foljs

<b>No major powers have gone to war however. Stalemates of nuclear war and the lack of conventional warfare between capitalistic countries equates to this weird period in history that does not involve actual military expansion. Economic expansion is enough :D</b>

Economic expansion built upon cheap resources for the industries of large powers and obedient world markets. I.e in war, coups, protectorates, old-style and new-style colonization.

And, when everything else fails, war between major powers themselves.

The same fallacies ("economic expansion will replace war") were uttered in late 19th century, we saw how that turned out. Btw, the market was no less global then.

"This has been the most peaceful period in history."

Not by a wide margin. The US for example is at war every single year of its existence. Now, it might be peaceful in Chicago or Pensacola, but the same was true for those living in Rome when the romans wages wars worldwide.

"""I can tell the difference, even with crummy earbuds."""

It's not enough to be able to "tell the difference". You also have to be able to tell the difference in random A/B tests.

If you are like 99.9 percent of the population, you will not be able.

A test is reproductible. Your anecdotal testimony means nothing at all.

"""The artists get 15 cents of every dollar? Fuck. That. I will continue not buying music until I'm able to pay the artists directly."""

I'm sure that's the exact motivation.

Utterly outlandish? Please.

The only proof we have of something being easier to learn, beside anecdotal evidence ("oh, I tried it and it was easy") is statistical empirical evidence, i.e people actually learning it. Well, people are not actually learning those languages. They are learning the "other ones".

(Where by people, I mean: a significant percentage of people, > 1%. I'm sure me, you and that "professional programmer who gives a shit about Haskell" do not a significant percentage make).

Even in universities, students find functional languages difficult, and opt-out of those classes.

It would only be a "counterexample" if it was a valid example. This only keeps the "counter" part, but as an example it is flawed.

So, essentially:

a) given that people has made bad arguments before b) it "seems relevant" to make bad arguments in the opposite direction now

Huh?

"How do you define "succeed"? Does something only succeed if it has the largest market share?" -- no: mainly if it's better suited to the task at hand.

"There are many other exceptions: Wikipedia is open source."

Which doesn't matter at all, the success of Wikipedia is in the content and the participation of the content creators, not in the open source-ness of the underlying wiki engine.

"And don't forget OSX is based on an open source kernel."

I don't. But that has nothing to do with the success of OS X. Darwin itself never got anywhere.

"Many tools used regularly by developers are open source."

Yes --but those are not replications of existing closed source ones...

"The learning curve of those languages is not bigger then the learning curve of other languages."

If only it wasn't for the fact that reality and history has proven otherwise...

Actually, despite all the fanfare about LISP, Haskell, Scheme et al, more useful programs have been written and deployed in, say, Python, than all those combined.

What's the last useful LISP program you have used? What proportion does it consist among the other useful programs you use?

>According to the link you posted, that's over four times slower than C++ virtual method dispatch

Hmm, check the results in the same page for the 64bit Cocoa runtime. This is where most optimizations are made, because Apple used the 32->64 bit transition as an opportunity to do most binary compatibility breaking changes to the language.

There, in 64bit, the IMP cached msg send is actually FASTER than C++ virtual method dispatch.

And if your app's performance suffers because of method calls / msg sends, you are doing it wrong. They should be an insignificant amount of time compared to the actual processing stuff done by your app.

Hmm, do we ever had any Open Source "answer" to anything succeed, not in the meaning of usefulness, but in the meaning of BEING ACTUALLY USED BY A HUGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE, something that is necessary for, say, Facebook?

Compare:

@ Linux, BSD -> Windows, OS X @ ogg -> mp3 @ Theora -> H264, @ Gimp -> Photoshop, @ Open Office -> MS Office, @ Mono -> Windows .NET CLR, @ GNUStep -> Cocoa,

The only exceptions I can think of are Firefox/Webkit (still lagging behind IE, though).

In the server side, of course, it's different: Apache, Bind, MySQL, PHP, etc...

The C safety / smalltalk speed quote probably was quite funny when it was relevant --some decades ago.

And all the rest of your "language criticism" is all about the IDE. Coincidentally all solved by Xcode 4: better autocomplete, automatic fixes, relevant error descriptions, etc. The main problem was GCC --it just didnt provide the info and interfaces to use for real time, AST guidance of the IDE. In XCode 4 Apple implemented all that stuff leveraging LLVM.

Apart from that, Xcode < 4 was not a bad IDE by any standard. Worse than Eclipse/VS in several ways, yes. Bad is a stretch. It also has excellent profiling tools, and a great GUI editor (Interface Builder) that gets MVC right.

Also: obj-c has had real GC for years by now. And the old scheme, still used in iOS of retain/release in not "barely" but extremely better and easier than C, while maintaining the performance benefits.

>except that in the Mac you can option-click, which is even >more complicated than a right click. There is always a way >to make features obscure, if you want to.

Emm, I think you missed his point. This is EXACTLY why the single button mouse forced software developers to make it work with a single click --because it made the "right click" equivalent more difficult for the user.

It's a term of service (TOS) agrrement, not a professional SLA.

Most of us don't pay Linode anything important enough to warrant an SLA.

You don't get very strict 99.9% SLAs for $20 and $80 a month anyways...

Why? Because there are other services with no downtime?

Even Amazon and Rackspace go down...

Even Google has had outages...

Yes, I'm sure your one page, one form, application tells a lot of relevant stuff about GAE.

Why is it mostly non-western developers that post those kind of ridiculous "please solve my problem for me" questions?

(btw: non western myself)

"""That said, it's a beta product."""

It always is with Google. When exactly do you expect the "rc"?

"""I always think if your site can't be host by GAE, then it's probably not very scalable at the first place. I"""

Well, your site is basically one static page. Do you really feel qualified discussing GAE?

Procrastination inducing apps and hobbyist tinkering apps, that is, as opposed to actual apps and games.

Being inside the content does not make it a "modern system".

Actually, it's a rather dumb idea too, except for very simple systems. Besides editing the content (title, body, etc) there are numerous others things to configure and edit that don't normally appear in the content area --so they would be out of place there.

But the bigger problem is that you have to navigate the content as an end user would in order to edit it. A specialized screen with filters, columns, search et al would be much faster to work with.

Yes, and missions organizations are very serious about QA on the apps their members use on their iPhones...

Nowhere in the comments it is shown to be a false claim.

"Faster than C" is doable, but needs qualifiers, e.g:

CUDA in modern GPU hardware is faster than dektop C.

JITed Java was shown to be faster than C in several cases, because the JIT compiler could make adaptable optimizations based on the actual runtime environment.

And, any competent language that takes advantage of multiple cores easily is faster than most C equivalent programs (even most multi-threaded ones).

People should also understand generalization, though.

That there's "tons and tons of parallel C code" doesn't matter.

Parallelization is built-in into this language. It is not built-in, as a first class language feature, in C.

A lot of C projects, such as servers, are indeed threaded, but threads are also so last century.

Different paradigms (like in Erlang) are better to parallelize, easier to write, more performant, and much much less confusing to debug than threads. Heck, even no-side-effects functional language programming is better to parallelize than C with threads.

"""A a little more humility here would be appreciated; they would be high priced consultants if their ideas were so golden."""

You'd be surprised to see how many "high priced consultants" have sank companies. Or how many bloggers have had better ideas...

Web/DTP is not the same thing at all. DTP is static. The web is dynamic.

You can envision some paragraphs of text in a blog post being re-flown but the web is more than that. What about interactive text? Text in SVG? Multi-language text in the same paragraph? Various stacks of text in varying z-indexes, css-3 animated? Text manipulated with Ajax? In a mobile browser AND in the desktop. Not so easy anymore when you have to cover all of those --and possibly in a W3C or HTML5 sanctioned way, compatible with concepts like "overflow" and all.

Thank you captain obvious (and condescending).

No, it was further developed by FOX News

Yes, they solved it alright.

In an entirely different context.