lectrick

I think they're more looking for a sign that you had an early and therefore natural curiosity to tinker with the mechanisms in the world. Not "CS" per se, but just... computer tinkering. If your family couldn't afford a computer, IMHO, if you at least, say, took a clock or motor apart or something, that would be a good indicator, too.

By the way, this has been brought up as the reason for the dropoff in the women who enter CS curricula in college. Ever since home PC's became affordable, freshman CS classes have basically assumed prior (and thorough) computer experience, and many women who might otherwise become good programmers, for whatever reason (society influence, etc.) have had waaaay less hands-on time with computers than boys, when they become freshmen.

That said, I have met some excellent programmers who started out doing something that is superficially completely different (musicians, for example).

I have been meaning to. I hope great things come of it.

Believe it or not, I also snore on my side. sigh

> I find this trend of platforms becoming walled gardens very unpleasant.

So did all the open-source people. ;)

I have seen showstopper, up-all-night bugs with BOTH shared mutable state (see: the reason it is nearly impossible to reduce a certain Rails app's test suite runtime below about a half hour without significant rewriting) AND single threaded mutability bugs (in one case resulting in me taking a month to fix a login bug that nobody else at the company was able to find out in over a year... It was a hash mutation deep inside a middleware affecting auth cookies)

A simple example of a single threaded mutability bug is passing an object by reference to a method which then (either intentionally or unintentionally) mutates the object, to the complete ignorance of the caller up in the call stack. The only thing stopping that is literally, programmer skill. No language constructs. At least in all the OO langs I ever worked with.

Here's better ones:

1) Did they fix the thing where you had to use __self__ practically everywhere? Double underscored variable names also look like crap, especially when they're everywhere. It looks like a really shitty design flaw, having to use __self__ this and __self__ that everywhere. (This situation may have been ameliorated since I last looked at the language.)

2) Not everyone likes significant whitespace. But moreover...

3) If you code for long enough, you'll eventually realize that Ruby, Python, C++, etc. etc. are all fundamentally flawed due to OO making it too easy to write spaghetti-dependency code with mutable state everywhere, which means EVERY OO CODEBASE NO MATTER WHAT eventually becomes an unmanageable bugridden long-test-runtime complexity tarpit.

They should stop calling it "technical debt" and start calling it "object-oriented debt" ;)

So you eventually convert to the Functional Programming™ religion. ;) And that is the real reason not to use Python (or Ruby or Java or C), IMHO. But don't take my word for it, here's John Carmack basically saying that everyone should use functional paradigms (even in OO languages) if at all humanly possible: http://gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functional_pro...

I think they did something to fix it, but back when I was investigating Python, it was useful to pass references to yourself to everything for some reason, so every method passed like __self__ to itself, it seemed like __self__'s were everywhere. Coupled with how fucking ugly (opinion, of course) double-underscored variable names are, it just did not give me a great impression.

control-D doesn't work in iex (Elixir's REPL) or erl (Erlang's REPL). Control-C-C does.

> and they gave me some POS machine and I hated it

I really hate that they do this. I had a friend who also got stuck with the same situation and did not have a good experience as a result. They should send you home to try the top-of-the-line model and then let you duke it out with your insurance company! ;)

That's fine for BP, but what about elevated cortisol levels as a result of repeated breath cessation? In my case a MAD was not helpful, unfortunately

Nasal pillow mask is (relatively) the bomb IMHO. Don't even try anything else, you will be disappointed.

Good point about the air filter; I need to get a new one

Mine's about 4 years old or so (?), perhaps I need to upgrade.

yeah, the newer ResMeds do look quite a bit more high-tech lol. I have a ResMed S8 Elite (https://www.google.com/search?q=resmed+S8&tbm=isch) with humidifier (the latter DOES make a noticeable difference).

You know... I believe I started this class once and didn't finish it due to time constraints. I think it's time to try again...

"Slight correction", good one haha

That said, technically correct is best correct, so here is your upvote!

I became a Ruby guy. It's like Python, but with less __self__'s, and insignificant whitespace. ;)

I'm... not sure. Sometimes I have trouble falling asleep (insomnia), although SOME of that can probably be attributed to late-night device usage (I use Flux, but the iPhone won't have "time-based screen yellowing" until the next iOS release.) My girlfriend, who sleeps in the same bed as me, also gets up around 6, and sometimes that wakes me (not most of the time, fortunately).

I understand the technical reasons behind it.

First/early impressions do matter, however.

But also, how is bundling that explanation into the stringified version of the "exit" object not as magicky as Ruby putting an "exit" method on Kernel which is in the root namespace of the REPL and exits the current process (with an optional exit code)?

Welcome to my sleep-apnea life. The CPAP is only partially effective due to (surprise, surprise) a new allergy to... well, everything airborne, seemingly, including house dust... and even though Allegra does a decent job, sometimes I unconsciously take the thing off in my sleep, and proceed to have a much shittier sleep: http://i.imgur.com/f9oHjqQ.png

1) Cover code with tests 2) Refactor. Martin Fowler wrote a famous book on refactoring patterns that are guaranteed to merely transform the code and not break functionality. 3) Rerun tests, repeat till everything passes

You don't need the dual charger.

Source: Owner of a non-dual-charger who has literally never missed it. I charge at 30mi/hr off a 220v dryer connection in my garage, what's not to like?

Similarly, Python turned me off immediately when I tried to exit the REPL with "exit" and it goes "The way you exit is with control-D." It fucking knew I wanted to exit, and instead lectured me. WTF, Python? Seeya, dick.

Is there an online course for this I could take?

Would cryptocurrencies (Auroracoin/Bitcoin/etc.) have any relevance in a state with weak currency controls and artificially-inflated currency values?

Underrated Mac gaming gem from way back in the day! Thanks for the nostalgia!

> So I've started "putting her to bed" and then coming out to do work

That is EXACTLY how I handle this

> But the problem is sometimes we have sex and then I fall asleep cuddling her, so it's kind of a trap.

Me having to sleep with a CPAP (or else horrible snoring and horrible sleep for us both) ensures that this will never occur with me (the falling-asleep-cuddling... not the sex... lol)

> they don't help you find it

Not true in my case. (I've had Pro for a long time, not sure which if any of these are Pro-only...) I can audition as much unheard-by-me recommended-by-Spotify music as I want through its Weekly playlist, its various curated genre "browse" playlists, its "trending" playlist (where you will often hear things that only become "visibly" popular MONTHS later, the playlist content is actually determined via algorithm to spot trendings super early)

Are you claiming that that range of camera and lens technology will never be duplicated in the digital realm?

You're burnt out. You didn't mention what languages you used but that's a factor.

Try coming over to the FP camp. We're more fun, and spend less time debugging because we simply make fewer bugs.

After you take a vacation!

One not-terrible way to start on your bug-free crusade would be to switch to functional programming languages and styles and "pure" functions.

Having done 10 years of OO before I began coding in a functional style and realized all the benefits, this is my experience talking.

Everything you described is at least theoretically digitizable.