Hashtable ordering

[Lew]

Lew wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :

Most of use do our poking around in the source code when a feature
first becomes available. We don't bother going back to see if
anything has changed unless the API changes, which rarely happens. It
is thus fairly easy for information to go stale.

So, knowing that Hashtable was retrofitted to fit the collections framework in
version 1.2, you would assume that its code was the same as in version 1.1?

Somehow I don't think so.

 

[Roedy Green]

Other such historical words that might need footnotes:
Hollerith

unit record
patch cord

You did unit record work with dedicated machines to reproduce, sort,
collate and list. You programmed them by plugging gold tipped wires
something like today's microphone plugs, into holes into a frame you
inserted into the machine.

--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"There is an evil which ought to be guarded against, in the indefinite accumulation of property,
from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by... corporations.
The power of all corporations aught to be limited in this respect.
The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses."
~ James Madison (born: 1751-03-16 died: 1836-06-28 at age: 85)

 

[Roedy Green]

So, knowing that Hashtable was retrofitted to fit the collections framework in
version 1.2, you would assume that its code was the same as in version 1.1?

Somehow I don't think so.

But you would not have the same driving curiosity to look again to
figure out how it worked. You would have easily assumed they just
tweaked it a bit to fit the interface without changing the guts.

Take a poll. How many people looked at Hashtable and HashMap source
only when they first came out.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"There is an evil which ought to be guarded against, in the indefinite accumulation of property,
from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by... corporations.
The power of all corporations aught to be limited in this respect.
The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses."
~ James Madison (born: 1751-03-16 died: 1836-06-28 at age: 85)

 

[Mike Schilling]

Or has another reason for posting than just to find out the answer,
such as to remind the previous poster that not everyone is familiar
with
the acronym they just used. In particular, that it is NOT a
"standard"
acronym,

Sure, it only gets about 2,000,000 Google hits. Really, really
obscure,

 

[Lew]

Take a poll. How many people looked at Hashtable and HashMap source
only when they first came out.

I didn't look at either until about nine years after I started programming in
Java. Once I did start looking at Java source code, I looked repeatedly at
classes of interest and not at all at others. I always look at the source for
the latest stable Java version unless I'm doing historical research. I'm not
going to take a poll, because that would be expensive and time-consuming and
only prove that some people make foolish and unfounded assumptions about the
unchangeability of Java API source.

If this thread proves anything, it's that it is not wise to assume that Java's
API classes have changed only slightly or trivially over time, so one hopes
that its readers will not make that mistake any more.

 

[Lew]

Hollerith used it
punch card used it
paper tape

used it - always wanted to put a program on a Möbius strip

mag tape

used it - used to have to mount'em myself.

core
tube used 'em
CRT

Can't even get my employer to stop using 'em

TTY used it
Univac learned assembler on it
Xerox (as a mainframe company)

It's the same company.

Any programmer who doesn't know about Xerox PARC needs to turn in their GUI
and their mouse.

Control Data used it
Ahmdahl Use his law.
data cell

can you say "spreadsheet"?

This one actually causes me doubt.

merge

Maryland drivers don't know how to do that.
Oh! You mean as in merge-sort. Any programmer who hasn't plowed through
Knuth at least once should go out and do so.

collator

still lives as a term in "collation sequence"

control break used it
RPG avoided it
engine still a current term
COBOL avoided it
FORTRAN used it a lot
Algol learned it in college
Basic used it
TSO used it
time sharing used it
IBM 360/370 used it
IBM OS 370/MVS used it
MTS OK, you got me.
pen plotter used it
line printer

Not only did I use them, I got stuck in a room full of them for my office on
one contract.

dropping a card tray Done it more than once
Oak

Every Java programmer should know that one

JavaOS haven't used it
PicoJava haven't used it
GPSS

Don't know that one

Great collection of terms, Roedy. Well done.

 

[Dave Searles]

Sure, it only gets about 2,000,000 Google hits. Really, really
obscure,

That is not a reliable measure of obscurity.

And even if it were:

Results 1 - 10 of about 322,000,000 for LOL

 

[Mike Schilling]

That is not a reliable measure of obscurity.

And even if it were:

Results 1 - 10 of about 322,000,000 for LOL

Who claimed that "LOL" was obscure?

 

[Mike Schilling]

I found most of these really humorous, but this one.. every
programmer
should know Ahmdahl's law. Did you mean something else?

Ahmdahl was also a brand of computer. They made IBM mainframe clones.
(Both were named after Gene Ahmdahl.)

 

[Dave Searles]

Who claimed that "LOL" was obscure?

That's exactly my point: it's not, but it has more than two ORDERS OF
MAGNITUDE more google juice than ISAM.

 

[Mike Schilling]

That's exactly my point: it's not, but it has more than two ORDERS
OF
MAGNITUDE more google juice than ISAM.

That's because there are at least two orders of magnitude more teenage
girls than computer programmers.

 

[Arved Sandstrom]

Or has another reason for posting than just to find out the answer, such
as to remind the previous poster that not everyone is familiar with the
acronym they just used. In particular, that it is NOT a "standard"
acronym, as in a common textism or email-ism like LOL, or one you'd find
in the news.answers.newusers FAQ, or one that would be known to
practitioners in the field -- in a Java newsgroup, that's things like
JNI and other Java-specific things, and things like RAM and HDD that are
general technical computer-isms. COBOLisms would be expected to be known
in comp.lang.cobol, if there is such a newsgroup, but not in
comp.lang.java.

Like Mike said, it would depend on your background. It _is_ a standard
acronym, and I'd expect a well-rounded senior developer to have at least
vaguely heard of it. Also, just because this is a Java newsgroup, that
merely means that the topics of discussion (ought to) relate to Java,
not that the _people_ participating in this NG know about only Java. If
a person is that focused they are a boutique coder at best, not a
software developer.

I could come up with a list of dozens of acronyms that would be excluded
by your definitions, but if an intermediate Java developer hadn't at
least heard of them I'd consider their grasp of the art to be somewhat
questionable.

AHS

 

[RedGrittyBrick]

This was IBM's Indexed Sequential file Access Method for OS-360. It
probably still lives,

There are DBMS vendors who sell products that offer an SQL interface to
a C-ISAM engine. Ironically, IBM bought one such vendor in 2001 and
still sell those products.

I never formally learned COBOL but I learned about ISAM as part of my
early computer education, I don't think of ISAM as a COBOLism and am
surprised that younger programmers are unfamiliar with the term.

 

[Joshua Cranmer]

If every programmer of your own generation knows what a word means, it
is not obvious you need to provide footnotes.

As a university student, let me give my knowledge:

Hollerith
punch card

I've heard the stories

paper tape
mag tape

Heard, heard. Isn't that last one still around in the form of VHS and
cassette tapes?

core

As in magnetic core memory, or just core memory?

tube

As in vacuum tubes?

CRT

That's not *that* old.

TTY

Everyone who uses Linux or Unix has probably heard of this one.

Univac
Xerox (as a mainframe company)

Heard of them.

Control Data
Ahmdahl
data cell
merge
collator
control break

I'm guessing you don't want the first definitions that pop up in my head
here, with the possible exception of collator.

RPG

Nowadays, this means Role-Playing Game or Rocket-Propelled Grenade. Most
non-technically-oriented adults I've talked to associate it with the
latter. I've heard of the language, but I've never seen it.

engine

Which definition are you referring to?

COBOL
FORTRAN
Algol
Basic

I've heard of all four, seen at least five lines of code in all four,
and have actually programmed in two.

TSO

I may have heard of the acronym's expansion, but the acronym itself is a
bit mystifying

time sharing
IBM 360/370
IBM OS 370/MVS

Funny how these get brought up in the computer science classes constantly.

MTS

Don't know?

pen plotter

That's a new one.

line printer

I've heard of it: lp0 on fire!

dropping a card tray

Never heard the expression, but I can certainly imagine what would happen.

Oak
JavaOS

*blink* I have *definitely* heard of those...

PicoJava
GPSS

.... but not these.

 

[Lew]

That's because there are at least two orders of magnitude more teenage
girls than computer programmers.

Either that, or two orders of magnitude more people don't know what "LOL"
means and need to google it compared to "ISAM".

 

[Lew]

There are DBMS vendors who sell products that offer an SQL interface to
a C-ISAM engine. Ironically, IBM bought one such vendor in 2001 and
still sell those products.

I never formally learned COBOL but I learned about ISAM as part of my
early computer education, I don't think of ISAM as a COBOLism and am
surprised that younger programmers are unfamiliar with the term.

Considering that MySQL has "MyISAM" tables by default, I think many of them
have heard of it. Unless, of course, they don't read documentation.

 

[Eric Sosman]

People for whom COBOL and mainframes are mythical beasts from bygone ages
might well not have heard of it. You're showing your age, Lew

Don't you mean "COmmon Business-Oriented Language (COBOL)?"

I've wondered, idly, when descriptive names went out of
fashion in the software industry. When I started, the languages
were named FORmula TRANslator and ALGOrithmic Language and
LISt Processor and so on, acronyms that were sometimes contrived
but eventually got down to a descriptive phrase. And software
carried labels like Scientific Subroutine Package or Bill Of
Materials Processor (when disks got big enough and cheap enough
to displace magnetic tape, BOMP was replaced by DBOMP) -- again,
the name or acronym had some kind of meaning at its foundation.

But one day when I wasn't watching closely, descriptive names
died out like asteroid-smitten dinosaurs. Nowadays we swim in a
sea of names altogether lacking in descriptive power, cute names
but arbitrary. Programming languages are named Caffeine and
Boa and Achilles, applications are called Blunderbird and SeaFlunky
and Sioux -- and we're left to memorize a swarm of arbitrary
associations, each of us maintaining a Map<String,Thing> without
benefit of any kind of systematic arrangement.

All right, I'm overstating things a bit: We've got Windows,
PERL, HTML, and so on, each with a germ of meaning somewhere in
its history. But it does seem that today's ways of naming things
are not intended to aid communication, but to create "tests" that
separate the initiates from the unwashed. The goal seems not to
be to choose a name that informs, but a name that is catchy and
inspires a logo that's equally uninformative but cute as Hell.

 

[Eric Sosman]

[...]
data cell

can you say "spreadsheet"?

This one actually causes me doubt.

Justified, I think. I'd guess that Roedy was referring to

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_2321.html

.... a notoriously cranky beast, most of whose benefit was that
it conditioned people to make backups. On other devices.

OK, you got me.

The "M" is for "Michigan," if it's the one I'm thinking of.

Don't know that one

Found a bug in its source code once. The IBM coder had
written a conditional branch as `BC cond,*+22' (I don't recall
the tested condition nor the actual branch distance). Alas,
part of the stuff skipped over involved a macro that produced
different amounts of code depending on what options were chosen
at assembly time ...

 

[Joshua Cranmer]

Considering that MySQL has "MyISAM" tables by default, I think many of
them have heard of it. Unless, of course, they don't read documentation.

I saw MyISAM in the table and just assumed it was some MySQL-specific
acronym and never bothered to read up on it. I did read the
documentation, FWIW, but I was more concerned with "what do I need to do
to improve performance" than "what is the actual guts of this
implementation" at the time.

 

[RedGrittyBrick]

Heard, heard. Isn't that last one still around in the form of VHS and
cassette tapes?

Roedy perhaps refers to reels of 9-track magnetic tape on 6250-foot
reels. Yes computer storage capacity was once measured in feet and
inches. In my first job we backed up the three washing-machine sized 40
MB disk-drives using a wardrobe sized tape drive.

As in magnetic core memory, or just core memory?

When anyone says "core" I only think of the super-expensive magnetic
core memory threaded onto large wire-wrapped circuit boards. The
manufacturer's engineer came out to us to repair a memory board with
hand tools. Each "bit" of memory was clearly visible.

As in vacuum tubes?

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe, I've seen a reconstructed
vacuum-tube "Colossus" decoding Japanese ciphertext from a punched
paper-tape loop on the verge of catching fire. All those moments will be
lost in time, like tears in rain.

Everyone who uses Linux or Unix has probably heard of this one.

How many of them are picturing something like an ASR33?

I may have heard of the acronym's expansion, but the acronym itself is a
bit mystifying

TSO is an abbreviation (not an acronym) of Time Sharing Option. A
typical bit of IBM product naming.

That's a new one.

http://www.computer-history.info/Page4.dir/pages/PDP.1.dir/images/calcomp.plotter.jpg
Eee luxury.

I've heard of it: lp0 on fire!

In my first job we had one in the computer room. The chunk-chunk-chunk
of lines being smashed into the paper was so loud that few people came
near enough to see how it worked. The only thing louder was an early
dot-matrix printer (IDS-440 "Paper Tiger") that came along a few years
later, that was like being in a sawmill. The guy who requisitioned it as
a personal printer certainly regretted it.