smeg

"but it's a lot cooler"

Are you referring to the work or Perl? Most programmers I know working in a scientific area switched to Python years ago and run away screaming when they hear the work "Perl".

People still building software in Perl ought to be arrested.

If your looking for a powerful canvas feature, qt is really your only choice. That's what swung me away from gtk and wx.

Well I guess it is "unnecessary" to the extent it is unnecessary to be able to Control-C your programs. Personally I like my programs to respond to signals.

Or just write the fast bits in C, call it from Python via ctypes and get the GIL unlocked and parallelism for free.

Same here. As a nice side effect, QThread somehow makes signals work again, so you can Ctrl-C a MT Python program (you still have to set a handler for SIGINT but at least it works).

For this reason, I actually use QThread in console apps aswell.

So if mass and charge are both just attributes of particles, what is the "charge equivalent" of the Higgs boson? And if there isn't one, then why is it assumed the HB exists? Why cant particles have a innate "mass charge" in the same way they have an "electric charge"?

If it were simple why aren't these lawsuits being thrown out the front door? Why isn't FRAND turning out to be the watertight defence it ought to be? (serious question I would love to know the answer to, as these FRAND related lawsuits seem to keep coming up over and over again).

Python3 and Perl6 can both fuck off.

I look forward to the day PyPy is considered the real Python. Look at PyPy's homepage (http://pypy.org/), doesn't even mention Unicode as a significant feature. Instead it talks about speed, security, concurrency, and compatibility with the current real Python (2.7.2) - all the things real Python programmers care about and expect the Python developers to focus on.

PyPy may be some way off but I want to find the developers and hug them for setting the right vision and trying.

I just donated $50 and if you hate Python3 you should too.

Legal in what country?

>Google's is worse because it takes all rights to use your work however it likes, and then states in its Privacy Ppolicy that it won't use it for anything other than to provide the service.

Please point to the part of the Privacy Policy that deal with "my works" or "works that I create and own". I think if you look closely, the PP only deal with information Google collects about your usage of the service, which is quite different to works you upload to Drive.

> Well, first off, Google has a privacy policy [1] where they commit to not publishing my entire works without my consent.

It doesn't say that anywhere. The Privacy Policy covers "What information we collect and why we collect it.". In other words, the PP is about information they collect about you using the service, not stuff you upload to Drive. Think IP addresses, cookies, log-on times etc.

> Even without that, though -- what do you think would happen if they did what you're suggesting? I think the public punishment would be worse than any legal repercussions.

So your saying that TOS don't matter and we shouldn't read or analyse them because we trust Google wont do anything untoward? So we are we even having this discussion in the first place then?

>Google specifically enumerates the rights that you're granting them

They sure do. It just turns out one of these rights is that they can use your content for promotional purposes (advertising?).

Dropbox may not have such a detailed TOS, but they are clear on one thing: whatever rights you do grant them are solely for the provision of the service to you.

Right, so native code generated by Go probably needs some kind of runtime initialization before it can even start executing.

Well given that the current runtime (written in C) doesn't have a runtime, I would assume there wouldn't be one, as Go compiles down to native code just like C does, using the same toolchain (6c/g -> 6a -> 6l).

My current guesses are: 1) Performance 2) The need to call assembly code easily

"What's changed in the last decade?"

Uh...the need for highly scalable web servers handling tens/hundreds of thousands of lightweight, I/O bound, concurrent requests?

Does anyone know why the Go runtime is written in C? The FAQ says it is to get around bootstrapping, but that does not seem obvious, as the Go compiler (6g) is written in C, so why cant the runtime be written in Go and compiled with the rest of the Go library?

Also, is the incompatibility between Go and C just due to the segmented stacks in Go? What about function call conventions? Anything else?

"You are saying that Agile is supposed to mean programming in Ruby instead of Java?"

Of course not. But in my experience and observations, corporate IT programmers, especially those with a Java background, are the worst offenders when it comes to abusing the Agile concept and failing to get the basics anywhere near right.

"And only small teams can be Agile? Amazon.com would disagree with you, for one."

I am not saying that, but I think it is a good question. I have never seen a team of hundreds coordinated to an outcome using an Agile approach. I have been involved in large projects with up to 300 people (think multiple, large teams of business analysts, developers, database designers, architects and testers and a little hierarchy of IT project management) work towards a single outcome using a highly managed, strict waterfall approach over several years. It wasn't pretty, but we got there in the end, and I would not swear on the Bible that we could have done the same using Agile.

If Amazon is really using an Agile approach to coordinate hundreds of people working on a single project, I would love to read about it.

Why don't you go back in time and tell that to Napoleon. And Genghis Khan.

I could not possibly agree more.

Like many early Agile adopters I have been shocked and saddened by what it has become. I think the problem is that brainfucked corporate IT programmers (Java, .NET, whatever) have jumped on the bandwagon and driven it into the sea.

I was recently smacked around the head by this in a meeting about how a team was going to implement Jira ticketing to help improve their development process. I am not sure entirely what I was expecting, but I was totally, totally unprepared for the mind-stunning crap that I got - an endless series of slides of things called "workflows" which apparently document the life-cycle of a ticket and need to be mapped out in excruciating gory detail. I decided to raise my hand and ask a simple question "how do I just raise a ticket and assign it to someone" - the presenter gave me this kind of stunned "why would you want to do that??" look and explained that it doesn't work that way, first you need to assign everyone into teams and roles (like tester, developer etc), and then the workflow will decide where the ticket goes based on the kind of ticket and it's status. Mind blown. I could almost appreciate how such system might be of use on a really large project where you don't know and interact with most project members directly - they had a team of 8 people including testers and analysts. And in their minds they were doing Agile.

In another case I was arguing for the use of the Jira Fisheye plugin to enable meaningful access to VC to enable things like code review and release diffs and the like. The so called "Agile practitioners" had a different idea however - they were keen on a different plugin called Greenhopper which apparently does Agile process management and the like. I knew something was wrong when it was mentioned that it does nice Gantt charts. I probed a little deeper into why they didn't see the value in Fisheye and found that their actual VC practices were a joke - ludicrously large commits with minimal comment just before a release, no consistent release tags, broken commit history (they seemed to be deleting and re-creating their trunk after every release...what I don't even...). Advanced process/project management techniques over getting the basics like VC right? That doesn't sound like Agile in any universe I am familiar with.

I really struggle to think of any other examples where a worthy movement has been so thoroughly corrupted and debased into something almost diametrically opposed to it's original vision. Fuck Agile programming and what it has become. I think I'll stick with being a Pragmatic programmer.

When the oil runs out.

I remember watching another video about the Falcon Heavy Rocket, and how it was designed with a large number of small rockets cones at the bottom, so a certain number can die yet the whole thing can still reach orbit.

I just seemed so elegant and efficient, the kind of thing that could only have come from the mind of private industry that is so mindful of cost and efficiency, unlike the government which only build monstrosities at ridiculous expense (to the taxpayer).

Yep. I don't even use/like Facebook, but I just deleted my 10 year old Yahoo account in protest (in truth it was only a secondary account after Google, but still).

Coudlent agree more. Py3 was/is a shocking disaster. All this work and effort for nothing...except crap that most people dont care or know about...like how Unicode strings a dealt with internally and stuff.

Things that would have made Py3 enticing to me: - JIT - Real GIL improvements (no changing from op-slicing to time-slicing is not a real improvement) - Better OO. Roles, traits, enough with the duck-typing. - Anonymous subroutines/multiline lambdas. Creating closure generators is too much work in Python compared to Perl. - Tail recursion - More stuff that will come to me after I click "submit"

I found this post on SO quite enlightening: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/101268/hidden-features-of...

It now also has many links at the top to other SO answers on various topics - this is amazing.

"The WORST thing is that: G+ app searched all my mobile and ext-sdcard, got all my personal photos stored in mobile, and uploaded them onto the Internet without my permission."

If true, that is pretty disgusting. Especially if it made them publicly viewable, or even just by friends. This kind of thing has to be opt-in.

The problem is you are applying linear Earth-scale concepts of space to the whole Universe.

In reality space (or space-time) is curved - as you approach the "edge" of the universe you actually are traversing a loop around a 4-dimensional hyper-sphere.

The common analogy of an ant on the surface of a balloon is quite effective. As the balloon expands, the distance between points on the surface of the balloon certainly grow and they become further apart. The ant can measure this, see this, but for the life of him, no matter how far he walks, he cant find the "edge of the universe".

Of course it is hard to visualise this analogy when projected into our 4-dimensional universe, but it's the best we've got.

I recently discovered the Spyder ide/debugger development environment. It is quite powerful and well featured.

Before that, Eric4.

And here I was hoping it would be a damn nice RSS/Video downloader/player in the way Google Listen is a fantastic RSS/Audio player...

That they would try such deceptive tactics to prop up G+ shows how truly desperate they are.