I'm a developer and deeply grateful that running the network is somebody else's job given that I can't even seem to figure out what in a windows 7 reinstall/re-update has completely nuked my wireless connectivity on my silly little home network. Never assume the other guy's job is easy. Even if you know a thing or two about how to DIY.
It's kind of like saying "What part of electricity gets light to the most in need?" Money is just an abstraction of value and a device for distributing it. Fairness isn't its job. If it was more challenging to screw the little guy in the barter system, that's only because everything is more challenging in a barter system and while I'm no great scholar of the history of barter, I'm pretty sure they still screwed the little guy when there wasn't money. Socialism and communism haven't prevented the screwing of the little guy. Fear of Hell hasn't stopped the screwing of the little guy. The information age has really just made the screwing of the little guy considerably more efficient.
At some fucking point, we have to evolve beyond this BS but it hasn't happened yet and trying to blame it on money is ultimately dodging culpability for the real problem which is us. Let's take Gene Roddenberry screwing over Alexander Courage for instance:
That's the guy who famously believed money was the root of all evil and dared imagine a world without it. But was the problem really money or was it that he was an asshole? In a Star Trek world he could have just as easily stolen credit for doing the work. There's always something of value to steal or threaten to get what you want or to get people to give you what you want. Taking money away doesn't change that.
You're strapped for resources, often faced with uncomfortable dilemmas and never know what you're going to run into next. In BSG it was always Cylons. Or drama. Or new revelations leading to a sinking feeling that as awesome as the first season was, there was never a !@#$ing plan.
I would actually disagree with the statement that it's paradigm free. While I respect C# as a feat of language design, one thing I don't like about its implementation of every language feature it can get its hands on is that it doesn't have a very strong opinion and there's just a crap-ton of syntax you have to learn as you work with it (although given the alternative I'd rather have first-class funcs in any language at the expense of bonus syntax). JS encourages OOP and functional used together and has strived to do a lot with a little syntax. Strictly imperative isn't really possible if you're using it for web UI as much of the DOM relies on event handlers and you can't really escape the topics of closure or OOP when you start doing non-trivial stuff from there. Functions can be classes or methods or in many cases both.
That's the default behavior in a language that can mix numbers and strings and then convert them to match dynamically for purposes of comparison in the same array, yes. Not a very hard problem to solve:
[10,1,5].sort(sortNumeric);
function sortNumeric(a,b){ return a-b; }
So what you in ignorance thought was a flaw is actually a demonstration of one of JS's most powerful features. We've been writing functional code long before F# showed up.
That book is written by a guy with a love/hate relationship with JavaScript. I do much appreciate Doug's contributions in regards to Monkey Island and JSON but beyond that I wish he'd just butt out of the vast majority of JS conversations given some of the truly inane stuff he's said about it.
I'm sorry, but the whining in this industry is getting pretty epic. Learn the !@#$ing tool. It's not Java or C#. You CAN write maintainable code without static types. JS and Python devs have been doing it for some time now. And believe you me, it would really help C# and Java devs with their primary languages if they learned how to.
For cross-platform desktop OS apps with node handling the file I/O and JS and web technology handling all UI concerns inside a window. Only the Python community does cross-platform as well, IMO.
Speaking as a JS dev who's had to put with some pretty ugly Java, I'd be happy if the average Java developer would content themselves with simply actually understanding what OOP is supposed to do for them rather than assuming that the 18-method-calls-to-retrieve-some-static-data-for-a-basic-web-service mess they've made is actually OOP just because it's all wrapped in classes by default.
I don't know about you but I won't be trusting anybody to maintain their down-compiler as JS continues to evolve. That would be short-sighted to say the least.
You sound very threatened. Like those Java devs (not all Java devs, but I've run into lot of these guys) that they've been producing by the metric ton for about oh, twenty years (or decades if you wish) who deeply resent having to learn anything new after graduation. As any JS dev can tell you, that's a really bad hangup to have in web technology, which I'm sorry to report to you has started to touch on just about everything.
You really don't need a compiler or static types to write decent maintainable code and believe me, I've seen enough Java and C# code bases from hell to tell you that they certainly don't protect from writing complete procedural spaghetti horseshit wrapped in meaningless classes either. If people would just be bothered to understand what the whole point of OOP was in the first place, they wouldn't sweat the lack of a compiler when doing anything non-trivial in a different style of execution environment.
Have you ever learned a lisp-like language or gotten very far with C#'s first class functions? If you haven't, give those a whirl and then come back to JS and stop throwing tantrums every time it doesn't behave like Java or C or C++ just because it looks like them.
I'm anti-death penalty but if it came down to post-apocalyptic/frontier justice brass tacks I would have no problem killing somebody if I could be certain they murdered another human being in cold blood. And that's more about being able to sleep at night knowing that dude's not potentially escaping and finding new victims than justice or vengeance. For me, being anti-death penalty is about having no way to be certain and way too many guys being proven innocent that were on death row when DNA evidence became admissible.
But still, I'd be willing to make exceptions. If somebody kills an entire boyscout troop, there's DNA evidence, it happened while they were trying to get their photography merit badges and each and every one of them caught the guy on camera as he was murdering them at a different angle... yeah... maybe we can allow the death penalty on that one. Well, not really. It wouldn't be legally feasible but I'd personally be okay with it.
Ha!. There's no JesusDay, but there is a Thor's day. And Tyr's/Tues day and an Odin's/Wotan's/wednes day and Freia's/Fri day. It's my favorite topic of discussion when some Christian tells me they've eliminated pagan influences from their family lives by telling their kids there's no such thing as Santa Claus. !@#$ing dicks.
For anything not on the client-side, I would look into C-bindings via V8 (and of course Node which is just V8 + a small library basically). I love JavaScript and will defend it vigorously but number/math-intensive code is not something it's strong at yet. That's in the works but even when it's introduced we still have to wait for old versions of IE to die off (which is fortunately happening at a faster rate than it used to). Otherwise JS is peformance enough to be competitive with any other multipurpose language IMO but I do love having the C/C++ option for operation-intensive performance + JS handling higher level archite
But don't kid yourself. Skilled client-side engineers care A LOT about performance. There is a lot of craft that goes into manipulating the DOM well and I'd say any JS engineer that had to deal with IE6/7 or below knows a lot more about the value of work avoidance than your typical Java or C# dev at the median level who tend to put out awful performance on the back-end in spite of all the perf advantages that are supposedly available to them.
People from outside of JS get way too obsessed with its lack of a type system, IMO. The values a dynamically typed language trains you to take seriously (things like DRY and the value of encapsulation to avoid having too many hands on the same sets of data) very much transfer in value to statically typed languages as well, but with IDEs and "type safety" programmers seem to lack the incentive to learn them well, at least judging from the vast majority of server-side code that I've observed and debugged.
But yeah, if you need computation-intensive number-oriented code, JS blows for anything non-trivial. I won't deny that.
How computers work hasn't actually changed that much. I'm a JavaScript programmer. I find it valuable to have a clue about assembly language. It gives me a better idea of what sorts of things are more likely to be heavily optimized when dropped into these modern JIT's for instance.
But on the flip-side of that, yes, there are higher level concepts that weren't born of nothing. OOP got popular for all the crap-tacular C that's been written by all the old hands out there. Sadly, that resulted in the same types of people writing crap-tacular OOP and adding getters/setters a super-class and interface to absolutely everything (*facepalm).
The fact of the matter is, it's very easy to make that soporophic 70 grand a year with only the slightest clue as to what you're doing with an IDE and one language. There will always be people who confuse programming with any other job where after college, you can get away with barely learning anything new over the course of an entire year. Truly actively self-teaching programmers are rare and will become more so the more the barrier to entry is lowered for people who don't want to learn and are making a mostly-doomed career choice for themselves because they like the years of college to starting salary ratio.
Slashdot Mirror
Ashamed of "I'm the man?" Why do you hate freedom?
You sound like a real peach to work for/with. If technology wasn't 50% screwups and botched design, we wouldn't need sys admins.
I'm a developer and deeply grateful that running the network is somebody else's job given that I can't even seem to figure out what in a windows 7 reinstall/re-update has completely nuked my wireless connectivity on my silly little home network. Never assume the other guy's job is easy. Even if you know a thing or two about how to DIY.
They'll add so many new features nobody needed to Word it will still take as long to load a doc as it did in Window '95 and now takes in Win 8.
I think all we really need is a deep husky-voiced man's voice that tells women what they just did was "delicious."
It's kind of like saying "What part of electricity gets light to the most in need?" Money is just an abstraction of value and a device for distributing it. Fairness isn't its job. If it was more challenging to screw the little guy in the barter system, that's only because everything is more challenging in a barter system and while I'm no great scholar of the history of barter, I'm pretty sure they still screwed the little guy when there wasn't money. Socialism and communism haven't prevented the screwing of the little guy. Fear of Hell hasn't stopped the screwing of the little guy. The information age has really just made the screwing of the little guy considerably more efficient.
At some fucking point, we have to evolve beyond this BS but it hasn't happened yet and trying to blame it on money is ultimately dodging culpability for the real problem which is us. Let's take Gene Roddenberry screwing over Alexander Courage for instance:
http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/...
That's the guy who famously believed money was the root of all evil and dared imagine a world without it. But was the problem really money or was it that he was an asshole? In a Star Trek world he could have just as easily stolen credit for doing the work. There's always something of value to steal or threaten to get what you want or to get people to give you what you want. Taking money away doesn't change that.
You're strapped for resources, often faced with uncomfortable dilemmas and never know what you're going to run into next. In BSG it was always Cylons. Or drama. Or new revelations leading to a sinking feeling that as awesome as the first season was, there was never a !@#$ing plan.
Or would it track you all the way to the gun store and back?
I would actually disagree with the statement that it's paradigm free. While I respect C# as a feat of language design, one thing I don't like about its implementation of every language feature it can get its hands on is that it doesn't have a very strong opinion and there's just a crap-ton of syntax you have to learn as you work with it (although given the alternative I'd rather have first-class funcs in any language at the expense of bonus syntax). JS encourages OOP and functional used together and has strived to do a lot with a little syntax. Strictly imperative isn't really possible if you're using it for web UI as much of the DOM relies on event handlers and you can't really escape the topics of closure or OOP when you start doing non-trivial stuff from there. Functions can be classes or methods or in many cases both.
That's the default behavior in a language that can mix numbers and strings and then convert them to match dynamically for purposes of comparison in the same array, yes. Not a very hard problem to solve:
[10,1,5].sort(sortNumeric);
function sortNumeric(a,b){ return a-b; }
So what you in ignorance thought was a flaw is actually a demonstration of one of JS's most powerful features. We've been writing functional code long before F# showed up.
How, beyond syntax is JS C-like?
You think type checking is more complicated than dynamic?
That book is written by a guy with a love/hate relationship with JavaScript. I do much appreciate Doug's contributions in regards to Monkey Island and JSON but beyond that I wish he'd just butt out of the vast majority of JS conversations given some of the truly inane stuff he's said about it.
I'm sorry, but the whining in this industry is getting pretty epic. Learn the !@#$ing tool. It's not Java or C#. You CAN write maintainable code without static types. JS and Python devs have been doing it for some time now. And believe you me, it would really help C# and Java devs with their primary languages if they learned how to.
For cross-platform desktop OS apps with node handling the file I/O and JS and web technology handling all UI concerns inside a window. Only the Python community does cross-platform as well, IMO.
Speaking as a JS dev who's had to put with some pretty ugly Java, I'd be happy if the average Java developer would content themselves with simply actually understanding what OOP is supposed to do for them rather than assuming that the 18-method-calls-to-retrieve-some-static-data-for-a-basic-web-service mess they've made is actually OOP just because it's all wrapped in classes by default.
I don't know about you but I won't be trusting anybody to maintain their down-compiler as JS continues to evolve. That would be short-sighted to say the least.
You sound very threatened. Like those Java devs (not all Java devs, but I've run into lot of these guys) that they've been producing by the metric ton for about oh, twenty years (or decades if you wish) who deeply resent having to learn anything new after graduation. As any JS dev can tell you, that's a really bad hangup to have in web technology, which I'm sorry to report to you has started to touch on just about everything.
You really don't need a compiler or static types to write decent maintainable code and believe me, I've seen enough Java and C# code bases from hell to tell you that they certainly don't protect from writing complete procedural spaghetti horseshit wrapped in meaningless classes either. If people would just be bothered to understand what the whole point of OOP was in the first place, they wouldn't sweat the lack of a compiler when doing anything non-trivial in a different style of execution environment.
Have you ever learned a lisp-like language or gotten very far with C#'s first class functions? If you haven't, give those a whirl and then come back to JS and stop throwing tantrums every time it doesn't behave like Java or C or C++ just because it looks like them.
I'm anti-death penalty but if it came down to post-apocalyptic/frontier justice brass tacks I would have no problem killing somebody if I could be certain they murdered another human being in cold blood. And that's more about being able to sleep at night knowing that dude's not potentially escaping and finding new victims than justice or vengeance. For me, being anti-death penalty is about having no way to be certain and way too many guys being proven innocent that were on death row when DNA evidence became admissible.
But still, I'd be willing to make exceptions. If somebody kills an entire boyscout troop, there's DNA evidence, it happened while they were trying to get their photography merit badges and each and every one of them caught the guy on camera as he was murdering them at a different angle... yeah... maybe we can allow the death penalty on that one. Well, not really. It wouldn't be legally feasible but I'd personally be okay with it.
Ha!. There's no JesusDay, but there is a Thor's day. And Tyr's/Tues day and an Odin's/Wotan's/wednes day and Freia's/Fri day. It's my favorite topic of discussion when some Christian tells me they've eliminated pagan influences from their family lives by telling their kids there's no such thing as Santa Claus. !@#$ing dicks.
It's no more complicated than keeping the web secure and we're aces at that, right?
These jackasses can't even seem to figure out what I do for a living from my LinkedIn profile. Keyword spamming asshats.
For anything not on the client-side, I would look into C-bindings via V8 (and of course Node which is just V8 + a small library basically). I love JavaScript and will defend it vigorously but number/math-intensive code is not something it's strong at yet. That's in the works but even when it's introduced we still have to wait for old versions of IE to die off (which is fortunately happening at a faster rate than it used to). Otherwise JS is peformance enough to be competitive with any other multipurpose language IMO but I do love having the C/C++ option for operation-intensive performance + JS handling higher level archite
But don't kid yourself. Skilled client-side engineers care A LOT about performance. There is a lot of craft that goes into manipulating the DOM well and I'd say any JS engineer that had to deal with IE6/7 or below knows a lot more about the value of work avoidance than your typical Java or C# dev at the median level who tend to put out awful performance on the back-end in spite of all the perf advantages that are supposedly available to them.
People from outside of JS get way too obsessed with its lack of a type system, IMO. The values a dynamically typed language trains you to take seriously (things like DRY and the value of encapsulation to avoid having too many hands on the same sets of data) very much transfer in value to statically typed languages as well, but with IDEs and "type safety" programmers seem to lack the incentive to learn them well, at least judging from the vast majority of server-side code that I've observed and debugged.
But yeah, if you need computation-intensive number-oriented code, JS blows for anything non-trivial. I won't deny that.
How computers work hasn't actually changed that much. I'm a JavaScript programmer. I find it valuable to have a clue about assembly language. It gives me a better idea of what sorts of things are more likely to be heavily optimized when dropped into these modern JIT's for instance.
But on the flip-side of that, yes, there are higher level concepts that weren't born of nothing. OOP got popular for all the crap-tacular C that's been written by all the old hands out there. Sadly, that resulted in the same types of people writing crap-tacular OOP and adding getters/setters a super-class and interface to absolutely everything (*facepalm).
The fact of the matter is, it's very easy to make that soporophic 70 grand a year with only the slightest clue as to what you're doing with an IDE and one language. There will always be people who confuse programming with any other job where after college, you can get away with barely learning anything new over the course of an entire year. Truly actively self-teaching programmers are rare and will become more so the more the barrier to entry is lowered for people who don't want to learn and are making a mostly-doomed career choice for themselves because they like the years of college to starting salary ratio.
Yeah and we're constantly making gross over-generalizations about people too.