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I've taken online programming classes that were text-based (you read the lessons), and classes that were video-based (you watch a video of the teacher giving the lecture).

I much prefer text-based classes.

- You don't have to take notes,

- there's no misunderstanding of what the teacher said (misunderstanding the spoken word),

- you can do a search on a word (ex: inherit) to find and read what the teacher said about that subject,

- you can easily go back and re-read a paragraph that you didn't understand,

- the sample code is embedded right there in the lesson, and

- there's much less bandwidth with text than with video.

I've only found two schools that offer text-based online classes that aren't super expensive: https://www.freecodecamp.org/ and https://ed2go.com/. (ed2go is cheap but not free.) Unfortunately, neither of these schools teaches more advanced stuff like Java Servlets.

ed2go is mostly text-based, but if necessary, they supply a video. For example, I took an ed2go class in Photoshop. The lessons contained text and images, but they also contained short videos. "Click here, then click there. See how the color changes from blue to red." Those short videos really helped.

Does anyone know of any other school that offers online classes that are text-based (not video-based)?

Then I guess you didn't know many people there. Fact is, you only have to look at Microsoft's developer blogs to see that they still have an awful lot of people that REALLY know their shit, as in cream of the crop, global top 10 in their field.

Hell, you don't even have to rely on blogs, as Microsoft is now the top contributor to open source, you can actually go and look at the code:

https://medium.freecodecamp.or...

It sounds awfully lot like you were pushed out because you weren't very good and are bitter about it, that seems incredibly likely given you apparently don't know talent when you see it. If you thought they weren't very good it's because you weren't competent enough to see why they were good.

Saying older more experienced folks were pushed out is laughable when folks like Russinovich are now CTO of Azure, and Mundie is a senior advisor to the CEO. The only ones that have been pushed out are those, that like you, are just awful at their jobs. No one who knows what they're doing whatever their age has been kicked out of Microsoft.

Ember actually is losing popularity, as per Google Trends and a recent survey done. But, yes, React is the framework to learn right now; it's overcoming Angular.

I would never include gratuitious image in anything I published. Never!

Because the actual blog by the guys who did this on how they did this is actually very interesting with a lot of technical detail - and really appropriate for a site which used to have "news for nerds". Would have been a much better link to include in the summary...

Ruby is fantastic for writing a-lot of code quickly. But it has terrible performance, and is has terrible maintainability characteristics (I recall doing global file system searches to find the file that defines something that my code requires, which is brought in by another require, and then another).

Performance sometimes matters. If one's app requires 20 VMs in Ruby, but only 2 VMs in Go or C++, then the cost difference can be substantial.

Also, Ruby - while 20 years old - is surprisingly immature. E.g., a few years back, I wrote a multi-threaded program in Ruby. It didn't work. After days of scratching my head, I discovered that while Ruby used native threads, it had a global interpreter lock, forcing the native threads to take turns. Maybe they have fixed this by now. My program needed true concurrency, so I had to re-write it using processes. Gosh - Java got threads working after the first two years.

Firms that really know how to maintain large codebases have also discovered that type-safe languages are very effective for maintainability. Check out this post: https://medium.freecodecamp.or... . I myself have experienced this: I once translated a fairly good sized codebase from Ruby to Java, and in the process discovered a large number of potential bugs - thanks to Java's type safety. I have found that when I refactor Java code, I introduce zero new bugs, but when changing Ruby code, the only thing that prevents new bugs is a large suite of unit tests. Thus, writing in Ruby _requires_ that one write comprehensive unit tests. I personally don't use TDD - I use ATDD, so my focus is on acceptance tests, not unit tests. Ruby _forces_ me to write unit tests. I don't want to be forced to work a certain way.

I am not bashing Ruby - I think it is great for some things - but people (like those at Google) have come to understand its shortcomings.