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"The types of problems you can solve is directly related to the quality of abstraction available"

Probably not who you are thinking of, but Paul Graham has said something very similar many, many, many, many times. I suggest reading as much of his writing as you can.

I recommend reading this article: How to do what you love. There is a lot of truth in it. Getting your dream job is a matter of persistence, being willing to apply to companies, building contacts, and realising that you are unlikely to end up in your dream job straight away, it takes years of working towards the goal before it comes within reach:

• I know lots of people who are not willing to relocate - this is a big problem, because their dream jobs generally aren't in the place they currently live. I know a handful of people who've actually been willing to relocate their entire lives for their career, whether it is moving across the country, or to another (off the top of my head, I have friends who relocated to Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Switzerland, Singapore, New York..). In every case, relocating brought them a slightly better job initially, and a hugely better job 5 years later. In contrast, I know a lot of people who graduated in their home cities, stayed there, and complain constantly about their jobs.
• I know one guy who always wanted to work in Formula 1. He got an engineering degree, but there are tens of thousands of people with those who want to work in F1, and who have more experience. He then worked for a standard engineering company for a few years, whilst writing applications to any company involved in the automotive trade. He also travelled, met some guys who ran their own small teams, made contacts, offered to work for free during his summers, etc. Eventually he got taken on by a tier 1 automotive company, and from that point he managed to work his way from an engineer up to senior management within 8 years. Now, he still isn't doing what he wants to do, but he still has his goal, he has better contacts than he's ever had, and he has years of experience to call on. He isn't there yet, and may never get there, but at least he has maximised the probability that his goal will be achieved. How many of the rest of us can say that?

Fact remains that doing honest and hard work brings you NOTHING. You must be a quack, a liar and just basically leech everything out of the company that you possibly can.

Sounds like you're working for large corporations where that kind of behaviour can go unchecked. In a small company, you'd be thrown out very quickly.

"Too lazy to come up with a relevant answer, ya fucking homo." (before you mod this down rtfa.)

Of course not. That entire "article" was written by a PR firm. How can you tell? A bunch of facts and experts and the mention of "Omnidate" at the end.

See: The Submarine.

without any real research. He needs to read Richard
Hamming's talk: You and Your Research

Java is a perfectly acceptable programming language in many circumstances.

Such as when your programmers aren't really great :p

From http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

Of all the great programmers I can think of, I know of only one who would voluntarily program in Java. And of all the great programmers I can think of who don't work for Sun, on Java, I know of zero.

I suggest we first define who a nerd is.

Someone who has better things to do than to try to be "popular" in school.

You say you've got a bit of education of a graduate level under your belt? Well, starting a startup might be a good idea, that is if you're the sort that doesn't have a family to support, a mortgage to pay, or some other long-term obligations that require a stable, reliable income. Don't be too worried about the economy. Sure, it's a difficult job too, founding a startup, but it's difficulty on your terms, and for many people that makes all the difference in the world.

There is definitely a feeling of expressiveness being similar to practical power in languages. I think Paul Graham summed it up well here: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

When I studied software engineering as part of my degree I found it quite painful. It seemed quite interesting and relevant but it eerily reminded me of the "soft" sciences I had to learn to pass school (foreign languages, biology, chemistry).

For me the most frustrating thing in computer science is the many programming languages, each of them offering one compelling feature or another. But as Paul Graham said: Languages evolve slowly because they're not really technologies. Languages are notation.
The problem is, that it is not enough to create a better programming language or integrate a missing feature into an existing one, because then you have made the problem worse by introducing an additional language. So what you really need to do (at the same time) is to persuade other developers to adopt your language by providing a notation which is "powerful" and looks "nifty". And that is where the human factor comes in.

Developers are the easy target, but please stop with the trolling about software patents being a developers' concern. They just happen to be the first users with money.

Don't get copyright (distribution) confused with patents (usage). If you are doing the same thing as outlined in the patent, you have a problem if you are outside the EU. It doesn't matter whether the code doing it is closed, open, bought, borrowed, stolen, home made or found on the street: It's not the code that violates the patent, it's the activity.

Anyone doing basic XML editing is the target for the patent. You there, hosting the RSS/Atom feed. Yeah, you. Pay up...

6. If you want to do a simple round-trip from BOS to LAX in two weeks, coming back in three, willing to entertain a 24 hour departure window for both parts, then limiting to "reasonable" routes (at most 3 flights and at most 10 hours or so) you have about 5,000 ways to get there and 5,000 ways to get back. Listing them is a mostly trivial graph-search (there are a few minor complications, but not many), that anybody could do in a fraction of a second.

7. The real challenge is that a single fixed itinerary (a fixed set of flights from BOS to LAX and a fixed set back) with only two flights in each direction may have more than 10,000 possible combinations of applicable "fares", each fare with complex restrictions that must be checked against the flights and the other fares. That means that the search space for this simple trip is of the order 5000 x 5000 x 10000, and a naive program would need to do a _lot_ of computation just to validate each of these possibilities. Suitably formalized, its not even clear that the problem of finding the cheapest flight is NP-complete, since it is difficult to put a bound on the size of the solution that will result in the cheapest price. If you're willing to dispense with restrictions on the energy in the universe, then it is actually possible to formalize the cheapest-price problem in a not-too-unreasonable way that leads to a proof of undecidability by reduction to the Post correspondance problem :-).

So it seems that your assumption that "Fares just aren't that complex. It's a straightforward directed graph." is in error. Remember that this work used to require dedicated intelligence (i.e. a travel agent) who was at a serious disadvantage in terms of fare data.

If you're not willing to read most of both sites, I'd say that your answer regarding CS grad school should be "no." Any form of grad school requires an enormous amount of reading, and the amount you should do in preparation ought to in part tell you whether you should go.

The problem is, he assumes that classrooms are just places where the prof broadcasts, you receive, and then you leave. In bad classrooms that's true, and if they go the way of the dodo, the world might be a better place.

But if he's going to argue that classrooms will be different, I'd agree: the 500 personal lecture hall that feels more like a train station, as discussed in Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus , is probably an anachronism. But the classroom where one exchanges ideas, responds to other students, and the like is still very much necessary, and perhaps even more necessary than ever because it's a place free of distraction, at least relatively speaking. I would expect the value of intellectual jazz to go up, not down, thanks to podcasts and what nots.

Finally, I'm reminded of something Paul Graham wrote in Cities and Ambition:

When you talk about cities in the sense we are, what you're really talking about is collections of people. For a long time cities were the only large collections of people, so you could use the two ideas interchangeably. But we can see how much things are changing from the examples I've mentioned. New York is a classic great city. But Cambridge is just part of a city, and Silicon Valley is not even that. (San Jose is not, as it sometimes claims, the capital of Silicon Valley. It's just 178 square miles at one end of it.)

Maybe the Internet will change things further. Maybe one day the most important community you belong to will be a virtual one, and it won't matter where you live physically. But I wouldn't bet on it. The physical world is very high bandwidth, and some of the ways cities send you messages are quite subtle.

(Emphasis added.)

The ultimate high bandwidth experience isn't going away by 2020.

At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don't.

http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html

I'll tell you why Pittsburgh isn't listed. Once you graduate CMU, you leave. If Pittsburgh could hold on to the CMU graduates, they'd have something, but they can't, so they don't.

Paul Graham talked about this very thing, including citing the problems of Pittsburgh-CMU conundrum. He posits that it's the lack of venture capital (or "rich people" as he put it) in Pittsburgh, but I suspect (as he seems to) that there's something more missing.

I miss the days when hackers were just doing things for lulz.

Problem is old time hackers did things for money, too. Pricing details here:

In 1971 Steve 'Woz' Wozniak designed a device called the 'Blue Box'. It allowed -- of course illegal -- phone
calls free of charge by faking the signals used by the phone companies. His friend Steve Jobs instantly realized that there must be a huge market for something that useful. He bought the parts for $40, Woz built the boxes and Jobs sold them to his fellow students at the University of California in Berkeley for $150.

This well known anecdote is what made me think of the market for an electricity meter hacking device. $150 in 1971 dollars would be about $800 today.

In my continued and repeated experience, the real geniuses aren't arseholes. They may be socially inept, but they aren't contemptuous about it.

Paul Graham talks about this in How to start a startup:

For programmers we had three additional tests. Was the person genuinely smart? If so, could they actually get things done? And finally, since a few good hackers have unbearable personalities, could we stand to have them around?

That last test filters out surprisingly few people. We could bear any amount of nerdiness if someone was truly smart. What we couldn't stand were people with a lot of attitude. But most of those weren't truly smart, so our third test was largely a restatement of the first.

When nerds are unbearable it's usually because they're trying too hard to seem smart. But the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like "I don't know," "Maybe you're right," and "I don't understand x well enough."

This technique doesn't always work, because people can be influenced by their environment. In the MIT CS department, there seems to be a tradition of acting like a brusque know-it-all. I'm told it derives ultimately from Marvin Minsky, in the same way the classic airline pilot manner is said to derive from Chuck Yeager. Even genuinely smart people start to act this way there, so you have to make allowances.

It helped us to have Robert Morris, who is one of the readiest to say "I don't know" of anyone I've met. (At least, he was before he became a professor at MIT.) No one dared put on attitude around Robert, because he was obviously smarter than they were and yet had zero attitude himself.

I doubt that'll ever happen. Microsoft is a large, publicly traded company, and what you want to see is a nearly 180-degree shift in the character of the company that would entail a lot of risk. Any moves to this effect will most likely be opposed by many members of the board of directors tooth and nail. They have all of the resources necessary to become a force to be reckoned with once again, a massive war chest that dwarfs the resources available to some small sovereign countries, a research arm that employs the best computer scientists in the world, all they lack is the balls to do it. Investing in bringing their innovations to market rather than depending on their old standbys of Windows and Office for revenue entails a lot of risk, and I doubt their board of directors has the balls to make it happen. Being a convicted monopolist also means that they may need to tread carefully if they tried to make such fundamental changes, but admittedly the payoff could be huge. It could actually bring them back into serious relevance again, and turn them into a company more resembling, um, Google...

I'm not holding my breath though.

See Great Hackers for an explanation. The women you mention would not qualify.

Well, that depends on how you define worse. AFAIK, in the US, most public schools do effectively teach their students to read and write at a basic level (which on average may be much better than in your country).

Grandparent is making a point about the purpose of mandatory school not necessarily being education (in the sense that it makes you a creative problem solver with a rich understanding of the world). This reasoning has a dash of...
http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
... and a hint of...
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Good pint, and Paul Graham seems to think that starting in a bad economy has benefits. Apple and Microsoft started the the 70s.

There have been large amounts of astroturf around this latest release, Slashdot has certainly played its part in posting many articles fawning over the new operating system.

Personally, I installed the beta on a VM, it's certainly slower than XP (in terms of time to start up and resources used when booted). Once the feeling of wow, this really does look like KDE4! was gone, I was left feeling rather deflated and eventually just went back to my Ubuntu desktop. It looks, feels, and even the feature list reveals, that this is just another minor release of Vista. A Vista SE, if you will. :)

Having said this, it's is just my opinion and I'm not representative of the great computer-using public. Here are my predictions for the release of Windows 7:

• sites like ZDnet and Slashdot will continue to hype the release -- Microsoft's PR dollars at work;
• GNU/Linux users may try the release, acknowledge it's a minor improvement and go back to their GNOME/KDE desktops;
• 'power users' will get excited about the release, because sites like ZDnet tell them to (and it is an incremental improvement);
• people who like Microsoft stuff, and have been silent during the Vista debacle, will loudly crow about Windows 7 as their sense of shame in Vista diminishes with the promise of a new release;
• the general public won't care, but will receive seven when they get a new computer, or because their 'power user' friend gets them a cracked copy;

One more thing: incremental releases, like Windows 7 are a good idea. Ubuntu, Apple, etc. do this themseleves. However, if Microsoft charge the same amount for seven as they did for Vista, they deserve to be mocked.

On a side note, I will use PHP on my servers before touching Ruby since I see no advantages for using it over PHP.

Choice of programming language actually matters, and dismissing languages you haven't used much is foolhardy. If this isn't obvious to you, this article may prove enlightening.

Create a fast drawing program
Build a real-time spell checker with wavy red underlines
Warn users that they are going to lose their work if they hit the close box of the browser
Update a small part of the display based on a change that the user makes without a full roundtrip to the server
Create a fast keyboard-driven interface that doesn't require the mouse
Let people continue working when they are not connected to the Internet

These are not all big issues. Some of them will be solved very soon by witty Javascript developers. Two new web applications, Gmail and Oddpost, both email apps, do a really decent job of working around or completely solving some of these issues. And users don't seem to care about the little UI glitches and slowness of web interfaces. Almost all the normal people I know are perfectly happy with web-based email, for some reason, no matter how much I try to convince them that the rich client is, uh, richer.

And these issues shrink all the time. I agree with Joel regarding rich clients--I use Mail.app for e-mail, but virtually no one else I know does. Photoshop and Final Cut Pro aren't moving to the web anytime in the short to medium term, but other apps will, and it's hard to see this guy's ideas mattering. Sure, they might be true, but the web is still more convenient. For me, it's become a central repository for book and other commentary in the form of The Story's Story and write about grant writing at Grant Writing Confidential. Yeah, I write my posts in Textmate, but most people don't--and most people aren't going to buy and install Textmate.

What timeframe are you defining "Lisp's heyday"?

If you mean ca. 1984 (when CommonLisp was first agreed) there were, inter alia:

Zetalisp : compiled to machine code on Symbolics workstations

Maclisp : well past Ncomplr - compiled to machine code on PDP10

CCL/MCL/Mac Allegro : compiled to native 68k code

Interlisp-VAX: compiled to DEC VAX machine code (including its own uploaded microcoded machine words)

VAX LISP : ditto

Spice Lisp : counts, compiled to native PERQ, which is heavily microcoded

Franz almost certainly compiled to native machine languages in 85, Liszt (the compiler) was outputting native code for the Sun-1 after all.

CMUCL : compiled to PERQ, and "sort-of" to the IBM PC RT (in early 85 it did RT, MIPS, and SPARC machine code at least)

Sure there were lots of emulators/byte-code-interpreters/pure-interpreters too (InterLisp/BBN LISP, XLISP, ...), but in 1985 it was easy enough to emit machine code for big-stack machines with wide words (e.g. 36 bits, with 4 bits robbed for tagging, typing and optimizing precise GC), since that was really what gave the CADR such an edge. JIT/partial compilation was also several years old by the arrival of CommonLisp.

Finally, and most importantly, the T compiler system had been rototilled a couple of years earlier, and the state of the art in compliation technology, period, was in Scheme-like languages:

http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html [seriously worth reading if you have any doubts about the compilability of fast code from Lisp-like languages in the early 1980s]

CmdrTaco should not have fallen for an article written by PR shills.

It's just a PR hit posing as a story. I'm surprised how often /. allows The Submarine to strike the front page as "news".

Read, then apply.

Read, then apply.

First off, you should read Why I ban laptops in my classroom and the professor vs laptop article that recently appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education and then Paul Graham's Disconnecting Distraction and then Is Google Making Us Stupid? in The Atlantic. If Paul Graham finds the Internet ceaselessly distracting, what hope do ninth graders have?

Secondly, I've read some of the pro-laptop comments, and while I sympathize with their points, paternalism is not *always* a bad thing. Sometimes it's a necessary component of developing discipline and other positive traits. Banning laptops might be one, as it could help one develop the ability to focus for a sustained period of time and not get lost in class, particularly during discussions about complex material.

I went to law school for a year by accident, where virtually everyone had laptops in every classroom. They were used for taking notes, yes. But they were also used for Facebook, and checking out bar happy hours, and IM, and IMing about the incompetence of the person speaking, and checking the score, and a variety of other things. I know, the jokes are coming: you must've been a dumb law student, gone to a bad school, had bad professor, etc. Maybe: but I think the bigger problem is that letting one's attention temporarily wander is made so much easier by having a laptop and Internet connection is almost overwhelming. Sure, you can stay on a diet with a chocolate cake sitting on the counter in your living room. Sure, you'd never lie on that mortgage application about your income--but, you know, you really want that McMansion, and no one is going to check it, and you just have to inflate it a little... The problem is that laptops made distraction so easy. They make continuous partial attention more likely than deep engagement.

Students in universities succumb to the Beer and Circus mentality, and if they do, what luck will middle- and high-school students have? I teach freshmen English now at the University of Arizona and ban laptops because they're likely to be used for Facebook, and IM, and everything else but taking notes. I know: if you're not a compelling enough teacher to keep their attention, they deserve to use laptops to get around you. But what if you can't get their attention in the first place? What if you're trying to impart something important but that doesn't have the immediacy of Perez Hilton? Then give them the Cs they deserve when they write bad papers. And then they whine to you about the grades they got. You, the Slashdot commenter, would be such a strong writer or coder or mathematician that you could get by: congratulations. But the other 24 people in the classroom probably can't.

All this is to say that laptops can very easily and quickly become more a burden than benefit. But they aren't necessarily a burden: I could see wanting them for programming classes, for math classes that could use advanced visualizations, for blogging, for exchanging immediate responses among a group, for editing papers on the fly, the moment you get feedback on them. But not every lesson will call for them and not every teacher will want to use them. "Here's the dilemma -- how much freedom do you give to students?" you ask. The answer depends too much on the instructor to give a firm answer, but I give the answer above in part because so many of the initial responses tend towards "let them do whatever they want." Sure: and throw someone into an ocean a mile from shore and see what happens. If the teacher wants them to conduct a textual analysis of a Facebook profile, let them.

The future of those kids is not necessarily web page design, enterprise application development, device drivers, database query's or that sort of things... so please avoid thinking on java vs C# or that kind of things.

Following the ideas from Why nerds are unpopular, maybe the best thing you can do is to provide a big spectrum of technologies, some (the math oriented) may want to develop a Fortran application for numerical methods related to their algebra courses, others (artistically oriented) may want to use your quick basic (or postscript?) to draw geometrical landscapes, a bit of assembler for the interested in the internals, etc...

In sum, better avoid regarding them as idiots that just deserve a toy or "turtle" language like Logo.

programming is more like an art rather than engineering. This nice article http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

Which OOP do you mean?

I like this approach - respect, appreciation and freedom.

Also remember input and creativity are musts.

I like one of Paul Graham's recent articles. Good developers like input and like to see their work in use.

http://www.paulgraham.com/artistsship.html

Hating Lisp says more about you than it does about Lisp.

http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html

If you decide it appropriate for your neice to read, it may spark some discussion comparing school maths/science to university maths/science. Find out what she is interested in.

One way ahead is to encourage her to consider only a five year career plan. Neither she nor yourself should feel her choices NOW lock her into a lifetime in one career. People often don't find out what the REALLY want to do with their lives until they've been in the real world for a few years. She should leave her options open. Encourage her to do whatever she feels like doing now, but whatever course, keep some higher level maths as a minor. It may end up giving her the edge someday.

Elegant and powerful? Sure. But Readable? No way.

I like S-Expressions as XML replacement a lot, since for representing simple structured data its quite nice. But it just doesn't lead to very readable code when it comes to programming, [...]

Readable. Clean. Two of the most useless words ever used in a discussion about programming. They both reek of the kind of plain spoken "I know it when I see it" sophistry which tries to mask ones own petty preferences with a false sense of "natural" consensus. Unfortunately, this phrase, "I know it when I see it," has stuck in vernacular while almost no one remembers that Potter Stewart later recanted his view in Miller v. California, in which he accepted that his prior view was simply untenable. No programming language has ever been readable to anyone not already schooled in programming. No mathematical notation has ever been readable to anyone not already schooled in mathematics. This feckless obsession with syntax has got to be one of the biggest wastes of brain power since theologians debated how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. One of the examples of using the Lisp pretty printer published at around the same time as its introduction, if I my history is correct, was using the pretty printer to print a subset of Lisp as Pascal. Dylan already tried adding a more Algol-like syntax to Lisp. Paul Graham's Arc is yet another go at tacking some kind of level of extra syntax to Lisp. Qi has already added a sophisticated static typing system to Lisp. There is absolutely nothing new or interesting about any of this.

Combine the netbook and OS X trends with the Linux becoming increasingly easy to use for novices and a worldwide recession, and one has problems brewing for Microsoft. Not fatal problems, to be sure, but problems nonetheless, and problems whose solution is not obvious.

Actually, regardless of whether they are making a comeback or not, or what their advantages and disadvantages may be, this is probably just a PR story. Just like the "The Suit Is Back!" that got traced back to a PR agency a couple of years ago.

Paul Graham wrote a nice article about this. Well worth a read for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

This isn't really an industry cycle, it looks more like a plug for a bunch of current products, ala: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

As a Debian user who always starts from the bare bones install and apt-gets my way to ideal, I agree with you that the base install shouldn't include Python. The base install is an example of something we want to be tight and small.

However, not everything worth writing should be written in C.

In general, writing C is expensive, compared to interpreted languages. More bugs need to be ironed out. There are portability issues, so moving to each new architecture or platform takes more and more effort. The program is longer and more complicated. And, worst of all, you are repeating a lot of work other people have already done. In the end, your C program is going to be tighter and faster than the interpreted one, but at what cost? And what have you gained? The user will not be able to notice the difference between 10ms and 100ms run times. Most desktop software spends almost all of its time waiting on I/O (this includes user input), and there is pretty much nothing that can be done (software-wise) to make I/O faster. Meatspace is too slow.

The interpreted version is usually fast enough and it's easier to write and maintain. To use your example, writing a build system in C is premature optimization, and the general rule for that is Don't Do It. Programs have bottlenecks, which cannot be found until you are done. If you really need speed, use a good profiler to find those bottlenecks and make them faster, which, in the case of interpreted languages, you then write those small parts in C using whatever C interface is provided.

To quote Paul Graham,

Everyone knows it's a mistake to write your whole program by hand in machine language. What's less often understood is that there is a more general principle here: that if you have a choice of several languages, it is, all other things being equal, a mistake to program in anything but the most powerful one.

Write in C and assembly when you really need the raw power, such as when you are writing some kind of data compressor or high-precision scientific simulation. For everything else, use a more powerful, higher level language -- especially when doing lots of text processing. You will be done faster and with fewer bugs and security holes.

The reason we have so many interpreters is because no one can agree on which language is the most powerful.

First of all, stop calling it SPAM. It's not an acronym -- it's just named after the actual meat, used in a certain context.

But more importantly...

The most effective SPAM filter is a human, sitting in front of their e-mail client, deleting mail that they know is SPAM from the subject line.

Incorrect.

Firstly, I don't know about the rest of you, but I get far too much spam to read every subject line. It's already impractical, and getting to where it would be physically impossible without hiring people to read my email for me.

But also, a human is not necessarily the most accurate filter:

http://www.paulgraham.com/wsy.html

Granted, if you actually read every single email, rather than skimming through subject lines, you'd have a shot. But it's impractical, at this point, for me to even read subject lines. It's impossible for me to actually read the text of every single email.

In fact, that's why I use Bogofilter -- it's somewhat of a hybrid, that way. It uses reasonably sophisticated techniques to categorize spam, but it has an additional classification of "unsure". Last I checked, on any given day, I was getting maybe ten "unsure" messages to a hundred actual spams. There are quite often some false positives in unsure, and some that I'm not sure about myself. Most of it is spam, and I retrain it as such.

Net result: Roughly one or two messages per day make it through, and those come through Ruby Talk. Maybe once or twice a month, something will actually hit my inbox directly. And as far as I know, I've never had a false positive.

Just because businesses and proponents want it, doesn't necessarily make it evil or stupid. That's being shoved down my throat and self fulfilled prophecy and ... bad stuff ...

So what you're saying is that suits really ARE making a comeback?

It doesn't hurt to look at the messenger and consider whether the message is informative or wishful thinking / marketing. Sure - just because someone is backing it doesn't mean it's bad. There's even something admirable about someone invested in their own convictions.

The ultimate decision should be based on the merits of the idea itself. If the idea seems dubious, it's time to ask whether you're missing something or being given a hard sell.

This is the sort of thing one encountered in dot coms: a bunch of MBAs who couldn't code had an idea and figured they just needed implementation help. This approach was and still is so wrongheaded that it's almost impossible to believe the number of investors who fell for it. Understanding what's wrong with it has been much covered elsewhere; see Joel on Software, especially here and here and here. Actually, you should spend an afternoon reading everything in his archives.

Then mosey over to Paul Graham, where you should read this and this. Actually, read about half his archive, including all the computer-related stuff. Chances are you could spend about a day with both; then read The Mythical Man Month and Peopleware. Once you're done with all four, you should have a much better idea of why what you're describing is virtually impossible--something many others on this thread are dancing around, but which I'll come out and say.

This is the sort of thing one encountered in dot coms: a bunch of MBAs who couldn't code had an idea and figured they just needed implementation help. This approach was and still is so wrongheaded that it's almost impossible to believe the number of investors who fell for it. Understanding what's wrong with it has been much covered elsewhere; see Joel on Software, especially here and here and here. Actually, you should spend an afternoon reading everything in his archives.

Then mosey over to Paul Graham, where you should read this and this. Actually, read about half his archive, including all the computer-related stuff. Chances are you could spend about a day with both; then read The Mythical Man Month and Peopleware. Once you're done with all four, you should have a much better idea of why what you're describing is virtually impossible--something many others on this thread are dancing around, but which I'll come out and say.

This is the sort of thing one encountered in dot coms: a bunch of MBAs who couldn't code had an idea and figured they just needed implementation help. This approach was and still is so wrongheaded that it's almost impossible to believe the number of investors who fell for it. Understanding what's wrong with it has been much covered elsewhere; see Joel on Software, especially here and here and here. Actually, you should spend an afternoon reading everything in his archives.

Then mosey over to Paul Graham, where you should read this and this. Actually, read about half his archive, including all the computer-related stuff. Chances are you could spend about a day with both; then read The Mythical Man Month and Peopleware. Once you're done with all four, you should have a much better idea of why what you're describing is virtually impossible--something many others on this thread are dancing around, but which I'll come out and say.

What the hell do you think HTML, XML, news stories, book descriptions, and reviews are? Are they not text?

Yahoo Shopping was written in Lisp. It was later rewritten, in sections at least, by a mixture of C++ and Perl. They wrote a Lisp interpreter in C++ to facilitate this.

Yahoo would have never happened without Perl.

Slashdot already ran a story about the BBC making a Rails-like framework for Perl because they liked Rails but prefer Perl as a language. The article at that second link says they're pretty dedicated to Perl for their whole Web infrastructure.

Amazon use Perl as a major component gluing the front end order-entry system to a back-end database, and also for part of their document authoring chain.

Amazon (for Amazon.com's own site) uses Mason (a Perl website templating system) as their official web development template system, and they're hiring for people with that skill set. They do use a lot of Java, too, apparently, but Perl is an important part of the site.

IMDb uses Linux, Apache, Perl and mod_perl to run pretty much the whole site, and is part of Amazon.

Google is using quite a bit of server-side JavaScript -- on the JVM as a replacement for Java in many cases.

Google uses C++, Python, and Java for most public-facing sites, and much of the management of the systems is done with Python.

This Google job (for a software engineer) lists C++ as a must and Python as a plus. This other job (for a software engineer) requires both one or more of C, C+, or Java and one or more of shell, Perl, PHP, or Python.

The nation of Scotland used Perl to migrate millions of land records between systems, which certainly is data munging, but a pretty important bit of it.

It was way back in 1999, but Agilent used Perl to build their big customer-facing e-commerce site.

Booking.com (part of Priceline) uses primarily Perl to run their site.

This PowerPoint presentation says Morgan Stanley in 2004 was using Perl written by over 500 developers on over 9000 (no, that's not a /b/ ism) systems to keep their network running smoothly, for a web front end development language, to develop middleware, and to develop backend applications.

ValueClick and TicketMaster make much use of Perl, too. That's along with the content management system -- Bricolage -- used by the Dean for President campaign, ETOnline, and the World Health Organization being written in Perl. You may have also heard of MovableType, which is a serious CMS from Six Apart. Or maybe you've heard of a site that runs it, called The Huffington Post, who right now is looking for someone to work on it?

No. It's not a review. It's a Slashvertisement (tm)

Correct. I've been seeing other random occurences of this software being conveniently mentioned in the comments to blog posts and what not (would love to post a link, but I dis-regarded it at the time).

My guess is that Likewise Software have hired a PR company. And a pretty good one at that.

Posted as AC, because some wanker will no doubt try to censor this by modding it down.

This theory is elaborated in another comment.