From: Eric Sosman on
On 5/2/2010 4:11 PM, Lew wrote:
> On 05/02/2010 03:18 PM, Eric Sosman wrote:
>> On 5/2/2010 2:27 PM, Lew wrote:
>>> Arved Sandstrom wrote:
>>>> Fortunately "may not" is one of the modal negatives that has a fairly
>>>> unambiguous meaning, as in, "not allowed". That doesn't mean that a lot
>>>> of people don't use it incorrectly, though.
>>>
>>> "Correctly" according to you. I've heard "may not" to mean "might not"
>>> my entire life.
>>
>> "Mom, can I use the car?"
>>
>> "You mean `may'."
>>
>> "Sorry. Mom, may I use the car?"
>>
>> "No, you may not."
>
> Your point may not have been clear here. What are you trying to say?

That your mother may not have taught you good grammar?

"May (not)" does indeed have the meaning Arved describes,
some of the time. "You may have another piece of pie" and "You
may not use the car" and "He may not make any move that puts or
leaves his King in check" are expressions of permission (or lack
thereof), not of possibility or probabality. "You may not have
heard the news" and "I may have known her, long ago" and "He may
have been color-blind" are expressions of possibility, not of
permissions. And sometimes it is not clear which sense of "may"
may or may not be intended.

--
Eric Sosman
esosman(a)ieee-dot-org.invalid
From: Lew on
Arved Sandstrom wrote:
>>>>> Fortunately "may not" is one of the modal negatives that has a fairly
>>>>> unambiguous meaning, as in, "not allowed". That doesn't mean that a
>>>>> lot
>>>>> of people don't use it incorrectly, though.

Lew wrote:
>>>> "Correctly" according to you. I've heard "may not" to mean "might not"
>>>> my entire life.

Eric Sosman wrote:
>>> "Mom, can I use the car?"
>>>
>>> "You mean `may'."
>>>
>>> "Sorry. Mom, may I use the car?"
>>>
>>> "No, you may not."

Lew wrote:
>> Your point may not have been clear here. What are you trying to say?

Eric Sosman wrote:
> That your mother may not have taught you good grammar?

My mother is a retired English teacher. I assure you she taught me good
grammar. You know, bringing up someone's mother is considered rude in some
cultures.

> "May (not)" does indeed have the meaning Arved describes,
> some of the time. "You may have another piece of pie" and "You
> may not use the car" and "He may not make any move that puts or
> leaves his King in check" are expressions of permission (or lack

No one disagrees with that.

> thereof), not of possibility or probabality. "You may not have
> heard the news" and "I may have known her, long ago" and "He may
> have been color-blind" are expressions of possibility, not of
> permissions. And sometimes it is not clear which sense of "may"
> may or may not be intended.

That is true, and not at all different from what I've been saying. It is
Arved's point about correctness that is not correct.

--
Lew
From: BGB / cr88192 on

"Tom Anderson" <twic(a)urchin.earth.li> wrote in message
news:alpine.DEB.1.10.1005021158460.19069(a)urchin.earth.li...
> On Sat, 1 May 2010, Peter Duniho wrote:
>
>> Tom Anderson wrote:
>>
>>> I should have phrased it better: i don't know a single good developer
>>> who develops on Windows by choice.
>>
>> That says more about your own personal professional and social circles
>> than it does the real world.
>
> Probably. But is was in response to this long-since snipped paragraph of
> cr88192's:
>
>>> but, we all know CRLF is the proper cross-platform line ending, since
>>> after all, it is used by Windows... (and typically people develop on
>>> Windows for Windows anyways, most non-Windows development often being a
>>> misnomer...). even when it is for non-Windows deployment, it is still
>>> typically developing on Windows for whatever is their target OS / HW...
>
> I object strongly to this notion of a de facto Windows hegemony amongst
> programmers. There is doubtless a majority, but it's not a monoculture.
>

this was originally partly intended as irony, but the sense of irony was
lost...

but, granted:
the majority of developers develop on Windows;
the majority of those developers, in turn, either use MS tools (MSVC or MS
Visual Studio), and very often, an MS technology (such as C# or VB.NET, or
they may use J# as their preferred Java implementation).

admittedly though, there is a bit of a Schism, where the majority of
open-source development is on Linux, and is also under GPL (vs MIT or BSD or
similar).


but, anyways, Windows is enough of a majority that one can easily get by
with using editors like Notepad, with the line-ending issue fairly rarely
showing up.


>> I also have observed a fair number of religious fanatics who have an
>> unwarranted anti-Windows bias, as if it's somehow an obviously-inferior
>> platform as compared to other mainstream ones.
>
> I used Windows for years, during the '95 and 2000 eras. From a programming
> perspective, it was an improvement on the MacOS 9 which i'd been using
> before that. But OS X and Linux are a *huge* improvement on Windows.
> That's my experience. Does that count as religious fanaticism?
>

I used Linux as my main OS during the Win95 and Win98 eras, but ended up
migrating back to Windows (during the Win2K era), since at the time Linux's
app and HW support was fairly poor.

I guess it is a bit better now (now most typical HW actually works...), but
I have ended up using primarily Windows as it still has much better app and
games support, and is still the dominant OS among end-users.


granted, personally, Java is not my main language (which would be C,
followed by C++ and ASM), so I can't say as much what are the statistics
among most primarily-Java developers.

I suspect Linux use may be a bit higher, since a much much more of the
development AFAIK is targetted at servers and embedded-systems, so there is
much less holding one to Windows for sake of the end-users...

and other factors, such as lower tendency to crash, and being free, are
likely to help some WRT servers, whereas app and games compatibility, ...,
is a much smaller concern.


personally, I haven't really ever used OS X.


> tom
>
> --
> Big Bang. No god. Fadeout. End. -- Stephen Baxter


From: Lew on
BGB / cr88192 wrote:
> but, granted:
> the majority of developers develop on Windows;
> the majority of those developers, in turn, either use MS tools (MSVC or MS
> Visual Studio), and very often, an MS technology (such as C# or VB.NET, or
> they may use J# as their preferred Java implementation).

I strongly suspect that hardly anyone is using J#.
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vjsharp/default.aspx>
> January 10, 2007: ...
> Since customers have told us that the existing J# feature set largely meets
> their needs and usage of J# is declining, Microsoft is retiring the Visual J#
> product and Java Language Conversion Assistant tool to better allocate
> resources for other customer requirements. The J# language and JLCA tool will
> not be available in future versions of Visual Studio.

--
Lew
From: BGB / cr88192 on

"Arne Vajh�j" <arne(a)vajhoej.dk> wrote in message
news:4bdcca13$0$279$14726298(a)news.sunsite.dk...
> On 30-04-2010 05:49, Arved Sandstrom wrote:
>> A lot depends on exactly what it is that people are writing. If I was
>> writing a Linux device driver in C I'd be cool with vim. But these days,
>> where I have to deal with .NET or J2EE web apps with thousands of source
>> files, I'd be an imbecile to try and do that with emacs.
>
> Emacs is pretty close to an IDE.
>
> But I don't know how good its Java and C# support is though.
>

personally, IMHO, I find that Emacs is just horrid and prefer to stay well
clear of it...


sorry, going off on a tangent here.

Notepad2 and Notepad++ is usable, and for some things I have been using
Visual Studio, and also some Eclipse, but personally I have found I am not
as fond of Eclipse in some ways (mostly it seems to hard-code a lot of
stuff, ...).

(although IME VS seems to be more customizable than Eclipse, but admitted I
haven't really dug into the details in Eclipse that much...).


the main thing I like about using the commandline and more ad-hoc tools is
that one is more free to customize the build environment to do what they
want (rather than being forced into the project-management and build
strategies the IDE developers had in mind).

for example, one can choose the type of editor they want, have a lot more
control over the build process, and can create their own tools to perform
various tasks (typically processing source code in specialized ways, or
automatically generating source-code from custom textual formats, ...), or
use GUI-based tools for other tasks (such as GIMP, or wysiwyg GUI forms
builders, ...).

as well, anymore, the OS-provided shells (be it bash or the windows command
shell), typically provide a lot of nice editing features, so a command-line
interface is nowhere near as bad as back in the days of DOS (where, if you
wanted to repeat a sequence of prior commands, it was generally needed to
re-type them, ...).

admittedly, Bash and CMD are different enough to where moving from one to
another can be disorientating at first (since they handle differently, have
different notations, ...).


similar, there are plain text editors with support for things like
autocomplete, ...

so, it is not exactly like forsaking an IDE is going into some barren land
of unusability or anything...