voidpointer

Than again, if you want to be really cutting edge and be mentioned in a lot of conversations, Go is probably a much more interesting choice as it as more of a hot topic right now.

I would agree they do, but them they don't do it in the Mac OS X environment but using it on the iphone... (Apple managed to create such a seamless integration of the environments that even seasoned developers are getting confused)

It feels very silly to argue about user experience matters like they were laws - but that seems to be where those lawyers are getting us :(

What if they took (or bought) a photograph of an imac etc. by themselves (maybe remove the apple logo as is normally done in stock photography in order not to infringe on trademarks) wouldn't that have been the most customer serving move on RA's part?

It's silly that Apple accepted it before and refuses the bug-fix release. And RA is right to be mad at them for that. However, for me the "it's a public API on the Mac so we are allowed to use the bitmap returned by that function on the iphone" -argument does not hold.

Some of them put language there like "please read these terms and conditions carefully before using this web site...".

How detached from reality can you become? If they find themselves in a lawsuit and want to argue that the other party should have read the T&C. Wouldn't any court throw out that argument immediately because there is now way to expect a normal person to read some terms and conditions linked in a footer of a webpage before reading/using it?

I agree with your general sentiment though. Whether you could burn 500 calories more or eat 500 calories less isn't much of a difference. However, a drug that makes you burn 500 more calories and allows you to enjoy more eating is probably something that you can sell to a lot of people. Telling them to get their act together and eat right isn't that easily translated into profit.

You are right though, it's quite a stretch of the term.

What I wanted to say is that the party offering compensation through experience is, in my opinion, just trying to get free work and making it look like they are "paying" by "giving out" experience.

A person on a full-time internship should get enough to cover basic living expenses. The employer should pay (in money) what the work done is worth to them.

However, one needs to remember the reasons for the pushback that XML and XHTML got in the web developer/designer community: The SGML based HTML allows all these nice quirks through the SGML declaration and DTD. There it is defined that tags are case insensitive, BR is always empty, you don't need to close TD and P etc...

XML on the other hand has this stric notion of well-formedness where you can parse any well-formed document without a DTD or schema. This is what allows you to more easily invent your own tags and attach a style to them.

Thus, with sticking with an SGML based language, HTML made a decision to make the authoring of the core language more convenient while sacrificing some of the benefits that XML would have had. It's a design decision and it has been debated a lot already. It's just something people should keep in mind.

BTW, I think nobody linked the classic goto critique from Dijkstra yet: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/EWD215.... (or paywalled in ACM context at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=362929.362947 )

Dijkstra was pretty specific about the cases where goto would be confusing and made a case that one should would be better off just not using it at all. His argument applies much more to gotos that can jump across procedure boudaries. Most surviving gotos (including the PHP goto) are not that unconstrained so they do represent a compromise between Dijkstra's position and the pragmatic use of goto where it actually improves the readability of code - especially when exceptions are not available for some reason.

I really don't understand why no other manufacturer is capable of producing something that gets close to the iphone. Even less since android is available as a platform. Sure, there still is the lack of multitouch, but I really don't get why nobody can come up with a serious device.

I suspect that all language features of C# should be expressible in Java bytecode, but I have not thought about the details yet. If you know of anything in C# that would be unimplementable in terms of Java bytecode it would be interesting to hear about that.

In the interview, he mentioned that the folks at MIT wrote the program in high-level-language called MAC (MIT Algebraic Compiler) and hand-compiled it to the machine language of the actual computer which I take is what we see at google code.

Wouldn't it be great if the MAC source would also be available for us to see? After all, that is the context in which the actual software engineering took place. Looking at the resulting assembly might give a somewhat distorted impression of how the work was done.

Even doing the core rendering part cross-platform has a lot of technical issues as the platforms provide a lot of functionality that can be leveraged by the rendering engine (typesetting, drawing, animation etc...). Consequently, the more you want to integrate with the native facilities of the platforms, the more interfaces and glue components you need in order to hook the platform independent part up to the native facilities. This leads to a loads and loads of ceremonial code and interfaces that introduce additional layers of complexity.

I also agree that this got into the security layer is probably the most worrisome part of the whole story. Maye this could build a case for mandatory code reviews for security related modifications.

Haven't read it or anything like it yet. Nevertheless, the idea that one might be caught up in planning and looking forward and forgetting the joy of the moment about that doesn't sound too far fetched to me...

I'm from Germany and we do not really have an equivalent to US college education. Secondary education is partially integrated in our equivalent to a high school and you go to university after that. Alternatively, there is another path of secondary education/apprenticeship where you split your time between working for a company to get hands-on experience in your chosen line of work and attend classes the rest of the time. Such apprenticeships are also available for IT and software development related work.

Nevertheless, a lot of people believe that programming a computer is a sufficiently complex activity which only people that have attended university are capable of. That may be a part of the problem that the guy in the original article was complaining about: although people can acquire the skills needed to be a programmer elsewhere, they still go to universities in order to secure some credentials that will increase their chances of employment.

If he finds that people from an academic background are not willing to submit to his requirements I would assume that they wont submit because they can find more fulfilling work elsewhere.

Furthermore, it's not how methodologies are called at these places, it is how they are used: an excuse for middle management to look at charts and metrics without having to deal with the human aspect of their team.