The Internet Meme Timeline 235
CNet pointed out a great use of timeline creation site "Dipity" that has resulted a timeline of internet fads and memes. While there are some subtle inaccuracies and a few notable omissions, it seems to have touched on most of the big stuff. Everything from GOTO being considered harmful to "the website is down," it's a great trip down memory lane if you don't mind a few speedbumps like the goatse guy.
Goto is Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Goto is evil and I am not going to cave in on that.
Speedbumps? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, things like goatse is why I would want such a tool in the first place.
I have warm, fond memories of him, tubgirl, the lemonparty, twogirlsonecup. They comfort me at night, and keep me warm inside my heda, where they frolic and romp through green and brown fields. Ah, the heady springtime of the internet, where such creatures roam easy and free. Now we enter the dark says of summer, where the storms of incomprehensible images and video come upon us, cheapening these rare jewels.
Re:When did the "Slashdot effect" term get coined? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a recursive meme...
assembly (Score:5, Insightful)
And for that matter, when you make a method/function call, doesn't the compiler create a JMP (goto) instruction?
And does that mean that assembly programmers are evil?
Re:I bet it was cool (Score:5, Insightful)
I never understood the whole "this was on Digg/Fark/Reddit/BoingBoing/Inquirer/Register/Kuro5shin yesterday" thing.
Was it? Great. When choosing between seeing it two days later, or having to go to one of those other sites that are polluted with even more nonsense than exists on Slashdot, I've chosen the former. The real question is, if people have already see this stuff on other sites, why don't they go there and stop coming here?
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh. Along the same lines as what I said in the COBOL thread yesterday, your compiled code probably contains a lot of whatever JMP gets to be at the machine code level, and that's nothing but a goto spelled differently.
Anything can be used incorrectly and/or incomprehesibly, even comments. I'd rather just get my programs to work and be maintainable than articially limit my toolbox.
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:4, Insightful)
It's also just not frequently important to get the linear increase in speed or decrease in executable or memory footprint that you get with these techniques any more.
A program that runs half as fast but is twice as easy to maintain is almost always the correct design on modern systems.
Re:assembly (Score:4, Insightful)
that's a GOSUB, not a GOTO.
No, it isn't. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but there's a reason very few people program in assembly today. Structured programming was a huge step forward, and it matters very little that every structured OOP program ends up as a bunch of load, store, add, compare, and jump instructions.
By telling people to avoid goto, the overall quality of code and acceptance of structured programming has been increased tremendously, which has done a lot of good things for computing. There are always exceptions, and obviously there are cases where a goto (by that or another name) is the best way to do it. But in the overwhelming number of cases, a higher-level structure will be a much better choice. That's what this is about.
The only thing I wonder about is what that has to do with the Internet.
Re:I bet it was cool (Score:2, Insightful)
They do it to prove they're more in the loop than you are. It makes their E-peen grow if they can claim that such-and-such is already old news.
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed.
Buying faster hardware is generally much cheaper - and a more likely to see a quantifiable return on investment - than buying faster programmers.
firehose (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to improve the site submit your own properly edited stories and use your influence over the firehose to promote stories of interest.
missing something important ... (Score:4, Insightful)
A Real Internet Meme Timeline would say "September" for every month after March 1994.
Re:I bet it was cool (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:missing something important ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, for every month after August 1993 [wikipedia.org]
Re:I bet it was cool (Score:3, Insightful)
I am coming here more and more and in fact, take Slashdot more seriously because of Digg. It showed people what would unlimited karma mean.
abuse.
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't forget that things like break and continue are also gotos with funny sounding names.
Actually no, if the language you're using (e.g. Java) restricts break and continues to refer only to loops that they appear in the body of, then the program's control flow graph is still reducible [acm.org]. Break and continue without this restriction lead to irreducible flow graphs. This makes a big difference in the conceptual complexity (and sometimes runtime complexity) of compiler algorithms, in particular the construction of SSA form.