Programmer Wanted

format_quote Originally Posted by Serinity

Python looks interesting. I think. I will try and learn, In shaa' Allah.
@fschmidt what are the requirements? Can any newbie with motivation take the Job?

I will start learning Python, In shaa' Allah. Will it be beneficial in terms of using PHP? Because my teacher is teaching us to program in PHP.

PHP is quite different to python so no they won't directly benefit each other. That being said when you program in one language, you will find it easier to pick up another language. If your teacher is teaching you PHP then stick with that for now, perhaps learn some javascript because this will work nicely with PHP.

You can learn programming in your own spare time at home. Even just 1 hour a day is good and soon you'll be making cool little programs.

Nerds

I am currently already on a project, but I would still like to know you better, and possibly also stay in touch with you!

You see, the day that I do need a project, I would probably want to work with someone who sounds a bit like you do.

Therefore, I would like to devise a way to stay in touch, or even possible work together on things, if only a few hours a week or so, on an open-source project or so. Maybe other like-minded programmers would also join in for a few hours per week or so?

The benefit of doing that, is that someone who needs to recruit would always have a pool of candidates whom he actually knows because has worked with them already.
The benefit for someone looking for a project, a gig, or a job, is that he already knows some of his colleagues or even his client (or boss) on the project.

Everybody involved could use this open-source project as a networking tool to find new employment or new collaborators. So, the few hours per week that you would spend on software of public interest, published for free, could sooner or later start snowballing economically and financially too. It is not just about finding a job, but a job with people that you know and appreciate. That is possibly also worth something?

It also cuts quite a bit of risk for the recruiter, because the level and nature of the skills of a person in such project group would be well understood. Other programmers in the group could also comment on that, and further reduce the risk.

Furthermore, it would also allow you to work with other people who are also rather religious and with a monotheist outlook (such as Muslims, or particular kinds of Jews or Christians). That could also possibly be worth something?

I think that we may benefit and therefore should be interested in working a few hours per week together, and get other programmers and potential recruiters to join the group. Any thoughts?

I have 2 open source projects:http://luan.luanhost.com

When I see the words Java, C# or C++, that is usually the last that I will read about the project, because I consider these terms to be non-starters. Show stoppers.
Java is not the answer. Java is the question, and the answer is no.

http://www.blasma.com

Quite hard to see what it is, except for being written in luan.

Luan itself looks good, actually.
I am also quite ok with Lua and LuaJit.
I consider Lua to be a bit of a relatively similar concept to Javascript, but without the bloat and the anine "bad parts". So, to some extent, I guess that Lua is some kind of "Javascript the good parts".

But then again, the only field in which they truly seem to use Lua extensively, is in games. I don't program games. So, lua may not be that suitable for my own projects. For example, I tend to program a lot around bitcoin primitives. You will find lots of usable code in C++ (horresco referens), Python(Duh!), Javascript (Ok-ish), and even some usable code in PHP, but nothing much in Lua.

Therefore, it means that if you use Lua, you would have to painstakingly reprogram the bitcoin primitives first. It is not that hard to do that, but still, it will still take time to do it. Lua may actually not be "better enough" to justify doing so.

Furthermore, the love of my life is Bash. So, I incessantly keep seeking for ways to use Bash instead of other tools.

Here you can find my latest publication in this realm: https://github.com/eriksank/altcalconv

I am doing everything to make Bash more usable, so that we can finally use it as a replacement for other scripting languages.

If you look at these projects, you will see that my programming philosophy reflects my religious views, namely that I support humble simplicity and I reject all modern ideological fashion. Let me know if either of these projects interest you.

The good thing about them, is that they are non-mainstream. They are not just a rehash of abusing AngularJS or ReactJS for doing something otherwise utterly uninteresting.

My personal belief is that Lua is certainly not bad for a contemporary scripting language, but that it is certainly not going to enable us to really move forward. Therefore, I do not believe for a second that I could ever be passionate about Lua. I would not see why.

This is another project that I find really exciting: http://ctypes.sh. It is also entirely geared at making Bash (Shell scripting) useful outside its narrow system administration context.

I also like C quite a bit. The themes that I really enjoy, are: Bash, Bitcoin, C, marketplaces. I would most likely only end up considering Lua to be some kind of distraction, and I would certainly not agree to use a version based on Java, instead of the original version in C. Maybe we can find some other common ground than lua?

But I am still curious why you hate Java.

Well, Java is a corporate concept originally designed by Sun Microsystems. In its first version, 0.96, it was certainly something interesting to look at. Gosling created something that looked a bit exciting. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that object-oriented programming is at best a programming pattern, and certainly not a general building brick, on which you can say that you can base every program. There are valid turing-complete axiomatizations that use sets as building bricks (Zermelo-Fränkel), functions (Church, lambda calculus), apparently also types (Bertrand Russell, type theory). There is even a valid but not turing-complete axiomatization that uses numbers as its building bricks (Dedekind-Peano). Or you could use an axiomatization based on combinators such as in the SKI combinator calculus. In fact there is an unlimited number of axiomatizations possible that will allow you to express all possible knowledge that can be executed on a Turing machine. However, there is no valid axiomatization based on objects. Nobody has ever produced one.

The core idea of object orientation is obviously the following:

a->f(x) == (lookup("f",a))(a,x)

Every function must first be looked up in the context of its first argument ("a"), so that you know what function to call.
Why would programming have to be like that? On what grounds do they declare that kind of functions the only valid kind of functions?
Where is the mathematics supporting that claims? Where is the axiomatization based on methods that supports that view?

People who tout the necessity of object orientation simply fail to realize that we have an entire field of computability investigating exactly that kind of claims. Making that kind of claims "Pure object-orientation" is just a way for these people to show to us their ignorance about the mathematics underlying computing and computability.

I see Java as a somewhat higher level C that is very portable.

Well, I consider that view to be of a level too low to seriously consider. In terms of the metalevel of computing and computability, I am only willing to consider arguments that are mathematically substantiated, that is, that are sailing under the flag of provability. There are no math arguments in favour of Java. It is just inane corporate hogwash. Corporate profiles generally have no understanding of the fundamentals. That is why their work is usually not worth publishing even just as open source. When it comes out of that crowd, I will almost automatically dismiss it as probably utterly dumb again. The TLR is that corporations should not do any of the fundamental thinking, because it is not their strength at all.

Luan integrates very tightly with Java which means that I can access all the usable stuff in Java from Luan. Java is probably second after C in terms of the amount of usable stuff available. It is much more work to make C stuff available in Lua than to make Java stuff available in Luan. Also, Luan is faster than Lua because Luan is compiled for the JVM. And the threading models for Lua and LuaJit aren't very good. Luan lets one do the equivalent of a fork by just cloning all the data for another thread. This is clean and simple. Luan also integrates cleanly with bash by treating a script as a type of URI what can be opened and read from of written to. Anyway, the main issue I guess is Java, so please explain this to me.

None of this will solve any serious or fundamental problem. It is utterly unambitious. What progress do you expect from it? You do not even mention anything that should be considered to be progress. Therefore, no progress will ever come out of it. I always seek to achieve progress, no matter how small. This does not even try.

It is better than the typical corporate style of doing things, which is typically very confused, and with no hope whatsoever of ever achieving anything, but it is still utterly unambitious and attempting to solve any real problem. In other words, I cannot imagine that anybody else would ever spend his time on it. Since it does not solve any compelling problem, everybody will pick the safe choice and go for lua/c. Why would they take a risk and use your luan implementation? They would only do that because the compelling benefit of doing that, would more than cover the risk, but for that, it needs to solve a real, compelling problem. Which one?

Java isn't a corporate concept. Java is Gosling's concept, and Gosling happened to work at a corporation at the time.

Yes, I agree. That is why the original prototype, version 0.96, was quite good. People liked it. Gosling managed to make an interesting point. Everything that followed that original version, was no longer Gosling floating a concept, did not improve it, but just made it increasingly unusable.

This is a reasonable combination of programming patterns.

Well, I believe that a programming language is the reflection of a particular mathematical axiomatization. Lisp is a very good example for that. The concept was first published in 1958. Lisp and its derivatives are still viable programming languages today, because underlying math did not rust. There is no underlying math for Java. In other words, Java is absolutely not in the same league. Enforcing a circumstantially-useful programming pattern through programming language syntax is not what we needed then, and also not what we need now. Not everything is a valid class or object. If it were, they would have phrased an object calculus first. Everything really is a function. The lambda calculus guarantees that. Therefore, I ignore things like Java. These things just don't have it and don't cut it.

It is particularly good for developing libraries since object-oriented programming is good at encapsulation. It isn't so good for rapidly developing applications.

At the metalevel, a programming concept is mathematics. Java is just not good mathematics. In fact, it is not mathematics at all. Therefore, it is fundamentally not good for anything it claims to be good at.

Math is what powers computability.
Java is a tool built by non-mathematicians for non-mathematicians.
The better tools are built by mathematicians for non-mathematicians.

Other paradigms may work for libraries, but they are unproven and Java is proven, so why bother?

At best Java could be falsifiable (as in science) but never provable (as in math).

Provability requires that all untruth in a statement be exclusively the result of the untruth in a set of underlying statements. This principle is then repeated for each of these underlying statements, recursively, turtles all the way downs to the basic statements, aka, the axioms.

The concept of proof means that you use the rewrite rules in the axiomatic system to unambiguously derive the statement from existing statements in the axiomatic system.

Unlike Lisp, Java has never been phrased as a theorem in an axiomatic system. It has never been formally derived from one. Java simply has nothing to do with provability, proof, and axiomatic systems.

Java has also never been phrased as a falsifiable statement along with an invitation to conduct experiments in order to falsify it. Therefore, Java is not even falsifiable (as in science).

Java is something else. It is more like someone who discovers that the number 47 appears everywhere in biology. Especially, if you add up 21 to 26 or 5 to 41, and so on. You can always find reasons to see the number 47 there. Therefore, he concludes that all biology rests on the core principle of 47. From there on, he creates a programming language in which all numbers must be phrased as multiples of 47, and in which all functions have 47 arguments.

They really believe that it works like that. They are absolutely convinced of what they have discovered. From there on, everything must be like that. Any function with a different number of arguments than 47, is simply wrong. They are sure about that. They pay for enormous advertisement campaigns insisting that everything is pure 47. A lot of people do not know better and believe them. So, now you have a gang, some kind of sect, creating all their programs in the 47 concept.

That is exactly what Java is. We look at it, and at the people who believe in all of that, and we consider the whole lot to be utterly stupid.