March 11, 2012
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote in message news:mailman.478.1331478431.4860.digitalmars-d@puremagic.com...
> On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 04:12:12AM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "so" <so@so.so> wrote in message news:pzghdzojddybajuguxwa@forum.dlang.org...
> [...]
>> > No matter how much hardware you throw at it, somehow it gets slower and slower.  New hardware can't keep up with (ever increasing) writing bad software.
>> >
>> > http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=9
>> >
>>
>> That is a *FANTASTIC* article. Completely agree, and it's very well-written.
>
> I really liked the point about GUIs. Many resources are used for graphical elements that only have aesthetic value AND tends to distract the user from actual work. IOW, you're wasting CPU, RAM, and disk time (which comes from spending lots of hard-earned cash for that expensive hardware upgrade) just for some silly eye-candy that has no value whatsoever except to distract from the task at hand, that is, to accomplish what you set out to do in the first place.
>
> That's why I use ratpoison as my WM. Who needs title bars with fancy colored icons, gradient shading, and *shadows*?! I mean, c'mon.

Actually, I rather like my black windows with "dark-blue to light-purple" gradient title bars. I've been using that scheme for years and I don't think I'll ever change it:

http://www.semitwist.com/download/img/shots/myColorScheme.png

> You're
> trying to get work done, not admire how clever the UI designers were and
> how cool a color gradient is. If I wanted to admire eye-candy, I'd be
> playing computer games, not working. (That said, though, I did at one
> point have a Compiz installation for the sole purpose of showing off
> Linux to clueless people. :-P)
>

Before I upgraded my Linux box to Kubuntu 10.04, it was Ubuntu...umm...something before 10.04, and although I'm not normally a UI-eye-candy guy, I fell in love with the window physics effect whle draggng windows. And it was properly hardware accellerated, so it worked very fast even being on an old 32-bit single-core. My brother, who had recently gotten a Mac laptop (although he's now become the third member of my family who's gotten fed up with Apple) saw it and exclaimed "I want jelly windows!"

But then in Kubuntu 10.04, the effect no longer works (or maybe it just doesn't work with hardware accelleration, I don't remember now), so I had to give it up :(

'Course, I'm more than ready to give up KDE itself now. Move to something like Trinity or LXDE or XFCE. And Debian 6. Canonincal just keeps getting crazier and crazier. I don't want their new Linux-based iOS of an operating system. OTOH, Debian's "versioning" system is irritationly moroninc. Squeeze, wheeze, wtf? They don't even have any natural ordering for god's sake! At least Ubuntu's moronic names have *that* much going for them! I don't care what Pixar character my OS is pretending to be, and I don't *want* to care.

> Then the points about background processes, auto-updates, and boot-up times. These are things about Windows that consistently drive me up the wall. Background processes are all nice and good as long as they are (1) necessary, and (2) don't do stupid things like hog your CPU or thrash your disk every 12 seconds. But the way Windows works, every time you install something, it insists on starting up at boot-time, incessantly checking for auto-updates every 12 seconds, downloading crap from online without your knowledge, and THEN pop up those intrusive, distracting, and utterly annoying "Plz Update Meeee!" dialogs. Ugh. Everytime I see one of those dialogs I have this urge to delete the app and expunge all traces of it from the system with extreme prejudice.
>
> At least on Linux you can turn off this crap and/or otherwise prevent it from doing stupid things. But on Windows you have no choice. Attempting to disable stuff usually breaks said apps, or affects system usability in some way.
>

I just avoid those programs (and immediately disable the upgrade nag screens). For example, I will *not* allow Safari or Chrome to even *touch* my computer. (When I want to test a page in Chrome, I use SRWare Iron instead. If SRWare Iron ever goes away, then Chrome users will be on their own when viewing my pages.)

>
> -- 
> Ignorance is bliss... but only until you suffer the consequences!

So very true :)


March 11, 2012
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote in message news:mailman.456.1331450402.4860.digitalmars-d@puremagic.com...
> On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 10:41:48PM -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 3/10/2012 1:20 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> >It's no fun at all if you had to wait 2 hours just to find out you screwed up some parameters in your test render. Imagine if you had to wait 2 hours to know the result of every 1 line code change.
>>
>> 2 hours? Man, you got good service. When I submitted my punched card decks, I'd be lucky to get a result the next day!
>>
>> (Yes, I did learn to program using punch cards. And to be fair, the programs were trivial compared with the behemoths we write today.)
>
> And also today, the complexity of the compile/link process can lead to dainbramaged makefiles that sometimes fail to recompile a changed source, and the linker picks up leftover junk .o's from who knows how many weeks ago, causing heisenbugs that don't exist in the source code but persistently show up in the binary until you rm -rf the entire source tree, checkout a fresh copy from the repos, reapply your changes, and rebuild the whole thing from scratch. (And that's assuming that in the meantime somebody didn't check in something that doesn't compile, or that introduces new and ingenious ways of breaking the system.)
>

*cough*DMD*cough*


March 11, 2012
"Matej Nanut" <matejnanut@gmail.com> wrote in message news:mailman.471.1331466712.4860.digitalmars-d@puremagic.com...
>
>I'm getting a new laptop this week because I
>direly need it at the faculty (some robotics/image processing/computer
>vision

Neat stuff!!

>However, I could notice an interesting trend between my colleagues' programs and mine. For example, solving the 15-game with heuristics took ~0.01 secs on the Eee, and comparing to others' programs theirs took several seconds and found worse solutions (not all of them of course, but most). When doing some local search optimisation, the difference was seconds-to-HOURS. I guess someone was really sloppy, but still.

Yup. Not surprised.

>This has also been one of the reasons I became interested in languages like C and D. Believe it or not, in our university, you don't ever get to see C officially if you don't learn it yourself. I consider this pathetic. The official and only taught language is Java. Which I grant them is at least cross-platform, but I believe that every university-educated programmer must know C.

Yea, Java has been pretty much the de facto standard College Computer Science language since I left college (close to 10 years ago now...god, that just seems so *wrong* that's it's been that long...)

>I am convinced that my university produces bad programmers and as such don't find it surprising that new written programs are terribly slow, if they even work at all.

I'm convinced that colleges in general produce very bad programmers. The good programmers who have degrees, for the most part (I'm sure there are rare exceptions), are the ones who learned on their own, not in a classroom. It's sad that society brainwashes people into believing the opposite.


March 11, 2012
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote in message news:mailman.479.1331479176.4860.digitalmars-d@puremagic.com...
>
> Java is a not-bad language. In fact, as a language it has quite a few good points.

+1

Java's actually the reason I got fed up with C++'s *cough*module system*cough* and header files. The lack of "->" was nice too.

> However, one thing I could never stand about Java culture is what I call the bandwagon-jumping attitude. [...]
>

+1, or two, or three

>
> Obligatory quote:
>
> If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution. -- Robert Sewell
>
> :-)
>

Hah! Fantastic.

>
> -- 
> Question authority. Don't ask why, just do it.

Fantastic, too. :)


March 11, 2012
"deadalnix" <deadalnix@gmail.com> wrote in message news:jjif2l$1cdi$1@digitalmars.com...
> Le 09/03/2012 23:32, Walter Bright a écrit :
>> This statement is from Linus Torvalds about breaking binary compatibility:
>>
>> https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/3/8/495
>>
>> While I don't think we need to worry so much at the moment about breaking binary compatibility with new D releases, we do have a big problem with breaking source code compatibility.
>>
>> This is why we need to have a VERY high bar for breaking changes.
>
> I think Linus is mostly right. But I don't think this is a reason not put the bar very high. Especially with the current state of D. This is more about providing a nice, and long, transition process.
>
> The way @property evolve is a good example of what we should do.
>
> An example of management the change (even breaking change) is PHP. PHP has so much improved if you consider what have changed between v4 and v5, and then v5 and v5.3, that it is a factual proof that breaking change can be done to great benefit.

PHP could have handled the changes MUCH better than it did, though.


March 11, 2012
"Nick Sabalausky" <a@a.a> wrote in message news:jjiv40$2aba$1@digitalmars.com...
> "deadalnix" <deadalnix@gmail.com> wrote in message news:jjif2l$1cdi$1@digitalmars.com...
>>
>> An example of management the change (even breaking change) is PHP. PHP has so much improved if you consider what have changed between v4 and v5, and then v5 and v5.3, that it is a factual proof that breaking change can be done to great benefit.
>
> PHP could have handled the changes MUCH better than it did, though.
>

Ermm, the transition, I mean.


March 11, 2012
On 3/11/2012 8:29 AM, deadalnix wrote:
> Win9x was good back then. Now it is crap.

Sure, but it's only fair to assess it in the context of its times, not current times.


> When doing something new (like D) you don't only need to provide something as
> good as what existed before. Actually, providing better isn't enough either. You
> need to provide enough to compensate the cost of the change, and additionally
> communication/marketing must convince user to switch.

Yup.
March 11, 2012
On 3/11/2012 4:20 AM, Matej Nanut wrote:
> I've been using an EeePC for everything for the past 2.5 years and
> until now, I could cope.

You're right that there's a downside to providing your developers the hottest machines available - their code tends to be a dog on the machines your customer has.

I have an EeePC, but I find I could not cope with the tiny screen and tiny keyboard :-)
March 11, 2012
On 3/11/2012 12:32 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> I'm convinced that colleges in general produce very bad programmers. The
> good programmers who have degrees, for the most part (I'm sure there are
> rare exceptions), are the ones who learned on their own, not in a classroom.

Often the best programmers seem to have physics degrees!

March 11, 2012
On Sunday, 11 March 2012 at 19:22:04 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

> I just avoid those programs (and immediately disable the upgrade nag
> screens). For example, I will *not* allow Safari or Chrome to even *touch*
> my computer. (When I want to test a page in Chrome, I use SRWare Iron
> instead. If SRWare Iron ever goes away, then Chrome users will be on their
> own when viewing my pages.)

http://code.google.com/p/smoothgestures-chromium/issues/detail?id=498