Redstate

I thought asp expressions translated pretty well to english. If, Then etc.

But, yeah, geeky anyway.

absentee

I love it. It make my inner geek smile.

absentee

ANY DECENT GEEK KNOWS YOU USE SOMETHING INCOMPREHENSIBLE

like this

(∼R∈R∘.×R)/R←1↓⍳R

From a good old IBM product if ever there was one
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Tell me, why isn't that around anymore?

The HinzSight Report
Managing Editor

Its still the best language for handling large matrices ever invented. It has uses in Geophysics and Modeling.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

I'm strangely clueless here.

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Thanks, Joliphant. APL reminded me of something like Brainfudge (I'm paraphrasing its name), a near impossible to read programming language. You can see an example of a DVD decryptor written in Brainfudge here. You can find other near impossible to use programming languages at Free Esoteric & Obfuscated Programming Languages.

Personally I get a real kick out of The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. They've had such winning gems like this. Now that is creative.

I never heard of the languages on that page (Possible exception of intercal), Java2k looks like fun.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

... for those of us mentally ill enough to appreciate them.
Thanks.

That DVD decryptor was sick, and no I didn't make the slightest attempt to understand it! I wasn't so impressed by the Obfuscated C winner - it looks about the same as when I have to go fix old code of mine, which I presumably thought made sense at the time ;-)

...
This is also from the Wikipedia entry:

'Tis the dream of each programmer
Before his life is done,
To write three lines of APL
And make the damn thing run.'

OK really, it's not that bad. Just because it is a programming language that occasionally used OVERSTRUCK characters doesn't mean it's bad...

But as you say, like everything interesting in the world, it has a use and some people are still using it for that.

Isn't there a 6 month rule before you can purposefully show your ignorance?

Texas Proud and Texas Loud

He's making fun of the paulites as being bots posting paranoid rants.

absentee

...you guys are posting in a foreign language, after all. :)

The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC. I've been usurped!

I stand by my earlier post... :)

Texas Proud and Texas Loud

I stand by your comment too then

Didn't he have that song, "Super Freak"?

The HinzSight Report
Managing Editor

I can't hold back for 6 minutes let alone 6 months.

YourComment=Request.Querystring("humor")

absentee

But because it's FUNNY, you're in.

Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie

"If this ain't a mess, it'll do until one shows up." -Sheriff Bell, No Country For Old Men

My world is CRUSHED!

Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie

"If this ain't a mess, it'll do until one shows up." -Sheriff Bell, No Country For Old Men

I'd have dispensed with the loop and vectorized the statement in Matlab.

EQUIVALENCE FORTRAN DINOSAUR

Heh, heh...

which is what I largely deal in, but I figured some people would have a harder time reading it with things like i++ and all.

Not that I can read any of it anyway...
I'm just an amateur nerd, after all. With mostly non-computerized nerd-skills...

"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up

And SCREW the people who can't read geek, I say!

Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie

because JAVA is where all the cash is. After all, the root to all evil is money. Speaking from a guy who has done (C ++) for more than 15 years, and JAVA 10 years after wards.

C++ is acceptable ONLY because it's been fairly central to my income generation for about 12 years. Other than that, it is a horrible mutation of C -- as in Kernighan and Ritchie C.

"C" is the language that gods speak. And when we get down to it, the most purely golden version is not the original K&R, but the ANSI version developed circa 1989.

Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie

1970's K&R C on a PDP-11 is MAN code...

Is VAX still around? Holy cow. But the deal is this -- M&R didnt include all the standard libraries, and I hate the way parameters are declared.

So, heretic I am. But if I'm a heretic, Strousup is a Commie spy.

Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie

running on Windows NT 4.0 systems so we can still run the old programs. We also have DEC VAXstations running VMS.

What we need in a leader is to tell us not what we want to hear, but what we need to hear.

==== 13 ====

Had the most rational and cleanest instruction sets I have ever seen. They were just things of beauty. As opposed to a certain series of processors that were originally meant for handheld calculators.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

not to say I haven't had occasions to appreciate those training wheels.

If you've been doing Java for the last 10 years, you started in 1997. That's cool. Java was released in May 1995, as I recall. (I remember well because the first thing I did when it came out was to write a native-x86 compiler for bytecode.)

Before that you wrote C++ for more than 15 years, which means you started no later than 1982.

At that time, Stroustrup hadn't even released cfront, and in fact hadn't even started using the name "C++" yet.

So, are you Bjarne Stroustrup? Or were you an assistant of his at Bell Labs?

And now that you mention it, in 97 Java had an almost non existent user base.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

I've gotten a pretty good nose for when people are stretching. It's not just applicants either. I can remember want ads back in 1997 or so, looking for Java programmers with a minimum of five years' experience! I guess the only people who qualified at that time were Jim Gosling and a few other people who worked on Project Oak at Sun.

And while I'm reminiscing: legendary techie Bill Joy is often credited as one of the inventors of Java in the popular press. Yet when he first heard about Oak (probably in 1993 or 94), his first reaction reputedly was: "Oh I get it, it's C plus-plus minus-minus." Not a bad description of Java, actually.

But Thunder has yet to answer whether he was stretching. Who knows, he might really be the inventor of C++!

Back in 1997, Java was still being pushed mostly as a way of improving the Web experience, via applets. As you know, it never really worked, and not just because Microsoft did their level best to kill Java by forking it. Javascript took over inside the browser environment and Java ended up totally taking over the market for custom programming in enterprise IT shops.

However one feels about Java as a programming language, there's no denying that Sun has managed it in an extremely adroit and successful way. Of course you can argue that they have mishandled its transition to open source, but none of the agile-language competitors (notably Python and Ruby) have done much to capitalize on those recent errors.

I have a very simple way of verifying a programmer's creds in a language. I sit them down at a workstation and ask them to implement something short and simple.

Mostly because I can never remember when what came about
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

...with pencil and paper while you watch them do it.

It's the ultimate acid test. Fewer than one in ten applicants are both willing and able to do it.

Some people say "I can't do it with you watching me." Some people can't do it on paper, and they'll even admit they rely on the compiler to catch their syntax errors. A lot of people simply don't understand recursion.

Hire the ones who roll up their sleeves and bang it out error-free in five minutes or less. The real stars are the ones who figure out the square-root optimization.

my first phone interview out of college in 03 the lady on the other end asked me if I had experience with OpenGL programming. I rattled off what I knew from gaming. She then asked me if I had two meshes how would I determine which 2 points (one on each mesh) were closest to each other. Lacking any significant geometric algorithm experience and realizing I was way under qualified, I asked "I assume you don't want me to say 'do a brute force loop through each point on both meshes'?"

I get recursion (better than most of the programmers I know... but maybe that says more about them than me), but honestly I don't know I could come up with a prime number generator off the top of my head. At least nothing slick and efficient.

Oh and btw, I now know how to do some basic OpenGL programming b/c of that interview.

Although I wouldn't use recursion, and I'm not a c/c++ coder.

algorithm:

int maxPrime=1000;
int[maxPrime] primes;
primes[0]=2;
print 2;
int numPrimesFound=1;

for (int i=3; i<=maxPrime; i++)
{
int currPrime=0;
boolean prime = true;
while (prime == true && primes[currPrime] != null && primes[currPrime] < root(i))
{
if (i % primes[currPrime] == 0) prime = false;
currPrime++;
} // while
if (prime == true)
{
print i;
primes[numPrimesFound]=i;
numPrimesFound++;
} // if
} // for
-
NARF

-
NARF

checking the current number to see if it was divisible ONLY by previously determined primes was the slick bit of efficiency I would have overlooked. I probably would have checked against all numbers <= 1/2 the current number which is hardly an efficient solution especially when you get to large numbers.

Talk about the ease with which you could find new Primes this way. Or confirming that what you're working with is a Prime...

"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up

Which is not a dig at jpers36, because it's not the solution I'd have first leapt to, either.

I'm pretty sure that the largest known prime is notably larger than, say, MAX_INT. I'm also pretty sure that there are enough known primes to overflow jpers36's choice of 1000 entries in his array. Would be reasonably trivial to generalize the approach to a dynamic array, and stocked with the first n primes in order. Would be a bit more complicated to cover numbers greater than MAX_INT, but there are existing code libraries for big numbers. (You could use floating-point numbers, but you'll get bitten by the (lack of) precision.)

Calculating primes seems to be a pretty common exercise for introducing CS students to loops.

Unless you were being sarcastic (I can never tell).

you only have to check all numbers < (n/2), not <=. Because n is an integer, n/2 is a valid factor iff 2 is a valid factor. And you'll have already checked 2.

HTML Help for Red Staters

NO TEXT DOES NOT WORK THIS WAY

HTML Help for Red Staters

I started out in high school on a PDP-8E with BASIC and Fortran programming. Later in life I learned C++. Now I do Java, and if given the choice, I am not going back.

Wubbies World, MSgt, USAF (Retired):
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("An argument is a sequence of statements aimed at demonstrating the truth of an assertion."); }

Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie

cc is the standard name for the UNIX C compiler, and Javascript does not have a preprocessor. (I'm honestly not sure what the C++ compiler would be called, although I think it's all aliased to gcc these days.)

What we need in a leader is to tell us not what we want to hear, but what we need to hear.

==== 13 ====

I've done alot of gcc, forgot to notice the implication of cc.

Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie

<script language="javascript">
if (YourLang=="C++") {
myage=this.age
yourage=myage+moreage
document.write("Use Java!")
}
</script>

absentee

/* But, if you insist: */
import com.redstate.users.*;

public class Rejoinder {
    public static void Main(String [] args) {
        System.out.println("Get off my lawn!");
        /* I'm not even 30! ;_; */
        if (RedStateUsers.GetUser("absentee").Age > RedStateUsers.GetUser("Canthros").Age) {
            System.err.println("Err ... sir.");
        } else {
            System.out.println("You whippersnapper!");
        }
    }
}

class Age
  def initialize(member)
    @member = member
  end
end

puts "Get off my lawn!"
if Age.member < 30
  puts " you wippersnapper!"
else
  puts " err ... sir."
end

What we need in a leader is to tell us not what we want to hear, but what we need to hear.

==== 13 ====

class Age
	attr_accessor :value
	def initialize(age)
		@value = age
	end
	def <=>(b)
		@value <=> b.value
	end
	include Comparable
end
class Member
	attr_accessor :age, :name
	def initialize(name, age)
		@age = age
		@name = name
	end
end
puts "Get off my lawn!"
if member.age < 30
  puts " you wippersnapper!"
else
  puts " err ... sir."
end

HTML Help for Red Staters

What we need in a leader is to tell us not what we want to hear, but what we need to hear.

==== 13 ====

©Z “ N DICE M; A; B
[1] Ê Dice
[2] A “ N ® M
[3] B “ œA
[4] Z “ -/B
[5] Ê Z “ -/œN®M or Z “ -/B“œA“N®M
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

HTML Help for Red Staters

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

What I ought to do is ad to_i to Age instead of calling #value.

HTML Help for Red Staters

: scram CR ." Get off my lawn!"
30 AGE < if CR ." you wippersnapper!"
else CR ." err ... sir." then;

scram

To think I once wrote a video game in that stuff

In Perl (could do similar in C/C++ or Java) I'd prefer

print "Get off my lawn "
  . ($age < 30 ? "you wippersnapper!" : "err ... sir.");

{ throw new SanityCheckException(); }

-
NARF

ListenTo("Rush", 3, vbDaily)

End Try

blast now i have to gifn my head
kinda wisj I xouls tyoe without it.

Can we now speak in Engliah, please?

"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up

absentee

Spongebob reference! The ultimate modern parental disclosure.

I have him on my keychain, souvenir of Nick Hotel in Orlando.

absentee

Plus she has that southern accent...

Creating blog entries with nearly incomprehensible comments, I mean. The homos one comes to mind.

absentee
Thompson | McCain | Romney | Giuliani

HTML Help for Red Staters

<%elseif yourguy="Huckabee" Then%>Fred Thompson is the most conservative candidate. He's solid, he gets the thinkers fired up if not the whole population. He'll be a solid, decisive, fantastic Commander-in-Chief. He is NOT lazy, disinterested or dead in the water, yet.

--
We would also like to know your advice for somebody like my daughter, who's going to graduate in two years, advice that you would give a young person.

SEC. RUMSFELD: Advice for a young person. Study history.

HTML Help for Red Staters

For every instance where yourguy=Huckabee I reference Thompson instead. I was reclassifying, as is my wont.

Basically, that those for Huckabee ought to be for Thompson.

absentee
Thompson | McCain | Romney | Giuliani

I frankly don't have much patience for the genre you're mocking, anyway, so I didn't get it...

--
We would also like to know your advice for somebody like my daughter, who's going to graduate in two years, advice that you would give a young person.

SEC. RUMSFELD: Advice for a young person. Study history.

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

-------------
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

Left over from my undergrad days.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." ~Professor Dumbledore

I knew a guy in college (97 or so) who was using Fortran for his scientific computing. I looked at him funny, and he said no, it's Fortran90.

HTML Help for Red Staters

Graduated from an EE program in 98... used Fortran until the bitter end. No punchcards, but I still have nightmares about that program.

www.fairtax.org
Sick of Government Expansion? libertarian-Minded Republican? Check This Out... Republican Liberty Caucus!!!
www.rlc.org http://www.republicanliberty.org/

Iustum et tenacem propositi virum non civium ardor prava iubentium, non vultus instantis tyranni mente quatit solida.
-Quintus Horatius Flaccus

"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." ~Professor Dumbledore

I'm ready for the Smithsonian.

-------------
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." ~Professor Dumbledore

May I present the DEC Professional 350 Personal Computer...

I swear the thing ran on hamster power.

-------------
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

My first "Personal Computer," though the term was barely coined in '81 or '82, was a NorthStar Advantage 64Kb running in CPM with a 5Mb Winchester hard drive. Ran WordStar, DBase 2 and SuperCalc. That was absolutely state of the art for a small business/personal computer (And it cost an **fing fortune)

Also had a TRS 80 handheld that ran in BASIC and used a cassette tape for data storage, that I could actually do a little work with - the predecessor of the laptop.

In Vino Veritas

I remember it well...

Joe Schmo's blog

I think.

Anyway, I started on a Leading Edge that we converted from a cassette reader to DOS...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/LeadingEdgeModelD.jpg

"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up

Still have it on my desk at home, use it frequently. 64k ram, 1 mhz processor, it is a beaut. It looks a little drab next to my Athlon FX-62 with 4 Gb and Dual 8800's, but I'm sentimental on the the C64.

that, that piece of crud was a brilliant idea was priceless.

My apologies you got forced into buying it.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Though I had CGA not MDA.

HTML Help for Red Staters

was on three of these:

The DEC "Rainbow" computer.

What we need in a leader is to tell us not what we want to hear, but what we need to hear.

==== 13 ====

1981 at 8 years old was a TI 99 4/A quickly followed by an apple IIe. Then we upgraded to an IBM PC XT with something like a 10MB hard drive, who would ever need more than 10MB they said. then and AT and Ive pretty much had a new computer every year since the 1990s.

Big win last night - congrats.

While we're all strolling down computer memory-lane, anyone remember this gem...

Behold! The Timex Sinclair ZX-81 PC!

They made great doorjams.

-------------
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

... is a 16K (that's not a typo, folks - 16K) piece of memory.

Ah, good times. Good times...

-------------
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

That can't be operational. It doesn't show a great big rubber band holding that horrible jiggly memory pack on.

And I felt sorry for him. I suggested he throw it in the trash, sell some newspapers, and wait for the QL to arrive and push IBM into the dustbin of history... ;)

But let's be fair. Lots of people learned how to program on a ZX-81 and its bretheren. I have a sweet spot in my heart for all of those cheap computers. If it hadn't been for them, IBM and Don Estridge might never have wanted to make the original PC open architecture (at least as far as the bus was concerned). In that sense they did everyone a big favor.

Were, as they say, "Zexy." If that machine had actually made a bigger splash I might have been Linus Torvalds. See Trivia at the bottom of the page.

It's TRUE! Unfortunately the QL was a manufacturing monstrosity even worse than the CMI hard drives on the original IBM PC/ATs. It was typical Sir Clive Sinclair BS marketing with terrible engineering and manufacturing capacity. For some reason he's recieved an official title for it in Britain. Strange.

Don't promise things you can't deliver.

Come to think of it, that goes awfully well for Presidential candidates, also.

Really. Simple language (and operating system, in most cases), it worked, any dope could use it, it worked, you could do lots of neat things with it... and did I mention that it worked?

I'm writing this on a Vista-based, Dual-Core Pentium-based Gateway laptop and thinking fondly of the Sinclair ZX-81. Man, I need to get some rest...

Oh, by the way, I freaking hate Vista with the seething, blaring, white-hot intensity of 1K suns - but that's a threadjack for another day...

-------------
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

I tried to install XP-64 on my workstation (HP Pavilion 64-bit dual core 4GB - pre-installed Vista Home Basic) and got multiple blue-screens of death. Seems that there's some core hardware that DOES NOT WORK with XP - only Vista.

There will be a special place waiting in Hell for Bill Gates, I'm sure - and it will be filled with Linux-based workstations.

-------------
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

Where's Service Pack 1?

It was supposed to be here by now.

On the other hand, my AMD machine has been running Vista now for almost 9 months I lurrrrrve it. Especially when playing Crysis.

Wubbies World, MSgt, USAF (Retired):
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("An argument is a sequence of statements aimed at demonstrating the truth of an assertion.); }

I haven't found any reason to hate it. It's working great for me, and I'm not a Microsoft Evangelist. I'm sure you have a long list, maybe I just have a high tolerance for pain, but my system has been running 24/7 for the last nine months and it has crashed *precisely once.*

It baffles me that people don't like Vista. I use it for everything, every day and it never lets me down.