Re: [gentoo-user] OT: old farts slum_code enforcement

[J. Roeleveld]

On Monday, September 15, 2014 07:21:18 AM Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On 15/09/2014 00:21, James wrote:
> >> Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon <at> gmail.com> writes:
> >>
> >> You are a C man.
> >> Working with bash must be .... excruciatingly painful
> >
> > Ah yes, State machine design; not much fittering around with
> > escaping silly little symbols.....
>
> python fixes all of that (see below)

I like state machines.

> > sh/csh/bash/scripting is not bad.  I just 'lift' the tough stuff
> > from others mostly. With some codes, like Java, you read
> > and follow 90%, then there is another code to find and read.
> > It never ends, on and on and on....  Then instead of one choice
> > you have 3 or 4 choices....... Maven is a whole nutter beast....
> > Why it is becoming so important is still a wee bit confusing to me.
> > [1] http://maven.apache.org/
>
> maven is important to enterprise users because Java is important to
> enterprise customers. Java is important to them because huge numbers of
> apps that enterprise likes use Java. It's not so much the language
> itself (any language is almost as good as any other) but the whole Java
> ecosystem. I see maven like this:
>
> Maven is to Java what CPAN is to Perl

Actually, enterprise customers just want big packages supplied by the vendor 
without having to do any further heavy lifting. That allows them to complain 
to the vendor when the product doesn't work as expected. (Never mind it works 
as designed)

> > I'm just not use to that sort of world. In embedded, you
> > over design before you begin coding. You do not have megabytes
> > of lib stuff to find and read and test  the dozens of variants.
> >
> > I like to code. It's debugging the stuff that drives me crazy(er?).....
> > These kids have no respect for us old farts. I remember when
> > "numerical recipies in C" [2] was the stuff. Now it's C++ or Java. [3]
> > I have a book on my shelf (where it belongs) on "Concurrency  State
> > Moels & Java" by Magee and Kramer, 1999 - Wiley. What a hoot!
>
> I'm looking for two books, and modern kids laugh at me when I mention
> them. How little they know :-)
>
> Wirth: Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
> Knuth: The Art of Computer Programming (I want the whole complete set of
> this one) (in dead tree form)

Did you try google? :)

> > I'm still looking for "Numerical recipies in Bash" ?
> > Ju gonna code that up?
>
> You'll have to write that one yourself, I doubt anyone has done it yet :-)

Are there enough "old farts" left to generate sufficient interest?

> > Howz your Fortan 90? I did not even know there was such an
> > ugly beast [4]. I thought Fortran was outlawed decades ago.
> > I guess nothing ever dies. Physicists have to have a language
> > to themselves.
>
> I believe Fortran is still very much alive and well in engineering and
> physics - 40 years of number crunching code doesn't just go away by itself

Fortran and Cobol refuse to die...
I still encounter them regularly.

> > Anyway, my_python is comming along......
> > (pist, don't tell anyone, but I almost, (almost) like python).
>
> My most favourite language of all time!
> Runs about as fast as reasonably complex shell code, but because it's an
> interpreter and not executed directly by the shell, there's no auto
> globbing and weird bash expansion going on. Effect = all that
> mind-bending psychosis-inducing escape nonsense just falls away.
> printf reduces to something a mortal human might even grok.
> control structures look sane - no fi, esac, or elif. Do's and while's
> look like real do's and while's
>
> I could go on, but you get the idea :-)

Python is nice, I should really look into that sometime.

--
Joost