Re: Checking for Modification to a Set of Files

On Sat, 25 Mar 2006 15:30:48 +0000, Randy Howard wrote:

Ben Bacarisse wrote
(in article <pan.2006.03.25.01.02.57.151812@xxxxxxxxx>):

I think partisan feelings are getting in the way of the facts here.

Maybe, but I don't think that discussing portable over
proprietary (or at least minimally portable) solutions is
partisan. I'm trying to figure out how a post listing off quite
a few platforms could be "partisan" anyway.

I was not suggesting you were partisan about platforms. You seemed to be,
like me, partisan about camelCasedAPIsFromRedmond and this was obscuring
the fact that .NET applications are not Windows-only.

I hope that there are sound /technical/ reasons for rejecting .NET, but I
don't know much about it so I can't quote any. Your complaint that it is
not standard is almost certainly a short-lived one since MS has the
resources and influence to make it a standard.

Maybe someone here has tried and can testify that writing portable .NET
applications is a nightmare?

<snip>
For any sufficiently diverse set of systems, a portable solution
will be hard to write

I guess that all depends upon how you define "sufficiently
diverse", yet I don't find this particular problem to very
difficult at all to achieve portably.

I think you are right. I have re-read the OP's post and it does not have
enough information to support my conjecture. I was thinking about a
general-purpose file-change notification mechanism when I suggested it
would be hard to write portably for a wide range of systems.

<snip>
Inferior is a question of point of view. Despite the common mantra of
the newly minted CS grads that everything in the universe is about
performance, in the real world, you need to understand that if it isn't
a bottleneck, then it it isn't a problem.

As someone who used to be partly responsible for minting those grads, I
think the performance obsession is almost unavoidable. I think it may
have more to do with the fact that most fresh CS grads are young men than
anything to do with what, or how, they are taught.

There are cases, though, where performance matters even when it is not a
bottleneck. I rejected some Python-based system monitoring software
because it took up around 5-10% of my CPU. This was enough to keep my
laptop fan on almost all the time. I point this out only in the spirit of
Usenet nit picking. I agree with the sentiment you are expressing -- that
there are properties of good code that are usually far more important than
performance, and that an appreciation of this usually only comes with
experience of code that lacks one or more of them.

<snip>
Can you post a link to the free download for OS X please?

http://www.mono-project.com/Mono:OSX

"This page describes some of the differencies and idiosyncrasies of Mono
on MacOS X..."

Well, I'm not sure if "differencies" is supposed to be differences,
deficiencies, or some combination of the two, but either way, that's all
I need to know for now. Thanks anyway.

OK, I'm not trying to sell you the idea -- I should not even have posted
the link because I knew you were asking rhetorically. The point is that
you accidentally picked a weak pair of reasons for rejecting .NET. "It not
standard" is possibly already false and will only get weaker as time goes
by, and "it is not available for OS X" is probably false (depending on
what you want to be included in the term "available").

--
Ben.
.