In 1989, UIs were designed so that it was easy to tell which controls were what.
They were standardized in that every button looked a certain way, every input box looked a certain way, etc. Even without shading, that's good enough to indicate to the eye what is what after a short learning curve.
I suppose IF the flat look were standardized, then it wouldn't be as annoying, but every web "designer" has to be a Picasso and make theirs "special". It's all flat and all differently flat.
Aesthetically, all-flat is also boring, in my opinion. I bet in a year or two everyone will get tired of it also and shading will come back; but in what shape or style, who knows. Maybe buttons will look like plush pillows with fabric; that hasn't been used before en-mass. Should I pre-patent the Cushion UI to profit off it?
Here's some advice, kid: Most jobs are BS jobs. Humans are highly illogical and don't care to factor the world to be efficient, simple, and stable. Dilbert is the Bible of the work world.
(Begin Rant) Example: I was 4x more efficient with desktop tools of the 90's, and then the web came along which bleeped up the normal flow of applications, and even later when the flow improved somewhat, the "in style" UI's kept changing, and with all the different browser brands and versions, one has to test on roughly 50 different devices or equivalent to make sure it works, and it will still break 2 years later when a new browser version comes out.
I bet 2/3 of all programmers would be fired if UI standards were done logically and didn't chase fads. Fat clients have failed unless measured as job security. Move the render and layout engines onto servers and let clients be dumb vector plotters so that one is dealing with ONE render engine instead of FIFTY for pete's sake.
It felt GOOD being productive back in the days: I focused on business (domain) logic and the UI was a minor concern. Now the UI wastes all my time in Fiddleville. It pays the bills but playing UI whack-a-mole gets old. It was more enjoyable to solve real problems instead problems invented by F'd up standards and eye candy fads because the stupid kids have to be re-hip differently every year.
The GUI standards of the mid 90's were perfectly fine. You fixed what wasn't broke. Familiar menus are gone, replaced with screwy slidy icons that are placed seemingly randomly. If there is a logic to them, one has to take LSD to "see" it. Consistency was shot in the head point blank.
F U Humans! Give cockroaches a turn, they can't do worse. One should vote Trump to start the world over, not because he's good.
You don't have to get off my lawn, for it will be raptured soon. The plants will wind up in heaven and the humans in hell because the 11th commandment is Thou Shalt Be Logical; Moses just skipped it because 10 sounded like a nicer number: marketers.
Perhaps, but maybe not a difference maker if both do it. A wash. It's like exaggerating, almost all politicians do it such that it's often not a difference maker.
This is all proponents of Agile ever say..."Your doing it wrong".
Perhaps under the right conditions it can work, but it's difficult to get and maintain those right conditions.
Most organizations are a chaos of re-orgs, management re-shuffling, mergers, splits, etc. such that a "clean" environment is hard to come by.
It's like threading a needle riding a roller coaster. Stability may be asking too much. Come up with methodologies that can tolerate some grit in the gears.
I agree. I cannot wait for that fad to die an ugly painful death. Make the pages longer, that's fine. But not infinity.
I hear it causes ADA lawsuits. I hope so, sue 'em hard!
Similar annoyance points for the "flat" look. You cannot even tell a button is a button, and entry box boundaries are washed out. Shade the fsckers, people! It's not 1989.
are currently in the over-hype cycle. We've been around and round on this on slashdot before, but most of the "justifications" for common usage are due to poor languages in my opinion, especially bad OOP design, and not to an inherent benefit of lambda's.
If you wish to say lambda's provide some decent work-arounds to poor language design, I'll accept that. But to say heavy lambda usage provides significant inherent benefits, I'll challenge it and ask for evidence and use-cases.
I won't dispute there are niches where functional may shine, but that's the case with a lot of IT tools.
...has proven itself for five years. The hard part is convincing executives of the five year rule. Often the benefits only appear in narrow niches or under specific conditions, but it takes a while for the industry to learn when and where.
Also, a lot "fads" are not directly technology fads, but rather obsessions. About 2 years ago our CIO became obsessed with SEO - Search Engine Optimization (Google hits, more or less), and so all kinds of silly games were played with our Internet content and CMS's, including mass repetition.
After a while people realized there was too much content to manage and clean up. That CIO moved on and the new CIO is a minimalist. Big change. SEO did nothing but make a mess.
We were suspicious of it all, but there was nothing we could do at the time but go with the flow. At least bullshit = jobs.
The biggest campaigning error Clinton made was focusing too much on Trump's personal character and not enough countering the "outsiders took your jobs" angle that Trump used.
Automation is a bigger threat to blue-collar jobs than outsiders or allegedly bad trade deals, and her retraining plans were thus more rational.
In the end, people vote their pocket book more than candidate character. The election wasn't about pussy grabbing nor being dodgy with email, but job loss.
Trump made a powerful emotional appeal to turn back the clock, and Clinton needed to hammer home the message that those jobs are NOT coming back and that her retraining plans had a better chance helping jobs.
Algol was amazing for its time, for it was designed in the late 50's yet has most of the procedural features we use and take for granted today, such as nested blocks instead of (just) go to's, and made a distinction between modifiable and read-only parameters (similar to by-ref versus by-value).
I hope that team gets a nice award also.
It was never really a commercial success, but influenced Pascal, Ada, VB, C, and all of C's descendants (Java, JavaScript, Php, C#, etc.)
Perhaps if the licensing were more flexible it would have rivaled COBOL. The team also allegedly didn't pay enough attention to I/O and I/O formatting issues and standards.
I said COBOL was bad for programmers - I never said it was bad.
Quote: "and while COBOL itself was a terrible language the concept of a compiler [was good]..."
And the rest of the tone looks like you are trashing COBOL in general.
"Major breakthrough" and "ahead of [its] time" are not necessarily compliments of COBOL as a language.
The Wright brothers' first airplane was practically junk as far as the utility of an airplane is concerned, but it WAS a "breakthrough" and "ahead of its time". Your characterizing of COBOL seems to resemble this kind of perspective. If you meant differently, I apologize; for I cannot read minds. My interpretation of your words as written is a reasonable interpretation even if that interpretation is not what the author intended.
Your county must be doing something wrong. We also had about 25 items to vote on, but the paper voter card was one card and simple. Here's an example section:
President: - Fred Smith.... [23] __ - Martha Jones [24] __ - Kermit Frog....[25] __
Proposition X: legalization of green pants: - Yes.. [26] __ - No... [27] __
The actual voting card has numbered slots to fill in, like a school "Scan-Tron" test form. If you voted for Kermit, and voted "No" on Proposition X, you'd darken in the corresponding bubble, shown as "O" in Ascii art:
23 (_) 24 (_) 25 (O) 27 (_) 28 (O) Etc...
The card can contain up to about 200 "slots", being it has about 4 columns, if I remember correctly.
A machine could optionally "print" (mark) the card for the voter to make things easy, but otherwise can be manually marked and/or checked by the voter if they want (including mailed in.) The machine counts can then be later verified against the physical cards. You can have the best of both worlds.
(Samples approximate only, due to limits of Ascii art.)
note how operating systems remained in machine code right until the end of the 1960s and nobody tried to write one in a compiled language until
An OS and a domain application are very different animals. Efficiency and memory usage are usually a much bigger relative factor for an OS compared to a domain app. Systems software, like OS's, file systems, drivers, and databases, typically needs to be more "tight" per machine resources. Thus, their code was hand-crafted for a longer period in history.
Cobol. A language that remains universally hated by programmers, second only to BASIC...
COBOL wouldn't have survived this long if it were as bad as you say. For one, it has a lot of built-in features that directly address its domain of business, accounting, inventory, and finance; and some slick ways to process fields (columns) as named groups and sub-groups. Modern languages are still awkward at this, or at least don't do it in a standardized way.
If you had to code all those business/financial idioms from scratch, it would indeed suck to use COBOL, but you don't have to because much is already built in. And the fact that it's built in means it's more consistent between shops and programmers. They don't have to relearn the wheel as staff moves in and out. The "cowboy coder" types will hate that, but businesses prefer plug-and-play IT staff.
Hopper was clearly trying for userfriendliness
I would note that Grace did not directly create COBOL. It was designed by a committee who used Grace's existing language as a key design reference. Experimental languages from others also influenced COBOL.
Do you mean end-user, or more "English like"? She indeed was striving for a more "natural" language of programming than machine/assembler language. And it was a factor in companies deciding to use COBOL versus machine/assembler language. But, cross-machine portability was the bigger factor TO THEM. Organizations of the time didn't see naturalness of the programming language as a significant issue, but porting between machines WAS a big practical problem.
And of course software vendors didn't want to re-code the same application for different machines. A compiler meant they only had to code it once, and then re-compile it for different machine brands. They have more customers per code base with compilers.
And if you are going to make a cross-machine language, you might as well make it more natural than assembler, so the committee looked around for working examples, and Grace's language was one of the better of the time.
Many criticized the idea compilers at the time for "dumbing down programming", fearing loss of understanding about the guts. Thus, the idea kind of languished until organizations realized they had to rewrite all their code for different brands or later models. The idea of a machine-agnostic middle language then became financially appealing to reduce recoding.
Thus, it wasn't really the alleged human-friendly angle that made compilers marketable, but the portability of the code.
Actually a lot of Trump voters agree he has an erratic personality. He's largely a protest vote: fix the system and pay attention to middle America or we'll spank both parties via a raging nut.
It's the adult version of "either you both share nicely or I'll flush the toy."
Let me try to say it again some other way. IN PRACTICE most either don't know about or won't use that feature. Whether they "can" is moot here. There is only one of you to show the whole world. Nobody else gives a fudge (so far).
How do you walk back something you've given different answers for? He waffled heavily on the campaign trail also. He is consistently inconsistent. We shouldn't be surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
They were standardized in that every button looked a certain way, every input box looked a certain way, etc. Even without shading, that's good enough to indicate to the eye what is what after a short learning curve.
I suppose IF the flat look were standardized, then it wouldn't be as annoying, but every web "designer" has to be a Picasso and make theirs "special". It's all flat and all differently flat.
Aesthetically, all-flat is also boring, in my opinion. I bet in a year or two everyone will get tired of it also and shading will come back; but in what shape or style, who knows. Maybe buttons will look like plush pillows with fabric; that hasn't been used before en-mass. Should I pre-patent the Cushion UI to profit off it?
Here's some advice, kid: Most jobs are BS jobs. Humans are highly illogical and don't care to factor the world to be efficient, simple, and stable. Dilbert is the Bible of the work world.
(Begin Rant) Example: I was 4x more efficient with desktop tools of the 90's, and then the web came along which bleeped up the normal flow of applications, and even later when the flow improved somewhat, the "in style" UI's kept changing, and with all the different browser brands and versions, one has to test on roughly 50 different devices or equivalent to make sure it works, and it will still break 2 years later when a new browser version comes out.
I bet 2/3 of all programmers would be fired if UI standards were done logically and didn't chase fads. Fat clients have failed unless measured as job security. Move the render and layout engines onto servers and let clients be dumb vector plotters so that one is dealing with ONE render engine instead of FIFTY for pete's sake.
It felt GOOD being productive back in the days: I focused on business (domain) logic and the UI was a minor concern. Now the UI wastes all my time in Fiddleville. It pays the bills but playing UI whack-a-mole gets old. It was more enjoyable to solve real problems instead problems invented by F'd up standards and eye candy fads because the stupid kids have to be re-hip differently every year.
The GUI standards of the mid 90's were perfectly fine. You fixed what wasn't broke. Familiar menus are gone, replaced with screwy slidy icons that are placed seemingly randomly. If there is a logic to them, one has to take LSD to "see" it. Consistency was shot in the head point blank.
F U Humans! Give cockroaches a turn, they can't do worse. One should vote Trump to start the world over, not because he's good.
You don't have to get off my lawn, for it will be raptured soon. The plants will wind up in heaven and the humans in hell because the 11th commandment is Thou Shalt Be Logical; Moses just skipped it because 10 sounded like a nicer number: marketers.
Perhaps, but maybe not a difference maker if both do it. A wash. It's like exaggerating, almost all politicians do it such that it's often not a difference maker.
Perhaps under the right conditions it can work, but it's difficult to get and maintain those right conditions.
Most organizations are a chaos of re-orgs, management re-shuffling, mergers, splits, etc. such that a "clean" environment is hard to come by.
It's like threading a needle riding a roller coaster. Stability may be asking too much. Come up with methodologies that can tolerate some grit in the gears.
I agree. I cannot wait for that fad to die an ugly painful death. Make the pages longer, that's fine. But not infinity.
I hear it causes ADA lawsuits. I hope so, sue 'em hard!
Similar annoyance points for the "flat" look. You cannot even tell a button is a button, and entry box boundaries are washed out. Shade the fsckers, people! It's not 1989.
are currently in the over-hype cycle. We've been around and round on this on slashdot before, but most of the "justifications" for common usage are due to poor languages in my opinion, especially bad OOP design, and not to an inherent benefit of lambda's.
If you wish to say lambda's provide some decent work-arounds to poor language design, I'll accept that. But to say heavy lambda usage provides significant inherent benefits, I'll challenge it and ask for evidence and use-cases.
I won't dispute there are niches where functional may shine, but that's the case with a lot of IT tools.
...has proven itself for five years. The hard part is convincing executives of the five year rule. Often the benefits only appear in narrow niches or under specific conditions, but it takes a while for the industry to learn when and where.
Also, a lot "fads" are not directly technology fads, but rather obsessions. About 2 years ago our CIO became obsessed with SEO - Search Engine Optimization (Google hits, more or less), and so all kinds of silly games were played with our Internet content and CMS's, including mass repetition.
After a while people realized there was too much content to manage and clean up. That CIO moved on and the new CIO is a minimalist. Big change. SEO did nothing but make a mess.
We were suspicious of it all, but there was nothing we could do at the time but go with the flow. At least bullshit = jobs.
Trump attacked women, Muslims, Mexicans, short people, fat people, crippled people, etc. Thus, your logic fails here.
Rise by hacking, fall by hacking. Suckit Rump!
It's available because Putin is finished using it.
The biggest campaigning error Clinton made was focusing too much on Trump's personal character and not enough countering the "outsiders took your jobs" angle that Trump used.
Automation is a bigger threat to blue-collar jobs than outsiders or allegedly bad trade deals, and her retraining plans were thus more rational.
In the end, people vote their pocket book more than candidate character. The election wasn't about pussy grabbing nor being dodgy with email, but job loss.
Trump made a powerful emotional appeal to turn back the clock, and Clinton needed to hammer home the message that those jobs are NOT coming back and that her retraining plans had a better chance helping jobs.
Didn't saccharin allegedly cause cancer?
Putin watered down the results
"Make America Great Again" caps.
No, they'll get gov't handouts, yet STILL complain about "Big Gov't"
You anonymous cowards are all alike.
Algol was amazing for its time, for it was designed in the late 50's yet has most of the procedural features we use and take for granted today, such as nested blocks instead of (just) go to's, and made a distinction between modifiable and read-only parameters (similar to by-ref versus by-value).
I hope that team gets a nice award also.
It was never really a commercial success, but influenced Pascal, Ada, VB, C, and all of C's descendants (Java, JavaScript, Php, C#, etc.)
Perhaps if the licensing were more flexible it would have rivaled COBOL. The team also allegedly didn't pay enough attention to I/O and I/O formatting issues and standards.
Quote: "and while COBOL itself was a terrible language the concept of a compiler [was good]..."
And the rest of the tone looks like you are trashing COBOL in general.
"Major breakthrough" and "ahead of [its] time" are not necessarily compliments of COBOL as a language.
The Wright brothers' first airplane was practically junk as far as the utility of an airplane is concerned, but it WAS a "breakthrough" and "ahead of its time". Your characterizing of COBOL seems to resemble this kind of perspective. If you meant differently, I apologize; for I cannot read minds. My interpretation of your words as written is a reasonable interpretation even if that interpretation is not what the author intended.
Your county must be doing something wrong. We also had about 25 items to vote on, but the paper voter card was one card and simple. Here's an example section:
President:
- Fred Smith.... [23] __
- Martha Jones [24] __
- Kermit Frog....[25] __
Proposition X: legalization of green pants:
- Yes.. [26] __
- No... [27] __
The actual voting card has numbered slots to fill in, like a school "Scan-Tron" test form. If you voted for Kermit, and voted "No" on Proposition X, you'd darken in the corresponding bubble, shown as "O" in Ascii art:
23 (_)
24 (_)
25 (O)
27 (_)
28 (O)
Etc...
The card can contain up to about 200 "slots", being it has about 4 columns, if I remember correctly.
A machine could optionally "print" (mark) the card for the voter to make things easy, but otherwise can be manually marked and/or checked by the voter if they want (including mailed in.) The machine counts can then be later verified against the physical cards. You can have the best of both worlds.
(Samples approximate only, due to limits of Ascii art.)
An OS and a domain application are very different animals. Efficiency and memory usage are usually a much bigger relative factor for an OS compared to a domain app. Systems software, like OS's, file systems, drivers, and databases, typically needs to be more "tight" per machine resources. Thus, their code was hand-crafted for a longer period in history.
COBOL wouldn't have survived this long if it were as bad as you say. For one, it has a lot of built-in features that directly address its domain of business, accounting, inventory, and finance; and some slick ways to process fields (columns) as named groups and sub-groups. Modern languages are still awkward at this, or at least don't do it in a standardized way.
If you had to code all those business/financial idioms from scratch, it would indeed suck to use COBOL, but you don't have to because much is already built in. And the fact that it's built in means it's more consistent between shops and programmers. They don't have to relearn the wheel as staff moves in and out. The "cowboy coder" types will hate that, but businesses prefer plug-and-play IT staff.
I would note that Grace did not directly create COBOL. It was designed by a committee who used Grace's existing language as a key design reference. Experimental languages from others also influenced COBOL.
Do you mean end-user, or more "English like"? She indeed was striving for a more "natural" language of programming than machine/assembler language. And it was a factor in companies deciding to use COBOL versus machine/assembler language. But, cross-machine portability was the bigger factor TO THEM. Organizations of the time didn't see naturalness of the programming language as a significant issue, but porting between machines WAS a big practical problem.
And of course software vendors didn't want to re-code the same application for different machines. A compiler meant they only had to code it once, and then re-compile it for different machine brands. They have more customers per code base with compilers.
And if you are going to make a cross-machine language, you might as well make it more natural than assembler, so the committee looked around for working examples, and Grace's language was one of the better of the time.
Many criticized the idea compilers at the time for "dumbing down programming", fearing loss of understanding about the guts. Thus, the idea kind of languished until organizations realized they had to rewrite all their code for different brands or later models. The idea of a machine-agnostic middle language then became financially appealing to reduce recoding.
Thus, it wasn't really the alleged human-friendly angle that made compilers marketable, but the portability of the code.
Actually a lot of Trump voters agree he has an erratic personality. He's largely a protest vote: fix the system and pay attention to middle America or we'll spank both parties via a raging nut.
It's the adult version of "either you both share nicely or I'll flush the toy."
Let me try to say it again some other way. IN PRACTICE most either don't know about or won't use that feature. Whether they "can" is moot here. There is only one of you to show the whole world. Nobody else gives a fudge (so far).
Yes, he masterfully trolled BOTH parties. We get to witness the Rembrandt of Trolling in action. No comparable president in US history.
How do you walk back something you've given different answers for? He waffled heavily on the campaign trail also. He is consistently inconsistent. We shouldn't be surprised.