grails4life

Thank you for the motivation! Right now im finishing up the fundamentals - basically getting all of R working over the web, manage sessions and removing the dangerous stuff like file operations, socket connections and infinite loops. Then I will add visual "gadgets" that let you do common things fast, as well as interactively, which is important in exploratory data analysis. Thanks again.

(live beta coming soon)

Im glad to see SAS Inc admitting that SAS by in large inst a programming language, unlike R, which is 100% a programming language.

great news!! Thanks for posting this, I never heard of WP before.

No.

calm down I just thought it was an interesting conjecture on future of OS X. If you dont like, dont upvote.

AutoIt

If your on Windows, just install AutoIt. It has the BASIC syntax and you can even do cool things like make the computer beep or open the optical drive with one easy command. Good intro language.

In order to compete with dropbox youll have to be as easy to use. People dont use dropbox for the storage they use it because it makes collaboration easier - even collaborating with those not so computer savvy.

Ever tried FlashDevelop?

Why is it always HTML5 vs flash? What about using both flash and HTML5? There is fabridge.js, after all. Its not all or nothing. Granted dependency on plugins sucks, but for now I see Flash as a supplement to a web application where I need things like audio, sockets and advanced graphics to work across browsers.

What I want out of a conference: what technologies are out there and how they address the headaches of development and/or solve problems that I am having.

The Latex resume is an excellent idea.

Ok, well then you have enough training. Go for it!

This post sounds bogus. So you have a PhD and an MD and you cant figure out whether should go to a community college or spend even more time in school playing with robots (if you are really an MD, you probably just finished your residency a few years ago at 34). ....hmmmm...sorry, dont mean to be rude but I dont buy it. If you are legit then a PhD in biomaterials is already plenty and with tons of free time, that is the perfect setup to do a startup....just do it!

I would study for it, you seem like a smart independent learner, so that should be enough. The worst that can happen is you dont pass. Who will know? Go for it. And keep up the programming. I didnt get into programming until I was 28, I wish I had when I was your age.

If you are planning to get a degree/take CS in college, It might be worthwhile to get the intro classes out of the way early, so you can more quickly focus on more interesting stuff in your degree program.

Unfortunately , working on projects dont usually earn you college credit even if said projects clearly demonstrate a level of competency above what the course is teaching - and you need the piece of paper.

If however you dream of doing a startup after college, then I would hold off on worrying about moving through your degree quickly and start focusing projects that could develop into a startup.

You can then take the college classes at a less rapid pace, enabling you more time to focus on startup ideas. I wish I had done the latter - I was to focused on getting courses done and going to grad school. In reality, doing a startup/software business is more interesting.

Remember to separate the JVM from the Java language. Java the language is getting old - its not that Java is bad, its that languages like Ruby & Scala are better - programming languages have evolved since the early 90s.

A startup has to do all that you said, plus one more thing: dont reinvent the wheel. With languages like JRuby and Scala built on the JVM you can reap the benefits of the agile philosophy and still make use of the available solid java libs (Apache Commons comes to mind), and not have to reinvent the wheel, saving the startup a ton of time.

Of those languages you mention, Groovy has the most java-like syntax. So maybe since its easy to pick up and does what they need, there is no need to learn/use those other languages.