True, but why should software break violently (crashing or glitching) when it can break cleanly (by throwing an exception, compiling an error report, and/or showing the user an error dialog)?
I'm just going to post my experience and opinions here.
First of all, I've seen shitloads of students who know Windows development environments. They know Visual Studio for using C#, or even C++ if they're really into games programming. I see comparatively fewer who enter school knowing about Unix environments (at least here at UMass lab computers are Linux, so they quickly learn).
And at least here at UMass, we do have a one-semester course in C++. It's new, and it's offered as an option for students who don't want to take Operating Systems without C++ experience. I advise everyone I know to take it, as I've seen truly horrific code written by both students and teaching assistants during my trek through the wonderful world of vague, unscientific, non-rigorous Operating Systems.
C++ is C with optional safety-less AK-47s. The top 1% enjoy it, the next 9% live with it, and the other 90% die bemused in a hail of friendly fire.
Well that puts me in the top 10%, so I guess it's OK then.
Oh who am I kidding. I've done enough C++ that I've become so fed up it's the best systems-programming language we have that I've gone and designed my own. JIHAD! JIHAD AGAINST C++ AND ALL ITS WORKS!
And yet in an impure functional language a set of closures closing over the same variables are equivalent to an object with those functions implemented as methods.
What would be better would be to more tha apps out of the browser completely. There's no reason that a java app sitting on your local machine can't do the photo touch-ups w/o having to be embedded in a browser, just like there's no reason you can't open up a remote file in the GIMP and edit it directly if you have the url, username, and password, without having to go through the hassle of right-click in your browser, save to disk, open in GiMP, edit, save to disk, then ftp'ing it back.
But that would kill the web-app business, and then where would all the code monkeys work?
If by "interest and development activity" you mean "buckets of code written to force otherwise-simply paradigms and ideas into Haskell's pure-functional world" yeah.
And that is why you don't code in a pure-functional language. Instead you use an impure functional language like OCaml that allows the use of mutable data structures in functional algorithms. That does slightly reduce the amount of parallelism you can get out of the algorithm implementation, but you still gain over a purely imperative language.
Actually academic research work tends to focus on revolutionary languages built from a fundamental core based on their innovative features. Then industry proceeds to completely ignore these languages because they don't bare enough resemblance to the status quo.
Actually, hasn't work been done in the past few years on producing smaller, more efficient transistors? That would allow the same basic designs to scale further up in processing speed. Sure, it won't make Moore's Law's Corollary for software work forever, but it could provide speedups without having to go multithreaded and run into Amdahl's Law.
Funny thing. That article says that poor college students get lesser grants than rich ones. In my experience the opposite is true: those universities that have money to give give it all away in need-based grants instead of nepotism or merit scholarships.
Well for one thing, Ruckus only works on Windoze. I tried to sign up last year only to discover that they only have a Windoze client and, IIRC, everything's got DRM.
Right, that's what I thought. I figured it was OK if you ran Qtopia instead of the OpenMoko distribution, but the GGP claims that the OpenMoko hardware makes it unreliable at making phone calls.
Well yes. But if one thing is true of Israelis, it's that they do not give half a shit about copyright. The ones who don't actually want to run Linux will all claim Windoze refunds so they can install Windows with the pirate disk they bought at the market.
If the Israeli courts keep requiring that these refunds be issued, suddenly you will see all of Israel "running Linux".
Capital A Atheists and other varieties of militant non-Christian aren't doing their cause any favors by being snarky and curmudgeonly. For that matter the cause needs rethinking: Holding up a banner proclaiming what you don't believe in is stupid. Advocating positive doctrines like rationalism and Enlightenment ideals at least shows what you're for rather than against and doesn't play as easily into the hands of fundamentalists who want to demonize you.
Well I'm sorry. We Jews get really tired of having to put up with the Month of Christmas every damned year.
It isn't jolly. It's dark and cold, and at least everywhere I've ever lived that really has a winter, it doesn't really start getting warmer again until March (and it won't really become spring until May) despite the lengthening days. I can't say I like having a month-long holiday dedicated to reminding me that I will spend the next three (possibly four) months freezing my butt off.
I'll stop complaining about Christmas-the-winter-solstice-celebration when it A) goes back to being a single day long and B) stops trying to creep beyond the boundaries of the European-Christian religion-family by calling itself "the holidays".
Actually, System.out.println() and cout are about equally cryptic, particularly because cout relies on templates and operator overloading just to work.
You want a simple way to output "Hello World"? Let's try an old teaching language, Pascal:
Slashdot Mirror
True, but why should software break violently (crashing or glitching) when it can break cleanly (by throwing an exception, compiling an error report, and/or showing the user an error dialog)?
I'm just going to post my experience and opinions here.
First of all, I've seen shitloads of students who know Windows development environments. They know Visual Studio for using C#, or even C++ if they're really into games programming. I see comparatively fewer who enter school knowing about Unix environments (at least here at UMass lab computers are Linux, so they quickly learn).
And at least here at UMass, we do have a one-semester course in C++. It's new, and it's offered as an option for students who don't want to take Operating Systems without C++ experience. I advise everyone I know to take it, as I've seen truly horrific code written by both students and teaching assistants during my trek through the wonderful world of vague, unscientific, non-rigorous Operating Systems.
You wrote that at quarter to 7 PM. Good programmers have gone home by then.
C++ is C with optional safety-less AK-47s. The top 1% enjoy it, the next 9% live with it, and the other 90% die bemused in a hail of friendly fire.
Well that puts me in the top 10%, so I guess it's OK then.
Oh who am I kidding. I've done enough C++ that I've become so fed up it's the best systems-programming language we have that I've gone and designed my own. JIHAD! JIHAD AGAINST C++ AND ALL ITS WORKS!
And yet in an impure functional language a set of closures closing over the same variables are equivalent to an object with those functions implemented as methods.
What would be better would be to more tha apps out of the browser completely. There's no reason that a java app sitting on your local machine can't do the photo touch-ups w/o having to be embedded in a browser, just like there's no reason you can't open up a remote file in the GIMP and edit it directly if you have the url, username, and password, without having to go through the hassle of right-click in your browser, save to disk, open in GiMP, edit, save to disk, then ftp'ing it back.
But that would kill the web-app business, and then where would all the code monkeys work?
If by "interest and development activity" you mean "buckets of code written to force otherwise-simply paradigms and ideas into Haskell's pure-functional world" yeah.
And that is why you don't code in a pure-functional language. Instead you use an impure functional language like OCaml that allows the use of mutable data structures in functional algorithms. That does slightly reduce the amount of parallelism you can get out of the algorithm implementation, but you still gain over a purely imperative language.
Actually academic research work tends to focus on revolutionary languages built from a fundamental core based on their innovative features. Then industry proceeds to completely ignore these languages because they don't bare enough resemblance to the status quo.
Actually, hasn't work been done in the past few years on producing smaller, more efficient transistors? That would allow the same basic designs to scale further up in processing speed. Sure, it won't make Moore's Law's Corollary for software work forever, but it could provide speedups without having to go multithreaded and run into Amdahl's Law.
Funny thing. That article says that poor college students get lesser grants than rich ones. In my experience the opposite is true: those universities that have money to give give it all away in need-based grants instead of nepotism or merit scholarships.
Well for one thing, Ruckus only works on Windoze. I tried to sign up last year only to discover that they only have a Windoze client and, IIRC, everything's got DRM.
Right, that's what I thought. I figured it was OK if you ran Qtopia instead of the OpenMoko distribution, but the GGP claims that the OpenMoko hardware makes it unreliable at making phone calls.
I thought the inability to make phone calls was a software issue.
If you want something completely open, you can run Trolltech's Qtopia on the latest Openmoko hardware.
Fear not, noble friend! By the time the Hashashin reach you, the Mossad will already have killed you!
Then we'll have a deathmatch over who gets the exclusive right to wear those kickass white robes.
Well true, but all Israelis are cheap and like to avoid paying for software anyway -- Jew or Arab.
Well yes. But if one thing is true of Israelis, it's that they do not give half a shit about copyright. The ones who don't actually want to run Linux will all claim Windoze refunds so they can install Windows with the pirate disk they bought at the market.
If the Israeli courts keep requiring that these refunds be issued, suddenly you will see all of Israel "running Linux".
And now we can all tell vorpal^ hasn't had a serious girlfriend for a very, VERY long time.
Ia, Ia! Shub-Niggurath!
Algorithms that don't terminate?
Does this also mean we could also prove theorems by physical experiment?
Capital A Atheists and other varieties of militant non-Christian aren't doing their cause any favors by being snarky and curmudgeonly. For that matter the cause needs rethinking: Holding up a banner proclaiming what you don't believe in is stupid. Advocating positive doctrines like rationalism and Enlightenment ideals at least shows what you're for rather than against and doesn't play as easily into the hands of fundamentalists who want to demonize you.
Well I'm sorry. We Jews get really tired of having to put up with the Month of Christmas every damned year.
It isn't jolly. It's dark and cold, and at least everywhere I've ever lived that really has a winter, it doesn't really start getting warmer again until March (and it won't really become spring until May) despite the lengthening days. I can't say I like having a month-long holiday dedicated to reminding me that I will spend the next three (possibly four) months freezing my butt off.
I'll stop complaining about Christmas-the-winter-solstice-celebration when it A) goes back to being a single day long and B) stops trying to creep beyond the boundaries of the European-Christian religion-family by calling itself "the holidays".
Actually, System.out.println() and cout are about equally cryptic, particularly because cout relies on templates and operator overloading just to work.
You want a simple way to output "Hello World"? Let's try an old teaching language, Pascal:
writeln('Hello, world!');
And now the newest teaching language, Python.
print "Hello, world!"
Much, much simpler.
So in the future Linux's children will use the Microsoft "Baron Harkonnen" Surface... interesting.