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Take a look at this. Well now, it's come full circle, hasn't it? Of course, this time it's probably not illegal, and it doesn't require any hardware hacking... but the similarity seems striking to me. Arguably, it doesn't affect Apple directly either, although I'm sure it won't help their relationship with AT&T.

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

The Submarine.

Look, how is Microsoft going to compete with Google? What, historically, are their best tactics?

Yeah.

I think we're going to see a lot more articles like this appearing in the press for the forseeable future. Some of the sources will have direct and obvious connections to Microsoft, others won't.

Paul Graham recently wrote an essay about a related topic just last May, on distractions. It seems that he even works by actually disconnecting his computer from the Internet while working, in order to reduce the amount of distraction that would come from use of the Internet, and using a separate machine somewhere else that had Internet access for those times when he really needs to do something online. It's a radical idea. Maybe it explains why I feel bit more productive while working from home, where Internet access can only be had by hooking my cellphone up to a special SIM card that has a data plan, and connecting to the Net via Bluetooth. With such awkward steps needed to get a working Internet connection, and with no coworkers to bother me, distraction is kept at a minimum. Whereas at the office the lawyer who's sharing our office space has a television permanently tuned to a news channel, I get distractions from coworkers up the wazoo, and a fast broadband connection which basically encourages me to read and post to Slashdot and engage in other diversions...

Paul Graham is in my RSS feed because he's very insightful, lucid, and extra relevant for CS/programmer people.

Paul Graham has an interesting take on (among other things) parents' illusions about their children: Lies We Tell Kids

I'd completely forgotten about that story. A little while back, I worked with a Brazilian programmer, and he had basically the same level of understanding. I know it's just one (more) data point, but it matches exactly with Feynman's observations.

We were discussing object-oriented programming, and how it has no clear definition. Brazilian guy says "nono, there is one definition of object-oriented". And then he starts reciting: "C++ is an object-oriented language, because it supports the 4 object-oriented features: inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphi--". He was simply unable to comprehend that any other language could be as OO as C++: C++, to him, represented the epiphany, the very definition of "OO", and everything else was a weak imitation. "If you are asked in an interview, 'What does object-oriented mean?', you will have to say these four words, or you will not get the job." I can only guess that he had a teacher who beat this into his brain; he really believed it.

I don't want to turn this into a C++-bashing (or Brazilian-bashing) post; the guy was a total ass. He was the only professional programmer (he refused that name, and proudly called himself a "software engineer") I've worked with who checked in code with syntax errors; he didn't even try running it.

The fact that Microsoft is wealthier than my country is not in question. They have a shitload of money, but they no longer wield the kind of influence and strike the kind of fear into the hearts of competitors as they once were able. Paul Graham put it very well in this article.

Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me indirectly--for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow disappeared.

But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money--so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not dangerous.

Microsoft will likely persist for a long, long time indeed, but people at the leading edge of software development need no longer be afraid of what they might or might not do. They have, in a sense, ceased to matter for those engaged in software development, a lot like the way IBM and SAP are too. Sure, they've got lots of money, and they aren't really going to stop making more, but there's no way in hell that they're going to use that massive war chest that dwarfs the funds available to some third world countries to bring themselves back into serious relevancy. Their very size makes that impossible. Their shareholders would never allow the immense risk doing that would entail.

Im surprised they're not using them to break the spam filter of yahoo/hotmail/gmail though, I mean if they all started sending each other spam and marketing it as ham, wouldn't that pretty much break any feedback based system that their using to protect their users.

Craigslist is a untapped gold mine, and eBay knows it. eBay's growth is tepid, at best, and they need some way to appease Wall Street. Why not connive plans on a hugely profitable yet potentially hugely more profitable site like Craigslist? If a hostile takeover was ever their goal and Newmark and Co. nipped that idea in the bud, I'd be a mad eBay, too.

As it happens, I still have this article bookmarked from when it was posted to Slashdot - oh hey look, it was just over a year ago. At the time I thought: oh sure, I remember hearing this six months before Windows 2000 came out, too. Now... now I'm starting to dream the impossible dream. Could 2008 really be the year of Linux on the desktop? Ten years after I started using Linux regularly as a lowly web developer peon, I'm now high enough up my employer's org that I can make a serious case for looking at Linux for some selected end-users (on top of the developers and network admins already on it), on a combination of cost and security (or rather, the cost of securing, and then managing, them.) I think the tide's turned. Despite their emerging strategy to start vapouring up the next version of Windows which will fix all the problems with Vista, honest it will, there are at least two or three clear years ahead for Canonical, Red Hat and hell, even Novell if they pull their fingers out to actually start making real inroads into the corporate market. My guess is that home users will be amongst the last segments to switch; partly because home users don't generally depreciate their machines over three years, so a longer upgrade cycle, and partly because they need a toy to play games on.

Since you live in the Bay area, it should be easier for you than if you lived in a lot of other places. You should try to look for internships. Talk to your college guidance/job counseling service. They may have some connections. Also talk to your classmates, you never know when someone's family may have connections. In other words, do some networking in the job sense. My recommendation is that you find a company where the software development pays the bills rather than serves a support role to the other parts of the company. Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software has some good recommendations. Paul Graham has his own opinion as well.

Since you're interested in software development the world of open source has lots to offer. Pick something that dovetails with your interests and start contributing to it. You'll only learn by doing and there's are plenty of opportunities to do that with free/open software. You'll be doing this for free, but you'll be gaining valuable experience. Pick a community that is active and has good developers so that you can learn some good practices.

As is blind hatred. Specifically, the level of irrational virtiol targeted against apple on this site in particular is kind of amazing. I don't really understand it,

It's a few things.

(1) Most haters don't get Apple's products -- sometimes because they're not familiar with them, but also often because the product priorities aren't theirs, and they therefore conclude anyone who has different priorities has been duped. Unsurprisingly, people who've been told they've been duped don't respond well, there's a backlash, and self-fulfilling prophecies about rabid fans come into play (see here for longer comment on this point).

(2) PR. What, you don't think there are companies out there who would pay flacks to get out and try to fight the fact that Google and Apple have a better image? I've sure seen a lot of stories like this one lately. Maybe it's because Apple and Google are turning evil, no better than Microsoft! By the way, have you heard suits are back in style?

(3) There are in fact some number of insufferable Apple users out there.

(4) Apple does in fact get it wrong sometimes, and if you're expecting better, it's like when Moz does the wrong thing with a CSS property where IE gets it right, or a friend insults you while an enemy shows respect. Even if it might be rarer, it's extra maddening.

I've read *only* the first link in that post (that was several years ago, when it was known as Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates), which was quite depressing, but also quite eye-opening.

      For rather less depressing reads, but still ones which pull no punches, try some of the Essays of Paul Graham. Especially, for high schoolers, try http://www.paulgraham.com/college.html and http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html.

I've read *only* the first link in that post (that was several years ago, when it was known as Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates), which was quite depressing, but also quite eye-opening.

      For rather less depressing reads, but still ones which pull no punches, try some of the Essays of Paul Graham. Especially, for high schoolers, try http://www.paulgraham.com/college.html and http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html.

The general answer to the questions you're asking is this article. Actually read it if you haven't seen it before - it's worth the time.

Ruby is an extention of java, so should I treat it as a fundamental programming language?

Ruby is about as far as you can get from Java while still having classes and mutable variables. There might be an argument for treating Perl, Python, and Ruby as the same language - but even that is stretching it a bit; it'd be like saying that C++ and Java are the same language.

lisp/prolog/haskell - these seem to have a reputation for being developed in academia, for academics. Will they make me the bucks once I leave academia?

Academics aren't just screwing around with pointless stuff for no good reason. Those languages are popular in academia because they allow the users to reason about programming problems in specific interesting ways - coincidentally, being able to reason about programming problems is what "makes you the bucks" as a programmer in industry.

erlang - as many slashdotters have pointed out, erlang's gimmick - being parallel, isn't all that efficient.

Erlang itself isn't wildly efficient because that wasn't its design goal. Erlang was designed for *reliability*, and concurrency was selected as an excellent way to accomplish that (in a well written Erlang program, a server exploding is a non-fatal exception). But... saying that Erlang-style concurrency isn't efficient in general is silly. In fact, it looks like exactly that concurrency model is going to be one of the best ways to effectively program for modern 8+ core CPUs.

If you're looking for books on LISP, another book to consider is On Lisp. It's free to download from the following link as it's inexplicably out of print.

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

If that's true, then why are new programming languages ever invented? Are new programming languages created by people who aren't "worth their weight as programmers"?

I dare you to write some non-trivial security-critical code in PHP.

This indicates something of a culture gap between the kind of hackers who the general presumably wants to recruit and the generals themselves. Paul Graham states it well:

Most imaginative people seem to share a certain prickly independence, whenever and wherever they lived. You see it in Diogenes telling Alexander to get out of his light and two thousand years later in Feynman breaking into safes at Los Alamos. Imaginative people don't want to follow or lead. They're most productive when everyone gets to do what they want.

Such "prickly independence" is the opposite of the stereotype of the military that's lodged in my mind. Now, I know that stereotype is somewhat inaccurate, but nonetheless the rebel/renegade streak that runs through many -- though by no means all -- of the creative, intelligent people who often know technology well. I'm not sure I'd go as far as Paul Graham's "most," but I'm definitely going to use "many."

Finally, regarding the tone of the answers, remember too that it's easier for an individual speaking for himself (Neal Stephenson, anyone?) to answer candidly than it is for someone who represents millions, especially because the military sometimes has PR problems. If the general says anything forceful, it will be spun around the Internet, quoted -- perhaps out of context -- in newspapers, and generally leave the military open to the PR of others.

I'm not sure how to solve such cultural problems between hacker types who need direct unvarnished honesty ("Where is the mistake in this?") versus PR types in public ("How do I make sure my words won't be used against me?").

Ah, you must be a fan of Paul Graham... you were obviously coding in Arc

The last thing I want in a production enviroment is some runtime optimiser fiddling away under the bonnet. I want the binary to be consistant in its operation with no extranious BS going on other than the OS VM system itself.

The thing is, it's very likely that this optimizer is better than you are.

It took me a very long time to understand and embrace this concept. It finally clicked when I read this paper about spamfiltering. Specifically:

The statistical approach is not usually the first one people try when they write spam filters. Most hackers' first instinct is to try to write software that recognizes individual properties of spam. You look at spams and you think, the gall of these guys to try sending me mail that begins "Dear Friend" or has a subject line that's all uppercase and ends in eight exclamation points. I can filter out that stuff with about one line of code....

When I did try statistical analysis, I found immediately that it was much cleverer than I had been. It discovered, of course, that terms like "virtumundo" and "teens" were good indicators of spam. But it also discovered that "per" and "FL" and "ff0000" are good indicators of spam. In fact, "ff0000" (html for bright red) turns out to be as good an indicator of spam as any pornographic term.

I've tried a statistical spamfilter myself, and it works. It's that old principle of, at a certain point, the computer is better at it than you are -- or, at the very least, more reliably better and with so much less effort that you'd have to be insane to do it manually.

A simple example: C code. It compiles to some fairly ugly assembly, yet there are compiler optimization flags that will make it, on average, pretty decent. It's theoretically possible you could write better assembly, but it would take so obscenely much time, and the compiler is already doing it for you, so why bother? You wait until the performance is actually hurting you, and then you find a tight loop, take the smallest part of your program which the compiler didn't do quite as good a job with as you could -- and there, you write assembly.

Besides which the optimiser is not going to be able to 2nd guess what the OS is going to do - it might try and optimise some pipeline calc on the fly just for the VM to be swapped out halfway through.

It might be swapped out anyway. And by the time you're being swapped out, it doesn't really matter how fast you were running. Those few extra cycles spent in runtime optimizations aren't going to be the final straw.

The existence of swap also creates problems for having your program be entirely deterministic in its performance. If you want that, you write in C, probably mostly ASM, and you put it on a Real-Time OS.

Most people don't need things to be that consistent -- it's good enough if it is fast on average. Even things like a game -- computers are fast enough that a garbage collection cycle or a bit of runtime optimization will take place in much less than a single frame or tick.

And you're also assuming that such a VM won't communicate with the OS, or be a part of the OS. Take a look at Microsoft's Singularity for an idea of where that might go.

Because I don't see any good reason for having an extra layer between my program and the OS if its not required.

But you give no reason for that preference, other than not liking runtime optimizations.

I see no reason to have an OS at all if it's not required -- let's all write x86 assembly while we're at it! -- but it's certainly a nice thing to have.

Because Lisp wasn't so much invented as discovered. It was a mathematical formulation, with a toy syntax, meant for pure mathematical work, that was never meant to be implemented as a real programming language. Then a grad student had the bright idea to write eval in machine code... thus creating the first interpreted language. Ever.

Those same mathematical principles apply to any programming language, and thus each new language is just slightly more Lisp-like than the one it replaces. Java is C++ with garbage collection (invented in Lisp). Perl added closures (invented in Lisp) to many peoples' everyday vocabularies -- every time you type "map { ... }" or "sort { ... }" in Perl, that's Lisp peeking through. Perl 6 is going the extra step of adding Lisp-style macros and a user-modifiable grammar, thus making it (in the mathematical sense) a dialect of Lisp, albeit one with a funny syntax.

Go read Paul Graham's What Made Lisp Different, then claim that it's just a coincidence that every new programming language borrows more and more ideas from something invented in the 1950s. Then do yourself a favor and buy Higher-Order Perl.

http://paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Location makes a huge difference. I think a small number of people are born everywhere with the ability to understand programming, but employers and clients concentrate in few places. This is self-reinforcing due to the number of talented workers and venture capitalists already attracted to these places. Anyone who grew up elsewhere and doesn't want to move is going to see more competitors (unless everyone else does move) for less local work. Seattle was a decent place for me doing software, but moving to silicon valley was like night and day--about five times as many recruiters calling constantly suggesting so many good fits I had to start taking notes just so I didn't lose track of any.

What kind of idiot would make an even slightly controversial argument knowing it'll be attached to the name on top of their résumé? We say "in vino, veritas," because we know people who are thinking clearly won't say what they truly believe. With anonymity they can.

I started reading the article but when I got to this bit I realized they had nothing useful to say: ...

The Python Paradox
Paul Graham

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

August 2004

In a recent talk I said something that upset a lot of people: that you could get smarter programmers to work on a Python project than you could to work on a Java project.

I didn't mean by this that Java programmers are dumb. I meant that Python programmers are smart. It's a lot of work to learn a new programming language. And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know.

Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire. Hence what, for lack of a better name, I'll call the Python paradox: if a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it. And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you want to get a good job, is a language that people don't learn merely to get a job.

Only a few companies have been smart enough to realize this so far. But there is a kind of selection going on here too: they're exactly the companies programmers would most like to work for. Google, for example. When they advertise Java programming jobs, they also want Python experience.

A friend of mine who knows nearly all the widely used languages uses Python for most of his projects. He says the main reason is that he likes the way source code looks. That may seem a frivolous reason to choose one language over another. But it is not so frivolous as it sounds: when you program, you spend more time reading code than writing it. You push blobs of source code around the way a sculptor does blobs of clay. So a language that makes source code ugly is maddening to an exacting programmer, as clay full of lumps would be to a sculptor.

At the mention of ugly source code, people will of course think of Perl. But the superficial ugliness of Perl is not the sort I mean. Real ugliness is not harsh-looking syntax, but having to build programs out of the wrong concepts. Perl may look like a cartoon character swearing, but there are cases where it surpasses Python conceptually.

So far, anyway. Both languages are of course moving targets. But they share, along with Ruby (and Icon, and Joy, and J, and Lisp, and Smalltalk) the fact that they're created by, and used by, people who really care about programming. And those tend to be the ones who do it well.

Writing - take some writing courses. Make sure you can write a 10 page paper in few days that is well organized and readable. Being a developer means a lot of writing and not just code.

Finally read some articles and books by Paul Graham and start working on a cool hard problem.

As the cost of creating and running online ventures plummets the need for large groups of 'suits' to fund and manage said ventures will diminish with many 'suites' being replaced by smart automation.

A lot of the innovative businesses were created by techies. Example: Google (Page & Brin), Craigslist (Newmark), Yahoo (Filo & Yang), YouTube (Hurley & Chen). And these days even more ventures are being self funded - no VCs needed. This article by Paul Graham The Venture Capital Squeeze sums it up quite well.

The meek don't need to inherit the Earth - they already own it !!

In fact, in some circles it's become fashionable to be stupid. Cue a downward spiral as each member tries to not end up in the upper 50% of their group.

The John Allen Paulos "Innumeracy" is a good study in mathematical illiteracy, and talks in passing on the "pride of ignorance" when it comes to math, but I think it also applies more broadly to other tech subjects. Nobody would think of telling strangers on a bus "I can't read", but many feel comfortable telling complete strangers "math is hard" or "I can't even balance my checkbook".

Paul Graham's Nerd Article from 2003 is pretty good, and while it doesn't sum it up entirely, it gives a few hints. It DOESN'T indicate why it's such a Western cultural issue, and doesn't indicate gender differences; girls dumb down for slightly different reasons than boys.

One thing children reward is conformity. They dislike things and kids that are too different, and will reward, or at least fail to torment, the mundane. To be different is to take a strong chance to get praise, but also to get beat down, and stats show that a school child will hear eleven negative things for every one positive thing about themselves every day, so odds reward keeping a low profile.

The way to break a scam is to make it expensive to continue. A similar scheme could work for spam. Go through the filtered emails, making a list of URLs. Wait for slow network usage, and do a throttled wget to /dev/null on the websites.

following all the urls in a spam would have an amusing side-effect. If popular email clients did this in order to filter spam, the spammer's servers would take a serious pounding. The more I think about this, the better an idea it seems. This isn't just amusing; it would be hard to imagine a more perfectly targeted counterattack on spammers.

sinister. Sb mentioned "Vitamin D".

The good news is that they are doing in a free way what Octave is doing, but without being tied down by Matlab syntax.

The bad news is that they are wasting their time using Python, while there is a much better alternative for doing exactly the same thing. Lisp is universal (it doesn't change its syntax every year like some languages we could mention!). Python doesn't even have a native optimizing compiler, which is a dealbreaker for numeric computation for many people. It doesn't have macros, or even the concept of read-time evaluation, which makes some things harder, and often forces you to choose between readability and performance. SciPy wraps C/Fortran libraries to get performance, which means you get good performance only when you can use an existing function; if you can't, you can't just extend the framework from your HLL.

I've done scientific programming in the past, and I looked at Python. I used Lisp, Octave, and even Java instead. Python failed at just about every criteria I could think of.

Organizations representing an industry supply "news" to newspapers and broadcasters all the time.

You *CAN* develop equivalent applications in ASP, J2EE, LAMP, or what have you (see Church-Turing Thesis), sometimes just as easily, sometimes more easily.

The Church-Turing thesis says that these things are computationally equivalent, but makes no guarantee that real programmers will be able to produce results of the same quality in the same amount of time.

Choice of programming tools matters - see this classic article.

Oh, right!

So a robot "made by US firm Sarcos and then developed by researchers at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Japan" can do what 3 guys in a machine shop in Boston can do, and only about a year later.

Except the Japanese robot doesn't seem to be able to walk -- it just stands there while you shove it.

Color me unimpressed.

1. There's lots of press recently about Iran==bogeyman that sound an awful lot like the Iraq==bogeyman articles from five years ago.
2. A bunch of Air Force recently guys got busted for "accidentally" shipping nuclear weapons to the military base we just happen use as a major staging area for Middle East deployment.
3. Suddenly here's an article about "radiation from nuclear fallout is no biggie."

Okay, so I got this idea before my morning coffee has fully kicked in. But two years ago I read a brilliant article by Paul Graham about the relationship between the press and the Big Public Relations Machine. Graham pointed out a New York Times article about the "return" of the business suit that looked a lot like ones in USA Today, CNN.com, Business Week and other outlets. He played Follow the Money for a little while and wouldn't you know it, the articles' "facts" came from an industry trade association. And ain't it weird how all these "industry experts" were suddenly available at the same time? Ever since then, when the media start trumpeting "evidence" that just happens to match somebody's financial or political profits, I get nervous.

Look at what Western mainstream media was saying about Iraq before we invaded. Gosh-oh-golly, don't it look a lot less like investigative journalism than a conduit for somebody's press releases?

And now we see an article where "industry experts" are telling us the radiation from Hiroshima didn't have long-term effects. Are we seeing some preventative PR in advance of a nuclear strike?

Like I said, tinfoil-had-grade paranoia. It's probably bullshit, but maybe that'll teach me not to take my meds on an empty stomach.

Right, so he doesn't pay his own staff but instead pays staff at StrikeIron, Workday and Visual Sciences.

Well said sir, and isn't that outsourcing?

This reminds me of an article called 'The Submarine'--about the PR business:

One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.

According to that article PR firms were having trouble dealing with getting stories onto the Internet to generate buzz for their clients. I think this Slashdot story proves they're not having that trouble any longer. My supposition is--bear in mind I have no proof--that this article was bought and paid for by many of the companies mentioned in it. Notice the large, nearly irrelevant, chunk about Microsoft Sharepoint for example: it reads like a press release.

This article doesn't say anything, or contain any useful information. It doesn't even make any sense and was probably bought by a PR firm! Sort it out Zonk.

I heard you speak a while ago (5 years? 8?), and this was one of about 10 reasons you gave for why Microsoft was going down the tubes.

Well, the company is still here, and the monopoly is still mostly here, but they're certainly on their way out.

I'd be curious to see you make up a scorecard of your original reasons, and how Microsoft did at each one, and how correct you turned out to be.

There's nothing wrong with using tools that have been around for a while, and your choice of tools may be completely appropriate and optimal for the type of work you're doing. But the fact that you can accomplish meaningful work with the set of tools you use really means very little. A horse and buggy is a meaningful tool, as is a honda civic. But simply because your horse and buggy can bring you from point A to B, it doesn't follow that you should scoff at all the people telling you it's "so 100 years ago"

See also, the Blub Paradox. Almost everyone has experienced the paradox for themselves, but its a constant struggle to not continue committing it again and again

Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

A programmer is more someone who writes code to spec, with much less scope for innovation.

If the "spec" is written in a precise enough language, there is no need for this "programmer" — get (or develop) a compiler or interpreter for the language once, and be done with it.

That's the theory. In practice, you, most likely, just aren't using a high-level enough language...

A programmer is more someone who writes code to spec, with much less scope for innovation.

If the "spec" is written in a precise enough language, there is no need for this "programmer" — get (or develop) a compiler or interpreter for the language once, and be done with it.

That's the theory. In practice, you, most likely, just aren't using a high-level enough language...

... I wanted to point the good English teacher towards this: http://paulgraham.com/essay.html -- which provided many entertaining ideas^* about why do we write our essays about "symbolism in Dickens" (or, in my and my mates' case, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, "Folk motives in Evgeny Onegin" :) ) -- and not about something which would take a bit of, say, math skills (even on the basic accounting level), you know, like relevant in real life...

Did my best to avoid Redundant, and I have to agree with you that the one you linked is indeed good for students to digest -- but do you think it will go well with the school administration?

Paul B.

* alas, no link to the actual text of an example argument about "the number of angels dancing on a pinhead", which I always wanted to read since first running across mocking references to that in my textbooks -- but at least a good explanation of why would people spend time discussing such crazy things. ;-)

This is true of bad science fiction, just as it is true that bad literary fiction is overly abstract, botches its metaphors, and is incoherent. The same thing might have once applied to Gothic fiction like Poe's -- who I read for high school -- or to fiction with strong Gothic elements, like Wuthering Heights. Good science fiction is still good fiction, and has even become canonized or recognized in its own way, as the Library of America edition of Philip K. Dick shows.

Quality is not necessarily indicated by genre -- it's only indicated by quality. I am also highly skeptical about your Chinese friends, who are probably either abnormally educated or about whom you're making bad judgments. If they've lived in China their whole life, it is highly improbable that an education system that refuses to acknowledge the Tiananemen (sp?) Square massacre, a small but significant nation off its coast that is independent only because of the threat of a greater power, and the horrors of the Orwellian "Great Leap Forward" would produce people with a deep knowledge of history or appreciation of it at more than a superficial level.

Speaking of Orwell, he couldn't even be assigned in Chinese schools, but many consider 1984 science fiction, along with Brave New World and other writers that are canonized or nearly so. I think students should be exposed to a broad array of reading that emphasizes what is perceived to be the literary canon, but that also includes other relevant material like what the original questioner appears to want. If there were one thing I wish I could've handed to my eight- or ninth-grade self, it wouldn't be a book, or a poem, or whatever: It would be this essay from Paul Graham. It's not really science or math writing, but I suspect students would find it more valuable than almost anything else.