I really don't know why people worry so much about this. I don't think dissuading people from entering any field is surprising. Generally, experts in a field want passionate, talented people, because that's how the field will likely advance, which is what any good expert hopes for. If we scare off the dispassionate before they have a chance to burden the field, great. This is exactly the purpose of "weeder" courses in college.
Edit: Well, pardon me for having an unpopular opinion. I have no intention of apologizing. Perhaps your opinions will change when you see the damage that incompetence can cause.
I have to agree with Jeff Atwood's original post, here. The complexity of modern society is requiring individuals to be more specialized. If anything we need improved communication so that inter-disciplinary projects proceed efficiently. As much as we exalt the individual here in the states, a team almost always surpasses what an individual can accomplish.
Exactly. People really need to get off their high horse. Regarding the github pull request interface, I actually find it reassuring that Linus has rather strict requirements for contributing to the kernel source.
Is anyone really surprised that Microsoft continues this behavior? For the fan-boys (not that I expect there are
many): the purpose of standards, whether you like them or not, is to ease development and promote products with
actual value - not merely technology lock-in. Having maintained a C compiler for Rabbit Semiconductor and read the C99 standard, I can say it is an improvement on C90. Contrary to certain comments by Microsoft employees in the
article claiming irrelevance of C, it remains very relevant to the embedded systems community. If we, as developers,
want standards to prevail, we must eschew nonconforming implementations. You've heard of "vote with your dollars",
now "vote with your code".
Can we please stop titling postings like this? How about "An Alternative to the Python Subprocess Interface". Fixing something implies that it's broken or inadequate, and from my limited experience, Subprocess is already a major improvement over os.system. I'm not saying this idea doesn't have value, I'm saying that the way it's framed lacks the requisite humility it ought to.
It really surprises me how many nay-sayers have posted negative comments, here. Bottom line is that, because of the popularity of paying with credit cards, merchants have to pass on the cost of transaction fees to consumers. Consumers pay. Will your reward points make up for the increased prices that you unwittingly pay? I doubt it. Even if Dwolla isn't the one to do it, toppling credit card profits is in everyone else's interest.
The author of this article is exactly the customer credit card companies don't want. They actually lose money. The irony of extolling the virtues of good credit card use is that if everyone who owned a credit card did the same, credit cards would cease to exist because they would no longer be profitable.
My thoughts exactly. Companies might choose as this CLO someone with considerable PR experience. Lawyers, almost by definition alone, lack this experience.
I encourage people to follow this. We need more data on outsourcing effectiveness. If I were the author, however, I would not use HP as a success story.
If we're going to be posting judgmentally titled articles, then why don't we post "why perl is the language of the past." I suspect the main reason languages like perl and FORTRAN are still used is because of legacy and tradition. But I acknowledge that is my opinion, not fact, so I wouldn't post such a title. Seriouly, we need to stop the pomposity. What about "My concerns about Dart 0.1", or "Early Criticism for Dart 0.1"?
One comment on the site stated that as long as we're using theory to disprove experimental results, we might as well just republish Einstein's original paper and call it done. Until someone actually dicovers the source of error and repeats the experiment, the measurement stands.
My wife recently opened my eyes to the idea that the low rate of female to male programmers is far more cultural than genetic. I found a link, in fact, that speaks more to this:
I have looked through google patents beta just to see how ridiculous many software patents are, and though my sample size was small, most seemed pretty obvious ideas to me. Truly amazing that lawyers can write so much text about so trivial an idea. The core issue is that the patent office does not have "people skilled in the art" to bar these patents from being issued.
Developers should already know this. Is computational theory an elective in some colleges, or have some developers not gone to college? Both seem unlikely.
Perhaps this will make facebook better. Competition can often improve product quality. For google this might, however, turn out the same way that Microsoft's grab for web applications is going. First to market is hard to break.