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I once had a job in the EduBubble where I had to learn SAS. It's a language could only survive in the EduBubble, which is at least 15 years behind in technology and 25 years behind in thinking.
If R isn't a well designed language, at least it is free, open source, and capable.
If this is true, then it proves once again these truisms of a military-based capitalist economy:
= Politicians serve their economic masters.
= When the rich declare war, poor kids are sent to die.
= The betrayal of the credulous happens every day.
Welcome to the oligarchy folks, it's all down from here.
In other breaking news, the Egyptian foreign minister just announced the completion of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Great, now I will know what the function with the following comment does:
"Gott vergib mir, das ist eine schreckliche Hack!"
For the sake of order on this sadly degenerating News for Nerds site, please add your post to this parent if the essence of your "thinking" is one of the following:
= LibreOffice is not MS Office, therefore it's crap.
= LibreOffice uses Java, which everyone know is not as fast and portable as
= LibreOffice lacks MS Office proprietary features and misfeatures, therefore it disappoints me terribly.
= LibreOffice doesn't read or write the constantly mutating, rubbish file formats of MS Office the way only MS Office can.
= LibreOffice isn't backed by a large corporation that Only Wants The Best For Me.
= LibreOffice is bloated, and I insist on the lean responsiveness and stability of MS Office!
= LibreOffice doesn't have ribbons to help me not find features that I used to use.
How you resolve your cognitive dissonance is your personal matter. You abandon intellectual integrity and the practice of science when you talk rubbish.
Citizen: Help! Randian Nutbag! My house is on fire!
RN: Contemptible Weakling, if you were strong, I would help you. Or perhaps I would murder you and take everything that makes you strong. That certainly would be an option for a Heroic Spirit. But you are weak and destined for failure.
Citizen: My family is in the house! Oh, save them!
RN: Pusillanimous Conformist Vermin, you have bred hapless, dependent whelps as pathetic as yourself. You are weak and destined for failure. I am indifferent to your suffering. { begins to fly away }
Citizen: W-wh-where are you going?
RN: To collect my welfare cheque. I am *not* indifferent to my own suffering.
> I'm no economist, but
That's ok, they don't know what they're talking about either.
And I expect that a highly numerate society would understand the probabilities well enough not to wage open war against a numerically superior adversary.
Hence the "global economy" that we have today.
There are many forces apart from incompetence acting upon any non-trivial software project. There are compromises to be made, and risks to be evaluated.
In short, there are factors that have nothing to do with the code that affect the quality of code.
The larger the organisation, the greater the tendency towards failure to understand, failure to communicate, and failure to complete. It isn't simply a question of architects, coders, testers, and documenters doing their very best.
There are some coding projects that are as essential as housing, in the sense that defects might cause death. But the majority of coding done in the world is slapped together and discarded within a five-year cycle.
What the heck, if it's for revenue recognition, release the prototype and hire e-workers to post favourable comments on some Web sites!
To paraphrase the Shat, "Bad code... survives."
... except that it's not, despite several similar obituaries having been published.
With all due respect to "language companies" and all the script kiddies coming out of universities today, C and Perl are the stable tools. They will remain important for any work requiring stability.
Most "alternative" languages mentioned in this discussion have broken backwards compatibility at least once, have serious performance and other internal problems, and don't come close to the practical effectiveness of C and Perl.
Perl 6 is a new language. I have played with it and I think it is evolving with the right principles.
The next big challenge to serious programmers is concurrency. Functional programming is the only solution, but let's acknowledge that functional programming is nowhere near becoming the norm. It's very difficult to master, especially for OOP-damaged, pattern-deranged programmers and their IDEs of Desperation.
Having said all this, I'll add that tools will change. Fads come and go, but the tools that do the real work in the most efficient way are always at the top of a smart coder's tool box. Including a Fad Detector.
I'd prefer decent parents teaching kids to do the correct thing for the right reasons
Description of 'correct' is carried through centuries with the help of religion. That's the most important part of the religion, that it creates a foundation of moral thoughts. Since it's information age, that you 'reach' everything through a single search query, you think you're god now. But you forget that vast majority of the thoughts that keeps the society awake and in a living condition is because of moral experiences of our ancestors carried to our age with religion.
Civilization has been a long journey. All these 'uber genious' atheists were existed in all ages. 'I know everything better than everyone' people became majority, society corrupted, then a new page with a new "sin" was added to testaments. Even if all these religious sayings, and prophets etc. were man-made, not god-made, someone considering himself clever enough, should respect them. Because an idea that would affect billions of people for centuries is nothing they could dream of to produce.
> We have a messed up society.
What the US has is a constitutionally protected gun business.
There are more than 20 US manufacturers of guns. This business is worth about $30 billion a year (
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2013/0103/A-look-at-America-s-gun-industry).
The US market for guns is more than 300 million people. Gun ownership in Canada and the UK, to cite figures from nations that have gun-control laws, is at about 30%. Gun ownership in the US is at about 80%.
So, the probability of a gun in the US being in the hands of a crazy person is very high.
The probability of a gun in the US being in the hands of a person who will *go crazy* at some point is also high.
The guns won't go away -- there are too many of them now, and a profitable, constitutionally protected gun business with a huge market will do whatever it must to keep producing and selling.
The only practical options for gun ownership are
constraints on types of weapons and quantity of ammunition for citizens, and
annual psychological testing of gun owners.
In short, political suicide.
Nobody knows what goes between his cold toes and his warm ears. -- Roy Harper