Stormbringer

Disclaimer: I've done GWT and I liked it.

I did not find any Java<->Javascript paradigm shift problem at all. You simply forget about the Javascript and just write Java.

The big benefit of using GWT over writing 'native' javascript is that you get the same behaviour on all browsers.

The big benefit of using GWT over using other java based web frameworks is that GWT moves the client's state down to the client, where it belongs.

If you look at most other Java web frameworks like that (e.g. Struts and it's direct competitors), they expend enormous effort porting data to and from the client, and trying to hack around the limitations of the HTML post operation - namely that blank values aren't returned (checkboxes!!) and that everything is passed as text (numbers!!). So what these other frameworks do is they end up making you write all these model objects, and then try to simulate the client state. JSF is the worst of these as it takes it the furthest, they're not just emulating the model, but also the view as well with their overly-complex de-hydration and re-hydration of components.

If you tell the client state to bugger off back to the client where it belongs, you save a good 30-40% of your typical web framework effort right there.

Eliminating Javascript browser/version idiosyncrasies saves you another 20-30% of your effort (more if the UI is very dynamic, less if it isn't).

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I think you're posting on the basis of assumptions you've made based on what you've heard about GWT, rather than experience with it.

This security layer is the only code I've ever written that years later would still cause me to wake up in the middle of the night thinking "oh no! What if an attacker did X, Y and Z??!!"

Note: as far as I know, the security I put on it has never been broken. But it still caused nightmares even so.

But every time Apple jumped up a rank in US or global sales there was a gleefulness and gloating aspect to the posts that would report it.

When rumours of the iPhone was leaked there was enormous sledging of Apple. People literally made mocking posts about how ridiculous a one button phone would be. Apple and their one button phone were the laughing stock of tech punditry. For months people wrote about what idiots Apple and their fanboys were.

Then Apple demoed the iPhone, and everybody suddenly realised that the "drooling idiot fanboys" were right after all.

So yes, guys like Gruber are being hypocritical with their banner waving "we're number one" stuff. but they took so much crap for so long, that to resist that urge to thumb your nose and do the "nyah nyah I told you so" thing would require super-human self-control.

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In market share there is almost never a complete victory. Even Microsoft almost but not quite had a complete victory in the OS wars. They could have killed off Apple, but didn't.

Now, 10-15 years later, if you looked at profitability or the market cap you'd be forgiven for thinking that Apple had won that war. But if you look at market share you'd still think that Apple had one foot in the grave.

The problem is that all these one dimensional views are (surprise!) myopic. We love to make straight-up comparisons of Apple and Microsoft - but Apple is predominantly a hardware/entertainment company and Microsoft is predominantly a software/business company. It's like trying to compare an insurance company with a supermarket (which is possible, but it requires hard work and patient analysis, neither of which pundits are generally blessed with an abundance of).

Would we compare Microsoft and Dell, and say that Microsoft had "beaten" Dell? No? Why not? After all, there are people who hold the view that Microsoft encouraged and pushed the commoditisation of PC hardware, which meant that the hardware manufacturer's profitability kept getting chipped [sic] away at.

Fanboy gladiatorial aspirations aside, you could probably make a better argument about Microsoft being at war with its hardware partners (atn: Nokia -> Microsoft is not your friend) like HP and Dell than it being at war with Apple.

... it ain't credible.

On the other hand, it sounds like they would have a great career path at the federal reserve...

If you want to have a discussion, don't start by putting a ridiculous set of trousers on the straw-man you made.

As soon as their code is made more readable, not only does this make life easier for the next guy, but it also makes it a lot easier to optimise once it is clear what it is actually doing.

People who don't want to write readable code seem to subscribe to the belief that there is only one way to write a particular line of code, yet they could not be more wrong. For any non-trivial section of code in any non-trivial language there are dozens, if not millions of different ways of writing it. Given that, making it unreadable is either maliciousness or incompetence, and Hanlon's Razor tells me it's probably not malice.

Moreover, most of the time the poor sod who is the "next guy" to read/maintain the code is you. You are the next guy. You are the audience of most of your coding efforts. If you cannot read your code 6months down the track, then the only person you're shafting with your bad workmanship is future you.

You can have your cake and eat it to. Code can be both efficient and readable.

  There are still reasons to pay attention to efficiency when writing code.

To suggest that nobody wants "reasonable" efficiency anymore is absurd. To do so when the article actually argues your point for you is painful.

To suggest that the people who favour readable code are proposing "pathological inefficiency" is insulting.

I downvoted your whinge about getting downvoted for the following reasons:

(1) meta discussions must die

(2) pretending that upvotes/karma matter is just deluding yourself. Go watch the Southpark episode about internet dollars until you get it

E.g. 5,3,2,1,10 makes five threads, one sleeps for one second and prints 1, one sleeps for two seconds and prints 2, one sleeps for three seconds and prints 3, one sleeps for five seconds and prints 5 and the last one sleeps for 10 seconds and prints 10.

  Just on the face of it, it's wildly improbable that you could spend over a billion dollars operating ITMS.

Not to come across as an Apple apologist, but seriously, it wasn't even that frickin' long ago... even in internet time.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it, repeatedly, in online forums, but in a badly twisted and inaccurate version.

So Apple gains 1.07 billion with their 30% cut and spends 1.30 billion?

In other words, Apple digs into their own pocket for 230 million dollars in order to run it? And people still complain about Apple's 30% cut. Wow.

Kind of a Neo "I know Kung Fu" moment.

Unfortunately, no one else on the team knew/remembered anything about state machines, so my epiphany didn't help them out any, even if they had had the same kind of classical Comp Sci education as me.

Naturally, the first thing I did with this power was to leverage it into World Domin... no wait, that was something else. :D What I did with this knowledge was to hassle the people until they gave me a diagram of what the state transitions (or whatever they called them in Business Analyst land) were supposed to be, and then I went back and compared them, and they were not the same :(

What would be much worse is if all these talented engineers were working for a large advertising company with a poor human rights record and no respect for your privacy. Now there's a nightmare scenario.

#1 Since I'm the only one in the thread who actually knows what they're talking about, naturally this will get downvoted to oblivion. Farewell sweet karma, I barely knew thee. :D

#2 In order to actually get anything done you have to 'bust out' into the Windows APIs anyway. See here for a prime example:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aew9yb99(v=vs.85).as...

#3 For budgeting/political reasons I won't go into, I can say that this is possible with only the use of notepad. Speaking programmer to programmer, I strongly advise you to get better tooling than that. Really. This thing is an absolute pig to code and debug by hand.

#4 The horror is entirely justified. This is how bad it is... it actually makes those retarded Java enterprise projects, where you have to cobble together 14 different frameworks that are fundamentally incompatible, look good.

If you want to reframe the debate in terms of Apple is evil, therefore everything they do, say or think is evil, by all means go and do that. (And they say the fanboys are the ones suffering from a reality distortion field...) But this isn't really the place. I'm sure you can find large numbers of people willing to agree with you though.

On the off chance that you can't find any thread on Hacker News or elsewhere on the Internet that fit that theme... perhaps you should start your own? You could write a blog post about how it is all part of some conspiracy. Or if you're really lazy you could write a top ten list... just pick any ten random Apple news items, there's bound to be someone slagging them off for each of them.

Then you just post that link to Hacker News, you'll get guaranteed upvotes, it will make the front page... and Ta Da!!! "Apple = evil conspiracy" comments will be on topic in that thread! Hooray!

Every new thing is supposed to be a 'killer' of something else. Whether that be "iPod killer", "iPhone killer", "Windows killer", or, $Deity forbid: "linux killer".

This is not to say that things don't change, just that the sensationalist nature of reporting is unhelpful.

I suggest a new benchmark: the techno-journalism killer. Each time some techno-journalist describes something as a killer they lose a point. If they are right within 1 year, they get 10 points. Within 2 years, 6 points. Within 3 years, 3 points, and within 4 years 1 point.

If the journalist accumulates enough negative points (-10 ??), they themselves get 'killed' (ie deprecated, made obsolescent, removed from the news streams and RSS feeds etc).

After all, if they're wrong that much, they don't deserve our attention.

Going to HTML as your presentation layer doesn't suddenly and magically increase (or decrease) the sucktitude factor of the developers involved.

What it is, is a way to prevent developers trying to rort the system and doing an end run around their fee structure.

When this first came out, the ones screaming the loudest were the guys who had "free" apps ($0 to Apple) who then built into their apps an "okay, you've been using it for 5 minutes, now pay us $3 ($0 to Apple)" 'one-off subscription'.

E.g. you used to be able to get all the benefits of a paid app without paying Apple anything, simply by relabelling the "paid" app as an app with a "one-off subscription".

Apple closed that loop-hole. Hence one particular side of the screaming. You don't actually need to ascribe these actions to some kind of evil Microsoftian conspiracy, it's jsut closing a loophole that some people were using to cheat the system.

The other side of this coin is the arrangements between authors and publishers, where the authors have had a long time 70% of net agreement. If the author gets 70% and Apple gets 30%... this leaves 0% for the middle-man. So they weren't happy.

From the article it describes the ADA programmer as: "This developer had very limited Ada experience, having written only one Ada program, consisting of approximately 5000 lines of code, while working for a previous employer."

One of the key points of the article is that the code produced by the inexperienced ADA developer beat the experienced Assembly developer. I think a lot of people will struggle with this (because they think "well, logically the code gets turned into assembly anyway when it is compiled, so a sufficiently advanced assembly programmer _must_ be at least as good as a compiler), but the same claims (high level languages beating assembly) have been floating around for years.

In this case study at least, jumping straight to assembly (for size/performance reasons) turned out to be a premature optimisation of the sort we should avoid.

I haven't seen any Lisp where that is the case. Generally the lisp I've seen gets far too wrapped up in its own cleverness.

My impression is that Forth is a language where things get done, whereas Lisp is a language for basking in your own glory.

I have a theory: the amount of hype for a language is inversely proportional to the degree to which people use it to do real work.

The same could be said of methodology evangelism. The people actually doing the work don't tend to harp on about it.