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Joel Webber › Comments
Joe Hewitt - On Middle Men - http://joehewitt.com/post...
Maxamad, scott willeke, Mike Hussein Cohen and 23 other people liked this
"We're at a critical juncture in the evolution of software. The web is still here and it is still strong. Anyone can still put any information or applications on a web server without asking for permission, and anyone in the world can still access it just by typing a URL. I don't think I appreciated how important that is until recently. Nobody designs new systems like that anymore, or at least few of them succeed. What an incredible stroke of luck the web was, and what a shame it would be to let that freedom slip away. I do not wish to fight any mobile device makers who want to create a software ecosystem and act as the gatekeepers for that ecosystem. What I do want to fight for is the viability of the mobile web. Developers are rushing to create native apps, meanwhile letting their mobile web apps atrophy (I have certainly been guilty of that myself). Web technology is still relatively weak, and improving slowly. At this pace, what will the mobile web look like in 10 years? Will we...
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- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
But will Facebook stop working on iPhone apps just because of this? No. Neither will Google. Unfortunately, the big companies that have the clout to do something will not stand up for developer's rights, as long as the consumer insists on buying the iPhone and other such locked down devices.
- Piaw Na
In fairness to Google they are fighting for openness in the one conduit they control which is Android. Its asking a lot to expect them to completely boycott iPhone which would be their only other leverage with Apple.
- Ed Millard
Well, then I should expect Facebook to support Android, as well as all the other companies that have the resources to do so. :-)
- Piaw Na
Piaw, are you saying that facebook isn't supporting android? last i checked there was a facebook android app -- plus, this is just one guy's opinions, he does not speak for facebook (as far as i can tell)
- Chris Heath
Piaw, I'd imagine that Apple's non-approval of several Google apps has prompted Google to devote more resources to making superb Android apps (and yes, apps for the Pre and Blackberry) than iPhone. Where it really hurts is apps that have a hardware component. I don't know many/any developers willing to make consumer apps for the iPhone that require a hardware component because the rist...
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- Kevin Fox
I imagine Facebook is putting their resources in the ports their user base is demanding. The number of users they have on iPhone demands attention, and shorting it for reasons that are somewhat political probably isn't wise. With the growing popularity of Android it will probably warrant increased resources. Kind of sounds like Joe would rather make the web app work better and that would be more platform agnostic though its pretty hard to do a really exceptional mobile experience through a browser.
- Ed Millard
Is there a FB ad on Android? I switched from Android back to Blackberry earlier this year, but I definitely remember that there was no Android app before I switched.
- Piaw Na
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
- Ed Millard
I guess he's got his heart in the right place, but I can't get too worked up about this issue, not coming from the console game work, where all the platforms are locked down and always have been.
- Andrew C
from Android
I've never seen a major-label game be blocked from publication on a major platform for ambiguous and arbitrary reasons. Imagine if Modern Warfare 2 requires a patch to fix a hack and Microsoft decided to disallow it because they've decided that they don't want warfare scenes that take place within the United States? That's a fairer comparison.
- Kevin Fox
I have heard a few horror stories of games being rejected, or at least delayed, because the console manufacturer in question had its own strategic reasons for doing so (because they had a similar in-house game coming out, or because they thought there were too many similar games coming out at once). Not quite the same thing, but still a pretty dangerous situation if you're the developer.
- Joel Webber
Console platforms have a limited life (try playing the PS games on the PS3). Phone OS, however, look like they'll be around for the long term.
- Piaw Na
Joel, those reasons aren't ambiguous nor are they arbitrary.
- Chris Heath
They may not be literally arbitrary, but they are still opaque to the developer, and not in the developer's best interest. Not precisely the same thing (and probably less common), but close enough to bear mentioning.
- Joel Webber
Piaw, dude, you switched from Android to Blackberry? You are a man who loves outdated tools :)
- j1m
The switch was entirely based on my need for international roaming data plans at $20/month flat fee (this is on top of the standard fee, but the only time I *really need* data is when I'm roaming!). If any other smart phone came with that feature, I'd switch.
- Piaw Na
Stupid non downloadable games. I want my brother to play Borderlands with me but there is no way for me to buy it for him. :-/
Joel Webber, CW™, Amber, Random Time Lord and Rodfather liked this
http://store.steampowered.com/app... Here you go
- CW™
No kidding. I hate when I run into that problem. Seriously, any game that's not a large number of GB should be downloadable.
- Joel Webber
'Doomsday' 2012 prediction explained: Mayan calendar was cyclical - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...
Joel Webber liked this
The world ends every year on Dec 31. That's why we celebrate like there's no tomorrow on New Year's Eve. Then the world is recreated from backup on Jan 1.
- Amit Patel
And of course it looks like the movie itself sucks pretty hard anyway :)
- Joel Webber
Can you remove Safari from a Mac without worry?
Rodfather liked this
That's a good question.
- Rodfather
I believe you need Safari if you want to run iTunes. I'm not sure what else relies on it.
- Rodfather
You should be able to remove Safari with no problem. It's just an app that wraps WebKit. Don't remove the WebKit Framework, though, or iTunes and probably many other apps will start failing.
- Joel Webber
“SuperFreakonomics” and climate change : The New Yorker - http://www.newyorker.com/arts...
Steven Perez, Daniel Rowley, Lim, Kok Kim and 5 other people liked this
"Levitt and Dubner tell the horseshit story as a prelude to discussing climate change: “Just as equine activity once threatened to stomp out civilization, there is now a fear that human activity will do the same.” As usual, they say, the anxiety is unwarranted. First, the global-warming threat has been exaggerated; there is uncertainty about how, exactly, the earth will respond to rising CO2 levels, and uncertainty has “a nasty way of making us conjure up the very worst possibilities.” Second, solutions are bound to present themselves: “Technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined.”"
- Jim Norris
from Bookmarklet
That's it. I'm moving to Canada. Oh, wait...
- Mona Nomura
I shall laugh at all of you from my underground bunker the day yellowstone erupts and we have no geoengineering skillz to deal with the aftermath. :)
- Private Sanjeev
where are you building your bunker?
- bob
Get them pre-built: http://www.missilebases.com/
- Private Sanjeev
"Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong."
- Simon
"Would the trees take up CO2 while they’re alive, and release it back into the atmosphere only slowly, once they’re dead? If so, the world already has those sorts of trees. They are called, well, trees." - Al Gore made this same joke at Google today.
- Darren
Al Gore must be reading my FriendFeed!
- Jim Norris
He's still telling the trees joke? See, it's this alarming lack of awareness about what does most of the CO2 processing in the environment that has a tendency to discredit him out of the gate.
- Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
Care to elaborate, Mark? Trees don't have this property, or are you saying that it doesn't matter for some other reason?
- Joel Webber
"constructing a vast network of tubes" - like the internets?
- Alex Gawley
Trees do have this property, but trees aren't responsible for most of the CO2 absorption on the planet. The rate at which plankton absorb the planet's CO2 makes the tree population look insignificant. If you're talking about things that you could easily manufacture or grow that absorb CO2, single celled organisms would be at the top of the list. Incidentally, these could be much more...
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- Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
Al Gore's point was that deforestation accounts for a large portion of climate change, and rather than engineering fake trees to do what real trees already do well, we could just, well, stop cutting down the forests and plant some more trees.
- Darren
http://friendfeed.com/search... Jim I am receiving deflamatory comments about me using my first and last name which is illegal, I tried to tell brent but he placed it on private feed, which was not a nice thing to do, could you pull some strings please and have this user warned
- dawngordon
RT @Nikoro: Best hospital website I've seen all day: http://www.nwgrh.dhr.state.ga.us/Staff_1... (you won't be disappointed)
Mona Nomura, Susan Beebe, Dan Hsiao and Joel Webber liked this
Wow, I missed the casm of sar there....
- Kevin Fox
Go Georgia! Almost last in the country in education and it shows in the wonderful work of their IT staff :)
- Joel Webber
That is... alarming. It looks like a Geocities webpage.
- Rebecca Sun
yikes that is simply aweful :P
- Susan Beebe
Google 'Go' Name Brings Accusations Of 'Evil' -- InformationWeek - http://www.informationweek.com/news...
Joel Webber liked this
'Other commenters support renaming the language "Issue 9," a reference both to the dispute thread and to Bell Labs' distributed operating system Plan 9, which was developed in part by Google Go creators Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. '
- j1m
from Bookmarklet
I love how an honest naming conflict becomes "evil" when applied to Google. And of course there's always the howls of "how could a search company fail to know about this?" -- yeah, "go" is a really easy name to search for unambiguously, and everyone at Google walks around with a copy of the web embedded in their brains. Sheesh.
- Joel Webber
I imagine the Reddit crowd will get this out of their system after a few weeks and turn their attention elsewhere.
- Matt Mastracci
@Joel, yes, well, I would say that in general the public discourse is dominated by the notion that, since "there are 2 sides to every story! [sic]" whenever any idea is before you, you can generate another valid idea by inverting it. Thus Google's "Don't Be Evil" slogan, which is sincere, idealistic, and, perhaps most important, catchy, is routinely inverted into "Google Is Evil" not...
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- j1m
Sabrina's game for the iPhone was rejected two weeks ago. She's called every day, sent emails, - no explanation. Its a simple word game. Sad
Bruce Johnson, Joel Webber and Matt Mastracci liked this
This is why I've yet to upgrade my iPhone. Love the device design but want access to unfettered innovation. I'm waiting.
- Andrew Bowers
Meaning that your phone is jailbrpken?
- Joel Webber
Just imagine those companies that raised funding on the premise of developing an iPhone app, burned through capital, only to have it delayed or rejected. The unpredictability of it all makes rational economic calculation difficult.
- Ray Cromwell
@Joel - No, its not jailbroken. I haven't had the time to be a hax4r. I want a 3GS to complement my Android, but I think I'll just replace the iPhone with one of the new Android devices coming out. Haven't decided yet.
- Andrew Bowers
@Ray - Agreed. The app that her company just finished was also rejected. The whole thing seems arbitrary and poorly run.
- Andrew Bowers
An early birthday present: The Gmail Javascript compiler was just open-sourced! http://code.google.com/closure... (it compiles JS into smaller, faster JS)
Mona Nomura, Uğur Aslan, seyithanyener and 115 other people liked this
We first started work on it almost 8 years ago. It has come a long way since then :)
- Paul Buchheit
Happy Birthday Paul!
- AJ Batac
Today is actually just my internet birthday.
- Paul Buchheit
Well, thanks :) But for a verbose API I'll stick with YUI :P Have to inspect the power of templating and compiler, though.
- Claudio Cicali ♋
I wonder what happens when you apply it recursively -- can you get down to 1 byte of code that takes no time to execute? ;=)
- Brian Sullivan
Finally! This is great.
- Tudor Bosman
Happy Birthday!
- Robert Scoble
Nice!
- Micah Wittman
Unfortunately it looks like the internationalization features may be missing. I wonder why those were removed? (or if I'm just not seeing it)
- Paul Buchheit
Paul you are my best-friend :`(
- Onur Gündüz
if you were starting a new site today, would you use this over jquery (which friendfeed uses)?
- Karl Rosaen
Karl, jquery is a library, this is a compiler. I would use them both.
- Paul Buchheit
well, i mean closure library :) but yeah, they could be used together
- Karl Rosaen
ah, i see this is a link closure compiler, not the broader closure tools.
- Karl Rosaen
Refactoring, JS style.
- Gabe
Now, this is a good news
- Ozkan Altuner
@Paul the Closure project has three components: compiler, library, and template language. Looks like the Closure/library might be competing with jQuery.
- Shakeel Mahate
this is sweet!
- Jay
I think jQuery does a lot of stuff that might confuse the compiler, e.g. iterating over an array of string function names and creating new function wrappers (look at the way the parent/child/next/prev/etc functions get installed) The Closure library is also full of type annotations that help the compiler make better optimization choices, so you're likely to get a better compiled outcome using Closure than jQuery + fixes + compiler
- Ray Cromwell
@paul -- I know you've been wanting this opensourced for a long time. sorry it took such a long time. Nick Santos and the jscompiler team has finally done it! Cheers!
- Jing Lim
Happy Birthday
- ashish
Many happy returns!!
- Bleys
Happy Birthday, Paul!
- Andrew Terry
Happy Birthday Paul
- Sandeep Kalidindi
Happy B'day Paul! don't be evil :)
- sirishkumar
Congratulations to the team (and @Paul & Jing) -- I know everyone's been waiting a long time for this. For anyone considering whether to use jQuery vs Closure, consider that they're meant for largely different purposes. jQuery's good for enhancing static web pages; Closure's much better at building large apps. And as Ray points out above, Closure the library is going to get much better results from Closure the compiler than an arbitrary js library would, because of all the type annotations.
- Joel Webber
Paul Buchheit has been at the top of my best of pages all month. Rock on, Paul.
- Donald C. Lindsay
Hey HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAUL !!! Cool present!! <insert CAKE> :D
- Susan Beebe
Paul, any comment on this write up? http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs...
- Sachin
That writeup is trolling for traffic IMHO. Nit picking 50 lines out of 200+ thousand (written for readability, which get compiled and optimized), providing no benchmarks for claims, and spending half the time bashing Java, it just seems to be struggling to find something wrong with Closure.
- Ray Cromwell
Sachin: he seems to be commenting on Closure the JS library, not Closure the JS compiler (that Paul's post was about). And he may be a douchebag, but I haven't seen anything I disagree with.
- Gabe
@Sachin: I hate to be too harsh, but that post is pretty much garbage. From what I can tell he's pretty much managed to enumerate some of the worst things about Javascript -- nitpicking the code for referencing "undefined" directly without declaring it as an uninitialized local? That's insane. Following this advice is mostly a recipe for an unreadable mess. Also, look in the comments for several refutations of the idea that some of these are even optimizations.
- Joel Webber
Joel, you're just not man enough to handle a language where 'top' is an implicitly reserved keyword, and 'undefined' which should be, isn't. But it could be worse, 'null' could be something you could override. :)
- Ray Cromwell
The @dotspots Chrome plugin is live and in beta now! http://dotspots.com/#download
Mark Trapp, Michal Cierniak, Ray Cromwell and 3 other people liked this
We'll be working on improving this extension over the next few weeks. It's using the same code as the Firefox extension.
- Matt Mastracci
Yeah, that's right - the regular builds don't have extensions enabled (not until December for the beta ones)
- Matt Mastracci
The beta testers for Chrome extensions have to be pretty savvy right now. :)
- Matt Mastracci
Once you've got it installed, you'll start seeing dots inline automatically. If you click through one of our DotSpots links (like http://dotspots.com/d...), it'll pop up automatically.
- Matt Mastracci
I just installed it on Chrome/Mac in about 3 seconds, and it worked a charm. Didn't even have to restart the browser (!)
- Joel Webber
Matt, this is awesome, totally smooth user experience, you've definitely got to do a presentation on your linkers at some point.
- Ray Cromwell
Thanks, guys. Now that we've actually launched the product I can start to blog & present some of the neat stuff we've done. I think I owe those Chrome extension guys a beer - the whole extension architecture is so great.
- Matt Mastracci
Hey @daringfireball, Facebook lets people publish apps by the rules Hewitt proposes for Apple. Your irony is misplaced. http://daringfireball.net/linked...
Hutch Carpenter, Tyson Key, Ken Sheppardson and 2 other people liked this
To be fair, the link under "irony" is to a tweet pointing out that Facebook is a walled garden, not a complaint about its review process.
- Joel Webber
My point is that his irony is based on the tweet's saying that Facebook is hypocritical, which is wrong on two counts: First, because comparing an arbitrary and obtuse app review process to a supposed walled garden (debatable in itself) is apples to oranges. A fairer comparison of Apple's and Facebook's app review processes supports Joe's point and diminishes Gruber's. Second, because...
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- Kevin Fox
Fair enough. I guess I was being generous in seeing potential irony, in the fact that both practices (Hewitt's responsibility or lack thereof notwithstanding) are unfortunate for developers and users alike. But I do agree that it's a bit of a stretch.
- Joel Webber
I hate the whole Facebook/Walled Garden myth. If you're going to start calling Facebook a walled garden it's time to start calling Twitter the same.
- Jesse Stay
Start, Jesse? :-)
- Ken Sheppardson
Jesse, Twitter is about as open as it gets. Facebook, though taking baby steps, is still very closed and controlling from a user perspective. That said, yes the irony is misplaced, though Apple (largely due to its process) hasn't had the app problems that Facebook has (rampant privacy leaks, game ad scams, etc.)
- LogEx
LogEx have you compared Facebook's TOS to Twitter's? With Facebook my data goes with me when I leave - there's nothing alluding to that in Twitter's TOS.
- Jesse Stay
Open as it gets, LogEx? I guess it's all a matter of perspective. Try asking Twitter how you go about retrieving all public tweets...
- Ken Sheppardson
@Jesse: I'd hardly call the idea of Facebook-as-walled-garden a myth. The TOS, ostensibly for privacy reasons, make it nearly impossible to get your own data out in any kind of automated way, which makes it largely irrelevant to say you "own your data". If Twitter's TOS are controlling as well, then so be it -- I care less, because I don't really use it.
- Joel Webber
To me, a "walled garden" is something that rejects interoperating with the web. Neither twitter or facebook do that, but Apple does (and not just with the AppStore)
- Nick Lothian
Joel, my point is Facebook is just as open as Twitter, if not more.
- Jesse Stay
Twitter has some issues, to be sure (like forever locking up your user name, phone number, and/or email address when you delete). Not sure about the API, but I have all of my tweets in RSS. But it's a much simpler service... easy sign-up, tweets in, tweets out. I'd need a large separate post to itemize all of my walled-garden beefs with Facebook.
- LogEx
Ok, how about a roach motel then? Your data checks in, but it never checks out?
- Joel Webber
Joel, except that you can exterminate the roaches with Facebook (on your own profile). You can't with Twitter - they remain forever.
- Jesse Stay
Also, that all becomes an entirely different story when you talk about Facebook Connect, in which the data starts with you and stays with you
- Jesse Stay
With Facebook Connect doesn't the data still reside on Facebook's servers? Can I visit a page on FB which will export all of my personal information in some format (CSV, FOAF/XFN, etc?) Otherwise, it's still a roach motel.
- Ray Cromwell
Ray, Facebook supports the activitystrea.ms standard - is that what you're talking about? With Facebook Connect only the data you put into it goes onto Facebook's servers, and if any of your users delete their Facebook account their data is removed (minus anything that has already populated on a friend's profile), according to the Facebook TOS. Also, Apps can't store data about users for more than 24 hours, but that doesn't stop an app from enabling a user to export their own data.
- Jesse Stay
Examples: RSS News Feed Reader: http://www.facebook.com/apps... and FOAF Generator: http://www.facebook.com/apps...
- Jesse Stay
Also see Digg's implementation of Facebook Connect - every Facebook friend that logs in through Facebook on Digg automatically gets added as a friend on Digg - full export of Social Graph data.
- Jesse Stay
That FOAF tool doesn't seem to work and I wonder if it can produce email addresses (or atleast proxied addresses) I don't consider the data liberated unless I could use it to mirror my whole social graph onto a competing product, the way Facebook is harvesting Orkut customers through the Orkut Export Tool.
- Ray Cromwell
Ray, I don't know of anything stopping Twitter or MySpace or Orkut from leveraging Facebook Connect to import friends that log in through Facebook on those sites.. I may be wrong though and maybe they've tried and have been blocked. I just haven't heard of it. Have you heard to the contrary? The technology's there if those sites want to try and use it.
- Jesse Stay
Ray, FriendFeed even did that before they were bought by Facebook.
- Jesse Stay
@Jesse - there was this whole thing: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13....
- Nick Lothian
Nick, that's because Plaxo wasn't using the Facebook Platform to do that. They were scraping the site. Twitter will blacklist you too if you do that.
- Jesse Stay
It should be noted that McCrea and Smarr of Plaxo are also now working with Facebook on the Activity Streams standard.
- Jesse Stay
Ray, it's also important to note that 'your whole social graph' isn't actually yours. Your friends? Sure. Their friends? It depends on what they choose to reveal. Privacy is pretty important and just because you friend someone and they accept your friendship doesn't mean you automatically get to see all their friends if they choose to keep that private.
- Kevin Fox
@Jesse - yeah, but you can't just extract "your" data using the platform. You are only allowed to store it for 24 hours. As Kevin alluded, there are good reasons why "your" data isn't really yours, but anyway - it's misleading to say FB provides a way to export it. To quote "You must not store or cache any data you receive from us for more than 24 hours unless doing so is permitted by the offline exception, or that data is explicitly designated as Storable Data." http://developers.facebook.com/policy...
- Nick Lothian
@Jesse - I've written something like the FOAF exporter before, too. See http://apps.facebook.com/snpdemo... (although I haven't worked on that for years, and it doesn't work with Facebook profiles with names instead of IDs). http://nicklothian.com/blog... for background, and http://nicklothian.com/blog... is where I decided that portability isn't going to work anyway.
- Nick Lothian
Nick, also keep in mind that "You must not store or cache any data you receive from us for more than 24 hours unless doing so is permitted by the offline exception, or that data is explicitly designated as Storable Data." is for developers. That wording is not targeted towards users. I respect that - I don't want any 3rd-party developer holding my data indefinitely either.
- Jesse Stay
You don't want a 3rd-party developer to be able to be able to get data from Facebook (the messages you've sent, for example) and do something with it on your behalf? How is that different from giving said developer access to your mailbox via imap? We do that every day with mail readers. It seems to me that it's not really "my" data unless I can use tools to access it. Am I missing something here, or are all of my messages, status updates, comments, photos, and so forth inaccessible to automated tools?
- Joel Webber
@Joel - was that to me? I think that data should be accessible. But I think there are are some pretty good reasons why your social graph - especially the details of your contacts - shouldn't be ported from one website/application to another. http://nicklothian.com/blog...
- Nick Lothian
I think you could make an argument for the case of accessing friend-of-friend information, but for contact information (direct child nodes of my graph node), I don't see how this case differs from the traditional address book or rolodex app. I can port contacts between email clients already, share them via Bluetooth profiles, vCard, syncML, etc. If you don't want private contact details...
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- Ray Cromwell
@Nick: Sorry I wasn't being clear. I was really referring to Jesse's assertion that he doesn't want 3rd-party developers to have access to his data. And I agree that FOAF contact info should be kept private (isn't it already?) for the reasons you mention. I just want to be able to have automated access to the data I enter or upload, and to messages, comments, and such directed by...
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- Joel Webber
Joel, my thoughts exactly. What we have with social graphs today is a step back from what you had with ACAP/IMAP/LDAP/vCard/SyncML/etc. The original IETF protocols were designed with both federation/distributivity/client-independence and security in mind (after all, corporations often run servers supporting these protocols). We have lost this on today's web, see my screed:...
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- Ray Cromwell
So is Go Google's response to Apple's Objective C and Microsoft's .Net? Up until now Google hasn't had a programming language to brand.
I think Go is more to fill a technical hole (lack of real systems languages since C/C++).
- Matt Mastracci
Go against .Net ? of course not. Different targets, different approaches...
- Ozgur Demir
Keep in mind Google is also rumored to be building a Desktop OS - it's to their advantage to have a language that powers that OS that other developers can build on.
- Jesse Stay
Google's ChromeOS isn't exactly a rumor at this point. But I don't believe Go is really targeted at that problem. I think Matt's more on the mark here.
- Joel Webber
Why is it so hard to smear some groups (ACORN) while nothing sticks on others (Blackwater)? Why doesn't this ever change? #fail
Joel Webber and Jim Norris liked this
I assume you meant "easy to smear some groups". Blackwater's probably a little better equipped, financially and politically, to deal with this sort of thing. Plus, if you really piss them off they'll just send in mercenaries to kick your ass :P
- Joel Webber
Ah yes, the quick and wrong tweet. But the right sentiment.
- Rekha Murthy
Help me understand this Brian Kernighan quote - Stack Overflow - http://stackoverflow.com/questio...
Piaw Na, Mark Trapp, Ruchira S. Datta and 2 other people liked this
""Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." --Brian Kernighan"
- Michal Cierniak
from Bookmarklet
Such a great quote. I like to think of it as a simple mathematical basis for the KISS principle, as it applies to software development. If you're ever looking for evidence of it in action, try making sense of a nasty compiler error from a C++ template -- it's not technically debugging, I suppose, but it's kind of the same problem.
- Joel Webber
I'm thinking of using this as a comment for code reviews.
- Michal Cierniak
Google storage plans: $5/yr for 20GB, up to 16TB ($4K/yr): http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2009... New prices are 2x storage at 1/4th old price.
Anika, Louis Gray, Joel Webber and Piaw Na liked this
I'm surprised that it can be offered that cheaply. I'm going to have to get some more storage for some emails soon.
- Matt Ellsworth
This is going to be incredibly useful for Picasa. Now I think I could actually store originals there.
- Joel Webber
Considering the SmugMug, etc., were offering $40/year for unlimited storage, I think $5/year for 20GB is quite reasonable, not "surprisingly cheap". I was going to migrate from Picasa to Smugmug, but this just made it unnecessary.
- Piaw Na
why to pay $40 to Picasa if you could get unlimited storage from flickr for $25?
- earlyadopter
Thats getting fairly close to the retail cost of the drives. I can get an 1T drive at frys for around $80. Thats 8c/GB or $1.60 for 20GB. To have the data in 3 places (to get somewhere near the low risk of loss that google is offering), that would be $4.80. I'm still not considering the cost of the other hardware since to get the same low risk of loss, I'd need more than one machine - geographically distributed.
- Greg Grothaus
Because Flickr has a nasty habit of deleting people's accounts without warning? Also I'm guessing that Flickr's "unlimited" may not turn out to be that way in practice. I actually feel a little more comfortable paying something for the storage, so that the company doing the storing has an incentive to keep providing the service.
- Joel Webber
@earladopter, it's $5, not $40. :)
- Piaw Na
@Greg: Your prices are too high. Nowadays, 1.5TB drives are gotten at around $90. And obviously, Google can buy drives in bulk and drive costs down below what you can do by buying at Fry's.
- Piaw Na
And you have to consider the price of multiple drives for availability, backup, power, network connectivity, etc. I can't speak to Google's costs, but it sounds like a pretty good deal to me. I'll be quite happy to no longer fear having to tell my wife "Remember how I said our family pictures were all safe on my backup hard drive? Well a funny thing happened with that...". I trust Google to do backups a lot better than I ever will :)
- Joel Webber
I pay $50/year for MozyHome to back up everything on my drives. While I trust Google with backups, pictures aren't the only thing that is valuable.
- Piaw Na
"interesting parallel between the decline of rock music quality and, of all things, the decline in US oil discovery and production" - http://www.overthinkingit.com/2008...
Marco Fabbri, Kol Tregaskes, Jacopod and 29 other people liked this
So if we can get Bill and Ted together the world will be all right?
- CW™
There has to be some sort of birthday paradox around graphs. Given a large enough library of graphs, you will find a strong correlation between two.
- Joe Beda
Mean global temperature correlates quite well with the decline in the pirate population, after all. Actually, we can test causality now -- will the rise of Somali and Asian pirates bring the temperature back down? Or are the required to wear 17th century pirate regalia?
- Joel Webber
This also confirms my conjecture that there have been no new good artists since 1975.
- Gabe
This is why we must start drilling in Alaska.
- τorƍue
Will drilling in Alaska improve rock music?
- Gary Burd
Speaking of birthdays, I think a histogram of the birthdays of music critics would probably look a whole lot like the red graph... shifted 13-18 years or so.
- Ken Sheppardson
'Songs in "Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Songs of all Time,"' huh? That's some ground truth for ya.
- j1m
I'd like to see the graph for Pitchfork, but the lists are segmented by decade.
- Gary Burd
@Ken - "predicting oil production by music critic's birthdays". Who'd have thought we could solve the whole running-out-of-oil thing by getting Rolling Stone to hire 16 year olds!!!
- Nick Lothian
Ken: I think you might find more correllation with a histogram of drug use than age of critics.
- Gabe
Plenty of good rock out there: http://www.lala.com/#album... http://www.lala.com/#album... http://www.lala.com/#album... -- though can't argue that we're not in an age of decline
- Christopher Galtenberg
Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal! Fox cancels 'Dollhouse' http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr...
Kol Tregaskes, Mark Douglass, Travis Koger and 12 other people liked this
Ugh! First Sarah Conner and now Dollhouse too.
- Carl Fyffe
Nooooooo!!!!!
- Jesse Stay
I loved the first season of Sarah Conner but they totally lost me by season two. Stories completely dependent on time travel are doomed because absolutely everything can be undone, repeatedly.
- Ed Millard
8-( What Jesse said.
- Andrew Terry
:(
- Tudor Bosman
Fact is, Dollhouse ratings were awful. I can't blame Fox for canceling.
- Stephen Mack
I could take the best show in the world and mismanage it in to bad ratings. Glee isn't actually a very good show, but the Fox Marketing Machine has blessed it and they can make people think the show is a phenomenon that you need to follow unless you want to be a social outcast.
- Kevin Fox
I honestly haven't even seen the show yet, but after what happened with Firefly, this isn't terribly surprising. Either Fox can't manage these shows, or the audience is just too stupid to appreciate them.
- Joel Webber
Fox would rather show something like "So you think you're a fly fisherman!" than any show that takes thought.
- Kevin Pedraja
Kevin, it's true. With Firefly there were countless examples of mismanagement -- wrong order, terrible promotions, pre-emptions due to sports. With Dollhouse, the main bad treatment was putting it on Fridays (a sign from the beginning they had no confidence) and lack of promotion. But once the show airs and it gets low ratings, they can't really suddenly move it to a plum spot or pile on the promotions, because there's no evidence the show would do better.
- Stephen Mack
We need to make a pact, all of us agree we make sure that Jandy never finds out about this. We'll just hide it. We'll produce and act out episodes and let her think the show is still going.
- Matthew DeVries
Matthew: Ooh! Can I be a vacuous doll in the background known as Foxtrot who gets no lines?
- Stephen Mack
Not sure if is was the fault of Joss or Fox but the early episodes were so bad I imagine they lost most of their audience from the get go and most probably never checked back.
- Ed Millard
I can't say I'm surprised. Fox always has a way of cancelling the shows it should keep around though.
- veo
Dibs on being Golf
- Matthew DeVries
:( Took longer than I feared, but I'm not surprised, it was on Fox after all.
- Grant Bierman
Update: Joss Whedon posted this comment over at Whedonesque (thanks for the heads up, Bonnie!): mm. Apparently my news is not news. I don't have a lot to say. I'm extremely proud of the people I've worked with: my star, my staff, my cast, my crew. I feel the show is getting better pretty much every week, and I think you'll agree in the coming months. I'm grateful that we got to put it...
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- Matthew DeVries
Don't hate me, but I didn't think much of Dollhouse. I'm a big fat Whedon fan, but Dollhouse didn't hold a candle to Firefly or Buffy. I thought the writing was weak, and the character development was weaker. *braces for the unfollows*
- Sarah is Novembery
I don't think Dollhouse was his best work. But the show was getting better over time. And it was surely better than a good portion of the dreck that passes for prime-time TV these days.
- Kevin Pedraja
Matthew, lol. Too late. The show's been on borrowed time all season, though, honestly. The thing that got me was the show actually did fairly well taking DVR and hulu viewings into account. The nets don't want to count those, though, because they can't sell those numbers to prime-time advertisers. Ed, the first episodes being bad were Fox's fault. They asked him to recut the pilot and...
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- Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF
Kevin, Joss likes Glee and I don't think he would if it weren't very good. It's not amazingly kickass, but it's definitely very good. Still, you are correct that if Fox had put the kind of blitz behind Dollhouse that Glee got, it would have more viewers. However, due to Fox's inability to let Whedon be Whedon, the show people would have seen if Dollhouse had had huge advance promo would...
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- Spidra Webster
Sucks. 2x04 was particularly strong...looking forward to the rest of the season. Also, props to Kevin for the quote in the post, love it.
- Louis Simoneau
Google hopes to remake programming with Go - http://news.cnet.com/8301-10...
Thomas Amberg, Barry Mitchelson, Marwan Osman and 103 other people liked this
This could be very good! "Google software luminaries such as Unix co-creator Ken Thompson believe that they can help boost both computing power and programmers' abilities with an experimental programming language project called Go. And on Tuesday, they're taking the veil of secrecy off Go, releasing what they've built so far and inviting others to join the newly open-source project."
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
What do you think, Paul? I know it's early, but Python latched on at Google... Think this is a response? And just on a lark, do you think Go may be headed for the browser at some point (to replace javascript)? Many of us have wondered if Chrome will take a stab at reinventing/reworking the web stack. Go feels more like a back-end tool, but wondering what came to your mind when you saw this...
- Christopher Galtenberg
Christopher, Python is nice, but we need a new system language, something high-performance to replace C/C++. This may be it.
- Paul Buchheit
Yeah, I was remembering your thoughts from here, Paul: http://friendfeed.com/paul.... Wonder how the ooc folks feel today...
- Christopher Galtenberg
My first reaction was oh yay, another C like language with brackets to make it acceptable. Having Rob Pike and Thompson on the team is impressive but makes me think of a plan9 resurrection. Using CSPs though is pretty cool and it looks like it supports mobile tasks.
- Todd Hoff
"Specifically, Go uses a technology dating back to the 1960s called CSP, or communicating sequential processes, that handles interactions among a set of cooperating programs, Pike said. The technology made an appearance in programming languages such as Occom and Erlang, but it generally hasn't been applied in systems programming."
- Paul Buchheit
If Google uses this for internal projects, that will give it a big advantage over something like plan9 in terms of being practical (not to mention the fact that it's free software, which plan9 was not, and a programming language, not an OS).
- Paul Buchheit
I am very excited about this, it's not genius or rocket science but it maybe the language to put alongisde C/C++ for real. I thought it was going to be D, maybe this is it
- Lawrence Oluyede
D seems too fragmented to be usable. All my hopes are on Go now :)
- Paul Buchheit
And note that the language is designed to be IDE independent.
- Piaw Na
Plan9 was a set of composable tools. In this case Google is providing the OS and the tools.
- Todd Hoff
Go is NOT an OS!
- Piaw Na
Where's the link to it?
- Gabe
Please ; at the end of lines... (I hate languages without ; for some psychological reasons)
- Ozgur Demir
I am no fan of language features designed to ease parsing but i suppose that's important for a system language? But it's hardly a user (i.e. programmer)-centric design. I think they should have drawn more from Scala (for concurrency model) and Io (for a beautiful syntax) instead of the messy, old languages they chose. Luckily, it's not designed for my needs so i'll never have to worry about it.
- ·[▪_▪]·
@ozgurdemir I agree. Either require them or don't. Don't make them optional in some cases. It confuses what programmers generally expect of a programming language: consistency.
- ·[▪_▪]·
Just checked and hated it. Sorry guys, it's not about the rest of the language.. it's just the ;'s.
- Ozgur Demir
while checking it, I noticed how much I love C / Java syntax and how lame to trying to change it just for to make a new product different.
- Ozgur Demir
@Paul you should know better than to confuse a language with its implementation! The people working on this all hail from the C/Java lineage and I don't know...may be fast but generally C is a hassle and Java is too dumbed-down. Trying to fix the mistakes they made in the past. Wonderful...
- Rudolf Olah
For god's sake, who cares what the syntax looks like? What matters is whether it solves useful problems or not. It's designed to clean up a lot of the problems stemming from the legacy of C[++], compile fast, execute fast, be appropriate for systems programming, and have good primitives for concurrency. Those are good goals in my book, and they fill a much-needed niche.
- Joel Webber
I do care.
- Ozgur Demir
I thought it was kinda weird the way the video highlighted how fast it compiles. Compilation speed is great, and the vid was impressive, but I've never seen a language launch where that was highlighted so much. "Look, it compiles fast!!!!!! Oh, BTW, we are trying to solve concurrency".
- Nick Lothian
@Ozgur: Sure, but as long as the syntax isn't broken in some way, or ambiguous (VB6 comes to mind), it's surely much less important than what the language is capable of (compile speed, execution speed, what can be expressed, etc). Syntax seems like a distant third- or fourth-most important aspect to me.
- Joel Webber
@Nick: That kind of struck me as well when they first started talking about it. But when you consider that your main alternative is C++, and that compile times can get absolutely brutal (try compileing WebKit sometime -- it takes hours), it makes a bit more sense.
- Joel Webber
@Joel. yea, I can't say you're wrong and I am right.. these are all preferences.. for me, syntax is an important aspect in terms of code readability that's why I care since it becomes a real pain in the ass on a midsize or bigger project.
- Ozgur Demir
This thread is degenerating into rubbish. You know who you are - please stop.
- Christopher Galtenberg
from iPhone
@Joel yeah, I guess. But compiling something like that should take hours! Back when men were men and compiling a kernel on my 386 was a major undertaking success was so much more satisfying! Who are these young'uns Thompson & Pike and what do they know anyway!
- Nick Lothian
Yeah, really! Real programmers had to swap disks multiple times to run a Pascal compiler on Hello World for the C64 :)
- Joel Webber
Yeah, compilation speed doesn't mean too much. Would be nicer if they focused on the *thinking* part with regards to concurrency.
- Rudolf Olah
Compilation speeds mean a lot when you're dealing with the google programming model. This is a company that invented code search for internal use. (See as an example: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7613693...)
- Piaw Na
Luckily it isn't named "goo".
- Peng-Toh
@Piaw - nice example. I only skipped through it, but I can't see why something like that makes compilation speed critical. It seems similar in concept to static analysis - more speed is good, but the lack of speed doesn't break the model.
- Nick Lothian
@nlothian: static analysis and compilation both include parsing. efficient parsing of C++ is rather hard to achieve, due to messy nature of multiply included files and macro substitutions. if code analysis takes hours (ok, half-hours), it ceases to be useful.
- 9000
Lack of speed totally breaks the model. When you can get your analysis and search tools to respond in sub 500ms, the model for coding completely changes. You no longer remember where files are --- you just search for them and expect the search tool to remember for you. This enables massive code sharing, and allows small teams to be extremely effective, since they can now leverage other teams' work.
- Piaw Na
Must be Google..
- ★ Soner Gönül
Why compile time matters: http://xkcd.com/303/
- Robert Felty
Use an IDE for iterative development of the components you are working on, make modules independent through interfaces, do a nightly build so the bulk of build products like libraries etc are available, then these compile issues go away. Justifying based on compile times is so 1990s.
- Todd Hoff
Ah, but how exactly does your IDE allow you to do iterative development quickly? You have to be able to compile individual modules (whatever form they take) quickly enough to make this feasible. If you take C[++] as the de facto systems language, it fails badly on this front, because the only way to share interfaces among modules is via the preprocessor, and precompiled headers only get...
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- Joel Webber
Poor Frank McCabe and his ten year old "go!" language: http://www.reddit.com/r...
- Daniel J. Pritchett
C++ allows for abstract base classes. No implementation. Compose systems this way and you minimize recompilation. And I'm assuming the initial subsystems are developed in a mocked unit tested environment and then within a very narrow scope, so interface changes are minimized until the system test phase is reached. The compilation argument would make sense if they were talking about a...
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- Todd Hoff
Sure, but you still have to define the abstract base class (interface) in a header file somewhere, and individual .cc files end up depending upon a large number of these in practice, so that any change to one of them tends to force you to recompile a lot of object files. As you say, there are some ways of reducing this effect, but in practice large C++ systems end up taking forever and a day to compile (try compiling WebKit; a lot of Google code has this problem as well).
- Joel Webber
C++ templates are also implemented badly, which makes compilation slow.
- Piaw Na
Only if you don't compose your system well Joel. I've worked very comfortably on systems that took 12 hours to compile across a cluster of 32 build machines. I'm not saying I don't want a language where you don't have to go through all these hoops, but to say it's inevitable in C++ is not so, you just have to beat make into submission and not create a big ball of mud, which is good practice anyway.
- Todd Hoff
@Todd: Fair enough -- I'm definitely not saying you're wrong, and I have also worked on fairly large C++ code bases (mostly games) without everything going to hell in a handbasket. But you have to admit that it would be nice if you didn't have to wait many hours (or use a Google-sized build cluster) for compiling your code :)
- Joel Webber
I've worked "comfortably" on projects where the full rebuild time was a few hours on my local machine, but I can't say that I was ever working optimally. Even in the instant-on environment I'm working in now, there are occasionally changes that I have to wait a full build/deploy cycle to test and it almost always takes me 2-5x as long to solve problems in that case. You can multitask while you wait, but it's just not the same (IMHO, of course).
- Matt Mastracci
I think 12 hours to compile across 32 build machines is unacceptable. I want instant compilation. You know, the kind that Turbo Pascal used to have.
- Piaw Na
I think that there's a dramatic improvement in developer productivity when the compile-link-run cycle time goes from a minute to a second.
- Gary Burd
Piaw before you say what is or is not unacceptable you might want to take the trouble to know what problem is being solved. Turbo Pascal to a real deployed product like a unicycle is to the 5th fleet.
- Todd Hoff
But any, good, modern IDE compiles incrementally and continuously so there's no noticeable compilation step. Compilation shouldn't be a _highlight_ of a new language. It's nice and the ease of building developer tools is a benefit to uptake but, in the end, the language has to be something developers _want_ to read and write since we have to look at it so much. Syntax matters. It's why so much sugar is added to languages.
- ·[▪_▪]·
As stated before, modern IDEs don't scale to google-sized code bases. Go is not designed for your tiny projects that fit in main memory. It's designed for large scale development projects.
- Piaw Na
@piaw You seem to assume that Google doesn't organize it's code. Any good project, regardless of size, especially for large projects, should be modularized. If Google has to load every piece of code into the IDE, they have more serious problems than Go will resolve. Trust me, I work on a project with tens of millions of lines of Java code and i've been responsible for analysis and...
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- ·[▪_▪]·
Well, Piaw actually did write a fair amount of the code at Google, so I'd give him a little more credit :) I know plenty of people at Google who *do* use Eclipse/IntelliJ on Google's code base (myself included), but you do have to break it into manageable chunks to make it work. That's sometimes easier said than done, to be fair.
- Joel Webber
When I worked for a large company in the internet advertising business, I found that dependency creep was a constant problem. I spent more time than I would have liked trying to get fast compilation time in Eclipse/IntelliJ. I welcome a tool that helps with this problem.
- Gary Burd
"I have already used the name for *MY* programming language" http://code.google.com/p...
- Maxamad
I think that time spent pruning and organizing your code and library is best instead spent working on better tools that make your development environment super fast and capable of scaling. That's the way Go was designed.
- Piaw Na
If you want fast turnaround, eliminate compiles all together. There's no reason why a language can't support a double or triple hybrid model. Look at a language like Factor, image based like Smalltalk, you write a function, and can patch it into the live running app instantaneously, where it will run interpreted in combination with compiled code, until the runtime gets around to...
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- Ray Cromwell
I noticed that Go has an interpreter work-in-progress living in its source. The start of an instant-run mode?
- Matt Mastracci
Smalltalk had a massive sharing problem --- you couldn't ever replicate what was in your Smalltalk image on someone else's machine. Eliminating compiles would be nice, but again, if you're solving problems at a massive scale, interpretation would be an order of magnitude loss in execution speed that you can't afford. That said, a Go interpreter would not be out of the question, or even hard to build.
- Piaw Na
@Piaw - was just reading "Coders at Work" this week and Ingalls (http://www.codersatwork.com/dan-ing...) was saying the exact opposite. He said he pauses his Mac machine and sends his Smalltalk system state over to a Windows developer and they start right up, debug, and fix.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
The point is not to have the production version run in interpretation, the point is to increase developer productivity by allowing a fast edit-run cycle, production builds can take as long as necessary. When you're in development mode, you often don't need full execution speed, you are checking for correctness. Take GWT for example. You can make changes to Java source, hit reload, and...
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- Ray Cromwell
What does production mean? An experiment that processes a large number of records so you can decide how to proceed with your line of research is hardly production, but it nevertheless has to execute fast over large amounts of data. You might think that it doesn't matter how quickly that runs, but the difference between 10 minutes and 100 minutes is huge in terms of productivity.
- Piaw Na
Yes, if you copied the entire image over, you could replicate a smalltalk VM. The problem is, then you have to live with the other guy's image and customizations. Smalltalk is great, but it really was designed as a single-user environment.
- Piaw Na
It depends how often you are running experiments over huge datasets like that. In the case where I needed some experimental data to proceed, yes, if after every edit, you had such an experiment, then maybe programming in a neutered language would be worth it, but I'd say that for the majority of developers, this is not the case, so being able to run unoptimized builds/interpretation...
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- Ray Cromwell
No, it is not for everyone. It's very much for large scale datasets that are encountered somewhat frequently on the WWW.
- Piaw Na
Go is missing at least one feature that I wanted to see in a modern programming language: language extensibility through a Lisp-like macro facility.
Victor Ganata, Vlado Handziski, Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie) and 10 other people liked this
Ah, I miss Lisp macros.
- j1m
This is really hard to do in a language that separates compiling and execution.
- Gabe
That part is solved by a two pass strategy, the big problem is any language with significant syntax requires writing essentially AST-transformations for macros. Treating code as data in an infix-algol style language essentially turns macro writers into parse tree manipulators in the worse case. You can hack it with a templating approach, but it won't be as powerful as macros in lisp derivatives.
- Ray Cromwell
The Go designers aren't Lisp fans. That's ok, they couldn't have designed a better Lisp than Lisp. Go is designed explicitly to enable one pass parsing. That's where speed of compilation comes from.
- Piaw Na
While Lisp macros are indeed really cool in their own way, they're also somewhat antithetical to the idea of good tooling. You can't usefully answer questions like "who calls this function" if you've got a piece of Turing-complete code arbitrarily transforming the syntax tree at runtime.
- Joel Webber
Didn't Scheme's hygienic macros fix that problem?
- Piaw Na
speaking of which, why couldn't clojure be the next big systems language? would be interesting to compare performance especially in the highly concurrent on multicore scenario (where clojure claims to have a sweet spot)
- Karl Rosaen
i know there's a distinction where "systems languages" means statically typed and compiled, but in terms of something that works really well for writing highly concurrent efficient backends, clojure might be fast enough. and I wonder how often most programmers need direct access to the hardware these days (google obviously does, but for everyone else building on top of cloud infrastructure)
- Karl Rosaen
@Piaw: I'm no expert on Lisp macros, but my understanding of hygienic macros is that they could still introduce new references that would be invisible to static analysis. So if I wanted to ask the question "is the following function referenced anywhere, or can I nuke it?" I'd be screwed if a macro generated a reference to it. Java reflection and bytecode tricks (like Guice, et al) have the same problem, and I'm not a big fan of them for that reason.
- Joel Webber
@Karl: I'd have a difficult time defining as a "systems" language one that is "fast enough for some tasks, but not all". E.g., Erlang works great in telecom switches because of its parallel architecture, but you still need to write the parts that need to be fast in a "systems language" (usually C or similar). I don't know a great deal about Clojure, but I understand it to be dynamically typed, which pretty much caps its performance at about an order of magnitude worse than C for many important use cases.
- Joel Webber
(And yes, I know there are cases where compiled Lisp code ends up running at C-level performance, and the same can be true of Javascript, et al, for some cases. But it's most definitely *not* true in the general case, and (IMHO) a major point of a systems language is to be able to generate code that runs within some small percentage of the machine's theoretical performance)
- Joel Webber
@Joel, Ignoring the case where function references are programmatically constructed, it is possible to statically analyze Clojure code to find a superset of the functions referenced at runtime. Plain Java can generate class and method references programmatically, so this aspect is no different for Java and Clojure.
- Gary Burd
Dynamic invocations in Clojure can be removed using type annotations (a compiler warning for dynamic invocations can be enabled with a flag). Because Clojure uses the JVM, all of the issues that prevent the Java from being used as a "systems language" also apply to Clojure.
- Gary Burd
Clojure can also run on the CLR, as I understand it. But Clojure is just another Lisp, designed to integrate into VMs like the JVM and CLR, so I don't see how it would be any better of a systems language than any other Lisp. The only really nice features that Clojure brings to the Lisp party are fast maps and vectors.
- Gabe
@Joel: no, you can't introduce new references that would be invisible to static analysis with hygienic macros is my understanding. Even with regular Lisp macros, that would be hard and an easy case to throw out.
- Piaw Na
@Gary,Piaw: If you can indeed statically analyze macro-fied Clojure code to find all references to a function, that's wonderful. I freely admit to being no macro expert. I would also argue that Java code bases become unwieldy to the extent one uses unanalyzable dynamic patterns, as it becomes much more difficult to understand someone else's code, and to refactor without breaking things....
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- Joel Webber
@Gabe, In addition to maps & vectors, Clojure brings these really nice features to the Lisp party: persistent data types, STM, seamless integration with Java. None of these things help with "systems programming". That said, Clojure is awesome. If Java or Python is appropriate for your problem, then consider using Clojure.
- Gary Burd
Also @Gary: I agree that neither Clojure nor Java really qualifies as a systems language. It's kind of a fuzzy term, but I would argue that such a language should impose no significant performance ceiling over native code, and be capable of interacting with system calls and the like.
- Joel Webber
Joel, yeah defining what a "systems language" even means can be tricky, good ol' wikipedia has a nice discussion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki.... but my point is that I might view go as a special purpose language for when you *really need* to interact directly with the native OS and hardware and want something better than c/c++, otherwise you have a lot more choices, even when speed is a primary concern
- Karl Rosaen
The basic question for a systems language IMHO is, could you write deterministic real-time device driver using it. Could Go for example, be used in missile guidance, or a reaction control system for say, the space shuttle?
- Ray Cromwell
Watching the Go techtalk http://www.youtube.com/watch... Looks like a great language, would love to try it.
  |
Mark Trapp liked this
Some of these features aren't what I'd expect in a systems language: duck typing, type inference, etc, but look really useful. Love the concept of untyped constants.
- Matt Mastracci
After seeing that 100,000 goroutine example, I wonder if there's a concept of "tail channels" akin to tail calls.
- Matt Mastracci
I love the fact that they added things like duck typing, but did so in a way that didn't compromise performance. I think that's the really hard part of language design -- designing features that are useful to programmers but can be compiled down to something fast.
- Joel Webber
I'm curious how the duck typing works under the hood... I assume that they end up passing around a lightweight instance + function pointer table (which can be computed pretty quickly ahead of time).
- Matt Mastracci
The Eclipse 3.5 installation and add-on user flow is a usability anti-pattern. I'm sure someone said "oh, they're developers. They'll figure it out."
Thomas RICARD, Mark Trapp, Joel Webber and Bruce Johnson liked this
The really sad thing is that they seem to have put a lot of work into making it suck more than in previous versions. Which is no mean feat.
- Joel Webber
Issue 25313 - chromium - rounded corners look lighter in Chrome than in Safari and Firefox - http://code.google.com/p...
Paul Buchheit, Ryan Moulton, Matt Mastracci and 2 other people liked this
"I'm really outraged by this, I never saw such attitude in software development... ever, in my entire life, and I have 10 years of experience in software development..... this is just unbelievable, such irresponsibility! Going public with this!!! come on!! WHY!?"
- Simon
from Bookmarklet
I think the author is being serious.
- Simon
Simon, I think the author of the comment you just quoted, Comment 14, is satirizing a comment above, e.g., Comment 9. But the author of Comment 9 is being serious.
- Ruchira S. Datta
I'm not so sure. Graphics geeks get really sensitive about this kind of stuff. Both #14 and #9 may be expressing their honest opinions. They only way to be sure is to troll them both and post a reply about the bug not being that important because the page still operates correctly with the sub-optimal rounded corners. Also, I can't repro it on the latest dev channel release of Chrome 4 on the Mac.
- Bill Strathearn
I once filed a bug with IBM about a single pixel being the wrong shade of gray, but arguing for a P1 seems to go too far.
- Amit Patel
I see crap like this on a fairly regular basis, and it doesn't appear to me that comment 14 is being satirical (or if it is, then the author is pretty bad at making satire clear). There seems to be no shortage of douchebags who will spam every bug that bothers them with "the sky is falling" comments, lambasting the individuals responsible with ad hominem attacks, and so forth. This is one of the things that makes working on open-source software for a large company less fun than it should be.
- Joel Webber
Apparently the author of comment 14 is going to escalate the issue, so the Chromium team can just ignore it for now until the executive fixes the bug.
- Matt Mastracci
Which pixel was that, Amit?
- ⓞnor
It was something to do with menus. There were lines between menu items, border lines around the menu, and lines around the currently selected menu item, and the intersection of where those lines met was a pixel drawn in the wrong color. I don't remember the details :(
- Amit Patel
Also on this issue see http://www.imperialviolet.org/2009...
- Amit Patel
RT @slicknet: "One reason I love JavaScript is that it punishes you for over-architecting a solution."
Mark Trapp, Tyson Key and Jay Bird liked this
You certainly don't want to design a suspension bridge to cross a creek, but sometimes you need to cross a bay, and there, Javascript punishes your productivity.
- Ray Cromwell
+1 Ray. It's like having a 64kB limit on file sizes and saying that it "forces you to think small".
- Matt Mastracci
You mean you don't write all your apps as COM files? I feel so much more free when I don't have those pesky EXE headers and other stuff getting in the way of the glory of my beautiful hand-crafted x86 code! :)
- Joel Webber
It's hard not to appreciate the sentiment in the quote. That said, I feel obliged to add my own metaphor to the list. What I appreciate about playing cards is that it's self-evident that you shouldn't try to live in any house you could build out of them.
- Bruce Johnson
from BuddyFeed
"So I'm in Java. I guess I start by writing an AbstractBaseRepresentationClass and go from there?"
Micah Wittman, Doug, Chi Hoang and 7 other people liked this
No. Start from an AbstractBaseRepresentationClassFactory.
- Private Sanjeev
Or you could do what we all did before the Java "community" went apeshit will all that stuff, and write the same kinds of classes you would if you were sitting down to write Python or whatever :)
- Joel Webber
I barely use classes with Python any more, closures are much nicer.
- Jim Norris
Like inverse CLOS? :-)
- Daniel Dulitz
I haven't actually had the pleasure of using CLOS, but probably something like that. Maybe I use python more like scheme than CLOS.
- Jim Norris
Note however, the AbstractBaseRepresentationClassFactory (which should better be an interface - then you can have a AbstractBaseRepresentationClassFactoryImplementation) needs to be provided by a dependency injection framework configured with some XML configuraiton file that is partially generated from annotations in Java classes; done so via some custom ant-task.
- Henner Zeller
Henner, I think you're exaggerating the verbosity of java; it could clearly be named AbstractBaseRepresentationClassFactoryImpl
- Karl Rosaen
It's so sad that this caricature of Java rings true, because the architecture-astronaut crowd seems to have taken over. We need more people thinking like these guys: http://www.playframework.org/
- Joel Webber
Joel, I agree it's easy to make fun of java by finding some straw man BeanSerializerFactoryConfiguratorImpl out there and pointing and laughing, but I do think there is a tension between reusability and over design / verbosity in java since you need to depend on interfaces for your class to be reusable whereas in python or javascript, the duck typing means anything you plug in that will work just works without it having to implement an interface.
- Karl Rosaen
Aren't there ways of introducing prototypal inheritance to Java now?
- Jason Wehmhoener
@Karl: Agreed that Java's inheritance model (like C++'s, though at times even worse) sometimes causes people to over-design a bit. But I don't think it's anywhere near as difficult to write simple, sensible Java code as these examples would imply -- I think it has more to do with archinauts (?) finding that it's so easy to write lots of code in Java that they simply do so without considering how silly and baroque it all gets.
- Joel Webber
What I do object to is the notion that I have to jump to a dynamic language to fix these problems (not obviously espoused on this thread, but on plenty of others). I want good tools, and I want a language that has a hope in hell of being optimized, and no truly dynamic language can give me either. Anyone notice that the Closure Compiler essentially defines a statically typed version of...
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- Joel Webber
The downside of duck typing though is that in a large program, for a given callsite, you don't really know what methods are available unless you know the 'greatest common duck', I find this really makes code navigation on code bases you didn't write painful.
- Ray Cromwell
Funny: For various reasons I'm having to bang on some Python code I didn't write. It's such a freaking nightmare trying to figure out why it's blowing up all the time, usually because I misunderstood what properties were supposed to be available on an object, or what type a parameter is, or whatever. "Who calls this method" is a pretty damned hard question to ask of a Python code base. So is "are there any syntax errors in my code". Bah :P
- Joel Webber
I'm eager to see if Go might bridge the chasm. Sound-but-lithe would be ideal in a type system.
- Bruce Johnson
from BuddyFeed
Schoolgirl suspended for cancer head shave - http://www.smh.com.au/nationa...
Maxamad and Joel Webber liked this
"Emily Pridham was sent home from Mount Alvernia College yesterday and will not be allowed back until her hair regrows after she shaved it off as part of a cancer research fund-raiser on Saturday."
- Rob Schonberger
from Bookmarklet
I guess the 'States don't have a monopoly on stupid school admins, then...
- Joel Webber
not at all. Comforting that there are idiots all around the world, right? This was an example which made me a wee angry.
- Rob Schonberger
from email
Brain puzzler: Guess the function of this bit of Javascript: a = [65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82,83,84,85,86,87,88,89,90,97,98,99,100,101,102, 103,104,105,106,107,108,109,110,111,112,113,114,115,116,117,118,119,120,121,122,48,49,50,51,52, 53,54,55,56,57,43,47]
Maxamad, Mark Essel, edythe and Mark Trapp liked this
looks like the alphabet used for Base64 encoding?
- Chi Hoang
Yup, that's it. Good eye. Showed up in some compiled GWT code, but had a pretty striking signature.
- Matt Mastracci
I have to admit, i didn't recognize it until i converted the numbers to ASCII. Gotta love REPL environments.
- Chi Hoang
You BROKE FF!!!!!!
- Roberto Bonini
Roberto: that's also a correct answer, apparently!
- Matt Mastracci
How did it break ff? I'm using the mobile ui and it seems ok.
- Joel Webber
from iPhone
I added some spaces in - the array was running off the right side of the page originally. :)
- Matt Mastracci
With so many consecutive numbers, it seems like there should be an easier way of writing that. Too bad JS doesn't have a built-in range() function
- Curtiss Grymala
All this talk of Base64 is making me want to experiment to see which method is faster: raw numeric array, characters in a string or an algorithmic approach (ie: if (i < 26) return i + 65, etc). Of course, that means breaking out the big suite 'o' browsers and making sure my test harness tests what I think it does. Gotta love JS environments. :)
- Matt Mastracci
Once you figure out the chrome extension model, it becomes trivially easy to make them work. "Reload" your dev extension is so handy.
Mark Trapp, Bruce Johnson, Ray Cromwell and Joel Webber liked this
I still wish it would contain a simple JS text editor like JetPack. :) Also, when you bring up the inspector, it often has a list of every JS of every tab you have open. It would be nice if you could group those per-tab. If you write a content-script for Chrome and have 10 tabs open, you'll have 10 separate copies of your script listed in the drop down.
- Ray Cromwell
BTW, can you attach OOPHM to any arbitrary chrome Tab, include those associated with extensions? e.g. the background page of an extension loads a GWT module?
- Ray Cromwell
I haven't managed to get OOPHM up at all in Chrome yet. The script is effectively running the same code from our publisher script to the chrome extension (except that RPC happens over a chrome extension port instead of directly to the server), so I've lucked out that everything just worked in the end. I strongly suspect that the content script would be impossible to boot up directly in hosted mode. Maybe something could proxy the hosted mode requests across a port?
- Matt Mastracci
I know the existing Chrome hosted-mode plugin does something like this, as there are already the plugin/renderer processes to deal with. You should probably bring this up on the list -- I know you aren't the only team that could use this.
- Joel Webber
Good idea, I'll bring it up on the contrib list right away.
- Matt Mastracci
I would pay $1K/month if I could use Groovy every time I have to use Java. Would you?
I would not
- Dmitry Skavish
Maybe $500/mo for Scala? :)
- Joel Webber
definitely wouldn't.
- אלף
dynamically typed language? No way!
- Dmitry Lomov
Never Let Me Forget About You [Startups] - http://pagesaresocial.com/2009...
Maxamad, Joel Webber and Louis Gray liked this
Don't worry, it's on it's way. Had to overhaul the whole front-end first. ;)
- Matt Mastracci
Ditto. I have every intention of picking up DotSpots again when the Chrome plugin's available. Let me know if you guys need us to ping Chrome team on anything.
- Joel Webber
Joel- if there's a way to debug Chrome content scripts, I'd love to know it :) (the docs seem to indicate that this isn't possible right now). Running into a weird issue where everything works well up to a point, then a window reference is inexplicably set to null.
- Matt Mastracci
I'm pretty sure it's not possible yet, though I'm sure they're aware it's badly needed. @kellegous has done a fair amount of Chrome extension work. Does the window reference problem sound familiar, Kelly?
- Joel Webber
I've figured out what the Chrome issues were. Everything is good to go and we'll be launching this new Chrome extension very soon.
- Matt Mastracci
W00t!
- Joel Webber
Chrome uses a bizarre JS parameter form for chrome.extension.connect. It tests the type of parameters for string/object to allow you to omit them entirely: http://src.chromium.org/viewvc...
Doesn't this kind of parameter sniffing make you kind of nauseous? I know that's considered "normal" in javascript, but god it gives me the willies.
- Joel Webber
Yeah, I'm not really a fan of it, since it fails in mysterious ways. Most of the parameters are tested using typeof "blah" == "string" or "object". Of course, typeof null == "object", but none of the checks actually look for that. You have to use function.apply to call it from GWT to make sure you don't throw in a null.
- Matt Mastracci
Here's what I basically ended up doing to support RPC from Chrome scripts: http://code.google.com/p...
- Matt Mastracci
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