route66

I remember to fail one such test somewhere around 2001, the reason being: "... lack of a status-driven momentum ..." and " ... lack of aggressivity in pursuing career goals ... " or something to that effect.

Not that I walked out smiling, but they explained me in two sentences why I would not have liked to work there. So, addressing your quote above, I'm astonished that these tests are still around. Basically this company (and others) are putting their culture into the hands of an external service (Mercury Urval if I remember correctly in this case) and they can lose big by handing off influence on the choice.

... usually don't destroy hard drives of journalists or don't detain people as a matter of harrassment just to name two recent actions undertaken by governments who use their introspective powers to take conclusions ("we have to have this Miranda guy") and act upon them ("we know he's in Berlin. Check the flight records")

The point is that the control of the governments does not seem to work anymore OR, at the same time addressing that "Big Brother is loved": nobody cares, because governmental agencies do the right thing. (That is my impression until now, living in Europe)

While we are are from the ideal world where this behaviour would be without consequences, the matter asks for a change of the situation we are finding ourselves in.

Get loud, get political. Don't dream that you are holding a weapon in your hand because you can half assedly encrypt peer to peer communication. This is only confirming the status quo. Like n umbrella might confirm it's raining.

As side-thought: the same technical reflex might have occurred to that institutions in the first place: let's record everything and we will be more safe.

So it's not governments who try harder to maintain their secrets, it's you (or us or whoever).

Just for the fun of it: take a recent pandora related artist-bashing thread, look for the "too late, digital wants to be free" comments and apply them to a scenario where we not talking about sound waves but phone metadata.

... that modern languages, such as Scala, offer advantages as human communication mediums. I describe an experiment, using an eye-tracking device, that measures the performance of code comprehension.

Develop an application for support of financial and tax regulations for a certain country. You will have verbs and nouns which describe the situation clearly.

You develop an application from specifications written another language than English. They exist.

The biggest failure I keep seeing are futile attempts to translate concepts under these circumstances into English.

I agree in this case: when you want to invite collaboration on github, English (or Chinese?) would be better suited.

As a consequence the current races might not be able to evolve resistance so easily. Earlier efforts to breed European bees in combination with (I think) Japanese bees both imported to the Philippines led to the import of varroa destructor mites.

Man is not so lucky with his manipulation of nature, it seems. Or choose another word.

To react also on the "crab mentality" remark in another post: If the emperor says that crabs older the 1 year of age should be cooked and all crabs start to lie about their age and put others forward as being older (the ones who don't lie) the real ugly face of this mentality becomes clear.

You just described why projects fail. Developers Developers Developers.

Architects? We don't need, we are so smart we integrate everything ourselves. Marketing? Sales? Who needs that, my github repository sells and when it doesn't, there is always oDesk.

And don't get me started over "customers" and "clients".

To cut the sarcasm here, yes, I know that a lot of MBA's and Architects suck. As do a lot of software developers, even if they call themselves agile or know that svm is somehow related to classification.

So I do not really see where this straw man burning leads to .

I can assure you that the blank stares go away completely when there is a breach. You will probably learn by then that your customers just expect you to handle it professionally. They might not be able to think beyond their deadline and their first business goal, but leaking passwords or losing user data will be your fault eventually.

I will not pretend that all my past work is bulletproof, but it should be not so difficult to make sure your tools and code handle all incoming data like hot grenades. You might skip some big-upfront-user-import in the beginning as you control the data chain, but $_POST or params[:model] or what else is flying in your face should be met with a standard treatment.

Think of it this way: right now you do not want to have your CV say "2012: developed user login module for LinkedIn. Finished within the deadline"

The Nielsen graph clearly represents 51% Android as about 33%, apple's 34% as one quarter and the Blackberry als one-fifth. If you prefer readability of the labels over more-or-less-correctness of a graph which suggests it covers a full 100% and it's subdivisions you should maybe just use a table. As in Excel. A 30-31 x-scale is misleadin but showing 10% as 20% though is more than sloppy because you do show the "origin". This has got nothing to do with visually perfect.

In the downloadable sample there is a nice analysis which refutes the "zealots who enforced weren't the brightest".

In the short: there were no zealots. Nothing was enforced, the term "waterfall" comes up much later and it was meant as being iterative from the beginning.

So one might ask: how come that this folklore is being trumpeted all around like a truth?

Is it reasonable to expect a 20 year old intern to have these 11000 songs? Does her life depend on it? What about other things which are unreasonable expensive for a 20 year old intern? The laptop to store the music on, external hard drive, smartphone with data plan to download and so on ... ?

This one has some background on numbers. And myths about royalties: http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emi...

Every time I look at this index (probably too often) I cannot fail to notice that the variance for all languages below the 3rd place is so enormous (VB.NET from 29 to 12 thanks to 0.78 percent of something) that this list is nothing more than a collection of footnotes to Java and C.

Maybe that's even realistic.

Why would any content creator (except, of course, producers of software, they laugh at you from their SaaS cloud) want to create anything if a pompous and self-righteous "respecting" in quotes is the spit in the face?

Or could you care less? If so, why do you consider payment-or-not-download not an option? (hint: "because I can" was already answered but not considered satisfactory)

Not necessarily. In my MS past I also had to defend my VB.Net experience in interviews, being perceived as a low-threshold toy language. And peer pressure matters in your network: how much reach-out would you get, as self described VB wizard or a SQL master?

Fashion rules, as PL topics on HN show regularly. A PL survey [1] was linked from an article some hours ago; it shows interesting answers: just compare the language list of "I know many people who use this language" to "I would use this language on my resumee"

That said, of course you are right: If you stay out of the fashion circuit and produce some value with tools you know, then nothing else matters...

[1] http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~lmeyerov/projects/socioplt/viz...

That programmer quality shows way stronger effects than the measured effect of a typing system would suggest to me that

- the measurement was flawed?

- programmer ability beats language choice by orders of magnitude?

Or do I make a category error here?

The worst is even that you (or somebody else) begins with good intentions ... and then , 4 software generations and law changes later, the complexity starts to smell.

Heijlsberg argues, that javascript will be harder to refactor in those cases. I can't really disagree with him.

So it find it's not so much lacking thought. The current thought for some is "let's use javascript", let's see what comes of that... :-)

As for my reply above: "you should not have that problems" does not make them go away: some problems solved by software are inherently complicated and cannot be reduced to some simple API calls or a 5kloc code base. Composition of 100 multiple 5-kloc code bases still makes them a 500-kloc code base with all mutual dependencies.

Just saying "you should not write so much code" might display inexperience with problems which fall outside of the currently common javascript apps ...