Typical 'let me mock this because hating on MS on HN is cool'
Can you name one build system that people like, and concretely compare how its better than MSBuild, please? Once you do that, please feel free to omit the perfunctory thank you to look unbiased.
Also, this would now be community developed, let me know your github handle and I'll see what contributions you made to make it better (oh wait, that would require actual work and give you 0 internet points)
My GitHub handle is the same as my HN username. Go nuts. You'll notice I mainly write .NET software but I won't be contributing to MSBuild. MSBuild is becoming irrelevant with ASP.NET 5 and Roslyn.
No. It's also very much not irrelevant if you build non-web software. (I do games with .NET, and that's not going to be replaced by the kproj stuff anytime soon. Which is kind of a drag, I like that stuff, but such is life.)
Given the abuse and name-calling directed at another person further down in this thread posting under his real name, combined with the persistent attacks on any comment that is perceived to be in any way a criticism of Microsoft, I can't imagine why anyone would ever post under their real name around Microsoft fans.
I'm not sure what you guys think this kind of nasty behavior benefits you or your favorite company, or why you believe people don't notice and aren't going to do something about it.
Do you mean the guy that made fun of the company for open-sourcing their product by posting a PR that completely replaces it with another tool?
He was being incredibly disrespectful and he got called out for it. If he wasn't being such a prick in the first place, maybe people wouldn't call him one.
> If he wasn't being such a prick in the first place, maybe people wouldn't call him one.
There we go. Posted straight from Redmond, no less.
I'm not sure where you guys get off calling another commenter "a prick" over and over again, along with other insults, for a joke pull request, given there is a long history of people (including pretty notably respectable people) creating them. I even listed some in another comment you guys can keep downvoting (because apparently my comments are worse than personally attacking other commenters): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9229987
I was using the same wording that the other commenter used, because that's what he was. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
It's a joke PR, sure, but he was being disrespectful. He was insulting everyone who has worked on the product because he feels it's crap. He's entitled to his opinion, sure, but at the same time, he didn't have to state it the way he did. Just because it was a joke PR does not suddenly excuse him from his actions. It's not like it suddenly makes things okay.
He straight up made fun of the product, in a disrespectful way, and was called out for it by the community. You are free to disagree, sure, but there's a reason people reacted the way they did.
And furthermore, my location and the company I work for are completely irrelevant to this discussion. I'd appreciate you not bringing them in. I speak for myself, not my employer.
Joke pull requests waste the time of people who have much better things to do and demeans the immense effort it takes to drag projects to open source at large companies. Being called a prick for doing prickish things is a very light response, and in a functioning culture (one of which which software developers rarely do more than pretend to aspire to, but that's nothing new) it might even be enough to teach him to not do so again.
You know the best part, though? I've probably perturbed more electrons on why MSBuild is a horrible build system, and how its integration with Visual Studio will happily destroy many types of changes in .csproj files, than most people here. My life is worse when I have to deal with it. But despite that, I somehow manage to not cape up for jerks who hurt people. Isn't that weird?
And not one of your "pretty notably respectable people" is a person for whom I had the time of day before you alerted me to their penchant for screwing with other people for fun. A list of meaningless names to buttress the case for hurting other people is remarkably unpersuasive.
I used Excel to do some basic data analysis tasks to see whether it is a reasonable alternative to using a statistical package for the same tasks.
Excel is a poor choice for statistical analysis beyond textbook examples, the simplest descriptive statistics, or for more than a very few columns. The problems I encountered that led to this conclusion are in four general areas:
[1] Missing values are handled inconsistently, and sometimes incorrectly.
[2] Data organization differs according to analysis, forcing you to reorganize your data in many ways if you want to do many different analyses.
[3] Many analyses can only be done on one column at a time, making it inconvenient to do the same analysis on many columns.
[4] Output is poorly organized, sometimes inadequately labeled, and there is no record of how an analysis was accomplished.
'Here’s an example of how the numerical inaccuracies in Excel can get you into trouble.'
As a computer science graduate, and having worked as a s/w engineer, researcher and quant and currently writing code in strongly typed language, I can assure you that unless you're doing research and writing your own PL, you wouldn't need to understand PL theory, so much so that now I'm rusty in less than 6 years.
Also, just to clarify- PL itself has not much to do Grammars and lexers. PL theory mostly deals with programming paradigms, and type-safety. Lexers and grammars knowledge can help you write a compiler for a PL, but PL theory doesn't care about it- its the job of compiler writer.
I suspect you mean 'theory/models of computation' when you refer to Languages theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Automata_Theory...) That's what covers "language"/grammars. While it's good information to have- a ground up understanding of "computation" science- you would need that pretty late into your foray if you really want to learn about "Computer Science"
CS is a big field- you'll have to choose what you want to learn.
So start with Algorithms first, when you come to the Big(O) notation, you'll get a brief and usually enough introduction to the Theory of Computation.
In 2 mins, you're the top comment
How about actually disproving his arguments one by one. The world is not black and white is a bad statement to make. How about your pull up your panties and try to make it better, rather than giving useless arguments.
This thread shows the big thing that is wrong with today's HN.
There is a guy presenting a list of 49 arguments against using a service that is used by one billion people globally. Some of them are pretty good, some more sucky than the others. Yet, the discussion focuses only on the person. It's like the people here could not process the raw facts and derive their own conclusions, and had to fall back to their emotional brains. Certainly not a thing I would expect from HN community.
Well, I've been around for almost four years now, and I'm not sure HN has ever been different since then.
That said, I agree with you, but rms as a way of increasing that response. I think that if he wrote that the Earth orbits the Sun, someone would make a passionate argument for geocentrism.
Thank you, I was fearing I'll see an ad-hominem argument criticizing Stallman and thereby nullifying the arguments while actually not saying anything against the arguments. Your points are right, and personally, I don't see a reason to follow people who're not friends anymore
My biggest problem with Facebook is that my contact details are uploaded to Facebook by my "friends" without my permission. I choose not to he Facebook user but people I know are persistently sharing my contact details with them and I assume even my contact details photo which they can later match using facial recognition to other photos uploaded by friends without my permission.
Very few people know this. People in my all Windows firm believe that OSX is everywhere because everyone in coffee shops is using it and same on TV, and I tell them its only them lol
I hope I don't put oil in the fire, but OS X is more close to any Linux ( since it's unix based ) than Windows is going to be, which makes a great difference for any developer.
I can benefit all available *nix tools in it's native state ( not run by cygwin ).
I doubt there is statistics for this, but in my mind OS X is the most popular OS that people are doing web-development on.
Although I like what Microsoft are doing lately with TypeScript and many more additions to open source community, it is really hard for me to imagine a switch.
> I can benefit all available nix tools in it's native state ( not run by cygwin )
Like you say, it's incredibly difficult to pull any solid numbers for this - Github isn't even close to representative, web server hosting is skewed by domain parking, pretty much any statistic you can come up with to support any side, at least that I can think of, is going to have major problems.
But Windows-based developers have an entirely different workflow that completely obviates the need for Linux tools. Sometimes the workflow is different enough so you genuinely don't need it - the average ASP.NET developer probably doesn't have any need for them. Sometimes the developer just doesn't know any better - and you see that kind on all systems. Sometimes they've developed a PowerShell proficiency or something that lets them use analogous tools in an analogous ways. But this just isn't an argument. It's effectively saying, "well, if you do web development like I do, you need *nix." Well, of course! :) For most of them, it would be equally unimaginable to switch. I think there's very few like me, who have actively done and enjoyed both professionally.
There are, of course, exceptions: I think we can all agree that almost all ASP.NET developers are on Windows and almost all Ruby developers are on OS X or maybe Linux. Most of the amateurs are certainly on Windows - I don't mean that in a disparaging way, I just mean the people just starting out and putting together very simple, possibly static webpages, or playing around with whatever their CMS has set up for them. Then you have all the enterprisey web development, likely mostly internal sites, with somewhat less of a skew, but still probably majority Windows. For the professional, public-facing sort of stuff, I expect its a lot closer to 50/50. Of course, just like you say, it's very hard to demonstrate anything and anecdote-by-anecdote and gut-feeling doesn't really say much.
I work and develop on Windows. Go, javascript / typescript and Scala, mostly. I can tell you: every development tool you can think of runs just fine on Windows. Natively:
* bash
* all the GNU tools (grep, less, ...)
* vim
* emacs
* npm
* all the npm tools (gulp, grunt, &c; everything installable through npm)
* gcc
* make
* IntelliJ
* ssh (command line or putty)
It's all here. Without cygwin. The only problem I ever have is performance of the FS on many small files. That's just terrible.
"Just fine" might be overstating it a little. For example, I've often hit path length limits with npm. But definitely better than most people seem to expect.
Can you explain what you're talking about? Do you mean that if a program exhibits bugs only under a certain condition that its bugfree? And even assuming you know the spam's distribution, the error function needs to heavily penalize any false positives. So even one occurrence is a major event. Your comment reeks of blind faith, not appropriate for a forum like this
Its happened with me too, and a friend of mine as well. Funny story with that friend- he missed summer job emails because of Google, and cursed them a lot :-). But later ended up visiting Google for his summers.
Can you name one build system that people like, and concretely compare how its better than MSBuild, please? Once you do that, please feel free to omit the perfunctory thank you to look unbiased.
Also, this would now be community developed, let me know your github handle and I'll see what contributions you made to make it better (oh wait, that would require actual work and give you 0 internet points)