Well if they do test this on humans, and if something goes wrong - they can easily fix it.
Just apply a wetware update. Maybe we can even deploy wetware updates wirelessly soon.
Just think of the possibilities. "Have you installed the Starbucks(tm) Wetware upgrade that makes you able to digest our latest drink, yet ?"
Or... "the latest patch for <brand>(tm) protects your genome against future cell aberrations so you can safely consume our (carcinogenic) products. Update your system now?"
No fear mongering going on here.
As i wrote earlier, the incident wasn't discussed in terms of being a threat in the german media.
Also, the pilot of the drone was only briefly arrested for disturbing the rally and released hours later by the police.
After conducting an examination of the drone, the police concluded that it posed no threat. case closed.
Just read the linked article. Talk of deploying ground-to-air missile systems or gun turrets against drones at public events, etc. You can be sure the billion dollar defense contractor industry is salivating at the 'threat' and will spend the money to make us all believe in it.
They would have been more effective if they had 50-100 individually-controlled quadcopters, and had them hover near specific individuals, looking at facial expressions, phone screens, gestures, etc. Crashing the drone at the guy's feet makes them seem harmless, or even hapless.
I'd argue that PHP came out of the gate with some pretty powerful properties, too.
They hit a sweet spot of
* Being there at the right time (none of the "good" languages in your book was around or usable for web dev at the time of PHP4 and PHP5 came out)
* Being easy to learn - giving beginners quick rewards.
* Being powerful enough to do quite a bit more than "simple web pages", as you say. This enabled people to "graduate" from "simple web pages" to "web apps".
In fact, most of the web was built in PHP (Wikipedia, Facebook, Wordpress runs on 50% of all webpages or so, Drupal is incredibly popular, Magento runs loads of webshops, and on and on). This has not happened merely by accident.
I feel it's a bit wrongheaded to suggest otherwise.
* Being dead easy to deploy on almost any webhost (Drop files, hit them with their url, be done - almost no other language delivers this even today)
In all i feel PHP has moved the web forward tremendously.
In time, itself has evolved as well. It may not have evolved as fast as one would want.
"Being there at the right time" is pretty much the only redeeming quality it has, and it's not so much a quality of the language, is it?
"Easy to learn" is not the same as giving beginners quick rewards. Being easy to learn, in reality, would probably result in things like Wordpress not having more holes than a swiss cheese.
"Powerful enough" -- most web frameworks are. Saying that it didn't happen by accident of course depends on how you define accident. Personally I think the only thing PHP has got going for it is the timing and next point:
"Dead easy to deploy" again isn't a property of the language. Saying that "almost no language delivers this" about something that's really up to the service you're using to host your website isn't fair, in that it actually has nothing to do with the language.
I must say that I wholeheartedly agree with your closing statements, though.
Well that's why I said "even" Javascript. Brendan Eich actually pulled off a small miracle by embedding incredibly powerful functional and prototypal paradigms in JS. It's not perfect, and there are plenty of warts, but JS came out of the gate with a powerful core that PHP took decades to add in a Frankenstein manner.
Enough with the "JavaScript is a functional language" myth, please. Merely having first-class functions does not make a language a functional programming language.
JavaScript does not promote the use of pure functions, referential transparency, and the minimization of state.
JavaScript does not encourage the use of recursion.
JavaScript has an atrociously broken type system, rather than a robust and theoretically sound one.
JavaScript does not offer pattern matching and other functionality offered by modern functional languages.
In fact, JavaScript goes out of its way to promote a very imperative, non-functional style of software development, even when efforts are made to try to use it in a functional way.
And JavaScript's prototype-based OO is anything but powerful. In practice, it's nearly useless. That's why we see so many JavaScript developers try to fake a class-like OO system using it, since class-based OO does offer what they need and want. But due to the incapability of JavaScript's prototype-based approach, these hacks end up being incompatible maintenance headaches.
JavaScript does not have a "powerful core". It has a rotten core, just like PHP, and it has evolved in a broken manner, just like PHP.
JavaScript's design is clearly much more coherent than PHP's. Whereas PHP's developers have added features haphazardly over several years, the JavaScript language hasn't changed much since its initial design in 1995. Warts aside, having a (barely) complete initial design that was done by one person over a short time and has since been mostly left alone is an advantage. And JavaScript is flexible enough that library and framework developers have been able to explore several different approaches while the language remains frozen. Therefore, it's quite misguided to lump JavaScript in with PHP in terms of language design.
It's certainly not accurate to categorize JS as a functional language, but it is flexible enough that one can program in a more or less functional style; and unlike PHP, it always has been.
Also, I've read several of your anti-JS diatribes, and I feel compelled to ask this: What drives you to denigrate JavaScript, and programmers who willingly choose to use it, wherever you can? Do you feel the need to show your superiority by bashing the languages that many programmers use to produce useful applications despite their lack of expertise? Can we not accept that all mainstream languages have warts, and that in many cases, practicality may dictate that we use a language that doesn't please us aesthetically but is nevertheless useful?
A bad programming language that remains bad for nearly two decades isn't really any better, in my opinion, than a bad language that undergoes some change that may have mixed results in the end.
JavaScript is bad. PHP is bad. They're both bad in many of the same ways, and they're bad in different ways. None of this changes the inherent fact that they're both bad programming languages.
Of course all programming languages have "warts". Very few, however, have as many horrible and inexcusable "warts" as JavaScript and PHP do.
As an industry and as a community, we can do better than JavaScript and PHP. In fact, we have already done better in the past (sometimes many years ago), many times over.
So, yes, I will speak out against programming languages that are inherently broken and inferior, and even extremely harmful, whenever I get the chance. It's the right thing to do.
This is not about my ego, or about my "superiority", or about me at all. This is about doing things properly, as an industry and as an entire community of programmers and software developers. JavaScript and PHP are very clearly not acceptable programming languages to use, even if a lot of people make the mistake of doing so.
I take issue with your recurring assertion that JavaScript is bad. Not just that it isn't to your liking, but that it's objectively bad, something that the software development community ought to avoid. JavaScript's bad parts have been discussed to death, so I won't rehash them; it's enough to point out that programmers can easily get used to avoiding or working around them. What's more important is that there are good things about JS which make it very desirable as a cross-platform, general-purpose programming language. Specifically:
1. JS is the native language of the Web platform. Because of its ubiquity, the likes of which Java, Flash, and Silverlight never achieved, the Web platform is an attractive deployment target for many apps.
2. Because of JS's role in the Web platform, it has the support of every major player in personal computing, specifically, Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Languages like Python, Ruby, and Lua have nowhere near that level of corporate backing.
3. Yet no single company owns JavaScript, so there is no patent trap as with Java or .NET. Nor is there any threat of vendor lock-in.
4. Because of the strong corporate backing and the fact that most Web browsers are now based on open-source engines, there are mature, open-source, non-copyleft implementations of JavaScript for all major desktop and mobile platforms. (The "non-copyleft" bit is in contrast with, say, Mono, whose license enables Xamarin to charge a premium for use in iOS, Android, and Mac apps.)
5. Because JavaScript is the native language of the Web platform, full-stack Web application developers basically know it to some extent, regardless of what language they prefer on the back-end. So many programmers know JavaScript, making it an attractive choice for a software company wanting to hire more programmers, or an open-source project looking for contributors.
6. Because of the competition among browser developers in recent years, all of the major JS implementations are now very fast.
7. Unlike C and C++, which are AFAIK the only languages that match or exceed JS's ubiquity, JS guarantees memory safety. This eliminate a whole class of bugs that many programmers are not equipped to deal with or prevent. These bugs often turn into security holes.
So these qualities, largely political and business-related but important nonetheless, make JS very attractive to anyone wanting to choose a mainstream, high-level, general-purpose programming language for cross-platform application development. In light of this, how can you say that JS is objectively bad?
Don't set me up as straw man for your anti-JS rant. I never said JavaScript was a functional language, and I never said it was a great language. I just said it is better conceived than PHP, no more, no less.
Support for higher-order functions is obviously a minimal requirement of a "functional programming language". But functional programming extends far, far beyond that.
It also embodies a philosophy emphasizing the purity of such functions. It encourages the use of recursion for iteration. It encourages the use of robust type systems. It encourages the use of pattern matching. It discourages the use of many imperative approaches.
Although they may offer some form of higher-order functions these days, I don't consider languages like JavaScript, C#, C++, Ruby or PHP to be "functional programming languages". They're imperative languages that just happen to have added the most basic of functionality expected from functional programming languages. They don't truly encourage, and only partially enable, the writing of software using a functional approach.
I wouldn't say so. It's far, far closer to a functional programming language than JavaScript is, for instance. But it's clearly nowhere near what Haskell or Standard ML are, either.
Maybe "semi-functional" would be a good term for it and Scheme. It has some of the important elements of functional programming, but not all of them.
For example they have now deprecated the dreaded mysql_, pgsql_ interfaces (including mysql_now_escape_the_string_for_real() and the like ;) for accessing the database in favor of PDO.
They will be removed in the future.
Lots of projects still use those.
Just 1 example of PHP dropping backwards compatibility.
It's not quite so bad as you make it out to be.
Deprecation of those awful vendor specific DB extensions is a good start, no doubt. But those are library functions, rather than language features.
Another thing to consider is that PHP developers have a track record of deprecating certain functionality, then a few releases later changing their minds and no longer deprecating it. Some examples of this include is_a, and var in property declarations.
Given how it's still relatively common to see PHP 4.x installations in use today, 10 or more years after they were first released in some cases, merely deprecating some of the broken functionality now won't help much. We'll still see deprecated features in use in 2020, if not well beyond then.
The broken functionality needs to be stripped out completely within a reasonable time frame (well under a year), not merely deprecated and left around for years, if it even stays deprecated. But this involves the PHP community acting responsibly, and going along with these changes for their own good. I don't think we can expect that level of responsibility out of them, unfortunately.
I agree about the need to really strip out the bad stuff, not just deprecating.
Wrt removal of language features:
They seem to be in the process of cleaning up some there as well.
For example in 5.4 they removed safe mode, register globals, magic quotes (and those were really awful).
see: http://php.net/releases/5_4_0.php
I also agree that there is a lot of bad stuff still around.
Look at how slow Python 3 adoption has been. I don't think completely breaking backwards compatibility is a quick thing. The Python folks expected 5 years for Python 3 to become the default version because of the dramatic changes.
I've worked on a number of software systems at several different organizations that have very effectively used Python 3 for years now. I think that Python 3 has been adopted perfectly fine by many other people and organizations, too.
We're just not overly vocal about using it, because it has worked for us with so little pain and so little effort in many cases. It really wasn't much different going from 2.7 to 3.0 or 3.1 than it was going from 2.6 to 2.7, for example.
Immigration is unpopular here in germany.
Indeed, it is very unpopular among many people.
German politicians, in the past (60s,70s,80s), have brought in many worker-immigrants mainly from turkey. They were badly needed to fill the many vacant spots in the booming economy.
They left no thought to integrating / assimilating them into the german society.
Up until the 1990s the political parties in germany could not even come to grips with the fact that germany was in fact an "immmigration country". They were in denial.
Today germany has 12-14% foreigners, mostly from turkey, and many of them have not been integrated well into the german society.
Also, unemployment is high among this group. Education chances are depressed, etc - you get the picture.
Now, we are in a bind.
On the one hand the birth rate has been dropping for decades.
This has to do with societal trends (more women working, etc) - but is a complicated issue in itself.
Only group with a healthy birth rate, ironically, are the turkish immigrants.
Politicians do not have any idea what to do about the birthrate.
That has to with a cultural memory of nazi-era family policies, which rewarded having many children. It's a taboo today in german politics to try to directly induce families to have more children in any way.
The german economy is already suffering. The term "fachkräftemangel" has been coined for this- which means the industry is already finding it difficult to fill all the vacant spots with qualified personell.
Correct, in fact in general families/women from lower income and education levels (no matter if immigrants or not) tend to have more children than higher educated couples that prioritize their career. Overall germany is also not a very family-with-children-friendly country. This is in stark contrast to, for example, the US.
While Germany has plenty of room for improvement, I'd hardly call the US a shining example of a country that's great for families with children, either.
Not in my experience, and families with children face a great many obstacles.
The abortion rate in the US is about three times that of Germany; the majority of women who have an abortion cite that they cannot afford to have a child as a primary reason.
There is no statutory maternity leave in the US (let alone parental leave).
Depending on what health insurance you have, even having a baby can be pretty pricey; a friend of mine who recently had a baby ended up paying over $2,500 in coinsurance for the delivery alone.
Daycare is generally much more expensive than in Germany, where daycare is heavily subsidized (daycare subsidies for low-income families vary by state).
Having a positive attitude towards families with children is great (and it's arguable whether there's actually a difference), but it doesn't put food on a table or a roof over their head.
The biggest practical problem that German parents face, in my experience, is that schools or daycare centers that are out at noon are difficult to square away with having both a job and children (though the problem of latchkey kids is hardly unknown in the US, either; google "Kim Brathwaite", for example).
Hispanics have high birth rates, and they are a growing minority (30%?), a majority in many states. Also, we have subgroups like Mormons who are very old school catholic in having lots of kids.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. Germany it seems will continue to pay for this mistake from the 50/60/70s in a number of ways unfortunately.
People are now afraid of immigrants in general. Most people don't realize that there is a VERY big difference to the economy from an Indian IT worker - who learns German - assimilates himself culturally (maybe even studied a masters or something in Germany - picking up the finer bits of your complicated culture) & the Turkish family in the shady part of the city thats living on Hartz 4. This is a huge issue for a country thats trying hard to attract foreigners (www.make-it-in-germany.com).
Most other immigrants I know here - eventually get tired of this feeling of constantly have to justify that they arent here to mooch of the system - and are probably providing for some family in Brandenburg with their monthly tax and social security payments (most educated immigrants earn atleast 40-50k€ - its a natural lower limit set by the fact that you cant get a permit otherwise). This means easily 15-20k € in tax and Social security (and lovely SOLI of course) - with which they are supporting a society that looks at them as leeches.
Dont get me wrong - Germans are tolerant - but that's different from inclusive. The tendency is to assume "oh these poor 3rd world people need to come here to have a good living." That simply isnt true - a well qualified person can live an equally good life in the developing world as he would in Germany. (sure maybe not everything is always on time but so what). Many people move to Germany for other reasons - be it hte love for beer (no kidding) , german cars, the green, or they wanted to be with a German person they got to know somewhere. but instead of considering any other possibilities - the average German tends to assume "ah he wants our awesome healthcare & social security).
This needs to change. Especially if you want to tackle the fachkraftemängel. Those qualified people will get employed anywhere. The government gets this and has made small moves to make it "easier" - you can easily get a permit and work here now - this is good. Even the beauraucracy is less of a pain in the ass than a few years ago.
What's missing though is the public education. Merkel herself at some point said "Multiculti has failed in Germany". Foreigners will take an integrationtest, learn the language and even figure out the complicated regulation system. In turn though - you need to offer them more than juts a decent salary and standard of living - you need to offer them acceptance. This is missing. People need to be given reverse integrations training or atleast provided some information - let them understand that these people aren't here to mooch of the system or steal jobs - they're here because to a large extent the country needs them.
You cannot live an equally good life in the developing world. That's a romanticization. First, the top 1% of India has purchasing power equivalent to just above the median purchasing power in the U.S.[1] "Upper middle class" in India is defined as $10-20 international dollars per day.[2]
Second, even if you are top 1% in India living like a top 25% in Indiana, your life is one of walls and enclaves. My family was rich in the developing world. We would go from our house with its high wall and iron gate into our foreign car with driver and tinted windows. We would do anything we could to avoid having to interact with the people on the street, our supposed countrymen.
The US has its enclaves, but I can get in a car and head to the relatively poor coastal town where my wife's parents grew up. I can go eat at the seafood shack by the side of the highway and consider it a treat. I can talk to the people and feel like we all live in the same country. That's living a good life.
[1] See this article, for example: http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/the-.... The couple in the article (one a consultant, another a PR executive) makes 1.8 million rupees per year, equivalent to about $29k USD. Adjusted for purchasing power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity), that's roughly equivalent to $70-80k USD. That's roughly at the top 1/3 mark of US household income, and probably not that far above median for US households where both people are working. As noted in this article, the couple is well within the top 1% of India, which starts at $1.25 million rupees per year. That level is equivalent to about the 57th percentile in the U.S.
[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-23271.... $20 PPP-adjusted dollars per day, or $7k/year is around the bottom 5% mark in the U.S. Only 4.6% of Indians have all four of these assets: a TV, a car or scooter, a landline or mobile phone, and a computer or laptop. Even people living in trailer parks in the U.S. will often have all four of these assets.
"You cannot live an equally good life in the developing world. That's a romanticization. "
Not really. You can't get as good in some aspects, but if you have the money (which is not difficult if you're being poached to work in Europe/the US) you can get beyond on some others.
Like big house with a pool and maids.
Very nice hotels/vacations for a price of an average hotel in Europe
"My family was rich in the developing world. We would go from our house with its high wall and iron gate into our foreign car with driver and tinted windows"
You missed the point - I´m not talking about the US. You might be able to find solidarity with the folks in your wifes towns seafood joint in the U.S. In Germany you'd at best get curious looks and awkward questions.
Everything else you've stated is either untrue (people lived in strange walled societies) or irrelevant (PPP etc - 29k is enough for people to live a good life in India. In any case the people I referred to - the ones who would even have a chance in places like Germany etc - are well above that 1% figure even in India). I leave it to you to figure out how big 1% of 1.2 Billion is.
> I´m not talking about the US. You might be able to find solidarity with the folks in your wifes towns seafood joint in the U.S. In Germany you'd at best get curious looks and awkward questions.
On the contrary, I think there is more solidarity across economic classes in most of Europe than there is in the U.S.
> Everything else you've stated is either untrue (people lived in strange walled societies)
> or irrelevant (PPP etc - 29k is enough for people to live a good life in India.
Sure, but your premise was that people didn't come to the West from places like India for the economic opportunities, because "a well qualified person can live an equally good life in the developing world as he would in Germany." A programmer in Germany lives a far better quality of life than his counterpart in India, at nearly any level of qualification.
> I leave it to you to figure out how big 1% of 1.2 Billion is.
It doesn't matter how many people are in the 1%--it still means that 99 out of 100 people live in far less comfortable circumstances. And, from my personal experience, living in communities with high income inequality sucks. I find it barely tolerable in Wilmington, DE, and that's a egalitarian paradise in comparison to anywhere in India. Life in India is not "equally good" outside the enclaves frequented by 1%-ers and Western expatriates, and being forced to stick to these enclaves is itself something that undermines quality of life.
well being from what would be considered that 1% of india - I can assure you I didn't live in an enclave where I didn't have access to the "real world" around me.
Getting back to the actual point - quality of life is highly subjective and the fact that there's a strong reverse brain drain happening makes it pretty obvious that there's plenty good opportunities in India right now - educated Indians dont need to go abroad for a good life. Sure there maybe differences - but after a certain level it doesn't matter anyways. The truth is - there are more people in india (also proportionally) - who have access to a decent standard of living today - than there were at any point in its history - and for most Indians thats pretty good already.
More importantly - what you misunderstood by focusing on just that one statement is that - the economic difference is just not attractive enough that companies can ignore the softer aspects. Especially for a country like Germany where the language barrier is anyways a huge disadvantage - just being economically attractive isn't going to be enough for them to draw people in. In fact - a recent article from a leading german weekly itself states that even after simplifying the visa process (if you have a degree in STEM - you can essentially just come here for 6 months and look for work no questions asked) - there hasn't been any sort of significant increase in the number of qualified people coming here. Anecdotal and personal experience, as well as the numbers clearly then point out that even for people who would maybe want better economical conditions - there's other things that matter more.
When you lose yourself in the statistics and GDP calculations - you miss the bigger picture. People are fine with living with less money in places where they feel happy compared to places where they dont feel at home, especially if the difference in the money is not percieved to be significant enough.
* 2/3 of your last wage for 1 year on unemployment, free health care
* After that expires you get your rent paid, free health care , and 400 euro per month for other expenses - indefinitely
On top of that everyone also gets free additional care when they are old / nursing home.
Also everyone gets a minimum pension once they reach 67 years of age.
Germany has the lowest youth unemployment in europe. it has one of the lowest overall unemployment rates in europe. it is one of the few countries that still had growth in the years past / is not deeply in recession.
I liked living in Germany, they have a good work ethics, I really like their service at the bar/restaurant, they come back from the office sooner than the French (I think we have a cultural problem with that), and they know how to have fun, chilling with a beer in the sun, enjoying riversides, simple joys.
Germany is doing well, because of :
1. Germans working hard
2. Qualified immigrants from Eastern European countries(and other parts of the world as well). Their labour is cheaper, which in turn is like adrenalin to the economy. I'll let you figure out why.
1) That's actually factually wrong (check EU work statistics) and a little racist -- adopting the stereotype of Germans as working robots. Here's a pointer:
"According to a new research on working hours in countries of the European Union, Greeks work 42.2 hours per week. more than all other Europeans. The research was conducted by the National Statistical Service of Britain for the period April-June 2011. German people work 35.6 hours per week, French 38 hours, the British 36.3 hours, while the Irish only 35 hours. In addition, according to the same research, full-time workers in Greece and Austria are working more hours (43.7) than workers elsewhere in the EU" (from the Guardian).
2) Nope, they mostly got/get lots of unqualified immigrants. Not to mention that the integration of Eastern Germany post 1989 had an enormous cost that nearly toppled Germany's economy.
There's more. There's technical standards, procedures and laws accross europe for the storage, retrieval and processing of metadata and other information.
