Posts by The Indomitable Gall 1733 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
I haven't really been able to examine Eiffel closely, because as soon as I look at it, I see yet another impenetrable jumble of fixed-width letters.
Why are we so obsessed with fixed width? It is hard to read, making it easy to make mistakes.
Why are we so obsessed with plaintext? It's so inconvenient that we spend our lives hacking IDEs to try to present layers of visual meaning on top of the text through colouring and font weight. And still it lets us type illegal code -- syntax errors.
Creating a truly smart language integrated with the IDE would be simpler than hacking the editor to highlight errors.
Just look at the STRIDE language, invented as a teaching language. Almost all the flexibility of Java with practically no scope for syntax errors.
" I take it that you hadn't heard that this process was completed in 1760 under George III? The Monarch's assets were separated off and paid to the Treasury, "
Which is why anything since taken from the people would be accurately described as stolen in a legal sense. Under previous monarchs, many state assets have gone mysteriously missing from high-security locations and no charges have been brought, including several generations of crown jewels. The crown jewels were quite certainly stolen. Who by, we can't say, but the lack of any action suggests someone who is above the law. Some of these disappearances are said to line up quite coincidentally with cashflow problems in the households of the then-reigning (now dead) monarchs.
" and in return the government ran a Civil List returning a set figure "
Ah, so we got back what they stole from us... by buying it? You think having to buy back what was stolen is justice. If so, I'll sell you your own car next Sunday.
Oh, and then you mention the Crown Estate. How did they get the Crown Estate? Now I'm not saying they stole it, but I think the previous poster would. Why did they have rights to own the land in the first place?
If you're honest with yourself and think way back, your early mouse experience was probably like mine -- pushing the mouse to the edge of the desk and off the side because the pointer wasn't quite at the edge of the screen yet... then embarrassedly realising that I could just pick it up and move it back without the pointer moving.
We all had problems getting our heads round the mouse when we started.
For me the issue was rarely the ball itself, but the accumulated crud that had transferred from the ball to the rollers.
One of the PC magazines gave away a free cleaner that I thought was great -- it was a ridged ball on a stick and you just took the ball out then wiggled this in the whole to scrap out the rubbish.
Then I realised it was quicker and easier to use the pocket clip on the lid of a cheap bic biro and just scratch it all off directly.
" There is absolutely no way to ensure that f(x) is idempotent. If you don't understand that, then step away from the keyboard. "
And this is another reason to favour the PEP -- taking the same example
results = [(x, f(x), x/f(x)) for x in input_data if f(x) > 0]
if the function f is not idempotent, then we now have the possibility of throwing a divide-by-zero exception, which would cause the whole comprehension to be binned. (E.g. first call to f(x) returns 1, but in x/f(x), f(x) returns zero.)
In the case of the assignment expression version...
results = [(x, y, x/y) for x in input_data if (y := f(x)) > 0]
... as f(x) is only evaluated once, x/y will never result in a divide-by-zero exception.
Anyone arguing whitespace vs block delimiters is really missing the point -- these are both compromise solutions for coding in plaintext on memory-limited machines.
Modern computers handle block nesting in much more sophisticated ways -- think XML.
Take a look at Stride, an educational programming language based on Java.
The editor is "frame-based", meaning all the block delimitation is implicit, and it's damn near impossible for a coder to mix up the flow control.
It's also impossible to commit any syntax errors, as starting a line with if, while etc leads to a template being presented with all possible slots presented as text boxes, so you can only put something where it's permissible.
Better still, you no longer have to type full commands, with a single keystroke indicating the line's key function: "=" for assignment, "i" for if, "w" for while etc.
It's quicker to code than standard java, it's less bug prone than standard java, and it's made up almost entirely of keyboard shortcuts, and because it saves as XML, you technically could edit it in plaintext if you wanted. It seems to be everything programmers want... so why aren't programmers picking up on it?
I agree that visual programming is very limited.
I think the future of code is in frame-based programming. Check out the Stride programming language used in the Greenfoot and BlueJ educational IDEs. It's designed to let you develop traditional line-paradigm code more efficiently by reducing the number of keystrokes and making syntax errors impossible and scope errors rare.
Every type of code statement has a limited range of possible syntaxes, so Stride turns each statement type into a template where you fill in the boxes. As an educational programming language, Stride maps to a subset of Java, and any Java code can be called from Stride.
It also renders the block delimiters vs meaningful whitespace debate moot, as blocks, scopes and indentation are handled by the editor automatically as the programmer is no longer dealing with plaintext.
I think this frame-based paradigm has real potential to change coding practices in a way visual coding never really did.
" News sites make money off of the additional traffic driven to them by the news aggregators. "
Which assumes that:
A) aggregator sites drive traffic to content providers
and
B) the traffic driven is of high value.
Whether A is true or not depends on whether you're interested in unique visitors or page-views. Aggregators increase the former, but decrease the latter. This is where B comes in. "Drive-by" readers are less valuable than brand-loyal "sticky" readers.
Overall, aggregators appear to cost content providers significantly.
@HmmmYes
" Layer your software - assembler/C at the metal/kernel. C++ at the system level. Dynamic scripting language a the application level. "
Where do libraries sit though?
What do you see as the role for functional programming?
And why would you want dynamic scripting for applications when self-modifying applications are a security risk?
The biggest issue with nuclear is that all current practical economics models emphasise short-term outcomes, and the last thing a nuclear reactor needs is a management team that can't see the bigger picture. This really comes out into play when the reactor hits the end of life, as decommissioning hasn't historically always been budgeted for, meaning the operator goes bust and leaves the cleanup to the public purse.
I reckon nuclear operators should be obliged to buy government bonds to insure the cleanup, and if they can do it cheaper and cash in the bonds, good for them.
@MonkeyCee
" It's not an etymological fallacy if it's also used (and understood) in the original sense. It's only the case if the original meaning is almost never used. "
Yes it is, because the previous poster was talking about the etymological argument being used against the modern one. That's fallacious -- just because one version matches the etymology, doesn't mean the other version is wrong.
" The university that I work for in 1996 dropped Computer Science in favour of Applied Computing, realising that industry doesn't need someone who can build a linked list library from scratch but rather knows how and when to use an existing library. "
But this brings up the problem of how to develop the mental schemata to process what you're doing. If all you ever do is work with libraries, you miss out on several levels of abstraction and don't fully understand what you're doing.
The other side of the coin is that if you only ever deal with fundamentals like manually programming lists, you're missing out on several levels of abstraction and can only do real-world tasks within a very narrow domain.
The problem we have is that most courses fall into one of two extreme camps, and few people are discussing the middle-ground. But if you look at things like Stride in BlueJ, we're slowly starting to approach it.
Hmmm... while I like the concept, I'm a little bit unsure about how the data is encoded. My understanding is that classic Mario games were all designed as repeated "chunks" of tiles, hence patterns of blocks that recur throughout the game.
This is non-trivial -- part of the learning curve of Mario is the fact that you become more fluent/competent in these patterns as you play, and then adapt your strategy based on the different obstacles before and after.
A machine learning algorithm based on the individual tiles may spot the repeating patterns and implement them incidentally, but not necessarily... in which case the levels would not be "Mario" levels.
If you're looking at generating levels at the tile level, pretty much any platformer of a similar vintage would be more appropriate, as most other games had fully hand-crafted levels. But then again, 2D Mario games were always huge because of how quickly the levels could be generated, and other platformers don't provide the same size of training set as Mario.
" "The problem UWP faced was the fact that it was something new"
I disagree. The main problem with it was that it was an entirely inappropriate interface for people who weren't using a handheld device."
If the existing Windows API had been genuinely abstract, UWP could have been one API with two or more presentation methods, and the problem is gone.
Windows has always failed to decouple behaviour from presentation.
" "if there's anyone who can make it work, it's Apple."
The Apple that possessed that sort of magic stopped existing a few years back. "
Not necessarily. The ace up Apple's sleeve has been their mostly successful attempts to retain control of look-and-feel in iOS app UIs. The problem UWP faced was the fact that it was something new, and Windows already has layer upon layer of UI cruft -- how many different load/save dialogues are there in the Windows 10 interface for legacy support, for example? Windows never abstracted the APIs enough away from presentation that they could be considered interchangeable.
iOS, on the other hand, was built ground-up on the philosophy "when we change, you change" and "if you don't do it our way, your apps will break. Apple refused to repeat the legacy trap that haunts Windows (and MacOS, to a certain extent) which means they now have an established platform and ecosystem with a high degree of future-proofing. iOS apps that don't rely on specific hardware configurations are already a cat's whisker from being MacOS apps, and it wouldn't be all that hard to rewrite the APIs for non-touch.
" They seem to like adding them near schools. "
That's quite logical -- roundabouts force drivers to slow down, whereas you can fly over a crossroads at full pelt when the light's on green.
Unless you're suggesting that the only solution to a bad man with a speeding car is a good man with a speeding car, and that all schools should have a NASCAR-trained marshal to nudge speeding drivers out of the way of kids, I think roundabouts near schools are eminently sensible.
Betty Boop and other cartoons of the era were targeted at adults. A lot of it was about bending adult expectations of reality, and was at best indecipherable to kids, at worst nightmare-inducing (and I think the Pink Elephants On Parade sequence in Dumbo was inappropriate for kids, harking back to the days when cartoons were a pre-feature item at adult cinema).
" So behave yourself. You are under observation. "
Oh dammit! What we didn't want was everyone acting as though they're being watched. Have you never heard of the observer's paradox?
Bugger it all -- the experiment's a bust. Might as well put the whole planet in the autoclave and restart from scratch.
I'm never going to finish my BSc at this rate....
@Haku
" I've still got it somewhere, along with an Opus Discovery disc drive that allowed the ZX Spectrum to use 3.5" floppy discs as if they were Microdrive cartridges if memory serves me right (sometimes it doesn't, I think I'm getting old). "
I think all of us who remember Spectrums are getting old....
" It is always safer to call a Lecturer "Professor" then to accidentally call a Professor "Lecturer" or "Instructor." Most people address faculty as "Doctor" just to be safe as well. "
In most of the universities I've studied or worked in, people tend to call teaching staff by their names.
@Cipherpunk:
" Professor is a job title, not a degree. There was nothing improper. "
True. However, in the American system, it's synonymous with "lecturer", whereas in the UK it is reserved for the academics at the top of the tree, and once you become a prof, you are always a prof, just you become a "professor emeritus/emerita" once you're no longer in post. You'll be expected to go back to your old university every now and then to lecture, and to supervise the occasional masters or PhD student, so you never fully retire.
@Yet Another Anonymous Coward
[ Re: pursuing compensation for the emergency services. ]
" What's the cut-off? "
I would say that performing a stunt in a professional capacity without a completed form signed by a suitably qualified risk-assessor and without the requisite safety equipment on-site is already illegal. And not warning the emergency services and/or the local council in advance of a potentially dangerous stunt too... but as the notification would have needed to include a risk assessment form, they wouldn't have been able to do that anyway.
The problem here is the way the so-called "gig-economy" takes amateurs and pays them, but still treats them as amateurs.
Sunday-league football, skiing, skydiving and cycling are mostly amateur affairs. Professional sports, on the other hand, are generally expected to have medical and crowd-control staff on-site, and are generally expected to pay for that.
Road racing on open roads is illegal, so I'll assume you're referring to closed-road events, where the organiser is again responsible for maintaining suitable response provision just in case there's an accident.
Rocket-powered cars for TV... well, again, TV has health-and-safety obligations. However, I do believe it's a bit of a different question whether you're talking about a competent professional racer like Guy Martin or a hyperactive middle-aged-"lad" TV-presenter like Richard Hammond. Top Gear was highly irresponsible letting Hammond go in that thing, and really the show should have been closed down permanently at that point.
The purpose of the research was to inform other research that says "Language X is the most popular language (according to Github)." Analysing Github for patterns that bias other research is completely valid, and identifying patterns is part of that.
This is perfectly scientific, and in fact continuing with their original plan would have been the statistically worthless option, as modified file copies are at least an order of magnitude less common than verbatim file copies. The originally sought data would be valueless without this file-level data, so there was no point in pursuing the original plan.
" ...people have done calculations and you would have to run an intensive at full belt for about 10 hours solid for it to be an issue. "
No, it's not only an issue when it runs out during plugged-in use, it's an issue as soon as you unplug with the intent to use it on the go, but find it's got no bloody battery left.
People expect laptops to be at a higher state of charge when you unplug them than they were when you plugged them in.
So... problem.
" You come down to earth and realise it's a religious statue, no one's likely to deliberately make a rude statue in church grounds and you simply need to grow up a little bit and see it for what it really is, just a statue. "
It's for a school. Yes, the people looking at it and seeing it as rude need to grow up -- that's why they're called "children".
" No, that's a plain dependency. There's nothing recommended about them. If something requires a dependency to install, it will be automatically selected. And that method isn't restricted to the Debian-esques... it's a method use by all distros."
Did you read the article? It clearly points out that the issue arises because Debian installs recommended packages silently out-of-the-box. You have to specifically configure it not to do that. You can criticise the OS makers for their choice, but "recommend" is semantic metadata, and I don't think there's any specific suggested action.
" Debian user Felicia Hummel installed a package called "cowsay", [...]. But with default settings of "install suggests" enabled, a controversial second "recommends" package called "cowsay-off" was also installed. "
