sajidu

Nice introduction to socket programming.

You might like to follow up with this:

http://wangafu.net/~nickm/libevent-book/01_intro.html

Which is the introduction to this:

http://wangafu.net/~nickm/libevent-book/TOC.html

Some quotes:

"and I believe that mathematicians who continue to do pure human, pencil-and-paper, computer-less, research, are wasting their time."

"The axiomatic method is not even the most efficient way to prove theorems in Euclidean Geometry."

The author is disagreeing with math as practiced by most mathematicians: proof using only pencil, paper and coffee.

BTW, formalism is only a fairy tale mathematicians tell their children when putting them to bed at night. In our hearts, we're all closet platonists.

I'd agree with the author that only logicians are interested in formal proofs.

But what the author describes as the Hilbet-Bourbaki method is simply what math is. Any mathematician will tell you that if you're not proving theorems then you're not really doing math.

Anyway, what good is a computer proof if it doesn't provide any insight ? (which is usually the case). A good proof usually illuminates why some mathematical statement is true, and that is why computer proofs are usually looked upon with suspicion by many mathematicians.

After all, a computer simply churning out the answer (42 ?) doesn't advance the state of human knowledge at all.

MSFT, welcome to the interwebs!!!

Even Linus loves it :)

Wonderful :)

This is stupid...

Brokers don't trade with their own money, they trade on behalf of clients.

They make a living by charging their clients a small commission for making the trade. Brokers make money when the market is going up, and they make when money the market is going down.

Most users think it is.

Ignore your users at your own peril...

Facebook users don't care about Beacon ... not yet anyway.

Steve is a Google employee.

Or use my app:

http://apps.facebook.com/webmail/

Which Facebook are clearly trying to squash :-(

Facebook are directly trying to squash my app:

http://apps.facebook.com/webmail/

It's exactly what you hoped for and what Facebook haven't yet managed to deliver :-)

This is a hard problem.

If your app isn't successful then there's nothing to worry about.

But what if your app is super successful? How would you ever be able to secure enough servers to meet the demand without burning a very deep hole in your pocket?

What we need is a Y-Combinator like incubator for Facebook Apps - a company which will host your app and help you scale it up for a chunk of equity.

C and JavaScript.

I worked with Perl before PHP but never grew to like it (it's not consistent enough and not exactly easy on the eyes, either).

I do understand the tradeoff between efficiency and power, and PHP hits that sweet spot just right for web programming.

Worrying _too_ much about language efficiency when it comes to web programming is clearly a case of premature optimisation. PHP is efficient enough (probably Perl and Python as well, maybe not Ruby ?).

There is such thing as blub languages

But PHP is not one of them, it's perfectly suited for the web. I personally find it easier to identify blub programmers than blub languages ...

As long as it resolves symbols (variable and function names) at run-time instead of compile-time, it can't be efficient.

That includes all dynamic languages i.e. Lisp, Ruby, Python, Perl, Smalltalk, JavaScript, Eiffel, Erlang, Forth, Lua et al.

No programming language is straight-forward unless you know all internals.

True, but as you say, that applies to any language. PHP is a very easy language for novices to pick up.

OOP ... gives nothing but an illusion of maintainability, while in reality you end up

In my experience OO code tends to be easier to maintain, and so long as you don't over do it, efficient.

Only good thing about PHP is that it's a dynamic language with dynamic strings and lists/arrays, it is embedded (in HTML) and is largely supported. And that's all you need for server programming on the Web.

That's why I recommended it as a good choice for web programming.