Saying that people buy something just because it is popular is not even attempting to search for a root reason.
You should read the second half of my sentence. Look at Apple's iPod pages. See how many of them mention the clicky wheel. See how many of them mention that you can carry hundreds to tens of thousands of songs in your pocket. Then read the second half of my sentence again.
I believe (but can't prove) that the "intuitive interface" claim is a post purchase feel-good explanation given by people who want to explain why they've bought something trendy as anything more than emotional cliquish behavior. "It's obvious," they say. "This interface is objectively and intuitively better than anything else I used. I scoff at the ubiquitous product placement in television shows and movies and all of the PR-planted news stories and those silly iTunes commercials. I have good taste, darn it all!"
Fortunately, you and anyone else can compare the ratio of mentions of clicky wheel versus "You can carry lots of songs in your pocket!" on Apple's own site. I think we can both agree they have thought more about marketing iPods than either of us have.
One caveat for you, using the word caveat does not magically make you look smarter, on the contrary, using it improperly or in a sentence where it's not needed makes you look very stupid.
Let me rephrase then. A warning or admonition that my opinion could be out of date with regard to recent events.... You know, from the Latin cavere, to take caution or to guard. I could have used noto bene, but fewer people understand that.
People use inconsistent interfaces on DVDs because the alternative is???
Want some homework? Go find a hundred iPod owners who don't read Slashdot. Ask them about the alternatives to the iPod and how they decided to buy an iPod instead of another device. If 20% of them even mention the "intuitive interface", I'll admit shock and surprise.
You must have missed the disclaimer on the W3C site that says you can't write an HTML renderer if you've ever used one (for example, to read their specifications).
More people play DVDs than use iPods and iPhones, and DVD menus are by no means consistent.
More people drive cars than use iPods and iPhones, and minor things such as light controls, wiper controls, and parking breaks are not consistent between makes or even models.
You're just parroting the industrial designer's version of the geek fallacy that the best technology always wins. People buy iPods and iPhones because that brand is particularly popular and because music players let you carry thousands of songs in your pocket.
For a direct replacement, probably Cairo, though plenty of projects seem to get by with the Gtk or QT primitives, if they don't use SVG or PNG libraries.
The release cycle is painfully slow, or possibly even non-existent.... Raster said they are working towards a release. The snapshot news linked above supports they notion that he is following through with this.
I seem to recall he's said that multiple times over the past decade, and my impression is that he eventually came back and said "All we need to do is rewrite a few pieces from scratch, and then we can release!" That's no skin off of my nose, but I'll take the software more seriously when it has something closer to a regular release cycle.
Raster just doesn't get the attention he deserves for his elegant technical solutions...
He did a lot of work on imlib2, which languished for years until better software replaced it (where "better" might mean "less buggy" or "released more frequently" or "appears maintained"). I've never thought that he had much interest in releasing stable versions of his code with any frequency or rhythm. That's not the sole criterion for positive notoriety, but releasing software that people can actually use is important.
(One caveat is that I stopped using Enlightenment a decade ago, around E14, because the new versions weren't stable or releasable.)
The "we'll maintain it for you" line has not particularly been borne out by experience....
I just browsed the Tamarin mailing list, status reports, and commit logs. Adobe employees seem to do at least half of the work, but that's less than all of the work you'd do if you hadn't donated the code.
So I have to wonder at the thought process of a team which makes that monumental a mistake.
It's pretty simple, actually. Which existing VM, if any, is sufficiently free that we can distribute it under the Artistic License, is sufficiently dynamic that we don't have to build our own method dispatch system on top of it, is sufficiently portable that it builds and runs on most of the platforms that Perl 5 does, is sufficiently hackable that we can attract enough developers to produce Perl 6, and is sufficiently open to changes required to run Perl 6 effectively?
In 2001, the answer was... not much. In 2006 or perhaps 2005, LLVM might have been a sufficiently attractive option.
I know! The epistemological/ontological gyrations required to argue that Perl 6 is vaporware make my head hurt too.
You're welcome to download any of the 20 previous monthly Parrot releases and write and run Perl 6 code with them, though we've only had a binary called perl6 for the past nine or ten.
Guido's been talking about Python 3000 for at least five years now; I talked to him about it in 2003, and he'd been talking about it for a while before that. That's not much younger than Perl 6.
And if you think the Perl examples are unclear and ugly because of lack of context, you have ENTIRELY missed the point.
I think you believe they're "unclear and ugly" because you know don't know Perl 6, in the same way I have trouble understanding Stanislaw Lem's Solaris because I don't even know the Cyrillic alphabet. Your original post jumped around between "I find advanced Perl 6 constructs difficult to read despite never having programmed in the language" and "My Ruby code is more readable than my Perl 5 code", so I may have missed your point.
Now that's a ridiculous comparison between Perl 6 and Python 3.0.
Why? Neither one is out in a "final release", as the grandparent post suggested. If that's what it takes to make a language worth looking at for the grandparent poster, the comparison is apt.
I hope you meant "functional" meaning "it works" rather than that it exemplifies functional programming ideas, because it doesn't do anything close to the latter.
Why not? It has lambdas, dynamic scoping, lexical scoping, and closures. It lacks homoiconicity, but so do OCaml and ML and Haskell. It doesn't forbid mutable global state, but neither does CL, and a lot of people believe that CL supports functional programming fairly well.
Why would anyone trust TIOBE's results? They don't reveal their research methods, and no one has been able to reproduce their findings. That's not good science. That's push polling without the telephone.
Perl 6, the behemoth on the perpetual horizon, is threatening to change almost everything but never actually arriving.
There will be another combined stable release of Parrot and Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot) next Tuesday. We release a new stable version every month, just as we've done for the past 20 months.
That depends on whether you think systems breaking are acceptable.
That, my friend, is a false dilemma. It's software. You can change it. You can configure it. Even if the default boot is a fast boot with ext3 compiled in and expecting to mount only local filesystems, no one is going to remove the option of changing mountpoints or loading other kernel modules.
You may not be able to boot in five seconds, but we're talking about better defaults for most people.
Slashdot Mirror
You should read the second half of my sentence. Look at Apple's iPod pages. See how many of them mention the clicky wheel. See how many of them mention that you can carry hundreds to tens of thousands of songs in your pocket. Then read the second half of my sentence again.
I believe (but can't prove) that the "intuitive interface" claim is a post purchase feel-good explanation given by people who want to explain why they've bought something trendy as anything more than emotional cliquish behavior. "It's obvious," they say. "This interface is objectively and intuitively better than anything else I used. I scoff at the ubiquitous product placement in television shows and movies and all of the PR-planted news stories and those silly iTunes commercials. I have good taste, darn it all!"
Fortunately, you and anyone else can compare the ratio of mentions of clicky wheel versus "You can carry lots of songs in your pocket!" on Apple's own site. I think we can both agree they have thought more about marketing iPods than either of us have.
Let me rephrase then. A warning or admonition that my opinion could be out of date with regard to recent events.... You know, from the Latin cavere, to take caution or to guard. I could have used noto bene, but fewer people understand that.
Want some homework? Go find a hundred iPod owners who don't read Slashdot. Ask them about the alternatives to the iPod and how they decided to buy an iPod instead of another device. If 20% of them even mention the "intuitive interface", I'll admit shock and surprise.
You must have missed the disclaimer on the W3C site that says you can't write an HTML renderer if you've ever used one (for example, to read their specifications).
More people play DVDs than use iPods and iPhones, and DVD menus are by no means consistent.
More people drive cars than use iPods and iPhones, and minor things such as light controls, wiper controls, and parking breaks are not consistent between makes or even models.
You're just parroting the industrial designer's version of the geek fallacy that the best technology always wins. People buy iPods and iPhones because that brand is particularly popular and because music players let you carry thousands of songs in your pocket.
For a direct replacement, probably Cairo, though plenty of projects seem to get by with the Gtk or QT primitives, if they don't use SVG or PNG libraries.
I seem to recall he's said that multiple times over the past decade, and my impression is that he eventually came back and said "All we need to do is rewrite a few pieces from scratch, and then we can release!" That's no skin off of my nose, but I'll take the software more seriously when it has something closer to a regular release cycle.
He did a lot of work on imlib2, which languished for years until better software replaced it (where "better" might mean "less buggy" or "released more frequently" or "appears maintained"). I've never thought that he had much interest in releasing stable versions of his code with any frequency or rhythm. That's not the sole criterion for positive notoriety, but releasing software that people can actually use is important.
(One caveat is that I stopped using Enlightenment a decade ago, around E14, because the new versions weren't stable or releasable.)
I just browsed the Tamarin mailing list, status reports, and commit logs. Adobe employees seem to do at least half of the work, but that's less than all of the work you'd do if you hadn't donated the code.
It's pretty simple, actually. Which existing VM, if any, is sufficiently free that we can distribute it under the Artistic License, is sufficiently dynamic that we don't have to build our own method dispatch system on top of it, is sufficiently portable that it builds and runs on most of the platforms that Perl 5 does, is sufficiently hackable that we can attract enough developers to produce Perl 6, and is sufficiently open to changes required to run Perl 6 effectively?
In 2001, the answer was... not much. In 2006 or perhaps 2005, LLVM might have been a sufficiently attractive option.
I know! The epistemological/ontological gyrations required to argue that Perl 6 is vaporware make my head hurt too.
You're welcome to download any of the 20 previous monthly Parrot releases and write and run Perl 6 code with them, though we've only had a binary called perl6 for the past nine or ten.
XNU is a variant of BSD?
Guido's been talking about Python 3000 for at least five years now; I talked to him about it in 2003, and he'd been talking about it for a while before that. That's not much younger than Perl 6.
You made a hasty generalization. I dismiss all "It's hard to read!" criticisms from people who don't know the language.
I think you believe they're "unclear and ugly" because you know don't know Perl 6, in the same way I have trouble understanding Stanislaw Lem's Solaris because I don't even know the Cyrillic alphabet. Your original post jumped around between "I find advanced Perl 6 constructs difficult to read despite never having programmed in the language" and "My Ruby code is more readable than my Perl 5 code", so I may have missed your point.
Why? Neither one is out in a "final release", as the grandparent post suggested. If that's what it takes to make a language worth looking at for the grandparent poster, the comparison is apt.
So is Ruby 2, Jython 2.6, Python 3, PHP 6, GHC 6.10, C# 3, Java 7....
Here are some random phrases from Gravity's Rainbow, one of the finest works of 20th Century English literature.
crimson, hot, squeak-stockinged slavegirl "gam"
a woman or an entente of nations
You can keep Der Bingle too a- And that darn "bu-bu-bu-boo"
allowing the cosmic Serpent, in the violent splendor of its scales, shining that is definitely not human, to pass
Thus, English is also unmaintainable and Pynchon is a terrible hack, at least when you take random bits and phrases out of context.
Why not? It has lambdas, dynamic scoping, lexical scoping, and closures. It lacks homoiconicity, but so do OCaml and ML and Haskell. It doesn't forbid mutable global state, but neither does CL, and a lot of people believe that CL supports functional programming fairly well.
Why would anyone trust TIOBE's results? They don't reveal their research methods, and no one has been able to reproduce their findings. That's not good science. That's push polling without the telephone.
You can count on almost every 5.001 program working on 5.10, however.
There will be another combined stable release of Parrot and Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot) next Tuesday. We release a new stable version every month, just as we've done for the past 20 months.
Either the battery in your iPun or the motherboard in my MetaPun Pro has gone out!
Macholm Syndrome?
That, my friend, is a false dilemma. It's software. You can change it. You can configure it. Even if the default boot is a fast boot with ext3 compiled in and expecting to mount only local filesystems, no one is going to remove the option of changing mountpoints or loading other kernel modules.
You may not be able to boot in five seconds, but we're talking about better defaults for most people.
Linux runs many embedded devices; some of them may wish to boot quickly.