You question the conscientiousness of the programmers in the first paragraph and assume it in the second.
You should see the crazy type casting that happens in production code to please the IDE and/or compiler. It may or may not be the right thing.
Then there's the cases where it is actually OK if not all objects passed in support all of the methods. Not Applicable might be the right outcome of a method call if the caller is prepared for that possibility.
I would say more compromise is needed, particularly for smaller operations where one more or less person is significant to the operation, but at the same time, if the operation is large enough to claim they have permanent openings and need H1-Bs to fill them, they should jump for joy at the return of a pre-vetted professional.
Perhaps if employers made more concessions to work-life balance in the first place they wouldn't find themselves in this position today.
Actually, approval does not in practice require the new drug to be as good as or better than the original in any way. It has to show the basic safety and be more effective than placebo.
In many cases, the inexpensive generic isn't even tried before jumping to the expensive option unless the patient brings it up or, in some cases, insists.
My objection is not to the me too drugs in and of themselves, it is to the order they are tried in practice.
The insurance companies are right (for once) to push back when the generic isn't even considered first. They are wrong to keep pushing when the doctor has any articulable reason to go with the more expensive drug for that particular patient, especially when the patient was on the generic and had a problem that the me too might solve.
And Python was meant to be used to teach people how to program. Both languages' capabilities have grown far beyond what they were meant to be.
Actually Python was meant to be a general purpose scripting language for Amoeba. It was not a teaching language.
Many things in the computer world end up used in ways that were never envisioned, and that's good. My comment on Perl was mostly one of fairness. It is certainly used beyond it's original purpose, but it isn't fair to blame it for any difficulties that may entail.
Actually, no, they work much better. I can pass the latest whizz-bang object that just happens to have the right attributes in to the old library code and get it back out the other side without having it cast to a crippled shadow of its former self.
As for the typing, if your project is big enough that you're actuallu worried about any of these issues, you should be properly documenting everything anyway.
In the beginning, Netscape wanted both Java and Javascript in the browser. Javascript was to be the VB of the browser programming world with Java for professional programmers to do the heavy lifting.
The Java side rapidly got the reputation for being slow, crashy, resource hogging, and way too sensitive to sub-minor version differences so it was largely ignored.
Javascript, OTOH was eagerly embraced, first by web designers wanting cutsie special effects and minor amusements and then for more serious pursuits. Then came AJAX..
J2ME could have worked but in the fast moving web world, it was a day late to the party. By the time it came out and demonstrated that it wasn't a lumbering resource hog, the ship had sailed. Javascript was everywhere.
You do realize that women don't just go to work one day and go into labor, right? There's generally ample warning.
Depending on the length of the sabbatical and her employer, she might join a different team or department, or perhaps go to work elsewhere. But there's no reason to leave the profession.
Virtual base classes are VERY limited in comparison.
Unless calling functions when you don't know what they are has become common practice these days, why do you need the IDE to tell you what the docstring says. If you program with the assumption that whatever the IDE doesn't reject is permitted, bad things will happen.
I would say that is more a problem of perception in HR and hiring managers than reality. If you've seen one silver bullet that willd solve all our problems, you've seen them all.
Sure, things do change in just a few years, but it's not that hard to catch up given you needn't bother with the flash in the pan stuff that already went away again.
C is still C, Java is Java. Python is more popular, Perl a bit less. Java is the new COBOL. It's not like taking a few years off to stay at home until a child is school age is spent in total isolation. Most of the tech news is on the web anyway.
Duck typing is a mixed bag. You can make the requirements clearer in comments and the doc string. It also has great advantages in being more concerned with attributes than declared type or lineage. It allows modules to deal with classes that weren't even imagined when they were written.
Perl is best kept to small projects. Not too surprising, it was meant to be a report generator.
However, there's no good reason not to use Python for a large project. It is not at all hard to write clean and well documented Python. It is, of course possible to write a complete mess as well but that's true of any language.
It sorta got there. It's an unmitigated disaster on the browser, for example. It is also awfully touchy about what version of java you're running. The desktops with native java CPUs never happened.
Java definitely isn't Hip and never will be. It is, however, the new COBOL which means it'll be around for a long time.
The one exception is it's use in Android. I wouldn't say the language is hip there but it is tolerated because mobile is hip.
Except in Canada, Pregabalin won't be a generic for several years. Until then it is much more expensive. It has also been the subject of illegal off-label promotion.
They do have differing side effects and it is up to the individual which one will be preferable. Many have no problem either way. The sensible thing would be to start with the inexpensive Gabapentin and go to Pregabalin if necessary, yet the opposite happens.
Did you ever wonder why nobody else makes the old formulation when it goes generic? It;s because the holder of the exclusive on the new formulation pays them not to.
The endless reformulations that offer no actual patient benefit plus the payoffs very well supports my claim that the extreme cost of drugs is greed driven rather than being intrinsic.
You conveniently clipped that quote, allow me to fill it in:
Oral colchicine had been used for many years as an unapproved drug with no prescribing information, dosage recommendations, or drug interaction warnings approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
All those things existed, the FDA just hadn't whacked them with it's $45million approval stamp.
The rest of the argument sort of falls apart there.
Unlike the supplements, colchicine was regulated for purity and accurate dosing and is prescribed by a physician following long-standing medical guidelines and monitored.
However, I'm going to challenge the article on supplements a bit. I have NEVER seen aconite (aka monks hood) for sale ANYWHERE. It hasn't been used in medicine (folk or otherwise) in the west for nearly a century. That's why, in spite of being a powerful and dangerous poison, you don't read about deaths from it. If you see it listed somewhere, read closely and you'll see it's in homeopathic form (read no actual aconite present).
Colloidial silver can turn you bluish grey if you use way too much for way too long. Try the same overdose with tylenol and you'll be dead in a week.
But my advice for the silver is don't take it internally. Externally unless in the eyes, use iodine.
I have never suffered any ill effects with ephedra, but then I use a sensible dose intermittently for flu-like symptoms, not in mega doses to lose weight or to pretend I don't need sleep. The others are about as likely to cause harm. Note how they didn't compare the 'dirty dozen' to the figures fro the 12 most dangerous FDA approved drugs.
You might guess from that that there IS dosing and interactionb information out there. They might print it on the bottles if the FDA wouldn't scream 'you didn't say mother may I" and shut them down for selling a drug.
The manufacturers of the selenium supplement in your link SHOULD be sanctioned for providing a dose well off from that indicated on the label. Note that it has happened with FDA approved drugs as well.
The free market won't work either. The FDA came in to being when the free market gave us a children's sulfa elixir filled with anti-freeze.
Note though that it's not just the FDA. Generic drugs, various medical devices and supplies are all vastly over-priced right down to crutches and tongue depressors.
Then there's the use of expensive still patented drugs in cases where equally good generics are just as usable at a tenth the price. That's not caused by an excess of regulation.
Government and regulations have their place, but the FDA is well off the deep end. They seem to be all about expanding their power base and seem consider their primary purpose to be more of a nuisance than a reason to be. I notice the agency pocketed $45 million in the colchicine case, all of which will come out of the hides of gout sufferers.
That's why there needs to be a reasonable middle ground. It's one thing if that $1 of chemicals costs $5 or $10 inb the capsule. It's quite another if it costs $32,000.
That is no good reason to claw back a long time generic drug. Instead, the producer of the new combination drug should deal with that.
Then there's the people who won't be able to afford any combination of either drug now and will be forced to do without or make do with crocus tea (Hellllloooooooooo shaman!) rather than a well controlled manufactured drug.
Of course, for those who can afford it, it's physicians, not shaman who give them the drugs and watch for side effects and interactions. In fact, that's how most interactions are discovered.
Or, for more fun, look at gabapentin vs pregabalin. The former is a generic, the latter is not. There is little appreciable difference except for price.
I'm fine with regulation, but it needs to make sense.
Considering that doctors have been successfully and safely using colchicine since before there was an FDA, and continued to do so throughout it's existence under the grandfather clause based on well established guidelines, No, I was not and am not particularly interested in the FDA's rubber stamp. Particularly not a rubber stamp that would cost each and every individual prescribed thousands a year.
The studies really didn't do any more than provide that rubber stamp. They revealed nothing that hadn't already been known for decades, they caused no changes in the use or safety of the drug.
They might as well have flushed the money down the toilet.
How about colchicine? It cost about $8/month. Then, one company did a million dollar study, generally considered to have contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and so got temporary exclusivity from the FDA and suddenly it costs $450 for the same thing.
The $1 cost BTW was already covering the factory, employees, etc. The rest is gravy and marketing.
Much of the research is taken care of by universities operating under a federal grant. By all rights, that research belongs to the people already.
Based on the immensity of the pharmaceutical companies, they aren't exactly losing money.
Similar things happen in business. No manager wants their pet project to actually be declared an expensive failure. They'd rather throw more money at it until it can at least limp out of the starting gate.
A big part of the blame should go to the failed market and its greedy occupants that cause $1 worth of chemicals to cost more than many people make in a year.
In what way? 16 year old writes two clearly flippant sentences that cannot possibly be true. School officials, apparently too mentally ill to distinguish reality from fantasy, call the cops. Cops, apparently also mentally ill, question the boy as if what he wrote could possibly be a confession. They then arrest him for the perfectly natural outrage he expressed at being subjected to their madness. Then principal Nutty McCuckoo suspends him for a week over the incident that the school instigated.
In what way is that not sensational?
In a just world, the students and their parents will mock and ridicule the principal until he is forced to resign. He brought it upon himself by refusing to be more mature than the kids in his charge.
Slashdot Mirror
You question the conscientiousness of the programmers in the first paragraph and assume it in the second.
You should see the crazy type casting that happens in production code to please the IDE and/or compiler. It may or may not be the right thing.
Then there's the cases where it is actually OK if not all objects passed in support all of the methods. Not Applicable might be the right outcome of a method call if the caller is prepared for that possibility.
I would say more compromise is needed, particularly for smaller operations where one more or less person is significant to the operation, but at the same time, if the operation is large enough to claim they have permanent openings and need H1-Bs to fill them, they should jump for joy at the return of a pre-vetted professional.
Perhaps if employers made more concessions to work-life balance in the first place they wouldn't find themselves in this position today.
Actually, approval does not in practice require the new drug to be as good as or better than the original in any way. It has to show the basic safety and be more effective than placebo.
In many cases, the inexpensive generic isn't even tried before jumping to the expensive option unless the patient brings it up or, in some cases, insists.
My objection is not to the me too drugs in and of themselves, it is to the order they are tried in practice.
The insurance companies are right (for once) to push back when the generic isn't even considered first. They are wrong to keep pushing when the doctor has any articulable reason to go with the more expensive drug for that particular patient, especially when the patient was on the generic and had a problem that the me too might solve.
And Python was meant to be used to teach people how to program. Both languages' capabilities have grown far beyond what they were meant to be.
Actually Python was meant to be a general purpose scripting language for Amoeba. It was not a teaching language.
Many things in the computer world end up used in ways that were never envisioned, and that's good. My comment on Perl was mostly one of fairness. It is certainly used beyond it's original purpose, but it isn't fair to blame it for any difficulties that may entail.
Actually, no, they work much better. I can pass the latest whizz-bang object that just happens to have the right attributes in to the old library code and get it back out the other side without having it cast to a crippled shadow of its former self.
As for the typing, if your project is big enough that you're actuallu worried about any of these issues, you should be properly documenting everything anyway.
In the beginning, Netscape wanted both Java and Javascript in the browser. Javascript was to be the VB of the browser programming world with Java for professional programmers to do the heavy lifting.
The Java side rapidly got the reputation for being slow, crashy, resource hogging, and way too sensitive to sub-minor version differences so it was largely ignored.
Javascript, OTOH was eagerly embraced, first by web designers wanting cutsie special effects and minor amusements and then for more serious pursuits. Then came AJAX..
J2ME could have worked but in the fast moving web world, it was a day late to the party. By the time it came out and demonstrated that it wasn't a lumbering resource hog, the ship had sailed. Javascript was everywhere.
You do realize that women don't just go to work one day and go into labor, right? There's generally ample warning.
Depending on the length of the sabbatical and her employer, she might join a different team or department, or perhaps go to work elsewhere. But there's no reason to leave the profession.
Virtual base classes are VERY limited in comparison.
Unless calling functions when you don't know what they are has become common practice these days, why do you need the IDE to tell you what the docstring says. If you program with the assumption that whatever the IDE doesn't reject is permitted, bad things will happen.
I would say that is more a problem of perception in HR and hiring managers than reality. If you've seen one silver bullet that willd solve all our problems, you've seen them all.
Sure, things do change in just a few years, but it's not that hard to catch up given you needn't bother with the flash in the pan stuff that already went away again.
C is still C, Java is Java. Python is more popular, Perl a bit less. Java is the new COBOL. It's not like taking a few years off to stay at home until a child is school age is spent in total isolation. Most of the tech news is on the web anyway.
Duck typing is a mixed bag. You can make the requirements clearer in comments and the doc string. It also has great advantages in being more concerned with attributes than declared type or lineage. It allows modules to deal with classes that weren't even imagined when they were written.
Perl is best kept to small projects. Not too surprising, it was meant to be a report generator.
However, there's no good reason not to use Python for a large project. It is not at all hard to write clean and well documented Python. It is, of course possible to write a complete mess as well but that's true of any language.
It sorta got there. It's an unmitigated disaster on the browser, for example. It is also awfully touchy about what version of java you're running. The desktops with native java CPUs never happened.
Java definitely isn't Hip and never will be. It is, however, the new COBOL which means it'll be around for a long time.
The one exception is it's use in Android. I wouldn't say the language is hip there but it is tolerated because mobile is hip.
Except in Canada, Pregabalin won't be a generic for several years. Until then it is much more expensive. It has also been the subject of illegal off-label promotion.
They do have differing side effects and it is up to the individual which one will be preferable. Many have no problem either way. The sensible thing would be to start with the inexpensive Gabapentin and go to Pregabalin if necessary, yet the opposite happens.
Did you ever wonder why nobody else makes the old formulation when it goes generic? It;s because the holder of the exclusive on the new formulation pays them not to.
The endless reformulations that offer no actual patient benefit plus the payoffs very well supports my claim that the extreme cost of drugs is greed driven rather than being intrinsic.
You conveniently clipped that quote, allow me to fill it in:
Oral colchicine had been used for many years as an unapproved drug with no prescribing information, dosage recommendations, or drug interaction warnings approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
All those things existed, the FDA just hadn't whacked them with it's $45million approval stamp.
The rest of the argument sort of falls apart there.
Unlike the supplements, colchicine was regulated for purity and accurate dosing and is prescribed by a physician following long-standing medical guidelines and monitored.
However, I'm going to challenge the article on supplements a bit. I have NEVER seen aconite (aka monks hood) for sale ANYWHERE. It hasn't been used in medicine (folk or otherwise) in the west for nearly a century. That's why, in spite of being a powerful and dangerous poison, you don't read about deaths from it. If you see it listed somewhere, read closely and you'll see it's in homeopathic form (read no actual aconite present).
Colloidial silver can turn you bluish grey if you use way too much for way too long. Try the same overdose with tylenol and you'll be dead in a week.
But my advice for the silver is don't take it internally. Externally unless in the eyes, use iodine.
I have never suffered any ill effects with ephedra, but then I use a sensible dose intermittently for flu-like symptoms, not in mega doses to lose weight or to pretend I don't need sleep. The others are about as likely to cause harm. Note how they didn't compare the 'dirty dozen' to the figures fro the 12 most dangerous FDA approved drugs.
You might guess from that that there IS dosing and interactionb information out there. They might print it on the bottles if the FDA wouldn't scream 'you didn't say mother may I" and shut them down for selling a drug.
The manufacturers of the selenium supplement in your link SHOULD be sanctioned for providing a dose well off from that indicated on the label. Note that it has happened with FDA approved drugs as well.
The free market won't work either. The FDA came in to being when the free market gave us a children's sulfa elixir filled with anti-freeze.
Note though that it's not just the FDA. Generic drugs, various medical devices and supplies are all vastly over-priced right down to crutches and tongue depressors.
Then there's the use of expensive still patented drugs in cases where equally good generics are just as usable at a tenth the price. That's not caused by an excess of regulation.
Government and regulations have their place, but the FDA is well off the deep end. They seem to be all about expanding their power base and seem consider their primary purpose to be more of a nuisance than a reason to be. I notice the agency pocketed $45 million in the colchicine case, all of which will come out of the hides of gout sufferers.
That's why there needs to be a reasonable middle ground. It's one thing if that $1 of chemicals costs $5 or $10 inb the capsule. It's quite another if it costs $32,000.
That is no good reason to claw back a long time generic drug. Instead, the producer of the new combination drug should deal with that.
Then there's the people who won't be able to afford any combination of either drug now and will be forced to do without or make do with crocus tea (Hellllloooooooooo shaman!) rather than a well controlled manufactured drug.
Of course, for those who can afford it, it's physicians, not shaman who give them the drugs and watch for side effects and interactions. In fact, that's how most interactions are discovered.
Or, for more fun, look at gabapentin vs pregabalin. The former is a generic, the latter is not. There is little appreciable difference except for price.
I'm fine with regulation, but it needs to make sense.
Considering that doctors have been successfully and safely using colchicine since before there was an FDA, and continued to do so throughout it's existence under the grandfather clause based on well established guidelines, No, I was not and am not particularly interested in the FDA's rubber stamp. Particularly not a rubber stamp that would cost each and every individual prescribed thousands a year.
The studies really didn't do any more than provide that rubber stamp. They revealed nothing that hadn't already been known for decades, they caused no changes in the use or safety of the drug.
They might as well have flushed the money down the toilet.
How about colchicine? It cost about $8/month. Then, one company did a million dollar study, generally considered to have contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and so got temporary exclusivity from the FDA and suddenly it costs $450 for the same thing.
The $1 cost BTW was already covering the factory, employees, etc. The rest is gravy and marketing.
Much of the research is taken care of by universities operating under a federal grant. By all rights, that research belongs to the people already.
Based on the immensity of the pharmaceutical companies, they aren't exactly losing money.
It will take a lot of new hires for intern time spent with a hiliter to add up to $1200.
Similar things happen in business. No manager wants their pet project to actually be declared an expensive failure. They'd rather throw more money at it until it can at least limp out of the starting gate.
A big part of the blame should go to the failed market and its greedy occupants that cause $1 worth of chemicals to cost more than many people make in a year.
In what way? 16 year old writes two clearly flippant sentences that cannot possibly be true. School officials, apparently too mentally ill to distinguish reality from fantasy, call the cops. Cops, apparently also mentally ill, question the boy as if what he wrote could possibly be a confession. They then arrest him for the perfectly natural outrage he expressed at being subjected to their madness. Then principal Nutty McCuckoo suspends him for a week over the incident that the school instigated.
In what way is that not sensational?
In a just world, the students and their parents will mock and ridicule the principal until he is forced to resign. He brought it upon himself by refusing to be more mature than the kids in his charge.