The Wicked Witch is dead!

I'm like this guy, wanted to be an astronomer but went into CS because it was the lazy easy thing.

Now I'm probably going to retire in a few years and would like to do something that matters before I'm too dumb and slow. I doubt I'll ever learn enough physics to advance the science, but I've seen what passes for software in academic settings, and I could certainly make the software suck less.

So what kind of software does astronomy need?

http://dan.hersam.com/tools/smart-quotes.html

'Zactly. There are PILES of PHP and Perl snippet that filter quotes, or allow Unicode.

I have tried typing Russian (Cyrillic) and Persian (Arabic-derived) into the site in the past. Ouch.

...is that our selfies are safer.

This is not, nor has it ever been a central tenet of Islam. This cannot be viewed in political or historical isolation.

"Convert to Christianity under Papal authority or die by red-hot poker" was a governing principal of church and state - at the center of Europe's most powerful empire, for nearly 200 years. It was never the message of Jesus, regardless of your belief in Christianity. But scripture and political expropriation of pseudo-theology made that it seem so.

I hope someday you have a daughter who marries a an African Muslim. You might be forced to reconsider many of the things that you "know" so assuredly.

It's so much EASIER than THINKING!

I keep thinking that if an ISP really wanted to cut costs, they could proactively monitor their network for problems:

• Provide the CPE preconfigured, at no additional cost to the customer. (Build the hardware cost into the price of service.)
• Ensure that the CPE keeps a persistent capacitor-backed log across reboots. If the reboot was caused by anything other than the customer yanking the cord out of the wall or a power outage, send that failure info upstream. Upon multiple failures in less than a few weeks, assume that the customer's CPE is failing, and call the customer with a robocall to tell them that you're mailing them new CPE to improve the quality of their service.
• Detect frequent disconnects and reconnects, monitor the line for high error rates, etc. and when you see this happening, treat it the same way you treat a CPE failure.
• If the new hardware behaves the same way, silently schedule a truck roll to fix the lines.

If done correctly (and if clearly advertised by the ISP so that users would know that they didn't need to call to report any outages), it would eliminate the need for all customer service except for billing, and a decent online billing system could significantly reduce the need for that as well.

You're a racist cunt. People are people, and want/need basically the same things - if you don't push them into corners and poke at them with sticks.

The thugs? Products of our selective, post-colonial domination. Nobody rallies round a bully, when they have nothing much to fear.

Exactly. "What you mean 'We', White Man?"

Why not disband the NSA and instead spend the hundreds of billions of dollars that fascist cess-pit drinks off of the public teat - instead spending a decent fraction on making FRIENDS, not ENEMIES? There are a lot of schools, hospitals and high-school diplomas that could be bought, all round-the-world. You wouldn't have a popular resistance to American influence in the world, were that influence actually benign.

One word answer: "Disappointment"

They won't see people switching to Swift uniformly. There are trillions of lines of code written in Objective-C, and programmers already know it and are comfortable with it. There are no tools for migrating code from Objective-C to Swift, much less the hodgepodge of mixed C, Objective-C, and sometimes C++ that quite frequently occurs in real-world apps, so for the foreseeable future, you'd end up just adding Swift to your existing apps, which means you now have three or four languages mixed in one app instead of two or three, and now one of them looks completely different than the others. I just don't see very many developers seriously considering adopting Swift without a robust translator tool in place.

I do, however, expect to see Swift become the language of choice for new programmers who are coming from scripting languages like Python and Ruby, because it is more like what they're used to. In the long term, they'll outnumber the Objective-C developers, but the big, expensive apps will still mostly be written in Objective-C, simply because most of them will be new versions of apps that already exist.

BTW, Apple never really treated Java like a first-class citizen; it was always a half-hearted bolt-on language. My gut says that they added Java support under the belief that more developers knew Java than Objective-C, so it would attract developers to the platform faster. In practice, however, almost nobody ever really adopted it, so it withered on the vine. Since then, they have shipped and subsequently dropped bridges for both Ruby and Python.

Any implication that Swift will supplant Objective-C like Objective-C supplanted Java requires revisionist history. Objective-C supplanted C, not Java. Java was never even in the running. And Objective-C still hasn't supplanted C. You'll still find tons of application code for OS X written in C even after nearly a decade and a half of Apple encouraging developers to move away from C and towards Objective-C. (Mind you, most of the UI code is in Objective-C at this point.) And that's when moving to a language that's close enough to C that you don't have to retrain all your programmers.

Compared with the C to Objective-C transition, any transition from Objective-C to Swift is likely to occur at a speed that can only be described as glacial. IMO, unless Apple miraculously makes the translation process nearly painless, they'll be lucky to be able to get rid of Objective C significantly before the dawn of the next century. I just don't see it happening, for precisely the same reason that nine years after Rails, there are still a couple orders of magnitude more websites built with PHP. If a language doesn't cause insane amounts of pain (e.g. Perl), people are reluctant to leave it and rewrite everything in another language just to obtain a marginal improvement in programmer comfort.

Obj-C isn't any better than C in my opinion. But, to each their own.

It is if you're doing any nontrivial amount of string manipulation.

Impressive. You have weaponized STEM envy.

No, they're saying Apple switched because GCC's core wasn't designed in a way that made it easy to extend the Objective-C bits in the way that Apple wanted. And that could well be part of it—I'm not sure.

But I think a bigger reason was that Apple could use Clang to make Xcode better, whereas GCC's parsing libraries were A. pretty tightly coupled to GCC (making it technically difficult to reuse them) and B. licensed under a license that made linking them into non-open-source software problematic at best.