Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Yes 100% Yes (Score 0) 47

Comic books aren't the best material for building reading skills. They're mostly composed of short two-to-three sentence snippets of dialogue, and children should be comfortable reading that sort of thing by the third grade. The next step is learning to read sentences with several dependent clauses, the kind that can stretch on for three or four lines, and you won't find those in comic books because they are simply too long to fit into speech bubbles. I'm not saying comics don't have meaningful and powerful plots -- they often do -- but the prose is simplistic as a result of the format.

Comment Re: It is interesting that you mention Rust! (Score 2) 48

And when it comes to Ruby having an anemic standard library, let's look at the libraries that are included with a vanilla install of Python versus a vanilla installation of Ruby:

Decimal arithmetic:
Python: decimal, Ruby: BigDecimal

Templating:
Python: string.Template, Ruby: ERB

Logging:
Python: logging, Ruby: Logger

Compression:
Python zipfile, Ruby: zlib

Argument parsing:
Python: argparse, Ruby: optparse

XML:
Python: xml, Ruby: REXML

Encryption:
Python: crypt, Ruby: openssl

Again, all these modules are included out of the box. No RubyGems required.

Comment Re: It is interesting that you mention Rust! (Score 1) 48

People keep bringing up RAII as if it's some kind of panacea. It's a useful tool, but it is no panacea. Sure, you allocated an std::vector on the stack to take advantage of RAII, but if the memory allocation in the constructor fails, it will throw an exception. Are you handling that exception? Because I've literally never seen C++ code that handled std::bad_alloc exceptions.

Do you do a push_back() operation later on? Because that can also throw an exception, and if you have a bunch of push_back() statements in a loop, and you get an std::bad_alloc exception halfway through, you are going to end up with a vector that is stuck in an intermediate state. How do you rollback the changes? RAII can't help you solve that problem.

And compound this with the fact that your compiler can't even give you hints on what exceptions you need handle because basically no extant C++ code (including most of the standard library) comes with proper throw specifications. There is literally no way for you to know that you missed handling that std::bad_alloc exception until some bug rears its ugly face.

Comment Re: It is interesting that you mention Rust! (Score 0) 48

Put your rabid fanboyism aside for a moment and actually use your brain: Rust fills a very different niche from C++. It is for writing safe code, whereas writing safe or secure C or C++ code damn near impossible.

So within the next decade, you will find Rust popping up anywhere where you need high peformance with strong safety guarantees -- automobile and aviation electronics, high-frequency trading, medical devices, etc.

On the other hand, using Rust for code that doesn't need to be especially safe is a fad because when you don't need safe code, Rust's safety features just get in the way.

I'm also not sure why you think Ruby is a fad because it has

  • a well-written and feature-complete standard library
  • an ecosystem that doesn't revolve around doing switching to new-framework-of-the-week multiple times a year.
  • an ecosystem that isn't fragmented because code is written with a dozen different incompatible flavors (CoffeeScript, Babel, TypeScript, etc.)

Comment Re:Not that crap again (Score 0) 256

I don't understand your point here. It was found and then fixed in a few days

A few days? Heartbleed went undetected for several years, not a few days.

What do you rather do: read source code, or dissassemble a binary?

It is almost always easier to find vulnerabilities through binary analysis. If you try looking for bugs by reading the source code, odds are that you'll make the same mistake that the original author of the bug made. It's just like doing an algebra problem on math exam. You don't check your work by redoing the problem because you'll just end up making the same mistake a second time; instead you do plug in some numbers and see if your equation spit out the right result.

Comment Re:We need to lose about 80% of the population, st (Score 1) 145

Why in the world is this modded +5 Insightful? Climate scientists have drawn a link between climate change and smog. And last I checked, "climate" referred to long term weather patterns. When the government has to issue several dozen smog alerts for a single city within a single year, that's climate.

Comment Re:You are aware that you need more than just that (Score 1) 114

The other components are under the license I originally referenced. Specifically, it's pretty useless without things like the Microsoft HTTP Client Libraries, Microsoft.Bcl.Compression, Microsoft BCL Portability Pack, Microsoft Async, Microsoft BCL Build Components,

Of course they didn't open source everything at once. That would have been a legal nightmare. Sun didn't open source Java all at once either. They open sourced the core in 2006, and then started the OpenJDK project to open source the toolset and standard libraries. The OpenJDK didn't eliminate the last proprietary code until the very end of 2010. But Sun was a good company, and MS is an evil one right? So we should shit on MS even if they do exactly what Sun did.

Also, having something available as source, doesn't magically port it to your platform.

Microsoft to Open Source More of .NET and Bring it to Linux, Max OS. Seriously, why don't you take five seconds to google something before you spew nonsense all over this comments section?

Someone else in this thread mentioned patents. Several parts of .NET have been released under the Apache 2 license, which contains a patent grant. Additionally, a lot of the software is released with a Patent Promise.

Comment Re:ISIS help desk prompts (Score 1) 145

Look, I don't think he intends to stay in office by force, marshal law or what have you, but I also think he's VERY involved in this election if for nothing else but to pad his "Legacy" by getting someone into office to carry on his policy (I.E. Hillary Clinton).

Ah yes, I also live in the fantasy land where Reagan clearly showed no thought to his "legacy" when he endorsed Bush Sr. for president, Bill clearly showed no thought to his "legacy" when he endorsed Gore, and Bush Sr. never endorsed Jr. or Jeb.

I also don't expect he will go quietly back to Home in January 2017 and spend the rest of his days relaxing and building his library like past presidents, this guy is going to have his fingers in politics

So I guess this is also the fantasy land where Carter and Clinton didn't go on stumping for years after their presidencies ended and Bush Sr. didn't handpick half of his son's cabinet.

Slashdot Top Deals

Vitamin C deficiency is apauling.

Working...