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  • What significant lost advances on side tracks should be revived in the main stream of software?

    - by C.W.Holeman II
    In reading Alan Kay's question on Significant new inventions I was coming up with answers that were not new ideas but old ones that have been passed by in the main stream. So, what significant lost advances that happened on a side track should be revived in the main stream of software? These would be ideas that worked well in their context but a different context appeared and became dominant the context, even though it lacked the idea. It maybe that in the new dominant context one just cannot do something or it requires great effort to be exerted.

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  • First ATMs programming language

    - by revo
    First ATMs performed tasks like a cash dispenser, they were offline machines which worked with punch cards impregnated with Carbon and a 6-digit PIN code. Maximum withdrawal with a card was 10 pounds and each one was a one-time use card - ATM swallowed cards! The first ATM was installed in London in the year 1967, as I looked at time line of programming languages, there were many programming languages made before that decade. I don't know about the hardware neither, but in which programming language it was written? *I didn't find a detailed biography of John Shepherd-Barron (ATM inventor at 70s) Update I found this picture, which is taken from a newspaper back to the year 1972 in Iran. Translated PS : Shows Mr. Rad-lon (if spelled correctly), The manager of Barros (if spelled correctly) International Educational Institute in United Kingdom at the right, and Mr. Jim Sutherland - Expert of Computer Kiosks. In the rest of the text I found on this paper, these kind of ATMs which called "Automated Computer Kiosk" were advertised with this: Mr. Rad-lon (if spelled correctly) puts his card to one specific location of Automated Computer Kiosk and after 10 seconds he withdraws his cash. Two more questions are: 1- How those ATMs were so fast? (withdrawal in 10 seconds in that year) 2- I didn't find any text on Internet which state about "Automated Computer Kiosk", Is it valid or were they being called Computer in that time?

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  • Origin of common list-processing function names

    - by Heatsink
    Some higher-order functions for operating on lists or arrays have been repeatedly adopted or reinvented. The functions map, fold[l|r], and filter are found together in several programming languages, such as Scheme, ML, and Python, that don't seem to have a common ancestor. I'm going with these three names to keep the question focused. To show that the names are not universal, here is a sampling of names for equivalent functionality in other languages. C++ has transform instead of map and remove_if instead of filter (reversing the meaning of the predicate). Lisp has mapcar instead of map, remove-if-not instead of filter, and reduce instead of fold (Some modern Lisp variants have map but this appears to be a derived form.) C# uses Select instead of map and Where instead of filter. C#'s names came from SQL via LINQ, and despite the name changes, their functionality was influenced by Haskell, which was itself influenced by ML. The names map, fold, and filter are widespread, but not universal. This suggests that they were borrowed from an influential source into other contemporary languages. Where did these function names come from?

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  • Why did the web win the space of remote applications and X not?

    - by Martin Josefsson
    The X Window System is 25 years old, it had it's birthday yesterday (on the 15'th). As you probably are aware of, one of it's most important features is the separation of the server side and the client side in a way that neither Microsoft's, Apples or Wayland's windowing systems have. Back in the days (sorry for the ambiguous phrasing) many believed X would dominate over other ways to make windows because of this separation of server and client, allowing the application to be ran on a server somewhere else while the user clicks and types on her own computer at home. This use obviously still exists, but is marginalized at best. When we write and use programs that run on a server we almost always use the web with it's html/css/js. Why did the web win, and X not? The technologies used for the web (said html/css/js) are a mess. Combined with all the back-end-frameworks (Rails, Django and all) it really is a jungle to navigate thru. Still the web thrives with creativity and progress, while remote X apps do not.

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  • Clear Linux file system after shutdown / start

    - by user35443
    I have very specific task. I need to clear the desktop, downloads, documents and so on after every shutdown or finish. For example, if anyone downloads something using Google Chrome, he will work with it and then he'll shutdown the computer for next use. And when second user sits for working on the computer, he'll find a clear file system without the data downloaded by the first user. On Windows, I used to work with Returnil Virtual System, but it doesn't have support for Linux. Can anybody tell me if is it possible and, if so, how? I was also thinking of using Wine for this program, but don't think it will be the best idea.

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  • What significant advances lost on side tracks should be revived in the main stream of software?

    - by C.W.Holeman II
    In reading Alan Kay's question on Significant new inventions I was coming up with answers that were not new ideas but old ones that have been passed by in the main stream. So, what significant lost advances that happened on a side track should be revived in the main stream of software? These would be ideas that worked well in their context but a different context appeared and became dominant the context, even though it lacked the idea. It maybe that in the new dominant context one just cannot do something or it requires great effort to be exerted.

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  • Are Java's public fields just a tragic historical design flaw at this point?

    - by Avi Flax
    It seems to be Java orthodoxy at this point that one should basically never use public fields for object state. (I don't necessarily agree, but that's not relevant to my question.) Given that, would it be right to say that from where we are today, it's clear that Java's public fields were a mistake/flaw of the language design? Or is there a rational argument that they're a useful and important part of the language, even today? Thanks! Update: I know about the more elegant approaches, such as in C#, Python, Groovy, etc. I'm not directly looking for those examples. I'm really just wondering if there's still someone deep in a bunker, muttering about how wonderful public fields really are, and how the masses are all just sheep, etc. Update 2: Clearly static final public fields are the standard way to create public constants. I was referring more to using public fields for object state (even immutable state). I'm thinking that it does seem like a design flaw that one should use public fields for constants, but not for state… a language's rules should be enforced naturally, by syntax, not by guidelines.

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  • Ubuntu Philosophy Question

    - by The-Ever-Kid
    I was just switching from Windows to Ubuntu and I started to read this. And there were quite a few things I did not understand one was : "OpenOffice decided not to have a learning curve" And "Firefox tries very hard to make sure pages written in 1995 look like they did in 1995. " And Finally "Windows isn't a poor man's Linux." In the final statement shouldn't the statement be the opposite.

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  • What was the first programming language written for computers?

    - by ThePlan
    Looking at so many programming languages we have today, each one being unique in it's own way, I've tried to figure out what the first programming language written for computers is. Looking at the release date for the popular ones I got somewhat close but I didn't look at less obvious ones, programming languages which are either dead or very little use nowadays. Fortran is the closest thing I got but I don't know if it's real. In a nutshell: What was the first programming language written for computers? Are there any languages that derived from that language?

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  • Why can't `main` return a double or String rather than int or void?

    - by sunny
    In many languages such as C, C++, and Java, the main method/function has a return type of void or int, but not double or String. What might be the reasons behind that? I know a little bit that we can't do that because main is called by runtime library and it expects some syntax like int main() or int main(int,char**) so we have to stick to that. So my question is: why does main have the type signature that it has, and not a different one?

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  • Book Readers As Envisioned Circa 1935

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    This early 20th century sketch showcases the future of books; thankfully the actual delivery of the concept proved to be a bit more lap-friendly. The sketch is from the April, 1935 issues of Everyday Science and Mechanics and presents a vision of book consumption that, thankfully, came to pass in a much more compact fashion that doesn’t require swapping rolls of film. [via Boing Boing] How To Properly Scan a Photograph (And Get An Even Better Image) The HTG Guide to Hiding Your Data in a TrueCrypt Hidden Volume Make Your Own Windows 8 Start Button with Zero Memory Usage

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  • What significant lost steps forward in side tracks should be revived in the main stream of software?

    - by C.W.Holeman II
    In reading Alan Kay's question on Significant new inventions I was coming up with answers that were not new ideas but old ones that have been passed by in the main stream. So, what significant lost steps forward that happened in a side track should be revived in the main stream of software? These would be ideas that worked well in their context but a different context appeared and became dominant the context, even though it lacked the idea. It maybe that in the new dominant context one just cannot do something or it requires great effort to be exerted.

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  • Why the Select is before the From in a SQL Query?

    - by Scorpi0
    This is something that bothered me a lot at school. 5 years ago, when I learned SQL, I always wondered why we specify first the fields we want and then where we want them from. According to my idea, we should write: From Employee e Select e.Name So why the norm says: Select e.Name -- Eeeeek, what e means ? From Employee e -- Ok, now I know what e is It took me weeks to understand SQL, and I know that a lot of that time was consumed by the wrong order of elements. It is like writing in C#: string name = employee.Name; var employee = this.GetEmployee(); So, I assume that it has a historical reason, anyone knows why?

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  • What is the historical basis of using Javascript in web programming?

    - by rd108
    I come from a scientific biology background where we also use Python a lot. Now that I've begun to start with Web development, I've consistently found myself wondering just why it is that JavaScript is the primary client-side language on the Web. Is JavaScript's predominance a historical accident or something else? Also, I'm curious if there are any hurdles to integrating Python into client-side scripting?

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  • What software programming languages were used by the Soviet Union's space program?

    - by shamp00
    I got interested in the Soviet space program and was interested to discover that the software on the Buran spacecraft circa 1988 was written in Prolog. Does anyone know what languages might have been used in earlier missions, especially the Mars PrOP-M rover missions of the early 1970s which were somewhat autonomous and could navigate obstacles? Edit My source for the Buran Prolog is this declassified document from the CIA site from May 1990. I couldn't find an OCR version, so here's the relevant quote from p. 0449: According to open-source literature, the Soviets used the French-developed programming language known as Prolog to develop on-board system software for the Buran vehicle...

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  • Why has the accessor methods from the JavaBean specification become the standard for Java development?

    - by Dakotah North
    The JavaBeans Specification describes a JavaBean as A Java Bean is a reusable software component that can be manipulated visually in a builder tool Since the majority of the lines of code that are written seem to have nothing to do with being manipulated visually in a builder tool, why has the JavaBean specification been the "way" to write object oriented code? I would like to forgo the traditional getter/setter in favor of Fluent Interfaces all throughout the code, not just in builders but fear doing so since this is traditionally not the way way object oriented code is written in Java.

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  • Did Bjarne Stroustrup create the terms constructor/destructor when talking about objects?

    - by user104971
    I was watching this keynote and Bjarne Stroustrup (Creator of C++) claims that he hadn't yet invented the words constructor and destructor yet when he was giving an example of RAII. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYBLXBJr0HU I know the concept of construction and destruction has been around a lot longer (even in C, a function that allocates and returns a struct and then a function that frees it etc.), but was Bjarne really the first to invent the terms?

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  • Why is 0 false?

    - by Morwenn
    This question may sound dumb, but why does 0 evaluates to false and any other [integer] value to true is most of programming languages? String comparison Since the question seems a little bit too simple, I will explain myself a little bit more: first of all, it may seem evident to any programmer, but why wouldn't there be a programming language - there may actually be, but not any I used - where 0 evaluates to true and all the other [integer] values to false? That one remark may seem random, but I have a few examples where it may have been a good idea. First of all, let's take the example of strings three-way comparison, I will take C's strcmp as example: any programmer trying C as his first language may be tempted to write the following code: if (strcmp(str1, str2)) { // Do something... } Since strcmp returns 0 which evaluates to false when the strings are equal, what the beginning programmer tried to do fails miserably and he generally does not understand why at first. Had 0 evaluated to true instead, this function could have been used in its most simple expression - the one above - when comparing for equality, and the proper checks for -1 and 1 would have been done only when needed. We would have considered the return type as bool (in our minds I mean) most of the time. Moreover, let's introduce a new type, sign, that just takes values -1, 0 and 1. That can be pretty handy. Imagine there is a spaceship operator in C++ and we want it for std::string (well, there already is the compare function, but spaceship operator is more fun). The declaration would currently be the following one: sign operator<=>(const std::string& lhs, const std::string& rhs); Had 0 been evaluated to true, the spaceship operator wouldn't even exist, and we could have declared operator== that way: sign operator==(const std::string& lhs, const std::string& rhs); This operator== would have handled three-way comparison at once, and could still be used to perform the following check while still being able to check which string is lexicographically superior to the other when needed: if (str1 == str2) { // Do something... } Old errors handling We now have exceptions, so this part only applies to the old languages where no such thing exist (C for example). If we look at C's standard library (and POSIX one too), we can see for sure that maaaaany functions return 0 when successful and any integer otherwise. I have sadly seen some people do this kind of things: #define TRUE 0 // ... if (some_function() == TRUE) { // Here, TRUE would mean success... // Do something } If we think about how we think in programming, we often have the following reasoning pattern: Do something Did it work? Yes -> That's ok, one case to handle No -> Why? Many cases to handle If we think about it again, it would have made sense to put the only neutral value, 0, to yes (and that's how C's functions work), while all the other values can be there to solve the many cases of the no. However, in all the programming languages I know (except maybe some experimental esotheric languages), that yes evaluates to false in an if condition, while all the no cases evaluate to true. There are many situations when "it works" represents one case while "it does not work" represents many probable causes. If we think about it that way, having 0 evaluate to true and the rest to false would have made much more sense. Conclusion My conclusion is essentially my original question: why did we design languages where 0 is false and the other values are true, taking in account my few examples above and maybe some more I did not think of? Follow-up: It's nice to see there are many answers with many ideas and as many possible reasons for it to be like that. I love how passionate you seem to be about it. I originaly asked this question out of boredom, but since you seem so passionate, I decided to go a little further and ask about the rationale behind the Boolean choice for 0 and 1 on Math.SE :)

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  • Routes on a sphere surface - Find geodesic?

    - by CaNNaDaRk
    I'm working with some friends on a browser based game where people can move on a 2D map. It's been almost 7 years and still people play this game so we are thinking of a way to give them something new. Since then the game map was a limited plane and people could move from (0, 0) to (MAX_X, MAX_Y) in quantized X and Y increments (just imagine it as a big chessboard). We believe it's time to give it another dimension so, just a couple of weeks ago, we began to wonder how the game could look with other mappings: Unlimited plane with continous movement: this could be a step forward but still i'm not convinced. Toroidal World (continous or quantized movement): sincerely I worked with torus before but this time I want something more... Spherical world with continous movement: this would be great! What we want Users browsers are given a list of coordinates like (latitude, longitude) for each object on the spherical surface map; browsers must then show this in user's screen rendering them inside a web element (canvas maybe? this is not a problem). When people click on the plane we convert the (mouseX, mouseY) to (lat, lng) and send it to the server which has to compute a route between current user's position to the clicked point. What we have We began writing a Java library with many useful maths to work with Rotation Matrices, Quaternions, Euler Angles, Translations, etc. We put it all together and created a program that generates sphere points, renders them and show them to the user inside a JPanel. We managed to catch clicks and translate them to spherical coords and to provide some other useful features like view rotation, scale, translation etc. What we have now is like a little (very little indeed) engine that simulates client and server interaction. Client side shows points on the screen and catches other interactions, server side renders the view and does other calculus like interpolating the route between current position and clicked point. Where is the problem? Obviously we want to have the shortest path to interpolate between the two route points. We use quaternions to interpolate between two points on the surface of the sphere and this seemed to work fine until i noticed that we weren't getting the shortest path on the sphere surface: We though the problem was that the route is calculated as the sum of two rotations about X and Y axis. So we changed the way we calculate the destination quaternion: We get the third angle (the first is latitude, the second is longitude, the third is the rotation about the vector which points toward our current position) which we called orientation. Now that we have the "orientation" angle we rotate Z axis and then use the result vector as the rotation axis for the destination quaternion (you can see the rotation axis in grey): What we got is the correct route (you can see it lays on a great circle), but we get to this ONLY if the starting route point is at latitude, longitude (0, 0) which means the starting vector is (sphereRadius, 0, 0). With the previous version (image 1) we don't get a good result even when startin point is 0, 0, so i think we're moving towards a solution, but the procedure we follow to get this route is a little "strange" maybe? In the following image you get a view of the problem we get when starting point is not (0, 0), as you can see starting point is not the (sphereRadius, 0, 0) vector, and as you can see the destination point (which is correctly drawn!) is not on the route. The magenta point (the one which lays on the route) is the route's ending point rotated about the center of the sphere of (-startLatitude, 0, -startLongitude). This means that if i calculate a rotation matrix and apply it to every point on the route maybe i'll get the real route, but I start to think that there's a better way to do this. Maybe I should try to get the plane through the center of the sphere and the route points, intersect it with the sphere and get the geodesic? But how? Sorry for being way too verbose and maybe for incorrect English but this thing is blowing my mind! EDIT: This code version is related to the first image: public void setRouteStart(double lat, double lng) { EulerAngles tmp = new EulerAngles ( Math.toRadians(lat), 0, -Math.toRadians(lng)); //set route start Quaternion qtStart.setInertialToObject(tmp); //do other stuff like drawing start point... } public void impostaDestinazione(double lat, double lng) { EulerAngles tmp = new AngoliEulero( Math.toRadians(lat), 0, -Math.toRadians(lng)); qtEnd.setInertialToObject(tmp); //do other stuff like drawing dest point... } public V3D interpolate(double totalTime, double t) { double _t = t/totalTime; Quaternion q = Quaternion.Slerp(qtStart, qtEnd, _t); RotationMatrix.inertialQuatToIObject(q); V3D p = matInt.inertialToObject(V3D.Xaxis.scale(sphereRadius)); //other stuff, like drawing point ... return p; } //mostly taken from a book! public static Quaternion Slerp(Quaternion q0, Quaternion q1, double t) { double cosO = q0.dot(q1); double q1w = q1.w; double q1x = q1.x; double q1y = q1.y; double q1z = q1.z; if (cosO < 0.0f) { q1w = -q1w; q1x = -q1x; q1y = -q1y; q1z = -q1z; cosO = -cosO; } double sinO = Math.sqrt(1.0f - cosO*cosO); double O = Math.atan2(sinO, cosO); double oneOverSinO = 1.0f / senoOmega; k0 = Math.sin((1.0f - t) * O) * oneOverSinO; k1 = Math.sin(t * O) * oneOverSinO; // Interpolate return new Quaternion( k0*q0.w + k1*q1w, k0*q0.x + k1*q1x, k0*q0.y + k1*q1y, k0*q0.z + k1*q1z ); } A little dump of what i get (again check image 1): Route info: Sphere radius and center: 200,000, (0.0, 0.0, 0.0) Route start: lat 0,000 °, lng 0,000 ° @v: (200,000, 0,000, 0,000), |v| = 200,000 Route end: lat 30,000 °, lng 30,000 ° @v: (150,000, 86,603, 100,000), |v| = 200,000 Qt dump: (w, x, y, z), rot. angle°, (x, y, z) rot. axis Qt start: (1,000, 0,000, -0,000, 0,000); 0,000 °; (1,000, 0,000, 0,000) Qt end: (0,933, 0,067, -0,250, 0,250); 42,181 °; (0,186, -0,695, 0,695) Route start: lat 30,000 °, lng 10,000 ° @v: (170,574, 30,077, 100,000), |v| = 200,000 Route end: lat 80,000 °, lng -50,000 ° @v: (22,324, -26,604, 196,962), |v| = 200,000 Qt dump: (w, x, y, z), rot. angle°, (x, y, z) rot. axis Qt start: (0,962, 0,023, -0,258, 0,084); 31,586 °; (0,083, -0,947, 0,309) Qt end: (0,694, -0,272, -0,583, -0,324); 92,062 °; (-0,377, -0,809, -0,450)

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  • Start Activity and clear activity history

    - by sandis
    So I have a huge maze of activities in my application. What I need to do, is that when the user logs in into the system, the activity history should be cleared. I cant just use finish() when I start a new activity, because I want the activities to have a history until the user logs in. I have experimentet with the different flags when starting an activity, but I have had no success. Any ideas? Cheers,

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  • SQL Server 2005 Table Alter History

    - by Kayes
    Hi. Does SQL Server maintains any history to track table alterations like column add, delete, rename, type/ length change etc? I found many suggest to use stored procedures to do this manually. But I'm curious if SQL Server keeps such history in any system tables? Thanks.

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  • Command history in R

    - by Brani
    Is there any IDE -from the ones supporting R-, that gives access to the command history (at least to the current session's commands)? Or is there a way to get a (character or expression) vector with those commands in R? For those of you that have been using MATLAB, I mean something like the Command History window there.. Thank you

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  • How do I remove sensitive files from git's history

    - by Stefan Liebenberg
    I would like to put a git project ( Rails app ) on github, but it contains certian files with sensitive data ( usernames and passwords, like /config/deploy.rb for capistrano ). I know I can add these filenames to .gitignore, but this would not remove the their history within git. I also don't want to start over again by deleting the /.git directory. Is there a way to remove all traces of a particular file in your git history?

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