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Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2

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  Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 Mark Janssen <dreamingforward@gmail.com> - 2013-05-09 14:51 -0700
    Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 alex23 <wuwei23@gmail.com> - 2013-05-09 16:58 -0700
      Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 Mark Janssen <dreamingforward@gmail.com> - 2013-05-09 20:08 -0700
      Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2013-05-10 13:07 +1000
        Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 alex23 <wuwei23@gmail.com> - 2013-05-11 15:23 -0700
      Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2013-05-10 14:33 +1000
        Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> - 2013-05-10 00:55 -0400
          Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2013-05-10 17:37 +1000
          Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 William Ray Wing <wrw@mac.com> - 2013-05-10 07:49 -0400
          Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> - 2013-05-10 08:58 -0400
          Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> - 2013-05-11 15:34 -0400
      Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> - 2013-05-11 15:32 -0400
        Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 Gregory Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> - 2013-05-12 12:50 +1200
          Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2013-05-12 11:10 +1000
      Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2013-05-12 08:41 +1000
        Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 Gregory Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> - 2013-05-12 13:02 +1200
          Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2013-05-12 11:19 +1000
      Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2 Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> - 2013-05-12 12:53 -0400

#45057 — Re: Message passing syntax for objects | OOPv2

On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 10:33 AM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 8:35 PM, Mark Janssen <dreamingforward@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Okay, to anyone who might be listening, I found the core of the problem.
>
> What "problem" are you referring to?  You've been posting on this
> topic for going on two months now, and I still have no idea of what
> the point of it all is.

You see Ian, while you and the other millions of coding practitioners
have (mal)adapted to a suboptimal coding environment where "hey
there's a language for everyone"  and terms are thrown around,
misused, this is not how it needs or should be.  Instead of the
thriving Open Source culture on the web we could have, the community
stays fractured.   Languages can reach for an optimal design (within a
constant margin of leeway).   Language "expressivity" can be measured.

--Tron

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#45067

On 10 May, 07:51, Mark Janssen <dreamingforw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> You see Ian, while you and the other millions of coding practitioners
> have (mal)adapted to a suboptimal coding environment where "hey
> there's a language for everyone"  and terms are thrown around,
> misused, this is not how it needs or should be.

Please cite your industry experience so we know this is a pragmatic
exercise for you and not a display of public onanism.

> Instead of the
> thriving Open Source culture on the web we could have, the community
> stays fractured.

What fractures communities is telling "millions of [maladapted]
practitioners" that they're wrong, and that your unsubstantiated
intuition somehow trumps their billions of hours of combined
experience.

> Languages can reach for an optimal design (within a
> constant margin of leeway).   Language "expressivity" can be measured.

I'm sure that's great. I, however, have a major project going live in
a few weeks and would rather just get something done.

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#45077

On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 4:58 PM, alex23 <wuwei23@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10 May, 07:51, Mark Janssen <dreamingforw...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> You see Ian, while you and the other millions of coding practitioners
>> have (mal)adapted to a suboptimal coding environment where "hey
>> there's a language for everyone"  and terms are thrown around,
>> misused, this is not how it needs or should be.
>
> Please cite your industry experience so we know this is a pragmatic
> exercise for you and not a display of public onanism.

"Industry experience...."

Do you know all the world's [industrial] leaders are endorsing an
impossible path of endless, exponential growth on a finite planet?

Is that who you answer to?

--m

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#45078

On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 9:58 AM, alex23 <wuwei23@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10 May, 07:51, Mark Janssen <dreamingforw...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Languages can reach for an optimal design (within a
>> constant margin of leeway).   Language "expressivity" can be measured.
>
> I'm sure that's great. I, however, have a major project going live in
> a few weeks and would rather just get something done.

Hmm, not really a fair argument there. A well-designed language lets
you "just get something done" far more efficiently than a
poorly-designed one. Being confident that similar objects behave
correspondingly when invoked the same way lets you write your code
without fiddling with minutiae, for instance. ("Hmm, I'll just switch
that from being a tuple to being a list, so I can modify this one
element." - code that indexes or iterates won't be affected.)

Now, whether or not it's worth _debating_ the expressiveness of a
language... well, that's another point entirely. But for your major
project, I think you'll do better working in Python than in machine
code.

ChrisA

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#45158

On 10 May, 13:07, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Now, whether or not it's worth _debating_ the expressiveness of a
> language... well, that's another point entirely. But for your major
> project, I think you'll do better working in Python than in machine
> code.

I wasn't disagreeing with the concept of linguistic expressiveness, my
ire was over the "I'm RIGHT and EVERYONE else is WRONG so STOP WHAT
YOU'RE DOING so I can REBUILD COMPUTER SCIENCE" aspect of these posts.
Thought without experience or experiment is about as useful to my work
requirements as bowel gas.

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#45081

On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 1:08 PM, Mark Janssen <dreamingforward@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 4:58 PM, alex23 <wuwei23@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 10 May, 07:51, Mark Janssen <dreamingforw...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> You see Ian, while you and the other millions of coding practitioners
>>> have (mal)adapted to a suboptimal coding environment where "hey
>>> there's a language for everyone"  and terms are thrown around,
>>> misused, this is not how it needs or should be.
>>
>> Please cite your industry experience so we know this is a pragmatic
>> exercise for you and not a display of public onanism.
>
> "Industry experience...."
>
> Do you know all the world's [industrial] leaders are endorsing an
> impossible path of endless, exponential growth on a finite planet?
>
> Is that who you answer to?

I don't answer to them. I also believe in a path of endless
exponential growth. Challenge: Create more information than can be
stored in one teaspoon of matter. Go ahead. Try!

The first hard disk I ever worked with stored 20MB in the space of a
5.25" slot (plus its associated ISA controller card). Later on we got
3.5" form factor drives, and I remember installing this *gigantic*
FOUR GIGABYTE drive into our disk server. Wow! We'll NEVER use all
that space! (Well, okay. Even then we knew that space consumption kept
going up. But we did figure on that 4GB lasting us a good while, which
it did.) Today, I can pop into Budget PC or MSY (or you folks in the
US could check out newegg) and pick up a terabyte of storage in the
same amount of physical space, or you can go 2.5" form factor and take
up roughly a fifth of the physical space and still get half a terabyte
fairly cheaply. So our exponential growth is being supported by
exponential increases in data per cubic meter. Between that and the
vast size of this planet, I don't think we really need to worry too
much about finite limits to IT growth.

ChrisA

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#45082

In article <mailman.1523.1368160434.3114.python-list@python.org>,
 Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:

> The first hard disk I ever worked with stored 20MB in the space of a
> 5.25" slot (plus its associated ISA controller card).

Heh.  The first hard disk I ever worked with stored 2.4 MB in 6U of rack 
space (plus 4 Unibus cards worth of controller).  That's not actually 
the first hard disk I ever used.  Just the first one I ever got to touch 
with my own hands.

Did I mention that the air filters had to be changed a few times a year?
  
Uphill both ways, in the snow, while beating off the dinosaurs with 
sticks.

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#45088

On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 2:55 PM, Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> wrote:
> In article <mailman.1523.1368160434.3114.python-list@python.org>,
>  Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The first hard disk I ever worked with stored 20MB in the space of a
>> 5.25" slot (plus its associated ISA controller card).
>
> Heh.  The first hard disk I ever worked with stored 2.4 MB in 6U of rack
> space (plus 4 Unibus cards worth of controller).  That's not actually
> the first hard disk I ever used.  Just the first one I ever got to touch
> with my own hands.
>
> Did I mention that the air filters had to be changed a few times a year?
>
> Uphill both ways, in the snow, while beating off the dinosaurs with
> sticks.

Yeah, I'm pretty young. First computer I ever broke (the same one that
had the aforementioned 20MB drive) addressed a whole megabyte of
memory, 640KB of which was OK (we're left wondering whether anyone
would notice if ROM developed a fault), and I got to play around with
64KB of it in DEBUG.EXE. And yeah, I wrote code straight in DEBUG and
saved it and crashed the system. (Tip: If you want to write a device
driver, make sure you start with your dad happy with you.) Was good
fun. I heartily recommend the exercise, but... uhh... do consider
setting up a virtual machine first :)

ChrisA

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#45094

On May 10, 2013, at 12:55 AM, Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> wrote:

> In article <mailman.1523.1368160434.3114.python-list@python.org>,
> Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> The first hard disk I ever worked with stored 20MB in the space of a
>> 5.25" slot (plus its associated ISA controller card).
> 
> Heh.  The first hard disk I ever worked with stored 2.4 MB in 6U of rack 
> space (plus 4 Unibus cards worth of controller).  That's not actually 
> the first hard disk I ever used.  Just the first one I ever got to touch 
> with my own hands.
> 

Sounds suspiciously like an RK05.  We used a lot of those on DEC PDP-8e's.  I can remember how startled I was when I first saw a DEC engineer pull the top off one and then, with it open, spin it up.  The platter inside was warped (a ceiling light reflected off the platter wiggled and then blurred) but the head mechanism actually just followed it up and down!!!

Bill

> Did I mention that the air filters had to be changed a few times a year?
> 
> Uphill both ways, in the snow, while beating off the dinosaurs with 
> sticks.
> -- 
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

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#45096

On May 10, 2013, at 7:49 AM, William Ray Wing wrote:

> On May 10, 2013, at 12:55 AM, Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> wrote:
> 
>> In article <mailman.1523.1368160434.3114.python-list@python.org>,
>> Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> The first hard disk I ever worked with stored 20MB in the space of a
>>> 5.25" slot (plus its associated ISA controller card).
>> 
>> Heh.  The first hard disk I ever worked with stored 2.4 MB in 6U of rack 
>> space (plus 4 Unibus cards worth of controller).  That's not actually 
>> the first hard disk I ever used.  Just the first one I ever got to touch 
>> with my own hands.
>> 
> 
> Sounds suspiciously like an RK05.

Yup.


--
Roy Smith
roy@panix.com

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#45149

On Fri, 10 May 2013 00:55:29 -0400, Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> declaimed
the following in gmane.comp.python.general:

> In article <mailman.1523.1368160434.3114.python-list@python.org>,
>  Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > The first hard disk I ever worked with stored 20MB in the space of a
> > 5.25" slot (plus its associated ISA controller card).
> 
> Heh.  The first hard disk I ever worked with stored 2.4 MB in 6U of rack 
> space (plus 4 Unibus cards worth of controller).  That's not actually 
> the first hard disk I ever used.  Just the first one I ever got to touch 
> with my own hands.
>
	I didn't get to work with it... But the first TRS-80 hard-drive was
an 8" model, with 5MB, and a cost of $5000 (when the computer it
connected to was $1000)
-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
        wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

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#45150

On Fri, 10 May 2013 14:33:52 +1000, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
declaimed the following in gmane.comp.python.general:

> 
> I don't answer to them. I also believe in a path of endless
> exponential growth. Challenge: Create more information than can be
> stored in one teaspoon of matter. Go ahead. Try!
>
	The coordinates of each particle storing the information in that
teaspoon of matter.
-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
        wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

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#45162

Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
>>I also believe in a path of endless
>>exponential growth. Challenge: Create more information than can be
>>stored in one teaspoon of matter. Go ahead. Try!

If that's your argument, then you don't really believe
in *endless* exponential growth. You only believe in
"exponential growth for long enough that I won't be
around to suffer the consequences when it runs out".

-- 
Greg

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#45165

On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 10:50 AM, Gregory Ewing
<greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
>>>
>>> I also believe in a path of endless
>>> exponential growth. Challenge: Create more information than can be
>>> stored in one teaspoon of matter. Go ahead. Try!
>
>
> If that's your argument, then you don't really believe
> in *endless* exponential growth. You only believe in
> "exponential growth for long enough that I won't be
> around to suffer the consequences when it runs out".

Technically, according to the laws of thermodynamics, there cannot be
any actually endless growth, yes. (Anything beyond that is the realm
of religion, not science.) But in that case, the term "endless" is
like "infinity" - a concept only. Like the Infinite Monkey Protocol
Suite description in RFC 2795, there will be many numbers that come up
that are plenty huge but fall pitifully short of infinity (Graham's
Number, for instance, is pretty small in those terms).

So long as storage capacities keep on increasing, we can keep
increasing the world's information at the same rate. So long as the
number of computers connected to the internet increases, we can keep
increasing the internet's information at the same rate. Put both
together - and neither shows any sign of ceasing any time soon - we
can continue with the corresponding growth. How long before that runs
out? A *looooong* time. We're not talking here of the Year 2000, a
couple of decades after the software was written. We're not talking
about the 2038 issues, roughly half a century after the software was
written. We are talking timeframes that make the Y10K problem look
like a serious lack of foresight.

ChrisA

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#45160

On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 5:32 AM, Dennis Lee Bieber
<wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 10 May 2013 14:33:52 +1000, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
> declaimed the following in gmane.comp.python.general:
>
>>
>> I don't answer to them. I also believe in a path of endless
>> exponential growth. Challenge: Create more information than can be
>> stored in one teaspoon of matter. Go ahead. Try!
>>
>         The coordinates of each particle storing the information in that
> teaspoon of matter.

Which is probably more data than any of us will keyboard in a
lifetime. Hence my point.

ChrisA

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#45163

Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 5:32 AM, Dennis Lee Bieber
> <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>>        The coordinates of each particle storing the information in that
>>teaspoon of matter.
> 
> Which is probably more data than any of us will keyboard in a
> lifetime. Hence my point.

My 1TB hard disk *already* contains more information than
I could keyboard in my lifetime.

The fact that it all got there is due to two things: (1)
I didn't have to enter it all myself, and (2) most of it
was auto-generated from other information, using compilers
and other such tools.

Our disk capacities are increasing exponentially, but
so is the rate at which we have the ability to create
information. I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point
before the human race becomes extinct, we build
computers whose operating system requires more than
a teaspoonful of atoms to store. Especially if
Microsoft still exists by then. :-)

-- 
Greg

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#45164

On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 11:02 AM, Gregory Ewing
<greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 5:32 AM, Dennis Lee Bieber
>> <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>
>>>        The coordinates of each particle storing the information in that
>>> teaspoon of matter.
>>
>>
>> Which is probably more data than any of us will keyboard in a
>> lifetime. Hence my point.
>
>
> My 1TB hard disk *already* contains more information than
> I could keyboard in my lifetime.
>
> The fact that it all got there is due to two things: (1)
> I didn't have to enter it all myself, and (2) most of it
> was auto-generated from other information, using compilers
> and other such tools.

I would like to differentiate between information and data, here.
Point 1 is correct, but point 2 is not; auto-generated data is not
more information, and basic data compression can improve that. (Simple
form of compression there: `rm *.o` - you've lost nothing.)

> Our disk capacities are increasing exponentially, but
> so is the rate at which we have the ability to create
> information. I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point
> before the human race becomes extinct, we build
> computers whose operating system requires more than
> a teaspoonful of atoms to store. Especially if
> Microsoft still exists by then. :-)

That's possible. But that would be data bloat, not true information.
It's certainly possible to conceive more data than can be stored.
Microsoft, as you cite, are experts at this :)

ChrisA

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#45189

On Sun, 12 May 2013 08:41:00 +1000, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
declaimed the following in gmane.comp.python.general:

> On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 5:32 AM, Dennis Lee Bieber
> <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, 10 May 2013 14:33:52 +1000, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
> > declaimed the following in gmane.comp.python.general:
> >
> >>
> >> I don't answer to them. I also believe in a path of endless
> >> exponential growth. Challenge: Create more information than can be
> >> stored in one teaspoon of matter. Go ahead. Try!
> >>
> >         The coordinates of each particle storing the information in that
> > teaspoon of matter.
> 
> Which is probably more data than any of us will keyboard in a
> lifetime. Hence my point.
>
	Who'd hand enter that stuff... That's what computers are for...
Something like a scanning electron microscope to determine atom
positions...

	Of course, we then run into the problem that encoding the position
data into the scanned subject is going to change the positions <G>
-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
        wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

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