431 karma · joined February 22, 2012
Except that in JSON, strings need to be surrounded by double quotes. Why impose on human readers a syntactic requirement that only compilers/interpreters need?
From this respect, JSON is in the same mixed bag as XML is.
If you want to go down that slope, be consistent and push YAML instead of JSON.
Having said that, you are quite right to credit Romain for a lot of the UI we see in Android, and there's also a reason why he didn't stay at Sun: he was one of the few graphic engineers who actually cared about releasing good graphical user interfaces.
He seems to be confusing Android with Java ME. Android has a few portability issues but it's light years ahead of anything that Java ME ever did.
Gosling seems to have a very strong tendency to badmouth his former employers (first Oracle, now Google), which made me lose a lot of respect for him.
I can't.
What's the justification for not using plain links for this page, seriously?
Not feeling sorry for you.
As for the age old myth that people are migrating away from Facebook, dream on. Facebook is scheduled to have a billion users in the next few months, it's going to be around for a very, very long time.
The target was much more obvious than that: the carriers.
Larry Page was tired of carriers dictating device models and data plans to users, so he decided to do something about it.
I see things the other way around: the JVM is a very impressive piece of technology that has been aging impressively well for more than fifteen years while Scala is a C++-like monstrosity that will probably be all but forgotten in a few years.
Personally, I'm more interested in the new crop of JVM languages such as Kotlin.
You know that Scala has gone off the deep end when somebody makes a parody post of how complex it is and several people comment and say "Yup, that totally matches my experience with Scala".
Everywhere I have worked (including Google), I've been surrounded with great developers, some of which who came from college, others who dropped out early and just learned on their own because they were passionate about software.
Both types of engineers are doing a great job, but when it comes to being involved in important decisions, or choices that will impact the company or the infrastructure for a long time, either the non-college people have very little to contribute or they are simply not invited to the meetings. Practically, they are good at getting things done based on what they are told but not much more beyond that.
Our profession needs both types of backgrounds, but you are vastly, vastly underestimating the amount of opportunities that will just never present themselves because of your choice of not going to college.
That's not the right analogy.
The situation here is more: you join a project that uses assembly language, which you find too hard to learn, so you decide you'll be using Ruby instead.
We're not talking about a different interface here but a new terminology.
It's a bit like saying that you think English is too hard so you'll be communicating in Spanish from now on. This is not a realistic decision in a world where you need to work with a lot of people who all communicate in English.
git's user interface is terrible and very counter-intuitive, but if you want to work in a team or, more to the point, be productive and leverage what git has to offer, do take the time to learn its native user interface.
Related article:
http://beust.com/weblog/2010/04/06/git-for-the-nervous-devel...
Taken in isolation, these numbers don't mean much but when you start putting all the evidence together, it's hard to make a case that Scala is growing at all.
... and it always will be.
By a wide margin, the overall consensus in the JVM community seems to be that Scala will probably never be more popular than it is today, which means, it will never become mainstream. Hopefully, one of Ceylon or Kotlin will succeed where Scala failed.
With that in mind, Play betting on Scala is quite a risky direction indeed.
You can't have it both ways.
This simply means that Google doesn't work very well for you, and I mean no offense, but what you are searching is a very, very small minority of search queries. Google still serves a crushing majority of people very well.
You are making the same mistake that Paul is making throughout his essay: he wants startups to build products for him and not for regular users. Seriously, email is actually a todo list? Come on, now.
I like Play overall but two things concern me, both related: 1) they are moving toward Scala and 2) they are adopting sbt.
This looks to me more like a "picking a shiny toy" move than something that is being done to benefit users (Scala is still quite a marginal language and sbt is very controversial, even among Scala enthusiasts).
He claims he complies with the DMCA.
We won't know until the trial happens, but from what I've read, there appears to be plenty of emails showing the employees explicitly discussing how they actually don't take down content.
A lot of Lisp programs look a lot better if you apply Python's space indentation for sexprs, for example.
I'm getting tired of Wikileak's bullshit. Either you have proof about this and you should just publish it in a pastebin, or you shut up. You don't publish 5 million emails and hint that there is material in there that could take down governments.
Like I said in my comment above, this has nothing to do with IDEA: dynamically typed languages are just technically impossible to refactor automatically without the developer's supervision.