agree on a certain level that we can and should probably leave behind explicit open/close/read/write calls by now in favor of an automatic persistence of some sort of "object", but that leaves a few questions. First, how does the program tell the OS about an object so it can be persisted? Secondly, what kind of naming system and name-space is applied to these objects? After all, I don't want my operating system to classify a document I'm not currently working on as garbage and delete it; I want the system to distinguish between "trash" objects to delete as soon as the last reference goes away and "closed" objects to maintain in some sort of name-space for later use.
Unfortunately (or maybe not) the truth is 20 years later, to write multi-platform products, the best option is still C/C++...
Well yeah, because nobody has even attempted to create a more advanced language that can still compile to C and C++'s target: bare metal with no software beneath it. It's this absolute lack of requirements other than a Turing-complete processor and a memory address-space that have made C/C++ so absolutely portable, and it's this absolute portability to different platforms that has made them successful.
Backwards compatibility is not a huge issue. Distro differences are not a huge issue. Configure and Make really takes care of most of it.
You cannot possibly expect proprietary ISVs to ship their program source for Linux - with configure scripts that output makefiles - to the user and expect them to do the work of compiling and installing the software without so much as a package manager!
Israel survives and prospers because of the promises Jehovah God made your ancestors Abraham Isaac and Jacob as well as to King David.
I'm just going to laugh right now. Sure, God made promises to Avraham, Yitzchak, Ya'akov and David ha'Melech. But if you honestly think He interferes in modern-day politics, I want to hear your explanation for Ha'Shoah.
God sticks to religious affairs; if He was messing about in politics the Arabs would all be dead of an old-fashioned, Old Testament smiting.
Mentats were trained to be "outsiders" and to deal entirely within the realm of pure logic. This excludes moral conscience, except as one of the many factors that affect human reactions.
Pure logic also excludes physical observation without postulates. Morality can be taken as a postulate to any sound logical process, thus making the reasoner a moral being.
If he had the power and knew he could get away with it, he would do it today rather than wait for tomorrow.
Yes, but he doesn't have the power nor a particular mandate from his people. Sure, the Iranian Persians who were brought up under the Islamic Republic probably hate Jews as much as any good Muslim brought up under a fanatic regime. But they haven't met very many and don't experience a war with Israel on a daily basis, so exterminating the Jews sort of rests in the back of their minds.
There are currently about 80,000 Jews in Iran who seem happy enough to remain there. They were and have been offered aliyah to Israel a great number of times, but have chosen to stay in Iran. Even if Ahmedinejad had the power, he couldn't kill all of them without a solid ass-whooping and a quick evacuation of all Iranian Jews by the Israel Defense Force.
It is the avowed goal of the Muslim enemies of Israel, not only in Iran, to push that nation into the Mediterranean and exterminate every last Jew on planet Earth.
I'm Jewish; I know this stuff. But now, unlike 70 years ago, we Jews have a country of our own that defends us whenever our existence is threatened. Unlike what a bizarre coalition of Muslim fanatics, American far-right nativists, anti-Semites, and nearly all Western leftists* seem to think, that country isn't going away any time soon. Even if, tomorrow, Barack Obama woke up a Seekrit Muzlim and decided to cut off all military and economic aid to Israel, the country would survive. It would take an economic hit and have to quickly tighten the belt on its military, that's for damn sure, but it would survive without having to suddenly concede everything to the Arabs or regress from a First-World to Second-World standard of living.
They hate the United States, mostly because it is the only nation that supports Israel.
Also because you're policies in the Middle East amount to nothing less than flagrant imperialism for the sake of oil. Remember, Osama bin Laden ordered 9/11 because the USA had its troops on holy Saudi soil. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was just a secondary excuse.
In short, the Jews are OK right now and will most likely be OK tomorrow. It's not that crazy bastards don't exist anymore; it's that we've become paranoid enough after the first one that we've got escape plans and military force prepared to deal with a second.
* -- I find it astounding the way political ideologies that claim to be based on notions of right and wrong are in fact not. From my observations, rightism is based on the principle of "might makes right", and leftism is based upon "weakness makes right". The USA supports Israel because it's a right-wing country with a Jewish voting bloc, and therefore enjoys seeing a triumphant and thriving Jewish state. Europe is leftist, and they've managed to forget how Jews and Israel were once their darling little weak people triumphing over the strong empires. Thus, they hate Israel for being strong in the face of foes wishing to destroy it, and love the Palestinian Arabs for their victimhood.
So tell me, which ethnic minority are the Iranians going to exterminate? And which neighbor will they invade?
Seriously, one crazy hack of a man who will likely be kicked out of office at next elections does not equal the next Hitler.
Yet it's true. A market has boundaries; no such thing as a "cosmic background market" exists.
According to a number of sources, President Mahmoud "Untreatable-Psychotic" Ahmadinejad of Iran firmly believes that Allah will aid him in wiping out the infidels of the world. Therefore, if he were to start a nuclear war that wiped out the entire planet, Iran would be safe amid piles of smoking rubble covering the rest of the planet.
Luckily for the rest of the world, the President of Iran doesn't have very much power.