youngatheart writes:
"First there was HipHop, the PHP interpreter which improved performance, now usually referred to by the less embarrassing name HHVM. Building on HHVM, they've just introduced Hack, which 'reconciles the fast development cycle of PHP with the discipline provided by static typing, while adding many features commonly found in other modern programming languages.'
Over the past year, Facebook has converted nearly all of its PHP code base to Hack, which makes up the core of its website."
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 22 2014, @12:20AM
Zuck named the language "hack" as a reference more condescending to his users rather than himself, for he was merely an unimaginative hack who got lucky doing what was already done many times over and people around the planet are still salivating over giving them all their data.
Metallica named their sellout album* "Load," because they knew it was a load of shit and that the customers would buy it anyway. Feeling enterprising, they expanded one mediocre album into two albums' worth and named the second "Re-load," because of course it was also a load of shit spawned from a load of shit.
* Friday diversion incoming: The hardcore among Metallica fans may argue that they sold out at the Black album or even Justice. The evidence suggests that the Black album was in fact they point at which they sold out, with a fairly complicated inside joke on Don't Tread on Me. As proof, first listen to the melody of the lead guitars which kick in at around 5 seconds of Don't Tread on Me. [youtube.com] Next, listen to this skipped-for-your-pleasure clip of where they got that riff from**. [youtube.com] And no, it wasn't some Revolutionary War-era bugle riff. Other inside jokes in music include the famous riff of Sweet Child o' Mine which the band laughed at when the first heard. Yet another example are the lyrics to the Police' Every Breath You Take which was another joke turned into a song.
** No joke, that movie was introduced to me in grade school by a Jewish teacher who wanted to show us at an early age that it's okay for everybody but White people to use racial slurs.
(Score: 1) by black6host on Saturday March 22 2014, @02:49AM
What kind of class was that. An opinionated, and tenured, professor at a university? Yeah, I could see that. Grade school? That type of stuff should be taught at home.
I'll raise my boy to be respectful of all. They can teach him geography, math, reading and writing, etc.
(Score: 1) by TheloniousToady on Saturday March 22 2014, @04:36AM
Sounds kindda like the lore on Git: "Torvalds said: 'I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself.'" [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2014, @06:28AM
I've often wondered what a language designed by Linus would look like.
I guess we'll never know, though - he seems to be perfectly content with C - and he's an OS guy, not a compiler guy. :-P
(Score: 1) by TheloniousToady on Saturday March 22 2014, @02:17PM
If Linus is content with C, I think he's right. To me, it's the only nearly perfect language, as judged by how well it does what it's trying to do. In other words, there isn't anything substantial that can be improved in C without it becoming a different language.
Other languages certainly have their purpose and place because they try to do different things. For example, Python is extremely good at what it does. But no language can ever be better at doing C stuff than C itself. Compare that to C++, which has its merits, but is far from perfect in terms of how well it does what it's trying to do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2014, @03:22PM
A native string type would be nice. I love C, I enjoyed learning it, but I was astounded by the gyrations (library functions, etc.) you have to go to to use strings compared to the BASIC I had previously learned. C's unfriendliness to text manipulation is one of the reasons I switched to Perl when I got into CGI Web programming in 2000.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2014, @11:46AM
How does playing 8 bars from Bernstein "prove" that a band has sold out? Had The Nice sold out when they played the whole piece? Why should hints of socio-political commentary be considered selling out? If that's the case, then most punk bands sold out before they sold anything.