Tools like DBIx::Class is unparalleled in any language, and combining with Moose gives nice syntax and extreme robustness and reliability in code.
To give an idea of what I'm talking about, DBIx::Class has a great idea of being able to "chain" result sets from the database. So, if you have a query, you can (on the fly) modify that query by adding additional filtering or even joining and prefetching.
But, to give an easy and stereotypical example, writing lisp-style functional/recursive code in C is a royal pain in the arse (function pointers are not friendly things to work with), while writing procedural code in lisp sucks to no end as well (its standard looping facilities being several kinds of bad all at once).
Huh? Lisp, qua Lisp, doesn't have standard looping facilities. Most practical Lisps, like Common Lisp and Scheme, tend to have much better standard looping facilities than C (Common Lisp has "loop", Scheme has "do"). Writing procedural code, looping included, in practical Lisps like Scheme or CL is, IME, at worst no worse than doing it in C.
The quality of a piece of software has no bearing on the license it's released under. There are enough quality BSD/MIT bits out there (and enough crappy GPL ones) to dispel that myth.
Yeah, I mean, consider OSS databases. You've got (just to name a few popular ones) SQLite (public domain!), Postgres (BSD-style), and MySQL (GPL). While they have different focuses, I think that that trio makes it pretty clear that quality isn't simply a function of licensing model.
Besides CPAN, Perl was one of the first languages to integrate advanced data structures - lists and hashes - directly into language itself. And not some half-assed implementation - e.g. C++'s STL or Lisp' lists - but really really good implementation, supported by many standard functions and (most importantly) internal optimizer.
Is this a joke? Most Lisps have quite an impressive array of standard functions for dealing with Lisps, which are the languages primary data structure, including functions for using lists as associative arrays.
Further, quite a lot of languages have language-level support for lists and mappings (whether the latter is implemented as hash-tables or not), including many that are much earlier than Perl. Whether implementations of those languages optimize those structures is another issue, but optimizers are an implementation feature, not a language feature, in general.
As noted by many Perl fans (like I am) you do not write in Perl - you think in Perl. It is language without any artificial barriers between you and resources you need to accomplish your task.
This is nice fluff, but what is it supposed to mean, other than the fact that, as with any language, if you use it enough it shapes your thought process so that its natural to use it more?
Um, no. Laws creating additional criminal offenses create more criminal offenses, by definition, but plenty of laws don't create any criminal offenses -- many laws aren't criminal laws after all. New criminal laws may reduce the number of criminal offenses, or may simply change (either expanding or contracting) the definition of, defenses to, or punishment for existing criminal offenses.
And, of course, whatever laws do to the number of criminal offenses has no necessary relation to the crime rate.
No, I meant exactly what I said; there is a reason that the words "essentially" and "economy" were in the sentence instead of "literally" and "country", respectively. Yes, it was a second-world country, but the second-world category was itself more about politics than economics.
Right, because people believing in Jesus & the biblical creation story is totally a new trend.
Neither of the mutually irreconcilable biblical creation stories mention dinosaurs, churches, or Adam & Eve physically coexisting with Jesus, so your statement would appear to not be particularly on point with regard to GP's post.
The USA defeated the communist Soviet Union by outspending them in the specific industry of aerospace technology.
It would be more accurate to say the USA defated the Soviet Union despite being duped by the latter into spending far more than there was any reason to on aerospace technology (among notable instances, the "bomber gap" stands out), but its really not all that surprising that by far the richest country in the world was able to win what was essentially a "spend money until your country collapses" contest with what was, essentially, a large third-world economy.
What lame-brain dummy would think that either:-( or;-) are trademarkable symbols??? They both originated circa 1980 and therefore are public domain.
Trademark isn't patent or copyright, and origin is of comparatively little concern. Colors have been trademarked. A trademark is not universal, it limits, mostly, promotional use of the mark in a specific domain of trade (hence, "trademark"), the protection exists principally to prevent misleading trading that confuses consumers.
Same for watthour. Sure, it has to something with the watts drawn per hour but why should it be so damn confusing?
the unit is not the "watthour" and it has nothing to do with watts drawn per hour. The unit is Watt * hour (the * should actually be the multiplication dot) and it refers to Watts times hours, exactly as the name suggest. If it was Watts drawn per hour (which doesn't make sense, as the Watt is a unit of power, not energy) it would be Watt/hour (or, in common spoken language, "Watts per hour") not Watt * hour (or "Watt-hour" in speech).
But logic programming gets called a paradigm because it's a Turing-complete computational model that's dramatically different from the more familiar ones (Turing machines, lambda calculus). I'm not aware that dynamic dispatch is like that.
Its not, clearly, and so OO languages also fall into one or more other paradigms (frequently imperative, sometimes functional or logic.) You could probably meaningfully describe imperative, functional, and logic as programming paradigms and OOP (data structures + associated methods used via dynamic dispatch) as a really powerful design pattern (or cluster or related design patterns) rather than a programming paradigm in the same sense that functional, imperative, etc. are.
Dynamic dispatch seems the closest thing to a deciding criterion, but that alone seems like an unsatisfying answer, because it describes a technique that can be easily built into a random impure functional language (you can probably implement simple dynamic dispatch in two pages of Scheme code).
You can (at least, I think I've seen it done) implement prolog-style logic programming in a couple pages of Scheme code; the fact that something has a convenient implementation in Scheme hardly means it isn't a valid programming paradigm. It just means Scheme is a powerful tool.
Its a common term for what would, in normal SI parlance, be a "micrometer", because "micron" predates the adoption of the SI system, and "micrometer", in English at least, has a well established meaning referring to a particular kind of measuring device.
Most of Obama's appointments are Clinton retreads or Chicagoland pols. Chu is one of the first appointments that more or less goes with the whole "change" mantra.
Uh, maybe you missed something, but the President of the last 8 years was Bush, not Clinton; Clinton "retreads" are a pretty big change, considering that the last 8 years weren't much like the preceding 8.
Yes, but administrating a group of scientists and grad students is nor the same as running a cabinet level agency.
Administering one of the biggest operations run by the Department of Energy, which also involves briefing Congress on its operations, working to justify its budget, dealing with many of the government, business, and academic stakeholders that the Department deals with, etc., may not be the same thing as running a generic cabinet level agency, but its certainly about as relevant experience as it is possible to get to running the Department of Energy, short of actually having already had that job.
This kind of thing takes different skills.
Skills I think that Chu has demonstrated in his tenure at LBNL. What skills do you think he is lacking, and on what basis do you think that?
With no offense to Steven Chu, this sort of post is why I have to hope his time as the Secretary of Energy goes very poorly. The idea that there is one correct policy and that all we need to do is get a scientist smart enough to tell us what Science says that is come from a gross misunderstand of the nature science.
I think its more likely that Steven Chu was chosen to head the Department of Energy because he is an effective current administrator of a major Department of Energy research facility who, in that role, has done lots of work (including establishing partnership with outside entities) on policy issues that are important to the President-Elect than because the President-Elect views scientists as a mystical priesthood and Chu as the priest most in touch with the deity "Science".
Chu is a Nobel laureate, but he's not just a Nobel laureate.
Yes at one point Chu did science. But now he is an administraitor at one of the biggest labs in the contry.
He's also an active researcher; a Professor of Physics and of Molecular and Cell Biology. So, its more accurate to say that yes, Chu does do science, he is also the chief of one of the biggest labs in the country.
Just because someone is a great scientist does not mean the person is a good administrator or a good politician. The sad truth is that politicians will not care if he has a Nobel Prize and will think nothing of tearing him down for no reason other than they can. Everybody has limitations, and it would be better to get someone who can listen to scientists and engineers and also be a great administrator.
I'm not sure why this was modded "Insightful" -- do you have a clue who Steven Chu is? Because, if so, I'd like to know why you think that he isn't a good administrator that can deal with politicians (the President, Congress, etc.), business leaders, etc., and a person "who can listen to scientists and engineers and also be a great administrator". It is hardly as if winning the Nobel Prize in Physics is inconsistent with also being a competent administrator, and to me his history (most recently, as director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) seems to have plenty of evidence of success as an administrator in roles which require working with scientists, engineers, politicians, etc.
Because I had done algebra, I was able to sit down at a keyboard and use BASIC to number crunch. Using = to assign seemed logical and I had never touched a computer until then.
That "=" means "equals" is taught well before Algebra, and insofar as algebra goes anywhere beyond that, the use of "=" as an assignment operator that can do reassignment to the same variable is contrary to what Algebra teaches, so that's not really something algebra helps with. It seemed logical to me, and I didn't have Algebra until several years after I started using BASIC.
Clearly, if you have taken more math, you'll know how to do more number crunching yourself, and it will be easier to automate that if you learn a programming language. But I don't see any real reason to see Algebra I as a prerequisite to learning programming.
Indeed, the educational world has moved well away from those terms.
Except that, in the real world, it hasn't. As Googling the phrase "gifted and talented education" and perusing the results would demonstrate.
The rest of us recognize the realize the reality that some people are in fact academically gifted and prefer to recognize talent instead of trying as hard as possible to homogenize it.
You know, your attempt to portray "the rest of us" as superior to the people actually in the field in question would be more successful if it wasn't entirely based on a completely false statement about the field being discussed.
you are so wrong on believing that teaching programming is easier with a real language.
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion, though nothing in your post says much about how using UML would be any better, even if all of your claims were true, except a little handwaving in your last sentence.
The reason being there are many pitfalls people tend to get into while using a real language to start off. The biggest of all is transition between procedure oriented programming and object oriented programming.
I don't think that the transition between structured imperative programming and object-oriented (but still imperative) programming is bigger than the transition between unstructured imperative programming and structured imperative programming or between any kind of imperative programming and any kind of declarative (functional, logic, etc.) programming. So, I'd have to disagree that that is the biggest paradigm transition pitfall of them all.
Some people can think in sequence very well, even if you throw spaghetti code at them, they still are able to do what they want.
True, but that's not a problem.
That can be a problem because team work, integration, and debugging with others become virtually impossible.
No, actually, the fact that some people can't deal with spaghetti code is the problem here, not the fact that some people can. OTOH, you are correct that there is a problem here that is manifest if people learn to program without learning good program design process. My point is that the best way to learn good process is in the context of actual progamming, which requires using a programming language as part of the course. It doesn't mean you just teach the language, you have to explicitly teach process. I think How to Design Programs is a good model here.
Especially when you teach people how to write code using examples like hello world and read file.
I would agree that starting with I/O is a bad way to start programming, which is I think that a good way to learn is to use a language with a REPL in which you can teach, initially, in a functional style, even if it is not a purely functional language.
All these programs can be written easily in a single function. That's why transition between C and Java in lots of universities get ugly.
In lots of universities, if there is a transition at all, its the other way, since Java is at least as common as C as a key language for a first course. But at any rate, I don't think any first course at any university with even a moderately well-respected CS program, whether taught in a multitude of languages, or expressly in one, whether that's Scheme, Java, or C, Pascal, Python, or whatever, lets students pass without ever producing a program which requires more than one procedure/function/method (and, for OO languages, class.) So I doubt very much that the "the first program you right can be written in a single function" issue is a major source of paradigm-transition problems between the language used in a first course and the languages used later.
OOP isn't hard, but it just requires people to think in a different way than what we are naturally accustomed to.
Actually, I think people naturally do thing of operations on objects. But then, I don't think teacing OOP is the center of teaching programming, or even necessarily essential in a first course. I think more general programming process is more important, and that a concrete language is necessary to that, and the particular special considerations of OO design can be handled later.
A visual representation would be much easier to be accepted by kids than words and theories later on.
True, LOGO can be used to do some spunky stuff. But how much of that is available, even graspable, to a completely complete beginner to programming? They have to first go through the senseless shapes.
Not really. Sure, in an agent-based logo you might have an exercise or two about moving a single turtle around that would cover some of the basic movement commands, but the natural progression there wouldn't be to more senseless shapes, its to the kind of simulations you can do with multiple turtles that interact with each other and with their environment ("patches").
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds a lot like Sequel, for Ruby.
Huh? Lisp, qua Lisp, doesn't have standard looping facilities. Most practical Lisps, like Common Lisp and Scheme, tend to have much better standard looping facilities than C (Common Lisp has "loop", Scheme has "do"). Writing procedural code, looping included, in practical Lisps like Scheme or CL is, IME, at worst no worse than doing it in C.
Yeah, I mean, consider OSS databases. You've got (just to name a few popular ones) SQLite (public domain!), Postgres (BSD-style), and MySQL (GPL). While they have different focuses, I think that that trio makes it pretty clear that quality isn't simply a function of licensing model.
Is this a joke? Most Lisps have quite an impressive array of standard functions for dealing with Lisps, which are the languages primary data structure, including functions for using lists as associative arrays.
Further, quite a lot of languages have language-level support for lists and mappings (whether the latter is implemented as hash-tables or not), including many that are much earlier than Perl. Whether implementations of those languages optimize those structures is another issue, but optimizers are an implementation feature, not a language feature, in general.
This is nice fluff, but what is it supposed to mean, other than the fact that, as with any language, if you use it enough it shapes your thought process so that its natural to use it more?
Um, no. Laws creating additional criminal offenses create more criminal offenses, by definition, but plenty of laws don't create any criminal offenses -- many laws aren't criminal laws after all. New criminal laws may reduce the number of criminal offenses, or may simply change (either expanding or contracting) the definition of, defenses to, or punishment for existing criminal offenses.
And, of course, whatever laws do to the number of criminal offenses has no necessary relation to the crime rate.
No, I meant exactly what I said; there is a reason that the words "essentially" and "economy" were in the sentence instead of "literally" and "country", respectively. Yes, it was a second-world country, but the second-world category was itself more about politics than economics.
Neither of the mutually irreconcilable biblical creation stories mention dinosaurs, churches, or Adam & Eve physically coexisting with Jesus, so your statement would appear to not be particularly on point with regard to GP's post.
It would be more accurate to say the USA defated the Soviet Union despite being duped by the latter into spending far more than there was any reason to on aerospace technology (among notable instances, the "bomber gap" stands out), but its really not all that surprising that by far the richest country in the world was able to win what was essentially a "spend money until your country collapses" contest with what was, essentially, a large third-world economy.
Wrong. Violating the regulations of a public agency that are adopted within its lawful regulatory power is a specific kind of "illegal" thing.
Trademark isn't patent or copyright, and origin is of comparatively little concern. Colors have been trademarked. A trademark is not universal, it limits, mostly, promotional use of the mark in a specific domain of trade (hence, "trademark"), the protection exists principally to prevent misleading trading that confuses consumers.
the unit is not the "watthour" and it has nothing to do with watts drawn per hour. The unit is Watt * hour (the * should actually be the multiplication dot) and it refers to Watts times hours, exactly as the name suggest. If it was Watts drawn per hour (which doesn't make sense, as the Watt is a unit of power, not energy) it would be Watt/hour (or, in common spoken language, "Watts per hour") not Watt * hour (or "Watt-hour" in speech).
Its not, clearly, and so OO languages also fall into one or more other paradigms (frequently imperative, sometimes functional or logic.) You could probably meaningfully describe imperative, functional, and logic as programming paradigms and OOP (data structures + associated methods used via dynamic dispatch) as a really powerful design pattern (or cluster or related design patterns) rather than a programming paradigm in the same sense that functional, imperative, etc. are.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. (Apparently, it was used as high-level glue.)
You can (at least, I think I've seen it done) implement prolog-style logic programming in a couple pages of Scheme code; the fact that something has a convenient implementation in Scheme hardly means it isn't a valid programming paradigm. It just means Scheme is a powerful tool.
Its a common term for what would, in normal SI parlance, be a "micrometer", because "micron" predates the adoption of the SI system, and "micrometer", in English at least, has a well established meaning referring to a particular kind of measuring device.
Yeah, Barack Obama using "Change.gov" for the name of the website of his Presidential Transition makes him worse than the Nazis.
Whatever.
Uh, maybe you missed something, but the President of the last 8 years was Bush, not Clinton; Clinton "retreads" are a pretty big change, considering that the last 8 years weren't much like the preceding 8.
Administering one of the biggest operations run by the Department of Energy, which also involves briefing Congress on its operations, working to justify its budget, dealing with many of the government, business, and academic stakeholders that the Department deals with, etc., may not be the same thing as running a generic cabinet level agency, but its certainly about as relevant experience as it is possible to get to running the Department of Energy, short of actually having already had that job.
Skills I think that Chu has demonstrated in his tenure at LBNL. What skills do you think he is lacking, and on what basis do you think that?
I think its more likely that Steven Chu was chosen to head the Department of Energy because he is an effective current administrator of a major Department of Energy research facility who, in that role, has done lots of work (including establishing partnership with outside entities) on policy issues that are important to the President-Elect than because the President-Elect views scientists as a mystical priesthood and Chu as the priest most in touch with the deity "Science".
Chu is a Nobel laureate, but he's not just a Nobel laureate.
He's also an active researcher; a Professor of Physics and of Molecular and Cell Biology. So, its more accurate to say that yes, Chu does do science, he is also the chief of one of the biggest labs in the country.
I'm not sure why this was modded "Insightful" -- do you have a clue who Steven Chu is? Because, if so, I'd like to know why you think that he isn't a good administrator that can deal with politicians (the President, Congress, etc.), business leaders, etc., and a person "who can listen to scientists and engineers and also be a great administrator". It is hardly as if winning the Nobel Prize in Physics is inconsistent with also being a competent administrator, and to me his history (most recently, as director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) seems to have plenty of evidence of success as an administrator in roles which require working with scientists, engineers, politicians, etc.
That "=" means "equals" is taught well before Algebra, and insofar as algebra goes anywhere beyond that, the use of "=" as an assignment operator that can do reassignment to the same variable is contrary to what Algebra teaches, so that's not really something algebra helps with. It seemed logical to me, and I didn't have Algebra until several years after I started using BASIC.
Clearly, if you have taken more math, you'll know how to do more number crunching yourself, and it will be easier to automate that if you learn a programming language. But I don't see any real reason to see Algebra I as a prerequisite to learning programming.
Except that, in the real world, it hasn't. As Googling the phrase "gifted and talented education" and perusing the results would demonstrate.
You know, your attempt to portray "the rest of us" as superior to the people actually in the field in question would be more successful if it wasn't entirely based on a completely false statement about the field being discussed.
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion, though nothing in your post says much about how using UML would be any better, even if all of your claims were true, except a little handwaving in your last sentence.
I don't think that the transition between structured imperative programming and object-oriented (but still imperative) programming is bigger than the transition between unstructured imperative programming and structured imperative programming or between any kind of imperative programming and any kind of declarative (functional, logic, etc.) programming. So, I'd have to disagree that that is the biggest paradigm transition pitfall of them all.
True, but that's not a problem.
No, actually, the fact that some people can't deal with spaghetti code is the problem here, not the fact that some people can. OTOH, you are correct that there is a problem here that is manifest if people learn to program without learning good program design process. My point is that the best way to learn good process is in the context of actual progamming, which requires using a programming language as part of the course. It doesn't mean you just teach the language, you have to explicitly teach process. I think How to Design Programs is a good model here.
I would agree that starting with I/O is a bad way to start programming, which is I think that a good way to learn is to use a language with a REPL in which you can teach, initially, in a functional style, even if it is not a purely functional language.
In lots of universities, if there is a transition at all, its the other way, since Java is at least as common as C as a key language for a first course. But at any rate, I don't think any first course at any university with even a moderately well-respected CS program, whether taught in a multitude of languages, or expressly in one, whether that's Scheme, Java, or C, Pascal, Python, or whatever, lets students pass without ever producing a program which requires more than one procedure/function/method (and, for OO languages, class.) So I doubt very much that the "the first program you right can be written in a single function" issue is a major source of paradigm-transition problems between the language used in a first course and the languages used later.
Actually, I think people naturally do thing of operations on objects. But then, I don't think teacing OOP is the center of teaching programming, or even necessarily essential in a first course. I think more general programming process is more important, and that a concrete language is necessary to that, and the particular special considerations of OO design can be handled later.
Maybe, maybe not, if your concern is simply about
Not really. Sure, in an agent-based logo you might have an exercise or two about moving a single turtle around that would cover some of the basic movement commands, but the natural progression there wouldn't be to more senseless shapes, its to the kind of simulations you can do with multiple turtles that interact with each other and with their environment ("patches").