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Comment Re:Go has some good ideas (Score 1) 186

So the issue of canonical brace style and automatic semi-colon insertion kind of go hand in hand. If you know you're going to have a canonical brace style, then choose the one that allows you to simplify the rules of the automatic semi-colon insertion and allows easy line-at-a-time parsing for interactive implementations.

Comment Re:Added value of Go? (Score 1) 186

I suppose I can respect that you don't think it's a problem worth solving. But I think that if you're going through all the trouble of designing a new language, you might as well fix as many problems as you can, no matter how small. Certainly compound declarations with function pointers are complex, but I think the ability to read the declaration from left to right is a major improvement over the Clockwise-Spiral Rule of C.

Comment Re:Added value of Go? (Score 1) 186

The syntax is obviously C-inspired, but with some changes, many of which seemed like experimentation -- doing something different just because it's different. Although I don't object to the philosophy, I'd like to see how those changes work out before investing a lot of time into them. In particular, the declaration syntax feels very strange to people who are used to C-style languages.

Perhaps this section of the FAQ might be useful in explaining some of those changes. Another page explaining the declaration syntax in particular can be found here.

Comment Re:Go has some good ideas (Score 1) 186

Really... *nobody* cares what style *you* prefer.

The most important person who cares what style he prefers is him. Really, that's all that matters.

Every person who ever reads your code disagrees. Programming is not a solitary activity.

I'm sure a smart preprocessor could deal with many indent styles just fine, but what's scary is when the language developers say, "here is how you will use our language." Because other people always find more clever things to do with flexible languages than the designers intended.

How does having a canonical brace format in any way limit what you are able to do with the language?

As mentioned below, in the Go community there isn't much discussion of formatting. If you prefer a technical reason, then the canon format can be easily enforced using the "go fmt" command. Using a separate brace style means you must either manually enforce it, or fork gofmt and make the changes yourself. In the end, is it really worth the extra effort?

Comment Dependency Management (Score 1) 186

One thing I'd like to add that most people miss is that the language was designed for easy dependency management, and it's built into the go tool. For instance, if you download library A that depends on library B that you don't have installed, when you build library A the tools will download, install, and build library B automatically.

Comment Re:Not that far-fetched, actually (Score 2) 483

Imagine you're watching a really good movie and your parents tell you to switch it off halfway through. Wouldn't you be angry? That has nothing to do with addiction.

Of course, the real problem with this statement is video games are much longer than movies. Zelda games can last 50 hours or more, depending on completion and whether you've played the game before or not. It's certainly not healthy to play games like that in a single sitting (this coming from a guy who played Mass Effect 2 in a single 24-hour session).

But the problem is not that you take away their super powers or anything like that, it's a bit more basic: They just want to know how the story ends! With games like Wii Sports and Mario Kart, the "stories" only last a few minutes, at which point it's easy to break away from the game.

Of course, game developers aren't stupid. Most games of the length of Zelda and Final Fantasy aren't written such that they have to be played in one sitting. The real trick, of course, is that you, as a parent, have to be able to find points in the story to switch off the game. This is not something you can do unless you are very familiar with the game itself, so my suggestion is this: Watch your child play the games. You don't have to watch every second; if you have a laptop you could get some work done during battles and puzzles and stuff like that. The point is to follow the story and find the best point to say "okay, that's enough for today" rather than just limiting it to half an hour a day.

Comment Re:Compatibility or conversion (Score 1) 274

Don't expect me to port existing code to your new language. Either make it compatible - i.e. an old language with new features - or provide me with an automated conversion tool.

One of Go's advantages are the features deliberately left out of the language, such as the typical class hierarchy, multiple inheritance, and operator overloading. Similar to conditional compilation in C, those features, while useful, are too easy to abuse and make code harder to read in the long run. So the Go devs left them out. You can't do something like that and keep backwards compatibility.

If backwards compatibility was necessary for a successful language, then every new language would C++.

Comment Re:Triangle Panties (Score 1) 241

K = 1/2 * m * v^2 (kinetic energy; integral of momentum with respect to velocity)

x = 1/2 * a * t^2 (position from acceleration; integral of velocity w.r.t. time)

U = 1/2 * k * x^2 (potential energy of a spring; integral of force w.r.t. distance)

E = 1/2 * C * V^2 (energy stored in a capacitor; integral of charge w.r.t. voltage)

E = 1/2 * L * I^2 (energy stored in an inductor; integral of voltage w.r.t. current)

A = 1/2 * tau* r^2 (area of a circle, integral of circumference w.r.t. radius)

Changing the formula actually brings it into line with the others. This is explained in both the "Pi is Wrong!" article and the Tau Manifesto.

As for spheres, remember that the volume of a sphere is 2/3 of that of a circumscribed cylinder. The volume of said cylinder is 1/2 * tau * r^2 * 2 * r = tau * r^3. The tau formula clearly shows this relationship, while the pi formula obfuscates it.

Comment Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM (Score 2) 119

The Australian Government should surely be looking at, for instance, how much of the decoration and formatting, how much of the Powerpoint, are actually wasted effort.

Almost all of it. The entire purpose of typesetting systems such as (La)TeX is to make it so the users didn't have to worry about such things.

Comment How to get rid of splash screens (Score 1) 477

As has been mentioned before, splash screens do serve a useful purpose in letting users know the app is actually loading. As has been mentioned before, Photoshop does a lot of stuff, so it's more or less impossible to get the program down to a reasonable size in a single executable. As such, you're pretty much left with a single option. Go back to the philosophy of making each program doing one thing well; in this case, a separate program for each photo effect. Now your huge, monolithic program becomes not much more than a simple shell that calls a number of smaller programs only when their needed.

Imagine if, to boot Linux, everything in $PATH had to be loaded into memory. That's pretty much what Photoshop does; no wonder it takes forever.

Comment Re:This isn't news... (Score 1) 1367

"No *atmospheric* warning in the last decade or two! IT'S A HOAX!"

Except they don't claim it's a hoax. There was nothing in the article claiming that global warming doesn't exist. In fact, they don't even debate the existence of global warming. They even mentioned Climategate without calling them frauds.

The specific claims:

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause.

Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse.

There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy.

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls.

And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

If elected officials feel compelled to "do something" about climate, we recommend supporting the excellent scientists who are increasing our understanding of climate with well-designed instruments on satellites, in the oceans and on land, and in the analysis of observational data.

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