xradionut

Considering it's history of abandoning projects, products and APIs, Microsoft will probably neglect Mercurial.

It's worrying that Git is becoming the OSS "monopoly" in the DVCS space.

It's not that you have to understand the details of the math of encryption or write your own library, you need to understand the processes required to use it. It's easier figure how to use GPG/PGP than use Mercurial or git.

And almost all users, and most IT folks and developers are too lazy to follow processes. Plus management and shareholders don't want to invest the time and money for training or implementation.

What's the point of your post then? :)

Regardless of how many "good" or "legal" deals they do, they have a long history of moral and ethical bankruptcy, so people tend to think the "worst" of them.

If you are programmer, why would you want to work for Facebook, let alone in a open environment?

Nothing will change until it's much too late because the financial industry and monied interests has completely captured the federal government and main stream press.

Depends on what domain you work in. If I used nodejs or web services, then I would be enamored of Javascript. But I do an data analysis and ETL, a domain that Python and friends excel at, I not concerned as what's "hot" and "in" at the coffeshop.

I'm not seeing a decrease in Python development and investment. In the past decade I've seen a lot of effort invested in interesting and productive third party utilities and libraries. New languages still have to build those tools and such to get to a steady-state and attract more than language explorers and hipsters.

I wasn't trashing Javascript, which is obvious if you trace through the message thread. I haven't delved much into modern Javascript, since most of my work involves data and cli/desktop/network applications instead of web applications and services, so I don't have a valid observation worth sharing.

Python also borrowed some good stuff from Icon. Not that many folks here have actually used Icon, but it was fun to compile and play with back in the day.

"Javascript has grown a rather nice async ecosystem that Python just doesn't have. It's also exciting for people from the standpoint that everything feels newer and more up for grabs. Python is a rather old language."

Python old? Not to be snarky, but I've got programs for the PDP-11 that dated Python's great-grandmother. Excitement in a language doesn't cut it, I respect productivity, environment and progress. For automation, data munging and analysis, Python is my secret weapon in a shop of MS SQL Server DBA's and C# ditto heads. Would have be nice if MS would have adapted IronPython instead of creating PowerShell...

Yes, there are oodles of crappy Turning complete programming languages, but there's definative advantages to a much smaller sub-set of decent langauges and environments.

Considering how much data he has access to, extremely dangerous.

North Texas you can choose to live in various environments, from very rural to very urban and various degrees between. Where you chose depends on what lifestyle you and your family wish to have. I can walk to my city hall or train station in 10 minutes or choose to drive to the majority of the area in a reasonable amount of time, traffic withstanding.

This would kill some smaller companies in the US. You can get away with this in larger corps since there is enough staff to fill in for parents. Even with the modest leave we offer at our campany, it was insane a few years back when we had a large "bump" in the number of new parents. Lost a few non-parent staff that got burned out covering for the parents and the attitude/entitlement wars that ensued. :(

Except that Microsoft is failing on their OS marketing and can't rely on corporate adaptation of Windows 8. The RT version of Surface is a sales fail. Much of their new software push is cloud based, which wouldn't necessary require a full version of Windows. Heck, they even lease Linux VMs on Azure, just confusing the whole message. Why run Windows when every thing except for corporate servers can be done on Android or Linux?

In the consumer world, "Wintel" should be wary of the future.

Except for the one beefy laptop/workstation and my wifes gaming PC, (both which should be good for years), most of the devices we have bought or planning to buy don't require an expensive Intel CPU/chipset. And we don't need any new Windows software outside of the annual Quicken/TurboTax update. For portable use, there's smartphones and I'm thinking a good ARM based Linux laptop should be hitten the market soon enough.

Must Have feature?

I must have it to test software for clients. Otherwise it's as about as useful as a foot steered automobile.

I have multiple keys available through my MSDN subscription. Only 2 are being used for VM test machines. I have no desired to actually use Windows 8 as a primary OS, (yes, I tried running it for a couple of weeks), Windows 7 and Ubuntu fill that role.

Here in Texas we have dysfunctional government and ridiculously shitty services.

His very large book was the "gift" to the public. Now we just need to find the "rule" that explains the universe.

Forth is the only language I'd place between C and assembly.

Really? Is there a test? What if I like Mecurial and use BitBucket? Does everything have to be based/hosted on Github?

There's only a few reasons to use Lisp. It's educational from a math/comp-sci aspect, you enjoy programming in it, and you can make money doing so. Career wise, it's way down on the list of languages/environments in which I would choose to do my daily coding. (And I don't currently have my brother-in-law calling me on a weekly basis to assist in automating various tasks in AutoLisp... )

Add in the flame wars and jerks on Usenet that crapped on many folks that were interested. People went off in search of friendly enivironments and ended up in C, Perl and Python...

The cynical side of me that has used Microsoft software for 3 decades asks: 'WTF did Redmond break to make it "better"?'

Clients changing schemas or replacing knowledgeable employees at critical stages of projects. Microsoft security issues, licensing and lack of vision with new products. Network and SAS provider outages. Technical debt at current PoE.

"Exerting the kind of influence that the Kochs do doesn't just require money, it also requires decades of hard and patient work."

You can see the origins of the current Republican party in the 1970's. And further back in the Birchers.

TPB is a distributor of culture just like graffiti tagged freight trains are a distributor of art.

Usenet trolls then are the equivalent of the political blog spam today.

In the nineties, Linux/OSS wasn't as mature/widespread and hardware for small devices sucked in performance and price. People wanted OSes and shit that just "worked". Installing and configuring "alternate" OSes in the '90s was painful even for experienced professionals and hobbyists. And the applications and user experience wasn't that great compared to what we have now.

Now days I can install Linux on a mainstream laptop, restrict Windows to a VM and actually get shit done without any or that much pain.

Also broken in Firefox on Linux.