opos - Slashdot User

Wikileaks To Name Swiss Bank Tax Evaders 783

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday January 17, 2011 @12:03PM from the oh-this-will-work-out-fine dept.

eldavojohn writes "The old cliche that the rich and corrupt hold all their money in Swiss bank accounts (to avoid taxation) may finally have a bit of transparency, as the news today is that Wikileaks has been handed a list of account holders tendered by Rudolf Elmer, former banker of Julius Baer. Julian Assange promises a 'full revelation' while Elmer cited his motivation as being: 'I want to let society know how this system works. It's damaging society.' This appears to be real, as Mr. Elmer is soon to appear before a Zurich regional court on charges of coercion as well as violations of Switzerland's strict banking secrecy laws. The public may soon find out that their favorite celebrity, politician or employer doesn't feel responsible to contribute financially to the commonwealth at the expense of privacy."

Comment Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software (Score 1) 923

by opos on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @09:37PM (#14252624) Attached to: Java Is So 90s

Java is definitely outdated and it's fall was absolutely predictable. Virtually every programming/scripting language developed by the corporate world (with the exception of Cobal) has been short lived. Look at the history dating back to the mid 50s.

For survivors, languages designed to solve specific problems have enjoyed a long life. Fortran was designed by John Backus to facilitate converting formulas to machine language (formula translator), Basic came out of Dartmouth to make teaching programming easy, B came from Ken Thompson at Bell Labs which led to Dennis Richie's C in order to overcome obstacles with the Multics/PL-1 project. More recently, Perl, PHP etc - also were driven by individuals solving specific problems.

What fell? PL/1, designed by IBM to combine the utility of Cobol and Fortran failed. The Defense Department jumped in and designed ADA and so on until we arrive at Java. Designed by Sun - again, not a response to a specific issue but rather a coporate strategy to solve classes of perceived problems.

Bottom line - programming/scripting languages, designed by individuals to solve individual problems seem to enjoy a longer life than languages designed by corporate groups that address large classes of problems (to increase market share?).

And another point - typically languages initiated by individuals have a shallow learning curve (remember printf("Hello world");) whereas languages initiated by groups tend to be too feature-rich (look at PL/1). The remarkable lesson for me is how a few individuals addressed their own problems in such a way that the resulting language could be extended while maintaining a very shallow learning curve.

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