I think only a hardcore C++ developer would claim that the author's sample is "succinct". Honestly, C++11 is still far behind the easiness of Python (or Scheme), even with Boost.
Funny, a decade ago Ada 95 (the "military" language for high-critical applications) looked like a monstrous over-designed beast when compared to C++. Today Ada 2012 looks elegant and even "small" when compared to C++11. How times have changed :-)
> That doesn't sound good. It seems that Wayland will have a hard time to replace X11 in the next decade. Currently I see no reason why I should switch.
The reason you will switch is that plain X11 goes unsupported and will not work on modern systems.
The initial thing you will switch is not Wayland proper, it's just X11 sitting on top of Wayland. Thinking of Wayland as a competing display server is as of now not really realistic -- it's much better to think it as a refactoring of the internals of the system that uses X and compositors, taking the parts of both that need privileges on the system and really fast communication and merging them together in Wayland, leaving the rest of the parts into X.
Another solution is xmodmap in Unix or some similar tool in Windows to change the keyboard layout. With that solution you don't have to miss the default national keyboard layout.
Adding a keyboard to a tablet makes it a computer with the power of a PC we had ten years ago.
There is nothing more productive than a good desktop workstation with big multiple screens. I recently purchased a new one for a good price, and I am happy with it.
I also like Lua. The speed of the virtual machine is awesome. But sadly Lua is still missing Unicode support. This is a big issue that needs to be solved.
Whenever I hear someone complain about (lack of) Unicode support, my ears prick up. See, Unicode support is a many-headed beast, and almost no languages have very much of it, and most of what people naively think of as Unicode support (length, indexing into "characters", case conversion) doesn't really work when you take into account combining diacritics, ligatures, Turkish I, German S, etc.
I'm not especially familiar with Lua, but it transparently stores and compares UTF-8 strings, and there are even bindings for ICU. So what's missing from "Unicode support"? Script specifiers in regular expressions, perhaps? I'm asking out of genuine curiosity.
Those who fail to realize the importance of unicode support is the same group of people think handling strings with \0 terminator is OK.
But no, it's fucking not OK. Lacking basic unicode handling means everyone handles unicode strings in different ways, so various libraries clutter in basic string capabilities. Sometimes this really piss me off.
Um, UTF-8, a valid unicode encoding, handles strings with a null terminator just fine. Those who throw stones, should not live in glass houses.
Proper unicode support would include things like normalizing strings (Unicode has 4 different normal forms!) and testing for fuzzy equivalence. But last time I checked, the usual library for doing those things, libicu, was bigger than the whole Lua interpreter. So I can see why there isn't a lot of enthusiasm, especially if there isn't a real use case.
yes, packing icu with every lua distribution or standalone app is bad, and we don't even need to think about OS's Unicode capabilities. So every lang deserves to be suck at unicode handling. Because, you know, ICU is big.
Even an experienced programmer can still be a bad programmer.
I realized that myself when I learned Ada. You cannot imagine how humbling an Ada compiler can be :-) This is possibly the reason why Ada is not popular at all. It exposes how bad you really are. Java, C#, and even C++ are much more tolerant and can easily give you the illusion of being a good programmer
I am experienced in really many programming styles and languages. Ada and Lisp and their programming paradigms advanced my programming skills the most. Ada, because of its merciless requirement of discipline, and Lisp because it teached me to focus on data instead of code.
Lisp is all about data structures. Data can be expressed so easily no matter how complex it is. Lisp coding is merely writing minimum code to handle data structures. Even code is data. So it's no problem to extend Lisp with new commands. That's precisely coding around data.
In Java or C# however you have a lot of libraries to handle data but you don't have such freedom of data expression. You have to write a lot of code to express and handle complex data.
I think it's exactly the opposite. If the story is really true then the psychological effects are enormous. It tells them:
"Look we have everything under control. We can even afford to let you know that. Look, we can make your top secret workstations play music just for fun. Don't mess with us, otherwise we can make even your bombs explode in your own bunkers."
I think if the Iranians are really so stupid to make war with Israel or U.S. (which means WW3) this would lead to their own self destruction.
I think only a hardcore C++ developer would claim that the author's sample is "succinct". Honestly, C++11 is still far behind the easiness of Python (or Scheme), even with Boost.
Funny, a decade ago Ada 95 (the "military" language for high-critical applications) looked like a monstrous over-designed beast when compared to C++. Today Ada 2012 looks elegant and even "small" when compared to C++11. How times have changed :-)