atlei

Is the human body conditioned to A: stay in an office all day B: stay outside in the sun all day

If we look at the last 50 years, it seems the answer is A. However, looking at the last X thousands of years, it is not surprisingly B.

I'm from Norway, and at the moment we only enjoy a few hours of sun (unless you live in the northern parts of Norway, in which case you get NO sun at all now).

Norwegians spend most of the year inside an office, and then go to Spain (or similar) for a two weeks vacation during summer where we stay 10 hours in the sun to get tanned. Even people from Spain stay inside in the middle of the day when the sun is the strongest.

And we wonder why we get skin cancer....

My simple rule: a little bit of sunshine every day is very important and very healthy - too much is not

Well, you're both right, as you are talking about two different types of memory.

Associations are best with "normal" memory, but with sports (or piano/instrument playing, or touch-typing etc) we're talking about muscle memory, and there is no way around repetition-repetition-repetition

Hmmm.. I actually have both types of products.

The Kinesis keyboard with backspace, ctrl, alt, enter, home etc using my thumb AND the iGesture pad from Fingerworks ( http://www.fingerworks.com/ ) which is a large "mouse pad" where you can use gestures with 5 fingers (and it works for all applications).

The brilliant part is that the iGesture pad fits perfectly on the top of the Kinesis keyboard (the left and right part of the keyboard is separated for ergonomic reasons).

I've had the iGesture for a couple of years now - it will be a sad day when it dies as there are no replacements that I know of....maybe Apple will release a similar "mousepad" in the future ?

Misc daily links:

- http://www.arjansworld.com

- http://jasonhaley.com/blog/default.aspx

Opera has been a superior product for YEARS !

However, Apple has had superior MARKETING for years (and I admire them for that :-)

I feel bad for Opera that all the great innovations haven't been noticed by the public, but the good thing is that all the other browsers copy their innovations and get much better.

My killer browsing tip (which maybe the other browsers support as well - I don't know):

- tabs to the left instead of on top

I can have 50 tabs open on my 22 monitor (in portrait mode), and I can still read most of the titles (it shows "Hacker News | Add com..." for this tab while having 50 tabs open)

Erlang is a functional language specially designed (and suitable) for concurrent programming.

His rant is partially correct (at best), especially looking at OOP from a functional programming point of view.

However, developers in the real world who doesn't focus on concurrent programming have different needs.

I'll comment his objections from a C++ perspective (which is a multi-paradigm language, not purely OO):

Objection 1 - Data structure and functions should not be bound together - you are free to store all your data structures in a single file, and access them from anywhere. However, using classes will let you hide some of the data structures which are not necessary globally, reducing the cognitive load.

Objection 2 - Everything has to be an object - Not in C++. You use classes where appropriate, and ordinary functions elsewhere. I agree that everything shouldn't be an object.

Objection 3 - In an OOPL data type definitions are spread out all over the place. - similar to objection 1. You CAN store all definitions in a single include file, but for large projects this can be a LOT of data definitions, where many/most of them are only relevant for parts of the applications. Hiding data definitions in separate classes will make it easier to focus on the RELEVANT data depending on which class/function you use.

Objection 4 - Objects have private state. - again, similar to 1 and 3. "State is the root of all evil". If you store all data in a single file, then you have one giant global mess. By assigning them to a class, you clearly state the responsibility and scope of the variables. A private state is nobody's business but the class. You don't HAVE to have private state for objects,but then you either need to pass all data to each function, or use global variables instead.

For Erlang (functional programming) these objections make (some) sense since you DON'T want any state whatsoever to facilitate concurrency.

However, saying that OO sucks is stupid, and the four reasons for why OO was popular is not even worth responding to. I don't think functional programming will become more popular due to this rant....

Agree ! Having gone from nothing to Subversion, I think Subversion is great (with TortoiseSVN, at least).

Are there better tools ? Is Git better ? Maybe, but different tools for different uses. For me personally, Subversion does not suck, and I don't need a "better" tool.

It works, and gets the job done for me !