jsnx

Maintain: Python things. There are so many EGGs! If you need a new package for something or other -- the JSON parser isn't fast enough or something -- someone has made an alternative already. Performance matters for maintenance -- scalable deployment is still not easy, or cheap -- and it helps that Python has a fast core and syntactic shortcuts to things like generators (memory efficient) and list comprehensions (CPU efficient).

It does not speak well of an author's arguments when they rely on generalities -- "you don't know everything" and "programmers can't communicate". As for Leibniz, Euclid and Newton -- Gauss was by all accounts more productive, more important, more fundamental than any of those guys; and a famously poor communicator.

The smooth, poorly reasoned prose of this article bears the mark of a real English major. The manifest lack of respect for the mores of the programming community is the sure sign of a n00b -- or a Java/.NET programmer -- who can not see a new computer technology in the context of the life of the field, because they are unaware of it.

I can't really agree with your position on language learning, but I'm a little biased. I've studied Ancient Greek, German, Chinese and Middle English.

...is to allow the economy to function more efficiently, through pervasive literacy, use of numbers, &c. It's in the interest of the wealthy if they can off load some of the organizational details to a large class of literate servants, but that's not the same as giving everyone a shot at wealth and power.

I suppose you could actively ban users who skew the community in that direction -- though you'd have an endless calvacade of sock puppets to deal with.

In practice, though, I never have any problem with indentation based syntax, because change in indentation is easy enough to detect, and that's good enough for anything I've ever had to read.

Classical logic does not, in general, jibe with the intuition: consider the case of the negative antecedent:

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/log/mat-imp.htm

For example, the statement, "If unicorns have one horn, then I am the Queen of England." is logically true.

In the intervening years, many kind people tolerated me as I wormed my way into IT. Now I live in a house and, yes indeed, drink the wines of Napa and other places.

However, my point was a little more general -- it makes most sense in connection with the bit about work and reward. Doctors and lawyers are portrayed as civil servants in the article, and this is used to drum up some sympathy for their relative impoverishment (relative to VCs). Why don't they mention the poor nurses?

Doctors and lawyers have ridden the demand curve long enough; they now find themselves contending with people who do even less and make even more, and they complain. Reflection would have been a more respectable response.

We all ought to consider, too, the absolute worthlessness of venture capital in a social sense (and the basic worthlessness of the web, I might add). How much should people expect to make for playing with computers -- in one form or another -- while other people make their bread and clean their houses?

Of course, it's always been that way -- income is not proportional to work. If it was, the grape pickers would be shopping at Neiman Marcus.