Stormbringer

You can have a main method that instatiates an instance of the class, populates it with whatever it needs (including mocks if you're into that sort of thing) and then exercises the various methods of the object.

It's like IoC but without all the bread and circuses.

NB: it's been about 8-10 years since I did anything like that.

Running from the command line is good for something that can run headless but you want to see immediate success/failure type messages.

The other main use I had for programs run from the command line was small 'one-off' file format conversion programs. Once you've done half a dozen of these it's relatively easy to just bang out the ~100 lines of code to do this (including proper exception handling).

Would it be faster to write it out in perl? Well, if the regex is sufficiently simple then yes, if it is moderately complex then you still use far fewer keystrokes, but getting it to the point that it is correct, that's easier in Java. (Assuming you optimise for readability, something perl... struggles ... with)

Scumbag blogger:

Takes Tai-Chi for a couple of months, thinks he is qualified to talk about 'qi'.

Takes university course that touches on Java, dabbles in Lisp, thinks he is qualified to discuss 'failings' of Java

Begs the question: if Lisp is so amazing and Java is so bad, why is Lisp a failure in the marketplace?

----

Remember that even Lisp's biggest recent (as in, in the ~17 years since Java was released) success (Paul Graham selling his store-thing to Yahoo) was quietly re-written in Java a couple of years later.

If your answer to the success/failure question is that people who use Java are stupid-heads and people who use Lisp are wonderful geniuses, then may I suggest that you haven't solved the dilemma, you've just multiplied the entities by pushing it back a layer.

In any case, nobody cares about Java vs Lisp anyway. All the 'cool kids' in that space (e.g. functional programming on the JVM) are into stuff like Scala and Clojure. To ignore those makes the argument kind of pointless... it is like having an argument between a Dodgers fan and a Patriots fan. The Dodgers fan says the Dodgers are better because they hit more home runs than the Patriots, and the Patriots fan says the Patriots are better because they score more touchdowns.

It's just fundamentally stupid. Whereas if you compared Lisp and Scala, then at least you'd be talking about teams playing the same sport. Yes, it's still going to be as useful as watching a Patriots fan and a Dallas Cowboys fan argue about which is better, but at least the argument isn't based on fundamentallty stupid premises in that case.

Yes, we, the rest of the world understand that the 'religious issue' in the US has become tied in with the 'political issue'. But (again speaking on behalf of the rest of the world) we just wish the US would grow the @@@@ up and get the @@@@ over it.

Then they had to start pretending that things had more upvotes than they really did, which made it worse.

The place ghetto-ised in a scarily quick fashion.

I'm not sure though how much the earlier 'Digg-revolts' over senselessly mucking around with the UI contributed. Had they already destroyed or eroded a lot of the goodwill of their users?

Personally I believe the problem started back when they decided to boot Apple stories off the front page, and twiddled their algorithm to achieve it. Yes, Windows fanboys hated seeing those stories popping up all the time, and would go in and troll the Apple fans something chronic (and then complain that it was justified because the Apple users were doing the same thing - even though they weren't)... but doctoring the results like that just meant that what was (at that time) basically one of the few IT companies doing new and interesting things, instead of just being a "me too" copycat.

Facebook at least pretends to care about privacy and then screws the user, whereas Google just skips to step B

...sounds like spyware... ...looks like spyware...

(a) doctoring the search results is killing the golden goose

and

(b) Google is essentially just a big advertising company

The reality is that even with watered down results they are still better than their competitors.

If I want to search MSDN then Google gives better results than Bing.

Think about that for a moment. How can Bing be a serious competitor to Google when they can't even search their own site properly???

So I think that there is some wriggle room for Google here. They can water the beer down... but it is still better than the cow piss the pub down the road is serving.

Have a look over at JoelOnSoftware (?? Or was it the Fog Creek Site?)

They have a free online version of something similar that they are trying to hit the big time with. I forget what it is called though.

Gruber referenced something about this not so long ago - someone had written an article showing that historically companies that do this appear good in the short term, but in the long term it is a huge danger sign.

Hence the person to whom you were replying may have been aware of the "profits are up" song RIM has been singing for a while now, but not aware of the most recent results which indicate a rude awakening is imminent.

My naive reading of the article indicates that the man in question is a canadian citizen who was arrested when he visited Iran.

TL:DR; it doesn't matter what semantic games you try to pull, if you're a cheap bastard you're still an ass.

(1) A single question (as you say)

(2) (Attached to the question) Some whiny git putting on his internet cop hat and suggesting that the question is inappropriate

(3) An almost immediate locking of the question by said whiny git

(4) An interesting discussion

Almost every time I see some moderator putting on his 'big boy pants' I want to reach down the internet and slap them.

I just wish they could find a way to send the gnomes back to wikipedia.

I weep cold salty tears into my stale cheerios at the thought that any large Enterprise was ever seriously considering it as a viable solution.

(1) Blind faith in Generics.

This alone screams newb to me. He says that he got better performance with a custom data structure (no shit sherlock) but then seems deeply surprised by this. Duh. Okay, well, obviously he's relatively new to Java, but hey, he could still be a performance expert.

(2) Never mentions the biggest weapon in the C vs Java arsenal. The thing is that C is only able to make optimisations up to a certain point, but there are optimisations that can only be made at run time not at compile time. So Java starts off behind, but can catch up some or even all of that distance.

People have used this to demonstrate Java code running faster than C code, but that is old news, a newb might not know this.

(3) Does not mention the second biggest weapon in Java's arsenal in the Java vs C speed argument. That being that more recent versions of garbage collection allow for super fast memory allocation - enormously much faster than what you get with malloc.

(4) Never quantifies how much slower Java is. If Java is 5 or 10% slower, then Meh, is that really news? If Java is 2x slower than carefully hand-tuned C by guys with actual code writing credentials like Linus, then that is still pretty good. 2x screamingly fast is still more than good enough for most people. If the difference is an order of magnitude, then that is not so good. If the difference is two orders of magnitude, then you might as well be using some scripting language.

A proper expert would certainly have quantified the speed difference.

If Google can't do simple HTML after all these years, there's something wrong.

Firstly, for the crowd arguing about whether this is a good/bad/ugly question, your initial premise is wrong, because you pre-suppose that there are any good programming questions to ask in an interview. Since waffling about this sort of crap is entirely orthogonal to actual coding skill, there are no good questions, they are all bad. It's like trying to find the fastest marathon runner before the race by interviewing everyone and deciding who will win based on who gives the 'best' answer.

Secondly, for the crowd debating the algorithms and offering better programming methods, or smug in your assurance of quadratic/linear/O(n) time or whatever, you're all wrong because your initial premise is wrong. You assume this is a programming problem, but programming is the wrong tool for the job. A much better general purpose tool for 'solving' this problem (but not even necessarily the 'best' tool) would be a spreadsheet for instance. Using a spreadsheet you could have finished (including testing - e.g. eyeballing the result for correctness) before the 'optimisers' have even finished typing in their code. In terms of effectiveness, you silly coders might as well be using pea-shooters in an ICBM competition.

So I put on my "old age and treachery" hat, aka my puzzle solving hat, and came up with a better solution one that was:

shorter

simpler

more robust

The experienced programmers I know call this cheating, hence the "old age and treachery" (from "old age and treachery beat youth and beauty every time").

Smarts, puzzle solving and intelligence are all a critical part of that. And that's the thing that is the 10x multiplier that makes all your 'average' (median) programmers look distinctly below 'average' (mean).

It's like the bad old days of trying to use the Eclipse IDE where most of your screen real estate is taken up with tabs and buttons and you only get a narrow 5x80 window on the world.

Except that in this case instead of the screen being taken up with masses of widgets, it is consumed with vast tracts of whitespace. Good job there, PG.

(Actually, if PG had anything to do with it, I suspect it is a well thought out policy which results because he doesn't like long conversations (possibly a signal to noise bias against long posts?) consider also that there is no easy way to quote the parent, which just wastes bandwidth anyway)

On the other hand, in forums where people upvote humour, there can be mechanisms that actually are counterproductive. E.g. on Reddit where there is something serious that you are interested in, but some idiot starts a punning thread which takes off and runs for pages. Or slashdot, where a witty one line (simplistic) put down off a complex issue will recieve maximum karma, whereas a well thought out retort will struggle to break the readability threshold.

Hacker News has a number of mechanisms for impeding flame-wars, and I think some of them also impede the flow of humour. No fast replies for instance slows things down, and also the depth algorithm because PG doesn't like deep threads. Another one is de-emphasising karma. If people hand out karma for being entertained, then the system 'rewards' you for being entertaining, so again people go for the slashdot style one-off witty put down.

On the gripping hand, now that HN de-emphsises karma (and has weird rules about what can and cannot be down-voted), I'm much less likely to actually bother. Karma is already pointless, but rubbing our faces in it simply reduces participation. The ideal system would 'reward' well thought out replies, and I don't see the current system doing that anytime soon.

On the invisible hand humour is an important part of geek culture, as are references to things such as invisible hands and gripping hands. I'm not sure why that is, but word-play and recursion (important parts of being a really clever programmer) are already pretty close to humour, or possibly even forming some of the foundations of it.

Which leads me to conjecture that all of the really good programmers have a healthy sense of humour, and that implies that if hacker news is overrun with people who don't have a good sense of humour, that would indicate the ratio of good programmers here is falling. Why would that be? Perhaps because of the emphasis on money, and winning the startup lottery. The programmers who are only in it for the money tend to view themselves as more 'serious' - so I suspect they are the source of the "humourless git" demographic.

The thing that makes silicon valley special is not the quality of its computer scientists. Sorry to say this cali, but you're probably average in that regard.

The difference is that in SV there is a confluence of business and IT guys.

AND

The business guys actually respect the IT guys.

Having worked in a wide variety of locations in the English speaking world, I can say this is pretty special. Just about everywhere else one of two conditions prevails:

(a) either the business people don't respect the IT people

OR

(b) the IT people don't know how to find good business people to be co-founders.

So many times I see business guys who undervalue IT "I want to build the next eBay, (vague specs) can you make me that website for $3000 ??" (appropriate response: can you die in a fire, please). Or scam artists looking to get rich and toss the IT a mere pittance for their efforts.

You and I on the other hand, might look at it and say "okay, but how do these brave new programmers eat? Who pays their rent?" Back in the day, RMS used to just do some hand waving and point out that if (sorry: "once") the economic benefits of open source are realised that companies will do this because they realise it is in their best interests.

I'd be delighted to be wrong, but it seems that only a tiny minority of Open Source developers are actually hired by enlightened companies to work on their Open Source projects full time. Google being an obvious big contributor in that regard. But here's the thing with RMS, he is such an extremist that even Google's contribution isn't enough. He doesn't want a measly couple of buillion dollars worth of commitment, he wants it all, the heart mind body and soul must be dedicated to the cause or you are unworthy.

The sandbox metaphor breaks down when we look at one of the things that RMS objects to about Google, that they use Open Source, and they provide 'free(ish)' software services in return, but because those web/software services sit behind the "big-iron" curtain Google are never obligated to release their changes and improvements. Hence the GPL becomes ineffective in that scenario.

The problem of course is the risk of ghetto-isation of the open source developers. You and I might be reluctant to leap in boots and all because of petty economic concerns and so keep at least one foot in the closed source world. This lets us see lots of exciting things happening there. But don't forget that there is lots of stuff happening in the open source world. Closed source may look more exciting now, but RMS is taking the long position that in the end his legions of trusty hackers working together will create something much better than the corporations all doing their own small secret things.

And something genuinely spectacular happened last year. Last year was (finally) the long predicted, long awaited year of Linux hitting the mainstream. Except of course it wasn't Linux on the desktop, but Linux on mobile (Android).

Unfortunately, as open as it might be, it seems to me that Android is deeply flawed as far as alignment with the GNU philosophy of openness, what with the carriers doing all kinds of horrible things (some behind the scenes, some brazenly out in public). I hear stories of Microsoft making more money off Android than the do off Windows mobile (or whatever it is called this week), simply by threatening legal action, and patents of dubious parentage. Not to mention some of the openness being more open than others (e.g. Google releasing the code to some partners but not others, and not the public)

What you're saying is that they should throw their arms up in the air and say "welp, that's how the real world works in reality, so might as well give up and accept it".

But I think you're being unfair. The normal open advocates don't fear and demonize closed source. They may secretly pity it, they may secretly hate it, I don't know.

The RMS vision of open source, when you get right down to it, is that of two sandpits. In one sandpit, everyone shares their toys. In the other sandpit... who cares what they do?

If someone comes from the closed source world and wants to play in the open source sandpit, they have to play by the rules (sharing and openness).

I think RMS gets frustrated sometimes, because he doesn't want the other people playing in the open playpit giving their stuff away to the people in the selfish (no sharing) playpit. I think his thinking is that it would mean that there is less incentive for them "over there" to examine and repent of their selfish ways.

Sometimes the people in the no-sharing playpit have rich relatives that buy them nice toys for Christmas. But RMS views that as okay, if the open playpit turns out to have a need for one of those, he is confident that the open source people have the ability to make something even better, if they can be bothered to do so.

#define competition illegal

is bad, m'kay?