sixthloginorso

There's barely any blogspam anymore on proggit, and if some manages to get through, it gets the customary tar-and-feathers treatment which even good submissions receive, only with more abundant, and hotter tar.

Maybe, but it's not something worth making into a political issue into itself, when the GNU project has actual political issues in mind, as close as they get to when speaking of a Software stack, like making sure that the management of a certain project is as close to their ideology as possible, as a political organization which writes Software (which is what the FSF and the GNU project always were, and a pair of beneficial ones at that).

Yeah, well, there are hammers of many brands, but few have claws on both ends, as the analogy for a certain controversial piece of technology went.

Why are people sweating small stuff like version control systems? How can you be a fanboy of a thing that keeps track of branches and patches. It's only incidentally related to Software development, you shouldn't feel as if a limb of yours was amputated if you \gasp\ had to use a different one for another project.

It's like using a different mail client or a different bug tracker; it doesn't affect what you can express or how can you build a program. It's just Version Control.

Web application development. I'm sure plenty of programmers would think of the Layer-3 device that chooses paths to forward packets through nodes to a destination.

Every time I see the word "hater" in response to criticism in the tech sector, I roll my eyes and find something else to read.

So you say that multinational corporations shouldn't compete on ethics? I thought you neoliberals didn't chastise anyone with respect to their choices in commerce.

Yes, this is systemic. Are you trying to convince me that the situation isn't fucked? For all the claptrap about how the economy isn't a zero-sum game and that the tide lifts all the boats and so many other platitudes, there's no denying that the quality of life of most people in the world is nothing but a point in a gradient of declining living conditions, everyone benefiting from the labor of people with fewer options who have to work and live worse than them.

Anyhow, how much do you think it would raise the cost of the things you use, just to ensure safe working conditions at factories? For jeans, it's a paltry 90 cents.

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/07/10/bangladesh-factory-saf...

Yes, the poorest in my country would probably have to think twice before spending even 90 cents, hell tell that to the homeless. The vast majority of the poor here probably wouldn't mind, given that it's a mere drop in the sea of debt they are drowning in, and that's a problem with many facets, on its own.

But there's quite a lot of room for diminishing the unfairness of this scheme, even if the solution feels even cosmetic at times given the broader problem of exploitation and inequality.

The economy isn't magical either; jobs lost in one region because the factories closed and moved to another aren't necessarily going to be recouped by new job creation in a short span of time.

Except for the people they'll lay off as the plants move? It didn't work out wonderfully for the autoplant workers at Flint and Detroit; for some reason, the people didn't get the upgrade you speak of after the plants closed. Weird, huh?

If they assured me that the extra price goes to ensure a better standard of living and better working conditions for their third-world workers, then yes.

Care to expand? I still find that Java's are some of the best concurrency libraries you'll find, among imperative languages or otherwise.

Java's concurrency primitives and libraries are really overlooked in these discussions. Is the syntax too off-putting, or is it merely that Java is unfashionable?

This got petty real fast.

Dijkstra's argument was more about Haskell than Java... well, except the trash talk about Java's origins, you can't change those.

it's just hard to make them work for a variety of types simultaneously.

That's sort of what you expect from any given implementation of a data structure and its related algorithms, though I imagine that some specialized implementations benefit from having them tailored to their concrete types. Examples, anyone, please?

Well, as we all know, Go does give you a way, sort of. You'd have to write basically a dynamic version using interface {}, and then write wrappers casting the values in and out, and possibly handing out the equality predicate.

That sucked in Java at the time, though, when you had to screw around casting Objects in your code, I don't see why people would prefer that.

It has a state-of-the-art Virtual Machine, rich concurrency facilities (why does everyone forget this?), reasonable type safety, great tooling, and it operates within a diverse ecosystem of languages using the same infrastructure.

But yeah, I have always liked the argument of throwing a curve ball at the kids who were already programming in imperative languages. It also levels the playing field and those who hadn't had any prior experience tend to perform better without feeling so inadequate next to their peers.

The author said that he needed a generic set for different concrete types, so he'd have to write a bunch of these functions for all the combinations he needed. And he did. And it was a mess. And it was also slow.

Edit: not that we can conclude anything from the lack of performance, though, we don't know how it was written.

So... if you need any data structure other than an array, a hash table or a channel, you should skip Go and find some other language? That's kind of limited.

Could be, given that book burning was always more of a symbolic act to intimidate the supporters of the ideas contained in the book rather than just the act of destroying information. What could the purpose of burning records of environmental research centers and monitoring stations possibly be, for what's pocket change to a first world Government?

I have just read this, not being from Canada, but this Harper fellow seems to have an internal war with the institutions of the State in charge of the monitoring and protection of the environment and a budget deficit, so he went forth and dismembered the one in charge of water, despite what his advisers said, and what's common sense nowadays, that water ecology is in danger world wide after heavy abuse.

This XWidgets project for Emacs has a rather unfortunate name, given that there is already a well-known GUI toolkit named wxWidgets.

Just not the same. Adding functionality to Eclipse is a "project". In Emacs, it's just some code and an eval-last-sexp away.

I don't understand, what's wrong with package-list-packages? It has concise descriptions, MELPA is kept very well updated, and and installing plugins is a breeze, no elisp configuration is necessary for like 90% of the packages you install.

Meh. The only total languages are used for formal verification, you'll always have to settle for less to get Turing-completeness.

Of course it is strongly typed! All expressions have type Univ.

Have you used PHP? You'll come to appreciate the differences between the different "unityped" languages.

All my C++ programs are commonly written in a way that preserves referential transparency, and clearly distinguishes between objects that are meant to be mutated (non-const) from those that are not meant to (const). That still does not make C++ a pleasant language to program in.

Does that say anything about Lisp? Nope, not at all. It isn't like C++ is comparable to Lisp, despite the efforts put by C++ programmers to wrest safety from a language designed as a superset of the language of cowboy-coders par excellence, its true nature as an imperative language with raw pointers may rear its head at any point. Not to say that Lisp has had more facilities up to this point than C++ to write referentially transparent programs.

Spooky action at a distance. Me no like. :-(

Depends on the Lisp. Common Lisp's global variables are mutable and dynamic. Me no like either. In Racket and Clojure you can declare variables to be explicitly dynamic, and they can be rebound within special blocks, locally, sort of. Not that it's something anyone should use frequently.

Will the result typecheck?

Does the if keyword typecheck?

What's semantically insane about Lisp? I find it has very clean semantics; it is strongly typed, its scope is perfectly lexical (sans a explicit caveat), programs are commonly written in a way that preserves referential transparency (in the FP sense, anyway), with pockets of imperative mutation here and there. The limited dynamic scope may be somewhat unpleasant though, but that's its flexibility.

As for macros, they are merely functions that transform expressions. They can be somewhat unpleasant to read, but they are basically that.

You are also indicating that the reference is not meant to be "reseated", i.e. that you aren't going to swap the object at the end of it for another, like you could do with a pointer.

With the typical reaction. "Thousands of sites use PHP just fine". "I don't care about the quality of libraries or the design of a language, and if you do, you're a snob". Trite.

And I doubt I, and many here, will ever make or work with a company which can have the leisure to rewrite the language implementation.

Its entirely possible to write a poorly organized bowl of spaghetti using Ruby if you leave Rails out of the picture. I would venture to say the same is true for any programming language.

You can easily write one with Rails over just a few months of maintenance. I hate, hate having to do a damned autopsy to trace all the @instance (read, global) variables copied and inserted into the objects that you never create yourself, -because Rails devs are apparently above having to endure the savagery of passing arguments to their methods- and having to grep every single function that gets automatically included from everywhere in the project into the namespace.

how easy it integrates with HTML, JavaScript, CSS

No more than any other language or product written in such.

Of course it's ugly, but who besides a bunch of snobs and people who actually can't use it really cares? Who should care?

You see, this is a big part of what's wrong with the PHP community, the apathy and immaturity. How on Earth is dismissing the reasoned criticism from professional peers and academics as "bashing" from "haters" or "snobs" an appropriate response?

In a Universe where consistency, soundness, orthogonal API design, modularity and evidence that the developers gave some thought to their language is expected. I would like to believe that this is such a Universe.

I mean, many of the endless list of functions imported into the default namespace were named so that their hashing distribution worked well with strlen for a hash. How much work went into working around the fact that just about the worst hashing function that you can come up with in three seconds was used?

And we can enumerate such blunders all day here. There are many better languages with good tooling, and guess what, they're free. I wouldn't use PHP if I can avoid it, and there's ample chance to avoid it nowadays.