The Whiteboard

user41796

5:00 PM

And C# is MS's answer to Java, so ...

@Telastyn yeah, that's what my thoughts are. It's not bad, but there are better options already. The type system lacks an amount of flexibility I would like, the language is more verbose than is necessary; one of the features I would love to see would be Go's style implicit interfaces. Constraint-inferred generics would be nice as well

daOnlyBG

As a beginner, one of the big issues I had (and still have) was picking a language I could spend a lot of time with learning the trade

Telastyn

Tangent started out with Go implicit interfaces, but that leads to a lot of tradeoffs elsewhere in the language. I can live without them now I think.

daOnlyBG

I tried a few, and I kinda enjoyed C# and Ruby a little more than the others

Telastyn

yeah, I don't want true functional

but just cutting some of the C# fat would be nice.

Jimmy Hoffa

5:01 PM

@Telastyn lots of these things lead to tons of tradeoffs; the constraint-inferred generics are basically tossered just by the fact that the language uses subtypal inheritance.

daOnlyBG

Do people see Ruby sticking around for quite some time?

Telastyn

true

Jimmy Hoffa

@daOnlyBG probably, though it's a smaller portion of current new development than many other languages. Choosing your language is a difficult thing because you have to know what you're aiming for: $$$ ? Longevity? Enjoyment? Opportunity?

daOnlyBG

It's a good question. The naive answer would be to say "all of them," but I understand there are tradeoffs

amon

@daOnlyBG no language that has crossed a certain threshold of popularity (= has lots of legacy code) is going to die soon. There's till tons of Fortran and Cobol stuff around. In the Tiobe-top-X index, only Objective-C is going away soon, because Apple is pushing a newer language

daOnlyBG

5:04 PM

Ah yes, "Swift"

....I didn't like objective-c...

My only fear is spending a lot of time in one language, just to finally have prospective employers think "Well, we're not really going to use this language any more, etc"

but maybe that's an irrational fear. Idk

Jimmy Hoffa

@amon when people talk about dying though there's a threshold of new development happening in them that they're really referring to. I think most people know legacy software will always be there and will always need maintenance, but there's very little new development happening in COBOL despite the massive amounts of maintenance and still active systems running in it today

Telastyn

all languages will have that happen during the duration of your career.

it will happen more than once even.

user41796

And now I'm out of close votes for the day

daOnlyBG

Ah, COBOL. Mainframe technology, right?

enderland

> 17 votes remaining

Jimmy Hoffa

5:08 PM

C# will hit that threshold by 20 years from now I believe. 10 years? Iduno; plausibly. I hope so. There is a huge amount of people moving to Node.JS these days- more and more .NET is being relegated to the desktop applications space as server side stuff is done in JavaScript

enderland

do you think desktop apps are going to continue to migrate to cloud based apps?

daOnlyBG

Corporate software aside, yes

enderland

I'm curious even about corporate software though

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland absolutely; it's the only approach to cross platforming that's showing promise and as mobile hardware improves and browsers alongside them... Browsers are effectively the modern OS

Telastyn

node.js is a tire fire.

enderland

5:10 PM

because for us, we have huge tech debt associated with the pain in upgrading software versions/etc - this could largely be mitigated if you were running the applications exclusively on a cloud based setup

daOnlyBG

(I'm not saying it wouldn't happen for corporate software, I'm just unsure about that area, and more sure about personal software, etc)

Jimmy Hoffa

@Telastyn only because the skill level of those living in it... it's perfectly good for people coming to it with a solid background in software design and analysis (a minority of folks doing Node.JS)

Telastyn

naw.

Jimmy Hoffa

you don't think people can write good clean JavaScript?

Telastyn

let's use a 1 week programming language without concurrency support or type safety for running services? Yeah, that's going to end well.

Robert Harvey

5:12 PM

So I'm going through a bunch of state government websites. Guess what percentage of them use tables for layout?

daOnlyBG

98%?

user114359

102%

daOnlyBG

yep, government websites...lol

Jimmy Hoffa

@Telastyn you have to look at Node.JS as a scripting language used to script a highly concurrent asynchronous runtime environment. The runtime environment is written in C++ and has shown to be very efficient, the JavaScript is just the scripting language with which you operate that runtime environment. People doing data crunching with the scripting language rather than through the runtime environment's call-outs are failing multiple sensible-design tests...

user41796

@RobertHarvey Guilty secret - sometimes I have resorted to using tables when I've needed a neatly aligned grid layout.

user41796

5:15 PM

We pull in a lot of key-value-pair type data, and a grid is a ~~great?~~ easy way to lay that out cleanly.

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 cut cut cut! Seriously though, learn a grid system. With a good grid system HTML layouts become so damned much simpler.

amon

@GlenH7 CSS display: table; /* all of the layout, none of the semantic baggage */

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 if you have tabular data to represent, ok, use a table. That's what it's for. If you have a bunch of data you want to present as a spreadsheet? Great.

user41796

Truth be told, a lot of our user base prefers tabular presentation of information and data entry. Just the nature of the beast.

daOnlyBG

Would you fine folks entertain a computer hardware question? I'm primarily a Mac OSX user, but thinking of getting a mini computer for desk at home, and had some questions about certain processor technologies

user41796

5:31 PM

Just get a mac mini and be done. :-)

user55340

Or air.

Ampt

@GlenH7 booooooo. your recommendations are bad and you should feel bad

daOnlyBG

Heh, I was thinking of getting a small machine that I could install both Windows and Ubuntu

I'm just not a big fan of Xamarin for Mac OSX

So one candidate was the Intel NUC

Ampt

@daOnlyBG Surface Book looks sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet

user41796

2 days ago, by Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 SCOTCH YOU!

daOnlyBG

5:34 PM

but then I heard about the ARM processor

However, ARM processors don't exactly support windows technology at the moment- am I understanding that correctly...?

user41796

@daOnlyBG Surface RT / Win RT is dead.

daOnlyBG

Well, that matter is settled, then

Beside the price, what other objections would one have toward the Intel NUC?

user41796

You could argue WinRT was DOA, but that's just splitting hairs. It's dead now.

user41796

Classic battle between Intel and AMD is raw performance vs. number of cores

Jimmy Hoffa

@daOnlyBG how is the price an objection? I've known multiple people who picked up a NUC and all of them loved it. I always build my own shit for cheaper though personally. Amazon and Ebay for parts; takes an hour or two one night to put it together and saves me hundreds

user41796

5:38 PM

Intel generally runs smaller numbers of cores, but faster and with excellent floating point support.

user41796

AMD throws more cores at things instead.

user41796

Intel is great for calculation type operations, whereas AMD is great for virtualization

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 intel sadly still wins on compatibility... it shouldn't even be a thing anymore, but it still is.

user41796

that's a good point. It's always been the defacto processor on the Winders side

enderland

it's annoyingthat it's faster to call a hotel directly and make reservations than go through our online booking tool

user41796

5:40 PM

In full disclosure, I'm running an AMD chip in my HTPC

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