Discussions

I want this thing. It also reminds me of a demo Craig Mundie did a while back. Also reminds me of an old Keanu Reeves movie with some nice VR in it. Great price, very useful. 

1 day ago, elmer wrote

 

Bhwahaha. Funniest comment!

They fixed a slightly embarasssing answer by not providing a biased answer but rather side-stepped the question and provided some humourous answers to a question without a real answer anyway. Not actually as petty as creating a thread about it. Changing the "facts" in this way doesn't deserve ridicule. There are more serious examples of this practice...

A little bit of Mjølner can go a long way.

The videos is the main reason for me to visit this place - and the discussions on the video threads.

I once proposed having video threads interleaved with other threads or in a separate forum so one could track replies to videos easily - but now I think it's good as-is because then the trolls stay mostly in the coffeehouse.

Channel 9 is still great. The best part of it is the videos and the video threads.

And do continue to check in, "go" deep, expert-to-expert, etc. Charles.

I have the same feeling but it appears to be usability criticisms related to the unified tablet and desktop interface and not technical criticisms at all. It'll be interesting to see what tweaks will appear, if any, in terms of usability, in the next release.

Still, I think my "computer savvy" brother in law will really like the new modality.

4 hours ago, Sven Groot wrote

I wouldn't recommend Javascript as a first langauge either, for two reasons:

1. JS on its own is pretty useless; the "obvious" environment for it is the browser, and that means learning HTML, DOM idiosyncracies, and possibly a library like JQuery.
2. I'm not sure starting with a language that does OO differently from any other mainstream language is such a good idea.

And then you didn't even mention "the bad parts".

1 day ago, JoshRoss wrote

I started with Atari Basic, around second or third grade. If I had to suggest a language to start with it would probably be either javascript or python. Either way, there is plenty of leaning material freely available on the internet.

-Josh

Javascript as the first language? Might one suggest a less tortuous path?

Coffeescript.

59 minutes ago, Bass wrote

@evildictaitor:

I think it's fine as long as there is a way to enforce strict standards compliance (eg: a compiler switch). Just my opinion.

In school for C code we used to pass the -ansi flag to gcc to ensure strict[er] standards compliance. I've never seen that done in the "real world" yet, since project design often guaranteed to use a specific compiler and platform anyway.

Apparently you can get finer grained than that with the -std flag. gcc also documents all it's extensions, which is nice (and educational, I think).

It's interesting that the Linux kernel actually uses many of these extensions, so gcc is typically the only compiler that can reliably compile Linux. Although Clang has been implemented many of gcc's extensions and has made a lot of progress in this.

So anyway I think the point is, extensions to standard languages are pretty common and not very controversial.

I think you have a good point here.

I also like the way you can switch on extensions for GHC.

There was also quite some negative reactions to some new WinRT extensions for C++ in one or more video posts on this site - but why, if it's restricted to a switchable compiler extension (which admittedly, I'm assuming it is).

As for extension methods, I seem to remember D having something close to it, where you can declare a function on a type, including a primitive type and instead of calling it like foo(x) you can say x.foo. But that's more like an extension property.

Anyway, there are good uses and probably not so good uses for extension methods but look at LINQ and how useful they are there. Also, don't extension methods prevent you from using implementation details (no access to private and protected parts)? This makes them just syntactic sugar for static functions and how can one argue against those?

1 hour ago, SteveRichter wrote

*snip*

a mixin is created by creating a new class that is based on the class being extended?

http://www.jakesee.com/2009/04/c-mixins-a-powerful-concept/

I have a class library that is returning an instance of a class. How to apply the mixin pattern to an object that already exists?

 

Indeed, mixins, at least the mixins I've seen are no substitute for extension methods at all.

I like the |> pipe operator in F# but in terms of tool and user friendliness, nothing beats extension methods. Dot dot dot...

New title: Chief Naming Officer (CNO).

So you get a "usage record" from Windows Azure. Do you really need to be told that you've used the Windows Azure Virtual Network rather than the Virtual Network?

This is a non-event.