Comment Re:Lucky for Democrats (Score 1) 165
Surprisingly, youth are switching away from democrats, and voting republican. Oh, maybe they're switching away from Facebook, too; that old, washed-up platform for hipsters and grandmas.
I'll get hate by the "programmers" but I'd argue that what we need is more along the lines of another VB 6 which is what TFA seems to be advocating.
How about instead of reviving old trash, building a language that has the advantages of VB without the disadvantages? It was so hard to write a good, stable application in VB.
Effective visual editing of templates; HTML template editing but much more like a good UI editor
I've always used a text editor for HTML since automation always seemed to produce bloated, unreadable (if not edited by hand) garbage, whether AOL's, Netscape's, Front Page, Word Perfect, or Word.
However, I discovered recently that you can get very good HTML from Open Office, but the way to go about it is really convoluted thanks to Oo's retarded menu structure. Under "file" towards the bottom of the list, nowhere near "export" where it should be, is "view in browser". Saving the web page from FoxPro produces excellent, readable HTML. However, I didn't run it through the WC3's HTML validator.
Professionals with years or even decades of experience have enough trouble writing secure software.
And just where do these "professionals" who can't write secure software get these years or decades of experience??
It's even worse when they use "beginner-friendly" languages like PHP, Ruby (with Ruby on Rails), and JavaScript. These languages are totally shit, and end up promoting buggy, insecure code.
I don't know PHP or Ruby, but javascript is in no way "beginner-friendly". I'd been coding in BASIC, assembly, xBase (various dialects), NOMAD, and a couple I can't remember (I'm getting old) for well over a decade when I needed javascript.
Javascript is crap. Often useful and necessary crap, but still crap.
When these amateurs try to write code in any sort of a business or professional setting, it usually ends up being the IT department or professional software developers who get to maintain the crap code in the end.
It's true that someone who thinks he knows what he's doing but doesn't can really screw a project up, an idiot I worked with who thought he knew dBase almost cost us a ten million dollar Federal grant by removing some columns in some tables in an application I wrote. I was able to make it work anyway.
Asimov got it right in Foundation; those who know little and are aware of their ignorance aren't dangerous, it's those who think they know but don't that are.
But I was mostly self-taught, only taking classes after I'd been programming for years, and few of the classes taught me anything I hadn't already learned from reading hundreds of books on the subject and practicing.
And we can't forget how these half-assed amateurs often start "contributing to" (a.k.a. destroying) open source projects. Thanks to them, we have disasters like GNOME 3, where instead of trying to make efficient, effective software, they just ended up trying to make a shitty, half-assed copy of their warped understanding of OS X.
It's not that they're shitty programmers, it's that they're shitty designers, and the professionals at Microsoft are no better; Windows 8, anyone? And whose code is the least secure? Yep, your fellow professionals at Microsoft with their warped "understanding" of UI, just like the GNOME devs.
We shouldn't promote the idea of them getting involved with software development. We should discourage it!
No, we should develop easier to use tools. The languages and compilers you professionals are writing suck donkey ass.
Of course, now we know how Timothy*cough* I mean... An "Anonymous Reader" leans in the elections, don't we?
The problems are that all variables are global and there's not a good way to create a function for it. It's not designed as a visual programming language but as a simple way to put together a bunch of simple tests that don't need to reuse a lot between them. If you want to share the code that logs into your web page every time, the easiest way to do that is cut and paste. Then you have to change 80 copies of it if you ever update that code. They were working on improving that situation last time I looked at it. You wouldn't ever want to use it to accomplish work in a production environment, but you probably would never want to use Hypercard to accomplish work in a production environment. Some people probably DID do that, but you wouldn't want to.
The problem with creating something like Hypercard is that it's very hard to hit that sweet spot where it's easy enough for non-programmers to use while being powerful (and secure) enough to be useful. Whenever people get their hands on something like that, they tend to start working around its deficiencies to accomplish their goals. You end up spending more time working around the deficiencies in the environment than you would have if you'd just written the application in a real programming language to begin with. There was quite a lot of THAT going on in the late 80s early 90s, too.
Even if Macs weren't so expensive, something cross-platform, like BASIC, would be better. I learned BASIC on a TS-1000, and after BASIC, learning assembly wasn't that hard; I was hand-assembling machine code for that TS-1000. I had to since BASIC on a 1 mHz Z-80 that powered the entire machine was just too slow for games.
Oddly, the company that brought BASIC to most was Microsoft; they didn't write Sinclair BASIC but they wrote the BASIC for most other computers of the time. GW BASIC on the IBM PC was still good. They have a bad habit of taking an okay or even excellent program like BASIC, FoxPro, or Windows 7 and trashing it completely.
Visual Basic is a convoluted joke.
And you hit the nail on the head with syntax. Shit like curly braces are IMO incredibly counterproductive and stupid.
I mean, would two non-gay roommates end up in a "common law" marriage now if they live together for long enough?
Common law marriages are idiotic to begin with. They shouldn't assume that just because you lived together with someone for X amount of time, that you're together.
That's a bit of an urban legend. The first requirement for common law marriage is that you hold yourself out as husband and wife over an extended period of time - that you go around introducing her as "my wife" and she says things like "my husband bought
The second requirement is that they live together as husband and wife. Examples of living as husband and wife include things like having a joint checking account or filling taxes as "married".
Note that BOTH requirements have to be met - the couple has to go around saying they are married (proving they've decided to be married) AND they have to actually do so - actually do the things married people do.
If a couple decides to be married and they do so for a long time, the court will simply recognize what already is true. So for example when one dies, their spouse will have rights to the property, because they did in fact live their lives as a marriage - not as roommates.
8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss
