@belgariontheking said:
And I thought beau wasn't a "guy".
This is true. I consider myself more of a "fop" or "raconteur" than a "guy."
@belgariontheking said:
And I thought beau wasn't a "guy".
This is true. I consider myself more of a "fop" or "raconteur" than a "guy."
@morbiuswilters said:
@belgariontheking said:
@morbiuswilters said:The mockery of MVPs is less heavy-handed than your unhinged IE6 rantThat was Bridget99, not this guy.They're not the same person? And I thought beau wasn't a "guy".
I switched to the similar-looking Bridget99 after I started getting long, menacing PMs. I'm certain I mentioned that... go back and read all my posts and I'm sure you can find it. The name is a tribute to a really intelligent user of IMDB who posts all sorts of astute commentary on that site.
Apparently this computer still "remembers" the old ID... I usually just walk up to any old kiosk here at the Penitentiary's A/V center so it's hard to avoid that sort of thing.@morbiuswilters said:
I'm guessing you're still a little gun-shy after your last effort ended so badly.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. I just looked at that IE6-related thread for the first time in a few days. It turns out that people in certain parts of the world experience even more difficulty getting their IE8 search bar to use Google than I did. In fact, it seems to be well nigh impossible for some people. So, in summary:
1) I posted something perceived as inflamatory
2) The inevitable conventional wisdom was loudly articulated by others
3) A different group of people began pointing out an even more severe version of the problem I had originally mentioned
4) The thread suddenly (and conveniently, for the conventional-wisdom-repeaters) went off-topic
5) In this second thread, the usual suspects grimly declared the first thread to be a personal debacle from which I should "learn," as if I had just drunkenly run over someone in my Camaro
I am sorry, but #5 makes no sense to me. The conclusion doesn't follow its premises.
@morbiuswilters said:
The real problem is that I've already come to associate your username with highly contrived attempts at flamebait, so it's kind of a wash. I also think you could have taken the MVP bashing a bit further and garnered more laughs, but I'm guessing you're still a little gun-shy after your last effort ended so badly.
I'm not really aiming to get a high number of stars. I do like to provoke discussion.
I think we're still very much in the "barber surgeon" era of software development and, as such, widely held opinions in the field are often still immature and even incorrect. There are a great many people involved in the field who are basically incompetent: people who only program in one "pet" language; people without the necessary formal training for their jobs;people who eschew formal thinking and parrot vendor talking points instead; and so on.
When I read comments like (paraphrasing) "Golly, don't make fun of Professor So-and-So; he could probably write a compiler single-handedly!" this only tends to confirm my analysis. If one hasn't written a compiler, or at least done maintenance-type work on one in a class, then what makes one feel competent to participate in this discussion? I ask this rhetorically- if you haven't done these things, then you're not qualified to dispute CS topics with me, or to hold many development jobs. And yet, such comments typify the state of thinking in this young discipline.
I am not alone in my assessment of the state of software development as a field, or in my use of provocative commentary. I would give Prof. Ed Lee (author of "The Problem with Threads") and the late Prof. Edsger Dijkstra (author of "To Hell With Meaningful Identifiers" - as pure an example of flamebait as one might name) as examples of people with similar views who are nonetheless highly regarded.
@alegr said:
Well, if you had just 1% of his experience and expertise, you might have some hope for my respect.
I said he was my favorite Microsoft MVP! One must admit, though, that he doesn't really fit the typical MVP mold.
@alegr said:
This guy could single-handedly write a compiler.
I don't doubt it. That's probably not as big a deal as you might imagine. In my experience, compiler development is similar to skeet shooting... it's both easier and more enjoyable than it looks from afar.
@alegr said:
Of course, you don't know that Dr. Newcomer currently has to use an electric "scooter" to get aroung.
We've probably all got a mental picture of the typical Microsoft MVP: the khaki pants; the dev-conference travel coffee mug and laptop case; the obsession with "sick new desktop gadgets" and "CTPs"; the 2-year-old white Toyota Highlander; etc.
Somehow this guy ( http://www.flounder.com/ ) just doesn't seem to fit. But apparently he made it through their, um, rigorous selection process.
The impression I get is almost as if that "Lord of the Web" guy were to get a PhD from Carnegie-Mellon. I guess Best Buy would really have to improve their benefits package for that to ever happen.
Sadly, he is probably my favorite Microsoft MVP now. There's something endearingly stubborn about just not giving a damn about design and not wanting to screw around with people that do... since they probably wouldn't get along anyway.
In fairness, this particular individual doesn't really seem to focus on the "Web" per se, he really is more of a nuts-and-bolts C++ expert.
@bridget99 said:
A moment ago while I was absent-mindedly picking the scabs off of my elderly neighbor's "missing" chihuahua, I had an unrelated (and hopefully less inflamatory) thought:
Are there just too damn many programmers out there? Think about how many search tools there are: Bing; Google; Dogpile; Hotbot; Yahoo; Altavista; etc. I get the sense that there are too many workers chasing the same piece of the metaphorical pie and the result is a bunch of duplicated work. I think "synch" is another example of a fun-to-play-with problem foisted off onto excess programmers by their baby sitters, e.g. Ray Ozzie, Scott Guthrie, etc. And how many custom drag-and-drop conference room schedulers does a Fortune 500 company need, anyway? Not nearly so many as they've gotten, I'd venture to say.
Consider, for example, the bundleware that came with my laptop: the stupid launch utility; the audio program with the horribly aliased icons; the back-door ActiveX rootkit left by their tech support. Somebody wrote this stuff, and the whole time they were probably drawing a big salary and wasting time with sarcastic posts like the ones I se here.
I ask myself, "Is that most programmers? Are we (or 'they,' since I'm a Manager;or 'you,' since this is Reddit ) just a bunch of con artists?" Sadly, it is actually even worse than that. Those bundleware programmers are actually fairly elite, inasmuch as they get to write commerical software that's made it to production. A typical Java or .NET programmer, slaving away at some ill-defined task for a dyspeptic "internal customer," is even more of a surplus burden!
Like I said, I was busy fooling with some stupid dog while I thought all of this up, so maybe it's not completely thought through.
That's a really good question and I'm glad it's out there. But are you even halfway serious about that Chiwhahua? The thing about Chiuhahuhas is that the surface area of their skin is very small. Even a small wound, inflicted "absentmindedly" as you described it, can prove fatal for such a small dog. Hopefully you are just kidding....?
@morbiuswilters said:
@bridget99 said:
I had an ex-girlfriend who competed in the Special Olympics, and she was quite vocal about the fact that using such an epithet in the general sense is offensive.You dated a retard? And you have a girl's name. How odd.
I'm not a girl. My nickname is a tribute to one of my all time favorite IMDB trolls. And yes, I had a girlfriend who competed in the Special Olympics, although she was really only my "show" girlfriend for family gatherings, business parties, etc. I apparently had something even less presentable for side action. But enough about the strange relationship between WPF and Silverlight...
@PJH said:
@beau29 said:
Practically, when doing real-time programming in .NETMy turn.
What??!?
We either have different definitions of what 'real-time' means or you're using entirely the wrong language.
(In a previous life I was involved with fiscal metering which had to be real-time, you can't integrate a pressure over time if you can't guarantee how long it's going to be between measurements. Languages of choice were assembly for the interface for the input hardware and C for the calculations. Windows wasn't involved either.)
I agree about the overall unsuitability of .NET for real time applications. If one defines "real time" as meaning that events happen in predictable or even bounded time, then yes, .NET definitely doesn't fit the bill.
However, every place I have worked since 2000 has at least been playing around with .NET. So, I definitely have seen what it can do in a wide variety of applications. And if one defines "real time" more loosely, e.g. if one uses it to say something like "this app needs to display boiler temperature in real time" then plenty of .NET apps fall into that category. Those apps will perform better using the loop / sleep approach (or a loop without a sleep) than they will with a timer.
More generally, my original comment wasn't about the suitability or unsuitability of .NET for any particular purpose; it was that I perceive that a great many programmers display an attachment to the "timer" paradigm which I find infantile.
@dhromed said:
@beau29 said:
.NET's ugly ancestor, VB6.What?
I'm an intuitive person and my intuition tells me this. Also, it seems that most VB coders have migrated to .NET; architecture aside, the VB6 target audience is the.NET target audience. In VB6, it was quite typical to drag a "timer" onto a form from a Toolbox. I think it is this mentality that's led to the .NET timer abuse I cite.
@dhromed said:
@beau29 said:
Typically, if they can find something like "8 hertz" in a specification, they interpret it as prima facie architectural evidence that somewhere a timer with an interval of 125 ms must be used.That makes some sense. Without more context, it's hard to see the problem with thinking of a timer when you read "Hertz".
Practically, when doing real-time programming in .NET, I find the only timing strategy that works reliably is to be greedy. If a program tells .NET it needs something every half second, .NET will respond by running the handler at (for example) 550 ms, then 540 ms later, then maybe 1200 ms later, then perhaps 490 ms later, and so on. The looping approach I suggested is more deterministic; if the sleep time is 0, then 100%/(number of cores) CPU utilization will be observed. This percentage can be throttled downward by increasing the sleep time. So, when doing real time programming in .NET, I typically decide on an acceptable CPU utilization level, and tweak the sleep time to achieve this. If performance isn't adequate at that level, then I go to management (or to whoever wrote that spec) and let them make a decision. In my experience trying to beat real-time performance out of .NET, this is the technique that's worked. And whoever wrote the spec does not care that, instead of "8 times a second," they are getting their data "as fast as .NET can manage."
Also, the looping approach does away with all the message-pumping, reentrancy, and overhead issues associated with timers. I just don't see what timers bring to the table, except a smug sense that "management said this has to happen 8 times a second, so I'm basically letting them write my code for me."
Another big problem with the message-pump-based timers is that (in WinForms, at least) the messages can "back up" and cause delays and even crashes. In cases where the handler code takes just slightly longer than the timer interval, this problem can take quite a while to surface. To put it in broken German, "das ist nicht gut."