47% of these newly created projects used the C language. Java came in as the number two language of choice at nearly 28%. Third was Javascript at over 20%. In the world of scripting, nearly 18% of the projects chose to use Perl
Summary:
47 per cent â" of new projects last year used C. [...] Next in popularity after C came Java, with 28 per cent. In scripting, JavaScript came out on top with 20 per cent, followed by Perl with 18 per cent.
I note that 47+28+20+18 > 100, so somewhere there's a move from one "percentage pie" to the next. I would like to know which language is in which pie, and more importantly why, and why there aren't numbers for one big pie with everyone in it. I'd also like to know why the summary (which is taken from the register) and the "here" seem to be ambiguous, when read together, about which pie javascript goes into.
I don't think malice is a good explanation for all of this, so I'll assume incompetence. That goes well with the 98%-of-everything-is-crap law;)
Note that 47+28 = 75, so that leaves 25%. Is C++ really that small? And let's just conveniently forget about C#, Objective C, and the odd app here or there written in lisp/scheme, an ML-like language (SML, ocaml, haskell), ada, pascal, eiffel, fortran,...
(I assume there isn't a moronic failure to distinguish between C, C++, C--, C# and Csh)
Even more surprising:
[Scripting: js=20, pl=18, php=11, rb=6]
That's 20+18+11+6 = 55 (percent), leaving 45 percent to be fought over by languages not attracting more than 6% of the projects. That takes at least eight languages.
This means we have twelve scripting languages in (reasonably) widespread use. Which eight (or more) remain?
I'm guessing python, bash and lua, but then I'm sorta' blank. I can guess at elisp, guile, QuakeC and the fragment shader language, but I'm kinda' skeptical. Anyone care to guess?
Personally, I feel that any parent that has kids that are under the age of 16 or so surfing the internet by themselves are pretty shitty parents.
Yeah! If my parents hadn't (unknowingly) let me on the internet at age 12, I would never have gotten into contact with that guy from the chess club who wrote the chess-playing program which lead to me taking up programming.
Instead, I would have most likely just sat at home playing games instead of learning a marketable skill.
Had that been the case, I would have had two reasonable career choices after high school: turn my mediocre amateur musician skills into great professional musician skills, or study math.
Instead, because I was let out on the tubes, I taught myself programming. I'm now doing my phd in cryptography.
Sitting alone coding, or sitting alone gaming; I don't think choosing one over the other would have impacted, say, my social skills much. Bear in mind that this is before I started gaming over the internet, since what I had at home was paid out of my own pocket and was slow like shit.
I assume (since I seem to recall) that my mom knew perfectly well that there was porn at the internet, and that I was looking at it. [if not, she probably suspected it]. I remember her telling me something to the effect that porn is always supernormal and that I'm not seeing women in their "natural state" but a state constructed for (and only women selected for) a particular purpose.
To the extent that I didn't turn out fine, I'm willing to wager that the internet wasn't the problem. I've been painfully shy through my teen (and pre-teen) years, but I managed to meet a girlfriend over the internet. I think that, among other things, helped me become less shy.
As always, the plural of anecdote is bullshit, so don't put too much into this. But don't underestimate young minds. And don't shield them from doing stupid things early: that'll make them do stupid things later.
Given the proper motivation, a below average performer can become a top-performer. If a person knows what's expected, is shown how to do this, and is encouraged - he will either refuse to conform (termination case) or he will improve. I've seen this, I've done this and it works.
Only so much can be taught.
Even heard the phrase "publish or perish"? If it was simply a matter of showing people how to come up with good and new enough ideas, and then how to the (hard and somewhat sophisticated) work to turn them into a published article, we'd all be graduating from the top universities with good grades.
Writing good code is a non-trivial task; depending on which part of the project you're working on, you may need to have novel ideas, or at least be able to understand other people's ideas well enough to implement them. If they weren't hammered home in your education, it might be the case that you (not you in particular, the general you) are not smart enough to do it.
Tasks in other professions may be highly reliant on intelligence as well; insert your own example if need be.
Government can not "stimulate" an economy by increasing government spending, as Hoover and Roosevelt thoroughly proved during the first great depression.
It can if it spends its money on something more valuable to the citizenry than private entities would have spent it on.
Sometimes, outside of theory-only land, the consumer is a moron;)
(or just insufficiently informed, due to time constraints)
The above joke should not be construed as stating anything about Obama; in particular not anything negative. I'm (mildly cautiously) optimistic about him being the president of the US.
First, i must solicit your strictest confidence in this transaction. this is by virtue of its nature as being utterly confidential and 'top secret'.
We are top official of the federal government bailout money review panel who are interested in subsidy of wares by your company with funds that are presently trapped in nigeria.
However, by virtue of our position as civil servants and members of this panel, we cannot acquire this money in our names. i have therefore, been delegated as a matter of trust by my colleagues of the panel to look for an overseas partner into whose account we would transfer the sum of us$21,320,000.00(twenty one million, three hundred and twenty thousand u.s dollars).
Please, note that this transaction is 100% safe and we hope to commence the transfer latest seven (7) banking days from the date of the receipt of the following informatiom by tel/fax; 234-1-7740449, your company's signed, and stamped letterhead paper.
We are looking forward to doing this business with you and solicit your confidentiality in this transation.
Personally I will neverhire an ex-Microsoftie; they don't have morals or ethics that are worth a damn, or they wouldn't have worked there in the first place. Fuck 'em, I say.
I'm sure Simon Peyton-Jones would be delighted to hear this. As would an ex-colleague of mine, who at the time was a nice guy. Presumably he still is;)
if Win7 cannot [...] how can that be called progress?
It's the new thing, the one created by the progress of time. Microsoft is generating profit, I mean progress, with their new OS.
It's progress in the sense that it allows Microsoft to survive off of a market it has already saturated and progress forward towards idunno by putting a "progress" sticker on their old^Wnew product.
there is another interpretation going on here [...] Freedom of Information Act [...] 'give me that code, because I payed for it with my tax dollars'
Let's compare with what my parent said:
I mean, it's truly Open, right?
I think my parent was just misunderstanding (deliberately or not) what Open Source and Software Freedom is about.
It has to do with the fact that any work done by the federal government is, by definition and law, in the public domain.
But software that's merely used by the federal government isn't automatically put into the public domain, because otherwise most of Microsoft's products would be and that hasn't happened.
You can try going to court (or to the government) arguing that the government should give you the source code to all software it's allowed to give out, but I guesstimate that this argument will fail.
If it was software created by the government, the outcome might be different, though. I don't know.
payed
On the assumption that you're like me, in that you want people to correct your mistakes when you make them, and that I know my English as well as I think I do: it's "paid".:)
[I also think that it's only by law and not definition that works of the federal government are in the public domain; I can't cite the definition of public domain, but I think it'd be strange if it was "works that are not copyrighted [either due to never having been, or due to the copyright having expired]; or works made by the federal government". I'd think it's more likely that there's a part b somewhere saying that the federal government can't copyright anything]
As I have pointed out (http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1099757&cid=26552417), the problem isn't that your parent wants to infer causation from correlation. It's that the causation your parent wants to infer points in the wrong direction.
"So what if many rapists look at porn. Only 0.000001% of porn-viewers become rapists."
And what the parent has done isn't a correlation. It's a (measured/observed) conditional probability.
Just look up the percentage of convicted rapist that are addicted to porn.
The implied implication arrow (the existence of which is debatable but let's not go there) points in the wrong direction.
Look up the percentage of convicted rapists that were breastfed as children. Say it's 90 percent. Is breastfeeding dangerous?
The rate of people in group A that are also in group B says something about the people in group A. It does not (a priori) say anything about the people in group B.
You want to look at how many of the porn consumers are rapists, not how many of the rapists are porn consumers.
If that's the case, then please send me all the source code to every Open Source program the "Intelligence Community" uses. I mean, it's truly Open, right?
When the Intelligence Community distributed to you software under the GNU GPL (v2), they gave you either
The source code;
A written offer to give anyone the source code (valid for at least three years); or
The instructions you need to get the source code [see the GPL for details].
If you want the source, you have the means. Use them, mm'kay?;)
If the object code you got is under a non-copyleft license (such as the X11, MIT or BSD), no one is required to give you anything.
Open Source doesn't mean you can point at anyone who uses it and say "give me that code". It means that they, in some cases, can point at the people who gave it to them and say "give me the code for that".
I hope I've cleared things up a bit, and keep on lovin' the open code:)
If you really wanted to do things fast you'd use the mouse (preferably with gestures or pie menus).
I often enough find that Firefox disagrees with me regarding which gesture I just gave it. Pie menus, maybe.
Try timing yourself on some web browsing/text editing/file managing tasks.
Let me instead quote some more of the article you link to:
People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.
It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.
It certainly doesn't take me two seconds to retrieve muscle memory. For rarely used features, it may be true, but for things done every day, I refuse to believe it.
I just don't buy the claim that pressing Ctrl-B is slower than moving my hand to the mouse, moving the mouse cursor to the menu bar, opening the menu, and selecting "Bold".
I dare anyone with a stopwatch to prove that mousing is faster for me than pressing Ctrl-B. I'll even bet large amounts of money.
their "community support" ideal is a rat's nest of dipshits who are working out of religious passion. [...] an unsupported amateurish user experience where you get assaulted by a horde of zealots when you need help?
I've found that wherever I have turned for support, I've been met with friendliness and the problems I've had have been resolved, mostly expediently.
A few people tend to be very aggressive (or defensive) when their OS of choice is talked about negatively. Unfortunately, those are also (by far) the most vocal ones, which can lead to a skewed perception. It sounds like you have that going for you.
I'm certain that anyone who distributes Linux wants the community to act nice; hence, I can't take your statement about Canonical's ideals as true.
Also, "unsupported" is factually incorrect: Canonical offers paid-for support for Ubuntu.
But rather than arguing back and forth, I'd rather just listen to you elaborate on your points.
What are your personal experiences dealing with the Linux or specifically Ubuntu community? How have you addressed the community? How have they addressed you in return?
How is the user experience of Ubuntu different from that of Windows or OS X, in a way that makes Ubuntu and only Ubuntu amateurish?
The vast majority of end users don't know the difference between XP and Vista
You give them too little credit.
Stick them in front of two boxes, one with XP and one with Vista, assuming they are somewhat familiar with both, and most can point to a difference within two minutes.
Even when not having the XP box present, and only having the memory of using XP, they'll say "oh this sucks, they moved things around".
They won't be very articulate about it (i.e. use fancy names and shit), but they can, most likely, distinguish between different versions of OSes.
Especially so if they only have experience with ninety-something, XP and Vista, which is overwhelmingly likely.
It's like if Nvidia managed to monopolize the graphics card market, then started making LCDs integrated with the video card and required all computer manufacturers to buy them as a bundle. [...]
That paragraph is a lot more funny if you misread it as "LEDs":)
Slashdot Mirror
A coincidence that it was posted two years ago?
Yeah, unless you think 5 - 2 = 2 :)
Anyway, here is their actual press release
Thanks for that.
Let's compare "here" with the summary. "Here":
47% of these newly created projects used the C language. Java came in as the number two language of choice at nearly 28%. Third was Javascript at over 20%. In the world of scripting, nearly 18% of the projects chose to use Perl
Summary:
47 per cent â" of new projects last year used C. [...] Next in popularity after C came Java, with 28 per cent. In scripting, JavaScript came out on top with 20 per cent, followed by Perl with 18 per cent.
I note that 47+28+20+18 > 100, so somewhere there's a move from one "percentage pie" to the next. I would like to know which language is in which pie, and more importantly why, and why there aren't numbers for one big pie with everyone in it. I'd also like to know why the summary (which is taken from the register) and the "here" seem to be ambiguous, when read together, about which pie javascript goes into.
I don't think malice is a good explanation for all of this, so I'll assume incompetence. That goes well with the 98%-of-everything-is-crap law ;)
[!scripting: C=47, java=28]
Note that 47+28 = 75, so that leaves 25%. Is C++ really that small? And let's just conveniently forget about C#, Objective C, and the odd app here or there written in lisp/scheme, an ML-like language (SML, ocaml, haskell), ada, pascal, eiffel, fortran, ...
(I assume there isn't a moronic failure to distinguish between C, C++, C--, C# and Csh)
Even more surprising:
[Scripting: js=20, pl=18, php=11, rb=6]
That's 20+18+11+6 = 55 (percent), leaving 45 percent to be fought over by languages not attracting more than 6% of the projects. That takes at least eight languages.
This means we have twelve scripting languages in (reasonably) widespread use. Which eight (or more) remain?
I'm guessing python, bash and lua, but then I'm sorta' blank. I can guess at elisp, guile, QuakeC and the fragment shader language, but I'm kinda' skeptical. Anyone care to guess?
Mein Kampf: The Game?
ID software is waaaay ahead of you. By about 17 years. Hitler lost, remember? ;)
Personally, I feel that any parent that has kids that are under the age of 16 or so surfing the internet by themselves are pretty shitty parents.
Yeah! If my parents hadn't (unknowingly) let me on the internet at age 12, I would never have gotten into contact with that guy from the chess club who wrote the chess-playing program which lead to me taking up programming.
Instead, I would have most likely just sat at home playing games instead of learning a marketable skill.
Had that been the case, I would have had two reasonable career choices after high school: turn my mediocre amateur musician skills into great professional musician skills, or study math.
Instead, because I was let out on the tubes, I taught myself programming. I'm now doing my phd in cryptography.
Sitting alone coding, or sitting alone gaming; I don't think choosing one over the other would have impacted, say, my social skills much. Bear in mind that this is before I started gaming over the internet, since what I had at home was paid out of my own pocket and was slow like shit.
I assume (since I seem to recall) that my mom knew perfectly well that there was porn at the internet, and that I was looking at it. [if not, she probably suspected it]. I remember her telling me something to the effect that porn is always supernormal and that I'm not seeing women in their "natural state" but a state constructed for (and only women selected for) a particular purpose.
To the extent that I didn't turn out fine, I'm willing to wager that the internet wasn't the problem. I've been painfully shy through my teen (and pre-teen) years, but I managed to meet a girlfriend over the internet. I think that, among other things, helped me become less shy.
As always, the plural of anecdote is bullshit, so don't put too much into this. But don't underestimate young minds. And don't shield them from doing stupid things early: that'll make them do stupid things later.
Given the proper motivation, a below average performer can become a top-performer. If a person knows what's expected, is shown how to do this, and is encouraged - he will either refuse to conform (termination case) or he will improve. I've seen this, I've done this and it works.
Only so much can be taught.
Even heard the phrase "publish or perish"? If it was simply a matter of showing people how to come up with good and new enough ideas, and then how to the (hard and somewhat sophisticated) work to turn them into a published article, we'd all be graduating from the top universities with good grades.
Writing good code is a non-trivial task; depending on which part of the project you're working on, you may need to have novel ideas, or at least be able to understand other people's ideas well enough to implement them. If they weren't hammered home in your education, it might be the case that you (not you in particular, the general you) are not smart enough to do it.
Tasks in other professions may be highly reliant on intelligence as well; insert your own example if need be.
Government can not "stimulate" an economy by increasing government spending, as Hoover and Roosevelt thoroughly proved during the first great depression.
It can if it spends its money on something more valuable to the citizenry than private entities would have spent it on.
Sometimes, outside of theory-only land, the consumer is a moron ;)
(or just insufficiently informed, due to time constraints)
The above joke should not be construed as stating anything about Obama; in particular not anything negative. I'm (mildly cautiously) optimistic about him being the president of the US.
REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP
First, i must solicit your strictest confidence in this transaction. this is by virtue of its nature as being utterly confidential and 'top secret'.
We are top official of the federal government bailout money review panel who are interested in subsidy of wares by your company with funds that are presently trapped in nigeria.
However, by virtue of our position as civil servants and members of this panel, we cannot acquire this money in our names. i have therefore, been delegated as a matter of trust by my colleagues of the panel to look for an overseas partner into whose account we would transfer the sum of us$21,320,000.00(twenty one million, three hundred and twenty thousand u.s dollars).
Please, note that this transaction is 100% safe and we hope to commence the transfer latest seven (7) banking days from the date of the receipt of the following informatiom by tel/fax; 234-1-7740449, your company's signed, and stamped letterhead paper.
We are looking forward to doing this business with you and solicit your confidentiality in this transation.
YOURS FAITHFULLY,
PRESIDENT OBAMA
Personally I will neverhire an ex-Microsoftie; they don't have morals or ethics that are worth a damn, or they wouldn't have worked there in the first place. Fuck 'em, I say.
I'm sure Simon Peyton-Jones would be delighted to hear this. As would an ex-colleague of mine, who at the time was a nice guy. Presumably he still is ;)
From the tone of the article it's like they're shocked that it works.
They're obviously familiar with Windows ME.
if Win7 cannot [...] how can that be called progress?
It's the new thing, the one created by the progress of time. Microsoft is generating profit, I mean progress, with their new OS.
It's progress in the sense that it allows Microsoft to survive off of a market it has already saturated and progress forward towards idunno by putting a "progress" sticker on their old^Wnew product.
</snark>
All I saw was a page of [[weasel words]] or something like that.
[[citation needed]]
They obviously grabbed a hack from thepiratebay.org which did nothing except disabling the DRM, and saw a performance gain of 20-40% ;)
The code that Microsoft contributed was the Happy Slider
I know a certain Genuine People Personalities prototype which could use one of those.
You better replace the diodes down his left side first, though :)
there is another interpretation going on here [...] Freedom of Information Act [...] 'give me that code, because I payed for it with my tax dollars'
Let's compare with what my parent said:
I mean, it's truly Open, right?
I think my parent was just misunderstanding (deliberately or not) what Open Source and Software Freedom is about.
It has to do with the fact that any work done by the federal government is, by definition and law, in the public domain.
But software that's merely used by the federal government isn't automatically put into the public domain, because otherwise most of Microsoft's products would be and that hasn't happened.
You can try going to court (or to the government) arguing that the government should give you the source code to all software it's allowed to give out, but I guesstimate that this argument will fail.
If it was software created by the government, the outcome might be different, though. I don't know.
payed
On the assumption that you're like me, in that you want people to correct your mistakes when you make them, and that I know my English as well as I think I do: it's "paid". :)
[I also think that it's only by law and not definition that works of the federal government are in the public domain; I can't cite the definition of public domain, but I think it'd be strange if it was "works that are not copyrighted [either due to never having been, or due to the copyright having expired]; or works made by the federal government". I'd think it's more likely that there's a part b somewhere saying that the federal government can't copyright anything]
Correlation does not imply causation.
As I have pointed out (http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1099757&cid=26552417), the problem isn't that your parent wants to infer causation from correlation. It's that the causation your parent wants to infer points in the wrong direction.
"So what if many rapists look at porn. Only 0.000001% of porn-viewers become rapists."
And what the parent has done isn't a correlation. It's a (measured/observed) conditional probability.
Just look up the percentage of convicted rapist that are addicted to porn.
The implied implication arrow (the existence of which is debatable but let's not go there) points in the wrong direction.
Look up the percentage of convicted rapists that were breastfed as children. Say it's 90 percent. Is breastfeeding dangerous?
The rate of people in group A that are also in group B says something about the people in group A. It does not (a priori) say anything about the people in group B.
You want to look at how many of the porn consumers are rapists, not how many of the rapists are porn consumers.
Once, but I read it after reading your post.
I found it perfectly clear, although I read it slowly enough to digest all the negations properly, probably influenced by your post.
(fwiw)
I guess it's this one you're talking about: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9875
I haven't watched it start to finish, but Charlie Rose talks about an interview with Bill Gates [a few weeks ago]. Assuming no hash collisions...
If that's the case, then please send me all the source code to every Open Source program the "Intelligence Community" uses. I mean, it's truly Open, right?
When the Intelligence Community distributed to you software under the GNU GPL (v2), they gave you either
If you want the source, you have the means. Use them, mm'kay? ;)
If the object code you got is under a non-copyleft license (such as the X11, MIT or BSD), no one is required to give you anything.
If you want to learn more, I can recommend http://www.gnu.org/philosophy, http://www.gnu.org/licenses, http://www.opensource.org/ and http://www.debian.org/social_contract among others.
Open Source doesn't mean you can point at anyone who uses it and say "give me that code". It means that they, in some cases, can point at the people who gave it to them and say "give me the code for that".
I hope I've cleared things up a bit, and keep on lovin' the open code :)
If you really wanted to do things fast you'd use the mouse (preferably with gestures or pie menus).
I often enough find that Firefox disagrees with me regarding which gesture I just gave it. Pie menus, maybe.
Try timing yourself on some web browsing/text editing/file managing tasks.
Let me instead quote some more of the article you link to:
People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.
It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.
It certainly doesn't take me two seconds to retrieve muscle memory. For rarely used features, it may be true, but for things done every day, I refuse to believe it.
I just don't buy the claim that pressing Ctrl-B is slower than moving my hand to the mouse, moving the mouse cursor to the menu bar, opening the menu, and selecting "Bold".
I dare anyone with a stopwatch to prove that mousing is faster for me than pressing Ctrl-B. I'll even bet large amounts of money.
their "community support" ideal is a rat's nest of dipshits who are working out of religious passion. [...] an unsupported amateurish user experience where you get assaulted by a horde of zealots when you need help?
I've found that wherever I have turned for support, I've been met with friendliness and the problems I've had have been resolved, mostly expediently.
A few people tend to be very aggressive (or defensive) when their OS of choice is talked about negatively. Unfortunately, those are also (by far) the most vocal ones, which can lead to a skewed perception. It sounds like you have that going for you.
I'm certain that anyone who distributes Linux wants the community to act nice; hence, I can't take your statement about Canonical's ideals as true.
Also, "unsupported" is factually incorrect: Canonical offers paid-for support for Ubuntu.
But rather than arguing back and forth, I'd rather just listen to you elaborate on your points.
What are your personal experiences dealing with the Linux or specifically Ubuntu community? How have you addressed the community? How have they addressed you in return?
How is the user experience of Ubuntu different from that of Windows or OS X, in a way that makes Ubuntu and only Ubuntu amateurish?
The vast majority of end users don't know the difference between XP and Vista
You give them too little credit.
Stick them in front of two boxes, one with XP and one with Vista, assuming they are somewhat familiar with both, and most can point to a difference within two minutes.
Even when not having the XP box present, and only having the memory of using XP, they'll say "oh this sucks, they moved things around".
They won't be very articulate about it (i.e. use fancy names and shit), but they can, most likely, distinguish between different versions of OSes.
Especially so if they only have experience with ninety-something, XP and Vista, which is overwhelmingly likely.
It's like if Nvidia managed to monopolize the graphics card market, then started making LCDs integrated with the video card and required all computer manufacturers to buy them as a bundle. [...]
That paragraph is a lot more funny if you misread it as "LEDs" :)