Seeking computer-programming job (Sunnyvale, CA)
Robert Maas
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
http://tinyurl.com/uh3t (Click on "Contact me")
e-mail: res129.3.CalRobert [at] SpamGourmet.com
OBJECTIVE: Changing fields from Programmer/Analyst to Software Engineer
SUMMARY: 10+ years experience designing & writing software
Major application areas include:
* Instructional/educational software
* Smart/expert systems
* Calculations in support of scientific research
* Automation of business systems
Programmed languages include:
* Java (on 3 platforms), including: applets, JDBC/ODBC, JSP, J2EE servlets,
XML parsing (SAX), GUI (AWT & swing), JavaDoc
* JavaScript, including calls to methods in Java classes
* C (on 4 platforms)
* C++ (on 2 platforms)
* Visual Basic
* Fortran (on 5 platforms)
* Lisp (on 6 platforms)
* Assembly/machine language (for 7 different CPUs)
* Perl/PHP/shell (just a little on one platform)
Platforms (programming environments) include: Unix/Linux shell, CGI,
Macintosh, MicroSoft Windows, and many others
SKILLS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
SOFTWARE
* Wrote programming module to find longest matching segments between
correct answer and student's guess, and to present all the correct
matches back to the student in correct sequence for further edit,
which allowed computer assisted instruction software to test/coach
short-answer and fill-in-blank questions.
* Implemented my effective flashcard-drill algorithm, whereby anyone
regardless of disability or young age can learn vocabulary and
spelling.
* Wrote program to lay out text and graphics, including arbitrarily-
complex nested mathematical formulae, for printing or display.
* Wrote module to perform interactive derivations in differential
calculus and related algebra, which allowed students to create such
derivations and get them immediately graded as part of
computer-assisted instruction.
* Wrote software for very-low-overhead packet-based communication,
which allowed effective use of low-speed modems that were the only
modems affordable at the time.
* Wrote program for adaptive compression of text data, typically
achieving 3:1 compression with ordinary text and 5:1 compression with
tabular data similar to spreadsheets.
* Wrote program for computing predicted vibrational spherical harmonics
for NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) measurements of large organic
molecules, and plotting results both as function of excitation
frequency and parametrically one measurement against another, to
distinguish whether particular molecular bonds were mostly fixed or
oscillating or freely rotating.
* Wrote program for payroll, which included deductions etc., at a university,
and achieved greater speed and accuracy than previous non-computer method.
* Wrote program for pre-registration (allocated students to desired
classes as much as possible, and detected classes that were over- or
under-enrolled) at Santa Clara University, which allowed classes to be
automatially planned several months before the school term started.
* Completely designed and programmed a system for watching for
newly-arriving e-mail, distinguishing spam from legitimate e-mail,
parsing headers to find injection IP number, building and maintaining
database of spam-complaint addresses for IP blocks, automatically
composing and sending spam complaints within a minute of newly-arrived
spam, which relieved me of the burden of doing all that work manually.
Details of recent activities&accomplishments: http://tinyurl.com/352wo4
INFORMATION ORGANIZATION
* Compiled a toplevel meta-index to the InterNet, listing all the major
lists and indexes that were available online 1991-1996, allowing
Internet users to find important information before the World Wide Web
and search engines existed. http://tinyurl.com/yokhtb
* Compiled (in 1996) an index of information and advice about dealing with
network abuse (mostly "spam"). http://tinyurl.com/3xkgm9
EXPERIENCE:
Programmer/Analyst IMSSS, Stanford University, Stanford, CA
EDUCATION:
Bachelor of Science (Mathematics major) from University of Santa Clara, CA
Computer-programming classes at De Anza College, Cupertino, CA
PUBLISHED WRITINGS:
(1995) Computer-based advanced placement calculus for gifted students.
Instructional Science, 22, 339-362 (written by my supervisor about our work)
(1985) Natural-language interface for an instructable robot.
International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 22, 215-240 (written by me)
(1984) A note on discourse with an instructable robot.
Theoretical Linguistics, 11, 5-20 (written by my supervisor about my work)
(1978) Magnetic relaxation analysis of dynamic processes in
macromolecules in the pico- to microsecond range.
Biophysical Journal, Vol 24, 103-117 (jointly written by supervisor and me)
(1970) Abstract on differential algebra published in Notices of the AMS (by me)
ACADEMIC/INTELLECTUAL HONORS, PROFESSIONAL LICENSES:
- First place in University of Santa Clara High School Mathematics
contest for three years
- Undergraduate mathematics research project at University of Santa
Clara for five summers
- Among top five (in United States) in William Lowell Putnam
undergraduate mathematics competition
- Passed California civil service exam for Programmer/Analyst I
- Passed Mensa exam, achieving top 1% on BOTH tests, whereas achieving
top 2% on EITHER test is sufficient to qualify for Mensa
- Passed federal civil service exam for Writing & Public Info
SKILLS/BUZZWORDS/PHRASES (in alphabetical order):
1620, 360/370, 6502, 68000, 8080, acia, algol, altair 8800a,
anti-spam, applet, archie, arpanet, assembler, awt, bachelor of
science degree, balanced binary trees, bitmapped image of graph to
parameterized lineaments, bitnet, blockade puzzles for 3-yr-olds or
dan quayle, bnf-driven type-checking, c, c++, cai, calculus, canonical
representations, card input, cgi, class-assignment, client/server
telecommunications, clustering, cmucl, cobol, college graduate,
combinatorics, computer-assisted instruction, console typewriter,
consumerism, cross-reference, data compression, ddt, dec pdp-10,
destructuring, device interfaces, diablo disks, diet optimization,
differential algebra, differential polynomials, dm2500 emulator,
docindex, dom, eqd, expert system, file maintenance and indexing,
finger, flashcard drill, forth, fortran, four-phase iv/70, fractals,
frontpanel, ftp, gcd, generalized computer dating, graph hockey, gui,
hashing, heapsort, help-net, hermes, high-level languages, html,
hypercard, hypertalk, i/o device interrupt handlers, ibm 1130, ibm
1620, ibm 360/370, image processing, imsss, indexing, info-nets,
information retrieval and indexing, intel 8080, interval arithmetic,
interval refinement stochastic mapping, inventions, its, j2ee, j2se,
java, javadoc, javascript, jdbc, jsax, jsp, jsys, kermit, large prime
numbers, lattice manipulation, laying out text, linux, lisp, listserv,
maasinfo, machine language, macintosh, macintosh allegro common lisp,
macl, maclisp, macsyma, mail, mainsail, mathematical research,
mathematical-formula printer, mathematics, mathprinter, mensa,
meta-index, microsoft windows, mos 6502, ms-windows, natural language
understanding, net-relaxation, netnews, netscout, nmr relaxation,
note, nuclear magnetic resonance relaxation, numrel, nutritional
diets., odbc, opacs, os traps, packet-based data communication,
packet-based telecommunications, pacs-l, payroll, pcnet, pdp-10, perl,
permutations, php, pnews, pocket forth, portable standard lisp,
porting, pre-registration, prettyprinter, principal differential
ideals, processing and rendering remote-sensing multi-spectral images,
programmer/analyst, proofreading, proximity-hashing, pseudo-random
numbers, psl, putnam contest, pvm, rdrlist, redhat linux, reduce,
rlisp, rmail, rmi, rn, rsa cryptosystem, rscs, s-expressions, sail,
save/restore environment, sax, segmat, servlets, sesame c,
shortanswertests, single-step debugger, sl, software engineer, sokoban
puzzles for 3-yr-olds or dan quayle, sort/merge, space exploration,
sprouts, standard lisp, stanford, stipple, sunos, svc202 commands,
swing, syntax&semantics checking, syscalls, telecommunications,
telnet, tenex, terminal emulation, text compression, toolbox traps,
topindex, toplevel meta-index, tops-10, uci-lisp, university payroll,
university pre-registration, unix, us citizen, usenet, uuo, vb,
versaterm, virus detection and removal, visual basic, visual c/c++,
vm/cms, waits, wilbur, word problems, wordprob, writing & public info,
www, xml, zmodem, zterm.
gw7...@aol.com
(Robert Maas) wrote:
> ROBERT MAAS
> Sunnyvale, CA 94086
I don't think that comp.programming is really a suitable place for a
CV. I suspect that the two *.lang.* groups aren't, either.
> PUBLISHED WRITINGS:
> (1995) Computer-based advanced placement calculus for gifted students.
> Instructional Science, 22, 339-362 (written by my supervisor about our work)
> (1985) Natural-language interface for an instructable robot.
> International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 22, 215-240 (written by me)
> (1984) A note on discourse with an instructable robot.
> Theoretical Linguistics, 11, 5-20 (written by my supervisor about my work)
> (1978) Magnetic relaxation analysis of dynamic processes in
> macromolecules in the pico- to microsecond range.
> Biophysical Journal, Vol 24, 103-117 (jointly written by supervisor and me)
> (1970) Abstract on differential algebra published in Notices of the AMS (by me)
It seems a bit odd to include in your "published writings" two papers
written solely by someone else.
> SKILLS/BUZZWORDS/PHRASES (in alphabetical order):
> ... blockade puzzles for 3-yr-olds or
> dan quayle ...
I'd advise re-writing this bit. There seem at least four problems with
it:
1) Putting jokes in your CV looks unprofessional;
2) It makes you look cynical, which is possibly not a good idea when
you are trying to get a job;
3) You may well annoy someone of a different political viewpoint;
4) it looks a bit dated now.
Neverthless, I hope you do find employment soon.
Best of luck.
Paul.
Robert Maas
> I don't think that comp.programming is really a suitable place
> for a CV.
It's not a CV, it's a resume, a 1-2 page summary (plus keywords to
trigger search engines that recruiters use). A CV is much more
complete, perhaps five or ten pages of detail (not counting the
keywords).
> I suspect that the two *.lang.* groups aren't, either.
I've been posting to ba.jobs.resumes and/or misc.jobs.resumes since
1991, but haven't gotten any job since 2.5 weeks in 1992, and
haven't even gotten an interview since 1994. I've tried posting to
Web-based job boards more recently, but not a single
employer/recruiter ever contacted me as a result to tell me about
any job even close to what I can do. All I've gotten in response to
my Web-based resume postings is spam spam and more spam, mostly
from CareerBuilder and Monster. If you can think of any reasonable
place to post my resume where I'll get legitimate queries for more
information about my skills for jobs or which my resume shows I
mostly qualify, please tell me where.
Meanwhile I'm really really desperate, and since most of my
experience is in Lisp I feel that comp.lang.lisp is a reasonable
place to post my resume, and since java is the only currently
popular language where I'm competant I feel that
comp.lang.java.programmer is a reasonable place to post, and since
I have experience in ten or twenty different languages depending on
how you count them (assembly language on six different CPUs counts
as 1 or 6? 3 different dialects of FORTRAN counts as 1 or 3? 6
different dialects of Lisp counts as 1 or 6?), plus my Hello-CGI
project to document how to get started programming in several
additional languages or Web server-side applications, I feel my
wide variation of programming languages and ability to learn more
qualifies me to post my resume in comp.programming to catch anybody
who wants to hire me for some odd job in a new language nobody yet
knows but which I can learn quickly.
> It seems a bit odd to include in your "published writings" two
> papers written solely by someone else.
They were written specifically about my work and/or projects that
include my work as a major part.
During my work on nuclear magnetic resonace relaxation, I tried a
new idea for classifying molecular side-chains as to whether they
wobbled or freely rotated, which turned out to be successful, and
that result of mine was a key point in enabling the publishing of
the results of the research project. My name was listed as one of
the authors of the paper, whose head author was the leader of the
research team. It's difficult to squeeze all that explanation into
a **resume**, better the employer who is interested in NMR research
contact me for more info.
During my work on CAI for calculus, my idea for the derivational
engine was the number one key new idea in making the five-year
project feasible. Without my idea, and subsequent implementation by
me, the CAI systen would have been worthless because didn't go
beyond what old systems for CAI already did. Again, the leader of
the project wrote up a description of our system to publish. It
wouldn't have been reasonable for each individual programmer to
publish his/her own contribution independently.
By the way, I'm starting a new job-ad-filtering "cooperative",
whereby job-seekers mark up help-wanted ads to identify the
specific required skills/experience in each, and then submit these
tagged ads to a database. The database is then automatically
searched for each job-seeker to eliminate jobs for which that
person is definitely *not* qualified (for example if it requires 3
years experience using JBoss and WebSphere but that particular
job-seeker has not even *seen* either of those application
frameworks, much less gotten years of experience using both), and
then show the job-seeker just the remaining jobs. This way
job-seekers wouldn't have to scan thousands of jobs, *each* of
which requires such a skill the job-seeker doesn't have, becoming
too exhausted to continue, and being forced to quit looking before
finding even one job ad for which the person might qualify. If
anybody reading this thread is interested in joining my FilJob
(short for filter-job) "cooperative", use this URL:
<http://tinyurl.com/filjob>
Mariano Montone
then... :S
Jon Harrop
>> From: gw7...@aol.com
>> I don't think that comp.programming is really a suitable place
>> for a CV.
>
> It's not a CV, it's a resume, a 1-2 page summary (plus keywords to
> trigger search engines that recruiters use). A CV is much more
> complete, perhaps five or ten pages of detail (not counting the
> keywords).
My CV is 2 pages long. I believe "resume" is American for CV. If you are
interested in working in Europe, I would recommend also using "CV".
> Meanwhile I'm really really desperate, and since most of my
> experience is in Lisp...
If you diversify into OCaml or F#, I'll gladly help you advertise your
products.
--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?u
Arne Vajhøj
> Robert Maas wrote:
>>> From: gw7...@aol.com
>>> I don't think that comp.programming is really a suitable place
>>> for a CV.
>> Meanwhile I'm really really desperate, and since most of my
>> experience is in Lisp...
>
> If you diversify into OCaml or F#, I'll gladly help you advertise your
> products.
Products ????
He is looking for a job !
Arne
Bart
> You have that resume and can't get a job??!! What can I expect for me
> then... :S
I suspect a lot of people are thinking the same. In my case: major
application areas over last two decades: one; mainstream languages
used: zero :-(
There seems to be too much detail there and some things might just put
off people reading it (like appearing a lot smarter than them; top 1%
in Mensa? And explaining why that is good?).
And what's the buzzword list all about, is this just all the ones he's
simply heard of? Otherwise no-one could possibly have that much
experience in one lifetime. If it's just for getting search engine
hits, there seem to be one or two words left out, or misspelt :-)
--
Bartc
viper-2
>
> There seems to be too much detail there and some things might just put
> off people reading it (like appearing a lot smarter than them; top 1%
> in Mensa? And explaining why that is good?).
>
This is why Robert might need to write a few versions of his resume
and CV, each designed for a particular target audience. The academic,
scientific and research communities, for instance, will very likely be
interested in someone with superior intelligence. On the other hand,
some employers might not be comfortable - initially - with employing
someone whose abilities will create too sharp a distinction between
him/her and the rest of the pack.
> And what's the buzzword list all about,
This might be one reason why Tamas suggested a CV instead of a resume.
Robert's information in resume format looks crowded, while a CV would
allow a more descriptive presentation so the details would not appear
to be "buzzwords".
I think Robert should write both a CV and a resume with versions of
each tailored according to audience. The resume is typically a shorter
document - one or two pages max allowing a quick review of the
applicant's qualifications and interests. The CV is important when the
reader wants a more detailed grasp of the facts.
Rob, don't forget to include any clubs and societies of which you
might be member, e.g. a folk dancing troupe perhaps? This will allow
your potential interviewers to see that you are sociable and relate
well to people - despite your being hacker.;-)
agt
--
Freedom - No pane, all gaiGN!
Code Art Now
http://codeartnow.com
Email: a...@codeartnow.com
Alan Morgan
viper-2 <visi...@mail.infochan.com> wrote:
>On Feb 4, 7:50 am, Bart <b...@freeuk.com> wrote:
>>
>> There seems to be too much detail there and some things might just put
>> off people reading it (like appearing a lot smarter than them; top 1%
>> in Mensa? And explaining why that is good?).
>
>This is why Robert might need to write a few versions of his resume
>and CV, each designed for a particular target audience. The academic,
>scientific and research communities, for instance, will very likely be
>interested in someone with superior intelligence. On the other hand,
>some employers might not be comfortable - initially - with employing
>someone whose abilities will create too sharp a distinction between
>him/her and the rest of the pack.
Mr. Maas has been complaining about his inability to get a job (and
recieving comments on his website, resume, etc) for fifteen years now.
He's obviously smart, but he just doesn't seem to "get it". He
radiates an aura of defeat (perhaps justified) and has serious interpersonal
problems (that's "serious" by the standards of programming professionals,
where being borderline autistic counts as having people skills). He
managed to be unemployed during the .com boom and has variously claimed
to have no friends who could refer him to jobs, no ex-coworkers who
could refer him to jobs, and serious medical difficulties that would
make it difficult for him to work.
I presume he's living on disability and my advice to him would be to
continue to do so. I rather doubt he is capable of working professionally
at this point. I realize that the social safety net in the US ain't great,
but it's there, and I suggest he resign himself to taking advantage of
it for the rest of his life. Sorry, but if you've been unemployed
in the programming field in silicon valley for 20 years then I can not
imagine what is going to change in the next 20.
Mr. Maas - good luck. Seriously.
Alan
--
Defendit numerus
revoltingdevelopment
hiring mode, and there are tons of legacy systems plus new systems.
Good luck.
Jon Harrop
> Jon Harrop wrote:
>> If you diversify into OCaml or F#, I'll gladly help you advertise your
>> products.
>
> Products ????
>
> He is looking for a job !
I suspect he's looking for income.
phil-new...@ipal.net
| There seems to be too much detail there and some things might just put
| off people reading it (like appearing a lot smarter than them; top 1%
| in Mensa? And explaining why that is good?).
That could get people a lot of job offers ... when there is money to pay them.
--
|WARNING: Due to extreme spam, googlegroups.com is blocked. Due to ignorance |
| by the abuse department, bellsouth.net is blocked. If you post to |
| Usenet from these places, find another Usenet provider ASAP. |
| Phil Howard KA9WGN (email for humans: first name in lower case at ipal.net) |
Kaz Kylheku
> Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> Jon Harrop wrote:
>>> If you diversify into OCaml or F#, I'll gladly help you advertise your
>>> products.
>>
>> Products ????
>>
>> He is looking for a job !
>
> I suspect he's looking for income.
But income without a regular job generally requires better people skills than
job income. Or at least the equivalent job income.
phil-new...@ipal.net
| On 2009-02-05, Jon Harrop <j...@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
|>> Jon Harrop wrote:
|>>> If you diversify into OCaml or F#, I'll gladly help you advertise your
|>>> products.
|>>
|>> Products ????
|>>
|>> He is looking for a job !
|>
|> I suspect he's looking for income.
|
| But income without a regular job generally requires better people skills than
| job income. Or at least the equivalent job income.
Or skills in the art of the con, or knowing how to not get caught after a
bank heist.
Anagram
>| But income without a regular job generally requires better people
>| skills than job income. Or at least the equivalent job income.
>
> Or skills in the art of the con, or knowing how to not get caught
> after a bank heist.
Them's people skills.
Matthias Buelow
> I presume he's living on disability and my advice to him would be to
> continue to do so. I rather doubt he is capable of working professionally
> at this point. I realize that the social safety net in the US ain't great,
> but it's there, and I suggest he resign himself to taking advantage of
> it for the rest of his life. Sorry, but if you've been unemployed
> in the programming field in silicon valley for 20 years then I can not
> imagine what is going to change in the next 20.
That's nonsense; one should never give up trying. Good luck in sorting
it out, Robert.
Jon Harrop
By that argument, I have good people skills.
viper-2
> He
> radiates an aura of defeat (perhaps justified) and has serious interpersonal
> problems (that's "serious" by the standards of programming professionals,
> where being borderline autistic counts as having people skills).
This suggests that you might have a serious problem with people skills
yourself - and you're not even autistic.
--agt
Kaz Kylheku
One, however, at one point one should give up trying exactly the same thing
over and over again, hoping to that the results will change. That is not sane
behavior.
Kenneth Tilton
"exact same"? One never steps into the same stream twice. If one has
been paying attention, our applicant's contributions here on c.l.l have
improved greatly lately. And new employers are coming along all the
time, but sparsely, so the wise course is a steady presence and steady
reminder of one's availability.
my2,kth
Alan Morgan
He has been doing exactly the same thing for 15 years (literally. I
found posts of his from 1993 which sound exactly like the ones he posts
today). If someone has been trying and failing for 15 years then they
need to consider the possibility that it just isn't going to work (or
they could change their approach. He has been given ample advice about
how to do that and is either unable or unwilling to take said advice).
I feel sorry for the guy. Obviously life has not treated him with a
great deal of kindness. But, I'm not sure that telling him to keep doing
exactly what has been beating him down over the last decade+ is helpful.
Alan
--
Defendit numerus
Kenneth Tilton
Actually, giving up is the worst thing to suggest. The mere fact that
the OP has /not/ given up hope is a hopeful sign. Giving up hastens the
end and removes all chance of finding that one employer who might be
able to tolerate his idiosyncrasies and provide him with a little income.
Something tells me you are speaking in the abstract and not from
experience of helping such folk. IIANM, you might want to STFU.
hth,kth
viper-2
Woof! Woof!
Translation:
Go Kenny Go! ;-)
--
Freedom - no pane, all gaiGN!
Arne Vajhøj
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over
again and expecting different results." is often attributed to
Albert Einstein.
Arne
William James
No, it doesn't. This suggests that you are devoid of logic or honesty
or both.
> - and you're not even autistic.
But you are?
Arne Vajhøj
> Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> Jon Harrop wrote:
>>> If you diversify into OCaml or F#, I'll gladly help you advertise your
>>> products.
>> Products ????
>>
>> He is looking for a job !
>
> I suspect he's looking for income.
Possibly, but that does not create any products of of
nothing.
Arne
blue indigo
> viper-2 wrote:
>
>> On Feb 4, 2:06 pm, amor...@xenon.Stanford.EDU (Alan Morgan) wrote:
>> > He radiates an aura of defeat
Did anyone notice his Organization: line?
> No, it doesn't. This suggests that you are devoid of logic or honesty
> or both.
This thread is certainly devoid of something important, and that something
is Java, Lisp, or programming, I'm not sure which.
f'up set to ba.jobs.resumes, the only crossposted group where this seems
like it might be on topic.
--
blue indigo
UA Telecom since 1987
Anagram
news:d71c759e-68e2-48d1...@e1g2000pra.googlegroups.com:
Programming is an art. Not an aut.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> My CV is 2 pages long. I believe "resume" is American for CV.
My understanding is different. In Europe, employers want to read
somebody's life story, for almost any job. Here in the USA<
employers want the quickest summary, no details until later such as
phone interview. Accordingly it's not *just* a different name for
an otherwise identical first-contact seek-job document, it's a
different name because of a significantly different format and
size. In the USA, a European-style CV is used for academic jobs,
especially for tenured professor.
> If you are interested in working in Europe, I would recommend
> also using "CV".
I already have a CV, about ten pages long, but I'm not looking for
any jobs in Europe, so I have no use for my CV. Do you know any
employers in Europe who would let me tele-work from California?
> If you diversify into OCaml or F#, I'll gladly help you advertise
> your products.
Are either of those available on FreeBSD Unix, or Ubuntu Linux? If
so, what is the name of the program file, so that I can use
'whereis' and 'man' to find info about using it?
Most of my recent software is for server-side Web applications, via
CGI or equivalent. If I write such an application using OCaml or
F#, and show you a demo of it online, how would you know I'm not
cheating by writing the application in Common Lisp and lying to you
saying it's written in OCaml or F# instead? Is there some
characteristic of such software that you can tell what language
it was written in?
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> I suspect he's looking for income.
I'm looking for *earned* income, which has an advantage over
charity: Somebody is paying me because they appreciate my work, not
just because they feel sorry for worthless little old me. I'd even
be willing to work for **free**, for a while anyway, if just
somebody would appreciate my **free** labors. I'm currently
available to give free lessons: ESL, pre-school reading, computer
programming, board game "Go".
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> But income without a regular job generally requires better people
> skills than job income.
Perhaps under the current economic system. On the other hand what
if there were an online auction site for bidding on short-term
contracts, where all you need to do is
(1) make the lowest bid on the contract
(2) complete the contract before the deadline
and you get paid automatically? No need to talk your way into the
contract. Just bid-then-perform. That's it. No people skills
needed?
George Peter Staplin
There is such an online auction site, or at least was. It was overrun by
people that didn't know what they were doing, and the quality was often
questionable from what I've heard of the work. Perhaps things have changed
by now.
People skills do say a lot about a person, or lack thereof.
A bigger problem is often that some companies are wasting the time of US
programmers with H-1B visa scams, with phoney ads, so that they can use
foreign workers.
See the video here about "Fake job ads":
http://www.youtube.com/programmersguild
The law firm that made that video got into a lot of trouble, but as far as I
know, their client list wasn't leaked yet. If that ever happens, we might
find that big and well known companies are intentionally using the H-1B
Visa system to take advantage of foreigners and force them to work long
hours for less pay than a US worker.
My understanding that many of the jobs with rare qualifications are about
this type of scam. It's pretty wide spread from what I've been able to
tell. You don't have to search long to find one of those jobs through the
want ads, or sites like Monster, Dice, etc.
Even Bill Gates has lied about the H-1B visa program. See:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BIvffAHsJs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDltU1ysQTE
Microsoft is not entirely staffed or run by corrupt people, but they have
given some of the people that work there a bad reputation. It casts a
shadow of doubt on people like Tony Hoare, and Leslie Lamport, due to guilt
by association.
Eventually these corrupt companies will fail. I'm hoping that employees
that are being replaced, or about to be, will consider that they have all
of the power. If you unite, you can replace the entire company and do
something better.
Note: I have nothing necessarily against some poor foreigner taking a job
from a company. What I think is wrong is that they are being taken
advantage of, and the company is hurting the local economy. Some companies
use that leverage to manipulate foreign workers. They should put more
emphasis in school on business ethics, especially with regard to lies,
otherwise the management of companies must learn the hard way how their
choices effect society.
-George
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> >> But income without a regular job generally requires better people
> >> skills than job income.
> > Perhaps under the current economic system. On the other hand what
> > if there were an online auction site for bidding on short-term
> > contracts, where all you need to do is
> > (1) make the lowest bid on the contract
> > (2) complete the contract before the deadline
> > and you get paid automatically? No need to talk your way into the
> > contract. Just bid-then-perform. That's it. No people skills
> > needed?
> There is such an online auction site, or at least was. It was
> overrun by people that didn't know what they were doing, and the
> quality was often questionable from what I've heard of the work.
> Perhaps things have changed by now.
Can you please try to find it and show me where to find it?
> People skills do say a lot about a person, or lack thereof.
But such skills as needed to hussle a job under the current system
are irrelevant to many kinds of work, such as computer programming.
It really sucks that good skilled people with lots of other skills
are neglected for employment because they don't have that one
specific skill job-hustling and none of the employment agencies are
willing to do their supposed job.
> A bigger problem is often that some companies are wasting the time of US
> programmers with H-1B visa scams, with phoney ads, so that they can use
> foreign workers.
> See the video here about "Fake job ads":
> http://www.youtube.com/programmersguild
I have no way to see that video here but I've made a note just now
to try to see it next time I'm at a semi-public computer lab where
watching InterNet videos is possible.
> ... My understanding that many of the jobs with rare qualifications
> are about this type of scam. It's pretty wide spread from what
> I've been able to tell. You don't have to search long to find one
> of those jobs through the want ads, or sites like Monster, Dice,
> etc.
A few days ago, on recommendation from someody who claimed DICE was
good, I tried a job search through DICE. I found only a very few
jobs at all in my category and nearby, with only one that I
qualified for per the requirements section, which said *nothing*
except that I needed 4 years experience software programming,
nothing specific at all, although the job duties section was full
of stuff I had not the slightest idea how to do them, but just to
harass them for posting such a stupid ad I applied anyway. I also
applied at a company that is two blocks from where I live despite
the fact it requires a security clearance plus lots of experience
with military specs etc., only because they are so very very
conveniently located that I've been wanting to get my resume to
them just in case they have some job not requiring security
clearance, and this was my first chance, a shot in the dark.
As for jobs I really qualify for, I haven't seen one in more than a
dozen years.
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BIvffAHsJs
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDltU1ysQTE
Likewise noted for later attempt to watch.
> Note: I have nothing necessarily against some poor foreigner
> taking a job from a company.
I neither, but when I'm willing to work at the legal minimum wage
but the company says i'm too expensive so they'll hire the
foreigner instead to save money, it totally pisses me off, either
that they are breaking the law, or they are simply not listening to
me that I'm really highly skilled but after 17+ years unemployment
I'm desperate to find a job even if I have to work at minimum wage
to "get my foot (back) in the door".
-- Maas Wireless Web Services: http://tinyurl.com/6l6ke3
thomas...@gmx.at
http://tinyurl.com/uh3t) wrote:
> > From: Kaz Kylheku <kkylh...@gmail.com>
> > But income without a regular job generally requires better people
> > skills than job income.
>
> Perhaps under the current economic system.
-- Begin off topic --
Don't expect some unrealisic change of the economic system. The
evolution will not allow that kapitalism (For europeans: free market
economy) to be replaced by something weaker. Survival of the fittest
will not allow a weaker replacement (at least not permanently,
see Russia).
-- End off topic --
> On the other hand what
> if there were an online auction site for bidding on short-term
> contracts, where all you need to do is
> (1) make the lowest bid on the contract
> (2) complete the contract before the deadline
> and you get paid automatically? No need to talk your way into the
> contract. Just bid-then-perform. That's it. No people skills
> needed?
Forget it, the world will not change just because some people have
no people skills. It might sound harsh, but you have to change. The
world will not change just to fit to you. Take my advice: Try to
adopt to the needs (people skills and other things) and try to be
successful in the current world/economic system. Even it many things
in our world are wrong by far. With reasonable success in the
current system you are capable to do some changes (make the world
a better place). This is at least my aproach. In companies I write
C++ programs under Windows. This enables my to help changing the
world into a place were people write Seed7 programs under Linux. :-)
Greetings Thomas Mertes
Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net
Seed7 - The extensible programming language: User defined statements
and operators, abstract data types, templates without special
syntax, OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch, statically typed,
interpreted or compiled, portable, runs under linux/unix/windows.
Patricia Shanahan
> As for jobs I really qualify for, I haven't seen one in more than a
> dozen years.
If I wanted a job, and was not qualified for any recently advertised
jobs, I would do the following:
1. Pick a skill set that is needed both for advertised jobs, and for at
least one major, well-known, active open source project.
2. Get studying. Study the chosen skill set, and also the open source
project.
3. As soon as possible, start contributing to the project. In the early
stages, use general programming skills to analyze bugs. As I built
knowledge of the project and the skills, I would expect to be able to
propose implementations of requested enhancements.
The objective would be to simultaneously build three things: in-demand
skills, a body of code to which I had made significant contributions
using those skills, and set of programmers with whom I had good
cooperative relationships.
4. Apply for jobs that need the skill set, pointing to the open source
contributions as evidence of recent experience, and asking other
participants to act as references.
Patricia
1Z
> Robert Maas,http://tinyurl.com/uh3twrote:
>
> ...> As for jobs I really qualify for, I haven't seen one in more than a
> > dozen years.
>
> ...
>
> If I wanted a job, and was not qualified for any recently advertised
> jobs, I would do the following:
>
> 1. Pick a skill set that is needed both for advertised jobs, and for at
> least one major, well-known, active open source project.
No, no, no! Stick to LiSP, it is The Best Language.
thomas...@gmx.at
> Robert Maas,http://tinyurl.com/uh3twrote:
>
> > dozen years.
>
> ...
>
> If I wanted a job, and was not qualified for any recently advertised
> jobs, I would do the following:
>
> 1. Pick a skill set that is needed both for advertised jobs, and for at
> least one major, well-known, active open source project.
What about the Seed7 project?
There are some open issues:
- Seed7 needs a database interface.
Not a simple one which is just moving SQL strings to the DB.
Something which integrates with the language such that syntax
checks can check for correct SQL syntax and static type checking
can help to find some errors. I think a database interface could
be inspired by some ideas from LINQ/C#.
- Seed7 needs a foreign function interface (to C and maybe to other
languages) which allows easy definition of interfaces and deals
with conversions between char * and the Seed7 string type. Other
type conversions may be necessary as well. The foreign function
interface should also protect against buffer overflows (as much
as possible).
- The Seed7 to C compiler (comp.sd7) needs better support for local
functions which use local variables from outer functions.
Currently comp.sd7 supports this feature in many cases, but when
compiling the P4 Pascal compiler (rewritten in Seed7, currently
not released) comp.sd7 will fail. Since C does not support local
functions the current implementation makes all functions global
and adds additional parameters to emulate the use of local
variables over several levels. It is necessary to check out if
this concept covers all possibilitys and to improve the current
solution or to write a new one instead.
- Support for 64 bit integers is needed and a concept how to work
with integers of different sizes. An interesting part of the
challenge is a hopefully portable solution for C to recognice
integer overflow. This would be needed for the Seed7 to C
compiler.
- I am trying to introduce lambda expression, functions as
parameters as well as variable functions to Seed7 while retaining
static type checks and overloading. See the thread:
"Overloading, lambda expression and functions as parameters."
in "comp.programming". I am in the middle of discussing issues.
A functional programming expert could help to get the design
right.
> 2. Get studying. Study the chosen skill set, and also the open source
> project.
>
> 3. As soon as possible, start contributing to the project. In the early
> stages, use general programming skills to analyze bugs. As I built
> knowledge of the project and the skills, I would expect to be able to
> propose implementations of requested enhancements.
>
> The objective would be to simultaneously build three things: in-demand
> skills, a body of code to which I had made significant contributions
> using those skills, and set of programmers with whom I had good
> cooperative relationships.
>
> 4. Apply for jobs that need the skill set, pointing to the open source
> contributions as evidence of recent experience, and asking other
> participants to act as references.
To Robert Maas:
Patricia suggests that you improve towards the skills searched in
job describtions. This is formulated in a much more friendly way
than I did: "You have to change, the world will not change for you".
She (I hope this is correct) suggests even a way to do this change.
Take her advice, it is a good one.
eric-and-jane-smith
990def...@t11g2000vbc.googlegroups.com:
> No, no, no! Stick to LiSP, it is The Best Language.
It's not the best language to get hired as a code monkey. A big project
using as typical programming language often becomes a nightmare mess, and
some of the key programmers quit because they find better jobs. That's why
the project needs to hire more programmers.
In Common Lisp, the person who wrote the program is more likely to stay to
keep improving it. There is usually no need to hire any other programmers
than that one. So you're less likely to find jobs advertised for Common
Lisp programmers, simply because they aren't needed.
thomas...@gmx.at
> 1Z <peterdjo...@yahoo.com> wrote in news:d80bd6bf-19d7-4d02-b5d5-
> 990defadb...@t11g2000vbc.googlegroups.com:
>
> > No, no, no! Stick to LiSP, it is The Best Language.
>
> It's not the best language to get hired as a code monkey.
But it is the best language to stay unemployed.
> A big project using a typical programming language often
> becomes a nightmare mess, and ...
In your parallel universe non Lisp programs automatically
become a nightmare mess?
> some of the key programmers quit because they find better jobs.
Probably as Lisp programmers with very attractive salary. :-)
> That's why the project needs to hire more programmers.
The size of a project has no influence of the team size?
> In Common Lisp, the person who wrote the program is more likely to stay to
> keep improving it.
Or to debug and test endlessly because code coverage
tests with 100% code coverage are necessary after each
change. Dynamic typing has advantages ...
> There is usually no need to hire any other programmers
> than that one.
In which reality do companys only hire one programmer
independend of the size of the task?
> So you're less likely to find jobs advertised for Common
> Lisp programmers, simply because they aren't needed.
Well, this is your explanation why the chances to get a job
as Lisp programmer are small. Other people will have other
explanations. At the end the explanation is irrelevant. If you
want to get a job you must have skills that are searched for.
Patricia Shanahan
> On 8 Mai, 17:10, Patricia Shanahan <p...@acm.org> wrote:
>> Robert Maas,http://tinyurl.com/uh3twrote:
>>
>> ...> As for jobs I really qualify for, I haven't seen one in more than a
>>> dozen years.
>> ...
>>
>> If I wanted a job, and was not qualified for any recently advertised
>> jobs, I would do the following:
>>
>> 1. Pick a skill set that is needed both for advertised jobs, and for at
>> least one major, well-known, active open source project.
>
> What about the Seed7 project?
Here are a some questions I would ask. They are nothing to do with
the inherent merit or long term usefulness of the project, just its
potential as a stepping stone to a job:
1. How many people are currently actively contributing to the project?
A large team has several advantages. Being part of a team would help
with demonstrating ability to work in a team. A large team also presents
better networking opportunities, increasing the probability that someone
on the team knows someone who knows someone who knows about a suitable job.
2. How many users does the project currently have? How many discussions
of it in newsgroups or blogs that were not initiated by participants?
A hiring manager is more likely to be impressed by contributions to a
project if the manager uses it, knows someone who uses it, or at least
has heard of it, and can read a variety of opinions about it.
3. What resume buzzwords would work on the project justify? What is the
intersection with buzzwords in advertisements for suitable jobs?
Patricia
eric-and-jane-smith
news:e5218320-46a1-45bc...@r36g2000vbr.googlegroups.com:
> But it is the best language to stay unemployed.
Even better than Seed7?
Lew
>> There is such an online auction site, or at least was. It was
>> overrun by people that didn't know what they were doing, and the
>> quality was often questionable from what I've heard of the work.
>> Perhaps things have changed by now.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t wrote:
> Can you please try to find it and show me where to find it?
GIYF.
> But such skills as needed to hussle [sic] a job under the current system
> are irrelevant to many kinds of work, such as computer programming.
> It really sucks that good skilled people with lots of other skills
> are neglected for employment because they don't have that one
> specific skill job-hustling and none of the employment agencies are
> willing to do their supposed job.
Wow. I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, but I read it as a
complaint that you have to hustle in order to find work. I got news for you -
lots of people have good computer skills; it's the hustle that distinguishes
them and makes them better than other candidates. If I were a hiring manager
hearing your pitch, which sounds awfully petulant, I'd look for another candidate.
> A few days ago, on recommendation from someody who claimed DICE was
> good, I tried a job search through DICE. I found only a very few
> jobs at all in my category and nearby, with only one that I
> qualified for per the requirements section, which said *nothing*
> except that I needed 4 years experience software programming,
Do you have such experience?
> nothing specific at all, although the job duties section was full
> of stuff I had not the slightest idea how to do them, but just to
If you don't have the slightest idea how to do them, there's a high likelihood
you are not qualified for that particular position. And saying that it had a
"job duties section ... full of stuff" is the exact opposite of that it "said
*nothing*".
> harass them for posting such a stupid ad I applied anyway. I also
That you confess readily that you wanted to harass them, and condemn their ad
as "stupid" is evidence that you have what any hiring manager would consider a
bad attitude and make them very unwilling to hire you.
> applied at a company that is two blocks from where I live despite
> the fact it requires a security clearance plus lots of experience
> with military specs etc., only because they are so very very
> conveniently located that I've been wanting to get my resume to
> them just in case they have some job not requiring security
> clearance, and this was my first chance, a shot in the dark.
You get a job by demonstrating that you have what they want, not by hoping
that they have what you want.
> As for jobs I really qualify for, I haven't seen one in more than a
> dozen years.
"Would you like fries with that?"
> I neither, but when I'm willing to work at the legal minimum wage
> but the company says i'm [sic] too expensive so they'll hire the
> foreigner instead to save money, it totally pisses me off, either
> that they are breaking the law, or they are simply not listening to
> me that I'm really highly skilled but after 17+ years unemployment
> I'm desperate to find a job even if I have to work at minimum wage
> to "get my foot (back) in the door".
Anyone who's been unemployed for 17 or more years has a perception problem
they will need to overcome, as most hiring managers will be very, very
skeptical of someone with such a gap. They will want to know why a person has
been unemployed - have they been ill, a homemaker, independently wealthy?
That kind of thing. They'll want to see what a person has done recently to
make themselves more attractive to prospective employers - have they gone to
school, done research, taken an internship, worked in a volunteer capacity?
Someone without appropriate answers to these kinds of questions, who complains
bitterly, even if accurately, about why it's other people's fault, who readily
admits to "harassing" prospective employers, who simply states that they're
"really highly skilled" but has no verifiable skills relevant to the employer,
who asserts that they're "desperate to find a job" but also says that they're
unwilling to hustle - that person will almost certainly not get hired. There
are too many people with verifiable skills, a solid work history, and a
demonstrably positive attitude with hustle who are competing for those positions.
Time for some tough love, Robert. Project a positive attitude, even if you
have to fake it. Take courses; get certified. Develop the skill set you see
advertised in the help wanted. Don't ever let them hear you complain about
"foreigners" or whining about the circumstances. Develop hustle.
I know that I repeated some things that Patricia Shanahan said. You should
listen to her. And get a better attitude.
--
Lew
Tim X
writes:
>
> But such skills as needed to hussle a job under the current system
> are irrelevant to many kinds of work, such as computer programming.
> It really sucks that good skilled people with lots of other skills
> are neglected for employment because they don't have that one
> specific skill job-hustling and none of the employment agencies are
> willing to do their supposed job.
>
A lot depends on what you define as job-huslling, but good peple skills
and communication skills are still important even for programmers. While
much of the work you do as a programmer involves sitting at a terminal
cutting code, this is only part of the job.
The days of a programmer being given a task and then they just go off to
wherever they do their work, code like mad and then deliver the finished
solution are gone (actually, I'm not even sure they ever really
existed). These days, programmers need to have good communications and
people skills to extract the true requirements of the software from the
client and to work well with others on the team. In fact, to some extent
this has become an even more difficult task as the general level of
computer literacy has increased. Now, more often than not, in addition
to system requirements, you also get clients telling you how to program
the solution. often the requirements are difficult to identify because
they have presented you with what they think is the solution rather than
describing what they want. You need good peple skills so that you can
extract the real requirements from what the client gives you - you can't
just accept what they tell you, implement exactly that and then expect
they will be satisfied with the result. You need to make them feel
comfortable enough that you can discuss the problem they want to solve,
feel free to ask questions and be able to extract what you need without
making them feel uncomfortable, threatened or concerned that perhaps
your not terribly sane or don't understand the problem. It is only
through good inter-personal skills that you can extract the information
you need to gain sufficient understandinig of the problem to come up
with a good solution. (there are some exceptions of course - writing
your own software to solve a problem you already know and understand and
then hoping to sell the solution to other for example).
Good communications skills are also required because fewer and fewer
programming jobs represent just a single developer working in
isolation. More often than not, there will be a team - possibly a small
team of only a couple of people or maybe a large team of 30 or more. To
actively participate in the team, you need to be able to communicate
with them and you need the people skills necessary to fit into the
team.
having been responsible for employiing staff, both for small companies
and larger beurocracies, two things jump to my mind when I see an
application from someone who hasn't worked for a long time (BTW, 17
years of unemployment is an excessively long time - not sure I've ever
heard of anyone not having any employment for 17 years who wasn't in
prison or in a coma!). The first thing I'd want to know is why they
haven't had a job for 17 years. If there answer involved a lot of what
sounded like excuses or blaming the system or something akin to a victim
attitude, I'd probably write them off. Anyone who hasn't been able to
adapt to changing circumstances and an evolving world and stil comes up
with nothing but excuses or considers themselves a victim of situation
and takes no responsibility for their part in their situation is
unlikely to have the problem solving and outcomes oriented focus I would
be looking for in an employee.
The second thing I'd possibly want to know is what they had been doing
over that 17 years and what they had done to try and get a job (assuming
they wanted one over that whole period). The problem I would have with
employiing anyone who had been unemployed for 17 years is with the fact
that if they couldn't solve their unemployment problem for that length
of time, can I have any confidence they will be able to solve any of the
problems they are likely to run into while working for me. At the end of
the day, you have to weigh this person up with all the other applicants
you have that have recent employment, possibly recent track records of
work completed, recent education or even just youthful
enthusiasm. sometimes, peple will have very good reasons for not having
worked for 17 tears (such as prison or a coma). For this type of
situation, I think your better off being honest and stating why you have
been unable to work for so long. Yes, it may cost you a job, but it may
also get you one. Not everyone will automatically right someone off
because they have a criminal record or a history of mental illness or
whatever. Yes, there are small minded bigoted people who will just write
you off, but they would have written you off already just because you
haven't worked for 17 years. There are some out there who are honestly
prepared to give people a second chance. There are also a growing number
of people out there who have either suffered some significant physical
or mental illness who can have a better understanding and greater
acceptance of such things. Whatever the case, I suspect you are more
likely to find someone who is willing to give you a chance once they
understand why you haven't worked for a long time and that there is a
good reason for it. Complaining that you couldn't get a job because of
low paid overseas competition, lack of money to access and stay current
with modern technology or because the current hiring practices are too
myopic to see your potential are not valid reasons, only excuses.
Is any of this fair - no, probably not. However, it never has been and
never will be a fair world. Good people get screwed over all the time
and bastards are often very successful. What is important to
realise is that the individual plays a significant role in determining
what their situation is. Very few are simply passive victims. It is how
you handle the situation you find yourself in that matters more than the
causes of what put you there.
While it is positive to see someone wanting to get something happening
by starting their own projects and lookinig for others to help, I do
have to wonder why not just join an existing project. Establishing a new
project, particularly one with multiple contributors, is a difficult and
time consuming process. It is also one that usually requires someone
with strong peple skills and a certain level of charisma and ability to
inspire others to be a success. You will be able to get far more mileage
out of working and contributing to an existing recognised project in a
much shorter time than you will with starting your own project. In
particular, a reasonably well know project with a good profile can be
worth a lot. In addition to being able to point to something you have
done which can easily be verified, you are also likely to make
connections with people who would be willing to provide references or
act as referees for jobs you apply for.
For the record, I do believe the way job interviews are handled and the
way applications are processed is fundamentally flawed. My personal
preference for assessing someone for a job is to give them a simple task
that will take about a week to complete and assess how they deal with it
and what they come up with. This lets me see how well they fit in with
the rest of the staff, how well they handle obstacles and whether they
actually can deliver the goods. It may cost a weeks wages to find this
out, but generally, it works a hell of a lot better than making largely
arbitrary assessments based on an interview where all you can tell is
whether the person is a good interviewer or not. Unfortunately, too many
employers are worried about doing tis in case they get problems with
litigators, unions or government beurocracy concerning hiring and
firing - though this varies a lot from country to country.
Tim
--
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au
thomas...@gmx.at
> thomas.mer...@gmx.at wrote innews:e5218320-46a1-45bc...@r36g2000vbr.googlegroups.com:
>
> > But it is the best language to stay unemployed.
>
> Even better than Seed7?
Yes, in this regard I consider Lisp as the best language ever.
At least I have never heard of a person being unemployed
for more than a dozen years because of Seed7 or any other
programming language skills.
thomas...@gmx.at
> thomas.mer...@gmx.at wrote:
> > On 8 Mai, 17:10, Patricia Shanahan <p...@acm.org> wrote:
> >> Robert Maas,http://tinyurl.com/uh3twrote:
>
> >> ...> As for jobs I really qualify for, I haven't seen one in more than a
> >>> dozen years.
> >> ...
>
> >> If I wanted a job, and was not qualified for any recently advertised
> >> jobs, I would do the following:
>
> >> 1. Pick a skill set that is needed both for advertised jobs, and for at
> >> least one major, well-known, active open source project.
>
> > What about the Seed7 project?
>
> ...
>
> Here are a some questions I would ask. They are nothing to do with
> the inherent merit or long term usefulness of the project, just its
> potential as a stepping stone to a job:
I think it was clear that Seed7 is not the optimal project to get a
job.
> 1. How many people are currently actively contributing to the project?
I have recieved contributions of approximately a dozen persons.
The contributions are currently not at a regular basis.
Believe it or not: I expect that this and other things will change.
Current popular programming languages took 10 or more years to get
popular. I announced Seed7 in october 2005 so there is still much
time.
> A large team has several advantages. Being part of a team would help
> with demonstrating ability to work in a team.
This is a good argument for taking a big project. But without
personal skills it might be hard to be recogniced by senior team
members.
> A large team also presents
> better networking opportunities, increasing the probability that someone
> on the team knows someone who knows someone who knows about a suitable job.
On the other hand: Entering a big project with a large team will not
allow you to easy get a status where each staff manager knows your
name. Mr. Torvalds, Cox, Molnar, ... I have already heard about you.
Just the most prominent team members are known to outsiders (you can
be sure that staff managers are outsiders). E.g.: You probably have
more knowledge than a typical staff manager, but did you know that I
contributed to the Wine project?
Unless you are so prominent that the manager already knows your name
it can IMHO backfire if you put too much emphasis on an open source
participation. Many managers have doubts about open source and/or
are fans of a monopolists proprietory software. The FUD tactics
still work for some managers. I once had a manager questioning my
skills just because I mentioned that Linux could possibly be
better than M$ in some areas. For this manager such an idea was
unimaginable and talking about it was blasphemy. He even came back
several times to show me articles in his manager magazines,
> 2. How many users does the project currently have?
There are between 200 and 600 downloads every month.
> How many discussions
> of it in newsgroups or blogs that were not initiated by participants?
I am busy programming and do not watch blogs. At least there is
reasonable traffic at the Seed7 homepage.
> A hiring manager is more likely to be impressed by contributions to a
> project if the manager uses it, knows someone who uses it, or at least
> has heard of it, and can read a variety of opinions about it.
Well, I already talked about staff managers. Unless you are one of
the most prominent members of one of the most prominent projects it
will not help.
> 3. What resume buzzwords would work on the project justify? What is the
> intersection with buzzwords in advertisements for suitable jobs?
I thought the goal was to aquire skills not buzzwords? :-)
But you are right that a good buzzword list is important for
managers. IMHO buzzwords requested and skills needed to do a job
have almost no relationship. But I admit that buzzwords are
important to get a job.
For a list of Seed7 buzzwords see my signature. :-)
BTW.: Everybody is invited to help the Seed7 project.
Phlip
> Someone without appropriate answers to these kinds of questions, who
> complains bitterly, even if accurately, about why it's other people's
> fault, who readily admits to "harassing" prospective employers, who
> simply states that they're "really highly skilled" but has no verifiable
> skills relevant to the employer, who asserts that they're "desperate to
> find a job" but also says that they're unwilling to hustle - that person
> will almost certainly not get hired. There are too many people with
> verifiable skills, a solid work history, and a demonstrably positive
> attitude with hustle who are competing for those positions.
We need to respond to clinical depression as a health problem, not a job
problem. These newsgroups have seen these threads before, for many years, with
the same recommendations...
(BTW the secret words here are "Rails" and "Craigslist". They apparently have
higher numbers than the corporate systems and sites. Go figure!)
--
Phlip
Andrew Thompson
That you are still as big a pathetic, moron, whining
troll as you were in 2005*, or that as many people would
fall for your whine job today, as they did then.
Piss off till you can relate to the real world, Robert.
* <http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java.programmer/browse_frm/
thread/ba620f3da6ac0dee?tvc=1>
F/U set to c.l.j.p. only.
--
Andrew T.
Tamas K Papp
>> As for jobs I really qualify for, I haven't seen one in more than a
>> dozen years.
>
> "Would you like fries with that?"
While working in a fast food chain is considered the ultimate bottom
on the job ladder (hence the term "McJob"), even that sector requires
some skills: serving customers the whole day at least demands the
right attitude, you need to be polite, etc. Judging the OP's attitude
from his posts, no fast food chain would employ him, or even if one
did, he would find himself on the street in a week with a valedictory
box of chicken nuggets.
Tamas
eric-and-jane-smith
news:b4ce081e-7c5b-48f3...@t10g2000vbg.googlegroups.com:
> Yes, in this regard I consider Lisp as the best language ever.
> At least I have never heard of a person being unemployed
> for more than a dozen years because of Seed7 or any other
> programming language skills.
You're saying you think he's unemployed because of CL? If you read what he's been
posting for years about not being able to get a job, you would realize his problem has
nothing to do with CL.
CL competence is valuable for programming job applicants. I'm not saying he does or
doesn't have such competence, but just that it's unrelated to the real reason why he
can't get a job.
You should learn CL yourself. Even if you never have any use for it in any job, what
you learn from it can make you a much better programmer in any programming language.
thomas...@gmx.at
> thomas.mer...@gmx.at wrote innews:b4ce081e-7c5b-48f3...@t10g2000vbg.googlegroups.com:
>
> > Yes, in this regard I consider Lisp as the best language ever.
> > At least I have never heard of a person being unemployed
> > for more than a dozen years because of Seed7 or any other
> > programming language skills.
>
> You're saying you think he's unemployed because of CL?
No.
> If you read what he's been
> posting for years about not being able to get a job, you would realize his problem has
> nothing to do with CL.
Agree. OTOH I had discussions with several Lisp enthusiast
which did not show any people skills. The habbit to suppose
that everybody, who doesn't have the same opinion is an idiot,
is not really helpful to convince people. Discussions are about
exchanging opinions and not about forcing an opinion to others.
> CL competence is valuable for programming job applicants.
You probably know that there are much bigger markets than
CL competence...
> I'm not saying he does or
> doesn't have such competence, but just that it's unrelated to the real reason why he
> can't get a job.
>
> You should learn CL yourself. Even if you never have any use for it in any job, what
> you learn from it can make you a much better programmer in any programming language.
By pure coincidence I just bought a book about Lisp a few days
ago. I had some Lisp knowledge already and wanted more
information. From what I have seen so far I can tell you:
I will not turn into a Lisp fan. :-)
Pillsy
> On 10 Mai, 21:45, "eric-and-jane-smith" <nore...@nospam.com> wrote:
> > If you read what he's been posting for years about
> > not being able to get a job, you would realize his
> > problem has nothing to do with CL.
> Agree. OTOH I had discussions with several Lisp enthusiast
> which did not show any people skills.
Eh, some people are jerks wherever you go, but I've really seen no
evidence that Lisp attracts them at a higher rate than any other
programming language.
[...]
> > CL competence is valuable for programming job applicants.
> You probably know that there are much bigger markets than
> CL competence...
Market size is hardly the only factor when it comes to determining the
value of a skill.
Cheers,
Pillsy
[...]
Espen Vestre
>> Agree. OTOH I had discussions with several Lisp enthusiast
>> which did not show any people skills.
>
> Eh, some people are jerks wherever you go, but I've really seen no
> evidence that Lisp attracts them at a higher rate than any other
> programming language.
Not /jerks/ perhaps, but maybe Asperger Syndrome type personalities?
But that's the case for math and computer science in general.
--
(espen)
Pillsy
> Pillsy <pillsb...@gmail.com> writes:
[...]
> > Eh, some people are jerks wherever you go, but I've really seen no
> > evidence that Lisp attracts them at a higher rate than any other
> > programming language.
> Not /jerks/ perhaps, but maybe Asperger Syndrome type personalities?
I don't think Lisp is worse for this than any other programming
language.
> But that's the case for math and computer science in general.
Kinda, yeah. Though I tend to dislike dragging autism spectrum
disorders into conversations like this one....
Cheers,
Pillsy
[...]
eric-and-jane-smith
news:dc89f16a-0732-4b7b...@u10g2000vbd.googlegroups.com:
> By pure coincidence I just bought a book about Lisp a few days
> ago. I had some Lisp knowledge already and wanted more
> information. From what I have seen so far I can tell you:
> I will not turn into a Lisp fan. :-)
"a book about lisp"
Are you saying the book you bought isn't good enough to convince you to
learn Lisp? And you want me to guess what book it is? Or what?
Lew
>> By pure coincidence I just bought a book about Lisp a few days
>> ago. I had some Lisp knowledge already and wanted more
>> information. From what I have seen so far I can tell you:
>> I will not turn into a Lisp fan. :-)
eric-and-jane-smith wrote:
> "a book about lisp"
> Are you saying the book you bought isn't good enough to convince you to
> learn Lisp?
Either that or the book he bought is good enough to convince him not to learn
Lisp.
> And you want me to guess what book it is? Or what?
No, he doesn't want you to guess what book it is. He doesn't care whether you
know what book it is.
Wait, are you saying that you want him to tell you what book it is? Or what?
--
Lew
eric-and-jane-smith
> Either that or the book he bought is good enough to convince him not
> to learn Lisp.
You mean bad enough. It's not likely that there's any Lisp book that tries
to convince people not to learn Lisp. So, if it's a good book, it's far
more likely to convince him to learn it. A bad book can convince him not
to learn it, in the same sense that a bad math teacher can convince
students that they don't like math.
Espen Vestre
>> But that's the case for math and computer science in general.
>
> Kinda, yeah. Though I tend to dislike dragging autism spectrum
> disorders into conversations like this one....
I agree - I was merely commenting on your general statement, just to
make that clear.
--
(espen)
fft1976
> No, no, no! Stick to LiSP, it is The Best Language.
Actually, LISP is good for impressing potential employers. It's like
Assembly. The unspoken message here is: "I learned thomething that
nobody needth. Imagine how well I might know thingth that people do
need! However, I will not lower mythelf by lithting thothe things"
Lew
>> Either that or the book he bought is good enough to convince him not
>> to learn Lisp.
eric-and-jane-smith wrote:
> You mean bad enough.
No, I really don't. I am in the habit of saying exactly what I mean, for the
most part, and this was one of those times. I really don't think I was at all
unclear in my statement that it would be subject to misinterpretation.
> It's not likely that there's any Lisp book that tries
> to convince people not to learn Lisp. So, if it's a good book, it's far
> more likely to convince him to learn it. A bad book can convince him not
> to learn it, in the same sense that a bad math teacher can convince
> students that they don't like math.
A good book will give an accurate picture of the language, its capabilities
and its shortcomings. Whether it's trying to convince someone not to use the
language or to use it is irrelevant; an honest assessment might well convince
someone not to use it.
I certainly have encountered many informative references for languages, pretty
much all of which were partisan to their respective topics, that convinced me
not to use those languages. No reflection on the languages, necessarily, it's
just that good information allowed me to make an informed assessment whether I
should invest time and energy in them.
--
Lew
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> If I wanted a job, and was not qualified for any recently advertised
> jobs, I would do the following:
> 1. Pick a skill set that is needed both for advertised jobs, and for at
> least one major, well-known, active open source project.
I don't know of any open-source projects using WebSphere and JBoss. Do you?
> 2. Get studying. Study the chosen skill set, and also the open
> source project.
I don't know any way to get access to a computer that is running
WebSphere and JBoss, so my "studying" would be just reading
tutorials without any hands-on practice at what I'm reading.
For me, that's a very ineffective way to learn a software system.
> 3. As soon as possible, start contributing to the project.
I don't know how I could possibly contribute to a WebSphere/JBoss
project without access to any machine that could test the code I
would write. I would not at all be comfortable editing a wiki of
source-code where I have not *ever* tested even one line of code in
WebSphere or JBoss much less the actual made-up code I'm adding to
the wiki. Most likely I'd be banned from the open source project if
I started editing the group-source to have never-tested code,
because it's extremly unlikely that code I just type in without
even a syntax check could possibly be even close to correct.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> From: "eric-and-jane-smith" <nore...@nospam.com>
> Even better than Seed7?
AFAIK Seed7 can't be used to write WebServer applications,
rendering it moot in discussions between Common Lisp or Java or C
or C++ etc. all of which can. There is actually one *new* (unknown)
language which has passed the test of 3-steps-past-hello-CGI (full
HTML FORM decoding), namely Flaming Thunder. For all 7 languages
that pass that test, see:
<http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/HelloPlus/hellos.html#step3>
I'd really like somebody to volunteer demos of JSP and ASP to
include there, but so-far nobody with access to either has offered
a demo.
Lew
>> If I wanted a job, and was not qualified for any recently advertised
>> jobs, I would do the following:
>> 1. Pick a skill set that is needed both for advertised jobs, and for at
>> least one major, well-known, active open source project.
>
> I don't know of any open-source projects using WebSphere and JBoss. Do you?
Any open-source Java EE server will work for learning; JBoss is a good one,
and the open-source core of WebSphere is Geronimo. Naturally you wouldn't use
both together.
>> 2. Get studying. Study the chosen skill set, and also the open
>> source project.
>
> I don't know any way to get access to a computer that is running
> WebSphere and JBoss, so my "studying" would be just reading
> tutorials without any hands-on practice at what I'm reading.
> For me, that's a very ineffective way to learn a software system.
If you have a computer, preferably one with at least 2GB RAM by the way, then
all you have to do is download Geronimo, JBoss, and/or GlassFish, follow the
installation instructions, and Bob's your uncle.
>> 3. As soon as possible, start contributing to the project.
>
> I don't know how I could possibly contribute to a WebSphere/JBoss
> project without access to any machine that could test the code I
Do you own a computer?
How much RAM does it have?
> would write. I would not at all be comfortable editing a wiki of
> source-code where I have not *ever* tested even one line of code in
> WebSphere or JBoss much less the actual made-up code I'm adding to
So test what you write.
> the wiki. Most likely I'd be banned from the open source project if
> I started editing the group-source to have never-tested code,
So test your code.
> because it's extremly unlikely that code I just type in without
> even a syntax check could possibly be even close to correct.
So test your code.
I would offer different advice from contributing to JBoss or WebSphere,
though. I'd use them to practice Java EE coding and deployment skills, not to
contribute to the platforms themselves. One would need experience relying on
the platforms before daring to modify them.
Your caution about contributing to projects without actual deployment is well
founded. Your concern that you can't download or run a Java EE web server is not.
<http://geronimo.apache.org/>
<http://www.jboss.org/>
<https://glassfish.dev.java.net/>
--
Lew
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> > Even better than Seed7?
> Yes, in this regard I consider Lisp as the best language ever.
> At least I have never heard of a person being unemployed
That's a bogus argument, claiming a brand new language like Seed7
is better because it has a shorter history of unemployment. That's
like claiming that 2-yr-old babies are better software programmers
than I am because they've been unemployed only two years.
Perhaps a better way to calculate this is to go all the way back to
most recent employment, sort of like finding the highest-order bit
of a twos-compliment number. A negative number has an infinite
number of high-order negative bits (extended sign), just like how
Seed7 has an infinitely long extended period of unemployment before
it was invented. But Lisp has *some* employment (17.7 years ago) to
break the long stretch of unemployment, so Lisp is better than
Seed7, having *only* 17.7 years unemployment compared to an
infinite amount of unemployment.
Or we could do a proportional way of calculating merit over the
lifetime of the language. Lisp is 50 years old, and I was earning
money at Lisp for about 10 of those years (and using it for 35 of
those years), so Lisp is 20% good per employment and 70% good per
usefulness, whereas Seed7 is 0% good per employment. (YMMV. Is
there anyone who was using the very first implementation of Lisp
for productive work and has continued to use various versions of
Lisp for the whole 50 years thus getting 100% usefulness out of
it?)
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> I'm not saying he does or doesn't have such competence, but just
> that it's unrelated to the real reason why he can't get a job.
According to most of the experts, getting a job depends almost not
at all on what you can do and almost all on whom you know.
Unfortunately I don't know anyone, so all my skills at writing
software go unnoticed. Starting in early 2001 I put up CGI demos so
that people on the net could look at samples of what I can do, thus
become familiar with my abilities to develop working software
applications, but I don't know how to find anyone in the local area
willing to look at my demos and discuss them with me. Several total
strangers I've never met, living thousands of miles from me, have
tried my demos and said they liked them, but they were of no help
in setting me up with local employers. The one local person who was
willing to experience a demo of my very first CGI demo in early
2001, a recruiter at Volt in Mountain View, really liked my demo,
but said his agency recruits *only* for MicroSoft, and they aren't
hiring. When I contacted him again in more recent years, he said
that MicroSoft still wasn't hiring. I haven't yet found even one
person with connections in industry in the local area to let me
show a demo of my more recent and serious CGI applications.
thomas...@gmx.at
http://tinyurl.com/uh3t) wrote:
> (After claim that Common Lisp is best language for not getting a paying job:)
>
> > From: "eric-and-jane-smith" <nore...@nospam.com>
> > Even better than Seed7?
>
Well, Seed7 can be used for WebServer applications, but I admit
that the release does not contain CGI examples. I have to polish
my CGI examples a little bit before I release them. Additionally
I need to write documentation how to write CGI programs in Seed7.
I also plan to extend Comanche, the WebServer for static pages,
released with seed7_05_20090510 such that it is capable to
execute CGI programs.
> rendering it moot in discussions between Common Lisp or Java or C
> or C++ etc. all of which can.
I thought this is not a language comparison discussion.
> There is actually one *new* (unknown)
> language which has passed the test of 3-steps-past-hello-CGI (full
> HTML FORM decoding), namely Flaming Thunder. For all 7 languages
> that pass that test, see:
> <http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/HelloPlus/hellos.html#step3>
After looking at your page for 10 seconds I found the following:
There is a switch to bold (with <b>), probably to highlight
a Warning, but it never switches back to normal. Maybe you
should fix that bug.
thomas...@gmx.at
http://tinyurl.com/uh3t) wrote:
> > > > But it is the best language to stay unemployed.
> > > Even better than Seed7?
> > From: thomas.mer...@gmx.at
> > Yes, in this regard I consider Lisp as the best language ever.
> > At least I have never heard of a person being unemployed
> > for more than a dozen years because of Seed7 ...
>
The dialog above uses a concept which might be unknown
to you. Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humour
for an explanation of this concept.
[snip paragraph because keyword 'Lisp' was used]
And now for something completely different.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> ... I had discussions with several Lisp enthusiast which did not
> show any people skills. The habbit to suppose that everybody, who
> doesn't have the same opinion is an idiot, is not really helpful to
> convince people.
What you describe there is not so much a lack of a people skill but
the presence of a distinctly un-skill. Fortunately I don't have
that un-skill. My approach is to try to find when a person has time
to listen to my idea, then to present my idea and express my belief
that it's a great idea and ask what they think of it. Then I try to
reasonably deal with any problems they see, for example by
proposing a possible solution to the problem. Unfortunately even
the several people who claimed to really like my idea, don't have
any time to spend working with me on developing the idea, and don't
have time to proofread my preliminary idea-specs, etc., so their
liking the idea doesn't turn out to be of any practical use to me.
As for the several pitches I've made in various threads in several
newsgroups, and on Twitter, for my tinyurl.com/NewEco and its
various individual services, not one person has sent me e-mail
expressing interest much less willingness to work with me on
developing the idea. But when I checked my tinyurl.com/Portl1
shortly after I got the connection-logger running, I saw that
connections had come in from several places around the world:
Cablecom GmbH, Zuerich, CH
NTL Infrastructure, Leeds, GB
Milanese, Italy
Hamburg, Germany
Buenos Aires, AR
Oslo, NO
Barnaul, RU
Jazztel, ES
Tampere, FI
as well as various places in the USA:
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
PaeTec, Fairport, NY / Saffron Technologies, Morrisville, NC
University of New Mexico / CS
Activision, Santa Monica, CA
Google Inc.
Comcast
The hit from Google was obviously an attempt to spider my site,
which isn't possible beyond the first stage of logging portal
because of the Turing test to protect all access beyond that point,
so Google probably didn't get much to put in their index. I haven't
checked back since May.03 to see if any new IP numbers connected
since then, from even more places around the world. Hmm, would it
be perverse to compare the number of countries connecting to my
tinyurl.com/Portl1 to the number of countries with confirmed cases
of Mexican A-H1N1 flu, and notice that as of May.03 they were
approximately the same number although different in details? (For
example, my site had Italy Argentina and Norway, which the flu had
not yet reached, but lacked New Zealand France and most notably
Mexico!)
Hmm, I did a Google search for text in the contents of the PHP
script that was spidered via tinyurl.com/Portl1, and there were no
matches, so why did Google spider it but not yet include it in
their index nearly a week later? Was it deemed not worth including?
Or was the logged connection *not* their spider but actually some
real live person at Google interested in my NewEco portal?
> Discussions are about exchanging opinions and not about forcing
> an opinion to others.
Yes. Unfortuately in RL I have been unable to find anybody with
enough intelligence and presence of mind to understand my ideas yet
enough spare time to seriously discuss them with me.
> By pure coincidence I just bought a book about Lisp a few days
> ago. I had some Lisp knowledge already and wanted more
> information. From what I have seen so far I can tell you:
> I will not turn into a Lisp fan. :-)
Reading a book is just about the worst possible way to become
enlightened as to the value of *totally* interactive development of
computer software made possible by the R-E-P loop together with
identical seantics between typed-in-REP-code an compiled code
(unlike Java, where BeanShell REP is grossly different in semantics
from compiled code).
If and when I get tinyurl.com/NewEco up&running, whereby anyone can
get an account and log in and browse Requests For Bids (RFBs) and
post bids in response and the lowest bidder then works for "pay"
(credit on the system that can't be cashed out at present but can
be used to purchase services from the system or from other
laborers), would you be willing to try your hand at bidding on some
Lisp software contracts (tasks I could do myself but I have far too
much "on my plate" to have time to write *all* the code myself),
little tasks that take a few seconds or up to five minutes, where
you write just a couple lines of Lisp code, or maybe you write one
complete function per spec. Alternately would you be willing to bid
on contracts for writing Seed7 code? Or is Seed7 incapable of
easily being programmed to do most of the data-processing tasks I'd
be wanting done? Or are you collecting $50/hr for Seed7 coding
already so you wouldn't waste your valuable time writing Seed7 code
for anything less than $50/hr?
Here are examples of small tasks I might submit for bids (in Seed7 or whatever):
- Given a large integer, break it into byte-fields per some spec,
such as some fixed-width fields and some UTF-8 variable-length
values. (Inverse of the next task.)
- Given various fields as small integers, express each as
fixed-width or UTF-8 code and append together to make a large
integer. (Inverse of the previous task.)
- Given an associative array containing the decoded HTML FORM contents,
check whether a particular field is present, and if not go down
one branch (stub for the present), else check several specific
possible values for that field and dispatch to appropriate branch
(each stub for present).
- Given the timestamp A3 when a particular "card" was last
finished, and the timestamp B1 when that "card" was scheduled to
be re-started, and the timestamp B2 when that "card" was
actually re-started (sometime after schedule if the system was
busy with something else so it had to be queued for later),
calculate the delta-time from A3 to each of B1 and B2 and
compute the geometric mean ABG of those two delta-times.
- Given the timestamp B3 when the "card" was just now finished
again, and the ABG computed earlier, multiple ABG times a
randomly generated scale factor per a formula I provide, and add
that to B3, to generate the expected time C1 when this "card" is
scheduled to be started *next* time.
- Given a set of "cards", each with scheduled time to be processed
next, all in one table within a MySQL database, determine which
are already (over-)due and which are not yet due, count the due
set, and choose the "card" in the due set that is most overdue.
(2 return values: count, and most-overdue card)
Do you think it would take longer than 5 minutes to write and test
and submit the code for any of those single tasks in Seed7?
This would probably take longer than 5 minutes to code, so I'd need
to break it down into smaller tasks before posting RFBs for each,
or else wait until I have procedures that would support such larger
tasks and a user-base large enough that I'd get more than one bid
for such a large task:
- Given two strings (of text), find the largest matching
sub-string, and from what remains (no overlap allowed)
recursively find the next-largest matching sub-string, providing
that each match is at least two characters long. Return list of
triples showing sub-string and location within each of the two
given strings.
How long do you think it would take to program that in Seed7?
How efficient would it be for moderate-sized strings (appx. 50 to
200 characters in each of the given strings, with matching segments
of all possible lengths, sometimes most of the strings match as one
huge single sub-string, sometimes there are lots of tiny
3-character and 2-character pieces matching but the sequence of
them is scrambled from one input string to the other)?
thomas...@gmx.at
> Lew wrote:
> >> Either that or the book he bought is good enough to convince him not
> >> to learn Lisp.
> eric-and-jane-smith wrote:
> > You mean bad enough.
>
> No, I really don't. I am in the habit of saying exactly what I mean, for the
> most part, and this was one of those times. I really don't think I was at all
> unclear in my statement that it would be subject to misinterpretation.
>
> > It's not likely that there's any Lisp book that tries
> > to convince people not to learn Lisp. So, if it's a good book, it's far
> > more likely to convince him to learn it. A bad book can convince him not
> > to learn it, in the same sense that a bad math teacher can convince
> > students that they don't like math.
>
> A good book will give an accurate picture of the language, its capabilities
> and its shortcomings. Whether it's trying to convince someone not to use the
> language or to use it is irrelevant; an honest assessment might well convince
> someone not to use it.
You hit the spot. I want objective (neutral point of view)
information.
Why someone thinks that reading a book about Lisp or learning
it, would automatically turn me into a Lisp fan, is beyond my
comprehension (In other words: Is the pope catholic?).
BTW. I took several lectures about Lisp and AI at the university.
That way I am already familiar with car, cdr, caaadr, cons, setq,
dotted pairs, propertys, s-expressions, lambda, deffun, defmacro,
programs as data and other Lisp concepts. I just don't get
enthusiastic about this concepts because I miss other concepts
which IMHO also have some value. I will not start a discussion
about this concepts since I already know how Lisp fanatics
react:
- Either a concept is present in Lisp and therefore considered
great.
- Or a concept is missing in Lisp which renders it unnecessary
and stupid.
My answer to "How should a language look like?" is Seed7.
Seed7 is far from perfect and needs improvement at many
places, but at least some basic concepts are done in a way
I think they should be done. If you find places where Seed7
should be improved, please tell me.
> I certainly have encountered many informative references for languages, pretty
> much all of which were partisan to their respective topics, that convinced me
> not to use those languages. No reflection on the languages, necessarily, it's
> just that good information allowed me to make an informed assessment whether I
> should invest time and energy in them.
I hope you invest some time to look at Seed7. :-)
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> A good book will give an accurate picture of the language, its
> capabilities and its shortcomings. Whether it's trying to convince
> someone not to use the language or to use it is irrelevant; an
> honest assessment might well convince someone not to use it.
I agree. But in the case of Lisp I respectfully submit that any
such book might recommend not using Lisp specifically to earn lots
of money as "software engineer" but would surely recommend using
Lisp for writing your own software applications, taking advantage
of rapid development of code in a wide variety of data-processing
areas. Any book that flat out advised never using Lisp for any
purpose couldn't possibly be "good" as you described.
Please look at:
<http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/HelloPlus/hellos.html#s4outl>
and scroll down to Lesson 6 (comparison of languages) and tell me
if you disagree with my main point that Lisp is great overall,
except for specific areas where one of the other languages might be
better. IMO the "good book" you described ought to say something
approximately like what I say there.
Note, if you have suggestions for additions to what I wrote there,
such as additional problem domains where some other language is
much better than Lisp, please tell me!!
Note that for embedded systems, C used to be the only mainstream
language available (with Forth being better for some purposes
although not "mainstream" IMO), but nowadays Java is used a lot in
embedded systems such as cell-phones. I'm not sure what if anything
I should say about this topic in Lesson 6.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> > > > Even better than Seed7?
> > > At least I have never heard of a person being unemployed
> > > for more than a dozen years because of Seed7 ...
> > That's a bogus argument, ...
> The dialog above uses a concept which might be unknown
> to you. Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humour
> for an explanation of this concept.
Oh no, you're mistaken. I am quite familiar with humor. One of my
favorite TV programs this past season is intensely full of humor.
"The Big Bang Theory"
It was just that after all these months of you hawking Seed7 as
better than Lisp, seriously, not as a joke, it was such a surprise
for you to have given up that and now just make a *joke* about
Seed7 being better than Lisp, not to be taken seriously, that such
an unexpected event completely missed being treated by my mind as a
likely event. Well, then, I'm very pleased you are now treating
Seed7 as a joke rather than a serious programming language.
Note: You have not yet provided an online demo of how Seed7 can be
used as a CGI application, many months after I challenged you to do
so, so at this point I am quite sure either Seed7 isn't a serious
language for such purposes or you are ashamed to show the ugly code
in Seed7 that would be required for such a demo. So maybe it's just
as well that you now accept Seed7 as just a joke.
By the way, what do you think of the Flaming Thunder CGI demo that
was posted sometime last year (or maybe the year before)? Flaming
Thunder succeeds where Seed7 failed.
BTW, if you change your mind again, want to treat Seed7 as serious
again, that CGI-demo challenge remains, so any time you want to
demonstrate that Seed7 can do CGI, feel free to contact me to show
me your demo. Until then, enjoy your humor.
Nicolas Neuss
> which IMHO also have some value. I will not start a discussion
> about this concepts since I already know how Lisp fanatics
> react:
>
> - Either a concept is present in Lisp and therefore considered
> great.
>
> - Or a concept is missing in Lisp which renders it unnecessary
> and stupid.
Hmm, I consider myself a Lisp fan and would not want to choose between
these two statements. Maybe you should refine your simplistic world
view a little qbit?
Nicolas
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> ... Seed7 can be used for WebServer applications, but I admit
> that the release does not contain CGI examples. I have to polish
> my CGI examples a little bit before I release them.
I'm looking forward to when you do that. But note that the CGI
examples in my helloCGI+steps document are very simple, completely
toy, trivial, just to demonstrate the one principle without mixing
in a bunch of Red Herrings. If you can just translate my demos
directly to Seed7, that would be best.
For more serious CGI examples, showing major things a CGI
application needs in addition to just decoding the HTML FORM
contents, such as validating contents of textfield to be an
integer, or handling cookies, see:
<http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/HelloPlus/CookBook/h4s.html>
After you get the super-basic toy demo of CGI FORM decoding, I hope
you go ahead to also translate those more serious cookbook examples
to Seed7.
> Additionally I need to write documentation how to write CGI
> programs in Seed7.
IMO, once a student knows how to do general D/P software in Seed7
(or any language), all it takes to learn CGI programming is a set
of trivial demos of major aspects (HTML FORM decoding, validating
various kinds of fields from the form, handling cookies, generating
output of HTML either by inline spewing or by DOM, etc.) with very
little additional text needed to explain what each unit of code is
doing. There's a PHP tutorial I like, see tinyurl.com/phptut, which
is one possible amount/style of documentation for how to do various
things. It's divided into just-starting tutorials about each
different *kind* of thing being handled, and corresponding manual
listing *every* function available for such kind of thing being
handled. I'm not saying that's the best way to do such a tutorial,
but it's a good starting point for thinking of how you want to do
it. I seem to recall your Seed7 tutorial is actually somewhat
similar in verbosity/style. Sun's J2SE JavaDoc is another good
example.
If and when I find time to re-do my cookbook/matrix, it'll be
somewhat different, heavily emphasizing the concept of intentional
datatypes, making clear distinction between the intentional
datatype that expresses what you need and the actual datatype that
affects speed of various operations. For example, Lisp uses binary
integers, which make bit/byte-extraction/building fast but decimal
I/O and digit-extracting slow, whereas PHP uses decimal-digit
strings to represent big integers, making bit/byte
extraction/building rather slow but decimal I/O and digit
extraction fast. Same intentional data type (unsigned integer), two
different actual datatypes that make different operations fast. For
another example, a *set* can be implemented as array or linked list
or hash table or self-balancing binary-search tree, each with its
own particular sets of operations that are fast vs. slow. Finally,
there's UTF-8 (usually compact, but variable length) vs.
fixed-length 32-bit UniCodes (takes more space, but is easier to
scan and count length of string etc.).
> > ... see: <http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/HelloPlus/hellos.html#step3>
> After looking at your page for 10 seconds I found the following:
> There is a switch to bold (with <b>), probably to highlight
> a Warning, but it never switches back to normal. Maybe you
> should fix that bug.
Thanks for the heads up. I ran the W3C validator on that WebPage,
and found that (missing 'b' character so I had </> instead of </b>)
as well as two other errors (<br> in wrong place just after </li>
instead of earlier, because the </li> was misplaced). Fixed all
three, so it now validates fine. In all the months since I
previously edited that file and screwed up those three places, you
are the first to find one of them and tell me. If you happen to
notice any other of my active Web pages that fail validation,
please let me know.
Never mind checking the HTML in my PHP scripts for now, because
calls to 'die' don't add the </body></html> that they really
should, so there's no way a PHP script that uses die can pass
validation. And on the free PHP/MySQL hosting sites I'm using, it's
even worse: JavaScript and advertisements are added by the server
in ways that totally break the almost-valid HTML that my PHP script
is generating, for example:
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fcalrobert.freehost10.com%2Fportal1.php&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0>
thomas...@gmx.at
wrote:
As I already said: This is not my simplisic world view.
Proof: Just tell me about great language features that are
missing in Lisp.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> If you have a computer, preferably one with at least 2GB RAM by
> the way, then all you have to do is download Geronimo, JBoss,
> and/or GlassFish, follow the installation instructions, and Bob's
> your uncle.
My computer has only 8 MB of RAM, and the 160MB hard disk has less
than 9 MB empty at the moment.
> Do you own a computer?
> How much RAM does it have?
See above, or see:
<http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/NewPub/mySituation.html>
> > would write. I would not at all be comfortable editing a wiki of
> > source-code where I have not *ever* tested even one line of code in
> > WebSphere or JBoss much less the actual made-up code I'm adding to
> So test what you write.
How would you propose I do that on my Macintosh Performa with only
8 MB RAM?
> I would offer different advice from contributing to JBoss or WebSphere,
> though. I'd use them to practice Java EE coding and deployment
> skills, not to contribute to the platforms themselves. One would
> need experience relying on the platforms before daring to modify
> them.
My assumption is those help-wanted ads that require 3 years
experience programming in/with JBoss and WebSphere involve *using*
them rather than *implementing/modifying* them per se. But to tell
the truth, since I have never even **seen** either much less used
either in any way whatsoever, it didn't seem important to waste the
hiring manager's time with attempts to learn more about the jobs I
grossly didn't qualify for in the first place.
> Your caution about contributing to projects without actual
> deployment is well founded. Your concern that you can't download
> or run a Java EE web server is n ot.
Neither the public library, nor CONNECT/NOVA in the EDD building,
nor the semi-public lab in my apartment complex, would allow me to
download **anything** whatsoever, never mind something as major as
J2EE. And as I implied above, 8 MB RAM on my own personal Macintosh
isn't enough to even boot up J2EE never mind no disk space to put
it in the first place.
For the time being, I'll stick to PHP/MySQL and CGI/CMUCL where I
can implement my tinyurl.com/NewEco + tinyurl.com/Portl1, where if
it succeeds I'll be as famous as Adam Smith or Thomas Jefferson or
FDR, a lot more famous than Bill Gates or Alan Greenspan or Richard
Stallman. (If Bill and Melinda manage to completely wipe out
HIV/AIDS in Africa, then worldwide, maybe they'll be as famous as
Salk and Sabin, but I seriously doubt they'll succeed that
completely, but it's nice that they're trying.)
Espen Vestre
writes:
> How would you propose I do that on my Macintosh Performa with only
> 8 MB RAM?
Good grief. Go to the nearest trash dump and pick up something from this
millenium!
--
(espen)
Tamas K Papp
> data and other Lisp concepts. I just don't get enthusiastic about this
> concepts because I miss other concepts which IMHO also have some value.
> I will not start a discussion about this concepts since I already know
Well, then your statement is pretty vacuous, it amounts to "I don't
like it, but I am not telling you why because then you would reason
with me."
> I hope you invest some time to look at Seed7. :-)
I did, and I can't say I see anything special about it that would make
me even consider it, I can't see any novel features in it. Also, the
claim that it is extensible is pretty empty, it seems no more
extensible than most contemporary languages (and of course it is way
less extensible than Lisp). Designing another Pascal variant in the
21th century is unnecessary. Also, listing "user defined statements
and operators" as a feature sounds like advertising you car "with
wheels included".
Tamas
Nicolas Neuss
> On 13 Mai, 10:52, Nicolas Neuss <lastn...@math.uni-karlsruhe.de>
> wrote:
>> thomas.mer...@gmx.at writes:
>> > which IMHO also have some value. I will not start a discussion
>> > about this concepts since I already know how Lisp fanatics
>> > react:
>>
>> > - Either a concept is present in Lisp and therefore considered
>> > � great.
>>
>> > - Or a concept is missing in Lisp which renders it unnecessary
>> > � and stupid.
>>
>> Hmm, I consider myself a Lisp fan and would not want to choose between
>> these two statements. �Maybe you should refine your simplistic world
>> view a little qbit?
>
> As I already said: This is not my simplisic world view.
> Proof: Just tell me about great language features that are
> missing in Lisp.
Easy: As every Lisp fan knows there are important things like
multitthreading, uniform dictionary access, etc, that are not portable
across Common Lisp implementations. And there are only few libraries
compared with, say, Python.
So your problem with the too simplistic world view apparently remains.
Nicolas
Lew
>> A good book will give an accurate picture of the language, its
>> capabilities and its shortcomings. Whether it's trying to convince
>> someone not to use the language or to use it is irrelevant; an
>> honest assessment might well convince someone not to use it.
>
> I agree. But in the case of Lisp I respectfully submit that any
> such book might recommend not using Lisp specifically to earn lots
> of money as "software engineer" but would surely recommend using
> Lisp for writing your own software applications, taking advantage
> of rapid development of code in a wide variety of data-processing
> areas. Any book that flat out advised never using Lisp for any
> purpose couldn't possibly be "good" as you described.
Irrelevant. We aren't talking about books that recommend, but books that
describe.
> Please look at:
> <http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/HelloPlus/hellos.html#s4outl>
> and scroll down to Lesson 6 (comparison of languages) and tell me
> if you disagree with my main point that Lisp is great overall,
I'm not looking at the page, being already familiar with Lisp.
> except for specific areas where one of the other languages might be
> better. IMO the "good book" you described ought to say something
> approximately like what I say there.
Whatever. I am not at all concerned with whether Lisp or any other language
is "great overall" - there are lots of "great" languages that I don't use.
Being "great" is not a criterion for whether to use it. A good book will
teach the language well enough that one can assess its utility in the context
of one's own needs, partisanship aside.
My context is along the lines of, "Would Lisp be suitable for a large-scale
insurance claim-processing system built by a team of a dozen programmers of
varying experience, maintained over several years, compared to alternatives
like C# or Java?"
--
Lew
Lew
>> So test what you write.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t wrote:
> How would you propose I do that on my Macintosh Performa with only
> 8 MB RAM?
Upgrade.
You can't learn to be a carpenter using only a toy hammer. You either need
better tools yourself or find someone who has them and is willing to let you
use them to learn.
You can't use excuses like, "My computer only has 8 MB RAM" to avoid learning
your skills, then complain that employers won't hire you because you lack
those skills.
You will make no progress in life until you stop making excuses and start
taking responsibility.
--
Lew
Tamas K Papp
I think you misunderstand his intentions. Making excuses and avoiding
responsibility is precisely his purpose.
A while ago he started a similar thread, and not being aware of who he
was I tried to help him with his CV. All I got in reply was verbal
abuse and excuses.
Similarly, one can get a 2-4 year old PC that is perfectly suitable
for programming in Lisp (or whatever language) with a CRT screen for
peanuts. It is just more convenient to keep the old one and complain
about what he cannot do with it. Sad, but you cannot help him.
Tamas
thomas...@gmx.at
> On Wed, 13 May 2009 00:55:30 -0700, thomas.mertes wrote:
> > data and other Lisp concepts. I just don't get enthusiastic about this
> > concepts because I miss other concepts which IMHO also have some value.
> > I will not start a discussion about this concepts since I already know
>
http://seed7.sourceforge.net/faq.htm#lisp_comparison
Static type checking is not new, but it has some vantages
ignored by fans of dynamic typing:
http://seed7.sourceforge.net/faq.htm#static_type_checking
http://seed7.sourceforge.net/faq.htm#development_speed_and_type_checking
> > I hope you invest some time to look at Seed7. :-)
>
> I can't see any novel features in it.
Well, it is probably impossible to get any positive message
from a typical Lisp enthusiast, but there are some features.
What about the possibility to define the syntax of constructs:
http://seed7.sourceforge.net/manual/syntax.htm
> Designing another Pascal variant ...
Just because it looks like a Wirth language does not make
one. The inner workings are totally different to Pascal.
AFAIK Pascal does not have a OO system with multiple
dispatch
file:///M:/seed7_5/htdocs/manual/objects.htm
What about the (theoretic) possibility to boot a different
language:
http://seed7.sourceforge.net/faq.htm#boot_a_language
> Also, listing "user defined statements
> and operators" as a feature sounds like advertising you car "with
> wheels included".
I am talking about defining statements/operators syntactically
and semantically. I know that you think the + in (+ 1 2) is an
operator while others would see it as function. I am talking
about the infix operator + in 1 + 2. I would really be amazed
when a Lisp fan would admit that syntax matters and that
there is a difference (+ 1 2) between and 1 + 2 .
From my point of view there is a difference between round
and square wheels although both are made from rubber.
And stating that your favourite car company added the
weels already 40 years ago does not make them round.
Sorry for being that harsh, but I have been attacked by Lisp
fans to often. Generally such sarcastic flamewars lead to
nowhere. Users of many different languages should talk
about pros and cons of various features and how they are
done in this languages. Nobody should question the
intelligence or attack others just for having a different
opinion.
BTW: It is my opinion that syntax matters and that a
static type system and many other things make sense.
thomas...@gmx.at
wrote:
> thomas.mer...@gmx.at writes:
> > On 13 Mai, 10:52, Nicolas Neuss <lastn...@math.uni-karlsruhe.de>
> > wrote:
> >> thomas.mer...@gmx.at writes:
> >> > which IMHO also have some value. I will not start a discussion
> >> > about this concepts since I already know how Lisp fanatics
> >> > react:
>
> >> > - Either a concept is present in Lisp and therefore considered
> >> > great.
>
> >> > - Or a concept is missing in Lisp which renders it unnecessary
> >> > and stupid.
>
> >> Hmm, I consider myself a Lisp fan and would not want to choose between
> >> these two statements. Maybe you should refine your simplistic world
> >> view a little qbit?
>
> > As I already said: This is not my simplisic world view.
> > Proof: Just tell me about great language features that are
> > missing in Lisp.
>
> Easy: As every Lisp fan knows there are important things like
> multitthreading, uniform dictionary access, etc, that are not portable
> across Common Lisp implementations. And there are only few libraries
> compared with, say, Python.
For which areas are libraries missing?
What about static type checking and other concepts present
in competing programming languages?
> So your problem with the too simplistic world view apparently remains.
No, I have no problem with people who have a simplistic
world view. :-)
Nicolas Neuss
> Static type checking is not new, but it has some vantages
> ignored by fans of dynamic typing:
Hey, guy-with-the-simple-world-view, I'm a fan of dynamic typing and
additionally I'm very happy that my usual Lisp compiler (SBCL) does quite a
lot of static type checks at compile time. I would appreciate it if it did
even more.
> I am talking about defining statements/operators syntactically
> and semantically. I know that you think the + in (+ 1 2) is an
> operator while others would see it as function.
Why do you think that? + is an ordinary function.
> I am talking about the infix operator + in 1 + 2. I would really be
> amazed when a Lisp fan would admit that syntax matters and that there is
> a difference (+ 1 2) between and 1 + 2 .
Oh, you guy-with-the-simple-world-view, as I said I'm a fan of Lisp.
Nevertheless, I admit that syntax matters and that there is a difference (+
1 2) between and 1+2. I even routinely use the infix package in Common
Lisp for more complicated arithmetic expressions, where I can write
CL-USER> (require :infix)
CL-USER> #I(2+exp(2*pi))
537.4916555247646
> [...] Nobody should question the intelligence or attack others just for
> having a different opinion.
That's the right philosophy. But you should follow it yourself, such that
it becomes easier for your opponents to take you seriously.
> BTW: It is my opinion that syntax matters and that a
> static type system and many other things make sense.
Yes, of course. And also a simple syntax and a dynamic type system make
sense. And for me, the perfect world is where you have a choice between
those options.
> Greetings Thomas Mertes
Yours, Nicolas
RedGrittyBrick
Lew wrote:
> From: Lew
>>> So test what you write.
>
> Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t wrote:
>> How would you propose I do that on my Macintosh Performa with only
>> 8 MB RAM?
>
> Upgrade.
>
In the URL Robert posted it says "Assets: Nearly zero cash on hand or in
bank, offset by appx. $64,000 credit-card debts ... Cashflow: Income
exceeds normal living expenses (not including food) by less than $10/month."
I like to imagine I'd sweep roads or flip burgers to bootstrap a better
career and escape such circumstances.
--
RGB
Tamas K Papp
> On 13 Mai, 13:06, Tamas K Papp <tkp...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I can't see any novel features in it.
>
> Well, it is probably impossible to get any positive message from a
> typical Lisp enthusiast, but there are some features. What about the
> possibility to define the syntax of constructs:
>
> http://seed7.sourceforge.net/manual/syntax.htm
I find macros much more powerful, thanks.
> Just because it looks like a Wirth language does not make one. The inner
> workings are totally different to Pascal. AFAIK Pascal does not have a
> OO system with multiple dispatch
>
> file:///M:/seed7_5/htdocs/manual/objects.htm
Again, this is not a feature that I am missing in Lisp.
> What about the (theoretic) possibility to boot a different language:
>
> http://seed7.sourceforge.net/faq.htm#boot_a_language
DSLs are used routinely in Lisp.
> I am talking about defining statements/operators syntactically and
> semantically. I know that you think the + in (+ 1 2) is an operator
> while others would see it as function. I am talking about the infix
> operator + in 1 + 2. I would really be amazed when a Lisp fan would
> admit that syntax matters and that there is a difference (+ 1 2) between
> and 1 + 2 .
By switching to infix, you introduce the distinction, and later you
try to fix it. I would rather not create the problem in the first
place.
> Sorry for being that harsh, but I have been attacked by Lisp fans to
> often. Generally such sarcastic flamewars lead to nowhere. Users of
You are not being harsh, and you are not being attacked. Criticism
should not be taken as an attack, and I will judge your responses by
their content, not their tone.
> features and how they are done in this languages. Nobody should question
> the intelligence or attack others just for having a different opinion.
Again, there is no need to take things personally, please do not try
to claim that I am questioning your intelligence. I was just
questioning the usefulness of Seed7 from my point of view, which is an
entirely legitimate thing to do.
Tamas
eric-and-jane-smith
news:aab22bec-1f87-4ec4...@s28g2000vbp.googlegroups.com:
> when a Lisp fan would admit that syntax matters and that
> there is a difference (+ 1 2) between and 1 + 2 .
A typical big Lisp program partly writes itself, so the programmer
doesn't have to do as much work. In some cases more than 90% of the
program can be written by itself. (+ 1 2) is easier for it to understand
and work with, so the programmer doesn't have to do as much work on the
parts of the program that write other parts of the program.
Most Lispers don't really claim Lisp is necessarily the most
mathematically elegant or beautiful. Only that it saves huge amounts of
work, lets the programmer tackle much more ambitious projects, and yields
very high quality code at much lower cost than with other programming
languages.
Lisp has ways to use expressions such as (1 + 2), but, most experienced
Lisp programmers prefer (+ 1 2) because its advantages outweigh its
disadvantages overall, even if it seems worse at first glance.
When reading a Lisp book, you should keep in mind that a lot of Lisp
books are written by people who are in the process of learning Lisp
themselves, and were inspired to write a book about it because they found
an interesting corner of the language that made them think they had
discovered its key advantage.
Some of the best Lisp books are written by very creative people, who are
never satisfied with anything, which is what makes them creative.
Creative people tend to complain about things, even if the things they
complain about are far better than anything else they ever encountered.
Because, they compare the reality with an ideal, which they hope to
accomplish in the future, rather than comparing it with something else
that already exists.
thomas...@gmx.at
http://tinyurl.com/uh3t) wrote:
> > > > > > But it is the best language to stay unemployed.
> > > > > Even better than Seed7?
> > > > Yes, in this regard I consider Lisp as the best language ever.
> > > > At least I have never heard of a person being unemployed
> > > > for more than a dozen years because of Seed7 ...
> > > That's a bogus argument, ...
> > From: thomas.mer...@gmx.at
> > The dialog above uses a concept which might be unknown
> > for an explanation of this concept.
>
> Oh no, you're mistaken. I am quite familiar with humor. One of my
> favorite TV programs this past season is intensely full of humor.
> "The Big Bang Theory"
> It was just that after all these months of you hawking Seed7 as
In most cases I don't see a language superior to another.
Languages are just different and have different purposes.
There are different philosophies behind languages. If you
compare languages this philosophies must be taken into
account. Such a philosopy can be a dynamic or a static
type system. There can be endles flamewars about such
issues but they lead to nowhere. When a language
uses some philosophies as base it is interesting how far
you can go with that. The same words can mean different
things to different people. So unified syntax or user defined
syntax can both have their advantages.
> Note: You have not yet provided an online demo of how Seed7 can be
> used as a CGI application, many months after I challenged you to do
> so, ...
Sorry, but I have many things to do. Wife, children, work,
garden and other hobbies beside Seed7 all take time.
BTW: Persons who accept every challenge are busy with
duels all the time...
When I have time I will add CGI examples to the release
(Note that I didn't mention when it will happen).
> so at this point I am quite sure either Seed7 isn't a serious
> language for such purposes or you are ashamed to show the ugly code
> in Seed7 that would be required for such a demo. So maybe it's just
> as well that you now accept Seed7 as just a joke.
Your people skills should definitely be improved.
You cannot manipulate me this way. I am too much
self-confident for this tactic to work.
> By the way, what do you think of the Flaming Thunder CGI demo that
> was posted sometime last year (or maybe the year before)? Flaming
> Thunder succeeds where Seed7 failed.
At least I succeeded in finding a job last year.
BTW: Several people in this discussion made suggestions
how you could get a job. I noticed that you don't seem to
follow the suggestions. Some of them seem pretty reasonable.
So take my advice: Try to improve your people skills,
concentrate on things searched by companies and follow
the reasonable suggestions given by other people in
this discussion.
thomas...@gmx.at
wrote:
> thomas.mer...@gmx.at writes:
> > Static type checking is not new, but it has some vantages
> > ignored by fans of dynamic typing:
>
> Hey, guy-with-the-simple-world-view
Would you please stop your ad hominem attacks
[Rest of mail ignored because of an ad hominem attack]
eric-and-jane-smith
> My context is along the lines of, "Would Lisp be suitable for a
> large-scale insurance claim-processing system built by a team of a
> dozen programmers of varying experience, maintained over several
> years, compared to alternatives like C# or Java?"
A typical highly effective use of Common Lisp for that would be that the
Lisp programmer would develop and maintain domain specific languages for
the various parts of the insurance business, and there would be people
whose expertise is in those parts of the business, who would write the
programs in those languages. The languages could be made to look more
like entering data in forms than writing programs, if that would be the
appropriate interface for the people who would do that particular work.
I don't know the insurance business well enough to give good examples,
but, as another example, suppose you have a big telephone company, that
provides both landline and wireless service to a number of cities and
states in the USA. Suppose you want to write a call center application,
so business and residential phone customers could call and make changes
to their phone service, and the call center employee could enter the
changes in real time, notifying the customer during the same call of all
the relevant details, such as their local taxes on various parts of their
service, etc. The phone company might provide thousands of different
items of phone equipment to businesses, and have a huge database of rules
and logic to determine what equipment will work together, what rates will
apply in different places at different times, etc.
A Common Lisp programmer could provide domain specific languages for
various aspects of the system, such as the database entry for the logic
rules. The people doing the database entry could be construed to be
programming the database. All other parts of the system could be
construed to be variations of the same theme. In a typical big phone
company, a system such as that is being changed constantly, to accomodate
new equipment, new taxes, changes in temporary promotions, etc. They
would typically have a large number of people spending full time entering
changes into the various databases that compose the system, such as the
above-mentioned logic rules database, etc.
By using application-specific languages, the work of all those people
could be done better and faster than if they had to struggle with
interfaces that weren't designed for their specific application.
Programmers in Java etc. often have to learn a lot of business rules and
how to implement them in Java etc. But the rules should have their own
language, so they can be stated clearly and concisely by people who are
already experts in those rules, rather than by programmers who have to
learn the rules to do the work. Common Lisp makes that kind of stuff
much easier, and can save a big company a huge amount of money, and give
them much higher quality software much sooner.
eric-and-jane-smith
> I'm not looking at the page, being already familiar with Lisp.
Being familiar with Lisp is not as straightforward as it seems. Synergy of
the different aspects of Common Lisp plays a key role in its power. You
can have a fairly broad overview and still not have the slightest hint of
its real power. You have to have a lot of experience with it before you
get the full benefit of it.
A lot of the mediocre reputation of CL comes from the fact that the people
who evangelize it the most are the ones who are excited about learning it.
They discover new programming concepts, not just new features. They get
all excited and try to explain to the world why it's so great. But they
miss most of its real power, because they're still beginners.
George Neuner
(Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t) wrote:
>Note that for embedded systems, C used to be the only mainstream
>language available (with Forth being better for some purposes
>although not "mainstream" IMO), but nowadays Java is used a lot in
>embedded systems such as cell-phones. I'm not sure what if anything
>I should say about this topic in Lesson 6.
I used to work in embedded systems. While C is the dominant player,
C++ is increasingly used today. There is a long history of embedded
devices being programmed in Pascal (and variants such as Modula-2). In
many industries, safety critical control systems are developed in Ada.
WRT Java, it is somewhat of an exaggeration to claim that it can be
used for embedded programming. Mostly it is used to develop hosted
user interfacing applications that are run on embedded devices.
Embedded programming, per se, is about direct hardware control and
coordination. With restrictions Java can sometimes be used for higher
level coordination software, but it can't be used for direct device
control nor can it realistically be used for most kinds of time
sensitive coordination software.[*]
[*] There is a so-called "real time Java specification", but to use RT
Java, the programmer must deal with a different concurrency model, and
give up GC and most of the standard libraries ... things which combine
to make time sensitive coding very different and very painful for Java
programmers. RT Java requires a special RT-JVM, which serves to limit
Java to programming mass produced devices for which a manufacturer has
made a RT-JVM available.
George
Frank GOENNINGER
This:
> http://seed7.sourceforge.net/faq.htm#development_speed_and_type_checking
Quoting from this text (author: Thomas):
"When comparing compile-time and runtime type checking it can be
concluded that dynamic typed languages save some programming time
by omitting type declarations, but this time must be paid back with
massive interest rates to do the debugging."
and this:
> BTW: It is my opinion that syntax matters and that a
> static type system and many other things make sense.
... gives quite some insight into the coding approach and coding style
chosen.
If you code with dynamic typing mind you will not have these "massive
interest rates to do debugging". Been there, done that: 20 years of C
coding (and C++, and ...) and 12 years of Common Lisp.
How many years, or better, applications actually in production use, do
you have with dynamic typed languages?
>
> Greetings Thomas Mertes
>
> Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net
> Seed7 - The extensible programming language: User defined statements
> and operators, abstract data types, templates without special
> syntax, OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch, statically typed,
> interpreted or compiled, portable, runs under linux/unix/windows.
Ah - Mac OS X?
Mit besten Gr��en (with best regards)
Frank
thomas...@gmx.at
> On Wed, 13 May 2009 08:44:37 -0700, thomas.mertes wrote:
> > On 13 Mai, 13:06, Tamas K Papp <tkp...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I can't see any novel features in it.
>
> > Well, it is probably impossible to get any positive message from a
> > typical Lisp enthusiast, but there are some features. What about the
> > possibility to define the syntax of constructs:
>
> >http://seed7.sourceforge.net/manual/syntax.htm
>
> I find macros much more powerful, thanks.
IMHO The logic of macros and syntax descriptions do only overlap in
part. Assume that the following expression is not a list but a
sequence of characters in a file:
a-b**c**d*e-f*g
Using the usual mathematic precedence rules gives the following
order of evaluation:
((a - ((b ** (c ** d)) * e)) - (f * g))
This order of evaluation is described with the following syntax
rules:
syntax expr: .(). ** .() is <- 4;
syntax expr: .(). * .() is -> 6;
syntax expr: .(). + .() is -> 7;
With just this syntax rules the expressions can be read from the
file. Sure some macros could do this as well, but that is not the
point. Most languages are turing equivalent and therefore they can
do the same things. The point is that some simple syntax rules are
able to turn a sequence of symbols into expressions and
subexpressions.
> > Just because it looks like a Wirth language does not make one. The inner
> > workings are totally different to Pascal. AFAIK Pascal does not have a
> > OO system with multiple dispatch
>
> > file:///M:/seed7_5/htdocs/manual/objects.htm
This should have been
http://seed7.sourceforge.net/manual/objects.htm
instead.
> Again, this is not a feature that I am missing in Lisp.
Interesting, you came to a conclusion although the link was not ok.
I thought that OO is present in Lisp. Maybe this is the reason you
don't miss it. Or maybe your answer was just too quick.
> > What about the (theoretic) possibility to boot a different language:
>
> >http://seed7.sourceforge.net/faq.htm#boot_a_language
>
> DSLs are used routinely in Lisp.
Lisp DSLs probably still use lists. This is not necessary when the
syntax can be changed. Please refrain from saying "You don't need
it" since a customer might have a different idea of what he needs.
> > I am talking about defining statements/operators syntactically and
> > semantically. I know that you think the + in (+ 1 2) is an operator
> > while others would see it as function. I am talking about the infix
> > operator + in 1 + 2. I would really be amazed when a Lisp fan would
> > admit that syntax matters and that there is a difference (+ 1 2) between
> > and 1 + 2 .
>
> By switching to infix, you introduce the distinction, and later you
> try to fix it.
Where you get the impression that I try to fix it? Infix is infix
and I don't need to fix it afterwards.
> I would rather not create the problem in the first
> place.
I see no problem with infix. You probably have other languages in
mind which use a relation between infix operator and corresponding
function. In Seed7 there is no corresponding function and
consequently no problem with infix operators.
> > Sorry for being that harsh, but I have been attacked by Lisp fans to
> > often. Generally such sarcastic flamewars lead to nowhere. Users of
>
> You are not being harsh, and you are not being attacked. Criticism
> should not be taken as an attack, and I will judge your responses by
> their content, not their tone.
Ok.
> > features and how they are done in this languages. Nobody should question
> > the intelligence or attack others just for having a different opinion.
>
> Again, there is no need to take things personally, please do not try
> to claim that I am questioning your intelligence. I was just
> questioning the usefulness of Seed7 from my point of view, which is an
> entirely legitimate thing to do.
I have no problem when people prefer other languages over Seed7. I
just don't like it when people shout out lound things that are not
really correct. Often wrong assumptions lead to the impression that
Seed7 contains nothing new. Seed7 is designed to imitate constructs
of other languages. It imitates statements of the Pascal/Modula/Ada
world, but the statements could also be totally different. So just
because it can look very conservative does not imply that it is a
form of Pascal. Seed7 is also designed to allow a look behind the
fence. BTW: How do the definitions of special operators like QUOTE,
IF and PROGN look like. Are they defined as macros (since they do
not evaluate all parameters they are probably not functions). In
Seed7 all predefined statements are (at least to some degree)
defined in the language. For a language from the Algol family this
is uncommon. When your goal is to immitate language constructs from
other languages syntax does matter. Seed7 was capable to emulate
the syntax and the semantic of a loop with middle exit which was
suggested by someone planing an Eiffel successor language. Sure
such things could be done with macros, preprocessors or other
technics in any language. In Seed7 this special technics were just
not necessary. The syntax is defined with a syntax statement and
the semantic is defined as function. There are other features which
are done in a different way. Mandatory static type checking and
overloading of functions are done in a way which is different to the
competition. E.g. Overloading resolution is done bottom up which
makes it easier to read and to compile programs. A reaction like
"I don't need it" to such things is just oversimplification.
It is human to just search for a reason to reject something new.
John B. Matthews
Frank GOENNINGER <dg1...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> > Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net
> > Seed7 - The extensible programming language: User defined statements
> > and operators, abstract data types, templates without special
> > syntax, OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch, statically typed,
> > interpreted or compiled, portable, runs under linux/unix/windows.
>
> Ah - Mac OS X?
It has a makefile, but I haven't tried building with it:
<http://seed7.sourceforge.net/faq.htm>
--
John B. Matthews
trashgod at gmail dot com
<http://sites.google.com/site/drjohnbmatthews>
thomas...@gmx.at
> Hallo Thomas,
>
> This:
>
> >http://seed7.sourceforge.net/faq.htm#development_speed_and_type_checking
>
> Quoting from this text (author: Thomas):
>
> "When comparing compile-time and runtime type checking it can be
> concluded that dynamic typed languages save some programming time
> by omitting type declarations, but this time must be paid back with
> massive interest rates to do the debugging."
>
> and this:
>
> > BTW: It is my opinion that syntax matters and that a
> > static type system and many other things make sense.
>
> ... gives quite some insight into the coding approach and coding style
> chosen.
Come on. From this two sentences you think you have insight into my
coding approach. I would say you probably don't have the slightest
clue what I use as coding approach.
> If you code with dynamic typing mind you will not have these "massive
> interest rates to do debugging".
With dynamic typing in mind you probably will not make any errors.
Do you ignore possible type errors and just omit code coveage tests?
> Been there, done that: 20 years of C
C is probably not the best language to see an advantage in a
static type system.
> coding (and C++, and ...) and 12 years of Common Lisp.
If you wanted to impress me you should have started coding much
earlier. I started to study computer science in 1980 and I have
programmed since 1978 in many languages. I have more than 20 years
C/C++ experience, approx. 12 years Pascal and also in many other
languages (Java, ...) . About dynamic languages: The predecessor
of Seed7 was a dynamic language and I used it for more then 12
years. So I can also say "Been there, done that". Just that I
introduced static type checks and other things to a dynamic
language. Seed7 still has dynamic features. It took me a very
long to find it out: Static and dynamic features can be combined,
but it is necessary to explicitely state when you want to do
something dynamic. You define DYNAMIC functions which dispatch
at runtime. See
http://seed7.sourceforge.net/manual/objects.htm
Do you want to establish yourself as higher ranking than me?
Does it make your arguments (where are they anyway) better?
Cool down, I belive that you have knowledge, but I have also
knowledge.
> How many years, or better, applications actually in production use, do
> you have with dynamic typed languages?
See above
> > Greetings Thomas Mertes
>
> > Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net
> > Seed7 - The extensible programming language: User defined statements
> > and operators, abstract data types, templates without special
> > syntax, OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch, statically typed,
> > interpreted or compiled, portable, runs under linux/unix/windows.
>
> Ah - Mac OS X?
What do you mean with that sentence?
Do you own a mac or assume that I use one?
Well, I don't use Mac OS X, but I have reports that Seed7 can be
compiled on Mac OS X. You just need to install XCODE and then you
can use the makefile mk_osx.mak (Until now I was not able to check
it, but the chances are intact).
Kaz Kylheku
> On 13 Mai, 13:06, Tamas K Papp <tkp...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, 13 May 2009 00:55:30 -0700, thomas.mertes wrote:
>> > data and other Lisp concepts. I just don't get enthusiastic about this
>> > concepts because I miss other concepts which IMHO also have some value.
>> > I will not start a discussion about this concepts since I already know
>>
>> Well, then your statement is pretty vacuous, ...
>
> http://seed7.sourceforge.net/faq.htm#lisp_comparison
>
> Static type checking is not new, but it has some vantages
> ignored by fans of dynamic typing:
Are you saying that all ``fans'' of dynamic typing do not know what static
typing is? If not all, then you should compile a concrete list of names,
so that you don't paint the rest with the same brush.
> http://seed7.sourceforge.net/faq.htm#static_type_checking
Completely moronic material written by someone who is appears to be complete
newbie to the static-versus-dynamic debate, and hasn't even done the
basic background googling in preparation for writing this diatribe.
> http://seed7.sourceforge.net/faq.htm#development_speed_and_type_checking
>
>> > I hope you invest some time to look at Seed7. :-)
>>
>> I can't see any novel features in it.
>
> Well, it is probably impossible to get any positive message
> from a typical Lisp enthusiast, but there are some features.
I've received lots of positive messages from Lisp enthusiasts over the years.
There must be some problem at your end.
Probable diagnosis: ignorance combined with flapping gums.
> What about the possibility to define the syntax of constructs:
CLPython:
http://common-lisp.net/project/clpython
Infix notation for Lisp:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/lang/lisp/code/syntax/infix/infix.cl
``CGOL'' Algol-like front-end for Common Lisp:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/lang/lisp/code/syntax/cgol/0.html
Scribble: markup syntax embedded in Lisp:
TwinLisp: C/Java-like syntax over Common Lisp:
http://www.nongnu.org/twinlisp/
Defining new (read) syntax within a language is not ``novel''.
Anyway, read syntax isn't what Lispers understand to be real syntax anyway.
Real syntax is the configuration of the abstract syntax tree, not how it's
written.
>> Also, listing "user defined statements
>> and operators" as a feature sounds like advertising you car "with
>> wheels included".
>
> I am talking about defining statements/operators syntactically
> and semantically. I know that you think the + in (+ 1 2) is an
> operator while others would see it as function. I am talking
> about the infix operator + in 1 + 2. I would really be amazed
> when a Lisp fan would admit that syntax matters and that
> there is a difference (+ 1 2) between and 1 + 2 .
Well, be prepared to be shocked because, for instance, we widely recognize that
there is a difference between, say, 'X and (QUOTE X), or #'X and (FUNCTION X)
and even that this difference is useful.
However, we just don't think that anyone with two brain cells
to rub together finds the difference /interesting/,
which is not to say that the difference isn't /useful/.
A wooden wedge to hold a door open is useful, but uninteresting. See?
In any case, we have programmable read syntax, and when that isn't good enough,
you can write yourself an entire custom scanner.
> Sorry for being that harsh, but I have been attacked by Lisp
> fans to often.
That simply because the internet has an ``I'm a misinformed moron'' button
which produces a predictable, repeatable result. If you keep pushing it,
you will keep getting the same result.
thomas...@gmx.at
> On 2009-05-13, thomas.mer...@gmx.at <thomas.mer...@gmx.at> wrote:
>
> > On 13 Mai, 13:06, Tamas K Papp <tkp...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Wed, 13 May 2009 00:55:30 -0700, thomas.mertes wrote:
> >> > data and other Lisp concepts. I just don't get enthusiastic about this
> >> > concepts because I miss other concepts which IMHO also have some value.
> >> > I will not start a discussion about this concepts since I already know
>
> >> Well, then your statement is pretty vacuous, ...
>
> >http://seed7.sourceforge.net/faq.htm#lisp_comparison
>
> > Static type checking is not new, but it has some vantages
> > ignored by fans of dynamic typing:
>
> Are you saying that all ``fans'' of dynamic typing do not know what static
> typing is?
No.
[snip]
BartC
news:20090524...@gmail.com...
>> Well, it is probably impossible to get any positive message
>> from a typical Lisp enthusiast, but there are some features.
>
> I've received lots of positive messages from Lisp enthusiasts over the
> years.
Lisp users do seem to be a rather fanatical lot, according to what I see in
comp.programming. I see that as a bigger turn-off than the language itself
(which is almost devoid of syntax so increasing complexity in other areas).
>> What about the possibility to define the syntax of constructs:
>
> CLPython:
...
> Infix notation for Lisp:
...
> ``CGOL'' Algol-like front-end for Common Lisp:
...
> Scribble: markup syntax embedded in Lisp:
...
> TwinLisp: C/Java-like syntax over Common Lisp:
...
All seem to be attempts to add that missing syntax to Lisp...
--
Bart
Lew
...
> Completely moronic material written by someone who is appears to be complete
> newbie to the static-versus-dynamic debate, and hasn't even done the
> basic background googling in preparation for writing this diatribe.
> There must be some problem at your end.
>
> Probable diagnosis: ignorance combined with flapping gums.
> That simply because the internet [sic] has an ``I'm a misinformed moron'' button
> which [sic] produces a predictable, repeatable result. If you keep pushing it,
> you will keep getting the same result.
Plonk.
--
Lew
Lew
> I think you misunderstand his intentions. Making excuses and avoiding
> responsibility is precisely his purpose.
Perhaps you misunderstand my intentions. You're certainly entitled to think
what you will about what I understand, but don't be surprised if you miss the
mark.
> A while ago he started a similar thread, and not being aware of who he
> was I tried to help him with his CV. All I got in reply was verbal
> abuse and excuses.
I've been around Usenet a little while. Even had I not seen messages from the
OP before, I would still understand what I was dealing with. This does not
preclude a straightforward response to what was, after all, a perfectly
reasonable request for advice and opinions. I do not expect nor require that
anyone on Usenet accept advice that I've given.
For the record, in this thread at least I see no evidence of "verbal abuse"
from the OP, but I do see judgmental remarks from you, Tamas.
--
Lew