twir

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In my opinion, the author is just taking a basic interview question way to seriously. Granted, it's a silly question to ask somebody who has 15+ years experience.

But consider trying to hire people out of college (for a startup perhaps.) As these people don't generally have oodles of experience, you're left with having to ask them some questions about their basic knowledge instead of their experience.

Sheesh, Norman, just lighten up. ;-)

Heh, I didn't think so. ;)

Wow, never knew one could do that.

This is a great philosophy, but I'd hesitate to say "all" variables; sometimes it just doesn't work out.

ex, in class definition:

  final int foo;

In constructor:

  try {
    foo = 1;
  } catch ( Exception e ) {
    foo = 2;
  }

I just don't get the article. Would somebody care to explain it?

Rarely do I get exactly what I want by "just being myself." Being socially adept is a learned behavior, often requiring one to modify one's own behavior to fit in. I speak of this anecdotally. Maybe I'm missing the point?

Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/231/

The kernel, of course.

Silly of me to have asked the question in the first place then? I'm aware of many differences between distributions. Still, I wouldn't hasten to claim that the kernel is the only similarity between many or even most distros.

"Linux is not an Operating System?" Come on! That's just pedantic. Honestly, when you hear the word Linux do you automatically think of the kernel by itself or do you think of an entire OS? Personally, I go straight to the latter.

Indeed. Yet I was also trying to illustrate (albeit unsuccessfully) how the language snobbery is basically the same thing--a failing to recognize a language for what it's worth. As you point out, languages often have specialties and are better suited than more powerful languages for certain tasks.

I hate to be "that guy", but I think you all might be misunderstanding the meaning of "blub".

Remember, "Blub" comes from the Blub Paradox (http://paulgraham.com/avg.html) in which one paradoxically believes that his or her language of choice (let's call it Blub) is the overall best language and that others are no good, usually due to missing some particular feature, or that they are too complicated.

An ironic example is that Paul Graham, who I believe is the creator of said paradox, asks rhetorically "If LISP is so great, why doesn't everybody use it?" and later, "I will say that LISP is at the top of the power spectrum." In effect, he's guilty of falling into his own paradox by assuming his language is at the top of the power spectrum, which is no different from assuming some other hypothetical language (that may have more capability than LISP) is too complicated.

I find learning each new language is easier than the one before it; the concepts of software development are largely the same from language to language and are often transferable from language to language.

Then again, I started out on C, so pretty much everything besides Haskell seems like a piece of cake.