joeburke

I've seen several proposals, such as making patents non transferable, shortening their life time or not allowing cases to go to court unless you can prove your business depends on that patent.

Yes, especially when there is no actual court case.

Let's talk again once the owner of the patent successfully sues over it, making millions in the process.

Never going to happen.

Software patents are not the problem, patent trolls are.

You only have a 50% chance of this being correct.

Replace "average" with "median" and you're at 100%.

Yup, because if Steve Jobs wants something but the team pushes back, he'll abandon the idea.

Facebook only recently added groups after years in existence, they seem to be doing alright.

> Circles are ok to set up at the beginning, but many people belong in more than one circle and it gets cognitively tiring to sort people appropriately into one-and-only-one circle.

A person can belong to more than one circle (that's why you have a list of checkboxes, one per circle).

Look at the position of Javascript. It's fair to say it's used exclusively for web development (node.js is quite marginal) and it still tops the job chart.

Ruby on Rails would be there as well if it were mainstream.

1) There is a literal syntax for Java:

entries = new ArrayList<Integer>() {{ add(3); add(4); }}

But yes, certainly not as elegant as Scala. Having said that, you don't encounter literal collections very often (except maybe in tests).

6) Named parameters are pretty easy to emulate:

new Window().width(100).height(50)

although the builder pattern is safer:

Window w = new Window.Builder().width(100).height(50).build();

7) No more checked exceptions: celebrating this is like saying that your code is shorter because you no longer bother checking for errors.

8) You can only omit parenthese in Scala when there is exactly one parameter:

x.foo a <-- legal

x.foo a b <-- illegal

x.foo(a, b) <-- legal

One of the many syntactic quirks that Scala suffers from

9) Comprehensions are neat but they suffer from a crippled performance limitation that forces you to revert to imperative loops, even in optimized mode. This technical problem is serious and there is no solution in sight at the moment.

There are genuine reasons to be excited about Scala but this article makes me think that the author just discovered Scala and they haven't really dug very deep yet. When you do, you start realizing that Scala's nice features are offset by quite a few annoying limitations that will probably doom this language to a niche.

Another mistake the author is making is calling the ORM "an abstraction".

ORM is a mapping technology: it takes input from one world and turns it into data suitable to another world. It doesn't abstract anything.

All the frameworks "are growing up", this is nothing to be proud about. The real question is: is the framework becoming mature?

Because RoR has this tendency to reinvent itself every 18 months or so, the answer to the question is a resounding no. It's being used mostly to explore new ways to create web sites, but RoR is more and more becoming a framework you really want to avoid if you need to create a production site that you are planning to work on for years to come.

"How to learn Lojban

Write to The Logical Language Group, Inc., and we will be happy to provide information"

Yup. That's gonna work.

Interesting article but the grammar and the typos... ouch. Especially when he's trying to use some uncommon words.

This article is much more about the evilness of patent trolls than about software patents.

My thoughts:

- Prevent the existence of trolls (for example by mandating that only patents that are central to your own business can be enforced).

- Raise the bar for the acceptability of software patents.

- Reduce the lifetime of software patents to something more in line with the software industry (a few years maybe).

But by all means, preserve software patents, they do have some value if used as they were designed for (protect companies that invest into R&D).

Probably about the same as if you played that video with some other technology.

I only see people downvoting a flawed analogy.

It means there's a huge potential for that income and revenue to grow.

As do people who want to "abolish patents".

While the system might need some revisions, it's certainly not as broken as a lot of abolitionists are depicting. Some things are working fine, and innovation is happening at a very fast pace in the US.

Software patents can be abused but they can also be a force that encourages people to actually innovate instead of just copying what's already out there (which is pretty much all we are seeing from countries that don't have software patent laws).

"Where's the library at?"

"You should never end a sentence with a preposition."

"Where's the library at, jerk?"

Correct, Dick didn't really get any business off the ground, and he's probably ashamed of this email, looking back.

For quite a few years now, he's been the chairman of OOPSLA (now renamed to SPLASH), which I find quite ironic.

There is really no reason to feel embarrassed because you use a GUI. A terminal is a terrible vehicle to display the complex information that git needs to show you, especially `status`, `diff`, etc...

To me, git GUI's are like IDE's: they make you more productive, so you'd be a fool to ignore them.

"generally easier to understand"

"Ultimately, more Scala used means more modern Android development. "

The author has a clear chip on his/her shoulder and is making statements that are pretty controversial, even within the Scala community itself.

Thinking that using a certain language automatically leads to "more modern development" (whatever that means) is pretty ludicrous in itself.

If language advocates spent less time advocating and more time actually producing the cool stuff they claim that their language enables, they might actually get heard.

What happened to him is very unfortunate but see the kind of conclusion he draws from his ordeal:

"I have formed the opinion that medical specialists are no more equipped to make a medical diagnosis than lay-people."

You would think someone with a reasonable intellect would refrain from making such sweeping generalizations, especially when their own judgment has been clouded by negative empirical evidence.

No, really, he's deranged. Quite a waste indeed.

> I haven't seen Tony Morris abuse anyone in the community, and the IRC channel is an amazing combination of immense knowledge and patience with newbies.

Seriously? Here is the latest example on scala-debate, just two months ago, where he went so far off the deep end that Martin himself had to step in and tell him to cool down:

http://groups.google.com/group/scala-debate/browse_thread/th...

He dishes this kind of abuse on a regular basis on lists, irc (especially #scala) and sometimes even on his own Twitter feed.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand: yes, I know the theory behind immutability and isolation and how it can enable easier parallelism. I have yet to see practical examples of that in Haskell and convincing stats that show a boost in performance compared to more traditional approaches (such as Java+nio or even Scala actors).

My questions still hold regarding Haskell's adequacy in production, e.g. with regards to database, logging or continuous integration, and I'm not the only one: Alex Payne recently expressed the same concerns on SO:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5808825/what-are-the-best...

Predictably, this blog post reads like a Haskell pamphlet and it hits all the Bingo marks: purity, no side effects, ah but yes side effects with the IO monads, monads, concurrency, the awesome community (seriously? Have they actually looked into it? The #haskell irc channel is moderated by Tony Morris, a lunatic who's been banned from many mailing-lists and channels because of several psychological disorders he suffers from), etc...

Even more predictably, not a single word on more pragmatic reasons to choose Haskell as a startup, such as: web and networking support, logging, database access, etc...

The odds of a startup succeeding are already vanishingly small, why make it even harder on yourself by picking an exotic language that's all but unknown in the work force?

<shakes head>

Indeed, and it goes in the same direction as the linked article, which does look like flattr lowering the barrier to entry because they're not getting enough traction. This kind of trend never ends well.

It's called "click through" and I also prefer the Windows behavior. Especially since the behavior is not consistent on Mac OS: certain actions do not require a click through (e.g. you can close a window in the back without bringing it on the front).

Please, let's keep the fear mongering down. This is the first incident of this kind in 40 years and the number of casualties will probably not exceed a few hundreds.

Coal alone killed over 100,000 people over the past century.

Nonsense. If you want to work at Google, learn Java or C++ (but especially Java). And show that you can code.

I work at Google, but let's be honest: Java and C++ continue to be the only game in town for existing and new projects, Go occupies only a very tiny niche in our code base, mostly for the reasons that Chuck mentioned: a lot of the parallelism value that Go claims is already widely available, battle tested and very robust in Java and C++.

When can we hope to get a 4.3 for Verizon?

I hope we're not going to start seeing from fragmentation like Android already has, as this post correctly observes:

http://shysnowsquare.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/no-fragmentati...