Thank god JSON has taken over XML. I'm sure XML still has its uses, but it simply is way too verbose, and frankly I have yet to find a data structure which representation fits better in a xml like format (besides html, obviously)
Ten predictions (2004)
241–250 of 324 posts
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being a "Lisp" is a very broad category and I always wondered about people calling Lisp a functional language. I would love to see a list of things that are today considered functional that originated in Lisp, I think there is not that many of them in the end. However, there is a ton of things that have nothing to do with being functional that originated or got popularized by Lisp: garbage collection, lists as the fu…
> Being a "Lisp" is a very broad category and I always wondered about people calling Lisp a functional language. I don't understand how anyone who has studied programming language history could not understand that Lisp, and APL to no small extent, are the languages that initially defined what it means to be "functional". Scheme, which is a hugely influential dialect of Lisp, is unambiguously functional, and Lisp in g…
I understand this, see my comment above, but when you speak of "the programming language Lisp", the way you speak about Python or Ruby, it most commonly refers to Common Lisp, that is and was the most popular implementation and its common usage was hardly functional. Part of the confusion is also that what today goes as "functional" is not only about functions as first-class objects but also very much about minimizing mutable state and this isn't something that was emphasized by first Lisp implementations.
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#243Wow, I really was expecting at least one of these comments to have meaningful discussion of each of his predictions with facts/figures. Instead, half of the comments are arguing about Lisp and the other half about XML / JSON.
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got a new job in December. This company mostly uses Ruby and PHP. I was given an assignment for which they scheduled 2 weeks. I wrote the whole thing in Clojure, my new favorite language. I got it done in 1 week (6 days). After I was done, I asked if it was okay if I used Clojure. The folks I work with had no problem with that. They asked were impressed with my speed, part of which I attribute to Clojure. I am the…
So, if I were to do your two week assignment in one day, in C, would that mean that C is much better than Clojure? What if I gave your Sysadmin a make file that would build a Debian package or RPM package rather than expecting him to maintain some complex and silly deployments system? The sysadmin would be my new best friend, but would that imply that the language I used was better? You are doing some seriously slopp…
As lifeisstillgood suggested, you are doing some sloppy reading here. I wrote:
To me, Clojure is interesting for 2 different reasons:
1.) the language
2.) the eco-system
You clearly read #1 but you seem to have missed #2.
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got a new job in December. This company mostly uses Ruby and PHP. I was given an assignment for which they scheduled 2 weeks. I wrote the whole thing in Clojure, my new favorite language. I got it done in 1 week (6 days). After I was done, I asked if it was okay if I used Clojure. The folks I work with had no problem with that. They asked were impressed with my speed, part of which I attribute to Clojure. I am the…
So, if I were to do your two week assignment in one day, in C, would that mean that C is much better than Clojure? What if I gave your Sysadmin a make file that would build a Debian package or RPM package rather than expecting him to maintain some complex and silly deployments system? The sysadmin would be my new best friend, but would that imply that the language I used was better? You are doing some seriously slopp…
As lifeisstillgood suggested, you are doing some sloppy reading here. I wrote:
To me, Clojure is interesting for 2 different reasons:
1.) the language
2.) the eco-system
You clearly read #1 but you seem to have missed #2.
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#2461. XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011. We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML. Close enough though. 2. Someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications. Github is cool but with all the cheapskate web devs (no offense, I am one of them) I don't think it is _that_ profitable. 3. Multi-threaded programming will fall out of favor by 2012. Not really.…
I believe number 6 accurately describes Facebook, which in November of 2004 may not have been on his radar as fulfilling this role.
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your ideas about Java and XML are very dated. JAXB makes it essentially transparent to convert an object to XML and back, and with JAX-RS I can give you a REST API that returns XML or JSON, your pick, for basically no effort on my part. These are part of the Java EE 6 web profile, so basically everybody gets them for free. Most of us don't "install libraries" anymore so much as add four lines to our Maven POMs. Point…
1. What's a good tutorial to learn JAXB and JAX-RS? 2. Maven is a nightmare too. Every time I've used it (usually because I'm compiling someone else's code and they wrote the build in maven), it downloads hundreds of megabytes of who-knows-what from random Internet sites. I want to pin versions of dependencies (and dependencies-of-dependencies) so my builds are repeatable, and I want to be sure everyone who's forked…
> I want to pin versions of dependencies (and dependencies-of-dependencies) so my builds are repeatable
That's by default in maven - you have to do something really stupid to get non-repeatable builds (usually involves specifying open version ranges or some weird plugin magic)
>everyone who's forked my git repo can still build the code if the Maven URL's for the deps have gone out of business
One of the main advantages of maven is just the opposite of that - you don't have to bundle your dependencies and get them to other people - they can just ask maven to fetch them. And maven is not going away.
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your ideas about Java and XML are very dated. JAXB makes it essentially transparent to convert an object to XML and back, and with JAX-RS I can give you a REST API that returns XML or JSON, your pick, for basically no effort on my part. These are part of the Java EE 6 web profile, so basically everybody gets them for free. Most of us don't "install libraries" anymore so much as add four lines to our Maven POMs. Point…
1. What's a good tutorial to learn JAXB and JAX-RS? 2. Maven is a nightmare too. Every time I've used it (usually because I'm compiling someone else's code and they wrote the build in maven), it downloads hundreds of megabytes of who-knows-what from random Internet sites. I want to pin versions of dependencies (and dependencies-of-dependencies) so my builds are repeatable, and I want to be sure everyone who's forked…
1. The Java EE 6 Tutorial is a good place to start for these things.
2. You may not like Maven--I hate it too--but it's how things are done. In practice the only people complaining about installing libraries and managing jar dependencies are people using ant without ivy. 90% of folks just use Maven and get on with it.
3. You're turning your complaint from "Java's XML support is weak" to "Java's XML support isn't Pythonic like Python's." This is a weak argument. You're saying you want to live the Python dream in Javaland. Well, it isn't going to happen, no matter what the Play guys tell you. But if you have to use Java--and sometimes you do--adding four lines to your maven config--which you will have--so you can use EE 6 or JAXB is not a big deal, and neither is putting a few annotations on a class.
I don't love Java. In fact I dislike it. I would rather be using Haskell, Python, or Ruby. Or any number of other things. But you can't be mad at Java for being Java and not Python.
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Being a "Lisp" is a very broad category and I always wondered about people calling Lisp a functional language. I don't understand how anyone who has studied programming language history could not understand that Lisp, and APL to no small extent, are the languages that initially defined what it means to be "functional". Scheme, which is a hugely influential dialect of Lisp, is unambiguously functional, and Lisp in g…
I understand this, see my comment above, but when you speak of "the programming language Lisp", the way you speak about Python or Ruby, it most commonly refers to Common Lisp, that is and was the most popular implementation and its common usage was hardly functional. Part of the confusion is also that what today goes as "functional" is not only about functions as first-class objects but also very much about minimizin…
I think I captured all of this pretty well with "In those days, "functional" meant Lisp, at least popularly."
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Being a "Lisp" is a very broad category and I always wondered about people calling Lisp a functional language. I don't understand how anyone who has studied programming language history could not understand that Lisp, and APL to no small extent, are the languages that initially defined what it means to be "functional". Scheme, which is a hugely influential dialect of Lisp, is unambiguously functional, and Lisp in g…
I understand this, see my comment above, but when you speak of "the programming language Lisp", the way you speak about Python or Ruby, it most commonly refers to Common Lisp, that is and was the most popular implementation and its common usage was hardly functional. Part of the confusion is also that what today goes as "functional" is not only about functions as first-class objects but also very much about minimizin…
> it most commonly refers to Common Lisp
That's not my experience at all. "Common Lisp" is used to refer specifically to Common Lisp. "Lisp" refers to the entire Lisp family. When I took SICP at MIT, Sussman and Ableson referred to Scheme as "Lisp" more often than they referred to it as "Scheme". Check the online video taped lectures if you don't believe me.
Additionally, lists in Lisp are the definitive persistent functional data structure. Sure, you can use rplaca and rplacd to modify a list, but this is very rare (not to mention dangerous) to do. Also, courses taught using Lisp typically focus on recursive solutions.