>I'm a fan of NodeJS, but I would never use it to try to solve a computation heavy problem, it's good at IO multiplexing
No it isn't. It is very bad at it. It just uses the most primitive event loop and foists all the complexity of that onto you as the developer using it.
He is, and I'm seeing more of this on HN over time. Many people who use <technology x> see a bothersome comment, and while snide- he was accurate. People may use Node.js, drank the Kool-Aid, but in 5 years there's going to be an industry movement off of it and the messes being created today. I've used it, was not impressed by its technical merits, and wrote it off as yet more technological churn.
I'm not a fan of churn, and keep a keen eye eye out for true innovation. Which happens far less than people are convinced to believe. That's the biggest scam the tech world convinced everyone, that innovation is rampant and fast moving, when in reality everything moves at glacial pace.
I'm a late adopter of technology, proud of it because it's generally the smart move for most of us. I test drive shiny things I can make time for, but bringing it into my stack doesn't happen by reading a few blogs. It not only requires significant technical merit, but someone has to maintain all this shit.
>I know a lot of people encharmed by it, but no-one productive (i.e. delivering products quickly; it's not the same as solving pure, mathematical problems).
Is this actually true, or is it "true in your heart"? Very few people use haskell for solving "pure mathematical problems". People use it for things like developing the fastest microkernel in existence, doing high volume trading, making games, and writing boring old web apps. References to "pure mathematical problems" and implying nobody is actually doing anything with haskell come off as sounding like second (or third, or fourth) hand FUD. We taught our PHP team haskell. They had their first project in production in three months. There's nothing special about math and haskell.
I don't imply that nobody uses it for solving practical problems. Just, I made my judgement based on:
- friends (I know, it may be biased),
- GitHub codes I use (and in general, popularity),
- blog posts on Haskell (I encounter mostly language-oriented; less problem-oriented like "let's make a 3d game", "web scraping", "machine learning", "web dev" etc).
Likely. Ideally with code tutorials/examples rather than "me and my friends changed X to Haskell and we liked it".
I mean, it's not I am anti-Haskell or something (it is clearly on my list things to learn), and I am theoretically-inclined (I did quantum physics and pure mathematics). Moreover, I am biased towards clever, succinct solutions rather that horrible code that "just works, somehow".
Yet, for practical problems I do things that work, even if it is JavaScript code, which is not even close to "pure" or "nice".
I'm interested. I probably wont ever use Haskell again, but it would be nice to see that there is more to the community than the self-congratulatory cleverness competition that I experienced.
To what? I'm supposed to link you to reality? How about since haskell is a general purpose, turing complete language, you demonstrate that there's some magical reason that it can only be used for "pure math problems" and nobody can be productive in it doing "real work". Why should a random nonsense claim be given the standing of fact and need to be disproved?
>friends (I know, it may be biased)
That's why I asked if it was true in your heart. Lots of people say things they think sound reasonable and believable based on other third hand information, but which are in fact made up. I have a very hard time believing you have so many friends into haskell and unable to write programs in it. Especially after teaching a bunch of PHP people who had never heard of functional programming (and half had never heard of types!) haskell in a few short lessons. Either your friends are some crazy statistical anomaly, or my developers are. Or perhaps your friends are apocryphal.
>GitHub codes I use
"I don't use anything written in haskell so you can't write anything practical in it" is a pretty poor argument.
>I encounter mostly language-oriented
Where are you encountering them? And are you sure you aren't just misinterpreting "practical" blog posts as "academic" because they mention something you don't want to hear like monads? Even most things I would assume you classify as "language-oriented" are still about solving practical problems.
That might sound scary to people who don't know haskell, but it is about solving a common issue with web development (and other server type programming) in a nice reusable library. Do you really think there's tens of thousands of people just sitting around writing haskell code that does nothing for no reason?
It would be interesting to define product as "dollars produced" or something of that sort. Then rank languages by net product and then by net productivity (net product over time).
I would expect it all to be heavily skewed towards high volume trading.
PHP is the standard bearer for the expert beginner. People write something that seems to be working quite quickly, so they feel they "get it" and know what they are doing. And then they stagnate and stay like that for 5, 10, 15 years even and never learn more. And then when presented with things they don't know, they resort to anti-intellectual rhetoric and trying to convince themselves that those things are "just a different way of doing it but no better than how I do it" and stay there in their rut forever thinking themselves an expert.
The point of graphs like these (aside from making a joke) is to describe the learning curve. These graphs admit that the beginning of haskell is a nightmare, but claim that eventually you have "unbounded" productivity.
It seems rather hard to evaluate the tail end from "little experience".
It's an incorrect conclusion that requires further education and experience before you can be sure your subjective experience of productivity truly is that poor.
please, this is getting old. Haskell is one of those languages for people who want to show off how clever they are instead of just getting on with developing applications that actually do useful things efficiently.
I hope you are trolling. Most Haskeller's value getting things done over being clever and actually actively avoid being clever. In your other comment you point out that many of PHP detractors have not used it or have very little experience.
Do you have experience using haskell? If not, you are being hypocritical. Please stop.
>Haskell is one of those languages for people who want to show off how clever they are
Yes, that's what banks are most known for. Showing off how clever they are and not doing anything useful. Facebook and google certainly fit that profile as well right?
I am suggesting that your confidence is misplaced. Having little experience in something means you should have little confidence in your knowledge of that thing.
PHP is full of problems that lead directly to security vulnerabilities if you aren't constantly aware of them and very careful when writing your code. So when someone who doesn't know those problems (most people) "hacks together" something that "just works", it is almost always providing a backdoor into that server. Once you do learn a little, you find that every scripting language is just as easy to work with as PHP (if not easier) and much safer. So why use PHP over perl or python or ruby or even javascript? They just aren't compiling into apache for no reason.
Generally speaking, tutorials in those languages recommend using the paramatized versions of the queries rather than string concatenation and manual escaping. The official docs from these more well-designed languages would have copious warnings against attempting to escape user input yourself, rather than having numerous functions baked into the language to help you do just that (e.g. `mysql_escape_string`, `mysql_real_escape_string`).
Reading a 10 year old tutorial on W3schools isn't the best place to learn current PHP, and it's not the fault of the language. PHP has moved on, if only the haters would too.
So your argument is that the dangerous extension is deprecated as of a year and a half ago? Given that PHP has been around for nearly 20 years, it seems like your evidence supports my argument more than yours.
> PHP has moved on, if only the haters would too.
Unfortunately it's not that easy. A lot of those tutorials are still being read by newcomers, and a lot of the web is filled with vulnerabilities as a direct result of official documentation recommending insecure ways of interacting with the database.
PHP may be "in recovery," but that doesn't necessarily mean the bad taste will magically leave everyones' collective mouths. The damage has been done.
The mysql extension is not dangerous in any way, don't spread FUD. The reason for not deprecating it sooner is that very large projects depend on it. These projects may have been ten years in the makings and aren't in any way unsafe because of the mysql extension. Software like WordPress and Drupal still use and support the mysql adapter and run on a huge percentage of the web today.
I agree a lot of people read insecure tutorials, but it allows even beginners to write fairly advanced web sites. If the choice is between easy and available and difficult and hard to use, I'd rather have the first option available. On the web, ideas, timing and execution is important, not how amazing your code looks on the backend. A lot of great software may not have been created had it not been for how easy PHP is to get started with. As a community we are trying to educate people to code properly. It's an ongoing process.
Actually yes - perl has a tainted mode (#!/usr/bin/perl -t) that force you to sanitize every input from the outside world. It does not do the work for you because it is agnostic to semantics (escaping for shell is different than escaping for SQL for example) but at least make you think about the problem.
So what you are saying, is that it's not actually widely used, or even useful in the scope of a web site? In that case, it don't see how it changes my original point.
>Does Perl, Python or Ruby have built-in automatic escaping and sanitization?
No, of course not. That's very much the point. PHP's broken attempt at that created security holes.
>On top of that all three of those languages require additional setup
No they don't. It is just that someone else has already done the setup for you with PHP at most cheapo hosting companies. Installing python is no harder than installing PHP.
>(Especially Ruby with RoR shudder)
You are comparing a framework to a language. Rails is no harder to setup than any of the PHP frameworks like zend or symfony.
Providing sanitization functions 10 years ago is broken to you? If you check my earlier post you'll see that prepared statements are widely used nowadays. Escaping functions like htmlentities() are also still effective.
You are right, there are a bunch of hosting company providing 0-config PHP, but setting it up in any distro is also never more than one command away, unlike the other languages mentioned.
Regarding Ruby and RoR, I can't even find a tutorial on how to run Ruby under FastCGI, and RoR appears to be the de facto way to run Ruby websites, so if having a framework is required to run any non-trivial Ruby website, then it has to go into the "hard to configure" part of the argument regardless of semantics.
>but setting it up in any distro is also never more than one command away, unlike the other languages mentioned.
No, exactly like the other languages mentioned. If you are seriously going to try to pretend installing python or ruby or perl is harder than installing PHP then you can't expect anyone to react as if you are being serious and genuine.
>I can't even find a tutorial on how to run Ruby under FastCGI
That sounds like a serious problem. I would suggest looking for a local "introduction to computers" type class. They tend to teach basic usage of windows and the web, including how to use google to search for things. I think it would help you a lot.
>and RoR appears to be the de facto way to run Ruby websites
While I'm sure the rails guys must be flattered, I don't know how you got that appearance. There's a whole bunch of frameworks, just like with PHP. And you don't need to use any of them, just like with PHP. But of course, you know all this and are just trolling.
He did seem like a hypocrite for trying to tell the audience how to "do Agile" (or, in his terms "develop with Agility") immediately after a satire on people who do just that. Further, I doubt he was giving the talk for charity. He's clearly making money off Agile just like everyone else.
Nevertheless, the first part was entertaining satire, no matter its source. The rest can be skipped.
>Do you really think C is any easier to understand that C++?
Yes. C is very small and simple. You can learn all of C in a very short time. C++ is the most complex programming language in existence. It is unlikely that there is any person in the world who actually knows it all, including the creators.
>or you could try to implement or use an existing implementation of a dynamic array
Imagine that. You could use libraries that implement things you want. What a concept.
> "Imagine that. You could use libraries that implement things you want. What a concept."
I think I didn't explain myself, but something that basic in these days should be on the standard library in my opinion.
>"Yes. C is very small and simple. You can learn all of C in a very short time."
I don't think C is simple at all. Its syntax can be really cumbersome at times (see my first example). Also it is very annoying to debug, and C code is very prone to contain memory corruption bugs and leaks.
C has great advantages but being simple is not one of them.
>I think I didn't explain myself, but something that basic in these days should be on the standard library in my opinion.
Ok well you hop in your delorian and go back to 1970 and let them know. In the mean time, how does that in any way make C not capable for the same tasks as C++?
>I don't think C is simple at all
Then you don't know C. The entire point of C is that it is simple.
>Its syntax can be really cumbersome at times
That has nothing to do with simplicity, and C++ has far more complex syntax.
>Also it is very annoying to debug
C is very simple and straight forward to debug. C++ is much more difficult to debug. Have you ever used either language?
>and C code is very prone to contain memory corruption bugs and leaks.
Because it is so simple.
>C has great advantages but being simple is not one of them.
Well your opinion is in the vast minority, and does not seem to have any basis in reality. The C spec is a tiny fraction of the size of the C++ spec.
>Ok well you hop in your delorian and go back to 1970 and let them know.
Well they could have added in C99 or more recently in C11. What's wrong about updating a language?
> In the mean time, how does that in any way make C not capable for the same tasks as C++?
I would rather prefer not reinventing the wheel and a language that actually ship with it.
> Then you don't know C. The entire point of C is that it is simple.
I know C fairly well to recognize it quirks (just like all languages have). I think your definition of simple is very different of mine. Scheme is simple, InteractiveC is simple, C it is not.
> That has nothing to do with simplicity, and C++ has far more complex syntax.
cumbersome(adj): difficult because of extent or complexity
simple(adj): 1.easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty. antonyms: complex
How come something cumbersome has nothing to do with simplicity?
Also I am not saying that C++ is simple. But it has a subset that it is well defined, type safe and easy to understand.
> C is very simple and straight forward to debug. C++ is much more difficult to debug. Have you ever used either language?
Yes, I have used both in my formal job, and I can avoid memory leaks and memory corruption easily on C++. Not the case on C, specially when working in medium size teams where always people forget what they should cast a void* into and why they should not.
>>and C code is very prone to contain memory corruption bugs and leaks.
>Because it is so simple.
Seriously? It is a feature now? Well Scheme is a good example of language that is order of magnitudes simpler than C and it is not prone to memory leaks nor memory corruptions
>"Well your opinion is in the vast minority, and does not seem to have any basis in reality. The C spec is a tiny fraction of the size of the C++ spec."
If by simple you mean simpler than C++, yeah. You could say the same of Perl. Does is it make Perl a simple language?
Nothing, they do update the language. But fundamentally changing the language to be completely different is not the same as adding some small thing. C is simple on purpose. Adding complexity is not just an update, it is making it no longer suitable for its intended goal. So they choose not to.
>I would rather prefer not reinventing the wheel and a language that actually ship with it.
You don't have to reinvent the wheel, use a library like you already said.
>I think your definition of simple is very different of mine
Clearly. But mine is the same as 90% of the people who have commented on the subject. People overwhelmingly describe C as simple.
>Scheme is simple
Yes it is. As is C.
>How come something cumbersome has nothing to do with simplicity?
You just quoted how. Are you joking?
>Also I am not saying that C++ is simple
But you are arguing that C is complex and thus not appropriate, while C++ is appropriate. You can't have it both ways.
>Yes, I have used both in my formal job, and I can avoid memory leaks and memory corruption easily on C++
Which has what to do with debugging? And why are you incapable of avoiding those problems easily with C when everyone else does it just fine?
>Not the case on C, specially when working in medium size teams where always people forget what they should cast a void* into and why they should not.
Yes, clearly there's no way groups of people could work together on large complex software in C. I'll go tell linux, apache, X, all 4 BSDs, nginx, postgresql, postfix, etc, etc, etc that they don't exist. I'm sure they'll be glad to know.
>Well Scheme is a good example of language that is order of magnitudes simpler than C and it is not prone to memory leaks nor memory corruptions
Scheme is not even one order of magnitude simpler than C. Go read the specs. And scheme is not prone to memory leaks and "corruption" because it is higher level. This also makes it much slower. Even more importantly, it makes it a ridiculous comparison.
>If by simple you mean simpler than C++, yeah.
You are the one advocating C++ over C while claiming C is too complex. What are you blaming me for?
I wasn't writing games in 1995 but I suspect you are mistaken. Fortunately https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_in_video_gaming tells us about the major games that year; unfortunately there are 33 of them. Descent and Mortal Kombat 3 are the ones I remember. https://github.com/drguildo/Descent/blob/master/MAIN/AUTOMAP... Descent is written in C++ (note the "//" comments) but it's a very C-styled C++, not even with classes. MK3 I don't have any idea, but it was eventually released for a lot of platforms with different CPUs, so I doubt it was written in assembly.
>Descent is written in C++ (note the "//" comments) but it's a very C-styled C++, not even with classes
That is C. Lots of C compilers supported // comments, like watcom which they used. Notice the file extension says it is C. Notice it uses absolutely no C++ features at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RollerCoaster_Tycoon
Still using ASM in 1999. Go look at quake 3 which was when id started into C++. Notice how it is barely C++. It seems odd to "suspect I am mistaken" rather than look at the evidence which lines up exactly with what I said.
Thanks for helping me look at the evidence! Maybe you're right. Do you want to pick another two or three random games from that list and figure out what language they're written in? Or figure out what MK3 was written in? I was trying but then I ran out of time while writing my comment.
I don't think RollerCoaster Tycoon is a good piece of evidence because it's famous largely for being written in assembly at a time when most games had already abandoned it.
(Sadly, I don't think it would be odd at all to ignore the evidence, but I aspire to better than that.)
It's unfortunate that you were downvoted when you're right, at least for the console space. You couldn't use many of the advanced features of C++ on the consoles of 1995 (rtti, exceptions, STL was garbage in 1995); C++ compilers were all non-conforming and so cross-platform was horrible; code optimization was bad and space/cpu was at a premium. I don't think either the Saturn or the PS1 devkits even had a C++ compiler in 1995 though it would have been possible, and the other consoles definitely didn't. I think people get used to how well things work and how ubiquitous tech is now and they don't remember how it used to be.
I am not sure about 1995. But at least since 1998 exists Unreal engine and the amount of games using it is humongous. And Unreal's source code is more involved that just C with Classes. (Which by the way is still C++)
The original unreal in 1998 was C with classes. And a significant amount of asm. And note that was in 1998, and part of the sales pitch was that it was OO, which was essentially unheard of at the time. C++ compilers were still really bad at the time, and if you wanted to be portable you really couldn't use much besides C with classes. The unreal engine has been rewritten from scratch several times over the years. What we have now is not indicative of what we had 15 years ago.
>That era saw a turning point, as various important factions in USA society withdrew their support from the project of advancing the role of women in society.
Any prior Republican support for women's reproductive rights/etc. had dried up at that time because of their alignment in the '80s with the evangelical Christian right. In the '80s the party platform dropped support for the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights.
Also, religious groups that were traditionally very liberal/voted Democrat (e.x. Catholics) on social issues also broke off from the Democrats over abortion and reproductive rights related issues over the course of the '80s, which isn't to say they were specifically /for/ those things at any point, they just became something more political in the '80s.
I wouldn't really have said that 1991 was a clear date for the 'start' of that process, though. Perhaps more "When it got into full swing." The other thing is that the loss of large groups like the Catholics and the involvement of the Christian Right in general caused the Democrats to swing right as well, which means that even when the Dems were in power in the '90s their attitudes and the policies they enacted were often more conservative than they had been before RE: women's lib/rights/etc., even if they still supported most of the issues on paper.
So an actually accurate statement would have been "some people are opposed to complete freedom on abortions". That's not quite the same as not supporting the advancement of women in society.
What about dropping support for the Equal Rights Amendment and attempting to reinforce/reinstate "traditional gender roles" isn't about putting the breaks on the advancement of women in society?
The issue wasn't just abortion: abortion was, perhaps, a catalyst or a trigger issue, but it also had implications on the rhetoric surrounding the passing of anti-discrimination laws, domestic violence laws, etc.
The equal rights amendment was not about equality. I am legally equal to a man. That should be the end of government involvement. Discrimination is already illegal. Domestic violence is already illegal. Being opposed to absurd DV legislation that requires arresting men who seek help when they are being abused is not being anti-women.
> The equal rights amendment was not about equality. I am legally equal to a man.
Discrimination on the basis of sex is, in fact, not as illegal as, e.g., discrimination based on race -- particularly, government acts discriminating based on sex are subject only to intermediate scrutiny, while race-based discrimination is subject to strict scrutiny.
Correcting this has been expressly cited by ERA backers as a key motivation for the ERA. As a woman, you are not, under existing law, guaranteed to be legally equal to a man even to the extent that a Black person is guaranteed to be legally equal to a White person.
I'm curious how you are reading particularly, government acts discriminating based on sex are subject only to intermediate scrutiny, while race-based discrimination is subject to strict scrutiny.
It seems to be a plain description of how the supreme court rules on things:
You clipped that in the middle and left a statement that doesn't make any sense. "...as illegal" can't be true, false, or even meaningful without the comparison that comes after. And with that comparison -- the comparison to forms of discrimination (such as racial) that are permitted only when the standard of strict scrutiny are meet, it's a simple statement of the fact of well-established constitutional case law. And is one of the motivations for the ERA, whose advocates argue that it is necessary to subject sex discrimination to the same degree of scrutiny.
Next time read a whole sentence before accusing someone of lying.
How is the campaign to legally revert the status of womens' bodies to property supporting the advancement of women in society? http://www.theocracywatch.org/women2.htm
> Dishonest rhetoric is why the abortion debate is so heated.
No, clash in fundamental values is why the abortion debate is so heated (its also the reason for the dishonest rhetoric, since extremists on both sides feel that the cause is so important as to justify any dishonesty.)
>No, clash in fundamental values is why the abortion debate is so heated
Except most of the people who "like murdering babies" don't actually like murdering babies and most of the people who "want to control women's bodies" don't actually want to control women's bodies. Most people's feelings on the subject are actually a lot closer than the rhetoric makes it appear. The rhetoric was created by people with agendas, who don't want people to recognize that both sides have valid points and are actual human beings who care.
> Except most of the people who "like murdering babies" don't actually like murdering babies and most of the people who "want to control women's bodies" don't actually want to control women's bodies.
Most of the people who use the phrase "control women's body" of the "pro-life" side do, in fact, see that as the motivation of the pro-life side, and ditto with most of the people who use "murdering babies" to describe the "pro-choice" side.
There's nothing dishonest about those particular examples. Yes, they aren't accurate to how the described side sees themselves, because they are using descriptions based on interpreting the described side in context of the values of the describing side.
That's not dishonest rhetoric, its a clash of fundamental values.
> Most people's feelings on the subject are actually a lot closer than the rhetoric makes it appear.
Most people's feelings on the subject may be a lot closer than the descriptions by the loudest voices would make it appear, because they don't fully hold the values of either of the clashing sides. But that has nothing to do with why the debate is heated -- the people in the middle, and what they believe and feel, have nothing to do with that.
> The rhetoric was created by people with agendas, who don't want people to recognize that both sides have valid points and are actual human beings who care.
To the people who hold the extreme positions, the people on the other side don't have valid points. The validity of a moral argument -- which both sides arguments are -- isn't a matter of fact, its something that only exists within a particular value framework.
>Most of the people who use the phrase "control women's body" of the "pro-life" side do, in fact, see that as the motivation of the pro-life side, and ditto with most of the people who use "murdering babies" to describe the "pro-choice" side.
That's the point.
>There's nothing dishonest about those particular examples. Yes, they aren't accurate to how the described side sees themselves,
So they are dishonest.
>That's not dishonest rhetoric, its a clash of fundamental values
No amount of making a random baseless assertion will turn it into a fact. Try spending some time working as a mediator with people with "extreme" views on this subject. You'll find their views are not actually extreme, they are just misrepresented.
>To the people who hold the extreme positions, the people on the other side don't have valid points.
Again, that's the point. Is this some kind of joke? Yes, the whole point is what A thinks about B is false, and what B thinks about A is false. A doesn't think B has a valid opinion because they don't know B's actual opinion, just a deliberate misrepresentation of it by the people who created the harmful rhetoric in the first place.
"Honest" means that the speaker believes it, not that it is true. If it accurately represents what the speaker believes -- colored by the speakers values -- it is honest even if it is not accurate.
> No amount of making a random baseless assertion will turn it into a fact.
Its neither random nor baseless, but, in any case, "honest" doesn't mean "well-founded".
> Try spending some time working as a mediator with people with "extreme" views on this subject.
I've spent quite a lot of time with people with views at pretty much every point on the spectrum, from hardline activists on both sides to people everywhere in between.
There are plenty of people with actually extreme views. There are plenty of people with relatively moderate views that are seen -- honestly -- as indistinguishable from opposing extremists by extremist of one or the other side (sometimes from both sides.)
> >To the people who hold the extreme positions, the people on the other side don't have valid points.
> Again, that's the point.
Its the exact opposite of what you said when you claimed that the rhetoric was merely an expression constructed to prevent people from seeing that the opposing side has valid points, and the opposite of your claims of dishonesty. So while it is my point, I think its directly opposed to yours.
Unless your point contains multiple self-contradictions.
I can't imagine any way to make it clearer for you, sorry. But perhaps I can set you on a path that might help. The word "honest" does not only mean "sincere; frank". It can also mean "honorable in principles, intentions, and actions; upright and fair".
No it isn't. It is very bad at it. It just uses the most primitive event loop and foists all the complexity of that onto you as the developer using it.