The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

I had the same with my old hoster. I think I switched about ten years ago and now pay €1.95 a month for 25GB storage, 150GB data traffic, SSL certificate, PHP and the works (no Python though...). I have my domain also there and my mail. It works fine and I almost never have an issue.

That's a very good price for those specs. Where are you hosted now?

I was hosted at Vevida in the beginning of the 2000's, but the only affordable plan they had back then was something like 25MB space and 1GB data, and PHP4. That was it, basically, so you could host some personal pages and do a bit of scripting as not to copy/paste HTML. Everything extra was expensive to the max for anything but companies wanting a big website. (AFAIK, you didn't even have a domain name; it was something like www.vevida.com/~15973/, just as with the spaces hosted at internet providers.)

Then in 2004 Antagonist came along. They offered everything, including domains and e-mail for an affordable price. I've been hosting with them for almost 14 years, but they got steadily more expensive. As of now, their smallest package offers 100GB of space, unlimited data, and... as you say, the works, except for Pyhton (I think). The price is €6.74 a month, without VAT, which comes down to €91 a year including VAT.

It's too much for hosting a personal Wordpress site with like 5 pages, and my e-mail of this year... but they don't have anything smaller.

I've moved to Vimexx (current nr. 1 hoster in the NL). They have a tiny package (2GB space, 25 GB data, without any additions such as Varnish cache and version control and such), for only €0.45 (€0.54 including VAT) per month.

Their next package at €4.49 (€5.43 including VAT, or €65) is more powerful than Antagonists smallest (an extra CPU core, 2GB of RAM instead of 512 MB), but €26 cheaper.

Even if the current smallest package at €0.54 inc.VAT is a special offer, with the normal price being €1.50 or €2 or something, it still is enough for most of what I do, but I would be interested in your host, just in case.

===

PS: In case this isn't clear: I'm not bashing Antagonist in any way. They have great functionality, excellent support by e-mail (send a problem/question, have it fixed within 1-2 hours at the most), and their prices are OK for what they offer.

The only reason for me to move is because their -smallest- package on offer is -way- bigger and thus more expensive than I need to have for a year's worth of IMAP mails and maybe a tiny Wordpress site.

If you need anything bigger than that, Antagonist is certainly a provider to go with, and maybe, in the future, if necessary, I will do so again... as long as other providers offering the same are not 25% cheaper.

[Toxaris]

It does not include the costs for the domain registration, as those are fixed costs from SIDN (or so I am told). My current hoster is PC Extreme. The package is hidden away rather well now, as they rather would like to sell other packages...

[Katsunami]

Eh. Found out about something new. WebAssembly.

The IT-industry is running in **** circles, chasing it's own tail.

- In the beginning, programming languages didn't have enough structure, so Pascal was created, with very strict data typing.
- Pascal didn't have enough power, so C was created for low level access and data casting from one type to another (Pascal later gained these things as well).
- Then software got too large, with too many variables and functions splintered into too many files, so C++ was created to keep everything together in objects.
- But people didn't want to do memory management, so you get languages like Java and C#.
- Then there are browsers, and because people get lazier and lazier, the types are cast aside (heh... see what I did there?) and you have typeless, garbage collected languages that are interpreted... making everything very slow, and bug ridden because each typo creates a new variable or even just makes the interpreter ignore lines here or there, which makes your application fall apart. (I've been hating Javascript and PHP's typeless paradigm since I first saw them, but you can't live without them on the web. The only way of actually using them productively in a large environment is with a linter/code checker.)
- Darn. We can't have that, so you get things like Typescript, a language with types, built on top of Javascript, but because it transpiles to Javascript, it isn't faster.... same with Hack, which is basically Facebook's typed PHP. It just requires an extra step, and compiles from an unrunnable language to a slow one (and worse, Typescript uses Pascal-like type syntax in a C-type language...)
- So we create WebAssembly, an intermediary execution environment that compiles a language to machine code before running it, and it uses.... C and C++ as input!

After 40 years, we're right back at the beginning, with the only difference that now, the browser is the platform of execution instead of the operating system.

Do you think anyone has learned something in those 40 years? No. Because there's already talk of making WebAssembly a target for garbage collected languages such as Java and C#.... and for typeless languages such as Javascript.

$#%@$%W$#% So you get yourself into a mess by making programming 'easier' (but slower and more prone to weird bugs), then you solve that problem by basically returning to the beginning of modern computing (~1973 or so), and after you've done so, you're going to reintroduce the concepts that failed in the last 20 years years all over again, on top of that solution?!

Some people, somewhere, need to be hanged.

(I know there are and have been many more languages and paradigms, but I'm using the best known ones to illustrate the point.)

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

- In the beginning, programming languages didn't have enough structure, so Pascal was created, with very strict data typing.
- Pascal didn't have enough power, so C was created for low level access and data casting from one type to another (Pascal later gained these things as well).

I was going to complain about your timeline, and then I found, to my surprise that Pascal (1970) did come before C (1972).

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I was going to complain about your timeline, and then I found, to my surprise that Pascal (1970) did come before C (1972).

I had the same reaction as you!

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I was going to complain about your timeline, and then I found, to my surprise that Pascal (1970) did come before C (1972).

Hehe... I know both Pascal and C very well. I've started out on Turbo Pascal 3 (on my XT, in 1990/1991), and then Borland Pascal 7 (on my 486, in 1994).

The original Pascal was extremely structured; it had procedures _and_ functions, and a function without a return value wasn't allowed, typecasting wasn't possible, and it didn't have any pointers, and couldn't use the CPU's registers. Inline assembly wasn't possible. I think you couldn't even do expressions during a return.

I don't know when Turbo/Borland Pascal gained those capabilities, but when I was good enough at programming to use them, version 7 did have all of that. I stuck with it until 1996 or so, writing my own command-line utilities or front-ends for things like PKZIP/UNZIP and ARJ, and then switched to Delphi 4.

I -did- discover C and C++ somewhere around 1995, but I found it to be a weird and cryptic version of Pascal. All of the touted benefits (low level access, assembly, pointer arithmetic and so on) were moot points because Borland Pascal had all of those as well. And Pascal had objects as well if you wanted them. (But they were comparing standard Pascal to standard C of course.)

In the end I switched to C/C++ purely because it had become the standard language (and I did so by using Borland C++ Builder for Windows... HAH!), not because I missed anything in Pascal.

For Windows programming, I finally came into contact with .NET and Visual Studio in 2006 (!) after Borland sold all its stuff and Delphi/Builder were overhauled by other companies, and switching to a new version would basically be the same as switching to a completely different system.

Now, when I still use C or C++, it's in embedded software engineering, mostly on realtime operating systems, or small things on Linux. I don't write applications in it. I've been looking into things like Electron/NodeJS and other web technologies for that, that take HTML/CSS and Javascript out of the browser. Most things that I make and have a user interface don't require the speed of C/C++.

Same with Mercurial by the way. I started out with that in 2006, because Git, as could be expected from it, being written by Linus Torvalds, didn't run on Windows. It started to change in 2012, but I stuck with Mercurial. I recently switched to Git only because it has about 75% market share, and many companies put it down as a requirement (and not Mercurial), so I studied Git and put it onto my CV.

And what's the verdict? As I expected... for day to day operations, it's EXACTLY THE SAME as Mercurial. Maybe it can do some weird stuff Mercurial can't, but if so, I haven't needed it yet. Same as it was with Borland Pascal and C/C++... same stuff, different syntax.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

same stuff, different syntax.

There are very few programming languages where that doesn't apply!

The RPN stack-based languages like Forth and PostScript are interesting, and I can manage them

For really weird you need to get into things like Lisp. Perhaps it's because I never did a project that needed it, but I never really got my head around Lisp.

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

For really weird you need to get into things like Lisp. Perhaps it's because I never did a project that needed it, but I never really got my head around Lisp.

I've only used one... for doing my brother's university exercise

[BetterRed]

Lisp wasn't so bad, APL was a health hazard.

It's my contention that the IT industry's obsession with programming languages is a major factor that has led to a significant reduction in the number of women in the business. I was taught to program in Autocoder in the early 1960's by a woman, and during the 60's and 70's most of my bosses were women - in technical, real time and commercial systems. And up until the mid-late 1980's, 30-40% of the graduates I employed were women, but then they just disappeared - initially in places like Singapore and India and then UK, Australia etc. After the wall came down I hired some Russian IT people, about half were women - that would have been in the early '90s. Shortly after that I too
got fed up with IT, so I changed tack.

Another factor that has driven women out of IT (by their own confession to me) is the over-emphasis on presentation - particularly in the past twenty years. It used to be - do you know the difference between CICS and Tuxedo, now it's Facebook Snapchat and Twitter

BR

[Terisa de morgan]

I agree with the over-emphasis on presentation, and I must confess that I find a bit boring to have to change the language and, mainly, the obsession with the last language, the last paradigm, that goes to every place, without thinking if it is right or not.

[PeterT]

I have to admit that APL was the first language I learnt. The school I went to in Montreal had a dial up connection to IP Sharp, and in grade 8 (first year high school) I was introduced to the joys of computing. I don't think we had any classes in it, it was just there for us to use and teach ourselves and each other.

A few years later we also had access to an APL PC; the IBM 5100 (although I don't really recall which model it was).

A few years later the school acquired an HP microcomputer, some thing in the 9800 family; BASIC, built in tape drive and a card reader.

In university I first was exposed to SP/K a series of subsets of PL/1, then PL/C a dialect of PL/1. After that came PASCAL, C and a myriad of other languages.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

For really weird you need to get into things like Lisp. Perhaps it's because I never did a project that needed it, but I never really got my head around Lisp.

Never looked into it; same with Haskell. Maybe they're used in companies, somewhere, but in the Netherlands, both are mainly taught at research universities because they're different from any of the common languages. Compared to Lisp and Haskell, languages like Pascal and C are intuitive.

I wonder if anyone ever made a language like Lisp or Haskell that can do what they do, but use C syntax. There are some projects that try to wrangle Lisp itself into a C-like syntax, but that's not what I mean; I mean a language that LOOKS as if it's C, but ACTS like Lisp.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

I agree with the over-emphasis on presentation, and I must confess that I find a bit boring to have to change the language and, mainly, the obsession with the last language, the last paradigm, that goes to every place, without thinking if it is right or not.

Like Javascript...

Why in hell would someone want to use a non-typed, dynamic, interpreted language for production applications? (Wrapped in the Electron franework, a webapp basically looks like a native one, as Electron's front-end is Chromium.)

Yes, for small projects productivity is very high, but I've been writing some AI fun stuff in Javascript (and the P5.js library to visualize it), but as a project gets even SLIGHTLY big, it becomes very hard to debug if something is wrong. Stuff just stops working, or you get the weirdest of warnings.

The only way I'm able to finish these not-so-huge (but not trivial projects) is to use a linter, that tells me I've not declared "ThisVariable", because the correct spelling is "thisVariable".

As an aside, I loath the Java/JavaScript convention of functionNames() and variableNames. It just looks weird. As someone who started out with Borland Pascal, I STILL prefer to use FunctionNames() and VariableNames, and a type would be called TStuff if it were up to me.

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Like Javascript...

Why in hell would someone want to use a non-typed, dynamic, interpreted language for production applications? (Wrapped in the Electron franework, a webapp basically looks like a native one, as Electron's front-end is Chromium.)

Yes, for small projects productivity is very high, but I've been writing some AI fun stuff in Javascript (and the P5.js library to visualize it), but as a project gets even SLIGHTLY big, it becomes very hard to debug if something is wrong. Stuff just stops working, or you get the weirdest of warnings.

The only way I'm able to finish these not-so-huge (but not trivial projects) is to use a linter, that tells me I've not declared "ThisVariable", because the correct spelling is "thisVariable".

As an aside, I loath the Java/JavaScript convention of functionNames() and variableNames. It just looks weird. As someone who started out with Borland Pascal, I STILL prefer to use FunctionNames() and VariableNames, and a type would be called TStuff if it were up to me.

Please, don't make me go there. I'm using it at work now and....

[BetterRed]

One of the Russian programmers I hired said of C++ - '. . . is good at hiding data, but even better at hiding bugs . . .' She was an assembler programmer - just as happy programming for an IBM 370, a Zilog Z80, or a DEC Vax.

But she left IT to study law, is now an M&A specialist at a big merchant bank, she'll retire soon - with lots of gold in her sack

BR