gtycomb

this was so many moons ago: I worked in an organization where I received a 'best contributor' award that year. Then my manager called me in to discuss a potential large project in the business. I was to go and find out what "they" wanted. For many months I worked with all kinds of business entities, learning about the requirements and how they operated, and about the core mission of the company itself. I was still the developer for this new project but what I did was architecture, it turns out. I knew nothing about this field and I learned a whole lot while working with many teams creating an architecture that I can communicate. I did little coding and the company started hiring as the project took shape. It was a turning point in my career. I never stopped learning about the innards of coding, it was and is an essential know-how in whatever aspect of development one gets into.

One thing to note here in HN is that, competitiveness of many a business is on the table because of this state of affairs. This is really so. The opportunity to organically develop technology with the business is always lost if the CIO skill is mostly that of a Purchasing Manager. Outside contractors will easily sell you a "roadmap" that looks nice and modular for management, with only contracts to manage :-)

Engineers need to get smarter, learn something from marketing and management, develop and protect their ideas, and move on to new business strategies for themselves.

I helped an 8 year old get started in Python. It was an almost effortless process once we started with Python's Turtle Graphics. He started "innovating" himself when he saw what he could do with loops etc and draw with the Turtle. I initially tried Javascript but I couldn't think of an easy way to get him to the level of Python's Turtle animations as quickly. Python seemed more packaged and modular this way.

use perl5 instead because it is already there on unix systems. Use it to collect infrastructure data, scrape logs, query databases, or even for some statistics/math on the fly. If on an island I will take perl5 (and golang :-) I had hopes for perl6 but it got cumbersome in practice ...

UML as a specification language is the right tool in software architecture. I find it to be very flexible tool, helping software projects or process models. However _Enterprise_ architecture need to work with the "Business" (consider COSO, COBIT, ITIL, and why they emerged when UML foundations were already so strong).

Enterprise Architecture. What is often an unmanageable bundle of "models", pictures, documentation (UML etc, or tools or “repositories”) giving way to concise and precise schema for architecture decision making – a pleasant outcome of the informal global teamwork surrounding meta-models in DoDAF, simplifying EA activity to a level that has not been anticipated ...

> I would argue that plumbers, sewage workers and farmers should be paid higher than programmers.

Then, of course, the plumber et. al. should consider moving into programming. No one is stopping them from training themselves and learning what it takes to make the switch.

The programmer getting $80,000, who developed a key technology to start a multi-million organisation, if she finds she is not compensated appropriately, should consider teaming up and starting something on her own probably.

Emacs 25.1 RC1. Installed it, tried it on Fedora 23. It works like a charm. I continue to be amazed at the design. Thanks to all involved.

I am thinking of George Boole (boolean algebra and logic) who wrote in the 18th centuary -- that a symbol (an individual gene in this case) in itself is not meaningful but that its meaning depends on how it combines with with other symbols. Quote- "..the validity of the processes of analysis does not depend upon the interpretation of the symbols which are employed, but solely on their laws of combination. Every system of interpretation which does not affect the truth of the relations supposed, is equally admissible, and it is true that the same process may,under one scheme of interpretation, represent the solution of a question on the properties of numbers, under another, that of a geometrical problem, and under a third, that of a problem of dynamics or optics." (Boole 1847)

Prof. Stein's earlier post that had appeared here on HN (http://wstein.org/mathsoftbio/history.pdf) is enormously absorbing reading also. It has much more to tell about the significant challenges that stand in the way of developing high quality open source math software.

Is porting OCaml code to F# on Unix straight forward? Is there something similar to the Opam package manager in F#? Thanks for your thoughts.

To start conversation in OCaml,

let is_palindrome str = str = String.rev str ;;

(function is_palindrome will return true or false for input str )

Is PLM missing? I used to program in PLM before C became popular for firmware coding.