I believe that Python, Java, C#, Objective-C and Javascript all have the same basic approach to this problem. The Ruby way is better for handling some Japan-specific problems. But that's at the cost of making life harder and less predictable for everyone else.
It's a pretty straightforward tradeoff. Of course people who are not Japanese will naturally be upset to pay a cost in complexity for a feature of benefit primarily to a programmers from a single country. Non-Japanese Ruby programmers will just have to decide whether their solidarity with Japanese programmers outweighs their personal and collective inconvenience.
> But stop whining. All over the USA, people who work hard, who get great reviews from bosses, customers and peers, who were promised bonuses and profit sharing, are seeing instead slashed pay and benefits. That is, if they are lucky, and not getting RIFed.
Most of them are not the subject of congressional investigations.
> If you worked anywhere besides the financial industry at a company in AIG's shape, you wouldn't be getting a bonus, not because of politics, but because there wouldn't be any money to pay one.
No, but he'd get a salary. Which he did not at AIG (according to his account).
> People in your line of work compensated themselves as if they were founders and early investors in F500 companies, while holding positions that would barely command six figure salaries in other industries.
Yes, that's more or less what he said in the article.
> I'm sure most readers here on HN would like to be in the position to write a 750k check to charity in the face of a depression.
Yes, that's more or less what he said in the article.
> That $100 million a year in equity and commodity trading? How much of that was on the back of the tech and housing bubble, and exploding oil prices? Sans the games the guys down the hall were playing with CDS and CDOs, would your returns even have been so high?
Perhaps your job also depends on the bubble economy. We'll know by this time next year.
If you follow the thread to the end, you'll see that the guy renamed some variables, resubmitted and got accepted.
PhoneGap is open source. There is no "signature" that they can use to know that you incorporated code from it. They would have to disavow their own APIs in order to stop people from using it.
JSON is much more popular than s-expressions, and not just accidentally. Explicit, compact syntax for both lists and key-value pairs is The Right Thing in a language like this.
A few years ago, I took over maintenance of a Windows program that depended upon a Java component wrapped in COM. With Sun and Microsoft at war, that seemed a bit risky to me.
I asked: "why is this Java component in the Windows client app?" The answer was that the server was also implemented in Java and the SOAP libraries were compatible, whereas Microsoft's and Java's were not (at that time).
I nearly choked: they chose a "standard" like SOAP and then re-standardized on a particular library (client and server components of it) "for compatibility."
So to bring this digression back to relevance, I'll say this: if you already have Java code around, it will be easiest to talk to it from Java. And since Java is the new COBOL, there is a bunch of Java floating around. (but if you need a Java client to talk to a Java server using a "standard" protocol then something is seriously awry somewhere)
You say libraries aren't the issue, but the discussion is about a blog pst that said: "And why Python, then? Well, said Sussman, it probably just had a library already implemented for the robotics interface, that was all."
I'm sure your experience is grounded in a general reality. But the post you disagreed with was about a specific case: i.e. the one described in the blog post.
We're talking about the user interface to computational machines. There is no abstract "right" or "wrong" and no context-insensitive "practical" or "impractical."
He wanted to do a course about robots, and according to him, the interface to the robots was Python, which was otherwise an adequate language.
If you want to make a case to the contrary, it should be rooted in the specifics of the situation.
I love Robert Morris' crunchbase bio: "... He has published extensively on wireless networks, distributed operating systems, and peer-to-peer applications. In 1988 his discovery of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public."
I think we know that the "discovery" of a vulnerability is never enough to get the general public interested...I didn't hear a peep in the MSM about the huge Debian/SSL debacle.
It's a pretty straightforward tradeoff. Of course people who are not Japanese will naturally be upset to pay a cost in complexity for a feature of benefit primarily to a programmers from a single country. Non-Japanese Ruby programmers will just have to decide whether their solidarity with Japanese programmers outweighs their personal and collective inconvenience.