There's barely any blogspam anymore on proggit, and if some manages to get through, it gets the customary tar-and-feathers treatment which even good submissions receive, only with more abundant, and hotter tar.
Why are people sweating small stuff like version control systems? How can you be a fanboy of a thing that keeps track of branches and patches. It's only incidentally related to Software development, you shouldn't feel as if a limb of yours was amputated if you \gasp\ had to use a different one for another project.
It's like using a different mail client or a different bug tracker; it doesn't affect what you can express or how can you build a program. It's just Version Control.
Because developers spend a lot of their day working with them.
And it can take a significant amount of time getting to grips with a new one you are unfamiliar with.
And you can often quite easily get yourself in quite a serious tangle with complex merges and operations done with VCSs leading to a lot of cursing and hatred for a particular tool.
A pair of shoes is just a pair of shoes, but I'd still quite like a pair I find comfortable, thanks.
Maybe, but it's not something worth making into a political issue into itself, when the GNU project has actual political issues in mind, as close as they get to when speaking of a Software stack, like making sure that the management of a certain project is as close to their ideology as possible, as a political organization which writes Software (which is what the FSF and the GNU project always were, and a pair of beneficial ones at that).
That's true, in a way, until someone tries to force CVS on you. Yes they are all sideline tools but once you get used to something, its the best thing in the world, until you get used to something else. Change is great, but not quite appreciated enough.
At work (where my script to convert all of our projects from CVS to Hg is complete for almost ¾ of a year now) I now resort to a hacky PowerShell script that allows me to work locally with Hg and then push selected revisions to CVS. Mostly because I fear that we won't ditch CVS for quite a while and when we do I'm probably the one to blame for lost developer productivity while we're coming to grips with a new tool.
So many wrongs in one comment. The fact you believe you'll be blamed for dev productivity loss is just not right. Blame? The fact you have to write scripts converting from one source control to another is not good, the fact you resort to hacky powershelling is scary. I wasn't even thinking the "are they still using cvs in 2014" even but I guess I should have.
"blame" should exist in source control systems only.
Actually I was agreeing to your point that at the time when CVS is used version control is no longer "just a tool" but a PITA.
I'm the one who suggested conversion to a newer system, so when the other developers need to re-learn and lose a week of productivity that way it is my fault, to some extent.
My conversion script is essentially just automating creating cvs2hg config files for a number of CVS modules (and cleaning up before/after conversion) because our CVS repo is a few GiB in size, containing everything that ever existed (and plenty of things beside that) so a 1:1 conversion isn't that ideal, especially because it will lead to frequent (harmless) merges. But to developers with a CVS background merges are scary.
Some people will be fanboys of anything they spend a meaningful part of their day with, because (a) it makes them feel good about themselves, and (b) they don't know any better. They're still in the larval hacker stage where they still have binary opinions about everything, because they don't yet have the technical depth to have more nuanced and informed opinions about this stuff.
If they can convince themselves that the few things they know really well are the only things that are important to know, then maybe they don't feel bad about all of the things that they're just starting to realize that they don't know. That's my interpretation at least.
Web application development. I'm sure plenty of programmers would think of the Layer-3 device that chooses paths to forward packets through nodes to a destination.
I don't know if I'd make that distinction. Routing certainly gets a lot of use in web application development, but routing at the application level is not web-specific: examples of the pattern can be found in the Android SDK,[1] userland Android/iOS development,[2] and in a number of EIPs.[3]
> I'm sure plenty of programmers would think of the Layer-3 device that chooses paths to forward packets through nodes to a destination.
I don't discount this at all, but I do think it's pretty obvious from the context and the README which type of routing this library provides.
The economy isn't magical either; jobs lost in one region because the factories closed and moved to another aren't necessarily going to be recouped by new job creation in a short span of time.
Then we should probably do what we can to help the worst off in the economy, whether they've lost their jobs due to new technology, moving factories, or whatever, rather than trying to nail the factories down to one particular place.
The problem with this is, the "factory owners" of the world run a political machine which they use to prevent that from happening, claiming it prevents them from building more factories. They use the same political machine to establish the moral goodness of continued factory building as axiomatic.
> the "factory owners" of the world run a political machine
Well, yes and no. The view I espoused was pretty similar to what Warren Buffet says, and that guy has owned a factory or two in his day. Even in the US, which has less government, there are a number of programs for those who don't have much. Perhaps you'd like to see more - fair enough - but the exact level of support is open for debate, isn't it? I don't think we'll ever agree on precisely what it should consist of. The Nordic states seem to work pretty well with more government. Probably depends on a lot of factors...
There doesn't need to be a cabal. But then I suppose that means "run," "use" and "machine" were pretty poor word choices.
"There exists a System, in which we are all but cogs" doesn't seem a very useful way of analysing the world, however correct we might suspect it is. Maybe I should try harder.
Ah, the old "when I no longer have to suffer the indignity of taxation I will donate half my money to the poor" argument. I wonder why I find it so hard to believe that the bottomless greed of capital will suddenly evaporate when we give them the entirely greed-based anarcho-capitalist society they want?
But I agree with you that "factory owners" and "government" are basically the same people. That's what I was referring to by the political machine I mentioned above, although it extends far beyond government.
Except for the people they'll lay off as the plants move? It didn't work out wonderfully for the autoplant workers at Flint and Detroit; for some reason, the people didn't get the upgrade you speak of after the plants closed. Weird, huh?
If they assured me that the extra price goes to ensure a better standard of living and better working conditions for their third-world workers, then yes.
How nice that you can afford to pay extra to ease liberal guilt. Do you think that the poorest in your country can afford to pay extra too?
For the relatively monied -- and software developers usually count among that number -- it's easy to argue that companies are too greedy, and that companies shouldn't use exploitative labour. For the lower class, paying extra so that someone in the third world can enjoy a better quality of life isn't an option.
So you say that multinational corporations shouldn't compete on ethics? I thought you neoliberals didn't chastise anyone with respect to their choices in commerce.
Yes, this is systemic. Are you trying to convince me that the situation isn't fucked? For all the claptrap about how the economy isn't a zero-sum game and that the tide lifts all the boats and so many other platitudes, there's no denying that the quality of life of most people in the world is nothing but a point in a gradient of declining living conditions, everyone benefiting from the labor of people with fewer options who have to work and live worse than them.
Anyhow, how much do you think it would raise the cost of the things you use, just to ensure safe working conditions at factories? For jeans, it's a paltry 90 cents.
Yes, the poorest in my country would probably have to think twice before spending even 90 cents, hell tell that to the homeless. The vast majority of the poor here probably wouldn't mind, given that it's a mere drop in the sea of debt they are drowning in, and that's a problem with many facets, on its own.
But there's quite a lot of room for diminishing the unfairness of this scheme, even if the solution feels even cosmetic at times given the broader problem of exploitation and inequality.
no denying that the quality of life of most people in the world is nothing but a point in a gradient of declining living conditions
I won't deny it, but I find it hard to believe. In any case, the poorest are better off, even if the middle class is declining (700M out of extreme poverty in just 20 years).
It's funny this comes up in an article about Samsung Electronics. They're not exactly in the business of selling essential goods. They basically try to convince you that each year you should get the N+1 TV or smartphone which has more or less the same capabilities as the one before. If you're buying the last Galaxy S4, paying a little more IS an option.
Java's concurrency primitives and libraries are really overlooked in these discussions. Is the syntax too off-putting, or is it merely that Java is unfashionable?
Very much unfashionable for the HN crowd. Most of the new research in concurrency is happening in Java and funded by the high performance trading industry - an industry which is very far from the HN crowd. The new Java8 stampedlock is a good example. It's possible to implement it in C++ as well, but because of the guarantees required by the lock it is a very difficult lock to integrate into C++ code. On the other hand, the JRE guarantees the correct constraints for Java code making a stampedlock very easy to use [1]. The performance of a stampedlock also seems to be the best case for any multi-reader environment. [2]
I find your claim that most new research in concurrency happens in Java strange. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with academic research in concurrency and parallelism? A way to get a small taste is to look at recent papers from the conference Practice and Principles of Parallel Programming (PPoPP).
If Java is involved, it's more likely they're interested in cutting developer costs than doing any "new research." That isn't to say they aren't doing any "new research," or that the research quality is poor, or anything negative at all, really. It's just a restatement of the observation that the labor market for Java developers is quite different from C developers or C++ developers (there are a lot more of the former than of the latter--a lot more).
I don't think there is anything wrong with Java as a language, but I have a question for you. Does Java's concurrency engine allow for many threads like Go or is it similar to C# in how your threads are not lightweight and are therefore limited to ixN where N is the number of CPU cores and i is a small integer < 10.
The Java language specification does not define how threads are implemented.
The first set of JVMs did implement green threads, which are what goroutines are. Shortly thereafter most of them switched to red threads, aka real threads.
You can still find a few JVMs that use green threads, like Squawk.
Java doesn't have a "concurrency engine", but a very large set of concurrency primitives: schedulers, locking and lock-free data structures, atomics etc.
To answer your question, yes: my own library, Quasar[1], provides lightweight threads for Java.
