I can't believe how the media is buying into the historically-bankrupt notion....
Really? For me, it was three things. First, during the X-Files Series Finale, a local newsbimbo said "Now that the X-Files are ending, we'll hear what the show taught us about real aliens, next at 10". Second, newspaper coverage of an event I attended had precious few facts in common with what actually happened. Third, I refuse to get breathless and hyperventilately every time a newsbimbo (of any gender) says with a straight face, "This is a historical event." No kidding? How many presidential elections don't make it into the historical record?
Without the charity of well-to-do geeks or companies that fund open source development from profitable product lines, can Open Source succeed at the enterprise level?
That doesn't help, but there are definitely language features which help people structure, abstract, and encapsulate code well. Lexical variables, automatic memory management, namespaces, higher-order functions, sane numerics, safe string handling, genericity, pervasive polymorphism, and hygenic macros are all good examples. You don't need any of them to write good code, but they do help.
If making money were our only concern, we'd probably run a porn site instead. Do you know how to make a small fortune in publishing? Start with a large one.
Indeed they are. Are you so offended that still believe that the only (or even primary) reason James spent several hours organizing interviews, editing the audio, and trying to navigate the black holes of information that are the FCC and Apple's media contacts was to get a few eyeballs on little book covers? Frankly, I'd be ashamed if I couldn't write a stupid little opinion piece in 20 minutes that raised this much discussion at least on Digg -- if I cared about ad impressions, that is.
Are you now pretending you didn't imply that the only reason we published this article was for, and I quote you directly, "ad hits"?
Except that it's not presented as "this is what every GSM phone does", it is presented as "this is what iPhones [the hottest new cell phone out there which everybody is abuzz about, come see us talk about it] do".
From the article:
To be fair, the iPhone isn't the first phone that's been reported to have interference issues....
But Rodman also thinks that beyond just plain visibility, the iPhone also causes problems because there's so much high bandwidth data transfer occuring so regularly with an iPhone.
I'm quite sure that this article is just a lame attempt to mooch off the iPhone's popularity for ad hits...
There are no paid ads in the article.
... not any legitimate surprise or concern on the part of the O'Reilly writers.
Actually, the idea for the article came from a conference call where we kept getting interference, and it was because two participants had their shiny new iPhones in the room. We've all heard this type of interference before, but never as much as with the iPhone. James decided to talk to the FCC and Apple and whoever else would discuss things in a way that an interested layman could understand.
Variable-width encodings are what's wrong with Unicode, but I meant that current stable versions of Ruby do not handle Unicode well, and I believe that Unicode handling in Python 2.x is suboptimal. (I haven't used Unicode in Python 2.x, and I understand that Python 3 is much better in that regard.)
Note that x is read-only, and y is read-write. I assume that if you don't put rw after an attribute, it's read-only. Otherwise, there's not much point having rw.
That's true, but note that the rw attribute only applies to the accessor method. A12 says:
The traits of the generated method correspond directly to the traits on the variable.
Further, it says:
In any event, even without "is rw" the attribute variable is always writable within the class itself (unless you apply the trait is constant to it).
The idea's a little tricky at first, but those types of declarations (and the public/private attribute distinction you get with the use of twigils or has versus my govern the visibility and type of access only outside the class.)
Patrick Michaud wrote a bare-bones Python implementation in eight hours. It doesn't support all of Python, but it supports a large amount -- and, to my knowledge, he'd never implemented a Python compiler or interpreter before. That project, Pynie, has languished for a while, as he's spending more time working on Rakudo (the Perl 6 implementation on Parrot), but it's a viable port just waiting for someone to work on it. Lua is functionally complete as of 5.1 (I believe), and Tcl, PHP, and Ruby are in progress.
You can play with the latest versions of all of these languages on Tuesday, 21 October, when we make our next monthly stable release (though partcl just moved to a separate repository, so you can check out the current version there on a different schedule).
I'm not sure whether to be happy, because desktop linux is simple to the point where building from source is considered unusual and hard; or sad, because I'm hearing this from people who are supposed to be geeks...
I appreciate the possibility of making changes and recompiling software if I need to (and sometimes I take advantage of that), but I have no desire to do that for every piece of software I use regularly. I'm sure Carsten has no desire to support whatever happened to be at HEAD whatever day I decided to make a checkout, and I have no desire to trade time I could spend doing things productively rather than keeping a nightly or weekly checkout up to date, reporting bugs, bisecting HEAD breakage, et cetera.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, has that ever worked for you? (I assume you don't work on space probes.)
Really? For me, it was three things. First, during the X-Files Series Finale, a local newsbimbo said "Now that the X-Files are ending, we'll hear what the show taught us about real aliens, next at 10". Second, newspaper coverage of an event I attended had precious few facts in common with what actually happened. Third, I refuse to get breathless and hyperventilately every time a newsbimbo (of any gender) says with a straight face, "This is a historical event." No kidding? How many presidential elections don't make it into the historical record?
Perl has, for years.
I'm confused. Are you suggesting that Twitter can do this?
That doesn't help, but there are definitely language features which help people structure, abstract, and encapsulate code well. Lexical variables, automatic memory management, namespaces, higher-order functions, sane numerics, safe string handling, genericity, pervasive polymorphism, and hygenic macros are all good examples. You don't need any of them to write good code, but they do help.
If making money were our only concern, we'd probably run a porn site instead. Do you know how to make a small fortune in publishing? Start with a large one.
Indeed they are. Are you so offended that still believe that the only (or even primary) reason James spent several hours organizing interviews, editing the audio, and trying to navigate the black holes of information that are the FCC and Apple's media contacts was to get a few eyeballs on little book covers? Frankly, I'd be ashamed if I couldn't write a stupid little opinion piece in 20 minutes that raised this much discussion at least on Digg -- if I cared about ad impressions, that is.
Are you now pretending you didn't imply that the only reason we published this article was for, and I quote you directly, "ad hits"?
From the article:
There are no paid ads in the article.
Actually, the idea for the article came from a conference call where we kept getting interference, and it was because two participants had their shiny new iPhones in the room. We've all heard this type of interference before, but never as much as with the iPhone. James decided to talk to the FCC and Apple and whoever else would discuss things in a way that an interested layman could understand.
The root fault is probably compatibility with Awk's global variables, combined with regular expressions.
Variable-width encodings are what's wrong with Unicode, but I meant that current stable versions of Ruby do not handle Unicode well, and I believe that Unicode handling in Python 2.x is suboptimal. (I haven't used Unicode in Python 2.x, and I understand that Python 3 is much better in that regard.)
Unless your XML contains Unicode....
1957 called. It wants its joke (about APL) back.
(I believe you meant to say "Perl is notorious for almost never breaking backwards compatibility.")
Close over a single-element array, then modify the first element of the array.
Excel is probably the most widely-used programming language on the planet.
That'll free up space on the new Macbook!
Research links, please.
... print the book in China, then transport it by sea and lounge around in international waters.
Fair point. The Apache 2 license might have worked then.
Food for thought: would a BSD-style license have accomplished the same goals?
That's true, but note that the rw attribute only applies to the accessor method. A12 says:
Further, it says:
The idea's a little tricky at first, but those types of declarations (and the public/private attribute distinction you get with the use of twigils or has versus my govern the visibility and type of access only outside the class.)
Patrick Michaud wrote a bare-bones Python implementation in eight hours. It doesn't support all of Python, but it supports a large amount -- and, to my knowledge, he'd never implemented a Python compiler or interpreter before. That project, Pynie, has languished for a while, as he's spending more time working on Rakudo (the Perl 6 implementation on Parrot), but it's a viable port just waiting for someone to work on it. Lua is functionally complete as of 5.1 (I believe), and Tcl, PHP, and Ruby are in progress.
You can play with the latest versions of all of these languages on Tuesday, 21 October, when we make our next monthly stable release (though partcl just moved to a separate repository, so you can check out the current version there on a different schedule).
The worship of ancient ligatures?
A thoughtful theologian might say that you've almost described the most important difference between the New and Old Testaments in two sentences.
I appreciate the possibility of making changes and recompiling software if I need to (and sometimes I take advantage of that), but I have no desire to do that for every piece of software I use regularly. I'm sure Carsten has no desire to support whatever happened to be at HEAD whatever day I decided to make a checkout, and I have no desire to trade time I could spend doing things productively rather than keeping a nightly or weekly checkout up to date, reporting bugs, bisecting HEAD breakage, et cetera.