static_typed

I thought all the hipster Brogrammers moved onto Node and JS? Didn't they get the memo?

Ruby is not dead, it just smells that way. Seriously though, it's demise is a little overstated - the BBC for one use it quite a bit, as do quite a few startups. The author of the post seems a bit butthurt that Ruby has not surplanted all other technologies - and it never will.

One big problem is that for most businesses their first and perhaps last taste of Ruby comes from Rails, and it's security fails. That is a shame.

Having been burnt by the failed promises of Rails ourselves, our company moved onto Python, and never looked back.

Also, Ruby is just one tool in the kit, fine for some jobs, patently unsuitable for many others. The evangelists should realise this, and not do a disservice to Ruby by trying to shove it into every place and frankly pissing off potential future adopters of that technology.

Frameworks sound great until you inherit a franken-app built using one. You might be able to understand bits if they religiously followed the dogmatic usage of the framework but more likely they just wanted to get stuff built and not wanting to learn someone else's idea of the perfect wheel maker framework and so ended up still building something unique, baroque, and possibly impenetrable.

Frameworks in the most case feel like straightjackets, so I understand why developers feel the need to abandon some of the magic and build bits that are actually simple robust and supportable, but it can become hell for subsequent developers.

Has QA slipped, or are all the walls in walled garden all a bit wonky?

It's something a little like this:

"We are altering the deal, pray we do not alter it any further".

Closed source, closed negotiating position.

When you buy one of these cards, you are already assuming the position to get kicked, you are just hoping not to get kicked too hard or too many times in a row. Doesn't seem like a sensible thing to do really.

Most of us who work in banking IT, are lured in either by the proported larger salaries, or the opportunity work on big systems, and interesting problems.

The reality is a little less glamorous.

The salaries can be larger than average in some roles, but then again, as you will be working longer hours, your overall hourly wage will be somewhat less. Also, bonus? Interesting. You can work hard all year, deliver, be on track for a nice share of the pie, then bang! Some tard on the desk does a run of bad trades, or worse, hides losses, or the firm gets hit with regulatory fines, then bang - either a small bonus or more famously, a doughnut (zero bonus), with the promise that next year will be better. Just work as hard or harder, and maybe, just maybe, a bonus will come later. Maybe.

If you have ever worked in a competent professional IT setup, your eyes will bleed, your heart sink, your soul evaporate when you are exposed to the full horror of banking IT.

Sybase ASE - you will see schemas with 1000's of tables and many more stored procs - not because they are all needed, but because each one is a sticky plaster fix on the last sticky plaster fix. Oh, and almost nothing gets retired, it just grows like a slow cancer, consuming all that get near to it.

Offshore and nearshore vendor staff will "own" and manage and support the infrastructure, help desk, request system, application support and maybe even more. It will be hell on earth just to get access to one of your application log files to help troubleshoot why johnny-fucked-the-pooch trader tard tries to blame the application for his poor selection of trades.

You will watch so-called partners and peers travel with ease and get what they need, as they work 'for the business', on a business cost-code. You will be on an IT cost-code, and you will need director sign-off for a trip to the bathroom.

In short - the banks need IT, and they are basically fucked without it. But then treat it worse than the department that fills up the vending machine with coke cans each day. The reason is because YOUR management, IT management seem destined to fuck you harder than the business ever would. I never knew people could stand or walk without a spine, till I saw IT management.

Oh, you bought Nvidia? Well, that was your first problem, and fault.

The Intel graphics are not so fast, but at least a big chunk are open source.

People who want to work in tech, being helped and being able to work in tech, regardless of gender, religion, social demographic, accent, body size, colour, shoe size? Fantastic. I am all for that.

From experience, the last thing most women in tech actually need or want is feminist dogma.

No, sadly not even messenger would have or could have saved them. The youth in the UK flocked to BB as it was a cheap platform. Nowadays they can get cheap(er) Android handsets that run more apps, and do a lot more. Also, the networks (in the UK at least) started chucking lots of text, voice and data allowances for increasingly lower costs, so even the previous bundled aspect was no longer an appealing factor of the BB as a platform.

I had a Z10 - I tried to like it, it did have some innovative ideas. But, it got far too warm. The battery life was a disaster, far far worse than any previous phone I have ever had. The updates were not really fixing any of the major bugs, and in the end, it became harder to justify keeping it.

The worry now is like Nokia, BB most likely has a large warchest of patents, and what happens to them?

It most comes down to the human condition, the need in our psyche for some mystery, things to keep our eyes and mind active, even when occasionally the rational part tends to point out the unlikeliness of the creature or event.

Some like Bigfoot, some Aliens, some Nessie - me personally, I am fond of the tales I was told as a young child of a few remaining dinosaurs in the large remaining land masses, such as Central Africa, and Brazil. Probably unlikely, yet, nice to dream that perhaps, maybe, a few select dinosaurs are at this moment hiding away.

Seems overly simplistic - an advert from a girls school would appear under the sexism ruleset, an advert mentioning that they have a pool of company cars that you drive would fall foul of bubble ruleset.

Luckily it is a Linux only world, where we don't have to build cross platform solutions, none of that considering those nasty BSDs or Minix or anything else really. Just Linux. Oh wait....

Maybe it is related to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing

If they post the same thing enough times, we become fatigued, inured, and even welcoming of an end with Go, just for the quiet in posting about how great life with Go could be, if only the incessant posting could stop.

We get it - a chosen few like Go, like the bore in the party with the single subject, trapping unwitting guests the kitchen, constantly going on.

What we haven't worked out - beyond the creator of Go wandering around Google, saying "Don't you know who I am?" whenever the technical merits of Go are questioned, is why Go even exists, and why we should down perfectly good tools for a new tool with a handle made of razor blades, and head made of glass, and usefulness yet to be proven.

Go? Be gone!

Simple answer - if we wanted something slower than C++, then we already have Java. If we wanted some more dynamic we have Python. If we wanted something more Brogrammer style, we have Ruby, so what fit is Go good for?

You gloat, standing atop a hill of technologies, all implemented in C or C. Fundamentally you built your blog in C and C++, you just to do so indirectly, much more slowly by inserting JVMS and other bits in the way.

The problem is not that C++ is hard, it's that Haskell doesn't solve the same kind of problems.

We would all love programming to be easier, for the compiler or interpreter to just know what we really meant, rather than what we actually typed, but sometimes the tools are sharp, are a bit more manual, exactly because they offer more control.

The constant sell of Haskell or Go as the panacea for all programming problems is like someone else telling us all to adopt socks made of rubber - a few make like that, may even blog and evangelise about it, but the rest of us find it uncomfortable and annoying.

Do you have a strong shoulder? From carrying that rather large chip on it?

Just curious?

There will always be bullies, especially in the school years, the big difference is now that the internet gives them further reach, if, the victim allows it. Not that the victim should have to avoid any websites, but thankfully there is that option, whether they choose it, or a parent or guardian is able to step in and do so.

I think the bigger problem is this - how do we setup online environments, social platforms where bullies can be quickly outed? Make all posts public? Moderated posts only?

In in ideal world, the parents of the bullies would be informed of the actions of their offspring, which does in some cases happen, and in a few cases work, but is harder to enact online.

The one single thing I always advise parents with children online is simple - be the person paying the bill, own the admin rights, and until the mid teen years, make sure you keep an eye on the sites and contact. Only step in if there is a real problem.

The danger is that real racism, which is a scurge we should all fight against ends up being lost in a sea of complaints, accusations and suggestions of racism.

The reality is that there are a few vocal people with might powerful shoulders out there, well, the shoulders should be strong for the size of the chip they seem to carry on it, and their complaining tends to drown out the quieter voices of those who do actually suffer.

You have to experience working in an IB to appreciate the article. They are very very much swamped down in politics process and paperwork (albeit electronic these days). It takes ages to do small things, forever to do the rest. No one has a long-term view beyond the next quarter, and most believe in doing just enough to grab some bonus and run. You will encounter big swinging dicks who like to lord it over the interns, making them stay late, just because they can. You will see many many unhappy faces everyday, and you will feel a little bit more lost with each day you remain there.

Ultimately, code is like farts. It does stink, but passes with time. Also, stretching the fart analogy a bit more, as developers we always find the output of others (farts and code) to stink more than our own. Some even seem to like their own.

It is somewhat ironic you chose the word ghetto when discussing Rails, as it reminds of Zed's previous article.

I think it is a good thing for new and maybe even experienced Ruby developers to build their own, to see a way beyond all the meta magic and five minute blogs, and that you really don't need that much plumbing to get things moving and understandable.

At least it didn't say roll Rails in five minutes - it would take much longer than that to bake in all the security holes and to stick YAML parsers all over the shop.

The real anti-pattern is building sites that get to the point of needing loading bar indicators.

I loved web, when it was, you know, documents. With links to related and other relevant documents.

There is a need for online forms, to replace the paper bound versions, and one day we may even develop an appropriate technology to achieve this. Until then, the layers of fresh sticky tape are sitting uneasily upon the aged, yellowing earlier layers of sticky tape, and the turtles-all-way-down "web app" continues to bloat.

There is always talk of game changers, disrupting things here on HN, but the massive, obvious challenge goes missed every time. It is easier, maybe more fun, to punt yet another JS framework, bork the HTTP standards a bit more, increase the attack vector in the already humungous browser, than to think outside the box.

Maybe instead of thinking outside the box, we should think outside the browser.

In my experience, most clients we worked with did not request Rails, it was foisted upon by developers who say the five minute blog video, tried to model the business problem, failed, left for shiny new gig, the client is left vulnerable to the many, many security issues, and a code base that brings tears to the eye of even a hardened developer.

The worst development gig out there? Walking into a Rails code base more than six months old. You are probably the third person to attempt taming the stink feet of magic magic code and thousands of useless unit tests and cucumber drivel that looks fab in a pretty graph but tests almost none of the core important business logic nor really helps anyone understand what was actually requested.

We are all to blame!

All of us that buy, or let relatives buy Android devices that use restrictive and closed blobs.

Customers and only customers have the power to make the change.

Every time we encourage someone else to buy a non-Android device make sure to publicise the fact on open social media like Farcebook or Twatter on the corporate tags and pages to raise awareness in the less technology literate and make some voices heard.

It is one thing for companies to see bottom-lines get affected, but they also need to understand why. Don't just boycott, let the world know why too!

Avoid Brogrammers, rock stars, and anyone who advocates rails as the solution to the business problem at hand.

The good programmer asks questions first. The bad one runs off and builds stuff at a whim.

The good programmer gets stuff done. The bad programmer wastes time on the latest and greatest, bikesheds on whether they should rewrite everything in ruby today and go tomorrow.

Avoid the bad programmers.

The biggest hurdle to women in the world of work, tech and everything is other women. The shrieking vocal minority of gynosaurs make life much harder for the majority who work hard and would like to be recognised for their contributions and achievements.

The feminist dogma has always been about telling others (especially women) what they shouldn't or couldn't do, rather than any kind of empowerment, well apart from the ego trip of a few of the most hardcore and ardent campaigners when they managed to get a law passed or some organisation to change how they operate based on their narrow view of the world.

The way this is going, Linux will end up as a single process operating system, that will do everything at web scale. All outputs in glorious binary format.

Funny, the crowd got distracted over Gnone3, Unity or Mir, or the latest worry of the day, yet never saw the big threat in their camp.

Linux isn't done until the text processor won't run.

This is very much a good cause - the BSDs tend to get forgotten behind the rush of Linux development, but they take their time and produce some excellent ideas and products (thinking of: PF, OpenSSH, amongst others) - why not take 5 minutes and donate the cost of this week's coffees to the project, and see what else they can produce in the long term.

Once upon a time the Rails Brogrammers laughed at Java, where there was endless design pattern abuse and needless armchair architecture. Now the same has happened to Rails.

When you even think you might need to use Inter actors, it's time to roll onto a better and maybe newer platform, as it's downhill all way from now on.