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• Programming Language Levels

  20 mai 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Programming

  I’ve been doing this programming thing for some 20 years now. Things sure do change. One change I ponder from time to time is the matter of programming language levels. Allow me to explain.

  The 1990s
  When I first took computer classes in the early 1990s, my texts would classify computer languages into 3 categories, or levels. The lower the level, the closer to the hardware ; the higher the level, the more abstract (and presumably, easier to use). I recall that the levels went something like this :

  • High level : Pascal, BASIC, Logo, Fortran
  • Medium level : C, Forth
  • Low level : Assembly language

  Keep in mind that these were the same texts which took the time to explain the history of computers from mainframes -> minicomputers -> a relatively recent phenomenon called microcomputers or "PCs".

  Somewhere in the mid-late 1990s, when I was at university, I was introduced to a new tier :

  • Very high level : Perl, shell scripting

  I think there was some debate among my peers about whether C++ and Java were properly classified as high or very high level. The distinction between high and very high, in my observation, seemed to be that very high level languages had more complex data structures (at the very least, a hash / dictionary / associative array / key-value map) built into the language, as well as implicit memory management.

  Modern Day
  These days, the old hierarchy is apparently forgotten (much like minicomputers). I observe that there is generally a much simpler 2-tier classification :

  • Low level : C, assembly language
  • High level : absolutely every other programming language in wide use today

  I find myself wondering where C++ and Objective-C fit in this classification scheme. Then I remember that it doesn’t matter and this is all academic.

  Relevancy
  I think about this because I have pretty much stuck to low-level programming all of my life, mostly due to my interest in game and multimedia-type programming. But the trends in computing have favored many higher level languages and programming paradigms. I woke up one day and realized that the kind of work I often do — lower level stuff — is not very common.

  I’m not here to argue that low or high level is superior. You know I’m all about using the appropriate tool for the job. But I sometimes find myself caught between worlds, having the defend and explain one to the other.

  • On one hand, it’s not unusual for the multitudes of programmers working at the high level to gasp and wonder why I or anyone else would ever use C or assembly language for anything when there are so many beautiful high level languages. I patiently explain that those languages have to be written in some other language (at first) and that they need to run on some operating system and that most assuredly won’t be written in a high level language. For further reading, I refer them to Joel Spolsky’s great essay called Back to Basics which describes why it can be useful to know at least a little bit about how the computer does what it does at the lowest levels.
  • On the other hand, believe it or not, I sometimes have to defend the merits of high level languages to my low level brethren. I’ll often hear variations of, "Any program can be written in C. Using a high level language to achieve the same will create a slow and bloated solution." I try to explain that the trade-off in time to complete the programming task weighed against the often-negligible performance hit of what is often an I/O-bound operation in the first place makes it worthwhile to use the high level language for a wide variety of tasks.

    Or I just ignore them. That’s actually the best strategy.

• How can I generate a video file directly from an FFmpeg filter with no actual input file ?

  26 août 2016, par blahdiblah

  FFmpeg has a number of video generating filters, listed in the documentation as "video sources" :

  • cellauto
  • color
  • mptestsrc
  • fei0r_src
  • life
  • nullsrc, rgbtestsrc, testsrc

  Those are great for using with other filters like overlay, but is there any way that I can generate a movie consisting of just one of those video sources without any input video ?

  Something like :

  ffmpeg -vf color=red" red_movie.mp4

  Except that that errors out with At least one input file must be specified.

• How to contribute to open source, for companies

  18 octobre 2010, par Dark Shikari — development, open source, x264

  I have seen many nigh-incomprehensible attempts by companies to contribute to open source projects, including x264. Developers are often simply boggled, wondering why the companies seem incapable of proper communication. The companies assume the developers are being unreceptive, while the developers assume the companies are being incompetent, idiotic, or malicious. Most of this seems to boil down to a basic lack of understanding of how open source works, resulting in a wide variety of misunderstandings. Accordingly, this post will cover the dos and don’ts of corporate contribution to open source.

  Do : contact the project using their preferred medium of communication.

  Most open source projects use public methods of communication, such as mailing lists and IRC. It’s not the end of the world if you mistakenly make contact with the wrong people or via the wrong medium, but be prepared to switch to the correct one once informed ! You may not be experienced using whatever form of communication the project uses, but if you refuse to communicate through proper channels, they will likely not be as inclined to assist you. Larger open source projects are often much like companies in that they have different parts to their organization with different roles. Don’t assume that everyone is a major developer !

  If you don’t know what to do, a good bet is often to just ask someone.

  Don’t : contact only one person.

  Open source projects are a communal effort. Major contributions are looked over by multiple developers and are often discussed by the community as a whole. Yet many companies tend to contact only a single person in lieu of dealing with the project proper. This has many flaws : to begin with, it forces a single developer (who isn’t paid by you) to act as your liaison, adding yet another layer between what you want and the people you want to talk to. Contribution to open source projects should not be a game of telephone.

  Of course, there are exceptions to this : sometimes a single developer is in charge of the entirety of some particular aspect of a project that you intend to contribute to, in which case this might not be so bad.

  Do : make clear exactly what it is you are contributing.

  Are you contributing code ? Development resources ? Money ? API documentation ? Make it as clear as possible, from the start ! How developers react, which developers get involved, and their expectations will depend heavily on what they think you are providing. Make sure their expectations match reality. Great confusion can result when they do not.

  This also applies in the reverse — if there’s something you need from the project, such as support or assistance with development of your patch, make that explicitly clear.

  Don’t : code dump.

  Code does not have intrinsic value : it is only useful as part of a working, living project. Most projects react very negatively to large “dumps” of code without associated human resources. That is, they expect you to work with them to finalize the code until it is ready to be committed. Of course, it’s better to work with the project from the start : this avoids the situation of writing 50,000 lines of code independently and then finding that half of it needs to be rewritten. Or, worse, writing an enormous amount of code only to find it completely unnecessary.

  Of course, the reverse option — keeping such code to yourself — is often even more costly, as it forces you to maintain the code instead of the official developers.

  Do : ignore trolls.

  As mentioned above, many projects use public communication methods — which, of course, allow anyone to communicate, by nature of being public. Not everyone on a project’s IRC or mailing list is necessarily qualified to officially represent the project. It is not too uncommon for a prospective corporate contributor to be turned off by the uninviting words of someone who isn’t even involved in the project due to assuming that they were. Make sure you’re dealing with the right people before making conclusions.

  Don’t : disappear.

  If you are going to try to be involved in a project, you need to stay in contact. We’ve had all too many companies who simply disappear after the initial introduction. Some tell us that we’ll need an NDA, then never provide it or send status updates. You may know why you’re not in contact — political issues at the company, product launch crunches, a nice vacation to the Bahamas — but we don’t ! If you disappear, we will assume that you gave up.

  Above all, don’t assume that being at a large successful company makes you immune to these problems. If anything, these problems seem to be the most common at the largest companies. I didn’t name any names in this post, but practically every single one of these rules has been violated at some point by companies looking to contribute to x264. In the larger scale of open source, these problems happen constantly. Don’t fall into the same traps that many other companies have.

  If you’re an open source developer reading this post, remember it next time you see a company acting seemingly nonsensically in an attempt to contribute : it’s quite possible they just don’t know what to do. And just because they’re doing it wrong doesn’t mean that it isn’t your responsibility to try to help them do it right.